Civil Society
The Dream of the Garden
Perhaps you need a vacation. A camping trip sure sounds nice. Time away from the stress and motion of the city—relaxing out of doors, breathing fresh air, drinking from a mountain stream, paddling a canoe across a picturesque lake, sprawling lazily by a smoky camp-fire with a pot of freeze-dried stew and tin-foil biscuits, sipping apricot brandy from a metal flask. It sounds to your civilized mind like a welcome getaway. At least for a few days—so long as the gentle summer weather holds and your tent and supplies remain dry. But imagine now that the clouds suddenly open up and the winds turn bitterly cold. This would be a good time to head home. But as you reach your car you are told that the roads out of the park are washed away, closed for the foreseeable future, rescue forces otherwise occupied. Looks like you won’t get home as planned. So you steel yourself to remain in the freezing out-of-doors a while longer. You become increasingly nervous as hours turn to days, the exile beginning to feel indefinite. You’re stuck in what looks less like a paradise, more like an unforgiving wilderness. Your supplies are nearly exhausted and you’ll have to think creatively if you want to continue eating. Can you live off the land? You wonder if there really is enough nutrition out here to support you. Then you watch in horror as the tear in your tent grows wider. You throw up your hands. Who could possibly hope to survive in such circumstances? The truth is that most do, and have little choice about it. Welcome to the lifestyle of the majority of human beings who have ever called this planet home, at least before the last century. A permanent, live-off-the-land camping trip—without the comforts of air mattresses and apricot brandy. Getting back to nature has probably never been as simple and attractive as our romantic imaginations would have it. We moderns enjoy nature only under the strictest conditions. Our species likes to dream of gardens, where life is slow and pleasant, wholesome food always close at hand. We create founding myths upon such imagined places, perpetuate visions of a better way of living in a benevolent state of nature. We hanker after a simpler, more natural lifestyle, no doubt because our lives in the modern world seem so much harder and more stressful than they ought to be. Whatever sort of garden we might prefer, it is surely far removed from the anxious routines of our familiar complicated and relentless lives. We are in little danger of starving, but we find that doing well—that is, succeeding according to contemporary standards—seems much further from our grasp than it ought to be, considering all the mind-boggling technology and education we have available. We think that conflict should be an aberration in a well-run society, though it remains surprisingly ordinary, inexplicably stressful. Just imagine one of our distant ancestors shrinking in terror from our daily commute to work. For a century or more, we have been promised labor-saving devices, an urban utopia. Where then are our sliding sidewalks, our flying cars, our picnics in orbiting parks? And why do we still labor as much as we ever did? What time have we gained from these technological advances to pursue worthier activities? It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult. It shouldn’t be! So we resist finding means of managing the daily stress of expectation, disagreement, conflict. Isn’t managing conflict just another way of validating it? Well, yes. Conflict persists as a seemingly unavoidable feature of our lives, even in this modern artificial lifestyle where no one needs to go hungry. And this will probably not change, however much our technology improves. Why? Not because our world has too few resources to provide those alive today with a comfortable, healthy and potentially-satisfying existence. But because we are creatures who inevitably desire more than we need—much more. Our resources are both limited and sufficient, yet our collective demands considerably outpace the ability of the natural environment to supply. We tend to want the same resources that other human beings want. And (whisper it) we expect to receive more of those available resources than they do. We want to have more and do better than the others. And beyond this competition for limited physical resources, we insist that other people behave in ways that are convenient and pleasing to us, even while those same people expect us to be pleasing and useful to them. But they never quite get it right. They never do exactly what we expect of them. They let us down. And they are as displeased with us as we are with them. For this alone, interpersonal conflict seems inevitable, even in a well-supplied society like ours. Yet conflict—competition and rivalry—can also be inspiring, motivating, challenging. These social forces are foundational to our human progress. Without wants, desires and unmet expectations—without discontent—there would be no reason to change anything, to work harder, to try new things. So perhaps we should have a better opinion of conflict, even welcome it into our modern urbane lives. Rather than trying to eliminate conflict, we would do much better to organize it, put it to use. Conflict management, it turns out, is what kindergarten was teaching us all along. It’s what civil society is really all about. Modern city life is indisputably crowded, busy and stressful. It requires a great deal of self-control, against which our animal nature rebels. Yet our biology, our beliefs, even our expressed values, still reflect the lost worlds of our distant ancestors, whose genes we carry. The challenge for us city-dwellers is to remake our nature and beliefs so that they more accurately reflect and take advantage of the realities and opportunities of our modern global existence. Though we no longer have to survive in nature—the cold and hungry garden—by our unceasing individual efforts, our modern society offers us the first opportunity in the history of our species to make something meaningful of our individualism. But we must train ourselves for this new world. And remind ourselves how unprecedented and hard-won our modern material prosperity is. We must consciously update our inherited ways of thinking, or get them out of our way. We were built for different times and different conditions. It is only by relentless training and suppression of natural urges that we are made fit for modern urban living. Doing civil society well requires careful thought, and a great deal more care than we’re used to giving it. Instead of merely muddling through, we might learn to muddle more purposefully. We don’t need a perfect society to be happy, but we can certainly make a better one. # The facts of modernity press upon us. We live in a Big Society, a world of cities and globe-spanning trade and technologies. Our globally-integrated world is really a society of societies, the tendrils of which penetrate deeply into all our local communities. Nearly everything we consume and every activity we do, every hour of the day, depends on the labors of millions and the conveniences of an integrated, urbanized global trading system. Even in our familiar cities and neighborhoods, we might pass by hundreds of people we had never seen before. And we do so with minimal coercion and violence. We even interact profitably with these local strangers. Just think how your activities changed the last time the power went out, even for an hour or two. How long do you think you could maintain your Zen without your Wi-Fi, cable television, recorded music, email, cat videos, petrol-burning transportation and air-conditioning? The want of the latter would bring us to one another’s throats. And we haven’t even mentioned light and heat. Assuming you’re in tolerable health now, how long would your happiness and sociability last without eyeglasses, prescription drugs, emergency rooms and dental care? How long would you be willing to go without the cheap, plentiful and diverse foods enjoyed by most human beings who live in cities today, most of which is not local? How would your life be different if you were suddenly responsible for producing your own food by your native ingenuity and labor—without access to weather satellites, seed banks, fertilizers or pesticides? And once you’d seen to basic calories, you’d still have to build and repair your own house and make your own clothes out of whatever materials happened to be within local reach. Welcome to the lifestyle of the majority of those who have belonged to our species. Yet we hardly notice today that virtually everything we consume, however simple and ordinary, is the consequence of global markets and modern technology. For millennia now, human beings have been choosing to live in cities—mostly because they promise a better life and (for the most part) deliver it. The greater part of human migration over the past several centuries has not been across national borders—from one country to another—but from rural to urban environments. We choose cities because that’s where the people are, where the money is, where the education is, where the opportunities are to be found (not to mention decent sushi). The move has been overwhelmingly voluntary. The city has become the best representation of our modern human freedom. But now in our technology-driven Big Society we are coming to realize that we have to live in cities—most of us anyhow—and that there is no other practical or humane choice. The future of civilization—of human prosperity or any hope of equality—depends on it. Some will object that cities are polluting and resource intensive. They are, of course, but only because people are. In reality, rural people use up more energy and resources and create more environmental harm in proportion to their numbers—primarily in wealthy countries. The future well-being of humanity will be found in more concentrated and resource-efficient cities. It can be a very good sort of life too, though we will have to become more coordinated and mindful of how we manage scarce resources to attain our civilized ends. We will have to create intelligent standards and rules to make this happen—then train ourselves to live contentedly within those rules. The dream of a prosperous life in the countryside, with civilized comforts and acres of private land far from government oversight, is an urban fantasy. It would be unaffordable to most, hugely unequal in practice. Such a dream could only happen in a world of a few hundreds of millions of people—and would negate all the technological advances and globalized prosperity (that is, comforts) we have in fact achieved. The long-term stability of our natural environment would not withstand such a resource-intensive lifestyle with greater numbers of consumers. The dreams of conservative wealth-seekers are not inherently wrong—merely impractical and unrealizable. And profoundly unjust in practice. Their vision would happen only with the impoverishment and misery of the vast majority of human beings—or with their violent and permanent removal. And then who would be rich? # Think about that camping trip again—the long-overdue getaway that turned into a suddenly wretched and seemingly permanent existence. Our species, homo sapiens, has passed most of its existence—long before there was written history—in such a condition. But, apart from a few survivalists (who seem, oddly, to have no end of high-tech gear available), we moderns are not remotely prepared to return to a simpler, more natural lifestyle. We no longer live in the small foraging bands that were the norm for most of the duration of our species. Such tightly-knit communities required close cooperative labor and collective ingenuity for survival, and thus a kind of intimate discipline in which every member knew and trusted every other member of the tribe. We cannot go back to such a lifestyle, nor