Cloaking the States Dagger by By Robert Nisbet

7/28/2019 Cloaking the States Dagger by By Robert Nisbet

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T h e h is to ry of polit ical tho ug ht is a history of oneeuphemism after another to disguise the naked powerof t he s t a te .

By Robert Nisbethat we call political philosophyis so overladen in the WestW ith euphemism, panegyric,and idealization that anyone might beforgiven for occasionally failing toremember just what this philosophystrue subject is: the political state, unique

among major institutions in its claim ofabsolute power over human lives.Euphemisms for the sta te drawn fromk insh ip , r e l i g ion , na tu r e , r e a son ,mechanics, biology, the people, andother essentially nonpolitical sourceshave been ascendant for so long inWestern history that it is downright dif-ficult to keep in mind that the statesorigin and essential function is, asphilosopher David Hume pointed out inthe 18th century, in and of force-aboveall, military force. W hat p rocreation is tokinship and propitiation of gods is to

religion, monopolization of power is tothe sta te .Th ere is no political order known to usin history, from ancient Eg ypt to contem-porary Israel, that has not originated inwar, its claimed sovereignty but an ex-tension and ramification of what theRomans called the imperium, absolutemilitary command. War is the origin ofthe state and, in Randolph Bournesfamiliar phrasing, is the health of thestate . Modern war , grounded as i t usu-ally is in the kinds of political and moralideals, or claimed ideals, which canjustify almost limitless expansion of thestate at the expense of society, is veryhealthful indeed to any form of sta te.The essence of the sta te , then, is i tsunique possession of sovereignty-abso-lute and unconditional power over all in-dividuals and their associations and

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possessions within a given area. And atthe basis of the sta tes sovereignty is thecontingent power to use the military tocompel obedience to its rule. This is astrue of democratic as of despotic sta tes.The most democratic of contemporarystate s claims a monopoly of pow er withinits borders, exclusive possession of andcontrol over th e military and police, andthe right to declare war and peace, toconscript life and appropriate incomeand property, to levy taxes, to supervisethe family and even, wh en necessary, thechurch, to grant selective entitlements,to administer justice, and to define crimeand s et punishment. T he polit ical sta te isthe only association whose freedom toact cannot be limited by the state. Withall respect to differences among types ofgove rnmen t, there is not, in strict theory,any difference between th e pow ers avail-able to the democratic and to the totali-tarian state. We may pride ourselves inthe dem ocracies on bills or other expre s-sions of individual rights against thestate, but in fact they are rights against agiven government and in history andpractice have been ob literated or sharplydiminished when deemed necessary, asin the United States and other Western-democratic powers in the two worldwars.It is not strange, then, that the historyof the state should be accompanied bythe rich embroidery of euphemism. Anyinstitution born of war, that thrives inwar, and th at c la ims unique absolutenessof power over all individuals within itsborders requires all the symbolic assis-tance it can get. Such assistance has for avery long time been the offering of thepolitical clerisy. Like the church, thestate must have its defenders, rational-izers, and justifiers, its scribes andprophets. Also l ike the church, the sta temust have its dogmas and rituals, itsfeast days, its saints and martyrs, and itssacred objects.

Familyhe oldest of euphemisms for thestates distinctive military powerT s drawn from the realm of kin-ship, which is natural, given the a ge anduniversality of family, clan, and kindredin mankinds history. Th us early kings orchiefs might claim themselves patri-archs. R ecurrently in history, kings havebeen rulers of peoples rather than terri-tories; they were this in the early MiddleAges. King is a deriva tive of Old En glish

cyng, meaning kinship.T he patriarchal image of the stat e wasnourished by a good deal of theology dur-ing the Middle Ages; and feudalism it-

self, as we find it at its height, was an in- divi filus Augustus, a title that artfullygenious fusion of military substa nce and fused military, divine, and kinship.kinship symbol. Patriarchalism survived Christianity was born in a setting ofthe decline of medieval society, its endu r- emperor-worship, and from the begin-ing appeal well illustrated in the modern ning its teachers and missionaries sough tworld by the popularity everywhere of to nullify as far as possible the influencesuch words and phrases as fatherland, of the imperial religion upon Christian

A n y nstitution born of war, that thrives in war,and that claims unique absoluteness of power over allindividuals w ith in its bordebolic assistance it can get. rs requires all the sym-mother country, sister-nations, and thelike. Mario Cuomo, the keynote speakerat the 1984 Democratic conven tion, usedthe word family to descr ibe the Amer-ican nation just under two dozen times.It was with a keen sense of the anti-quity of kinship metaphors in politicsthat G eorge Orwell chose to give his bor-rifying totalitarian government the labelof Big Brother. But in many ways themost telling example of the power of aeuphem ism in thought is the argum ent inpolitical and social philosophy-extend-ing from Aristotle to modern politicalethnology-that the state is but thenatural developm ent through tim e of kin-ship. It assuredly is not, but the myth ap-pears to be ineradicable by now.

