America is a nation whose foundation is deeply rooted in liberal ideals. Its ontological and normative horizons are set and defined by liberalism. In spite of this consistent liberal theme, the American polity has experienced several changes, chief among which is its transformation from a heavily decentralized confederacy to a massively centralized union. What informs this transformation? And what effect does this change have on American political thought? The answers to these questions will be the focus of this discussion. I will draw attention to the nature of our current bureaucratic culture. I will argue that the transformation of our liberal culture, which tends increasingly toward centralization, is fast changing our political landscape and that this change is likely to pose a monumental threat to American political liberalism.
The Ontological and Normative Horizons of the American Polity
The ontology of the American polity, America’s conception of what constitutes a “person,” is one that is hinged on the liberal notion of autonomy. Persons are persons if they are autonomous and self-determining individuals. A person may be truly autonomous if he has the independence and capacity to make moral judgments and act on them. Implicit in this definition is the requirement for the individual’s action to be free from coercion or undue restraint.
From this ontological perspective springs a fundamental liberal ideal - equality. If A has the right to live a happy, unencumbered life, so does B; it is a right they both share because of their shared person-hood. Liberal ontology, therefore, “implies a kind of equality in spite of actual differences.” But how does a society of autonomous beings get to be truly autonomous? This is a question to be resolved by another important liberal concept, freedom. This brings us to the normative constituent of the American polity.
America's conception of the individual as being autonomous behooves of it to ensure that its citizens actually have the opportunity to be self-determining. This moral imperative is necessary if individuals must be free, and it is this - more than anything else - that informs the need for a well-managed, bureaucratic culture. Unfortunately, the greater the centralization (I will be using this term interchangeably with "bureaucracy") the less autonomous individuals become. The paradox embedded in the necessity for centralization and its unintended effect on individual freedom is well highlighted by Frederick Jackson Turner in his critical look at the significance of the Western frontiers on American political thought. Turner noted that the free, egalitarian, and autonomous colonist, who was at first disposed to the importance of government, had to confront the challenges government posed to individual liberty. But Craig Carr, in his book Polity, puts it more succinctly when explaining the potential effects of bureaucratic power he posits, “If government is necessary as an enforcing agent to make sure that rights relationships are honored … it also poses a threat to these relationships itself.”
There is, however, a striking difference between the two observations; while Turner argues that the demands and challenges of the frontiers made centralization inevitable, Carr’s assertion is rooted in the necessity of centralization as a mechanism for the protection and enforcement of individual rights. The former sees government as an inevitable social construct; the latter sees it as the inevitable and indispensable guardian of law and order, serving principally to deter crimes and protect individual liberties. In spite of this difference, they both agree that centralization, as good as the rationale behind its existence may be, is something to be feared.
Bureaucracy and Liberalism
In a bureaucratic society - although freedom may be a little constrained, limiting options available to individuals, the actions of the individual could still in a sense depend on rational choice. So it would appear that a bureaucratic society, despite the limitations it imposes on individual liberty, is (just like liberal polity) based on the free exercise of one‘s will. There is yet a subtle difference between the two. Does the individual do what he wants to do, or does he do what the society wants him to do? If he chose the former, his choices might be limitless but personally daunting. On the other hand, if he chose the latter option, he would be confronted with limited choices but the consequences might prove to be satisfying because the society has reduced his options to a list of socially optimal choices. The larger implication, however, is that such choices are defined solely by means of his/her social obligations.
This happens in our lives all the time. Students are taught skills in schools, skills which make it easier for them to fit into specific social roles. But do the kids go to school only so they could fill those social roles, or are the roles available only because there are people in the society with the right set of skills? This question highlights the interplay of consciousness and reality and is best summed up by Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am ” -- the shaping in one's consciousness of a perceived reality whose existence can only be ascertained on the plains of the subjective mind. If the potentials of a student are limited by the availability of specific job types for which specific training was obtained, it goes without saying that the student's career option is socially limited.
The logical conclusion from the above is that although the individual is free to exercise his will, his actions are predetermined by the society, roles over which the individual has no control. He is conscious of his actions, but his actions are not the result of his conscious thoughts, so the perceived reality is, in fact, something else. His consciousness is being determined by social realities. This plays well into the freedom or happiness debate, one explored at great length by Carr.