should we want to. The natural and social worlds in which our ancestors grew up were difficult, unpredictable, often violent—far removed from the easy freedoms we are tempted to ascribe to them. When mobile human communities settled into more sedentary lifestyles during the Neolithic period, their personal lives became duller, more labor-intensive, and considerably more unequal—(slavery, endemic to ancient civilizations, being the most extreme example)—but hardly longer in duration or more satisfying. The traditional hunting and gathering lifestyle was probably happy in its own way, but it could not be satisfying in ways that we expect and demand for ourselves. Health care was rude or non-existent, education unknown, life spans short, the lives of children precarious at best. We today enjoy nature for a few comfortable days from a waterproof backpack. For our ancestors, nature was by turns benevolent and cruel. A peaceful and prosperous old age was rare, mostly a matter of luck. And such a lifestyle would be incompatible with a global population of more than a few millions of people. The vast majority of our species would have to perish for the rest of us to return to such an existence. It would likely happen only in the wake of an unprecedented global catastrophe. In the unlikely event that a few of us individuals survived, we would lose most of our loved ones. So we cannot expect to return, nor could such a life hold anything enticing for modern human beings. Modernizing societies like to indulge in flattering portrayals of virtuous farmers. Rural communities are portrayed as idyllic societies, in which resources are abundant and salt-of-the-earth folk agree on the important things, managing their modest differences with good humour and compassion. There is some foundation for such romantic notions, since rural communities do tend to be relatively equal and homogenous insofar as they are poor and parochial. But if such places are virtuous and idyllic, why are so many rural dwellers around the globe choosing to leave their familiar homes and move to the city? This persistent pattern of migration is called urbanization. It has been the dominant trend of human demography for centuries. As a rule, urban people need to be better behaved, more self-controlled and far-seeing than their rural cousins. Cities and civility are much the same thing. To do well in a city, one must be tolerant of different values and customs, in reasonable control of one’s passions and resentments, and more moderate and compromising than rural folk need to be. Cities are necessarily diverse and crowded. They are full of strangers. You will pass by hundreds of faces in a day that you have never seen before. Such environments require manners and a robustly-enforced rule of law to manage everyday encounters. City people instinctively understand this. Cities, in other words, require its members to think about what makes a better society. Cities are the foundation of civilization and of mass prosperity—they deserve our respect. # Civilization itself deserves a few hearty cheers. But it is usually taken for granted. In historical terms, it is a precarious and fragile accomplishment, one that is easier and quicker to erode than to construct. We moderns (who mostly live in urban places) have a lot to lose if we fail to maintain our civilized skills, either deliberately or by clumsiness and inattention. Most of us have little notion how difficult the process was to get our ancestors out of highlands and savannahs into settled communities, then into cities. We take the transformation for granted, as if the whole thing were easy and obvious. And we often exercise our hard-earned democratic powers resentfully, punitively, as if things had become so bad that they could hardly be worse. They can, much worse. To save our habits of democracy (which should be the bright future of our civilization) we need to become better skilled at the civilized life. We’ve come a long way already. We have room for improvement. Since we can’t go back—short of a dystopian disaster—we must deliberately redirect and retrain our social instincts for the realities of our recent civilized condition. We must remake our human nature to catch up with the Big Society we have painstakingly built. Then continuously retrain ourselves to live in our civilized world. In short, we must knowingly evolve. The values we need to cultivate if we are to become more successful practitioners of civilization—that is, if we are to continue enjoying the quality of life that we have become used to—are not difficult to identify: we must reduce our tribal tendencies, combat our instinctive xenophobia, learn to think across borders (of all kinds), limit the hazards of testosterone, be more mindful of our natural environment, improve the outcomes of the most vulnerable among our fellow human beings. Xenophobia (fear of strangers) is a natural human propensity, understandable in the wandering contexts in which our species developed. Exploiting and hoarding present resources in the face of an uncertain future is also a natural survival strategy, though it is now working against our long-term survival. But identifying our own instinctive and prehistoric tendencies is not the same as giving in to them. It is the first step in managing them. We need to recognize our own nature so that we can better understand the boundaries in which we carry on our civilized project—perhaps more so that we can identify the things we are not bound by. We can learn to defy or redirect our natural propensities. The success of our civilized project requires that we do so. Our survival likely depends on it. The only pressing question is how we choose to do so, and how quickly. Society in the abstract has no interests—it exists to serve our human interests. We as individual human beings determine what those interests are. Ironically, if we oppose everything in our ancestral nature, we give up the very things we built our society to safeguard—our families, identities, ambitions. But if we don’t give up enough of our instinctive behaviors, we put civilization at risk and consequently our well-being and future interests. It is a balancing game and no easy one to master.
What Has Civilization Done for Me Lately?
Think for a moment about the lifespans that have become typical in our modern world. The global life expectancy at birth is currently about 73 years of age, an improvement of 50% since the early 1950s, when our present cohort of septuagenarians was born. We owe these longer lifespans to recent declines in violence and global conflict, but mostly to substantial reductions in childhood mortality—facilitated by more reliable and nutritious food supplies, in turn made possible by global trading systems and robust intergovernmental agencies—and to general improvements in health care, notably widespread (and mandatory) childhood vaccination programs and neonatal care. And so we have come to assume a norm of surviving into our 70s and 80s—a social expectation that would have been inconceivable to our hunting-and-gathering ancestors. And this new norm means that we have become accustomed to another very novel social expectation—that we all commit an increasing proportion of our public resources to funding decades-long retirements, geriatric medicine and long-term nursing care. In modern industrialized nations, it is governments that guarantee and fund much of this elder care—for all citizens, no matter their wealth or status. This comes at tremendous cost to the rest of society. Such a state of affairs was mostly unknown before the twentieth century. Once, only the wealthiest families could afford such extravagant care for frail elders, if they had any at all. And who provided this care? Women. Mostly unpaid. Through most of human civilization, women have been the servants of their families—traded by domineering fathers through marriage to other families to perform similar services. Those women who did receive pay were invariably of low social status. Modern women have mostly (thankfully) forgotten that their predecessors had little notional equality or access to higher education before the last century. How many women living today would want to return to such a servile condition? (How many men would wish them to?) What does all this mean? Only this: If you want a decent chance of enjoying a long life, with leisure and modest comfort at the end, as well as of being cared for in your last years—all without enslaving the half of the population missing a Y chromosome—then you need civilization. And not just any kind of civilization. A modern, global, technology-rich, rule-bound, mostly borderless sort of civilization. There is no other way. Still not sure? Think about cancer. (Must we?) The word gives us a vaguely creeping sensation. Perhaps you know someone who has been diagnosed with a type of cancer requiring intensive treatment. Congratulations—it is your good luck that there are such treatments at all. What would that person’s chances be without it? What if that someone was close to you? What if that someone was you! Would you rather live in a world without reliable cancer treatments or one in which such treatments are not only available but affordable? If the latter, then you require not just civilization, but modern, expensive and intrusive forms of government. Cancer treatments have only been available in reliable forms for the past century or so. And only accessible to non-elites for little more than half that time. Cancer is a rich-country disease. The longer you live, the more likely you are to have experience of it. To deal with such a likelihood effectively requires big-scale public health spending, which in turn demands big government and substantial taxes. Ironically, it is the wealthiest strata of the population that reap the biggest rewards of such public, intrusive, tax-funded spending. So, if you wish to enjoy effective and accessible cancer treatments into the foreseeable future, then you have a considerable stake in preserving a modern, bureaucratic, tax-intensive, globalized kind of civilization. There really is no other way. # We should keep firmly in mind that the problems we face in our modern civilized world are the problems of success. Our species has succeeded magnificently in arriving at its modern set of challenges. And accomplished something that, as far as we know, has never been done before in the history of our world or any other. Civilization is humanity’s great accomplishment. It has provided the most exalted standards of living that our species has ever known—the longest lives, the fullest bellies, the most active and engaged minds, the highest accomplishments of art and literature. It has mostly delivered us from the scourges of contagious illness, violence, famine and body-destroying labor. But it has not delivered us from conflict. This is not a failing in our species. If human conflict were to end, the children born of those who had brought it about would be something other than human. They would be post-human. Such a state of being is beyond our present imagining, so beyond our present discussion. We need not regard conflict as a failure of our species, or even as a cursed state of affairs. It isn’t. Harmony as imagined and promoted by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is a fantasy—a self-promoting one. Conflict, or competitive striving, is the norm of human society, perhaps inevitable. There just aren’t enough physical resources available to give all the members of a society all the things they desire—though more than enough to supply comfortable lives for all. More significantly, there is not nearly enough social status available to satisfy all the members of society. Status is by definition a scarce and unequal resource. It is more desirable to ambitious individuals when others have less of it. We humans may dream of a state of uncompromising