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06/03/2004: "World Government?"
Natalie Solent has an epic post about world government. To excerpt unfairly:
First a question for you. How do you know communism doesn't work? Because you saw it not working all through your childhood and early adulthood [....] the goddess History primly laid out several countries split into communist and non-communist sections so that you could watch one half sink and one half rise and draw appropriate morals. [...] They say that an aerial photograph of two neighbouring states in the US will sometimes show the land changing colour at the state border as clearly as on a map; the difference being no manifestation of nature but the result of differing agricultural policies.
What I fear is that a time will come when there will be no significant examples of difference left in the world. That possibility is still far off but for the first time in history the technology is in place for it to happen. Think about that. We are always being told that this or that situation is without precedent when what the tellers mean is that they dislike the precedents, but this time there really is no precedent. We do not know how human beings do a single world society.
[....]
I can imagine a future US administration deciding to differentiate itself from its predecessors by coming repentant back into the fold. Then the UN would put gradually put its warm, loving arms around the whole world, with international treaties and courts and protocols and constitutions. These bodies do so love constitutions, don't they? And the whole point of a constitution is to take some matters out of discussion. The French National Assembly has voted to embody the Precautionary Principle into the French Constitution.
Voila! If they take it seriously (always a big 'if' in France), whole vast areas of variability and innovation have been swept forever off the table in order to get one week's good publicity.
[...]
All you have to imagine is stuff like that keeps happening on a world scale.
I am haunted by the tale of the fleets of Zheng He, recounted in Guns, Germs and Steel. China's vast program of exploration, greater than anything Europe ever had, was turned off click! because of some otherwise obscure quarrel between two factions at court. The reason that there was only one switch was that China was unified.
All you have to imagine is stuff like that keeps happening on a world scale.
As Madsen Pirie says, a tax or regulatory regime does not like exceptions. If once we have a world government or close imitation thereof I think we might really see, not the end of history, but its asymptote.
A couple of thoughts.
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First thought. The U.S. was set up with weak federal government. Thus, the name: The United States of America. They did not want one country. They wanted thirteen seperate countries, all of them part of a United Nations type organization to handle certain enumerated tasks. Heck, the Bill of Rights was thought by many to be unnecessary; after all, no part of the constitution said the government could abridge the right to free speach, therefore, there was no need to say the government could not abridge free speech.
Then came the 14th amendment, sold as a way to end slavery. To see how that amendment expanded the pervasive role of government, read the May 21, 2004 Best of The Web item I copied in the extended comments. The 14th amendment is about sodomy as well as slavery.
The point here is that government does tend to expand over time. I question what that would mean if we had a world government.
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Second thought. While we may have no experience with world government, Mrs. Solent's China example comes close. In a sense, China was a world unto itself. The leadership of that closed community decided to stop learning. Their society stagnated until bam!, half a millenium later, the outside world burst their bubble. They could no longer ignore the folly of their willful ignorance.
Govenrment is ok if it protects our right to be different, not if it grants us the right to be different. With world government, the cancerous effects of enforced mass conformity would be hidden. The trick is to form a world government with truly limited powers.
From the May 21, 2004 Best of The Web (middle item):
Slippery Slate The week Massachusetts starts marrying same-sex couples, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick mocks the "slippery slope" argument against same-sex marriage, an argument most recently offered by James Dobson of Focus on the Family in a Monday interview:
Last year, Sen. Rick Santorum made a similar argument about Lawrence v. Texas, a then-pending case challenging state sodomy laws: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." And in his Lawrence dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: "State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers' validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today's decision." These comments drew howls from gay-rights advocates, most of whom, we suspect, were objecting to the implication that homosexuality was comparable to practices like incest and bestiality, which most everyone still agrees are deviant. But Lithwick thinks the slippery-slope argument itself is fundamentally flawed: "The problem with the slippery slope argument is that it depends on inexact, and sometimes hysterical, comparisons," she writes. Also: "Slippery slopes are only metaphors. They are not intrinsic principles of law." Yet the way American constitutional law works, slippery slopes are almost inevitable--a point that is more easily understood if we think of same-sex marriage as coming at the end of such a slope rather than the beginning. In 1868 Congress and the states ratified the 14th Amendment, the first section of which was designed to protect the rights of black Americans, newly freed from slavery. But the amendment's language was much more sweeping:
The 14th Amendment was the basis for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, which declared unconstitutional the segregation of government schools. But it has also been the basis for a series of other court decisions that have profoundly affected American life but have nothing to do with the rights of blacks. The equal protection clause has been construed to apply to various sorts of nonracial discrimination, while the doctrine of "incorporation" has led to myriad restrictions on state policy in the name of enforcing the Bill of Rights (including judicially discovered rights like privacy), which originally limited only the federal government. A partial list of the Supreme Court-driven changes we owe to the 14th Amendment:
Same-sex marriage isn't on this list yet, because the U.S. Supreme Court hasn't spoken on the issue. But the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court relied heavily on Lawrence in its decision mandating it last year--proving that Scalia was correct in at least one aspect of his slippery-slope argument. The point of this list is not to make a judgment as to whether any of these cases were good law or good policy. It is simply to underscore the extreme unlikeliness that the framers of the 14th Amendment could have foreseen any of these results in 1868. Yet there is a logical progression from the sweeping language of the 14th Amendment to the jurisprudence of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Once the court had established a right to marital privacy in Griswold, it wasn't that much of a leap to expand it to include unmarried people, abortion and homosexuality. Indeed, the court's 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, which declined to strike down sodomy laws, left the court's privacy doctrine looking incoherent: If government was to stay out of abortion clinics, what business did it have in the bedrooms of consenting adults? Imagine if a conservative Southern politician had reacted to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 by issuing the following prediction: "If the court can strike down our precious institution of segregation, are there any limits? One day it will affirm the right to practice sodomy, and men will even marry men." History would have recorded this as a bigoted and hysterical pronouncement. But purely as a matter of prognostication, our hypothetical politician would have been proved right. At least where the law is concerned, one shouldn't be too quick to scoff at slippery-slope arguments. |
