Why Democracy?

treasury please thank you [Applause] good evening ladies and gentlemen our event tonight is sponsored by the program and constitutional government in the great great green government department and also by the institute of politics at the uh kennedy school our speaker tonight is james q wilson uh professor wilson was formerly a professor at uh at uh ucla before that for 26 years at harvard where his professor of government and before that he even a professor of political science at the university of chicago he is in an impartial view the most distinguished political scientist in america he has begun many subjects and finished all of them his first book was the amateur democrat a phenomenon of the incipient mcgovern movement which he first identified and best described he wrote what was at the time the best book on on on blacks called negro politics he's the author of uh of a book called thinking about crime instead of just reacting to it or punishing it or letting it go uh is a another book in a related field with the absolutely wonderful title varieties of police behavior he's the author of the best textbook in american government a book on political organizations and the list goes on and i'm going to stop before it ends but i do want to mention his most recent work where he has turned to political theory and moral philosophy in 1993 he published a book called moral sense which tries to make the best out of social science social science used intelligently together with the moral theory and he followed that with the book on on character in 1995 because he's always been a political scientist who's interested in the question of of character a book on moral intuitions also in that year uh and most recently uh the ethics of human cloning a book which he wrote in the form of a debate between himself and and leon cass to show you his speculative side or his speculating side he's the author of a book with his wife called watching fishes life and behavior on coral reefs 1995. he's one of the original neoconservatives one of the founders of the journal public interest together with irving crystal and nathan glaser patrick moynihan he is uh too knowing and too capable ever to been selected as a university president but but he is an absolute master of university administration he was the best chairman of the government department that's ever been i i and and i i've been there to see them all uh he he has always been ahead of his time and therefore not trendy he's a true leader in the deepest sense which means he's an intellectual leader and the subject tonight is why democracy thank you harvey i don't think you've seen all of the chairman of the government department i would say that there have been better ones you after all succeeded me in that office and i wouldn't leave you out the question is why democracy we are approaching the end of the century and i think it behooves us to think about where we have come and where we might go in the century ahead as a political scientist i would characterize the two leading events of this century as the rise of democracy and the rise of genocide happily for social scientists correlations are not causation but these two phenomena i think dominate any political view of the century we have just witnessed by democracy i do not simply mean government selected by free elections though that is important part of it but governments selected by free elections that operate within a context of personal freedom and human tolerance by genocide i do not mean simply the great horror that was visited on the jews in germany but more broadly the fact that in this century governments have managed to kill something around 150 million of their own people not in wars with other governments but killing them internally the genocide the holocaust in nazi germany is one case but with stalin's russia mount seitungs rwanda and now alas kosovo we're seeing the same sad process democracy in this period of rising hostility has been rare but now it is growing there were only three european democracies in 1914. after the war the number rose to 13 in part because of some skilled map drawing by president woodrow wilson but by 1939 at least half of these 39 uh half of these 13 had expired there was after the second world war and in particularly in the last two decades a new increase in democracy what samuel huntington is called the third wave of democratization but democracy is so rare and unlikely and as it turns out in many countries unstable a regime we must ask why it exists at all perhaps after all democracy is an auditing traditional societies from the first time men and women walked the face of the earth down to a period not much more than two centuries ago people lived in traditional societies that were composed largely of small villages these smaller villages had a chief or a ruler but decisions were largely made on some kind of consensual basis large societies however created by the agricultural revolution tended almost invariably to be authoritarian somebody had to decide who owned what land somebody had to decide where cattle and produce could be marketed and above all somebody had to control the rivers that flooded these areas that made agriculture possible and in these the beginnings of these large bureaucratized and authoritarian empires uh the empires of the ptolemaic kings in in on the banks of the nile river and similar rulers on the banks of the yangtze river uh and others made it clear to most people that large-scale rule meant rule that was not democratic it is possible therefore that people by nature by evolution are accustomed to being governed in small groups but they are not accustomed to being governed fairly in large groups large nations bring not only authoritarian rule to their power they also in modern times rest that authoritarian rule on ideologies and implement those ideologies with the weapons of mass destruction how then can we explain the short brief and sometimes uneven existence of democracy in this world there are several obvious explanations one is the existence of constitutions that limit government but this is obviously a weak explanation the british government has never had a written constitution the american constitution which was widely copied in latin america in the 19th century did not in any of these countries produce anything resembling democracy we could of course point to the great thinkers that have so deeply informed great britain and the united states john locke david hume adam smith countless others but it's not sufficient to rest on their arguments however skillfully made the case for democracy too few people read them then or read them now religion may be a help probably isn't important help if people take seriously the golden rule then they are more likely to display human tolerance even in regimes which are not democratic but beyond that religion itself may help democracy provided that unlike islam religion and the secular rule are kept in two separate spheres if they are merged as they are in some islamic states then religious rule guides the political system and secular law is used to implement religious verdicts even on people who disagree with them but religion must make a difference for many people we recall alexa alexis de tocqueville's famous remark that democracy depends on the customs of the people on their habits of the heart and explaining these habits of the heart tocqueville primarily emphasized religion and with good reason the protestant immigrants that came to this country had created a kind of democratic system of church rule you had this church and it elected its own minister and it elected its own board of directors and it raised its own money and in these little environments the many forms of democracy were developed and practiced and even catholic immigrants who came to this country accustomed to hierarchical rule nonetheless required of all people that they be