social harmony and unity (often displacing it to a future existence), but it too is a fantasy. This does not mean that we can’t live peaceably together. Conflict can be managed. That’s what the laws and rules of society are designed to do. That’s what the state is for. Our world is a much better place to live in now than it was a few centuries, even decades, ago. Reality has not let us down. It is our attitudes and expectations that have tripped us up. Our mental toolbox was stocked about a quarter of a million years ago for a more unforgiving environment and a much shorter span of life. The toolbox hasn’t changed significantly since. Our lifestyle has. It is time that our mental habits caught up. We will have to use some of these inherited tools—our reasoning capacity and our sympathy for the suffering of others—to override other embedded programs. We will have to compel ourselves to learn a more nuanced and accurate view of our present world. There is no perfect happily-ever-after, only new conditions of striving. Incurable romantics and idealists may not care to hear this, but there is no kind of politics that will solve all the problems and conflicts inherent in human society. So politics is inherently about compromise. We gain wisdom with age, and new problems too. Like diseases, these problems can be managed but never eradicated. Yet we are quite capable of making our world better by increments. The world we should strive for need not be a radically-different world but a moderately-better one. Even the best of our possible worlds requires a great deal of attention and maintenance. But popular democratic politics seems to resist coming to terms with this reality. Most citizens appear unwilling to put in the necessary time and attention, yet are increasingly impatient with a shortage of expected results. Part of the problem is that the same brain that made possible our civilization has also gifted us our self-awareness. It provided the intelligence and organizational capacity necessary for civilization-building, yet made us mindful of our civilized desires and expectations. This awareness might have taught us to moderate our desires and demands in the face of limited resources, but seems rather to have made our desires and expectations all the more implacable. Our species’ unique consciousness makes us feel the pain of dreams deferred, desires unfulfilled. Unfulfilled desires create resentment, however much better off we are than our ancestors. Consciousness is both the glory and the curse of our species. It allows us to imagine a state of affairs that is better than our present reality. Self-interest assures us that we deserve these imagined benefits, without all the tedious effort. And so expectation lays the groundwork for discontent. But reality has very little regard for our expectations. No other species experiences so keenly the frustration of the gap between anticipation and reality. And when we do get what we think we deserve—lord help us—we become quickly bored, and begin looking for new things to demand and anticipate. We are never very satisfied with our present situation, however adequate it may be for a comfortable life. So we imagine ourselves unhappy. Such a state of discontent has its advantages. Perpetual dissatisfaction makes possible striving, progress and improvement. It makes travelers explore, scientists investigate, musicians practice, artists and lovers persevere. It makes life surprising, meaningful, interesting. But it also makes disappointment depressingly common. This is our modern mental landscape. But we may also use our uniquely-human self-awareness to recognize that conflict will continue to be an inescapable aspect of our social condition. It may even be a useful problem to have. It is through conflict that we are most likely to push ourselves and realize whatever goals and freedoms we have the potential of achieving. As such, conflict may be counted as a human good. Moreover, argument (a type of conflict) is a useful means of discovering and amplifying the uses of this social good. So we would do well to become more skilled at using conflict. We can learn to argue more effectively—not only for the sake of advancing our personal interests, but of improving the quality of our collective well-being. A well-functioning society requires the improvement of our disputing skills. Good arguments are ultimately profitable for everyone, not just those who win them. Better to lose a dispute and walk away with a superior argument than prevail with a lesser one. So instead of despairing over conflict, let us harness the power of disagreement and employ it more effectively for our shared social betterment. We won’t always agree on which is the better argument, which side of a debate deserves to prevail. We will always be arguing in a world of disputed values and competing goods. It is too much to ask that we all agree on the meaning of the good life and the best way to achieve it. Our better hope is to agree on common rules of engagement, so that we may rub along happily when we’re in basic agreement or stay out of one another’s way when we aren’t. These basic rules of engagement—rather than commanded desires and enforced loyalties—are the fundamentals of civil society. It is possible to achieve a civil society that helps most citizens get some or much of what they want (seldom most or all of it) and diverse enough that those who pursue unusual goals can live peaceably alongside those who want different things. And so we engage in politics. Politics is the arena in which the equal members (called citizens) of a society work out their differences and discover innovative ways of reconciling the sometimes-incompatible demands they make of one another. Politics is by its nature a process of compromise. In a civilized society, compromise is not nearly a failing. It is essential—the very indication that politics is working. Without collaboration and compromise, government would be indistinguishable from dictatorship—literally, the voice of one person or faction drowning out the rest. Compromise is not an accidental feature of politics, nor an occasional and regrettable necessity—it is the thing itself. If every member of a society were able to get everything they wanted all of the time, there would be no need for politics at all, or of civil society. We would already live in a perfect world, without need of laws or government. But we don’t live in such a world. Few of those who live in a well-run civil society will get most of what they want. No one will get all of it. If only a few of the members of a society got all or most of what they wanted, it would mean slavery for the rest. Human history has already seen too many of such superficially-civilized societies. Any modern civilization that did not offer a semblance of equality and freedom to all its members would be rightly considered a failure. But to bring about such a practical sort of equality requires negotiation and compromise. Without the willingness to compromise, there is only civil war. So let us think better of politics and those who compromise. And agree to leave our uncompromising demands at the door. # Civilization has never been easy. Any civilization worth the having has taken centuries to build. And it is not just a matter of generating wealth, creating laws, building infrastructure and acquiring technology. All these things can be accomplished with time and patience—fortune willing. The greater challenge is training citizens to understand their role in this process, then keeping them engaged. But wait, you say. Isn’t it the responsibility of government to safeguard and expand our present civilization? A tempting thought, but the very mistake that brings civilizations to their sorry ends. Civilization is a shared task, and the responsibility to preserve it rests with its individual members—its citizens. Governments are only ever the servants of their collective will—if they are not, then they are corrupt and self-serving dictatorships. Citizenship is the most challenging and overlooked of all of civilization’s essential tasks. Complacency is the persistent enemy. The only thing relatively easy about civilization is losing it. Civilization, as we experience it in our modern, wealthy, global society, is only possible when billions of people—strangers to one another—are able to work together in a coordinated but unforced manner, each pursuing different activities yet all for a common end. This end is the maximum wellbeing and prosperity of all the many members of the global community. Such requires a well-managed marketplace—both free (in that individuals participate in their own chosen capacity and with the fewest possible restraints) and yet regulated by law (in that all members have equal access to the market and no one is able to oppress or compel another). But maintaining an efficient marketplace requires effective communication—signaling and receiving timely and reliable information. This in turn requires many unconstrained and competing sources of information, and the highest quality of education for the members of the community, as many of them as possible. To be useful, such education must be progressive, diverse, critical and as free from ideology and coercion as possible. It may seem ironic that civilized freedom requires so many rules and constraints upon individual freedoms. Yet we must always trade crude freedoms for better ones. We cannot enjoy the incomparable advantages of civilization and at the same time expect to be entirely unconstrained in our individual behaviors. Only in a democratic kind of civilization—in which all the members of the community stand equal before the law—can we hope to participate in framing the rules that will be binding upon our collective selves. We become the equal stakeholders in the system we have negotiated, and also its chief beneficiaries. Ironically, the worthiest sorts of freedom that human beings can aspire to are those found within a well-constructed and rigorously-enforced system of laws. Civilization has been painstakingly constructed upon hard-to-acquire habits. This work of cultivating civilized habits remains ongoing. Many of these hard-earned habits chafe against our inborn nature—we master them by suppressing some of our native prejudices and instincts, and redirecting others. Yet the rewards of civilization are more profound and fragile than we in our comfortably-civilized condition can fully appreciate. These habits are acquired and accumulated over generations. Civilization has saved us from that life-long (though much too short) ancestral camping trip. It has given us reliable and nutritious, often over-adequate, food supplies. It has given us security and private property, as well as the laws that make our property secure. It has given us life-saving medicines but more significantly a system of life-spanning health care. It has given us material prosperity and considerable leisure time in which to enjoy its fruits. These goods have accumulated to a degree and spread to a share of the human population unprecedented before the last century. But civilization is itself a continuing journey. We cannot rest on our laurels. The advantages of civilization can be squandered much more quickly than they are acquired and internalized. We need only look to Afghanistan to see how fragile civilization is, how quickly its benefits can be lost, even today. We have nearly everything to lose if we neglect what we have gained from this global form of civility. But losing what we have gained is not at all inevitable. We begin with self-awareness, then choose to modify our behavior. So in what follows we will focus on the fundamental requirements for maintaining a successful, prosperous and worthwhile civil society—equality, reliable information (which includes freedom of speech and criticism) and, not least of all, trust.
How Do We Talk to One Another?
