The Proper Functions of Government

Summary. Principle of subsidiarity, principle of solidarity, justice; thinking and living, thought and action.

Yen-Ling Chang

There are some among us who look to the government to solve almost any problem that is not strictly personal to individuals or families. There are others who, almost as a first principle, want to reduce government functions to the absolute minimum, as if asymptotically toward the limiting case where there will be no government at all (something I recall reading of one enthusiast of small government to want). Between Republicans and Democrats today the largest, most persistent difference is over what the proper domestic functions of government are. (Foreign policy, the principles governing which are even less settled or even understood, will be taken up elsewhere at this forum.) Thus, many Republicans object to the social programs of the New Deal and Great Society as improper government intrusions into matters that are no business of the government, and they remain intent on undoing them.

That such feelings should widely persist seventy years after the New Deal legislations went into effect attests to a profound failure of our political thought, which should long ago have laid down the principles by which we could come to some reasonable agreement on how to discriminate between proper and improper activities of government. Of course, in any practical matter decisive discrimination may not be possible; arbitrary differences in judgment are probably inescapable. Nevertheless, the gulf between the two parties would not be as wide as it is if there were common reference points—general principles—on which all are agreed.

So, in addressing the nation’s public policy needs our first consideration must be just such principles. If we can settle on them, then we can better choose the particular issues we should address as well as the means by which we want to address them.

Therefore, among the preliminary considerations at this website is the proper functions of government. Two complementary principles suggest themselves: solidarity and subsidiarity.

Principle of subsidiarity

The Tenth Amendment to the American Constitution states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

The unstated justification for this amendment is clearly that the United States is a creature of the states and ultimately of the people, each with a preexisting and superior claim to any power not specifically conferred on the national government by the act of union. As a legal or constitutional claim this amendment is unexceptionable, but it does not set out any reason why it is or may be better that such powers be exercised by the states or the people either as individuals or in various subordinate groups instead of by the federal government.

To find this reason let me first refer to some Catholic social teachings. As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam in the nineteenth century and the exploitation of workers became ever more brutal, various schools of socialist thought arose to seek improvement in labor’s lot. Industrial unions slowly came into existence in the second half of the century, inevitably giving rise to conflicts with owners of capital. The question then arose as to the proper role of government in these conflicts. In 1891 Leo XIII issued an encyclical on labor and capital, Rerum Novarum, in which he tried to steer a balanced course between complete government noninterference and heavy-handed interference on one side or the other.

Paragraph 35 of this encyclical says, “We have said that the State must not absorb the individual or the family; both should be allowed free and untrammelled action so far as is consistent with the common good and the interest of others.” On the other hand, in paragraph 52 he writes, “There are occasions, doubtless, when it is fitting that the law should intervene to prevent certain associations, as when men join together for purposes which are evidently bad, unlawful, or dangerous to the State. In such cases, public authority may justly forbid the formation of such associations, and may dissolve them if they already exist. But every precaution should be taken not to violate the rights of individuals and not to impose unreasonable regulations under pretense of public benefit. For laws only bind when they are in accordance with right reason, and, hence, with the eternal law of God.”

In 1931 in a changed world Pius XI’s issued a new encyclical Quadragesimo Anno to follow up on Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. With totalitarianism having reared its head, Paragraph 80 of this encyclical On Reconstruction of the Social Order says: ‘The supreme authority of the State ought, therefore, to let subordinate groups handle matters and concerns of lesser importance, which would otherwise dissipate its efforts greatly. Thereby the State will more freely, powerfully, and effectively do all those things that belong to it alone because it alone can do them… Therefore, those in power should be sure that the more perfectly a graduated order is kept among the various associations, in observance of the principle of “subsidiary function,” the stronger social authority and effectiveness will be the happier and more prosperous the condition of the State.’

Here, I take it, is the first explicit mention of the principle of subsidiarity, which has since been codified into the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1883, ‘Socialization also presents dangers. Excessive intervention by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative. The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”’

In turn, the European Community has lifted the principle of subsidiarity into great prominence in the Maastricht Treaty that created the European Union in 1992. Just how important this principle is to the European Union is illustrated by the fact that in December of the same year the European Council devoted a good part of its effort at its meeting in Edinburgh to a lengthy elaboration of how in general the principle of subsidiarity enshrined in a new Article 3b of the Treaty was to be applied. Without going into the details of the Treaty and the Edinburgh Annex, let me quote from the Europa Glossary maintained on the Web by the European Commission: The principle of subsidiarity “is intended to ensure that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen and that constant checks are made as to whether action at Community level is justified in the light of the possibilities available at national, regional or local level. Specifically, it is the principle whereby the Union does not take action (except in the areas which fall within its exclusive competence) unless it is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level. It is closely bound up with the principles of proportionality and necessity, which require that any action by the Union should not go beyond what is necessary to achieve the objectives of the Treaty.”