considered equal in the eyes of god and by the beginnings of this century had made a complete adaptation to the realities of american life in fact even earlier in spain in the 16th century the spanish conquest of the west indies was briefly suspended while there was an intense debate in spain about the moral nature of indians there were two views in contention one was that indians were like produce or cattle to be used as america later used its own slaves they had no rights the other view was that indians though very different from spaniards had rights because they were people and by being people they had standing in the eyes of god and this debate convulsed the spanish regime for several months it was finally resolved on behalf of the principle that indians had practical rights but of course the practice in the colonies often differed dramatically from what those behind had said religion surely makes a difference uh voltaire and adam smith on separate occasions remarked that if you a nation has one religion it will have authoritarianism if it has two religions it will have a civil war if it has a hundred religions it will have personal freedom and tocqueville in his own way repeats this observation religion does not in this country the united states govern politics but it informs it freedom of religion creates sex and the existence of a multiplicity of sex of many religions ensures freedom because the struggle among these sects prevents the state from imposing one view on everyone else but even allowing for the important influence that religious pressures have on the emergence of democracy and personal freedom much is left to be explained after all how can we have a society which has many religious sects for there to be many religious sects religious freedom must first exist and therefore the first task is to explain why religious freedom would exist many free sects do indeed encourage democracy but for them to encourage it democracy must first exist to answer this and related questions i will this evening offer three explanations the first is isolation the second is property and the third is mystery first isolation the freest nations in the world those that had the longest record of personal freedom were those nations protected from easy invasion by vast oceans england united states australia canada new zealand or protected from invasion by towering mountains switzerland this meant something very important to people not simply that they were protected against invasion and the disadvantages of invasion but the in-between attempts at invasion no large standing army was required and this meant that no high taxes had to be raised and this in turn meant that people in these isolated places were freer of government than they would be had they lived in france having to confront the german principalities and benelux countries and spain beside them freer than they would be in the austro-hungarian empire which was always on the edge or on the verge of breaking up and surrounded by hostile enemies latin america of course was isolated from europe but it was isolated in the form of having a number of independent states created on that continent and these independent states were often at each other's throats imagine what the united states would have been to people who came here in the 19th century if spain still controlled florida and france still occupied the mississippi valley there would have been frequent wars and hence large standing armies and hence high taxes and hence a strong national government and hence as strong national bureaucracy the isolation of these nations is one of those god-given events that has made it possible for democracy to begin at least in some countries where it had no chance in be uh of beginning and others the second argument i want to make has to do with property and this is a bit more complicated and so i'll take a few more moments with it there have of course been countless attacks on private property you know the attacks by karl marx and jean-jacques rousseau and many others as well but as aristotle explained four centuries before the birth of christ property in fact has a settling effect on the community people who own the property they work discover that they can more readily settle arguments with their neighbors over what fair shares may be if they all work the same property it would be difficult to decide who should take back eight heads of lettuce as opposed to someone else who should take back six because then you have to judge how much they work and how hard they worked and that is a difficult process but if each person works their own property and takes the produce of that property then arguments over fair shares are materially reduced moreover private property stimulates work imagine being called together and asked all to farm a single commonly owned piece of property some would farm it hard others would loaf and still others would not show up at all when you own your own property only you can cultivate it and if it is not cultivated it is because of your fault so the incentive effect to stimulate work is quite obvious and finally aristotle remarked that property conveys a certain kind of pleasure you like what you own and that is a feature of human nature that i think can be observed in the smallest children whatever their culture they are quite aware of what piece of thing what toy what blanket is theirs and why that toy and especially that blanket they sleep with should never be taken away and given to someone else pleasure flows from ownership aristotle began his book on politics by describing how a household is managed a household not a government and then went on to explain that the polis the larger political community existed to perfect the human character as it had been originally formed by the independent family but finally he added that the advantages he saw in private property only existed if private property was widely distributed if it was not widely distributed if one or two people owned almost all of it and everyone else owned very little of it then there would be deep and lasting political struggles over the division of that ownership the question therefore is in what countries was it possible early on to achieve the relatively wide ownership of property and here let me borrow from the research done by alan mcfarlane a professor at cambridge university in england he has written several books on these subjects i would commend to you especially his book the origins of individualism in this book he describes the difference between england and europe and especially eastern europe england he said did not participate in feudal society europe and especially eastern europe very much did by a feudal society he means a society in which property is owned by clans by groups of people who owe allegiance to some higher this process of clan ownership intensified by the obligation to surrender products uh to somebody who is your liege lord means that no individual will own a piece of property it means that the property cannot be bequeathed to anyone because the clan the family and not an individual owns it it means there will be little production for markets because the property exists for the benefit of the clan and its produce is designed chiefly to feed the members of the clan it means that the headship of the family will be patriarchal but not selected on the basis of the eldest person father or the grandfather but selected on the basis of who was most skillful at managing this land for the benefit of all women would have very few rights they would be married early and their children would soon be put to work in the fields in order to increase the agricultural produce of the land since labor was important early marriages were common and childhood labor was a phenomenon this was a practice in which land could not be purchased or sold or bequeathed or inherited it existed in the as the property of the clan but it was a