Before we decide on the policies and practices that will hopefully get us to a better society, we ought to agree on the means by which we can reach compromise, if not always perfect agreement. This means we should set out the rules of engagement, so that we can engage more effectively. We need to be in this discussion together. To refuse to engage with others, including opponents, is to prefer dictatorship—that is, the right of one dominant voice to speak and decide for everyone. This might seem appealing, if the one voice happens to agree with your voice. But it seldom does, and it won’t for long. A modern civil society is made up of many voices, and they all need to be heard. And so a more inclusive sort of discussion will require basic agreement on what kinds of argument are worthy of our time together and what kinds are likely to be counterproductive. Some of the rules of public discussion are reasonably obvious, others less so. It is worth some time now to work out the rules of civilized discussion, so that we don’t waste our brief lives battling over unachievable notions of perfection. Consider. If you agree that other people are often wrong about things that matter and that they ought to change their opinions, then you will agree that there must be some virtue and respectability in the act of changing one’s mind. You would undoubtedly be delighted if your opponents altered their opinions in your direction. You might even congratulate them—You did the right thing! I always knew you could! But why don’t those people already agree with what you think is obviously right? Well, let us assume that you are a generous person, that you are willing to concede that other people who are wrong don’t think that they are wrong—in fact, they think you are. And whatever you say in objection to this (“Well, I just know that I’m right!”), they will say likewise to you. So, it seems likely that somebody around here is going to have to change their mind in some way about one or more matters of public interest. They will or you will. (Or perhaps they will and you will.) And since you already agree that they would be virtuous for recognizing their present false beliefs and changing their opinions, it would seem not only permissible but downright laudable for someone around here to start shifting their beliefs soon. That person may turn out to be you. And if not you, then probably no one else either. After all, they think they are as right just as you think you are. So it will probably be all of us who have to shift our opinions, at least a little bit. Every culture is a learned form of social interaction. A society is a group of individuals who have chosen to live together, or at least have found no better option than to attempt to peacefully inhabit the same environment. Most of us will agree that neither endemic violence nor slavery is compatible with the long-term well-being of a civilized community. Civil society is composed of free individuals who live together in peace and according to rules. The two are fundamentally intertwined. Peace is not the absence of conflict—no group of free individuals is ever likely to be of one mind on every public issue. Peace is not frictionless harmony, but the successful management of conflict. To create a society, any society, we must be able to agree on a set of rules and procedures to manage our differences. To fashion a better society—that is, to bring about beneficial changes in the one we presently inhabit—we will have to negotiate and agree on rules of discussion and consensus-making, lay out as clearly as possible our competing premises and values, avoid unresolvable arguments. So we begin with basic rules for public debate, starting with ones we already know or are likely to agree to: Play fair. Take turns. Be thoughtful and considerate about the interests and feelings of others. Respect the right of others to be different from you. Listen. This means really listening, rather than just waiting for your turn to talk. Be patient with the errors and imperfections of others. Treat others as you would like yourself to be treated. Ask others how they would prefer to be treated. If, instead of these basic principles, you would rather have the law of the jungle—which is to say, no law but the opportunistic exercise of power—and if you think that the only way to avoid becoming prey is to be the predator, then you have no meaningful investment in civilization. There will be little in the rest of this discussion to interest you. You might just pick up the latest business best-seller on how to exploit and dominate other people (better known as suckers). But for those of us who would rather live inside a civilized project, these guidelines will seem entirely unoriginal. Most children already know about them. They only bear repeating because they are so easily misplaced in the blood-pumping world of politics, which has come to resemble a winner-takes-all contest. If we are to realize the promise of a civil society, we must continuously remind ourselves (not just others) what is at stake, and the costs to all of us if we lose our grip on the basic rules. Politeness may seem cloyingly superficial, but it is an essential feature of a civil society. The forms of politeness are cumbersome, boring, often excruciatingly pointless. But necessary nonetheless. We are always diplomats, even within our familiar societies. There is no magic to civilization, only patient and dedicated work. An enduring form of politics cannot be reduced to a winner-takes-all contest. This is more than just a question of fairness. It is a matter of freedom. The price of winning everything is much too high, not only for the members of society on the other side but for the winners too. To win all is to make a slave or enemy of the rest. You will neither enjoy your victory nor live in safety. The rest of us will come for you, in time. We may be losers now, but there are a lot of us. And even by your own competitive standards, you understand that someone else like you will eventually come to knock you off your perch. Rather than accept this inevitable and messy end, surely we would all do better to think of politics as a perpetual negotiation. It will never be done, never settled once and for all. Human beings are notorious for wanting the same things at the same time, or different things altogether. There is no reasonable prospect of seeing them live entirely without disagreement and strife, so we will have to learn to manage and live at peace with our differences. Compromise, then, is the heart of civil society. The artist may declare that his artistic vision must not be compromised (and we may admire his integrity) but he will discover that his ability to communicate with others—that is, reach an audience—is compromised in direct proportion to the rigor of his artistic integrity. In a civil society we are, by definition, not fully autonomous individuals. We cannot afford to emulate the noble isolation of the artist. We must live with others and cooperate, else there will be no society. An individual who declares that he will never compromise in his values has not really understood the meaning of society. # This means that each of us will have to climb down from our high horse, at least while we engage with other people in the public realm. Interrupting is not playing fair. Neither is speaking on and on. Talking louder does not make an argument more convincing. Nor does shouting over an opponent. Mocking a rival may be fun but does not make you right and doesn’t get us anywhere. Outrage is not an argument. (“Well, I never!”) Nor do insults constitute rationales. (“You’re an idiot!” Beside the point if everyone else thinks the same about you.) Appealing to common sense is not an argument. Things that seem obvious to you are almost never as obvious as you think. (“You just don’t get it!” Maybe, but how would you know if you were failing to get something that seemed obvious to others?) The things we regard as obvious are usually culturally-learned perspectives that we have become used to. Put it this way: if you have to argue that something is just plain common sense, then it really isn’t. So you will have to work a little harder to explain yourself, as fully and as patiently as required. If you are having trouble getting a basic idea across, the problem may not be the intransigence of the other person but the clarity or coherence of your idea. So don’t assume you already know everything—you probably know some things, but those things may not be the same as what you presently think you know. In fact, you may be more correct about the things you’re not confident about than those you’re very sure of. It’s better to regard you own collection of knowledge as provisional—subject to change. After all, you can’t reasonably expect other people to change their minds if you are determined never to change your own, especially about things that excite their dearest-held beliefs and passions (which others have too, though not the same as yours). You will also have to be more tolerant of other people’s odd behaviors and peculiar ways of speaking than you would prefer. You may be sensitive about certain words and topics, or you may have grievances and hurt feelings—perhaps you were the victim of a crime or just feel sympathy with those who have been victimized—but this does not mean you can dictate limits upon how others choose to frame their views. They may or may not intend hurt when they use language that makes you feel uncomfortable, but you will have to manage your own feelings and reactions when they say such things. They will. Disagreements about words and their appropriate uses are part of any civilized conversation. The way we behave and the way we speak to one another are matters that ought to be negotiated, not compelled. This requires considerable forbearance and tolerance, even of those we think are offensive. Useful public discussions require many options to be brought to the table. Every good idea we adopt for the first time was probably once considered ridiculous by somebody. To discover anything new or valuable we will almost certainly have to audition the unfamiliar—that is, give a generous hearing to ideas we initially think we won’t much like. But we won’t really know which are the worthy and the unworthy new ideas until after we have tried them all out. So we will have to allow ourselves and others to speak as freely as possible in order to get all the available ideas onto the negotiating table, even if many or most of them will not survive the process. And we must frequently remind ourselves that our strong feelings are not the same as defensible arguments. (This means we must say this to our selves, not just point it out to others.) Human beings have a tendency to confuse their strong internal feelings with certainty about the external world, and their feeling of certainty with objectively-verifiable claims. And we frequently confuse the apparent certainty and confidence we see in others—self-assured, charismatic people—with the reliability of the claims they make. But charisma is not the same as competence, self-assurance not the same as truth. We will repeatedly remind ourselves not to confuse the certainty of others with a right of authority. # When we’re out in public, we usually recognize that we ought to avoid speaking in ways that sound excessively arrogant, harsh or judgmental. Good to remember. But more than this, when we engage in public discussion we would do well to avoid the language of right and wrong, especially of good and evil. This may seem hard to swallow. That’s what the whole discussion is about! But consider. Virtually every individual and every group within the diverse realm of civil society already thinks they can accurately identify what is right and what is wrong, and will assume that they are on the right side of it. Consequently, they will conclude that those who oppose them must be on the wrong side. If we are good, then those others must be bad. If bad, they must intend to do those bad things (for those who are good are mindful of doing good things) and must therefore be counted as evil. The evil have to be those who know what is wrong and choose it anyhow. This seems to be a widespread assumption. Your opponents probably share this view with your own favored few, differing only in the assumption that you are on the wrong side of the accounting, and therefore to be included among the evil. The only reliable way of ridding such a divided world of all those bad things would be to rid it of bad people—that is, other people, maybe all of them. (And when we are done with those farthest removed from us, we will probably find something wrong with those closer by.) So the question of right and wrong, good and evil, will have to be a non-starter in a society composed of many different kinds of people—at least in matters of shared policy. In a cosmopolitan society, good and evil must be left entirely in the private realm. Some will already be objecting that we must be rid of cosmopolitan society! But think very carefully about the other things you will have to give up along with it—cities, trade, economic prosperity, material comfort, legal security, any expectation of a long life. It is highly unlikely that we will solve questions of good and evil in a manner satisfactory to everyone in the public realm, even to most of them. If we insist on making everyone agree about what constitutes right and wrong, we will likely find ourselves descending into tyranny or civil war, neither of which seems like a moral victory. And so the real question we face together, in our Big Society (the one we presently have), is how to get along in a peaceful and practical manner without agreeing on matters of personal morality—on right and wrong, or on the nature