Desperately Seeking Radical Centeredness - Intro

FROM THE SECOND COMING by William Butler Yeats

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
          ...
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

                                         --or?--

   "Extremism in the name of liberty is no vice."  --Barry Goldwater


"Dissing" the center is an old game.  To many people it seems to be about lacking conviction, "flip-flopping", going with the flow, "triangulation", etc.  There is that kind of centrism.  But there can also be a resolute stand, on a given issue or set of issues, that the right answer isn't all of one thing or all of another -- that no simple set of axioms will tell us just what to do about everything; that maybe only by painstakingly studying the results of our actions will we over time discover what works best.

Then again, maybe there is a right set of principals, but we don't know what they are, and won't for a very long time.  The tenacity of people's desire to understand and get mastery is a marvel.  For thousands of years people tried to understand the body and how to correct its problems.  In all that time, there were some people looked to as medical experts.  Yet until 1-200 years ago, they had next to no really useful, applicable knowledge.

All the same, we had to have a theory, so for a long time we had the theory of humours, four bodily fluids whose imbalance caused illness.  One of the few things we could do about the balance of these fluids was remove blood.  We certainly had no safe means to add it.  The other humours, black and yellow bile, and phlegm weren't so easily removed or added.  The practice was shaped to the available tools.  To the man with only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.  Maybe shibboleths like the liberal "Help the needy" (too often with a lack of creativity and empathy that dooms the "help" to failure) or today's Conservative/libertarian battle cry of "No new taxes!" could be usefully compared with the "medical" practice of bleeding.  There are, in fact, conditions that can be helped by reduction of the amount of blood, but far far fewer than doctors at one time imagined, when that was the only thing their theory could prescribe.

Maybe I'm for the center, and for conviction and passionate intensity.  But where do we find that?  My own reactions to political events and people has long lacked any clear explicit system.  Yet I think they are grounded -- mostly in diverse studies of history, and in study of what is reportedly going on in the world today.  Humans are very prone to close linking of belief systems with our identities, and identifying those who disagree with some kind of elemental evil.  All competent propagandists know what to do with this.  Our tendency to focus heavily on some theory or simple model of the world has often helped pave the way to mad tyrannies, such as Nazism or Communism.

When people speak of "conservatism", they nearly always mean a particular conservatism for a particular time.  But we could define a general (moderately) conservative position for any place and time by saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".  I.e. it is the sentiment that we have something that is working reasonably well, and we are afraid that radical (usually big-idea based) changes will make it worse.  And this sentiment is very often right.

What draws me to the idea of the political center? And what is it, or what could be made of it?  I have been thinking about this, and looking for books, people, articles, web sites, and the first thing that dawns on me is that different people draw very different pictures of it.  Conservatism and liberalism can come to mean (to most people who use them) positions almost opposite of what they once stood for, and centrism might be even harder to pin down.

So we can look at centrism as a general idea, or identify it as a set of positions that seem centrist in a given political situation, or with respect to the dominant party system at a particular point in time.

Just looking at centrism per se, and not the positions it seems to imply to one person or group at one place and time, what seems attractive about it (to me)?

• The personal quality of being "centered", is often viewed as positive, although on close examination, I think its meanings vary.
• It has a positive aspect if viewed as the opposite of being "out on a limb", though sometimes being "out on a limb" may be seen as bold, even heroic.

Like it or not, groups often have to find a more or less central position in order to accomplish anything in cooperation.  When a group becomes less prone to explor varied possibilities, and is pulled to an extreme position, it is often by a forceful or charismatic leader.

When legislators on different sides of an issue are close enough, or respectful enough of each others' points of view, debate and compromise can have at least two big positive effects:

• The person arguing an opposite point can uncover flaws in ones position and lead to its improvement.
• A majority based governing structure, with two closely matched (in strength), and rigid parties may project an inconsistent face to the world.  The U.S. has suffered from many radical oscillations between policy extremes, such as a policy of strength and force vs. one of engagement, and empathy with the grievances of other peoples.  These and other extreme oscillations and avoidance of the center have resulted in projects started by one party and dismantled by the other, costing much and achieving nothing.

Perhaps we can get some insight from informed speculation about how human nature took shape.  The environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) is a biology concept useful for explaining peculiar actions of animals living in a different environment from that in which their traits evolved.  A very good example (though involving human-assisted evolution) is the Australian cattle dog, bred to drive herds of cattle by biting at their heels.  In a human social environment, if not very well trained, they will nip at the heels of guests, and be distressed and aggressive unless people stay in a compact group, which may make it hard for anyone to go to the bathroom.