piece of property with that they could not dispose of now we move away from europe and especially eastern europe to england mcfarland makes the argument that since the 13th century and perhaps before the 13th century but records don't go back that far there was widespread private property ownership in england it was not universal there were many landless people and obviously there were many people the dukes and feudal lords of the time who own great pop amounts of property but private property was owned by a group of people we call those people the british yeoman they owned the property in the sense that they could buy it they owned the property in the sense that they could dispose of it by sale they owned the property in the sense that they could bequeath it uh to their children the fact that it was their property owned by a family not a clan but a family and typically a nuclear family a father a mother and one or more children meant that the farm did not exist primarily just to feed them the farm if it was of any size was designed to feed markets and so you went to the marketplace in the village or the town to trade your produce for the produce of other people because children were not necessary for filling out the agricultural workforce of a large piece of property but were only necessary for the management of a relatively small piece marriages were not arranged by clans companionate marriages that is to say the willing marriage of a man and woman came much earlier in england than it did in other countries and this meant that the marriages were not arranged by the church or arranged by the families though often as a practical matter the families had to bless the union they could not be required to compel the union there were relatively few extended families we think the extended family was the great legacy of the past and we are now reduced to living in nuclear families in fact the opposite is true nuclear families have always been the core form of families in non-feudal societies extended families began to develop in the 19th century as a result of economic changes that can be described in a moment women could own land now this was not ownership as you would understand it in the modern terms the ancient english tradition of cuvature meant that the husband took the prophet of the land and doesn't under no obligation to share it with the woman but on his divorce or on his death the woman claimed the property and could manage it on her own the existence of private property created and sustained the ideal of personal equality and freedom because to manage disputes among the owners of small pieces of personal property widely scattered across the country a body of law had to rise up in that law we call the english common law it was the law developed by local judges following no statute no royal edict but comparing the complaints of two people who are arguing about the boundary between their property or arguing about who should own a piece of land and they settle these on the principles of equity and fairness what is fair who owned it first who should own it now does one party have a legitimate claim against the other and these initial decisions made by individual judges and justices of the peace all over england gave rise to a body of law called the common law which was for many centuries the principal basis of english law law did not come from the top down law began at the bottom and worked its way up it also meant that though england certainly had an aristocracy and has an aristocracy now that aristocracy was not based on law it was based on blood you may think that's a faint distinction but let me clarify it an aristocracy based on law is an aristocracy protected by the statutes of the kingdom such that the baron of x or the duchess of y is preserved by law to have certain entitlements these laws by and large did not exist what existed was the concept of aristocracy based on inheritance who your father and mother were thus aristocracy rested on the concept of blood and this meant that the aristocracy though powerful in england had much less of a claim on political authority as the centuries passed than the aristocracy did in those countries where it was based on law and not simply on blood the only large nations that have never had a feudal society were those nations colonized by england me turn now to the third argument mystery this to me is in some ways the most important argument because it goes to the subjective state of people how do people acquire a subtle belief in their rights while at the same time recognizing that other people have rights often competing rights the answer to that question is it usually takes a very long time in england it probably took a half a millennium in 1215 the barons of england and king john signed the document called magna carta only parts of this document correspond to anything we would now regard as a declaration of rights and none of it constituted a constitution it was a series of complaints that the king agreed to manage as the baron's wished and these complaints were largely about taxes finances licenses inheritances how much money you should pay to jews from whom you had borrowed money but there were some enduring passages that leap out from the magna carta and can be tracked down to the present time for example in one section article 29 magna carta says there shall be no imprisonment except by the judgment of his peers and the law of the land the phrase the law of the land appeared in england in the early parts of the 13th century before i believe that it appeared in any other european nation and then in the next article article 30 magna carta said justice is not to be delayed nor sold nor denied but though these phrases leap out you at you and though you can imagine a relationship between these phrases and our current practices the magna carta read today seems to constitute largely a vaguely relevant antiquity and yet despite this it is revered today revered throughout england for many writers it is the ancient constitution of england now in fact it is not a constitution of england imposing on magna carta the idea that it was a constitution was a later development erwin griswold who used to be the dean of the harvard law school said quote magna carta is not primarily significant for what it was but rather for what it came to be unquote five centuries after it was written and signed in runymed it became the rock upon which english rights were built and it became the rock because it was constantly being recalled kings and the aristocracy and later on the common people the burgesses got frequently into quarrels about how the government should be run and the way to end the quarrel or to put an imprimatur on the agreement to end the quarrel was to assert that the principles of magna carta will now be restored and countless kings in these five centuries signed documents reaffirming magna carta as if it had been assigned yesterday or if it actually constituted an ancient constitution 40 times 40 times it was confirmed usually when the king and the people were at some kind of odds the puritans defended it in their revolution against the crowd brown probably confirmed it without having actually read it it's a rather dull document in 1628 magna carta was enshrined as the basis of the petition of rights even though little of it was about rights understood as we would understand them philip curlin who used to teach constitutional law at the university of chicago once compared magna carta to plato's noble lie its power rested on exaltation not on fact i think that's probably an extreme remark i don't think mike nakarta was a noble lie but i do think that the recollection of it can come close to that he was particularly critical of sir edward koch who in the middle ages wrote his famous institutes in which he tried to explain english english common law to people and in doing so summarized the magna carta and showed how