of good and evil. Modern civil society will necessarily begin with the assumption that we as individuals are likely to hold many competing and perhaps incompatible views of what is right and best. And so we will have to find compromises that allow us as individuals and groups to pursue what we think is right and best while at the same time allowing others the freedom to do the same. We don’t need to decide about good and evil. Our various private opinions will be in conflict, but our society does not have to be in a state of civil war. So let us agree to argue in terms of better and worse outcomes, more or less useful strategies, but not right and wrong. In the same spirit, we should agree that, in the realm of public debate, there are no such beings as good people (who inherently embody worthy actions and ideas) and bad people (who are mired in the contrary), only people. Every individual person is a bundle of traits and opinions, desires and foibles, some fairly harmless, some in need of amendment. No one has all the knowledge or all the talent, no one all the goodness or all the badness, merely degrees of a great many qualities. The battle of good and evil happens within individual minds and within familiar communities, not between them. # Likewise, we would do better to avoid the language of winning and losing. If you think you can only win or lose a democratic encounter (such as an election), you have already misunderstood the nature of democracy. Professional politicians will think in terms of winning and losing (careerwise, it is such a contest), and are apt to impose such concepts on their voters. But in a society where citizens are diverse but equal, politics cannot about winning, only compromising. Many True Believers insist that they will never compromise. If they are sincere and determined in these declarations, they have no interest in sustaining a democracy, perhaps no commitment to the civil part of society. A society that does not compromise must necessarily be an authoritarian society. It does not matter whether that authority is an autocratic individual, a self-righteous interest group, or an arrogant majority. It doesn’t matter how patriotic they feel they are or what other virtues they may claim. They are all the same—fundamentally oppressive. If one side, one party, one voice of a political contest gets everything it wants and the other side gets nothing, then democracy has failed and civil society has lost. Your interests do matter to the rest of us, but they are not the only things that matter. Your interests are held in balance against the interests of all the other members of society, either individually or collectively. Every good you demand comes at some cost. Every public pension payment you receive is someone else’s tax bill. Any health care plan worth signing up for will be hugely expensive. Every tax cut (or cheat) for you is a burden on someone else. Any public preference given to your preferred religion will be someone else’s loss of freedom. Or yours, if someone else is in power. What is the cost of gaining your predominant interest in relation to the goals and interests of others? But you are so very sure that your view of things is right. Your views must win! The future depends on it. The fate of your country hangs in the balance. Perhaps you would even say that your opponents would be better off (though the dummies don’t realize it!) if only you prevailed. They would actually win only if they were sure to lose, because then they would be compelled to adopt the better course, the consequence of following the better view—yours. What if that opponent turned out to be you? You would be so much better off in the long run if only you were to lose now—you just don’t know it yet. Don’t you want to be better off? (Why do you even need to think about it?) If so, you need to know when your argument is the poorer one. Thus you need to test your arguments against competing ones. Let us agree to give up the popular notion that the best man should win—let us instead allow the best arguments to win, regardless of who utters them. For the best arguments to win, we have to be very sure we know what all the other arguments are. This means that we have to hear them. # We will also beware the trap of simplicity. Populist politicians often repeat simple slogans that trigger crude emotional responses. Such slogans, at best, identify and unite people who are already agreed on an issue, which is hardly the point of politics. At worst, slogans trigger self-righteousness and intolerance, shutting down careful listening and thinking. In a working democracy, however, complexity is unavoidable, all the more so as a society becomes increasingly sophisticated, educated, prosperous and diverse. Slogans are as superficial as they are simple. Successful policies demand detail and nuance. To create the most useful policies requires patience, careful thought and, inevitably, revision. So clear and thoughtful statements of principle are welcome. Slogans are not. One common way of falling into the simplicity trap is to speak in absolutes, not least the abused language of rights. In a civilized society we can and should speak about the rights of the members of that society, as long as we understand that we are engaged in the process of defining and agreeing to those rights. We together create and enforce the rights that we live by. The universe at large is strikingly indifferent about our rights. When a fundamental human right is violated, nature remains curiously silent. A reasonable observer might conclude that nature does not really care, or that it does not have the power to enforce its namesake laws, or that it leaves it to human beings to work out their own justice. And if the last is so, then it is up to us alone to recognize and name these expectations as rights, and to create forms of infrastructure to vigorously defend these rights. And so we have done. They are called courts. But let us be clear. We conceive and create these rights, and only we can enforce them through our common institutions. And that is exactly why civil society matters. If rights are not found and enforced within a civilized framework, then any claims of fundamental right will amount to nothing. Natural or human rights are entirely our own responsibility. Likewise, there can be no such thing as an absolute right—one of such overwhelmingly precedence that no other consideration can be weighed against it. If one person really did enjoy a right that was absolute, then no other person’s rights could stand against it. All other rights and costs, perhaps even the lives of other citizens, would have to give way before the interests of that absolute right holder. That’s what an absolute right would necessarily demand—that every effort, every resource, every other life would be given so that this one right was not compromised in any detail. If your right of safety is absolute, then no cost—none whatever, private or public—would be too great to protect it. Anyone who might threaten your safety (that is, everyone but you), even in the smallest way, would have to be fettered and confined until rendered completely harmless to you. Ask yourself what shackles and restrictions you would allow to be placed on your own person to protect the absolute safety of another. You can ask no more than that of any other person for the protection of your own rights. Everyday life cannot wait for perfect justice. It makes do with the best available. Even when gross violations of human rights have demonstrably occurred, human beings tend to get on with the business of surviving whether or not the wrongs have been rectified. So any discussion of rights must be contextual, conditional and negotiable. The most useful rights are not perfect rights, but rather the best that we can manage, practically and fairly, to enforce together. # In sum, reasonable people will disagree, even about the most basic values and policies. Self-described reasonable people are often surprised that other seemingly-reasonable folk do not immediately share their views and preferences. This lamentable state of affairs is unlikely to change soon. You might try to force them into agreement, but they probably outnumber you. (Perhaps you will just retreat to your sovereign island that magically supplies everything you could desire. Sadly, there aren’t enough to go around. And chances are you will eventually become lonely on your righteous isle.) Nevertheless, reasonable people can find ways to live together. This is what civil society is about—reasonable people finding ways to get along even when failing to agree on values, policies and priorities. To pull it off, we will need to talk, and to keep on talking when we disagree. The word for such talk is politics. Politics is the continuing attempt to reconcile nearly irreconcilable ambitions and points of view.
Just A Few More Rules
Here are a few more provisional rules to help us engage in better political dialogue—that is, engage in better and more productive public conversations. These may not be perfect, but will have to do until we find better ones: The rule of principle. Specific policy proposals should always be connected to more general principles—the kind that might appeal to a majority of the members of a civil society, whatever their particular goals and identities. This means framing proposals in a way that makes them attractive to a variety of interests. In order to achieve greater equality among our citizens, I propose we mandate … In recognition of the principle of the right of individual self-determination, we should establish … To bring about a more resilient national identity, we should consider enacting … Others may agree or disagree with your ranking of the principle, or with your proposed means of reaching the commonly-desired end, but at least they will better understand your motivating values and the wider good you are hoping to achieve. Principles—which are both useful and necessary in negotiations among many diverse individuals—should not be confused with ideologies. Ideologies are declarations of value, loyalty or prejudice that tend to be simplistic, rigidly unbending, resistant to evidence or nuance, allergic to criticism, often prone to coercion and violence. They appeal to basic emotions, are readily turned into chants and slogans. Principles may also be constructed upon core values (which are sometimes counterintuitive, such as the principle of equality) but they tend to be less emotional and immediate in their appeal, more subtle and malleable, open to modification, respectful of disagreement and inherently pragmatic. Principles, more than ideologies, will consider and bend to evidence. The rule of evidence. Public declarations are often prefaced with the phrase, in my opinion … This is surely one of the lazier habits of our civilized way of speaking. In the public realm, opinions should have little sway. What value to listeners in merely publicizing your internal feelings, or declaring something you think is self-evidently true? (If it were, you would hardly need to say it.) As a speaker taking up valuable time in a public forum, you must ask yourself what another person who is not you and does not share your prejudices or know about your particular experiences would need to hear or see as evidence or argument in support of the plausibility of your public-policy assertion. Imagine you were in a court of law. What would a group of jurors (presumably-reasonable strangers of diverse backgrounds) need to be convinced of to accept your assertions? Your authority, your standing, your honor, your sincerity, your good intentions, even your passion, will not be sufficient. Your charm will cut no ice. You must give them something against which to weigh your claim, something accessible to their own experience to help them be persuaded. Specific, measurable claims are better than vague assertions. Verifiable facts are better than guesses. Experiences are better than conjectures. The rule of efficiency. We sometimes assert our public demands along the following lines: This situation is outrageous! Something has got to be done. Now look! Here is something we might do. Therefore, it must be done! This is how many wasteful or counterproductive proposals have been turned into useless policies. Not every proposed answer to a widely-recognized problem is equally likely to achieve its intended purpose. Some proposals will be more efficient than others, some less costly or intrusive. Sometimes it really is best to do nothing at all, unsatisfying as that may feel. And sometimes we must try proposals out even when we are unsure if they will work—because we are even less sure about the other possibilities). But we must always discriminate between various possible courses of action. And we must be willing to abandon attempts that prove inadequate or counterproductive. So we will need to learn to be more subtle and critical thinkers. (Or get used to putting time limits on some courses of action.) The best rule of discrimination is the rule of efficiency. What policy is likely to give us the largest or widest benefit for the longest duration with the fewest resources, the least prejudice to other public goals, and the smallest application of coercion? The rule of minimal compulsion. It is a profound irony that the principle of maximizing the freedom of individuals within a society demands a great many rules—that is, limitations to individual freedom of action. Individual human beings are unlikely ever to get all that they desire at once or without resistance. But they should be as free as they can be to try. They should be as unconstrained in their actions and private choices as is consistent with other public needs (say, road safety or maximizing lifespans, and therefore the