Knowing this breed's EEA gives a trainer knowledge of what tendencies must be modified for them to be agreeable and safe companions.  What about people?

Human beings are adaptable like no other species, but in the last few hundred thousand years, in order to live off the natural produce of the land (being "hunter-gatherers") we know at least that they had to live in small scattered groups or "bands".  This based on observation of how remaining (or recently surviving) peoples living off the land actually live(d), and reasoning that larger settlements would take more territory to feed them, so that expeditions in search of food must go too far.

E.g. we often face threats to our dignity, position within an organization, or financial well being which are not at all physical, yet our bodies have a highly emotional "fight or flight" reaction which can cloud our thinking or endanger our health.  If we anticipate this, we may cope with it by meditating or going for a run for example to satisfy the desire to act in some physically vigorous way.

Are there social and emotional tendencies that helped human settlements, in our almost forgotten EEA keep roughtly to the "right" size? Looking at how we in fact tend to factionalize, could it be that an unconscious or barely conscious sense makes us irritable and less tolerant with one another as group size grows, and could it be that when the group dynamics, after a succession of messy and unpredictable results of this irritability and tendency to find fault, fall into a pattern that looks like a split down the middle, this feels right, the split occurred cleanly, and the two groups move apart.

Consider where we are today.  What would our system of responses recognize as "the group" (or band)?  In evolutionary time, the group consisted of basically everyone a member was very familiar with -- everyone we ever spoke to or heard speak, except on a few extraordinary occasions.  If that is how it works, then modern humans may constantly live with whatever sort of sense arose from a "too large" group whose tendency would be to somehow bring about a split.  Perhaps given our current situation, we experience that response all the time, possibly in the form of a nagging sense that it's time for a "split" and looking for a set of differences that would guide us in making the split.


Could this hypothetical "splitting" tendency help explain, along with our love of team sports, the very widespread pattern of societies with fairly well matched parties (that go on without much change for decades), accompanied by the strong sense (which I suspect is illusory) of this being a very fundamental and "real" division?

If my speculations are right, it is certainly not serving the purpose it evolved to meet.  For the split to produce two groups of more optimal size, it is way, way too late for that.  And the two groups can never move apart and forget about each other, but are perpetually stuck in the moment just before that split should occur.

To live in this world, which sprung up far too fast for evolution to follow it, I suggest it is useful to have some mantra like "We are less divided than we appear to be" or "Much of this apparent division is illusory".

I am strongly inclined to make "Desperately Seeking Radical Centeredness" an ongoing series within "Owning Our Democracy" or maybe eventually a separate blog.  I have been exploring the idea for a long time, and have discovered many promising resources to share.

What is "Owning Our Democracy" About?

Democracy appears to be in trouble. A lot of people agree, but can't agree on how it is in trouble, much less what to do about it.

Actually, many people have taken to proclaiming the U.S. is "a republic, not a democracy".   The line has been heavily pushed by Pat Buchanan and Glenn Beck, as well as libertarians.  Ron Paul, in an online essay, says "The Founding Fathers were concerned with liberty, not democracy".  This is particularly convenient with the current alignment of ideologies, and naming of parties.  Convenient, that is, for those who want to demonize the Democratic party and make if effectively disappear.

The "party of Jefferson", however, were for the first few decades referred to sometimes as "democrats", sometimes as "republicans", and sometimes as "democratic republicans".

Around the time that Andrew Jackson was elected, they seemed to settle on calling themselves Democrats, and they were distinctly the party of small government and states rights.

I'd like to set aside history for a moment, and just examine the terms used by Ron Paul, "democracy" and "freedom".  My impression is that most Americans would have little to say if asked to explain the difference between democracy and freedom, so they miss the tensions that sometimes exist between democracy and freedom, and also miss how they support each other.

Democracy means "people rule", and has come to mean some form of majority control over ... what?  If the people rule it, then it is something held in common.  And that is just what the Latin root of republic, res publica means.  In the 17th century, when much of the American founders' political thinking was formulated, it was anglicized to "commonwealth".  Perhaps res publica (public thing or public matter) suggests the possibility, at least, of rule by the best, or wisest men rather than universal democracy; it suggests the possibility of property requirements for voting, which many of the founders believed in.  But I don't see how republic has any more to do with liberty or freedom than democracy does.

Samuel Johnson asked

"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" (meaning, of course, slaves).