If you read these texts carefully, you can feel that papal teachings are overwhelmingly works of reason, at least such reason as prevailed in the Vatican in the periods leading up to the promulgation of the teachings, whereas the European Treaty literally breathes the jealousy of member states to guard their own prerogatives and surrender as little power to the Union as possible. Not that Catholic Catechisms or papal encyclicals do not also harbor compromises between contending parties in the Church and within the Vatican, but the European Union is more thoroughly a political and arbitrary creation.

Specifically, at the time the Maastricht Treaty was negotiated, there was Britain on one side, supported by some of the newer members of the Community, that wanted as little “union” as possible—Britain, after all, had all along wanted the European Community to be little more than a free trade area, certainly not a vigorous political union, whereas most of the original six members of the Community wanted deeper political union. So far as the European Union is concerned, the central positioning of the subsidiarity principle in the Maastricht Treaty reflects a political victory for Britain. And it is becoming increasingly doubtful that Europe in the foreseeable future, widened to near unmanageability (again partly at the urging of Britain) in the absence of a more vigorously empowered center, will be able to solidify its political weight to serve as an equal political partner, much less a counterweight, to the United States, as some founders of the Union had hoped.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons for the principle of subsidiarity. It is not clear to me, however, that either the Maastricht Treaty and its Edinburgh Annex or the Church teachings adequately probe the depth of these reasons. Consider the European Union’s reason for the principle. It is to ensure that “decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen.” One may ask, What is wrong with decisions being made at great distance from the citizen? One answer must be this, that the farther away one is from an actual problem, the more abstract becomes the understanding or feeling of this problem, and being abstract means loss of details, of the particularities of the problems as actually experienced. As a result, solutions devised at a distance have greater chances of missing the target badly or altogether. Therefore, in an important respect the justification for the principle of subsidiarity is to ensure the greatest possible effectiveness of action, which is also the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno’s concern. But effectiveness, after all, is always more or less, so that in this respect the principle of subsidiarity cannot yield a decisive discrimination between the proper and improper activities of the central government.

More tellingly, the European principle of subsidiarity is also intended to ensure that “constant checks are made as to whether action at Community level is justified in the light of the possibilities available at national, regional or local level. Specifically, it is the principle whereby the Union does not take action (except in the areas which fall within its exclusive competence) unless it is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level.” That is, if we can do it ourselves, we don’t want Brussels to get involved. Put negatively, the Catholic Catechism says, “Excessive intervention by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative” and “deprive” “a community of a lower order… of its functions.” We are getting warm, but still not there. What is wrong with loss of freedom or initiative or being deprived of one’s functions? What if Brussels does take on something that London can do on its own?

Let me suggest that the ultimate justification for the principle of subsidiarity lies in the loci of freedom and satisfaction as they are actually experienced, hence the loci of value creation. Among human beings the loci are, for practical purposes, first and last the individual human beings. (The qualification “for practical purposes” is for the benefit of philosophers and metaphysicians who are attuned to the philosophical provenance of these writings.) Suppose, for example, I have a problem. It is I who most intimately and keenly feel the problem, and if the problem gets solved, it is again I who feel that solution most keenly. And if I myself manage to solve that problem, this exercise of creativity or freedom in solving the problem yields the utmost satisfaction such as nobody else can experience in connection with this, my particular problem, because at the very least the latter cannot feel being beset by that problem and then having the burden lifted as keenly as I can feel them. Therefore, if you could do arithmetic sums of the possible satisfactions deriving from the solution of the problem in question, which, of course, we cannot easily do, which explains the problem of the economics of happiness,the sum from my own successfully taking care of the problem would always be greater and deeper than if someone else did it for me. And life is freedom or self-creation, creation is of satisfaction or concrete value, so that my taking care of my own problems would add greater, deeper, more intense value to the universe than if someone else did it for me.