health, of citizens at large). The best public policies are ones to which most members of a society readily consent. At best, compulsion produces much displeasure, annoyance and resistance, which squanders public resources, not to mention goodwill. On the other hand, if consent to improved public outcomes were easily gained, we would not require laws to enforce our common policies. Some degree of compulsion is unavoidable in any civil society, though preferable to the brute force and body count of the jungle. Nevertheless, we should maintain as a rule always to keep compulsion to the minimum necessary to meet society’s greater ends. These greater ends should be defined carefully, in negative terms. A positive good such as social harmony is rhetorically attractive but not the leading purpose of society—it is more often a justification used by a dominating will. We cannot aim to eliminate all compulsion. Every law amounts to a constraint on individual freedom. A border may or may not increase public security and prosperity, but it certainly inhibits the free movement of individuals. Stop signs and speed limits are constraints on individual choices. The same is true of all other laws. The very notion of law and order is a concerted attempt to restrain individual freedoms and coerce the behavior of citizens. The rule of law, which is the best means of guaranteeing and maximizing individual freedoms, is itself a kind of compulsion, but one designed to minimize more arbitrary forms of violence and intimidation. We may sincerely wish we had a license to murder one or two people every so often (only the ones who really deserved it!), but we usually concede that it is better to give up such a freedom for the higher principle of social peace and stability. Those potential victims (even the ones who really deserve it) have friends, families and communities too. And they may privately believe that you should be numbered among the deserving. Combining efficiency with a minimum of constraint means crafting and refining evidence-based policies that use just enough resources and enforcements to achieve our collectively negotiated and principled public ends, but no more. # A few last ideas to keep in mind. Though we should always be ready to appeal to principles—that is, to the broader social values we hope our opponents will recognize and share—we need to avoid appealing to perfection. In the realm of civil discourse, there are no perfect principles or beliefs that supersede all others. No values so good and pure as to be without costs or downsides. Every good has a price. To choose one thing is to forgo another. In fact, the more worthwhile any particular goal is, the more likely it is to cost something else of value. Idealistic thinkers imagine that their favorite good is so good that it can have no rivals or competitors. But every good chosen means another pushed aside. (The most perfect slice of cheesecake will still cost a few hours of exercise, perhaps even a few days of one’s life.) Every public gain has a downside to someone. Thieves believe their hard-earned gains are rightly theirs. Clueless heiresses think their property is their own just as much as tenacious entrepreneurs who labor for every dollar. Corrupt politicians and cops would rather continue receiving the proceeds of corruption than have it returned to the public. They might even tell themselves that it hurts no one or should be their children’s rightful inheritance. Every opposing position has some value to someone, or it would not exist as a viewpoint. (A home security system, to be entirely foolproof, would probably cost everything it is meant to protect, and would surely disappoint a few thieves, who have an interest in maintaining the viability of their vocation.) In the realm of politics, the pursuit of the perfect will usually distract from the possible, and will make the best likely outcome seem not nearly good enough. To arrive at the better—which, by definition, is an improvement on the present state of affairs—we will have to change some of our political habits. In the pursuit of the better, it will not be enough to find flaws in your opponent’s position. Even if your opponent is wrong does not mean that you are right. Rather you will have to show that the balance of arguments favors your proposed means of reaching our shared policy goals rather than your opponent’s. No political victory is ever absolute—it is only a partial win, probably temporary, and will inevitably come at the expense of things that matter to you and to others. Evidence does not speak for itself and is never perfectly obvious and unequivocal. This means that it seldom falls entirely on one side or the other of a question or debate. The facts are not simply the facts—they themselves are in dispute. They must be identified, scrutinized and negotiated. Evidence is by its nature contentious and shifting. In the end it will be the weight and persuasiveness of a body of evidence that matters—the context—rather than any specific piece or part of it. And even then, the majority will weigh against the facts left behind. Efficiency has its limits. Any effective military organization will recognize that it must sometimes sacrifice a few of its individual members, occasionally a great many, to achieve the greater ends of its mission. A civil society cannot easily do the same. It might be efficient to sacrifice a few for the betterment of the many—to eliminate persons who cost the larger society a great many resources, and especially those who have little chance of returning the cost. Investing in children now (through education and primary health care) is easy to justify because of the high return-on-investment. Investing in the aged and the infirm is more problematic, requiring a different kind of justification. A civil society will usually choose to establish certain fundamental rights for its individual members (including expensive care for the elderly and disabled) that must be tirelessly enforced, even against the claims of efficiency. Technology is helpful in addressing many of our current and future challenges, but will never eliminate public conflict. Technology can make our human lives better and more functional in many specific ways, but will not really make our lives easier. Today’s victories will become tomorrow’s new problems. Medical breakthroughs allow us to extend human lifespans, but will not tell us how to afford the public costs of these longer lives. And they will not answer why we should live longer and how we ought to distribute resources among an ever-greater number of people looking forward to an ever-increasing number of cost-intensive years. Those who live longer will only consume more expensive medical services in the long term, not to mention public pensions. These are nice problems to have, but there is no magic button to neatly solve these newly-won challenges. Technology can alleviate some forms of suffering, but can also make possible new kinds of suffering, such as allowing longer palliative conditions. Technology can help extend life and create leisure, but cannot give purpose to that time. Having more, we will still want more than we gain, and acquire additional anxiety about losing the additional things we have accumulated, and still search desperately for meaning and purpose to it all. Technology can only ever help us do the things we want to do, but it cannot help us with the wanting itself. It cannot say what is worth wanting, or how much wanting is ultimately enough. It can help us get more from our available resources, but cannot endlessly create more resources. Technology can help us create more reliable voting systems, which will improve the accuracy and reach of our democracy, but will not help us trust our government or our fellow citizens when such trust is wanting. Technology is useful, but it is not magic. We will still have to argue with others and ourselves about things that matter and things that shouldn’t. So be prepared to change your mind. This is worth repeating often, less to others than to yourself. If others are wrong and ought to realize that they are wrong and change their opinions, then you will also have to do so when you find you have been mistaken. And you will be wrong, sometimes, if you are honest with yourself and count yourself among the human species. Human beings make mistakes, but are the only species sufficiently self-aware to entertain the concept of being mistaken. And having that awareness, they are the only species sufficiently intelligent to correct their own perceptions and beliefs. Even better than changing your mind when required is being slower and more cautious in making up your mind in the first place. Slow down your beliefs, reserve your judgments, take more time to be thoughtful and critical. Sometimes the most useful criticism is self-criticism. # Most books on civil discourse and policy suffer from a want of inspiring new ideas and practical solutions. This present attempt will be no different. But we don’t need new ideas or inspiring leaders to make a better society. We would do much better to remind ourselves of things we already know. We need small improvements gathered into best practices, and given time to work their way through long and boring periods of testing. Many of the best practical solutions to social problems have been unplanned and unintended ones. Policies of religious freedom and toleration were never anyone’s first choice to include in their ideal society, but worked out much better for (nearly) everyone in the long term. Industrialization, for all its goods and ills, has been fundamental to the long and prosperous lives we now believe are owing to us. Yet no one conceived of such an industrialized, globalized world before it actually happened. The kluges—the regrettable and cobbled-together compromises—often turn out to be the best public policies after all. We like to fantasize about big, decisive fixes—permanent answers. Yet we don’t want the fixes to interrupt our present interests. We want to be offered magical solutions, at least easy and costless ones. We want others to offer the compromises and surrenders we ourselves would not volunteer to make. We want honest, upright men (occasionally women) to inspire us and lead us to a better world. None of these things will happen. But we keep voting as if they will. We wait for others to do the unpleasant work, show us the way. Yet an improved civil society is well within our present grasp—by way of small, modest and incremental changes. All these improvements will cost us something. So let’s have three cheers for tedious compromise! No? In truth, it is hard to get fired up about something as effortful as incremental improvement or as disappointing as compromise. It is difficult to be inspired by principles such as patience and moderation. Yet we will have to teach ourselves to value these things more than we do. Moderation is the only viable political path that can reasonably deliver the fairer and more rewarding world that we desire. This is not because moderation is ever our first choice, but because it is the only one with any chance of working. Without compassion, moderation and concession, trust, there will be no compromise. Without compromise, there will be no effective democracy. Without democracy, we will never be our own masters, but will ever depend on the mercy of the powerful, ruthless and corrupt. Without mastery of our own lives, we will never remotely approach our human potential—either as individuals or communities. It bears repeating—politics is a negotiation, not a war. It can never be done once and for all, never reach an end. The human beings we are now will never arrive at a perfect society. There is no final resolution, no idyllic happy-ever-after. We must continue talking. Like the brave and committed members of an AA group, we must keep showing up for the meetings, as long as we live. But cheer up. Our species was made for talking. It’s already embedded in our nature. And we don’t need a perfect world, only a better one.
Public Values