If the end of freedom is happiness, then the individual and the society have the same goal in sight. The difference is in the path they choose to pursue it (happiness). To decide which of the two options is better will depend on whether we consider freedom to be an end in itself rather than a means to an end. Deontological philosophers like Emmanuel Kant have toyed with this question, arguing that freedom is an intrinsic good which is sufficiently satisfying and must be sought as an end. But utilitarians argue the opposite. Freedom, to them, is a means to an end; the action that leads to happiness should be that which produces the greatest happiness for the most people. It would seem, then, from the latter argument, that the current bureaucratic culture is liberal only to the extent that it affords a greater proportion of the society a satisfactory, happy life, one in which happiness becomes the ultimate good and freedom merely a means of getting there.
If on the other hand, what it means to be free is tantamount to being happy, the individual would prefer this choice to any other choice. But this could be fraught with problems. Let's assume that every educator decided to establish a medical school and nothing else. From the point of view of the individual who sees the exercise of freedom as an intrinsic good, the exercise of this free will by the respective educators would lead to happiness. But while this might be fine from the individual perspective, social reality might prove otherwise. The individual is still a member of the society, and if the society were to suffer from a dearth of lawyers, or accountants, or teachers, his/her happiness will be short-lived, as the need for people with the scarce skills is likely to offset his happiness. But this is the kind of freedom that the liberal political culture contemplates - one set in a decentralized, relatively anarchic polity - and it is what makes centralization all the more attractive and unfortunately inevitable. However, this does not mean that life is doomed under a centralized system; the happiness of the whole is and does translate into the happiness of the individual. For people living under a bureaucracy, “they are free because they are happy.” This perspective changes the meaning of what it means to be free, since freedom is weighed in terms of the quality of happiness it produces. Freedom and happiness are thus taken to be synonymous to each other. Carr is aware of the impact of this confusion on liberal thought, pointing out that the substitution of words (rich with liberal meanings) with words describing a bureaucracy is tremendous; the individual is less likely to find bureaucracies objectionable if he internalized liberal values with bureaucratic rationale. Carr calls this “subtle co-option," and it is, I believe, the single, biggest threat to American liberal idealism.
Our complacency with bureaucracy has equally transformed our view of "American individualism" and its place in our polity. In our pop-culture, we are infatuated with the image of the individual with unencumbered freedom whose strength and self-determining capacity we are too willing to admire. At the same time, we more readily sympathize with such characters when they eventually meet their tragic end. We do this because of our awareness of the fact that these characters represent who we are at heart, they remind us of whom we'd love to be. At the same time, we are also aware of the improbability of realizing that goal in the contemporary society that demands cooperation rather than self-serving individualism.
In the movie, A Thousand clowns, this image is embodied in the character Murray. Murray is independent, jobless, and irresponsible (at least, from the perspective of the society). He is "his own man" and does not like to be told what to do. He mocks the outside world, and views it as essentially monolithic with individuals subservient to the dictates of the society. Murray is convinced that those who have conformed to living within such societal confines have lost their freedom, and he is not ready to do the same. The dramatic irony is that Murray soon learns what his brother and others have tacitly accepted - that to be truly satisfied and happy, conformity is essential. Faced with the choice of losing his nephew Nick to the Bureau of Child Welfare, Murray is left with no real option other than capitulating. He finds a job, and like everyone else, loses his freedom. We fantasize with characters like Murray and then come to terms with the inevitability of the transformation from a decentralized polity to a centralized one. Such characters serve as comic reliefs in helping us deal with the realities of social life; they also remind us of the liberal ideals we so tenaciously cling to. But how tight is our grip? Does it loosen with increased bureaucratization?
The Future of American Political Thought
If we must contemplate the future of our polity and the effect bureaucratic culture would have on our political culture, we must start by analyzing what effects (if any) this change has already had on our political thought.
