The Spirit of the Time
This story is a little more personal than normal. It brought up a lot of experiences from my own life.
I will explain. First I am slowly getting older. Maybe not as slowly as I would like, but slow. And most of the time, I can’t access all of the stories from my life.
But today, I remembered some things that I had not thought of for a long time.
It so happened, that I was watching a YouTube video between several young men who had experienced life in difficult ways.
As a small favor, if you are reading this, try something before you automatically reach for your own experience, or the experience of someone you love. Think instead of an acquaintance. Someone you know, but not particularly well.
Someone whose life you can look at with a little distance. The reason is that I don't want you to miss the story becaue I make a mistake, and seem like I am taking sides in some way.
I thought about my own experiences while I watched these young men, and I may share some of the experiences here today but probably some other time. It depends on where this writing goes.
Anyway, I watched them discuss the reasons they thought they had suffered injustices.
I am not naming them or the injustices because that would take us away from what happened to me while I listened.
What happened was something like compassion.
And sadness.
Not only for them, but for all the people in the world who have suffered difficulty for whatever reason.
I was surprised by how poignant it felt.
And I had a realization.
There are times when I can look at my own life and see the unfairness of it.
My life, I mean.
Sometimes I face a hard time and it doesn't seem to end.
Sometimes there is no end in sight.
I am going to stop for a moment, because this is not a melancholy story.
It contains difficulty, but that isn't quite the same thing.
It is a realization story.
What I recognized while listening to these young men was something I could recognize in myself.
And once I saw it there, I started seeing it in a lot of other places.
There are times when an idea seems to belong to one person because that person happened to say it particularly well.
Later, when we look around, we discover that other people were asking remarkably similar questions.
They did not necessarily know one another.
They did not use the same vocabulary.
They certainly did not arrive at the same answers.
But something was in the air.
The late eighteenth century seems to have been one of those times.
I think about what it must have been like to live then.
Differences in class were visible.
Differences in culture were visible.
Where you were born, who your parents were, what you owned, what you believed, and whether you were a man or a woman could establish enormous parts of the world available to you.
And among the people questioning that world were people who possessed considerable advantages within it.
I am tempted to use the word privilege here.
I am going to borrow the word for a little while, but I want to be careful with it.
It is one of those words that can become so compressed that eventually the word begins doing the thinking for us.
Wealth can provide choices another person does not have.
Education can.
Family position can.
Reputation can.
Connections can.
So can physical strength, intelligence, beauty, specialized knowledge, a political office, or simply being the person who controls a resource somebody else needs.
Those things create leverage.
But leverage itself does not tell us what someone will do with it.
A person may accumulate wealth because he wants security.
Someone else may want status.
Another may want independence.
Another may want to leave something to her children.
And some people deliberately acquire resources because resources make service possible.
It is easier to employ people when you have enough money to create a business.
It is easier to build a hospital when someone has resources.
It is easier to fund an idea, feed someone, create a scholarship, support a community, or help someone through a difficult period if there is something available to give.
Usually our motives are probably mixed.
That seems more human.
So I don't want to turn privilege into either an accusation or a virtue.
I would rather ask:
What additional choices does this position give someone?
And then:
What does the person do with those choices?
That seems much closer to the problem people were beginning to examine.
We commonly package this period as the Enlightenment, which may already compress too much.
There wasn't one Enlightenment.
There wasn't one political theory.
There wasn't one understanding of human nature.
There certainly wasn't one agreement about what people should do with themselves.
It was a time of enlightenment.
That word reminds me of another story.
Years ago, I went on a double date.
I tell part of this story somewhere else in Stories. It has to do with the people I met working on JB.
There were four of us. The woman I wasn't seeing was the young woman who played Sarah, my wife in the play, when I was in J.B. She had introduced me to her friend, and both Sarah and I were friends with the fourth person.
Anyway, we were in the thriving metropolis of Rexburg, Idaho.
Out in the sand dunes were what I had been told were old civil-defense caves.
So, naturally, four college students found a car and some flashlights and went looking for the caves.
If you have never been deep inside a cave, it is an interesting experience.
Especially when everyone turns off the lights.
The darkness becomes almost physical.
I remember feeling it's weight.
And then someone turns on a flashlight.
The cave has not changed.
What has changed is what you can see.
I wonder whether the Enlightenment was something like that.
Not that everything before it was darkness.
That would be far too simple.
Maybe more flashlights were simply being turned on.
People were looking again at things that had been present for a very long time.
There were arguments.
Arguments about kings.
Arguments about churches.
Arguments about property.
Arguments about liberty.
Arguments about reason.
Arguments about what governments were for and where their authority came from.
And beneath many of those arguments was a more difficult question:
What do you do about power once human beings possess it?
I am borrowing power in its compressed form too.
We will have to give that word back later and see what is actually inside it.
The question itself was hardly new.
Kings had power.
Priests had power.
Families had power.
Communities had power.
Armies had power.
Merchants had power.
Majorities could have power over minorities.
Minorities could sometimes have power over majorities.