Any society that stays together over time must hold some fundamental values in common. It could not be a society otherwise. These core values must be accepted by the individual members of society and adhered to publicly, regardless of whether they are fully internalized. But the individual members need not agree on everything of value, even in public. Without disagreement, there would be no diversity. Without diversity, the individual members of a society would have little of value to exchange with one another—no special skills, unique knowledge or insight to contribute to the common good. Without diversity, a society would not contain all the skills and viewpoints it needed to be dynamic, innovative, prosperous, or to meet unknown dangers. Without diversity, a society would be unlikely to adapt or change as new circumstances demanded. And such a society would be dull. Very dull. Beyond mere survival, however, a more diverse society has a greater capacity to discover worthier and better-tested values if it is willing to dispute, contest and negotiate these values in public. A society that is prevented from doing these things will become ossified and thoughtlessly reactionary. But which values are the essential ones? Which are so indispensable that a society enshrining them would be sufficiently stable and adaptable to enjoy both prosperity and endurance? These common values must be acceptable to (or at least tolerated by) all of its members, else those who did not accept them would be held in that society against their wills. These unwilling would necessarily be compelled to adhere to the will of the rest. We call such individuals dissidents, outcasts, criminals, prisoners, slaves. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of their beliefs, such individuals would impose enormous disciplinary costs on society as a whole. It would be better for them, and much less costly for the rest, if they would accept the common standards by their own internal will. Therefore, it is best to minimize the number of values that must be shared by all the members of a society, so as to minimize the number of rebels and dissenters. The greater the number of values you wish to impose on others, the more resistance you will meet, and the more conflict you will provoke. (Some, it seems, take grim joy in forcing their will on resisters despite the costs—these are autocratic regimes, one-party states, religious dictatorships.) Ironically, a peaceful society requires great restraint in imposing and enforcing common values. So we must try to identify only those values that are just enough to hold a large, urban society together while allowing the many individuals contained within to pursue their own values and ambitions with the fewest obstacles. We will designate the necessary minimum of these shared values as public values. What are these values? To what degree must they be widely shared and publicly enforced to be effective? And what popular values might be less indispensable than we initially suppose? # Law and order. This pairing of terms may seem to belong especially to those on one end of the political spectrum, but they really belong to all who participate in any rule-bound arrangement—that is, any cooperative association of human beings. The only necessary dispute about law and order—for those who wish to belong to a society at all—is what kind of laws and what sort of order are to be set out and enforced. It is in the breadth and the details where we find disagreements, not in the basic need of laws and enforcements. And that is exactly what a civil society does—it finds orderly means of negotiating a broad consensus on the number of laws and the methods of enforcement that will be required. In fact, that is the greater part of what an orderly civil society needs to do. As such, the style and scope of law and order will be the subject of our remaining discussion. We will return to it again under the heading of justice. In the meantime, we should consider a few associated terms. Stability? The ruling Communist Party of China (the only one legally-sanctioned) prefers the term social harmony. The two mean virtually the same, since social harmony can only be measured in the absence of instability or public dissent. Enduring stability (as opposed merely to fearful quiet) requires consistency in law and policy, and a predictable use of force. Yet stability (like harmony) is a perception, a point of view, nothing more. A society will of course seem more stable if the greater number of its members agree that it is. And such an appearance of agreement is useful, even necessary to a prosperous society. But a minimum will do. Conservatives in any society assume that demonstrative and strutting authorities are required to enforce prevailing norms—that is, a visible display or performance of stability. Stability implies permanence, permanence suggests changelessness. But this is false logic, an illusion. Think for a moment of a young couple deciding to bind their lives together in a marriage. Nothing could seem more conservative and stable. On the face of it, it is a permanent union—the symbol of domestic stability, the heart of community endurance. Yet there is nothing very stable about a marriage, nothing changeless in the arrangement except that it continues over time, survives a succession of challenges large and small, and ultimately comes to an end. Even in the simplest and most-admired version, the couple grows old until one of them dies, ending the union. Likely they will have children, who introduce new forms of instability and unpredictability to the marriage, and yet more with every additional child added, and yet again as they form their own unions and create more generations. A family is in a perpetual state of reinvention and adjustment, leaning and tipping, realigning to meet every new and sometimes unexpected change. The marriage at the family’s core is a temporary permanency, designed above all to cope with both the anticipated and unanticipated changes that human lives must inevitably endure. And a great many of these will fail to cope. A formally-regulated society—that is, one with government and laws—is like a marriage in that it is a temporary union of interests designed to deal with inevitable, but often unanticipated, changes and disagreements. To imagine that it can make an existing social arrangement both permanent and changeless is at best a bit of wishful thinking. Obedience? Most human societies have rewarded or favored those who conform to the standards of the perceived majority—that is, to the prevailing social opinions, prejudices and hierarchical expectations of those who hold standing and respectable positions in the society nearest to them. In a traditional sort of society (that is, most of them), such an expectation would be uncontroversial. But in any society that values the autonomy of the individual, or recognizes the usefulness of dissent, such expectations must be relentlessly questioned, challenged, occasionally overthrown. Yet even the most modern, liberal, progressive and constitutional society will tend to reward conformists above dissidents—in jobs, appointments, promotions and honors. This is always the easier and safer course. Even the most modern citizens tend to confuse conformity with obedience, obedience with order, order with social stability. But though we in this present conversation will assume the necessity of a constitutionally-enforced civil order, we need not give any additional encouragement to such a fossilized social notion of obedience. Responsible citizens of a free society do not have to be lectured in the virtues of obedience to some established authority figure. They already have their own internal motives for upholding the rule of law. Only an authoritarian government that treats its members as children will resort to such cheap vocabulary. Authority? Any society that has survived more than a few years will have developed locally-grounded notions of authority. Authority has many faces, an infinite variety of provincial mannerisms, but tends to behave similarly wherever human beings gather into associations. Most members of our species, raised in conservative societies (again, nearly all of them), tend to assume that authority belongs to particular persons with recognizable faces, and that it must be a quality inherent in these privileged few, rather than in the rest. Monarchists and noblemen believe that authority resides in a specific and superior bloodline. Even members of the Chinese Communist party tend to locate it in the sons of early revolutionary heroes—a strange and fundamentally unsocialist assumption. But authority does not exist anywhere in the objective physical world or beyond the human mind. (You’re not sure? Then kindly point out its physical coordinates and describe its size, color and shape.) It is really something created and recreated daily in human imaginations. The dangers of inherited social and political authority are the dangers inherent in the familiar structures of the human imagination. National security? Most of the time, the invocation of national security is designed to provoke not a reasonable set of policies but a potent and overreactive emotional response—a sense of imminent invasion, a fear that the beloved country is under threat—often used to justify an urgency of reaction that would otherwise be disproportionate, inhumane and needlessly cruel. Better to justify any proposed policy by invoking the security of the individual human beings who live within the collective. After all, a nation is itself an agreed-upon fiction and can suffer no harm apart from the individual members who together imagine it. Loyalty? Conservatives (most people by temperament) tend to uphold loyalty as one of the noblest and most essential of virtues, in both the private and public realms—though they sometimes have trouble distinguishing the two. Loyalty is used by conservatives as a means of judging the trustworthiness and commitment of the individual members of the community, though the merit of loyalty itself is seldom examined or questioned. (Public figures will be heard to say “Loyalty is the most important thing to me!”, but almost never, “I would argue that loyalty is worthy of public regard for the following reasons …” Nor do they inquire too closely where loyalty ought best to be directed, if at all.) But the language of community loyalty—particularly patriotism (vaguely defined)—is used in popular politics precisely because campaigners know it will trigger immediate and instinctive reactions in a plurality of voters—often enough to shift elections—with no reciprocal expectation that the language will be carefully defined, defended or justified. (Just think of the powerful and immediate reactions provoked by the utterance of the words “race traitor!” whether or not the concept is coherent or appropriate.) Loyalty, whatever its civic value, is the easiest of all political shortcuts because it fits most comfortably with the inherited social prejudices of homo sapiens. Critical thinkers overlook at their peril the raw attraction of loyalty claims and public pledges. But as peril is a necessary companion of critical investigation, we will have to accept the risk. Much of the successful continuity of our civil society depends upon public disputes over loyalty and trust. Loyalty is what human beings are naturally constituted and socially trained to give (what would family be without it?), though it creates formidable challenges to the viability of our modern urban and globalized society. The loyalty instinct that has developed in our species over hundreds of thousands of years is specific, familial and tribal, though highly limited in scope. Our instincts tell us that we can’t really be loyal to our chosen tribe unless we exclude (often with extreme prejudice) the remaining members of the species. It was a useful survival instinct in a world that is mostly gone—a world without the rule of law and institutions. But we don’t live in such a world anymore. And we should not want to, because the price of such a world is, for the individual, a life that is short, uncertain, and frequently violent. Yet it continues to appeal to our inborn nature, and threatens to make civilization nearly unmanageable. One of the chief perils of this profound instinct is that in our determination to prove our loyalty to friends, family and familiar community members, we assume we must make and declare enemies of the rest. Strangers are transformed into existential threats to the familiar community—dangers to public safety, regardless of specific evidence. Now, in truth, there is no necessity that love of one’s family and traditions requires enmity toward those beyond. Yet as a political strategy, fear of strangers works very effectively. Populism would have little success without it. It thrives on the language of fear and suspicion, has little time for compassion and fairness. In fact, political partisanship is driven much more reliably by vilification of perceived opponents than by affection for one’s chosen allies and policy objectives. A second peril of the loyalty instinct is that members of our species tend to focus more readily on specific persons and symbols than on objectively-applied procedures and institutions. Living humans have faces, voices, personalities—which the modules of our brains have been shaped over hundreds of thousands of years to recognize and prefer. Courts, procedures and rules do not have such comfortable lodging in our brain’s wetware, and so are less amenable to our understanding and trust. We engage the world with our emotions, and these go with greater ease to the familiar than the abstract. In a successful constitutional democracy, citizens are asked to direct their loyalties not to persons but to rules and principles—artificial structures that have been painstakingly negotiated and agreed to by the many diverse members of a political community. So citizens must learn to ignore the demands of interest groups, including those that might give advantage to their friends and kin, resist being distracted by irrelevant symbols, welcome the sound of unfamiliar voices. If only it were that easy. The reality is that modern democracies confront a dangerous trilemma—a tendency to conflate familiarity with trust, and trust with the awarding of loyalty. Most human brains prefer the simplicity of finding a singular answer to each of three distinct questions—where to direct loyalty, trust, identity. They will give trust to those whom they presume share a common identity, and withhold it from those who seem too different from themselves. With such trust comes loyalty. But in its absence creeps loyalty’s shadowy companions—enmity and suspicion. Large urbanized societies cannot avoid having diverse and decentralized identities. In such places, public trust and a broader kind of loyalty—to institutions and to gathered strangers—are dismayingly difficult to bring about. It requires that we confront and interrogate our familiar assumptions about trust and identity. So in our modern world, trust must be relearned. It must become a public value, a shared concern. It will have to be deliberately disentangled from familiar and inherited notions of identity. A healthy civil society requires that we award our trust more broadly, beyond what our nature finds comfortable. We will need to recognize a new kind of public trust, then teach ourselves to practice it. It will require re-thinking our inherited commitments of identity.