Our founding fathers were essentially driven by liberal ideals - freedom, equality, fairness, independence - to overthrow the British colonial power, and in its place they established a government to ensure and protect the same ideals. The case for independence from Britain was eloquently made in numerous pamphlets, but most notably in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense so that many colonists were convinced that their fates, and indeed that of their nation, needed to be in their own hands. This notion of political self-determination was one of the catch-phrases of the 1776 revolution and was the precursor to the representative government the founders would later form. Interestingly, most of the accusations against Britain tenable in the revolutionary years could be made against America today. It is my opinion that America is gradually shifting from its liberal ideals, and the reason is attributable to the transition from a once decentralized state, which is perfect for such ideals to flourish, to a more centralized political system.
In his writing about the Western frontiers, Turner alludes to this point. He observes that the Western frontiers created the need for centralization, a need which made its conquest by the colonists easy. But when “all the free lands were gone and the continent was crossed,” Americans looked to something else to conquer. Turner, in conclusion, hints on what the government might do to divest itself of all that power: imperialism. During the quest to conquer the West, America was essentially in isolation, but after the conquest, it turned to imperialism for a way to fill that void.
This imperialistic culture, a product of the bureaucratic culture, is still very much intact today, and it was the very impulse the colonists opposed in their resistance of the British imperial power. If Lord Acton is right (and there is no reason to doubt he is) there is no system of government which amasses power and in the process corrupts itself the way a bureaucracy does. (Acton's notion that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" may well embody the absolutism of bureaucratic power which is evident in the latter's desire for efficient management, an unending desire that only craves for more power in order to be more efficient).
Compelled by this desire, we have grown from a nation which sought to manage its political affairs to one who seeks and to some extent does manage the affairs of other nations. This transformation in our polity is a product of our compulsion with bureaucracy, a product of the “bureaucratic mentality” - an attitude which expresses an acquiescence to and tolerance for bureaucracy, believing in its ability to solve all of our problems. Our bureaucratic mentality gives rise to an imperialistic impulse which in turn creates a dissonance in our political thought. When we think of freedom, we are immediately reminded of freedom of choice and the right to political self determination - key fundamental ideals of liberalism. But a look at the United States and its actions abroad would reveal the opposite. Our government is notorious for stage-managing the political affairs of other states.
The United States currently has a number of territories under its control. These territories, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and their like are politically semi-autonomous; Technically, they (just like the US under British colonial rule) have some of their rights determined by a foreign power, an unnecessary bureaucratic hierarchy created merely for American convenience and satisfaction. Our acquiescence to the continued exertion of US power over these states may well be an example of how our political thought has been transformed by our bureaucratic culture; our liberal mindset has been replaced with its bureaucratic counterpart so that what may have been objectionable now seems acceptable and inevitable. Having so “subtly co-opted” to this arrangement, it is little wonder then that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has drawn very little American opposition.
The same trend is visible on the domestic front. Bureaucracies seem to have taken over the management of people‘s lives. Every conceivable aspect of the American society has been affected by the culture of centralization. Schools are largely bureaucratized. They are fields for the training of students who would be tomorrow’s bureaucrats. The corporate world is also bureaucratized. The concentration of companies, and the expansion of hierarchies within them, has led to massive corporate bureaucracies, and because of the nature of bureaucracies, the larger a bureaucracy gets, the more layers it craves; supervisors are needed to ensure that the subordinates perform efficiently, and more supervisors would be needed to supervise the lower tier supervisors.
As a result of all the above transformations, the individual’s concept of individualism is lost. It is replaced by the mores of cooperation and social responsibilities. Even if the individual retains some notion of liberalism, these notions will be replaced by the social realities of centralization. No longer does the individual see himself as the liberated individual in Murray, he now acts in accordance with the dictates of the society; his industriousness is equally eviscerated. We are fast losing our individualistic attitudes. But how could we make sure that we never lose them completely?
Conclusion
The concept of individualism in America is not doomed forever; it could still be revived. Carr suggests this could be done by focusing on social justice, since social justice is the end of liberal ideals. This takes us back to where we began: ontological horizon. We have to extend our ontological horizon in order to bring the ideals of liberalism into the clear view of our psyche. But this needs to be a conscious effort.
The Hegelian model for change is predicated on the claim that historical progress is the product of reason. Following this model, therefore, it would seem plausible that consciousness shapes social reality. So to be successful, we must first be aware of who we are and how and why the liberal ideals we hold so dear are important to us. Consciously thinking about this will ultimately help us preserve liberalism in our political thoughts. When we fail to do this, then the radical transformation we fear will prove to be inevitable and the reality of our social life will precipitously lead us away from our most cherished ideals.
