Chief of Police of Malibu

In today’s New York Times, Harvard Sociology Professor, Orlando Patterson, takes to task President Bush for his acceptance of his neocon minions’ "erroneous belief [that] was a starry-eyed relic from the liberal past: the doctrine that freedom is a natural part of the human condition."  He pooh-poohs a starry-eyed Bush who sounds "like a late-blooming schoolboy who had just discovered John Locke, the 17th-century founder of liberalism."  It’s true enough that Bush and his minions were fools to think a free society and liberal social contract would merely "arise" in Iraq minus Saddam Hussein.  But Patterson’s critique comes from that uncomfortably, if subtly, smug perspective of culturalism: somehow the culture of the west simply tends toward more salutary social preferences (like individual freedom) than other cultures, which by implication must tend towards self-destructive ones.

If expressed in a politically correct way, it is appealing as an explanator for differences between countries, but it can also be expressed in a more disturbing way, for example, "What’s the matter with all those African countries that they don’t just stop fighting and form stable governments?  Why do they just let all of their people starve?  Maybe it’s because . . . "

However, at least for the case of Iraq, Patterson missed what perhaps would have been the best explanation, and the most powerful and realistic critique of the rose-colored views of Locke: a Hobbesian perspective(by way of Samuel Huntington). 

Hobbes’ conception of the "state of nature" was nothing like Locke’s peaceful idylls, but rather a "war of all against all", curiously similar to what we’ve seen in Iraq since Saddam.  The true origin of government is that in any such group, when one person proves himself the strongest, the others, to protect themselves from one another, submit to that one strongest, who becomes the Sovereign.  The Sovereign then becomes a sort of dictator, who may tyrannize everyone else, and take away even your life from you.  But for everyone in the group, it’s better to have only him to be afraid of, even though he may deny your freedom and hold your very life in his hand, than to return to the war of all against all.  Your security is far more assured under a dictator.

Samuel Huntington, in his important 1968 work Political Order in Changing Societies noted in Cold War American foreign policy a starry-eyed quality that can be traced to a similar Lockean unrealism.  He worried that the US would lose the Cold War because in sending aid to third world countries whom we hoped to keep from the clutches of the Soviets, American advice on governance and economics boiled down to "free markets, free governments, freedom for everybody" and reflected an American (and Lockean) ideal that the government that governs best is that which governs the least.  However, in many of the countries we were advising, the modernization of society, transportation, health, industrialization, skyrocketing populations, information dispersal, etc were overwhelming the hierarchies of the old societies and many risked falling into the kind of anarchy we see in Iraq now.  In such cases where the greatest threat to the population is violence and death in a war of all against all, a Lockean contract where the government promises not to do this, that, or the other thing that might impinge upon the people’s freedom is not what is needed.  Rather, what is needed is a Sovereign, unfair and arbitrary though he might be, who is strong enough to end the chaos and to guarantee security, even at the expense of freedom.  Huntington worried that the Soviet Union’s (then seeming) better methods of creating that kind of governing power which could stem these countries’ slide into a war of all against all would give it victory in the Cold War.  And indeed, many countries did prefer the Soviet camp and (like Saddam’s Iraq) adopted the its effective strategies of controlling chaos, by acting the tyrannical Sovereign, even as the USSR itself began to run out of steam, and lost the Cold War from the inside.

So if we do not see organic freedom and a Lockean social contract arising naturally in Iraq, perhaps instead of just looking to nebulous "cultural differences" that often come down to race and ethnicity, perhaps it would be more useful to ask about why Locke’s predictions were wrong.  They were based on an imagined, unlikely state of nature (much like Rousseau’s "Noble Savage").  In fact, the ultimately resulting societies Locke seems to be trying to explain had had a Hobbesian sovereign for so many centuries (at least since 1066, if not even since the time of Alfred the Great) that the people’s fear and tendency to war of all against all had run out long before.  And the social contracts that resulted in the happy government Locke was interested in resulted not from spontaneous contracting among noble savages, but rather from attempts to limit a sovereign for those forestalling of chaos their gratitude (along with their need) had waned.  These contracts (1215, 1688, 1776) came after centuries of tyrannical stability, and democracy was born from that source, not from a Lockean state of nature.  Give Iraq a few centuries of tyrannical stability under dynasty of Saddams, and perhaps we’d see the same result as from dynasties of Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, and Hannoverians.

Professor Patterson is right to criticize the Bush administration’s contention that freedom is "written on the hearts" of all humanity.  But the idea that what is written on our hearts differs by language, race, culture, and religion is not the only alternative theory to explain Iraq.  A better one would look to Hobbes to find that violent passion, along with the will to survive are written on our hearts, and they proclaim a similar evolutionary path for every society from chaos through tyrannical stability and only at long last to free democracy.  From this perspective, problems of any society reaching the end of that path stem not from cultural differences, but from externally imposed interruptions and detours from such path caused by other societies (like America or Europe).  Such a perspective could also help to explain problems in places like Africa, and the comparably salutary situations in other countries, like China, Japan, and Korea, that do not share the same cultural origins as America and Western Europe, but nonetheless seem to not at all plagued by the war of all against all, but rather be in different stages along the road from tyrannical  stability through to free democracy.