Similar considerations apply to families, local communities, institutions, regions, etc. Therefore, the ideal is for each individual, each family, each community to live as fully as possible and take care of its own problems. This is also the most efficient way of dealing with the problems of living, because less learning is needed about the nature of the problem needing solution.

(You can see the foreign policy implications of the subsidiarity principle, can you not? But that is for our foreign policy discussion thread.)

But you cannot talk about subsidiarity unless you have a solidarity or union to which the principle of subsidiarity applies. Thus, the very first words of the Constitution of the United States say: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…” In the minds of the framers of our Constitution union or solidarity takes precedence in the concerns of the United States government being brought into existence.

Yet, I began this discussion with the idea of subsidiarity. Why? Because although in the order of existence every human life begins with the physical union of a man and a woman and subsequently the fusion of the woman’s ovum with a sperm of the man to form a zygote, so that one may well argue that a human-level union followed by a complete cellular fusion precede independent individual human existence. Yet, you can also argue that before that act of physical union the woman and the man were each a separate, more or less independent individual. Either way, ultimately you cannot tear independent individual human existence from mutual relevance and support with human solidarity. Therefore, the order of our discussion of the two ideas is arbitrary.

Nevertheless, in the Western world we have put a premium on individual rights above the collective, so much so as to have made the phenomenon of human solidarity into something of a mystery. Most assuredly, when the Chinese, for example, claim priority of consideration for the collective welfare above the individual, Americans dismiss the Chinese claim without even thinking it worthwhile to argue. In the same way, we shake our heads at the Japanese for hammering on nails that stick out.

That the individual exercises an overriding claim on the Western mentality is an accident of history, derived from a series of accidents, including that a man called Sophocles lived, or that Athens rose to the apex of glory in Western educated imagination, that Plato and Aristotle have decisively shaped this Western mentality, that Aristotelian metaphysics was adapted lock, stock, and barrel by Saint Thomas to build the dominant Christian theology. But we will not divert ourselves with this history of ideas here.

Suffice it that to most readers of this paper subsidiarity will be easier to appreciate than solidarity. In connection with the Maastricht Treaty the Europeans, at least the British, to whom Americans feel the closest historical, political, and intellectual affinity, have also made a bigger deal of subsidiarity than union. Further, throughout the British-American constitutional development, the emphasis until the late nineteenth century was on limiting the powers of government, with the result that, as I indicated in the paper “The next stage in the development of American democracy,” many Americans have persistently questioned the Constitutional provenance of social, some would even say “socialist” programs introduced since the New Deal. My choice of the order in which these two ideas are discussed here has merely followed the line of least resistance.

Principle of Solidarity
I mentioned the preamble to the American Constitution. Solidarity is also the driving idea of the European Union. Article A of Title I of the the Maastricht Treaty states: ‘By this Treaty, the High Contracting Parties establish among themselves a European Union, hereinafter called “the Union”. This Treaty marks a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen. The Union shall be founded on the European Communities, supplemented by the policies and forms of cooperation established by this Treaty. Its task shall be to organize, in a manner demonstrating consistency and solidarity, relations between the Member States and between their peoples.” (You can see the hands of the resistors to “union” in the clause about taking decisions “as closely as possible to the citizen” right after the statement of purpose for “an ever closer union.” This clause all but takes the steam out of the drive for union motivating the Treaty.)

Although in both the American Constitution and the Maastricht Treaty union or solidarity is the first aim of their creations—the American Republic in one case and the European Union in the other—those who advocate greater solidarity or a “more perfect union” than now exists either in Europe or the United States almost invariably have been put on the intellectual defensive by those loudly pointing to the Tenth Amendment or individual rights or the principle of subsidiarity in resistance to common or central government action, because the benefits of union have never been adequately conceived and articulated.

Thus in the Maastricht Treaty the principle of subsidiarity is specifically mentioned at least twice, and it is formally framed in the Union Glossary, but there is no comparable mention of a principle of solidarity or union. Instead, Article B of Title I enumerates several specific projects that are intended to produce the “ever closer union” mentioned in Article A. Nevertheless, neither “solidarity” nor “union” is even listed in the Glossary.

In the United States, our overwhelming British constitutional inheritance is the struggle to limit the powers of the king in the name of the liberties of Englishmen. Our founders dispensed with the crown. Therefore, they worked on limiting the power of the government, whence our Bill of Rights, never mind that the first sentence of the Constitution speaks of a contrary ideal. The Tenth Amendment is a statement of the subsidiarity principle. But as to what a “more perfect union” is, well, the whole Constitution defines such a union as the founders envisioned it, but there is no statement of a principle of union or solidarity. The result is that to many people who advocate extremely limited government, it is not even clear that the American union is much more than the mere sum of its parts.