the common law had been built around it developed from it and ultimately rested upon it in the opinion of curlin i think correctly koch's writings about the magna carta were quite inaccurate nonetheless this document coke's institutes led almost every american colony established in this country by english charters to begin with the statement that the members of this company living in this new land the united states would have quote the rights of englishmen unquote now what were these rights well there was sometimes a debate about them but many things were quite familiar alexander hamilton you may recall defended peter zenger an accused journalist who was attempting to be censored punished and he did so in part by referring to magna carta even though there is not to my recollection a single word in magna carta about the freedom of the press the united states constitution and later the united states bill of rights drew on ideas associated with magna carta to flesh out some of these rights the idea of free churches the idea of an independent judiciary harking back to those english justices of the peace that were beginning to develop the common law of england and above all the protection of private property now to be sure when thomas jefferson wrote the second paragraph to the declaration of independence he referred to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness but everyone in the united states knew what he was really talking about he was talking about life liberty and property because the struggle over the ownership of private property was regarded as indissolubly linked to the maintenance of life and to the preservation of personal liberty the importance of law as the basis for the king's authority was made manifest in england and was imported to the united states the common law issued by the justices of the peace about specific matters came to be regarded in time as statements of rights and these statements meant that all petitioners before the justices of the peace had equal rights and there was no right to be regarded as a member of a particular aristocratic class frederick pollock and frederick maitland have observed that british law had almost nothing to say about social ranks as i've said before only blood not law sustained the aristocracy helen kamm who once was the zamori professor at harvard university said that magna carta was a myth but a good one it shaped our own myth the declaration of independence that refers to self-evident truths but were these self-evident truths these self-evident truths were the rights of all englishmen where do the rights of all englishmen come from they came from the 40 repetitions or more of a document that had been signed 500 years earlier it came from the view that all men are entitled to life liberty and property saved by due process of law or as it said in magna carta the law of the land now the american declaration and in particular the bill of rights has also become a legend in this country a group of political scientists for a while made a small living conducting polls among people asking them whether in the following specific circumstances they would allow somebody to speak or worship or teach or uh petition the government or conduct a protest demonstration and the evidence varied from time to time it's on the whole somewhat more positive now than it was 20 years ago but it was quite clear these political scientists thought that their interpretation of these specific choices they were being asked to make were not sanctioned by the constitution or the bill of rights they were directly contrary to it and so the political scientists would say ah americans don't believe in the bill of rights all this talk about freedom of speech freedom of press that's just window dressing what they really think is let's suppress whatever group they felt like suppressing let's be mad at communists or socialists or the ku klux klan or somebody else but that misses the point the point is that americans had acquired a reverential view for the declaration of independence and for the bill of rights that sustained them even though in the practical case they were often pressed to make choices that could be argued to be inconsistent with it the constitution of the united states protects this legend with certain processes that are well known to all of you the first is an independent judiciary designed to create a law that was independent of what congress could make and secondly the doctrine of separated powers which meant that not all authority could be vested in one branch of government these three things isolation property and mystery it seems to me help explain why we have democracy in the united states and canada australia new zealand england scotland what remains to be explained is not why we have it but why anyone else has it why do spain and portugal and poland and chile and the czech republic why are they democratic today i don't know i haven't studied spanish or portuguese or czech or chilean history i am linguistically incompetent of studying them even if i try we know they have it but they've only had it for a few decades will they have it forever will it sustain their countries as long as the idea of democracy and personal freedom has sustained england and the united states i would not be confident of this if we look forward to the next century we ought to say that at best it's an even money bet i know we believe that democracy has a certain natural force behind it that once people are experiencing democracy they will be led by its internal power to embrace it to continue it to maintain it i hope so but in this century in the decade between the first and second world war many countries had democracy germany italy and others and they gave it up abandoned it rejected it created fascist and totalitarian dictatorships in their place so if you explain to me and i hope you will why spain and portugal and these other countries have joined the realm of democratic nations i hope you will not do so with too much enthusiasm because a century from now somebody may be standing before you saying it was a noble effort but it failed my last remark is about russia and china there is nothing in the history of russia or china to give anyone the slightest hope for democracy they do not benefit from isolation there is no tradition of private property there is no tradition of an independent judiciary that defends property enforces contracts requires honor and the mysteries they have are unhappy mysteries long periods of dynastic and feudal rule in china brief recollections of more or less happy czars followed by the great 75-year nightmare of soviet rule i'm not saying that russia and china cannot become democracies i'm simply saying that i know it will not happen in my lifetime and i suspect it will not happen in yours either thank [Applause] you [Applause] uh professor wilson has consented or may even want to take questions and uh so if you could uh if you have a question please approach one of the microphones and uh identify yourself and ask them a brief and telling question please sir not too italian good evening professor wilson my name is marx i'm a sophomore government concentrator at the college from los angeles um i apologize for not having a question on your topic of democracy i read your american government book in high school but i'm going to talk about the article that appeared in new york not only read it but bought it yes i bought it and used it um i'm going to talk about the article that appeared in the new york times this morning um there are two points i have one i agree with and when i don't uh gun control i think appeared in the first column and while i agree maybe it wouldn't have made a big difference in i guess the littleton colorado case i i'm still adamantly for gun control while it seemed like you were not or are not um and i'd like to know don't you think that the 200 million guns in the country that you