Identity
An alarming number of our modern political disagreements are not about the details of laws, taxes, citizen responsibilities or any other practical concerns. The most passionate and heated disagreements are about matters of identity. Who are we? Who are we together? What kind of people should we strive to be? What makes us different from all the other peoples? What symbols or declarations best embody our collective aspirations? How do we compel the laggards among us to share (or at least appear to share) our preferred identity? It seems that human beings—even sophisticated, educated, individualistic ones—cannot comfortably endure one another without an aggressive and loudly-proclaimed identity. We are apparently terrified of not knowing—or losing!—who we are, especially when we’re not entirely sure what that is. We want our identity to be clear, stable, secure, protected, enduring. But in our complex, modern world, this will remain a forlorn hope. We fret about identity precisely because it is fundamentally fluid and unstable. To what degree then is it worth our public time to argue about questions so unlikely to encourage reasonable negotiation? To what extent should we spend our public and private resources battling over something as unreliable and changeable as identity? Consider the importance we attach to names. We use our human capacity for language to name things—every sort of thing—allow nothing to go unnamed. We name babies, countries, places, towns, buildings, streets, cars, body-parts. It seems to be more than a practical concern. Through names we give things (and people) identity and purpose. Adam’s first big assignment in the Garden was to name every species he found, and through this act of naming, determine for everyone else to come (everyone!), what the various inhabitants of our world were rightly called. Names determined characters and essences—what a thing was and what it was for. To name a thing was to give it purpose, but also to gain mastery over it. Renaissance magicians tried to recover Adam’s original language (surely the purest Hebrew!) in order to know the true names of things and thereby their true identities. To learn a thing’s hidden name was to command it, and all the power that belongs to it. We still think that by naming something we give it a more durable reality, a surer permanence and fundamental meaning. Naming a thing pins it down, puts it in its rightful place. It is the first and essential part of establishing identity. We utter the name and imagine the thing has become objective. And so we think we know what really is. But for the same reason, names get in the way of our careful thinking, especially when tossed into the ring of public debate. To declare someone a patriot is to make a positive moral judgment in one word. In the popular realm, patriotism stands in for virtue, and derails any chance of critical discussion. And to call someone a terrorist or a communist is to condemn the accused to a place beyond the pale of respectability—or of rational consideration—and deprive that person of human sympathy, and so absolve the listening audience of any further need for thought or scrutiny. Why? Because the audience has already imagined that the true inner character and loyalties of the other have been revealed. Now the serious thinker is on the back foot, laboring to make the audience forget the word while trying to bring the facts of the case forward for examination. But the audience has already decided—on the emotional weight of the identity-defining term—and will give no further thought to distracting evidence, which could only confirm their judgment or mislead them. Such identifying words are the most trusted words of political vocabulary, yet the most dangerous to the actual needs of civil society. Symbols are likewise representations of identity—shortcuts to the imagination. And they also trigger emotions, confusing and distracting citizens from careful thought. Politics is a form of conflict waged by means of symbolic proxies. Conflict is not the problem. Politics must have conflict—if there were no disagreements among a collection of people, there would be no need for negotiation or discussion. But it is less likely to produce widely-agree-upon resolution when weighed down by symbolic baggage. In fact, the conflict often becomes about the very symbols of collective identity rather than the shared interests and formal procedures that the symbols are supposed to represent. The tokens of shared identity—flags, banners, colors, arrangements of musical notes, words from familiar texts, postures, gestures, placements of hands, quivering lips—become confused with the procedures and attitudes they are supposed (merely) to represent. The symbols can sometimes take on extravagant forms—military parades, fields of fluttering cloth, orbiting satellites, Moon landings, arrangements of lines on a bill of exchange. Such symbols become confused with the things themselves—and no wonder, since a thing itself is an act of the imagination. And then the symbols inevitably become distorted to represent grievances, unmet expectations, unrealistic hopes, dangerous fantasies. And so if we are to engage successfully in the business of politics, to negotiate arrangements for living together peaceably and productively in a civil society—and to do all of this with strangers and oddballs who may not share all our heartfelt values—we must learn to step away from our familiar words and symbols. We must sometimes refrain from using the very words and images that we have come to love even above the collective endeavor itself. # Imagine a middle-aged, slightly pudgy, follicly-challenged man arriving home from work one evening with a big announcement. I’ve made a decision!, he declares to his family as they gather around the dinner table. It will change everything! For all of us! It came to him like a blinding flash as he sat in traffic on that same stupid offramp coming home from the same stupid job. His career has become dull, predictable, pointless. His boss is a self-important idiot, taking perverse joy in humiliating him day after day. What had become of his life, his dreams? Where had it gone so wrong? This wasn’t supposed to be how it turned out. Once he was a legend, known to everyone as Mad-dog for his football prowess, epic parties, legions of admirers and girlfriends (sorry honey!), and a steady refusal to back down from any challenge or outrageous dare! He was once untouchable in midnight street races! He would take all comers from every town around. And today sitting in that stupid family van, stuck in traffic again, he knew he had to reclaim that life—his true identity. He will become the legend again! And what better way than to accept a midnight street-racing challenge fueled by high octane and whiskey shots? Oh, he knows the risks, he confides to his son with a knowing nod. But that’s exactly what has been missing from his life! Danger! Unpredictability! No glory unless one stares into the grim face of death. Better to die a hero tonight than sink another day into middle-aged oblivion. His family stares in disbelief, then mounting horror, as a strange, reckless smile spreads across his face. He has become a stranger to them precisely as he has rediscovered his true self. Perhaps we can sympathize. Most of us think about lost youth from time to time. Most of us come up with a more sensible answer. We’re just not that reckless teenager anymore. We don’t need to be. We’ve moved on. We’ve grown up. None of us is impervious to aging and changing realities. No identity remains unchanged, or even stable, for very long. Everything we learn and experience changes us. So, despite its emotional appeal, we cannot give much weight to the reactionary justification: That’s just not the kind of people we are! But as sensible as we usually are in our private lives, we often indulge in similar fantasies with regard to our shared identities. We must return to a worthier past—when we were a great people and did and made great things! Never mind that our memories are highly selective, that in that golden time we did not think of ourselves as great. We struggled, we suffered, we hoped. We longed for change. At the same time, we imagined a better future, different from the suffering present, a time when we would actually achieve the things that we were striving for. But the past and the future are both imagined places—their purpose to make our present more tolerable. So imagine something else now, that your present reality was invaded and taken over by another culture group—that is, by foreigners. Imagine you were captured, sent off to a new place, forced to change your name, adopt a new language and new habits, abide by new customs. Imagine that once you had done all these things you found yourself living a very nice life, a better life than the one you had before—a job more suited to your skills, a bigger and more comfortable home, more capable medical care, more entertainment choices, better educational and career opportunities for your children. Other than giving up your native culture—your familiar identity—you would be better off in nearly every measurable way. Would you think this a step up or a step down? Would you be thankful or resentful? In fact, this sort of thing happens all the time. (It happens to every one of us born into a specific culture we did not choose—but let’s leave that aside for the moment.) Indigenous groups are forced to conform to colonial cultures, sometimes gaining a materially-better standard of living than they would otherwise have enjoyed, even if poor compared to the conquerors. Migrants are forced to adapt to a new dominant culture, even when leaving behind an unlivable situation. So what’s the problem with your new-found situation? You were compelled into it, by violence or necessity, but remain fully aware of what you have lost. You have had your original identity and familiar place of upbringing taken from you. And now you are compelled to live many more years to resent it! But to return to the fact put aside. We are all in that situation—we were all forced into a culture without our consent, compelled to learn a particular way of doing things whatever we might have preferred. That’s what childhood amounts to. The only difference is that we have no memory of an earlier identity. We aren’t conscious of having been forcibly acculturated. Our values were implanted in us long before we had any urge to fight back (though most teenagers become vaguely aware and resist just a little bit). Even the standards by which we judge cultures were implanted in us by the specific culture that we’re accustomed to. We become part of the mythical structures by which we interpret our reality. # Identities are constructed out of myths—these are the stories that define us, the enduring truths that are called so precisely because they rise above evidence. These are the things so important to us that they need no defending. These are the things that simply must be true. No community identity (or individual one) can survive and function without a lot of shortcutting myths that give location and structure to the group, coherence to the universe, and tell the members how they should behave and what they should aspire to be. We’ve heard of popular journalists who have made successful careers from the motto, “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” This is what a myth does—it creates a story too good not to be true, and establishes a truth that is regardless of facts. Even the group stories based on reputable and confirmable facts are still primarily mythical constructions. These are called national histories. We human beings choose the defining facts that suit our ambitions, leave out the awkward ones that don’t. Identity politics is entirely dependent on these processes of myth-construction. Nationalists tend to believe that individuals can discover their personal identity and worth only in relation to their exclusive tribal identity—the one determined by birth and ancestry. This notion of identity has strong roots in our evolved human nature—our tribal groups were once essential to our individual survival. But nationalists think of their favorite tribes in much more expansive terms than nature can justify, and further believe that their local tribe is superior to all other comparable tribes. It gives them a natural right to take more of the world’s resources for their familiar group, even if this requires depriving or destroying other tribes. That is how wars begin. But even without such extreme measures, nationalists like to impose identity on the members of their own society by force of law. They would separate the members of their nation (The People) from the non-members—the foreigners, the invaders, the non-patriots, the dissenters. The non-people would be targeted, constrained, restricted or (ideally) expelled. But in practice the heroic people themselves are no more free than the despised others, for they are compelled to behave according to the dictates of this imposed identity. Nationalists are those who say: Our people are constrained only by our inherent greatness. We cannot be denied our destiny! We are the favored of heaven! Our national will cannot be resisted or negotiated. Our demands will be met in full, though they require several hundred percent of available resources. We will use all available means against those who stand in our way. We will conquer what destiny has promised to us or perish in the trying. Nationalism drifts easily to extremes, especially when confronted by incompatible identities and loyalties. Or even the mildest of criticism and dissent. Nationalists believe that individuals can be wrong or misled, but the Nation can never be. And so every measure is justified, every action excused that is performed in its service. For its sake, individual human beings are disposable, even the members of the Nation itself. These extreme patriots imagine that the Nation makes them righteous, and that only the Nation can justify their existence. Nations, like all named things, are at best transitory fictions. They may be useful, but the idea of them tends to get in the way of better thinking. The ideal version of the nation tends to exist in the past or else in the future. But civil society is where we live right now. # We frequently judge the world we inhabit according to notions of what the world should be like. It is a very human thing to do, and occasionally useful. It allows us to strive and to become better. But taken too far, it becomes a council of perfection. Nationalists strive hard for purity, one of the unreachable sorts of perfection. Perfection is an act of imagination—one of the more hopeless and destructive kinds. Perfection cannot be the goal of a healthy civil society. So in our present conversation, as in civil society, we have to think not about perfection but about compromise. Being human, we will have to give some acknowledgment to arguments derived from notions of identity. And we will have to do this even with regard to overarching social concepts we think should not be compromised—justice, property, equality.