Edmund Burke said, more sympathetically of the slave-owning south

"Those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. [It] is to them ... a kind of rank and privilege ... In such a people, the hautiness of dominion combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible."

Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina quoted the Burke statement, framing it with these words:

"I will acknowledge the fatal effects of slavery upon character, if any one can say, that for noble disinterestedness, ardent love of country, exalted virtue, and a pure and holy devotion to liberty, the people of the Southern States have ever been surpassed by any in the world."

I.e. slave holders are the greatest defenders of liberty, according to Hayne, and to many other Southerners of his time (Quotes are from the Hayne-Webster debate; the relevant paragraph is HERE(LINK).)


Over the last few years, I have seen quite a few hints and suggestions from movement conservatives and libertarians that "too much democracy" is a threat to liberty (I apologize for having none of these references at my fingertips).

While that really can, in extreme cases, occur, it is also true that democracy is the only plausible guarantee of (universal) liberty, and (as I just illustrated) that a self-absorbed obsession with (ones own) liberty has often posed the gravest threat to (universal) liberty.  So, I would feel less anxious about the future of our country, if those who speak so often of liberty,  and how it is threatened by Democrats, would add the word universal in front of liberty.

One Point of View (Jefferson's) on "the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations"

Some borrowed citations from: http://fraughtwithperil.com/cholte/2010/03/14/the-american-corporate-monster-part-2-corporate-personhood-history/

Thomas Jefferson wrote in a 1816 letter to George Logan:[11]
““I hope we shall… crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

“A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible,” Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in an 1819 case. “It possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”

Jefferson and Marshall were not friends, or in tune politically, and that seems to be reflected here.

What do you suppose Jefferson, or even the more pro-business Marshall have said about the need to protect the "Freedom of Speech" of corporations?

A Radical Center Manifesto (or A Quick and DIrty attempt at one)

The legitimate object of Government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate and individual capacities. But in all that people can individually do as well for themselves, Government ought not to interfere. Abraham Lincoln

This is a very very incomplete "manifesto".

Most violent revolutions are unmitigated disasters. They mostly don't occur unless people are in a desparate state, but the provide too much of an opportunity for very bad power hungry leaders to climb to power, often over mountains of dead bodies. Something like what has been called a "velvet revolution" can have lead to a sane well-governed nation, but what does it take to make something like that happen? A subject to discuss some other time.

"Economic shock therapy" also tends to have terrible results, as far as I can see. When people think they have to dismantle a more or less working statist economy overnight, the results will probably catastrophic to people's well being; it is apt to create an ultra-rich class of people who are not good at running the enterprises they suddenly own, and as with Russia, it may reverse progress in the areas of democracy and freedom.

While I believe in mixed economies, socialism is at best a very dangerous experiment as it involved giving ultimate power to some central apparatus and just saying its purpose it to serve the people won't make it so. Extremely concentrated power is an invitation to the Stalins and Maos of the world.

If private enterprises become bigger and more powerful than the state, they are very likely to in effect become the state.

I favor "right sized" government, which is somewhere between a government you can "drown in a bathtub", and a government with sufficent power to arbatrarily seize and distribute property en masse. You cannot have socialism without a government that is just too powerful. People with extreme views are spared the embarrassment of being asked questions like "What do you mean by too powerful?" which don't have all-purpose answers, but that is not nearly enough reason, in my opinion for me to join their ranks.

Sometimes, and maybe very often, government needs to have a lot of fat cut out but this could better be accomplished by a lot of people seriously getting involved with the specifics, taking seriously what government needs to accomplish, and yes, sometimes asking is it time for govenment to be taking this job on at all?

Sometimes, government needs to grow, or even take on new things.

• E.g. if you are fighting a war, you probably should be expanding the army, not hiring $1000/day contractors, and bleeding the reserves. If you're afraid of asking for money to expand military forces, you probably shouldn't be taking on that particular war.
• Evolving technologies are apt to have an affect on what government should and shouldn't be doing.
• E.g., in the first half of the 19th century, when some of the "founding fathers" were still guiding the government, the post office subsidized newspapers in the interest of having a better informed public. According to one source, they made up 95% of the weight of mail transported for 15% of the revenue. Most newspapers were one-man operations, and in place of a national reporting staff, they exchanged newspapers with printers in other parts of the country. Much of this exchange was carried free. Do you think that might have required some non-obvious interpreting of the constitution? But without the network of information provider/propagandists that that interpretation brought into being, voters in this country, where it took week for some congressment to get to Washington, would surely have been less well informed - perhaps fatally so (for the country).
  