Religioneligion is second only to family inits fecundity of euph emism for theR ar-born state. Prepolitical manwas as saturated by religious as by kin-ship inf luences upon his thinking.Almost as hoary as the patr iarch is th eprophet in mankinds annals. How betterto give root to a m ilitary conquerors ac-ceptance by the conquered than to sanc-tify, even deify, him; to make him atworst an indispensable voice of the gods,at best one of the god s himself. Egyptiankings were addressed in rescript and in-scr iption as Aton, Horus, Re, and so onin order to give expression to theirclaimed identities as sun-go ds.The speed with which passage fromthe hum an to the divine could occur, andmuch later than the age of Egyptianpharoahs, is well illustrated by thecareers of Alexander in the Hellenisticworld and of Octavian, conqueror ofMark Antony at Actium, in the Roman.The latter was obliged by still-respectedrepublican tradition to be more subtlethan had been Alexander, but even sonot a great d eal of time passed b efore Oc-tavian became officially Imperator Caesar

minds. But taking the long history ofChristianity into account, it is impossibleto overlook the readiness with whichChristian faith and dogm a could includeacceptance of the sacredness of royal of-fice if not personage. Th e crowning ofCharlemagne by the Pope as holy Romanemperor suggests first the claim ofsuzerainty by church over state, in-cluding power of investiture of king, butsecond the allowance by church of sacredcharacter into the kingship. Even themost po werful and assertiv e of pop es inthe Middle Ages did not deny to kingships their ho ly, if derivative, status.It was, however, in the Reformationtha t the unqu alified divinity of king s wasonce again proclaimed in the West. AsLuther , Calvin, and others saw the m at-ter , elevation of kings to divine statu s intheir rule-directly divine statu s, un-mediated by church-was as powerful ablow a s could be struc k at the hated andfeared papacy. We tend to associateJames I of England most prominentlywith the Divine Right of Kings becauseof his early-man ifest fascination with thetheology of the subject. It was underCharles I, though, in 1640, that whatmust be the all-time high in Englishbelief in royal divinity was expressed.The sta tement begins: The most highand sacred order of kings is of DivineRight, being the ordinance of God Him -self, founded in the Prim e laws of natu re,and clearly established by express textsboth of the Old and New Testaments.Despite the numerous rationalist crit-icisms to which the divine-right pane-gyric was subjected in the next two cen-turies, it survived healthily. It was the in-fluential G erman philosopher Heg el whodeclared the state-with the Prussianstate foremost in mind-the march ofGod on earth. And even when the Ger-man political idealists chose to retreatGod to the background, obvious sur-rogates for God abounded: Dialectic,World-Spirit, and so on.Political euphemisms have by nomeans been confined to patriarchal or

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religious views of the state. The kind ofrationalism that began to flourish in the17th century is rich in euphemisms.Some of the more influential are:machine, organism, general will, Popularsovereignty, community, an d welfare.

Machine& Organismo l iken anything to e ither machineor organism was a favorite occu-T ation of 17th- and 18th-centuryphilosophers, and it w ould,have been ex-traordinary had the political clerisy notseized upon both of thes e euphem isms asmeans to advance understanding and ac-ceptance of the political state. The

corp oratio ns of his day are likened toworm s in the entrails of natural man.Intermediate groups are declared to befor the most part litt le worms which thephysicians call ascarides. Undue con-flict in government can induce a pleur-isy that breeds stiches and otherpains. Hobbess special form of natural-ism scored on both his physical andorganic com parisons; and in his mind thephysical and organic were really on e, forwhat was the organism but a divinelyconstructed machine? Man could do noless in the state-to make an organismdirected by the laws of mechanics.In John Loc ke, too, the im press of thephysical sciences is very evident. Thestate is at bottom one body politic withthe capacity to move as one body underthe direction of a soul tha t gives life to