mentioned is a problem and shouldn't we be combating that second one is dress code while i agree with it how do you think we can implement it with state governments this is the second time in two years i've given a lecture in this room the first time was the godkin lectures which were on processes of criminal justice the first question from the audience the first question was about gun control and when i published the lectures i said at harvard learning occurs rapidly but some things are never forgotten tonight the first question is about gun control i don't want to get sir into a long discussion about gun control unless you're prepared to answer the following question what do you mean by gun control 200 million guns 60 million of them are handguns in private possession in the united states what do you mean by gun control do indisputable so the point where which is the policy in most states up until very recently no way but that change has only occurred in the last two or three years new york city has had a higher homicide rate than london for 200 years if you look at the number of homicides committed in the united states without the use of guns by knives and clubs and poisons and being pushed in front of the subway train at the harvard square entrance they are three times higher than the number of homicides in england we are a more violent country i believe that if we had no guns we would have less homicide but i cannot think of any politically feasible way of extracting from the hands of american people the 200 million guns they now have when they would say in response you the government want to take away our guns even though you failed to protect us from homicide i think it's absolutely impossible my name is francis uh she i'm from china according to my understanding you said probably in the next few next two generations china is impossible to realize democracy is this what you said i said i am skeptical of the possibility of china achieving a meaningful form of democracy in the next several years or decades yes but i um i want to remind that you know for men maybe it's impossible but with god nothing is impossible so if you want to help china or russia i hope the american people can pray more for them okay well i hope so too because nothing would make me happier than having a democratic russia or democratic china democratic nations do not go to war against other democratic nations they are not territorial aggressors and so the incidents of war in the world would go down and the incidence of self-imposed genocide of a government wreaking havoc on its own people would go down so wanting these countries by the will of god or by some other means to become democratic is very high on my list of things but having studied political science for 40 years i'm not optimistic that it's going to happen in my lifetime or in yours sir i'm richard zach hazar i'm a professor here um i looked at the title of your talk which was why democracy and i didn't know whether you were going to tell us why we have democracy which is i think what you did tell us or why we want democracy but you didn't tell us i was hoping one you would give us a few words about that and second you might comment in particular on a study that was done very recently on switzerland where they look which is a you know moderately homogeneous country which has a fair amount of democracy as we normally discuss it but it looked across the cantons and discovered that the cantons that had more direct democracy where the people actually got together in a forum like this one to vote for the outcomes were substantially happier than the ones that had more indirect democracy for example where we voted for elected leaders so you i thought to casually dismiss the pursuit of happiness from one of the things that we should be thinking about with democracy but one do you well i guess i have three questions why do we want democracy do you believe that there's something special about being more direct in our democracy and is happiness a noble outcome of democracy dick i want democracy because for those who experience true democracy it is the most meaningful political life you can have it ensures personal freedom which to me ranks very high on my list of benefits it creates problems it subsidizes interests it does foolish things at home and abroad but in general it leaves the people better off than they would been left off by any other form of rule and it does not kill its own citizens i mean you may think this is a strange defense why should i defend the american democracy the british democracy because we don't kill our own citizens although in the case of the movement of the indians to the uh western side of the mississippi we did kill a few people but they were in the oddities of the time not regarded as citizens they were regarded as the members of another country i think the case for democracy is compelling the problem is getting people there tocqueville in his analyzing democracy in america is perhaps best remembered for the following statement people want freedom and equality but they prefer equality more they prefer equality more because freedom only works to the benefit of the dissidents and they're always few in number whereas equality works for the benefit of all and therefore you have to expect that in a democratic regime freedom will always be sacrificed for equality it's because of that i happen to like the separation of powers because it slows down the rate at which freedom can be sacrificed for equality now as between direct and indirect democracy i lived in belmont massachusetts which had a form of direct democracy we all voted for a town meeting of about 250 people virtually anyone could get elected um the meetings were contentious not a lot was accomplished but people went home feeling that they'd had their day in court now this may be good for them if you live in a town the size of belmont or if you live in a community the size of a swiss canton but if you live in the united think states democracy is not only impossible because we all can't meet in some vast football field to vote i think if we did meet in some vast football field to vote we would often come to the wrong decision madison defended representation not simply because direct democracy was impossible in a direct communicative sense but because direct democracy exposed government to the temporary passions of people the theory of representation much as we may dislike congress from any one moment to the next is based on the idea that discussion among people who have who are paid to have an interest in the matter will in the long run result in better laws and i happen to believe that now i've forgotten your third question there is happiness an appropriate goal for democracy happiness is the highest goal of mankind aristotle described philosophy as being a search for true happiness politics should try to produce true happiness as well to do that it has to produce virtue but true virtue leads to happiness hi my name is alex rubicoff i'm a freshman at the college my question to you is this given your pessimistic view for the spread of democracy to the rest of the world in the next hundred years or so especially to russia and china what can the world's established democracies do if not to help them achieve that goal in the goal of democracy in a reasonable period of time at least establish nascent traditions of freedom and equality so that eventually that goal might be achieved what can we do now today for the future i wish i knew what we could do today now for the future but i'm not sure there is any public policy we could adopt that would further that goal clearly we have an interest in helping the soviet union get rid of its nuclear weapons we have an interest in making sure they have free immigration we have an interest in trying to help them design a banking system that actually will work so far it doesn't design contract law we should send