The situation is not much helped by the Church teachings, which try to balance the discussion of subsidiarity with repeated reference to the “common good”: a venerable idea, to be sure, but not a very energetic one. The Church actually has a much more powerful ideational tool in its toolbox to argue for stronger union. I mean the concept and reality of love as displayed—His feeling of another’s feelings—and preached by Jesus and the consequent “solidarity” that the Church reserves for talking religion. But it does not bring the idea into play in its discourse on worldly matters for a reason, and that reasons lies in the intellectually tenuous relationship between some of the deepest revelations of the New Testament, including the phenomenon of love, with the Christian theology that got systematized in the thirteenth century through whose prism the Church tries to see the world outside.

This general intellectual condition has an explanation. It is Aristotle, according to whose metaphysics, the ultimately real entities in the world that we can unambiguously point to as “this” and “not that” are individual things like chairs, houses, trees, individual human beings, each with an enduring nature. For Aristotle, this world consists of such entities or “primary beings” and their properties. Relations between or among such entities have less or a subordinate reality. Whether you like it or are aware of it, in the crunch most people in the Western world continue to think and speak the Aristotelian way.

In contrast, the concept of solidarity, of union, if you will, is first and foremost a concept of activity and relations, which in Aristotelian metaphysics are secondary to the primary entities or things or individual human beings, each with a static nature; they are properties of those primary beings, and both have an inferior claim to reality than the things or primary beings themselves. Of course, in the actual existence or experience of men and women, relations, activities, experiences are as real and concrete as anything there is. But if you are a philosopher—and the principle of solidarity is inescapably a philosophical principle—you have a very serious problem. Philosophers are supposed to be interested in reality. What do you do with something that is not quite real? That is the reason that solidarity as a decisive principle has eluded political thinkers through the ages. Aristotelian metaphysics remains the foundation of Christian theology, whence also the Church’s intellectual disabilities.

Yet, if Aristotle had lived in the twentieth or twenty-first century, his metaphysics would most assuredly not have taken the form it did. After all, Aristotle was a biologist, a great one, too, and nothing has done more to reveal the wondrous solidarities at play throughout this earthly world we live in than modern biology. Look at a human being. Yahoo Answers (what a great thing the Internet is!) says that nobody is quite sure, but perhaps anywhere between ten to a hundred trillion cells make up a human body. Each cell is itself a living thing with its own individual freedom or spontaneity, so far as that goes in a cell. Many of them get together and form various organs, muscles, the central nervous system, the skeletal system, which, too, are individually “alive” over and above their constituent cells. Above them all presides the individual human being, who, again, is more than merely her “body” or bodily parts. Neurophysiologists can use all the scanners they want and scan the human brain as much as they like; they will not get a human thought, feeling, or experience—the most concrete reality of human existence—out of the scans, though they may detect physical activities occurring in various parts of the brain at the time of one or another experience. Moreover, a thought, a belief, a mere vague feeling of the man or woman can on their own “drive” or stimulate not only more brain activities, but also “actions” by the whole body such as physical motion, and again, no scanner, no physiological test will find that feeling or thought or, indeed, the spring of action that is individual freedom or spontaneity that defines that human being as distinguished from her body.

(Where biological lives are concerned, there are further the genetic factors that manage to keep the single-cell zygote’s splitting and growing within such boundaries as will ensure that the resulting organism is ultimately a well-formed human being or dog or, as the case may be, a tree, each with finely tuned physiological functions. These genetic factors do not concern us here, though the idea of the biological solidarities I just spoke of must be qualified by our understanding of the genetic process.)

What is pertinent to our present discussion, however, is the phenomenon of biological solidarity. It illustrates very vividly the memorably succinct Whitehead summary of the process of creative advance in the universe in which ”the many become one and are increased by one.” Although Whitehead was actually talking about even more fundamental units of becoming, here in biological life we have many individually living things becoming one, which is itself a living thing, thereby adding to the count of living things. Think of all the joys and sorrows, satisfaction and disappointments that have marked your life. The world is made richer, the world of values is increased by each addition that is the union of the many into the one constituting you at each moment. This addition to the world’s values is the ultimate justification of the union. But note the construction of the second part Whitehead’s description: “are increased by one.” He does not say the “the many increase themselves by one.” What he means is that in the act of the many becoming one, this new entity promptly assumes its own status as a self-determining free entity. Hence it increases the many by one. I increased the universe of living human beings by one additional such being when the cells and organs of the fetus got together in my mother’s womb and took human form and I became.