H o w ould the social security 9 system have eveYreached its eminence if it had been called in thebeginning something so mercilessly exact as ?statecharity?organic could be illuminated by analogyto one or other of the m echanical pumpswhich in the 17th century dotted thelandscape , especially in England; and thesocial and political could be explained bythe organic or the mechanical or, as inthe case of T hom as Hobbes, both.In his Leviathan, Hobbes first abjuresthe use of metaphor in scientific writing(what he refers to as demonstration),but his own ears were deaf to his warn-ing. Metaphor abounds in Hobbesspolitical writings. In the original editionof Leviathan there is a frontispiece of agiant human being, his body made up ofminiscule human beings. Hobbes is ofcourse laying the ground d rama tically forhis demonstrations throughout the bookthat the state is at once organism andmachine. The principles of statics anddynamics, so highly visible in the na turalphilosophy of the age, are seized uponwith avidity by Hobbe s in his explanationof political process. Th e sta te is, just likethe machine, an artificial body, one gov-erned by its inherent statics anddynamics. There is an artificial soulthat gives life and motion to the body.Human ingenuity has created enginesthat move themselves a s doth a watch.Wha t is the heart but a spring; and thenerves but so many strings; and thejoints but so many wheels, giving motionto the whole body.The state, l ike the human body, cansuffer malfunctions as the consequenceof foreign substances introduced. Thus,for Hobbes such corporate bodies as the

human society. When the Legislative(the political gove rnm ent) is dissolved,dissolution and death must follow.From Locke there is a straight line to thewritings of the philosophes in France, somany of whom employed the figures ofmachine and organism to underscore be-lief that almost identical processes are

played by contract applied to almost anyrelationship.For philosophers and political intellec-tuals alike, the idea of contract wasmesmerizing. The ugly reality of polit-ical-military power in dominance overmultitudes could be transmuted into arelationship among individuals that, likeany bona fide economic agreement, issimply a free contractual relationshipamong assenting, willing individuals. Itreally did not matter whether the socialcontract was believed to have historicalreality at som e remote time in the past orwhe ther it was m ore of a spirit, tacit butpervasive, in a political population. Allthat m attered was that in theory there bea justification for the absolute state thatcould render th e divine-right or patri-archal theory obsolete.Natural law was a perfect host for thematuration of the euphemism of con-tract. In the 17th century, substanceswere deemed of greater reality than rela-tionships. Man was the primary sub-stance; his social relationships withothers represe nted by traditional institu-tions were insubstantial, shadowy, m erereflections cast by individuals. For real-ity, one must begin with the individual;with his drives, his passions, and hisreason. One must also postulate, asphysical scientists did, some beginningvoid, some condition of nature in whichnothing but m an, solid man, existed.For Hobbes, this state of nature wasdreadful, a place of unceasing war, with

AUhe primordial milita rism of the fi rs t states inhistory was nakedly displayed in the Great W ar, butfew saw nakedness; only robes of divinity.found in the state and the human body.On such analogies and implicit lauda-tions, modem political science wasfounded.

Social Compacthe metaphor of a contract, orcompact, among individuals asT ource and rationalization of thepolitical state was not born in the 17thcentury, but it reached its maximum ex-pression then in the history of ideas. T heidea of contract had been made a popularone by the revival of Rom an law , inwhich contract is given prominent placein civil codes; and the general spread ofeconomic enterprise from the 16th cen-tury on could only popularize among themasses the notion of a vindicating role

life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish andshort. He pointed to the Indians ofNorth America as a contemporary in-stance of what all mankind had onceknown. T his is amusing, for the IndiansHobbes specifically referred to werethose of the Atlantic coastal area , most ofthem in the great Iroquois League, wellused to political institutions and to fre-quent war. H owever nasty and poor theirlives may have been, it would have mademore sense to c harge this to the politicalstate th an t o any prepolitical condition ofnature. It doesnt matter. T he social con-tract for Hobbes is the vis creatrix bywhich the absolute state, Leviathan,came into being. Awful as its power is,life within it is vastly to be preferred tothe even more awful state of nature.Every civil war, every rebellion, evenevery criminal individual act, is, Hobbestells us, an eruption, and a dreadful

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reminder of the natural condition of man .I t was by contract that Leviathan wasbrought into existence, and it is by con-tract that under no circumstances mayits absolute power ever be challenged.This was too much for other natural-law philosophers of the century, Locke foremost among them. Yes, an originalstate of nature in which men hadfreedoms, and yes, a contract by which