people over there who can tell them how to do these things but you're talking about a country that's never had banks that's never had contracts that's never had free immigration and has always had nuclear it's always had heavy weapons recently nuclear ones we should do all of these things but i don't think we're going to change them by giving large imf grants to them on the basis of how they should arrange their tax schedules or play games with the ruble on the international money market i think what we should do is convey what we're capable of conveying knowledge about how a democracy works and hope that in time they seize that information if they're going to solve their economic problems they're going to solve them by themselves we're not going to be able to show them how all we can do is show them how to acquire those things that will permit them to solve their economic problems so just to follow which institutions of democracy do you think will be the most difficult to adopt for the rest of the world i think the institution of democracies that are the most difficult to develop are first sufficient legitimacy in the ring in the reign in the regime so that whoever loses the election will voluntarily follow the wishes of those who win it and secondly human tolerance so you will not use your power in that regime to oppress other people those are the two essential ingredients george washington this country established the first it was a tight struggle to see whether legitimacy would last but in fact it did and it wasn't until this century that personal freedoms began to be extended widely so it's a long time even in the privileged countries thank you dr wilson my name is max paremer i'm an mpp tour at the kennedy school i had a question for you you've talked about the three things that are essential for the development of a democracy are these also essential for the continuity of a democracy or can a democracy survive after one of them has gone away i'm thinking specifically about isolation with the sort of globalization of war and the ability to deliver weapons of mass destruction anywhere in the world almost instantly is that a threat to democracy in countries like england and the united states yes i very much agree it is i isolation helps us explain why democracy developed as it did but isolation is not a protective factor because today no one is isolated from anybody not only by weapons of mass destruction but by an entirely globalized finance system by the spread of popular culture you cannot make a tape recording for a rap group in this country that is not available in the inner mongolia within three weeks which is where i think all such rap records should be sent but i'm i'm not the secretary of commerce so that isolation only answered my initial limited question it does not serve to protect countries anymore other things protect countries and i've tried to describe them in answering questions from this gentleman my name is david campbell and i'm a graduate student in the government department and i i just wanted to ask a question to maybe probe your thinking or curious what your thinking is a little further on the subject of mystery that you introduced here i'm i'm wondering if mysteries that is statements and documents that we revere are perhaps more malleable than perhaps you've suggested i don't know much about the english case the 40 affirmations that you mentioned of the magna carta but i know a little bit about the american case and it seems to me that throughout american history the interpretation of what the declaration of independence was saying has changed depending on other factors in the political context so lincoln redefined what the declaration of independence meant when he spoke at gettysburg i think the analogy here is perhaps with scripture that almost every battle that human beings fight has something to do with religion and often both sides are using the same book of scripture they're just interpreting it differently and so i'm wondering if what you've suggested here as a cause of democracy is really just an effect that is the way we interpret the documents is merely a result of maybe some of the other things that you've well i i think you're quite right about interpretation even before gettysburg uh lincoln and the powerful address explained why the phrase all men are created equal extended to blacks as well as to whites not that he was in favor of racial integration but he was in favor of extending to all people the fruits of their own labor and i think later on another group said that all men are created equal means all men and women are created equal none of those changes caused anybody to have any reduction in confidence in the declaration of independence maybe this is because it was like the new testament maybe it's because these changing interpretations though harshly contested at first gradually accepted over time did not alter the legitimacy of the of of the the ongoing legend and i think that that's suggests the power of the legend whether it's the new testament or magna carta or the declaration of rights or the declaration of independence if your loyalty to that principle remains intact provided the reinterpretations are not grossly inconsistent with its messages i think you can be reasonably confident you have created a government or a religion that is bound together by a set of common understandings my name is sue aitken i'm a mid-career at the kennedy school and i'm one of the people in professor box criticism for the american government course and i'm interested in participatory decision making and i'm going back to the earlier question if we think of the concept government of the people by the people and for the people america now ranks in the tail end of participation new zealand if you take out the countries with compulsory voting new zealand is the highest at about 85 percent over the last 20 years up to 1996 wondering your views on which people well let me ask you this question would this country be any different if everybody voted i'm not an american what do you think i don't think it would be i think that if everyone voted if we had compulsory voting as they do in some countries if we really enforced it you lost your driver's license if you didn't vote the elections would turn out pretty much the same the votes on referendum would turn out pretty much the same there has been some scholarship on this retex era and others have kind of looked at what would happen if you got everyone to vote and though the common view is that the least privileged don't vote uh that's not quite true the least privilege may not vote in higher proportions than others but they're a fraction of the population many people of the white majority don't vote at all and though the percentage of non-voting may be lower there they are very numerous part of the population so that i don't think it makes a large difference um i would worry more if suddenly we had an election in this country and 80 percent of the people voted i would worry that there was something seriously wrong they had lost their way of communicating with the government they could no longer act through interest groups they could no longer go to the city council and pound on the table they could no longer write letters to their congressmen and at least get a computer written answered they felt that they have to confront the system with the vote i may be overstating my reaction to your point i'm not trying to defend low voting turnout but it seems to me the level of turnout is not a central factor in evaluating the quality of the regime i can't think of any politically relevant fact that is correlated with our voting turnout when it was high or when it's low has the country change any material way i don't think so it's it's continuing to drop i mean the decline is the steady one it's a slow one but it's a steady one uh at what so you're saying you would be worried if it