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The
Role of Vision
Q.
If traditionalists believe that government should be by consensus,
why do they emphasize vision? Are not differences over something so
basic as comprehensive visions of the future a source of conflict?
Do not peace and stability require better mutual understanding,
rather than culture wars?
A.
First, I would answer that one of the greatest myths in the practice
of both domestic and foreign policy is that improved communication
automatically will resolve differences and promote stability.
As
a one-time inmate of Stalin's Gulag Archipelago or prison system
when I was a teenager, and probably the only person to have escaped
from it, I have always been impressed by the incompatibility of
certain visions, particularly those that are based on utopian views
of human nature and those that are not, because all utopian visions
are false gods. I have several filing drawers full of materials on
such false gods, and the various expressions of polytheism in my
taxonomy now exceeds seventy-two.
For
example, arms control experts during the twentieth-century Cold War
insisted that Soviet and American policy makers could come to
agreement on both arms control and disarmament if only they could
understand each other better. In fact, the better each understood
the underlying goals of the other, the further apart they would have
been, because they were proceeding from incompatible premises and
conflicting visions of the future. Both sought peace, but the
Americans sought peace as an end in itself, and were convinced that
the only means to this end was conflict resolution through better
understanding. The Communist leaders, however, sought peace as a
means to another end, namely, as a tactic in pursuing an historical
inevitability of transforming human nature toward a socialist
utopia. The means to this end was not conflict resolution, but
conflict management. The American premise, unspoken and simply
assumed, was that conflict is bad, whereas the premise of the
Communist leaders, equally unspoken in their communication with
Americans, was that dialectical conflict is inherently good, because
without it there can be no progress toward their higher goal.
The
impasse was resolved only when the end goal of a socialist utopia
was exposed as a fraud that could not compete with free, private
enterprise, and when President Reagan challenged the "evil
empire" to an arms race, which the Communist conflict managers
realized, they could not win. Instead of trying to convince the
Communists that conflict resolution was the key to all happiness,
President Reagan convinced them that he could beat them at their own
game by superior conflict management. And he appealed to the
universal power of the ordinary person attuned to God, which is the
ultimate power in the world. President Reagan clearly understood
that the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union did
not result from lack of understanding, but from incompatible
premises. Reduced to popular parlance, it was an epoch battle
between good and evil.
Throughout
the process of public policy making, at local, national, and
international levels, most conflict arises not from misunderstanding
but from differing sets of premises, purposes, goals, and tactical
objectives. Thomas Sowell formulates the conflict in terms of
differing visions. In a book summarizing his life work, entitled A
Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, he
remarks that regardless of the issue the same people line up against
each other. Even though "the issues themselves may have no
intrinsic connection with each other, ... the same familiar faces
can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the
political fence."(1) He explains
that the antagonisms often result because both sides are arguing
from premises so fundamentally different that they amount to
different visions of how the world works.
As
a student of comparative legal systems, I necessarily am a student
of comparative visions, because every legal system is merely an
articulation of its underlying premises and purpose. Thomas Sowell
describes vision as a "pre-analytic cognitive act."
Visions are necessary precursors to thought because "the
ever-changing kaleidoscope of raw reality would defeat the human
mind by its complexity, except for the mind's ability to abstract,
to pick out parts and think of them as the whole." The study of
the esoteric core of all higher thought reveals that this process of
abstracting meaning usually does not result from logical induction
from the parts, but appears at a sub-liminal level as intuition of
the whole, from which the rational brain can deduct connections to
the parts of reality.(2) This is the
source of almost all creative thought, including most of the
breakthroughs by Nobel prize winners.(3)
Sowell
points out that, "like maps, visions have to leave out many
concrete features in order to enable us to focus on a few key paths
to our goals. Visions are indispensable - but dangerous, precisely
to the extent that we confuse them with reality itself. ... Visions
are the foundations on which theories are built. ... Visions are
very subjective, but well-constructed theories have clear
implications, and facts can test and measure their objective
validity." He emphasizes that "a vision is not a dream, a
hope, a prophecy, or a moral imperative. ... A vision is a sense of
causation."(4)
One
of Sowell's most important insights is that, "Where
intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much
by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords
as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions
and misconceptions that sweep human action along. The effects of
visions do not depend upon their being articulated, or even on
decision-makers' being aware of them. 'Practical' decision-makers
often disdain theories and visions, being too busy to examine the
ultimate basis on which they are acting."(5)
This inherently covert nature of lobbying by subliminal vision is
why "think-tanks" have become the fifth estate in modern
governance, after the first three classical estates of the
executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, and the
more recent estate of the media.
The
essential task of a think-tank is not to influence policy directly,
but to influence the thought processes of the intellectuals in other
think tanks and in the staffs of Congress and the Executive branch,
and even in the chambers of Supreme Court justices, as well as among
the opinion elites in the institutions of informal civil governance
and private enterprise. The real task of a modern think-tank or
policy research center is not simply to gather facts, but to marshal
them in support of policies that emerge from a pre-set agenda.