• In the 1960s and later, the interstate highway system was built, and the speed of automobile travel was more than doubled. Also, many private turnpike operations were put out of business.
• The Internet was a product of DARPA (Research arm of the Defense Department), and various (mostly public) university computer programmers. The private sector gave us AOL and MSN.
• The highly regulated monopoly, AT&T was until sometime in the 70s or 80s, the only reasonable way of providing national telecommunications. Its size, and perhaps its not being driven by quarterly profits enabled it to keep up a massive research lab which developed the transister and the laser. Other electronics and telecommunication companies got most of their early business from aerospace, a largely government driven enterprise.

If we maintain that government should only provide national defense, and protection of some people from others -- all through threat and use of force, the government will tend to solve problems through the threat and use of force regardless of whether they could be better addressed through other means. This was well addressed in the international sphere in The Ugly American, which was written not by "bleeding heart liberals" but by down in the trenches cold warriors, and addressed how we were losing Southeast Asia to Communism in the 1950s. E.g. in a "Factual Epilogue",

The Communists are not so restricted in their approach. In Yunan Province, China, they have a vast schooling system for students from Southeast Asia. The students, roughly 30,000 strong, come from Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and the fringe areas of Vietnam. The term is eighteen months, and lectures are delivered in the native language of the student. Courses include agriculture, tanning, printing, blacksmithing, and other crafts which country people from small towns need. The students live in dormitories with their fellow countryment, and religious guidance is provided by clergymen of their own faith".

Power is Power is Power

The Bolsheviks established a government with power sufficient to appropriate any and all property. Somehow they didn't give much thought to just how a government that powerful would be kept in check.  Maybe they thought, well it will be our government so why should it go wrong (fortunately, America's founding fathers did not think that way). The vast majority of prominent Bolsheviks, if they lived into the 1930s, were eventually rounded up and murdered by their own creation. What were they thinking? Activists have a tendency to believe that the kind of power they envision and identify with will remain "good". Desperation can breed sloppy thinking. The Russia of 1917 was a terrible place; things were in flux; now was the chance to change it ...

Fast forward to the 1990s. Russia seemed for the moment to be headed towards Democracy, but to a group of radical free marketeers who were somehow charged with transforming the economy, it seemed desperately important to get the "means of production" back into private hands. Apparently which private hands didn't seem to matter. Everything was in flux; the moment could be lost if not seized now. And so vast enterprizes came to be privately owned by ex party hacks and a few "wild west" style entrepreneurs. Newly billionaires got total control over the media, and elections were highjacked, and Russia reversed course, away from democracy and free speech. Enormous piles of money in the midst of a population that had lost all its savings, and was lucky if they received any wage at all, could buy just about anything.

Businesses big enough to buy and sell small or poor countries can rival the most misguided states when it comes to destroying freedom and democracy. Look at Russia, and look at the history of Latin America. The U.S.'s Founding Fathers set up a system of competition between branches of government to make it less likely to devolve into absolutism, but government is our only tool for disciplining the potential tyranny of wealth. When too much power is taken away from government, as with Weimar, and the Russia of the 1990s, it invites takeover by some other power, which then becomes, in effect the government. The next step after a government small enough to "drown in a bathtub" is typically not pretty. For Russia as a case in point, see Sale of the Century by Chrystia Freeland.

The Free Market, The Public Sector, and What Should Government Do?

A major and perhaps the greatest problem with the purist libertarian position -- that the ideal government should only stop crime, enforce contracts, and protect us from outside threats -- is summed up in the aphorism "To the man with only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail." The Cold Warriors who wrote The Ugly American were quite ready to celebrate smart applications of violence. But they had quite a list of things for which the U.S. needed something other than that hammer with which to fight the Communist powers, and blamed much of our failure up to that time to our lack of capacity and willingness to use imaginative non-military methods to push back against the Communists. They pointed out things that the enemy did, like having embassy staff that knew the local language and lived much like the locals, like running schools in Southeast Asian countries teaching the skills people needed most -- a sort of Soviet Peace Corps 10 years before the U.S. tried that. The Communists seemed to value provision of peaceful benefits, as much as they valued the ability to pull off vicious underhanded dirty tricks, and both served them well, while U.S. policy-makers seemed to only envy their efficiency and freedom from scruples. It is a shame the title "Ugly American" became a byword for something that only played a small part in the book -- American boorishness. It was much more about lack of imagination (to use something besides the hammer) and common sense together with the ability to connect to people of dramatically different culture.