natural freedoms were incorporated inthe state, but not with the result thatsuch freedoms would be destroyed. In-stead, the natural f reedoms would beconverted into civil freedoms and remainessentially intact after the contract hadbeen mad e; indeed, they would be crucialelements of the contract. The cont rac t ,Locke declared (years before the Revolu-tion of 168 8 which so often is stillmistakenly thought to have been Lockesprime inspiration) holds the sov ereign aswell as the subjects accountable, and ifthe day comes when the sovereign failsto protect individuals lawful rights,especially the right of property, popularrevolt is justified. In fact, it is not reallyrevolt by the people; for whatever therehad been to revolt against was destroyedby the sovereign, by the sovereignsprior flouting of the terms of the con-tract, thus unilaterally ending it andthereby op ening the way to the establish-ment of a new and once again legitimatecontract .W e may think of the m etaphor of con-tract a s simply a conceit of the 17th and18th centuries, a plaything that wasdropped by philosophers at the end of theEnlightenm ent. But it is for intellectualstoo beguiling a figure not to surface fromtime to time. Th e much-lauded work of adecade ago by Harvard University phi-losophy professor John Rawls, A Theoryof Justice, is sufficient evidence of thatstatement. What Rawls calls his state ofnature is the original position withinwhich im aginary individuals exist behindthe veil of ignorance. Our minds aredirected to a hypothetical group ofhuman beings so anterior to culture (withall its in-built prejudices) that they are ig-norant of name, origin, social status,knowledge of good and evil, or even in-telligence and temperam ent. Such beingsexist, for Rawlss purposes, in anoriginal position that is for all theworld like a 17th-century state of nature.And just as his predecessors fashionedstates of nature to accord with theirrespective preferences for government,so does R awls fashion his original con-dition and his veil of ignorance to ac-cord with his unambiguous desire to seeequality of condition the law of the landas a result of a social contract devisedbehind that veil.

The Peopleery probably the m ost fateful con-cept of the late 18th century inV olitics was th e people. Not thenumerical aggregate of all who livedwithin a given se t of bo undaries, for thiscould include rabble on the o ne hand an dtyrants and exploiters on the other.

Rather, those individuals who could freetheir minds of sectarian prejudices andloyalties, who could in a rational waymake their individual ways to compre-hension of the general good and whoacted virtuously in political matters-these were the people, properlyunderstood. If government w ere based inthem, it would be inherently incapable oftyranny, for the people would never

the political comm unity-it will neve r beto one mans advantage to seek to tyran-nize his associates. As soon as the sta te isformed, it becomes automatically im-possible to hurt one member withouthurting th e en tire political body, with allmembers affected. Similarly, the sover-eign power need give no guarantee to itssubjects because it is impossible for thebody to wish to hurt all its members.Th e general will alone is sovereign, andwhoever refuses to obey the generalwill shall be compelled to do so by thewhole body. This means nothing lessthan th at he will be forced to be free .But w hat is th e gen eral will? Rousseauindulges in no nonsense about majoritiesor even unanimities necessarily being thesubstan ce of this will. For, he points ou t,there is the will of al1,and although

V e r y probably the m ost fa te fu l concept of the late18th century in politics wastyrannize itself.Jean- acques Rousseaus momentousidea of the general will epitomizedperfectly this vision of the people in con-trast to a mere multi tude. Th e vision hasmade its way uninterruptedly through19t h-ce ntu ry ideas of plebiscitary dic-tatorship to 20th-century totalitarian-isms. None of the latter would usetotalitarian as a label. For that mattereven communism tends to be eschewed infavor of, say, peoples democratic republic.

Rousseaus The Social Contract, pub-lished more than a century af terHobbess Leviathan, presented the socialcontract in a new light. It was nothing inthe dim past, nor was it to be construedas tacit in any existing state. It was themeans whereby, for the first time inhistory, the true, the only legitimate,sta te could be brought into being. Whatwas required, Rou sseau argued, is a con-tract among individuals whereby eachof us puts his person and all his power incommon under the supreme direction ofthe general will. Once entered into, thecontract is irrevocable and the newlyestablished general will is absolute inpower. Rousseau had only contempt forLockean notions of natural or otherrights persisting after the formation ofthe sta te . T he contract demands the totalsurrender , a l ienatioa, of each associatetogethe r with all his rights, to the wholecommunity.Such an alienation of rights does not,however, connote despotism. Since allmembers of the newly formed state areequal-in loss of natura l righ ts and in ac-quisition of equality of membership in