Europe did not discover this problem.
Across the world, human beings had been organizing themselves for thousands of years.
Families.
Villages.
Clans.
Tribes.
Kingdoms.
Empires.
Religious communities.
Trading networks.
Councils.
All of them encountered versions of the same problem.
People need one another.
So we organize.
Organization creates roles.
Roles create differences in influence.
Differences in influence create leverage.
And leverage creates possibilities.
It allows a parent to protect a child.
A community to defend itself.
A government to build a road.
A court to settle a dispute.
A group to accomplish something no individual member could accomplish alone.
Leverage is not automatically a problem.
Without leverage, much of what human beings accomplish together would be impossible.
But leverage carries another possibility. Responsibility.
Someone who can influence another person's choices may discover that influence becomes easier when persuasion becomes pressure.
Pressure may become control.
Control may become compulsion.
None of this requires us to decide that human beings are fundamentally good or fundamentally bad.
I am becoming increasingly suspicious of sentences that begin:
Human beings are naturally...
Perhaps we don't know.
People can be generous and selfish, courageous and frightened, restrained and impulsive.
Sometimes the same person manages all of those before lunch.
People also live inside circumstances they did not create.
We respond to incentives.
We become frightened.
We become certain.
We protect people we love.
We defend things we have built.
We become attached to explanations that worked before.
We are influenced by the people around us.
And authority changes the circumstances around the person who possesses it.
That much we can observe.
History provides enough sad experience to make one thing difficult to ignore:
Giving someone authority does not automatically make the exercise of that authority wise.
Giving authority to someone with good intentions doesn't solve the problem either.
That may actually make the problem more revealing.
Most people who acquire leverage probably do not wake up in the morning planning to become tyrants.
I will leave enough room for the occasional aspiring tyrant.
But most people are trying to accomplish something.
Protect something.
Correct something.
Prevent something.
Build something.
Help someone.
The intention may be admirable.
But an admirable intention does not answer the structural question:
How much leverage should I be allowed to use to accomplish it?
That question was becoming increasingly difficult to avoid in the eighteenth century.
If a king claimed authority because God had placed him on the throne, someone could ask:
How do we know?
If a government claimed authority over a population:
Where did that authority come from?
If people possessed rights:
Did government create those rights, or does government merely have an obligation to respect them?
And if the people themselves became sovereign, an even more uncomfortable question appeared:
What restrained the people?
It is easy to see the danger when one king possesses enormous power.
It becomes harder when ten thousand citizens agree with one another.
If a majority wants something badly enough, does the number of people wanting it make the action legitimate?
If fifty percent plus one can impose its decision on everyone else, what protects the forty-nine percent?
And what happens when today's minority becomes tomorrow's majority?
These questions helped produce one of the most interesting political experiments of the period.
Not merely democracy.
A democratic republic.
And then something more specific:
a limited democratic republic.
I think all three words matter.
Democratic.
The people retain a meaningful role in choosing who governs them.
Authority is not simply inherited by a king or handed down through a permanent ruling class.
Republic.
The people do not ordinarily gather together and personally decide every question.
They establish institutions.
They elect representatives.
They create procedures.
They delegate authority.
And then:
Limited.
Neither the representatives nor the majority are supposed to possess unlimited authority simply because they have enough votes.
That places the system in an interesting position.
Not politically between today's parties.
Structurally between competing dangers.
Too little participation by the people and government can become the possession of an insulated few.
Too little governmental authority and collective action may become impossible.
Too much governmental authority creates another danger.
And unrestricted majority rule can become its own form of leverage over everyone who lost the vote.
The system therefore does something peculiar.
It creates political power.
And then deliberately interferes with its use.
It gives people leverage and restrains the leverage it has just given them.
Voting determines who has enough support to make certain decisions.
Voting does not tell us everything those people should be allowed to do once they win.
A limited democratic republic adds another proposition:
Winning does not remove restraint.
That seems almost obvious when the other side wins.
It becomes much less obvious when we do.
This is where James Madison becomes interesting.
His famous observation that if men were angels no government would be necessary is sometimes treated as a gloomy statement about human nature.
I am not sure it needs to be.
It can be read much more modestly:
Do not build a system that requires people to become angels in order for the system to remain safe.
That is a very different proposition.
People can exercise restraint.
They frequently do.
Someone may possess the ability to humiliate another person and choose not to.
A parent may possess enormous leverage over a child and deliberately limit its use.
A leader may possess authority to compel and choose instead to persuade.
A wealthy person may possess enough resources to exercise enormous influence and choose to use some of them in service.
A majority may possess enough votes to impose something and nevertheless agree that some things should remain outside its reach.
Those are acts of restraint.
But Madison's problem goes one step further.
What if we don't leave restraint entirely to whoever happens to possess the leverage?
What if we agree beforehand?
Before we know who wins.
Before we know which faction becomes powerful.
Before we know whether the rule will frustrate our opponents or ourselves.
We create a structure.
We divide authority.
We limit offices.
We create competing branches.
We establish rights.
We make some actions difficult.
We place some actions outside ordinary political reach.
In other words:
We turn personal restraint into social restraint.
That is one way to understand a constitution.
It is not simply a document establishing what government may do.
It is also a record of things people have agreed government should not be allowed to do, even when doing them might be popular.
That changes the idea of a social contract.
The contract is not merely:
We agree to create a government.
It is also:
We agree to restrain ourselves when we become the government.
There is considerable humility hidden inside that arrangement.
I do not know who will possess political leverage twenty years from now.
I do not know what crisis will frighten us.
I do not know which ideas will seem obviously correct.
I do not know which faction my grandchildren will belong to.
I do not even know whether my descendants will regard my political assumptions as sensible.
So I agree to limits while I still do not know whose hands will eventually be tied by them.
Perhaps that is one of the quieter foundations of a limited democratic republic.
Uncertainty becomes a reason for restraint.
Not weakness.
Not indecision.
Restraint.
There is another reason.
The person on the other side of a political argument does not stop being a person because I have enough votes to defeat him.
Her agency does not disappear because I believe I am right.
Their independence does not vanish when my side wins an election.
That brings us back to another word floating through the same period:
independence.
Independence sounds simple until we begin opening it.
Independence from a king?
Certainly.
Independence of one nation from another?
Yes.
But what about the independence of the person from the nation that person helps create?
What happens when people free themselves from one authority and immediately begin constructing another?
The American Revolution removed one set of constraints and produced an immediate need for another kind.
People who had just fought against authority now needed enough authority to govern themselves.
They needed collective leverage.
And almost immediately they faced the question that follows every acquisition of leverage:
How do we keep the thing we created from becoming the thing we were trying to escape?
Jefferson approached part of the problem through rights, consent and independence.
Madison approached another part through structure.
Hamilton worried that too much restraint might leave government incapable of acting.
Others worried that the proposed federal government already possessed too much authority.
They were not having one conversation.
They were looking at the same landscape from different places.
Maybe that is what I mean by the spirit of the time.
Not agreement.
Not one philosophy.
Not one answer.
A collection of people looking at different parts of the same problem.
How much authority is enough?
How much is too much?
Where does it come from?
Who gets to use it?
What restrains them?
Who protects the individual?
Who protects the community?
What happens when the community itself becomes the threat?
What happens when so much restraint is placed on government that government can no longer protect anyone?
Those are not questions with particularly clean answers.
Maybe that is why they are useful.
And the people asking them were hardly alone.
Across cultures and continents, human beings had developed different ways of distributing authority, limiting rulers, requiring consultation, protecting relationships, imposing obligations, preserving hierarchy, resisting hierarchy, settling disputes and deciding when someone had gone too far.
Some concentrated authority.
Some distributed it.
Some relied heavily on custom.
Some on kinship.
Some on councils.
Some on monarchs.
Some on religious authority.
Some built mechanisms of consensus.
Others built mechanisms of command.
The structures differed enormously.
The recurring problem did not.
Human beings need enough leverage to act together without allowing that leverage to consume the agency of the people involved.
There may be no final solution to that problem.
Perhaps there shouldn't be.
In fact, maybe there is only one solution we certainly want to avoid.
Circumstances change.
Institutions drift.
Rules designed to solve one problem create another.
People forget why arrangements were made.
A restraint that once seemed essential can eventually feel merely inconvenient.
And when the reason for a restraint is forgotten, the restraint itself can begin to look irrational.
That may be one of the dangers of compression.
A long historical experience becomes a sentence.
The sentence becomes a principle.
The principle becomes a rule.
The rule becomes a tradition.
Eventually someone asks:
Why are we still doing this?
And nobody remembers.
The obstacle remains visible.
The danger it was designed to restrain has disappeared from view.
That does not mean the old restraint must remain.
That would be another mistake.
Some restraints outlive their usefulness.
Some were wrong from the beginning.
Some protected the agency of one group by restricting another.
Some solve problems that no longer exist.
The point of remembering is not to worship the restraint.
It is to remember the problem.
Perhaps keeping a republic requires more than preserving its institutions.
Perhaps occasionally we have to decompress the reasons they exist.
Take the institution apart.
Recover the problem.
Look again at the tradeoffs.
Ask what leverage it prevents.
Ask what leverage it creates.
Ask who benefits.
Ask who pays.
And ask whether the original reason still exists.
Then perhaps we can decide whether the restraint should remain.
But before removing one, we might ask a very old question:
What did people learn, perhaps through sad experience, that caused them to put this restraint here in the first place?
And then an even harder one:
If we remove it, what leverage have we just made available?
And perhaps harder still:
Who will possess that leverage when the people we trust are no longer the ones using it?
That question does not belong only to Madison.
It does not belong only to Jefferson.
It does not belong only to the Enlightenment.
It does not belong only to America.
It may simply belong to human beings.
Oh, and that one solution I said we probably want to avoid?
Losing the limited democratic republic while convincing ourselves that we are improving it.