Whoever controls the agenda controls both policies and facts, and
whoever provides vision controls the agenda. This was why President
Ronald Reagan was so popular and set the agenda that continued even
during the terms of his Democratic successor, and why George Bush
was merely an interim president.
Thomas
Sowell has published a dozen books to bring out the policy
implications of two contrasting visions, which he calls the
"constrained vision" and the "unconstrained
vision" of man's fundamental nature. He intentionally
"dichotomizes a continuum," by positing as the
unconstrained extreme the absolute perfectibility of the human race.
This extreme was well exemplified by the 18th-century American,
William Godwin, and by the coeval Frenchman, the Marquis de
Condorcet. Although the American was soon reduced to a footnote in
history, Condorcet became a godfather of the French Revolution,
which produced a long lineage of savage destruction culminating in
Communism and Nazism in the twentieth century, and in some forms of
extremist fundamentalism today. Such utopians exceed all others in
their resort to fear as an incentive to "good behavior,"
and they violate every human right in its pursuit. But their theory
is that transforming the political and social environment will
transform the nature of mankind, who as a species is potentially
perfect, so that the primitive incentives expressed in the
"hope of reward" and the "fear of punishment"
will forever disappear from human life.
Contrasted
with this flawed vision is the "constrained vision"
popularized, inter alia, by Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton. Both
regarded the moral limitations of man in general, and his
egocentricity in particular, as inherent facts of life. In policies
based on this vision, according to Sowell, "the fundamental
moral and social challenge was to make the best of the possibilities
that existed within that constraint, rather than dissipate energies
in an attempt to change human nature. ... In practice, people on
many occasions 'sacrifice their own interests to the greater
interests of others,' according to Smith, but this was due to such
intervening factors as devotion to moral principles, to concepts of
honor and nobility, rather than to loving one's neighbor as oneself.(6)
This
constrained vision of human nature produced a movement known as
constitutionalism, which was designed to produce order, justice, and
liberty by constraining human action. According to Ellis Sandoz,
constitutionalism, as derived originally from ancient Greece and
Rome and developed in Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, requires
"government by law and under law, separation of powers,
separation of church and state (but not of religion and politics),
and limited popular participation."(7)
These,
however, are merely the mechanics. Equally important is the vision
that underlies a particular constitutional order and the sources of
this vision. Rene Williamson puts it succinctly: "Checks and
balances do not always work. No constitutional order, even our own,
is entirely self-corrective. Something more than structural devices
is needed. What is that 'something more'? The most inclusive and
least controversial suggestion is transcendence or, as Claes Ryn put
it, 'a grasp of the divine'."(8)
For
the spiritually attuned person, this needs little justification or
exposition. For the spiritually dead, no explanation is possible.
For the rest of us, two explanations have been advanced. One is
inductive reasoning from the parts of creation to the purposes of
the Creator, which in Christianity is known as "natural
law" and in Islam as haqq Allahi. The other is deductive
reasoning from the holistic wisdom revealed by the Creator through
human prophets, which may be known simply as religion.
"One
of the most common and time-honored manifestations of
transcendence," writes Rene Williamson, "is natural law,
written in the hearts of men and read by right reason. It is
universal, eternal, and immutable. Aquinas identified it as man's
participation in eternal law. ... Aquinas added the category of
divine law to his otherwise threefold category of eternal law,
natural law, and human law." Natural law, notes Williamson, may
reflect divine law but it has limited utility for the protection of
a constitutional order, because "natural law requires human
interpretations, and human interpretations vary widely and are
unreliable. This flaw comes from a finiteness which cannot encompass
the whole truth and from sin which distorts it."
Williamson
asks, "Can religion, another form of transcendence, do
better?" This raises the issue of whether or not there is or
can be a common vision in a plurality of religions, which is the
subject of my current research. Williams concludes merely that the
modern consensus among Christians, and one might add among Jews and
increasingly among Muslims, is that they "have a duty to get
involved in politics but not to get assimilated by it; that there is
no salvation in politics; that no political program is ever wholly
right; ... and that politics without the transcendental dimension
brought by religion is doomed to corruption and failure."(9)
As Edmund Burke once commented, "Evil can triumph only if good
men do nothing."
My
second answer to your question about the seeming inconsistency
between the traditionalist search for consensus and traditionalist
intransigence about its own vision is that the decision to choose
between consensus and conflict depends on the particular visions in
contention. I have discussed this in my recent book. Where there is
consensus on ultimate values the strategy should be peaceful
engagement to build consensus on specific issues. Where there is no
such underlying consensus, the only alternative is culture war. The
task of think tanks is both consensus and conflict, depending on the
issues and the parties involved.
a. Positivism: The Root of Chaos
b. Traditionalism: The Root of Cosmos
c. Culture War
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