suddenly jumped to 80 percent can i ask you the conversation if it fell to 10 i would also be very worried uh i am confident in the middle range of these things moderate level of voting which i am happy to accept and and how do you quantify moderate level and don't press me i'm very good at very poor quantitative methods but somewhere between 35 and 65 percent is a moderate range for presidential elections thank you thank you my name is jim boyle i'm an attorney in town and professor i really respect your long-term interest in moral theory and i'm interested in your insights on how the administrative state particularly when it uh engages in what i would see is constructive sort of intervention in the economy specifically let's say work work programs and communities that have chronic unemployment what effect do those programs have on individuals moral life gives them an opportunity to engage in work and two what effect does it have on their ability to participate in democracy and find expression uh for you know sort of the best virtues of human beings but you're talking about work supported programs and government as the employer of last resort in communities where there's sort of chronic 50 unemployment for you know 20 30 years well um the only thing i know about this i will stay very briefly and then i'll speculate about what i don't know what we know about this very briefly is that a great variety of government and some private efforts to stimulate employment by a variety of techniques training work support programs and the like have had very modest effects when measured by such outcomes as do they stay on welfare do they commit crimes do they resume their life as delinquent but that's really not an answer to your question because what you would like to know is whether these programs have other impossible to measure consequences the answer is is that i don't know but i think one of the best arguments for retraining retaining at least the more promising forms of work programs is that they will in fact produce these unmeasured effects suppose for example a criminal gets work training and after the training resumes crime we might regard the program as a failure but the real test is what his son or what his daughter will do and that intergenerational movement of attitudes toward the workplace may turn out in the long run to be the most important ones and about these we have no information at all sir thank you my name is son andreas and i'm a student here as someone who schooled in political theory outside and modestly so but outside of the anglo-saxon tradition i was wondering when i heard your your remarks whether your remarks or your story about these three sources of democracy is a mystery in itself because often you hear the history of democracy traced in quite a different route through athens and the fiorentine republic and the french revolution i was wondering if what you think it takes to sustain democracy and if that would be different in the countries that you talked about that had the isolated precondition for democracy than other countries which do not and if one of the things it takes to sustain democracy is this kind of mystery or new conservative ideology that you have made yourself a proponent of and which role that plays in in sustaining democracy today well i don't know what sustains democracy outside of the countries that i've mentioned so far and they may be there may be alternate routes to it and there is an argument that there is a set of confucian values which can play as large a role in shaping a modern state as the values of magna carta played in shaping the english state i've read the analects of confucius and all i can say is i'm not convinced but on the other hand if it is a legend if it is like magna carta a document that is not widely read but often praised it may indeed have that effect singapore has created a kind of democracy it's a rather intolerant kind of democracy it punishes people for violating freedom for writing things it punishes people for demonstrating it controls access to office by keeping the minority party very small but maybe it will grow into something larger japan is a democracy today and maybe in the long run it will be a very successful one i don't think isolation and the other factors i mentioned are the only ways to create or sustain a democracy i am sure there are other factors but i don't know enough about them to talk about them and somebody in this room perhaps yourself who does know about these other things ought to look at them because when you look at the study of democracy today from a social science perspective you get correlation tables saying well the richest nations are also the most democratic nations or other peoples no no it's the democratic nations that are also the richest nations i find that a remarkably unhelpful contemporary correlation it's almost impossible to say which comes first and it's impossible to say what kind of growth dynamics may have led to this and so i think probing the historical origins of forms of government is immensely enlightening and if you have access to non-western data and countries i hope you will do the probing because i haven't been able to do it may i follow up about the contemporary ideologies and neoconservatives and in particular what do you want to know about neoconservatism i i don't know what it is but since i've been labeled with it i will try to defend it do you believe that keeping awareness about the roots of contemporary american democracy is an important factor in sustaining it yes i do the united states for reasons peculiar to it has sustained democracy because of the factors i've mentioned despite the extraordinary in migration of people from every country in the world so that we are now beyond any doubt the most diverse society in the world i live in los angeles where white anglo-saxons are a small minority of the population uh and yet i notice that when people come here they begin to acquire the culture of the place and they form interest groups and they vote and they do all they pound on the table of their city council member and they act just the way the rest of us act some cultural variations but they act the same way and i think what they're doing is picking up a very powerful culture that the culture of rights which was settled by the declaration of independence and the bill of rights is now reinforced by a private culture of rights which devise its strength from both what you learn when you arrive here and from the existence of a free and independent judiciary where you can assert those rights if they're anywhere in doubt so that maybe the best way to answer your question is do i ever think democracy will vanish in the united states no okay thank you my name is raphael mandelman and i'm a student here at the kennedy school and my question is based on your remark about the pursuit of happiness being sort of one of the highest purposes of government and then aside which didn't quite catch the formulation but that being very dependent on the promotion of virtue and what i'm curious about the critique of the ancients as i understand it of democracy or those ancients who didn't like democracy very much was that it was harmful to virtue and did not produce virtue um and i think that current conservative critics of american culture and american democracy feel that it is somewhat that it is self-destructive and that something like colorado um that happiness destroy that that that virtue that the democracies do not pursue virtue um that democratic leadership does not promote virtue oh okay and that democracy is then sort of ultimately unsustainable because the culture implodes um and it seems that that is the conservative critique of american culture today and and the it's not my critique maybe that makes me a lefty okay i am a hopeless optimist maybe it's because i have five grandchildren and i want the world to be as nice for them as it