Recently, two of these United States that are most prolific at killing people, California, and Florida, have had problems with it.  In Florida, a lethal-injection execution went wrong and required over 35 minutes and extra dose to kill a guy, leading Governor Jeb Bush to suspend executions there.  Meanwhile, here in California, all executions have been suspended since earlier this year and now might be ruled unconstitutional.  What has happened to our great country’s ability to kill people?  Has it become infected with the same incompetence with which our nation’s ability to prosecute war has?  I would say, yes.  If we wanted to really fight the war in Iraq well, we’d have sent half a million troops in there from day one.  But we wanted to do it painlessly, and ended up making a mess of it.

The same is true for the death penalty.  In an effort to abide by our constitution’s 8th amendment, a prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, we’ve tried to create more and more painless ways to kill people.  Instead of the horrific experience of hanging, we substituted the electric chair, which later was superseded by the seemingly less painful gas chamber, and now a lethal injection, that would merely "put you to sleep", right?  Apparently not with with this guy in Florida!

So if we want to get serious about killing people, we need to return to older ways, more tried-and-true methods, and there is, in fact, an ideal method out there that will kill you dead with much less uncertainty than depending on possibly incompetent people mixing up the wrong solutions, or faulty wiring on decades-old electrical equipment.  Moreover, this method of death is instantaneous, and insofar as it is, probably the least painful out there.  We should take a lesson from the French, and bring the guillotine into common use in death-penalty states (now that I’m a citizen of a killer-state, it’s my duty to suggest this to help my community, of course).

Now some might say that the guillotine, by severing head from body, is more cruel and unusual than what we’ve got going now, but this is demonstrably false.  The 90-lb sharpened, angled blade, if kept in good working order (which is much more straightforward than any other execution equipment, except maybe the gallows), will, with its nearly 900 lbs per square inch of pressure, cut right through your neck so fast that there is no time for pain, and thus cannot be considered cruel.  Also, since your head is facing the ground, you don’t see the blade coming at you.  I can only imagine (with the help of John Grisham’s descriptions in The Chamber) the mental experiences of a man during the seconds or minutes (as many as 35, apparently!) after the chemical forms execution are administered, before death.  The guillotine would allow for no such mentally anguishing interlude between life and death.  And as to "unusual", this is clearly absurd.  Until the invention of firearms, beheading was one of the most usual forms of execution.

So if the guillotine really would be more painless (and efficient), why don’t we use it now?  For the same reason that we sent so few soldiers to fight this wrong-headed war, and now are banned from seeing their coffins come home.  The "cruel and unusual" aspects of capital punishment that our society has been trying to minimize are those that act not upon the condemned, but upon everybody else.  It is our own society’s wish to avoid the painful suspicion that we, as a nation, are cruel and unusual in how we punish people that has driven us to try and find more and more clinical ways to kill people (even if they do not work, just as the "surgical" tactics of the war in Iraq have not worked), not our concern for how the punishment is felt by the condemned.  Lethal Injection, particularly, allows us to feel smugly self-righteous about how we kill people, almost like we were doctors carrying out the unhappy duty of amputating a limb to save the greater body of society, and taking every care to do so with the least pain and suffering.

But if we want to kill people, we should own up to it, and kill them in a painless way that does not make any bones about the brutality of the act itself.  We don’t have to put their heads on spikes afterwards (though if we really wanted to be consistent with the idea of capital punishment as a deterrent, we would do exactly that), but we should at least force ourselves (or those of us who choose to contemplate these things) to imagine the severed head, dropping into the basket or bowl, blood spurting from carotid arteries, the crack of the snapping vertebrae, and the lifeless eyes, still open in that instant of supreme victimization by the sovereign state.  That’s what it means for our society to kill people, and if we want to be humane, instead of ostriches with our heads in the sand, that’s how we should do it, in the way that minimize pain for the one who dies, not for those of us sitting at home on our couches.

Here I sit, trying to simultaneously finish a book review I promised to somebody and a dissertation chapter.  It’s my first _real_ chapter, and it feels like I’ll never be able to really do it well.  But I’ve got to do it, so I guess I just will.

What else today?  Here in Oakland it’s sunny and in the 60s, it seems that yesterday Vermont was actually warmer, but there will not be any snow in this part of the world until the next ice age, while Vermont should get some this week.

Tomorrow is a momentous day, more or less, though most of the time I just wish these things would happen without me.

It’s just another
Reminder that time is quick
And I’m falling back

(Haiku Upon the Eve of the mark of three decades)