the people.this may be identical with the general willin a given situation, there is nothing man-datory about it. T he general will appea rsonly when a people has first banishedfrom its collective mind all thoughts ofindividual or partisan interest. Rousseauhas in full measure the Enlightenmentsgeneral hatred of such intermediategroups as kindred, church, and guild,and he insists therefore that it is essen-tial, if th e gen eral will is to be able to ex-press itself, that there should be no par-tial society within the sta te. B etween in-dividual and sovereign there can benothing that is not of the sovereignsmaking and under the sovereignspower.Rousseaus genius, and the basis of hismultifold appeal in the centuries follow-ing, lies in the care with which heenclothes his sovereigns monolithicpower in such words as people, publicinterest, and above all, of course, thegeneral will. As I have already noted , thelast is so far f rom being synonymouswith the expressed wish of a majority ofthe citizens that it must be explicitlydist inguished from mere numb ers. Whatmakes the will general is less thenumber of voters than the common in-terest unit ing them. B ut how, we ask, isthis common interest to be ascertained,to be recognized when it exists? Not,Rousseau tells u s clearly in his Discourseon Political Economy, through any assem-bling of the people. It is by no means cer-tain that any decision of the assemblywould reflect the general will; such amethod would be impracticable in alarge nation; and, most important, such

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assembly is hardly ever needed wherethe government is well-intentioned: forthe rulers well know that the ge neral willis always on the side which is most favo r-able to the public interest. . . o that it isneedful only to act justly to be certain offollowing the general will. Needless tosay, there have been few govern ments inhistory which have not considered theirrule, however harsh, a s just.Rousseau believed the religious im-pulse in man to be fixed and ineradicable.What is necessary, therefore, is to unitereligion and the state. This Rousseaudoes through what he calls the civilreligion. Its articles of faith should .befixed by the sovereign, not exactly asreligious dogmas, but as social sen-timents without which a man cannot be agood citizen or a faithful subject. Thetenets of this religion will concern the

Mother Russia in the east across the con-tinent and the Atlantic to the UnitedState s, the nation becam e almost literallythe Voice of God. Once the sacred statehad been premised upon belief that theruler was a god; now it was the people,conceived as nation, to which holy at-tributes were given.Th e United States serves very wel l asexample of the power of civil religion-down at least through the Great War.Americanism vied with Christianity asthe religion of true believers. American-ism had its proper calendar of saintsdays for W ashington, Jefferson, Jackson,Lincoln, and others. It had its Torah orPentateuch in the Declaration of In-dependence and the Constitution. Medal-lions, scapularies, banners, epigrams,paintings, statues, and other essentiallyreligious objects abounded. Its Nativity

I t is necessary to rem ind the Moral Majority th atbehind the totalitarian states of the 20th century lievast schemes of attainment of virtue by political force.state and its members only so far asthey have reference to morality and tothe duties requisite to the states welfare.Rousseau speaks with all the force ofDostoevskis Grand Inquisitor about thedogmas of la religion civile. While it cancompel no one to believe them, it canbanish from the state whoever does notbelieve them. . as an anti-social being,incapable of truly loving the laws andjustice, and of sacrificing at nee d his lifeto his duty. Beyond this, if anyone , afterpublicly professing belief in these ar-ticles, beha ves a s if he does not believethem, let him be punished by death.

Vox Populi,Vox Dei

l though Rousseaus Contrat Socialseems to have been one of theA east read of his books during thedecade leading to the outbreak of theFrench Revolution, it became one of thebest read of books durin g the Revolution.No one else had so glorified the people-the population, that is, freed of its dis-senters, criminals, traitors, bigoted, andotherwise wicked-and so convincinglydemonstrated that government couldreach any height of repressiveness SOlong as it was anchored in the people.It is no wonder, then, that the FrenchRevolution brought the ideas of peopleand nation to a white heat that wouldtend to melt all other loyalties. From

was of course July 4th, down untilperhaps a half-century ago observed byAmericans more fervently than any ofthe Christian holidays.Basic to the Am erican religion was thebelief in the redemptive mission of theUnited States in the world. More thananything else it was this belief thatgoverned the mind of Woodrow Wilsonduring his tragic presidency. For Wilson,both before and after American par-ticipation in the Great War, the sacredobligation of A merica w as, in his words,to teach other peoples how to elect goodmen. To make the world safe fordemocracy meant, of course, American-style democracy.If W ilson and othe r worshippers at thenational altar needed anything to quickenfaith, to bring belief to a w hite-hot inten-sity, i t was the almost transfiguring ex-perience in Am erica of 1917-18. Neverperhaps in history had a large peopleknown religious conversion so quicklyand powerfully. From a nation of neu-trals, of fastidious rejection of E uropeanwars, Americans became, with only afew exceptions, crusaders, as avid tocarry the religion of Americanism to theold world as their medieval forerunnerswere in their Christian mission. It was arare Sunday sermon that gave God theattention tha t Am erica the B eautiful got.After all, nearly 200,000 volunteervigilantes, the so-called Four-MinuteMen, patrolled the land under Wilsonianorders to make certain that the Americancause was properly recognized at every