Now, when individual human beings come together to form various human solidarities—friendships, families, business enterprises, cities, nations, etc.—do we create new “living” entities with their own independent experiences over and above yours and mine? No, and there is nothing in the horizon of biological evolution even to suggest that we might. As Robert Nozick says, societies do not feel or think; you and I do. But that does not mean that a friendship of two people is just the sum of two individuals. Nor does it mean that Nozick is right in holding that, therefore, where the state is concerned, all that is justified is a minimal state that is little more than a “mutual protection society.”

It is not an accident that all of Plato’s public writings are in dialogue form. What dialogues can illustrate more vividly than a straight exposition is how the creativity or freedom of one person can feed on the creativity of another such as to ascend the steps of understanding in mutual cooperation that one person working on his own cannot easily do. Thus, all the major human enterprises—intellectual, artistic, religious, commercial, political, industrial—are the works of many people fueling one another’s creative energy. At the very least, we step on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. Existence is activity; it is experience and feelings and actions, all of which can be enlarged in scope and depth by human solidarities.

Furthermore, where two contemporaries are concerned, when they share a common understanding, say, there is a togetherness of thought, of feelings. But by reason of this togetherness of feelings, they also enjoy a feeling of togetherness, which is something more and which cannot be experienced by a person not in communion with another; and this feeling of togetherness is again felt together. This togetherness of feelings fueling a feeling of being together, which, in turn, then further adds to the togetherness of feelings, is what makes up human solidarities. The added richness of existence, of warmth, even merely of the strength of numbers as well as the mutual support in the joint ascent of life is what immediately justifies human solidarities of all kinds: families, business enterprises, institution of learning, cities and nations, ultimately internatiional solidarity.

When we come to consider the state or government, moreover, what can you recall of the England before the Norman Conquest? Probably not much, because it was a rather forgettable place, not much of a nation to speak of. We remember the names of a few kings, but very little more. Most certainly that England was peripheral to the European civilization, whose continental center of gravity was even then shifting from Rome to Paris. That also meant that individual lives in England before 1066 had relatively little scope. But after the Conquest England quickly became a significant factor in Europe. This was not only because the Normans owned a large swath of France, but also because the Norman kings were imaginative and vigorous rulers. (To my French friends I say, stop fighting the fiction of “Anglo-Saxon” British and Americans; the British-American world has been as great as it has been these 950 years not because of Anglo-Saxon influence, but more because of the greatness of Norman statesmanship in Britain: Normans who had conquered England from Normandie!) Thus, twenty years after the Conquest William brought about the compilation of Domesday Book, a census, the first of its kind after the Roman Empire, of all landowners in the kingdom and their individual worth in land and livestock. The purpose was of course more energetic and effective taxation. A century later came the glorious reign of Henry II, during which the king’s law came to prevail over disparate baronial rule and became common throughout the land: the beginning of the common law tradition. A more vigorous government brought about a more energetic feeling of nationhood; the people became more “one people,” as such became more “powerful.” Although the immediate effect of this increased English “power” was endless European wars, especially wars with France, an undeniable fact is that individual English lives—the ultimate loci of satisfaction, of values—came to have larger scope.

In the case of the United States, had we not our federal government as created by the Constitution, “Americans” would not be astride the world today, not that we have always, especially in recent years, behaved wisely as the first among equals in the family of nations. A great nation is capable of greater undertakings, hence greater achievements than lesser nations. That also means that citizens of great nations in some respects have greater scope in their lives than citizens of lesser nations. This is a truth, if you want, a fact that the British have consistently failed to grasp in fighting against greater European integration; their Euro-scepticism has impoverished the life possibilities of their citizens.

The principle of solidarity or union is, therefore, one of the many joining together in order that the life of each and every individual member as well as every subordinate group of members is enriched as a result, including the creation of a new, rich, and vigorous sense of togetherness. We work together in order to feel together, and feel together so that we can all the better work together, thus jointly ascend to ever-greater heights of existence.

According to the Preamble to our Constitution, a “more perfect union” or a more robust solidarity is the overarching purpose of the governmental system created by this Constitution. One can argue that, therefore, anything that is not specifically designated by the Constitution as a function of the government is not part of its function, though it may be conducive to a more perfect union. But it can just as well be argued that anything that is not specifically proscribed by the Constitution is fit for government attention if it advances national solidarity, the more so when there is an effective citizen solidarity in favor of that attention. And I suggest that both our legislative and Constitutional histories favor the latter argument, especially given what the federal government has made of John Marshall’s momentous and imaginative interpretation of the interstate commerce clause and the extensive regulatory functions that have accrued to the government.

Therefore, I suggest that in general everything that is systemic to the American society as a whole as well as everything that affects the members of this society universally are fit subjects for government attention. An imaginative conception of commerce will probably make the interstate commerce clause coextensive with these two criteria, but system and universality are more commonplace ideas and easier to apply than a particular Constitutional provision as interpreted through arguments and counter-arguments in a Supreme Court opinion.

Justice
The principle of solidarity is closely allied to the principle of justice and of equality, because injustice and inequality divide, whereas solidarity is togetherness. In its most general rendering, as Plato only partially succeeded in elaborating, justice is an aesthetic ideal; it is ideal harmony such as is meant by the French word “juste” in “let mot juste”: just right. In practice social and political justice has been most successfully achieved through the rule of law and procedural fairness in our judicial system. When both are working right, they can approximate substantive justice when laws are involved, but there can be no guarantees. Far less successful has been our achievement of distributive justice, as blatantly and all too frequently illustrated by recent developments in the United States where wages for most workers stagnate, even decline, even as corporate chief executives and Wall Street bankers reward themselves with ever more obscene munificence, sometimes even when they are driving their companies and the entire financial system to the ground.

The most majestic elaboration of the concept of justice since Plato’s Republic is John Rawls’. This concept, according to Rawls, is governed by two principles. The first principle says (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 302), “Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.” The second principle is “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.” To these principles Rawls adds two “priority rules,” the first of which states, “the principles of justice are to be ranked in lexical order and therefore liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty. There are two cases: (a) a less extensive liberty must strengthen the total system of liberty shared by all; (b) a less than equal liberty must be acceptable to those with the lesser liberty.” The second rule concerns the priority of justice over efficiency and welfare.

To me, the key to Rawls’ theory lies in how the two principles of justice are phrased: “Each person is to have…” and “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that…” Who is or is to be the arranger? Although to Rawls liberty is the primary value, the way he talks about liberty is wholly devoid of the sense of life and motion that is the essence of freedom, so that the second principle “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are…to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged” almost has a self-destructive effect. By this I mean that whoever makes such arrangements precisely by making them will rob or destroy much of the benefit, in this case the satisfaction of actively achieving greater justice, to the intended beneficiaries, unless it is the least advantaged themselves who take the actions to get the arrangements made.

When something is given to you, it can just as easily be taken away; it is also never as precious as if you earned it yourself. It is only when you create, earn, or seize it yourself by compelling the public recognition of your self-creation that you are likely to be able to keep it. This is especially so in social and economic welfare. Thus, the history of British-American liberties is one in which one group after another seized their liberties and never let them go again: the Church, though in this case her special liberties were first “conferred” by the Roman Emperor Theodosius, the merchants and manufacturers of the medieval towns and cities, the feudal barons under the Norman kings, the English lawyers who led the struggles against the Stuarts, the lawyers, merchants, and plantation owners who founded the United States, the industrial workers who organized themselves into unions to combat industrial exploitation, and more recently blacks, women, and other minority groups. In each case, those who led the struggles managed to carry a whole class or group of people with them to enjoy the fruits of victory, but there were invariably laggards and omissions or exclusions. Thus, the founders of the American Republic not only did not provide for women or blacks, but they also did not specifically enfranchise the unpropertied. The black leaders of our recent and ongoing civil rights movement have mostly done well, and a significant black middle class has grown in the United States, but there remains a huge black underclass that is still mired in the vicious circle of poverty, failure of education, unemployment, hence more poverty and often crime, from generation to generation.

My point is that life is freedom, activity, exertion or struggle: it is self-creation. Justice and equality are most effectively created by the actual seizure of equality by the least advantaged, ideally by means of undeniable self-achievement. Those who have the power to make or extend the kind of arrangements for justice that Rawls argues for, therefore, can best use their power to energize that seizure. And I do not think it even necessary to make the seizure easy, because it is to the advantage of everyone to have to sharpen their skills and strengthen their creativity by struggle, though due allowances must always be made for those among us who, through no fault of their own, are limited in their abilities.

In this way, we are back to where we began with Citizen Solidarity First Step: citizens joining together to take American democracy to a new stage of development where America becomes, in the founders’ words, “a more perfect union,” a denser and more buoyant solidarity, in virtue of our more complete individual participation in the shaping of our common efforts: national goals as well as broad outlines of how to achieve those goals. But this will be “a more perfect union” such as the founders never dreamt of.

Thinking and living, thought and action
It is the peculiar nature of what we have begun at Citizen Solidarity First Step that we may more than once encounter a problem of delineating where government should not tread that other attempts at working on public policies usually manage to avoid. Whether it is our environmental, economic, or educational problems, as we probe deeper into the nature of the problems we will inevitably find ourselves confronting fundamental inadequacies of thought and valuations. We will then have to seek ways of overcoming these inadequacies, which, however, are essentially intellectual problems. Government and its policies, on the other hand, are about actions. Yet, these actions must be informed by ideas and understanding, which, if inadequate, would adversely affect the actions and their consequences. Therefore, even government actions must involve intellectual analysis, criticism, and reconstruction. Besides, thinking is itself action.

Nevertheless, it would not be a government that attempts the inexhaustible pursuit of ideas to the end of human imagination. It must cut off the inquiry at some point to undertake practical action on the understanding that its understanding is the best available at the moment of action, yet may not be adequate, so that its actions may need correction as its understanding improves. Happily, as citizens we do not work under this constraint.

Also, the power of government is very largely a power of compulsion, which, however, is precisely what the pursuit of ideas cannot tolerate. Thus, we may recall the Lysenko fiasco in the Soviet Union, where the Soviet government effectively made into official orthodoxy a biological theory according to which acquired characteristics could be inherited, just at a time when the fortuitous Mendelian discovery with peas had just begun revolutionizing genetic studies. This exercise at government support of a particular scientific theory, and a mostly mistaken theory, too, has so retarded biological sciences in the Soviet Union since the 1930s that they have still not quite recovered in today's Russia, even though discoveries over recent decades have turned biology into the most exciting and fruitful pursuit among the natural sciences.

We are also familiar in the West with how Constantine's decision to make Christianity into the official religion of the Roman Empire planted the seeds of centuries of strife over competing claims of power between Church and state once popes began to claim the superiority of the spiritual sword over the temporal. And in the history of the Tudor monarchy, with its messy succession—a vigorous defender of Catholicism, Henry VIII, turned against Rome for mixed reason of state and personal necessities, followed by son Edward with his Calvinist advisers, then Mary with her Catholic education and advisers as well as a Spanish husband-king in Spain, and finally Elizabeth, an apt student under Cambridge Protestants tutors—we see how an entire society could be turned up-side-down and again in turmoil and bloodshed when the government, in this case the crown, insisted that the people follow it in religion. When, therefore, the crown under the Stuarts repeatedly appeared intent to take England back into the Catholic fold despite the Elizabethan settlement, parliament and the people rebelled, took Charles' head and drove James II into exile. The Glorious Revolution was at once glorious and a revolution because by it henceforth the English crown would be made to follow the people in religion.

Naturally, if the people were more or less agreed in their opinions and beliefs, the Glorious Revolution settled the matter. If the opinions are relatively evenly divided and the division is acute, however, the government can be endlessly embroiled in fruitless controversy. The anti-establishment clause of America's First Amendment to the Constitution reflects the lessons that our founders had drawn from this long, sorry chapter of European history. Thus, the Constitution is not without God, but it is a God that reflects the vague, inexact notion that the American people had about that entity in late eighteenth century. The contemporary controversy in America over abortion attests to the difficulty for government when public beliefs are so divided that one side insists on the immorality of an action and wants to make illegal what the other sides believes is otherwise and wants to make legal.

At this website we will eventually be driven to looking into some problems of fundamental valuations of our beliefs and feelings, though I hope we will not get roped into disputes about religion. We may not come into any new revelation or agreement. Depending on how well we succeed, we may want government policies to reflect our improved understanding, but the pursuit of this understanding is probably something that the government itself ought to avoid, though it is clearly a matter of public interest. Other institutions—colleges and universities, for example—and private citizens are better suited to the purpose.

(4/2010)