Turning to the aim of domestic peace -- consider what I heard recently about the California prison system, where the philosophy of only punishing and stopping criminals basically robbed it of effectiveness once all training and educational programs were stripped away (need to expand this). In the TV series The Wire, you had policemen and women with a very deep understanding of criminals as human beings, but not any less "tough" as a result. You had people fighting crime with a very effective combination of force and of empathy (dare we say even love, at times -- consider "Bunny", the black police commander who adopted a young man who had seemed to be on the road to viciousness).

The idea of the "empathetic warrior" has always been deeply interesting to me, from the imaginary "Caine" of the "Kung Fu" series (a naive fantasy I admit) to Joseph Stilwell, they have fascinated me. It is the opposite of the idea that when fighting something, you must treat the people who embody that thing (e.g. criminality or the Communist ideal/delusion) as embodiments of evil to be crushed. It calls for the ability to imagine that they could be something else. This includes the interrogator, like David Alexander (How to Break a Terrorist) who can "turn" an Islamic terrorist rather than (usually futilely) trying to beat information out of him.

I have to face head-on the idea that there is something "parental" about this attitude, and that is just what many people abhor (i.e. the "nanny state"). But all of the bad parenting in the world doesn't invalidate the idea of taking responsibility for children with compassion and force when needed. And all of the stupidities and crimes perpetrated by governments and parties in the name of dreams of a better world (whether that "better world" is a socialist or free market ideal) do not invalidate the idea of a community somehow acting in a collective fashion to try to promote the welfare of its individuals with compassion, imagination, and at times, but as little as possible, force.

Most people, though they may sing the praises of freedom (Burke "snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze"; Johnson's "yelps"), know this on some level, but then their minds get stuck in some particular rather perverse image of what that looks like -- one that reassures individuals that it is not their responsibility and none of their business -- a simplistic view of the "benevolent dictator". It might be Winston Churchill not preventing the bombing of some town so that the Germans would not discover their intelligence leak, or the Colonel played by Jack Nicholson shouting "You can't handle the truth". I'm sure that Soviet era Russian textbooks could provide many more such romantically tinged vignettes of leaders making "the hard decisions", but why dwell so much on such examples. I suspect there is some kind of agenda, maybe conscious or maybe not, behind the propagation of such images.

The Need for Real, not Theoretical Economic Freedom and Momentum

In 2003, Iraq was turned into a nation of people with no jobs and no way to get jobs, no daily routine, and essentially nothing to lose. However, the existence of an occupying power, and a few fanatic demagogues filled the void for many of those newly directionless people, and what happenned next is pretty well known.  It should have been predictable

Let me take a stab at a rough division into sectors of economies in the modern world:

• Government proper - military, police, courts, postal service, tax collection, ...
• Government-industrial complex - i.e. most manufacturing in the USSR as well as in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but should we also include road building and maintenance in the U.S.?
• Education - may well belong to some larger category - to be determined.
• Private goods-creation (industry but also building, restaurants, ...)
• The business of exchange of everything else
• The Primordial Soup, from which new political life forms are apt to emerge. The people with nothing to do and nothing to lose.

So you could say one factor in Iraq was that perhaps half the population got thrown into the primordial soup overnight. A similar thing happenned in post-Soviet Russia.

Iraq seems to have been approached with the simplistic idea that, with the help of the "invisible hand":

  Toppling the dictator ==>
          Freedom and Democracy ==>
                  Things will be "normal" like in the U.S.

Had our government instead done a sober analysis of the institutions that kept peoples' lives from falling apart, and tried to preserve their continuity (with improvements to be made over time), we would not have set up such a breeding ground for both plain criminality (first looting and trashing the infrastructure) as well as terrorism.

These institutions included "inefficient" state run industry (by the quotes I'm not asserting it was efficient, but compared to what? To nothing being manufactured, and people having no place to go to work?), which I gather the occupying forces tried to disband overnight, as well as the military, which was either disbanded or non-functional during the period when most of what was left of Iraq's infrastructure was destroyed, which made it far more difficult to bring back any sort of normal economic life, which in turn multiplied the number of people being dumped into the primordial soup.

The disbanding of the state industrial complex was done in the name of Free Marketism, but it took the Iraqis further away from the ideal of a humming society of people producing and exchanging goods.

"Free marketers" tend to be fixated on noninterference and nonparticipation by government to the point of overlooking the destruction of the closest thing to a market that there was, and leaving a chaotic vacuum, as happened in Iraq and Russia.  The Russia case is well described in Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism.