Problems of Democracy
Political Violence and Civil Disobedience.
by Ernest van den Haag.
Harper Torchbooks. 123 pp. $1.95.
Ernest Van Den Haag's book is something of a literary oddity. two excellent essays (the first on civil disobedience, the second on political violence) which there should have been no need to write. He demonstrates, with inexorable logic, propositions which everybody but the hochgelehrte would recognize as true without the demonstration—although common men might themselves be unable to prove the theorems, just as I am quite unable to demonstrate that the earth goes round the sun. (It is a matter of some surprise to me that there is not a flourishing revisionist school of astronomy in our universities, dedicated to the proposition that Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler were misled by their lack of a proper ideological perspective.)
Thus, Dr. van den Haag proves with Euclidean incontrovertibility that anarchy is not a workable polity (as recently established empirically by Chairman Mao's little experiment); that the notion that everyone should be free to violate any law offensive to his own ideas of right and wrong is not very different from anarchy; that dictatorship and oligarchy are not “true” democracy; that right-wing despotisms and left-wing despotisms resemble each other far more than either of them resemble democracies; that representative democracies, even when accompanied by capitalism, usually do more for the happiness of the governed than any despotism, no matter how loud and sincere its claims to enlightenment.
The sad fact is that there is a need for the book. Every one of the truisms in the preceding paragraph has been challenged, not only by ignorant enthusiasts, but by famous academic figures. Dr. van den Haag has, incidentally, rendered a signal service by translating into terse and plain English the philosophy of Professor Herbert Marcuse, which is essentially that an enlightened elite has both a right and a duty to impose its ideas by force on the incurably stupid and ignorant majority. This is a feat which that venerable mooncalf has never been able to accomplish for himself—an inability which may in large part account for his high profundity. He does as much for the legal philosophy of Ronald M. Dworkin, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford: Professor Dworkin, a representative specimen of the fashionable English variety of legal philosopher, who emerged from the chrysalis of a truly gifted American corporation lawyer (something of a reversal of the process normal among the lepidoptera), is the discoverer of the rule of Natural Law that if anyone “argues that he has a moral right . . . to protest in a way he finds effective [or to break a law which he thinks immoral] . . . then an official . . . can not point . . . to a Supreme Court decision as having . . . decisive weight.” To dissect such doctrines, to pickle them in formaldehyde and place them on exhibition, is an enterprise deserving of the highest praise.
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The core of Dr. van den Haag's own philosophy seems to be that “violence is justifiable only when its ends cannot be attained by other less costly means and when the ends can justify the cost. Few ends do.” I have some reservations about his corollary conclusion that “In a democracy violence is needed, and therefore, justifiable, only if one despairs of the far less costly process of persuading the majority, yet believes a change of policy to be important enough to impose it without majority support.” It seems to me that as a practical matter violence is almost never justified in a constitutional democracy—i.e., one which gives the minority basic protection, like the Bill of Rights, against serious oppression by the majority. One can, of course, imagine hypotheticals; if Congress were to pass an act providing that all red-headed children must be sacrificed to Moloch, and if the Supreme Court were to hold it constitutional, I would myself resort to violence. Such a contingency is, however, unlikely; the Court would certainly strike down the statute as an establishment of religion, in violation of the First Amendment. I know of no actual example of a constitutional law whose immorality I believe so outrageous, and my own opinion so clearly right, that I would subvert constitutional democracy in order to get rid of it. My father, for example, detested Prohibition and violated the Volstead Act at every opportunity (fortunately, the opportunities were pretty frequent). In the mid-20's the prospects for repeal seemed extremely bleak, but it never occurred to him to shoot Bishop Cannon or bomb the offices of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in order to force its repeal.
Looking at his book as a whole, I do not think that Dr. van den Haag means to say that violence is justifiable in a democracy whenever the perpetrator believes it to be the only means to an end which he sincerely thinks desirable. It is only in democracies, of course, that civil disobedience and political violence (without the authority of the government) pose a substantial problem. In totalitarian states there is much more justification, for there is as a rule no other way to try to bring about change, but there is also far less opportunity. About the most extreme form of civil disobedience in Russia is standing in Red Square with a very small placard urging respect for the Soviet Constitution, and it takes extraordinary courage to go to such lengths. If there are dissenters in China, nobody knows who they are, or were. For the government of a democratic state, however, few decisions require greater wisdom than those on the amount and kind of force to be used in repressing violence and enforcing law.
Dr. van den Haag is, among other things, a practicing psychoanalyst. I wish that he had gone deeper into the psychology of terrorists. He does recognize that not all men are naturally virtuous—i.e., that the concepts of original sin and the instigation of the Devil are picturesque descriptions of something which really is a strong factor in human behavior, that we are not by nature gentle and lovable creatures, corrupted by capitalism. The fact is that the hominids have been prone to violence at least since Australopithecines took to braining baboons and each other in East Africa several million years ago. It is unlikely that these ancient ancestors troubled their small brains about moral justification, but, if they did, they found it, for they had to eat. Most modern men must look for other excuses to gratify the primitive urge. Those in whom it is particularly strong often find the excuse in politics, religion, or morality. The taste for irrationality, which complements and reinforces the proclivity to violence among the zealots, seems to have developed later and to be still more distinctively human; there is, for example, no solid evidence of religious belief before the time of Neanderthal man. In short, a Weather-person is probably closer than most of us to man in a “natural” state. It is a sad fact that in recent years institutions of higher learning have done a poor job of civilizing such specimens.