assemblage; to ignore or oppose themwas alm ost instant ground for popular in-dictment as heretic. The Kaiser and allGermans were necessari ly infidels ;worse, minions of hell, disciples of thedevil. To be charged with pro-German-ism could be a s deadly an experience a sbeing charg ed with witchcraft in the 17thcentury.I am not suggesting, though, that thereligion of nation-state was limited toAmerica, no matter at what intensity.Throughout m ost of the 19th century,down through the early years of theGreat War, nationalism could be asecstatic and mystical a thing for Euro-peans a s for Americans. Intellectuals, to-day overwhelmingly dismissive of any-thing smacking of patriotism, were thenprime m overs in the new religion. Fran ceand G ermany ran hot competition in thepublished wor ks of historians and philos-ophers to establish the sacredness andthe appointed mission of their respectivenations. Not since the Reformation hadEurope known the enthusiasm that nowpermeated nations rather than cults.The Great War brought all of this tofulfillment-and then near-disappear-ance. It is difficult today to summon up,much less explain, the states of mindwhich were a commonplace all overEurope on matte rs of devotion, sacrifice,and martyrdom in behalf of nation. Dur-ing at least the first two years of the warthe young, those who faced almost cer-tain death or injury in the trenches, we reas religiously caught up as any of theirelders. T o give ones blood for E nglandor France was like the medieval cru-saders gift of blood for Christ. All theprimord ial militarism of the first state s inhistory was nakedly displayed in theGreat W ar, but few saw nakedness; onlyrobes of divinity. Rousseaus civilreligion, at the zenith of its 19th-centuryascendance, saw to that .

Social Welfareuring the 20th century, yet an-other euphemism for politicalD ower has m ade its way into pop-ular usage: the social welfare state. It isone of historys ironies that the wordsocial should have been so easily appro-priated by th e political clerisy. Wh en thisword achieved popularity in the W est inthe early 19th century, the context wasoverwhelmingly the nonpolitical spheresof society-family, neighborh ood, localcommunity, and voluntary cooperativeassociation foremost. T o Frenc h sociolo-gists and radical anarchists alike, thestate and the political were in bad odor

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after the totalitarianism of the Revolu-tion. Auguste Comte, founder of sociol-ogy, led the way in seeking to repudiatethe political and to ex alt the social as theonly feasible alternative to the political.Alas for Comtes hopes, the politicalclerisy was already at work seizingupon the social before he died.It is not difficult to understand.the at-tractiveness of the social in place ofthe political, for the latter had inevit-ably become somewhat stained in thepublic imagination. Th ere w ere too manycitizens for whom the state was stil l areminder of war and taxes, and, in anyevent , there w ere s imply l imits to whatcould be done with the word political.Such neologisms as politicization and,worse, politicalization didnt recomm endthemselves when reference was beingmade to the political states ownershipand c ontrol of increasingly large are as ofeconomy and society. Such words mayhave told the truth, but it is the functionof langu age to be ab le to conceal, as wellas reveal, the truth.Social was m ade to ord er as a beguilingp re f i x . So c i a l r e fo rm, s o c i a lsecurity, and social budget were somuch better as labels for what govern-ments were actually doing than wouldhave been any of these with the wordpolitical used instead of social. Similarly,for those who could dream of an evermore state-dominated future, socialismwas much to be preferred to politicism.And who is to say the clerisy is wrong?How, for instance, could the now-mammoth and always near-bankruptingsocial security system in the UnitedStates have ever reached its eminenceand load of close to 40 million people if ithad been called in the beginning polit-ical security or something so merci-lessly exact as state c harity.Big euphemisms in politics spawnsmall ones. Thus civil rights, once aprecise term for individual rights withinthe governing process, now stan ds mostlyfor group entitlements, Social Securityand Medicare being only the biggest. Af-firmative action is the euphemism usedfor a widening complex of highly nega-tive actions by the state against in-dividual liberties. The phrase is obvi-ously more felicitous to political sen-sibilities than quota system, which is infact the substa nce of affirm ativeaction enforced by the government.It is politics alone that has generatedthe race to euphemism by the variouspublic interest groups concerned withenlarging the number of governmentgrants. T hu s the once-honored elderlyor aged have been retired for good infavo r of senior citizens. T he blind andthe deaf have given w ay to the hearing-

impaired and the sight-impaired.The feeble-minded are gone, succeededby the exceptional in all public laws.And, finally, through political legerde-main, the poor and needy have been atlast banished, replaced by the under-privileged.