was for me you're quite right that in a secular competitive democratic state such as the united states especially one in which the supreme court has erected an absolutely indefensible wall between church and state based on the phrase the wall of separation which appears nowhere in the constitution uh that even the government supporting on a non-discriminatory basis religious institutions now seems to be forbidden i i agree that all of those forces taken in combination create problems i believe further that the success of the american economy emancipates everyone both to do good and to do evil it lets some affluent young men go out and buy tech nines and blow away half their classmates it enables other people to come to the jfk school and study things and go off being deputy secretary of state i assume some of you go in government well probably not all right consulting firms do very well in consulting firms um at when it comes down to is you just have to decide whether you're an optimist or a pessimist is how this is going to work out the reason i am an optimist i will put very simply human virtue is responsive to processes that we have acquired through evolution the love of a mother and her child the affection between a husband and a wife these are the guiding reinforcing principles of every culture that has ever existed and no matter what the government does to try to squeeze that out or ignore it or preach against it it cannot succeed the desire for asserting within the limits of the existing culture some kind of pre-ordained moral order is so powerful that i think it will restrict the ability of a secular society uninterested in character from proceeding very far one bit of evidence to support this in the last five to ten years presidents of both the democratic and republican parties but most recently the democratic president have begun issuing speeches on school uniforms and being nice to your parents and staying in school they're not doing this because they've studied some ancient educational text they're doing it because they think that's what the public wants them to say and they're quite right that is what the public wants them to say and that tells you that the public has a life of its own apart from the government thank you my name is barry lantern i live here in cambridge my question goes back to a relationship which you made between the sizes of the um the uh the population and uh and and how the how this is ruled you mentioned that smaller smaller households and were easier to manage than or to rule than bigger government bigger sorry bigger societies something of that in your speech one of the one of the aspects of control which is very popular today is the media and how the media is being is used by authoritarian authorities or leaderships in in in even non-democracies and democracies to sort of control this mass as you are talking about it i'm i'm my i have sort of two two questions related to this one does do you see uh any relationship between your your your your point about mystery and the media and how and whether the meteor has any effect on on the mystery and do you think that um there is a it's possible to effectively to effectively um instill a mystery to me through media well i think that it's an interesting question you pose uh i think one way to measure whether a set of shared understandings is a living legend is so to speak a myth or not is whether the media can attack it and get away with it the media will attack anything that bill clinton or the republican leadership in congress announces they live off conflict if it bleeds it leads i mean that's their story any bill that's been passed in the last x years will come up for critical review if somebody thinks that something bad has happened but do you really believe that the media would attack the declaration of independence or the emancipation proclamation or the constitution i don't think there's any chance of that at all not because they're constrained by internal forces to respect these documents because the public would be horrified by it so no i don't think the media will erode those things whether we'll acquire new legends that the media will be equally inclined to respect in perpetuity i don't know but they respect those now i'm not sure i understood your other question um the other question is whether there are it is possible that uh effective governments and leaderships for example we're seeing the case in um in uh in uh yugoslavia uh yugoslavia or what what is serbia today uh where this proportion provided that um milosevic has a very good handle of the media and is able to manipulate the media to to achieve certain goals i'm thinking in that sense of of leadership being able to to manipulate uh the media even in non even in non-um in countries which don't have the americas like russia and china to be able to achieve a certain mystery which is going to lead to those process of democracy oh there's no question that the government leaders given half a chance will use the media to manipulate the public no doubt at all it would happen here if it weren't for certain arrangements to make it very difficult for that to happen and milosevic's use of the media like hitler's use of the media like everybody else's use of the media will be designed to build popular support and in the short run it will succeed i mean if you control all the media you can get pretty much all the people marching in the same direction the question is not whether the media can influence politics it clearly can but whether the media will affect in the long run the capacity for the country to acquire a democratic regime and that i don't know the answer to i'd like to think that a generation from now serbia would be a reasonably content democratic nation with a high regard for personal freedom it's possible other countries in that region have moved in that direction but whether will happen i don't know my my final guess is that despite 75 years of media bombardment of the russian people by the soviet government though they got them in the short run to do whatever they wanted they did not affect i think the common moral understanding of the people that when the soviet regime fell it fell climactically with scarcely a tear in anyone's eyes so that there are obviously some limits to media effects last question my name my name is andres vinelli and i'm from argentina i'm a doctoral student here at the kennedy school and i have a question about uh definition of democracy and the topology of different democracies coming from latin america we have different governments there that claim to be democratic and some are more virtuous than others and my question is how do you know when you have democracy first and would you define different types of democracy perhaps on the lines of virtue or on the lines of different types of restraint that they have towards citizens and markets well to me democracy involves has two central criteria can the people freely achieve their representatives in which two rival parties have a fair chance of competing for their vote and secondly once in power will the regime in power respect the rights and freedoms of the citizens under on the basis of some written or if not written deeply understood tradition as to how far the government can go i know that america has had many problems they often have competitive elections that produce tyrannical regimes that's been the tradition around the world but i if those two things are met then the regime is democratic in my view that doesn't cover a lot of countries i hope it covers yours thank you thank you thanks very much james wilson this is a sign that wisdom and moderation go together we're grateful to you thank you it okay uh thank you

Channel: Institute of Politics Harvard Kennedy School

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Id: AOcMBXd8pXE

Length: 78min 59sec (4739 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021