Soulcraftecently a resurgence of the moraland the sacred has taken place inR merica n political thoug ht and ac-tion. George Will, political columnist,has given benediction to this resurgencein his book Statecraft as Soulcraft. T h etime has passed, Will declares, when thegoverning machinery can properly limititself to the act ua l behav ior of individu alsand concern itself with soybeans butnot virtue. He is contemptuous of theinsistence of the late Supreme CourtJustice Felix Frankfurter that govern-ment consider behavior, not the innermind, of those it rules. No longer maymoral matters such as abortion, birthdeformities, and school prayers be leftwhere they have been for millennia-chiefly in the ha nds of the fam ily and th echurch and in our day the medical pro-fession.If there is to be virtue in these andrelated matters, says the self-styledMoral M ajority, statutes of the nationalgovernment and even constitutionalamendments are mandatory. Neighbormay be set on neighbor in the interest oftotal con form ity to political law s of vir-tue. T he entire coercive machine ry of thestate is to be utilized when necessary.But, w rites Ge orge Will, none of this is tobe regarded as compelling persons toact against their settled convictions; it isnot collision of wills. . . Rather it is aslow, steady, gentle, educative, and per-suasive enterprise. That it is also anenterprise in which police, prosecutingattorneys, courts, and prisons quicklyand necessarily enter seem s not to matterto the Moral Majority and its prophets.Will and his allies believe that thisassignment of virtue to the political statehas Edmund Burke for its ancestor. Intruth, i t is not Burke, who abominatedcentralization of political power, andespecially in the moral realm, but Jean-Jacques R ousseau who gave birth to thephilosophy of political manufacture ofvirtue and of virtuous minds. Ea rly in hislife, Rousse au tells us in the Confessions,he had come to the realization that peo-ples moral lives are shaped by politicalgovernment. It was thus easy for Rous-seau to reac h the c onclusion in Th e SocialContract that when government coerces,

it is only forcing men to be free and ofcourse virtuous. Government must pen-etrate into mans inmost being,Rousseau declares, if it is to progressfrom merely ruling men to making m enas they should be. It is the sacred taskof govern ment, he concludes, to changehuman nature, to transform each in-dividual, who is by himself a completeand solitary whole into part of a greaterwhole from which he. . receives his lifeand being. Rightly do we perceive theRousseauian state as a form of perma-nent m oral terror.It is do ubtless.crue1, but it is necessaryto remind the Moral M ajority in Americathat behind the totalitarian states of the20th century lie, without exception, vastschemes of attainment of virtue in thecitizenry through limitless uses of polit-ical force. Lenin, S talin, Hitler, Mao, andPol Pot have not been by nature sadistsand carnage-mongers. They have been,though we shrink from the word, ideal-ists, so certain of being m orally right in aworld of evil that they believed them-selves justified in uses of political powerranging from simple decree to what theNazis in a triumph of political euphe-mism called the Final Solution. FromMa rx, Lenin drew a picture in his head ofthe perfect socialist man; and in the in-terest of creating this being, no limit tothe use of force could properly be re-garded as virtuous. Again, i t is cruel butnecessary to see Leninism in its severalforms a s nothing less than Soulcraft.

Afterwordt is almost too much to bear. Morethan 2,000 years of political euphe-I ism and panegyric, and with whatresult? T he sta te, born of war and nour-ished by war, has become, all euphe-mism notwithstanding, more powerful,mo re inquisitorial in hum an lives, than atany time in its history. It is almost as ifMars, god of war, were exacting tributefrom us for having sought for thousandsof ye ars to conceal with euphemism th eunion of war and state. For, in our cen-tury the state has reached a pinnacle offorce never before known in history, andwarfare h as taken m ore lives in devasta-tion, killing, and mutilation than in allprevious centuries put toge ther. Id

Robert Nisbet i s Albert Schweitzer ProfessorEmentus at Columbia University and adjunctscholar at the American Enterprise Institute.His latest book is Pre jud ices : A Phi losoph ica lDic t ionary . Th is article is adaptedfrom hiscontribution to the forthcom ing book Fair o fS p e e c h: T h e Uses o f E u p h e m i s m , edited byD. . Enright (oxford University Press).

O C T O B E R 1984 R E A S O N 47


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Mucking Up the Melting PotB Y LYN N SCARLETT

ver half a million Indochinese refu-0 ees have flocked to the UnitedStates in the wake of South Vietnamscollapse. For non e of the se refugees wasthe flight from their homeland an easyone, but for one group-Hmong people-the uproot ing has been espec ia l lytraumatic .Tribal peasants from the highlands ofnorthern Laos, the Hmong were cata-pulted from a centuries-old slash-and-burn farming culture into the computerage. They were totally unfamiliar withmodern urban life, even in their owncountry. Not only stoves and refriger-ators but tables and chairs were foreign.Banks, checking accounts, and super-markets defied even the imagination intheir native home. And they were il-literate-in fact, their own languagedoesnt have a writ ten form.When I was ask ed recently by a UnitedNat ions organiza t ion to char t theHmongs problems and prospects inSouthern California, where over 33 per-cent of the 50,000 Hmong in the UnitedStates have sett led, I found a peoplestruggling to adapt to monumentalchang es in their lives. But m y investiga-tion also revealed something deeplyt roubl ing abou t A mer ica s we lfa resystem.Like millions of immigrants who hadpreceded them to the United States, theHmong were greeted by g enerous volun-teers-individuals and charitable organi-zations-who helped ease them into theirnew surroundings. Unlike past eras,however, the federal government nowhas its fingers in just about every dimen-sion of Am ericas melting pot. Th ere areprograms to impar t to immigrantslanguage and job skil ls . There aret a xpa ye r - f unde d hous ing subs id i e s ,health-support systems, special counsel-ing, and welfare.It all sounds quite generous, at first.But, talking to the director of the Indo-Chinese Commun ity Program in my area(yes, its federally fund ed), I noticed howmuch support for the Hmong has gonetoward guiding them through a maze ofgovernment bureaucracy. Immigrationpapers, Social Security numbers, taxforms, Medicare forms, welfare applica-tions, immunizations-all this, the pro-gram director proudly confided, her of-

fice takes c are of for the refugees.Had any of the Hmong in this area, Iasked, set up businesses? A bemuseddirector replied that these people canbarely cope with the basic proceduralrequi rements of se t t l ing down inmachine-age America. Surely, she said,not realizing her implicit criticism ofwhat America had become, they couldnot contemplate throwing themselvesagainst the m orass of agencies, councils,commissions, boards, and departmentsthat regulate sm all business.Contrast this to the situation in turn-of-the-century New York, where govern-ment interference didnt nip entrepre-neurship in the bud. The waves of im-

likely to engend er the dem ise of the pro-gram-since its welfare rolls are slim, theprogram is slated to receive no morefunding.In the same building out of which theIndochinese Program operates, I sawhealthy, able-bodied American adultslined up for their regular welfare hand-outs. Some, the director complained,have been receiving welfare checks for adecade or more. Meanwhile she couldpoint to a Hmong tribesman-illiterate,speaking no English, with 10 childrenand almost no belongings, in utterlystrange surroundings-who is ineligiblefor continued assistanc e because of legalquirks and political finagling.The program di rec tor seemed genu-inely concerned, and I asked whethershed reached out to the community forhelp. Yes, she said. She had presented aplea for funds to the city council, tocounty officials, to the mayor, to the localcongressman, to the state senator-allgovernment officials! I probed further.What about individuals? Philanthropicvolunteers? I was astounded, but it hadnot even occurred to her to se ek help fromthe private sector.Historically, the United States was aland of opportunity for immigrants. It of-fered them relative freedom to pursuetheir dreams. And, with f lourishingvoluntary, charitable organizations, itprovided a flexible support network forthe needy. Today, we have a situation inwhich eager, hardworking individuals,hindered from setting out on their own,become captives of a welfare system thatmigran ts that poured in then have left a is unreliable yet breeds depen dence.rich diversity of shops, restau rants , and And , in a self-perpetuating process, th eservices that bear witness to what un- social w orkers who administer therestricted opportunity can me an for in- system have been inculcated, more often

dividuals. than not in government schools, in theToday we have, instead, refugees who creed that governments, not individuals,are increasingly pushed on to the mercy solve problems. Slowly but surely thisof govern men t welfare program s, as creed has penetrated our ranks, narrow -private efforts are crowded out and ening our vision and capping our imagina-trepreneu rship is stymied. And what the tion, so that a call for help is unquestion-government gives with one hand, it is ingly put out as a call for more govern-often quick to take away with the other. ment. Wh at an introduction for theWhether a tr ibute to the hardworking Hmong!refugees themselves, or to the vigorousefforts of the IndoChinese Community Lynn carLett is R E A S O N Sook review &or,Pro Sam s d i rec tors , 75 Percent or more She is in the doctoral program in politicalof the Hmong in this area have found science at the university of California, Santawork. Ironically, that very succes s seems Barbara.

48 R E A S O N O C T O B E R 1984 Illustration by Susan Sallade

Documents

Cloaking the States Dagger by By Robert Nisbet