The Ontological and Normative Horizons of the American Polity
The ontology of the American polity, America’s conception of what constitutes a “person,” is one that is hinged on the liberal notion of autonomy. Persons are persons if they are autonomous and self-determining individuals. A person may be truly autonomous if he has the independence and capacity to make moral judgments and act on them. Implicit in this definition is the requirement for the individual’s action to be free from coercion or undue restraint.
From this ontological perspective springs a fundamental liberal ideal - equality. If A has the right to live a happy, unencumbered life, so does B; it is a right they both share because of their shared person-hood. Liberal ontology, therefore, “implies a kind of equality in spite of actual differences.” But how does a society of autonomous beings get to be truly autonomous? This is a question to be resolved by another important liberal concept, freedom. This brings us to the normative constituent of the American polity.
America's conception of the individual as being autonomous behooves of it to ensure that its citizens actually have the opportunity to be self-determining. This moral imperative is necessary if individuals must be free, and it is this - more than anything else - that informs the need for a well-managed, bureaucratic culture. Unfortunately, the greater the centralization (I will be using this term interchangeably with "bureaucracy") the less autonomous individuals become. The paradox embedded in the necessity for centralization and its unintended effect on individual freedom is well highlighted by Frederick Jackson Turner in his critical look at the significance of the Western frontiers on American political thought. Turner noted that the free, egalitarian, and autonomous colonist, who was at first disposed to the importance of government, had to confront the challenges government posed to individual liberty. But Craig Carr, in his book Polity, puts it more succinctly when explaining the potential effects of bureaucratic power he posits, “If government is necessary as an enforcing agent to make sure that rights relationships are honored … it also poses a threat to these relationships itself.”
There is, however, a striking difference between the two observations; while Turner argues that the demands and challenges of the frontiers made centralization inevitable, Carr’s assertion is rooted in the necessity of centralization as a mechanism for the protection and enforcement of individual rights. The former sees government as an inevitable social construct; the latter sees it as the inevitable and indispensable guardian of law and order, serving principally to deter crimes and protect individual liberties. In spite of this difference, they both agree that centralization, as good as the rationale behind its existence may be, is something to be feared.
Bureaucracy and Liberalism
In a bureaucratic society - although freedom may be a little constrained, limiting options available to individuals, the actions of the individual could still in a sense depend on rational choice. So it would appear that a bureaucratic society, despite the limitations it imposes on individual liberty, is (just like liberal polity) based on the free exercise of one‘s will. There is yet a subtle difference between the two. Does the individual do what he wants to do, or does he do what the society wants him to do? If he chose the former, his choices might be limitless but personally daunting. On the other hand, if he chose the latter option, he would be confronted with limited choices but the consequences might prove to be satisfying because the society has reduced his options to a list of socially optimal choices. The larger implication, however, is that such choices are defined solely by means of his/her social obligations.
This happens in our lives all the time. Students are taught skills in schools, skills which make it easier for them to fit into specific social roles. But do the kids go to school only so they could fill those social roles, or are the roles available only because there are people in the society with the right set of skills? This question highlights the interplay of consciousness and reality and is best summed up by Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am ” -- the shaping in one's consciousness of a perceived reality whose existence can only be ascertained on the plains of the subjective mind. If the potentials of a student are limited by the availability of specific job types for which specific training was obtained, it goes without saying that the student's career option is socially limited.
The logical conclusion from the above is that although the individual is free to exercise his will, his actions are predetermined by the society, roles over which the individual has no control. He is conscious of his actions, but his actions are not the result of his conscious thoughts, so the perceived reality is, in fact, something else. His consciousness is being determined by social realities. This plays well into the freedom or happiness debate, one explored at great length by Carr.
If the end of freedom is happiness, then the individual and the society have the same goal in sight. The difference is in the path they choose to pursue it (happiness). To decide which of the two options is better will depend on whether we consider freedom to be an end in itself rather than a means to an end. Deontological philosophers like Emmanuel Kant have toyed with this question, arguing that freedom is an intrinsic good which is sufficiently satisfying and must be sought as an end. But utilitarians argue the opposite. Freedom, to them, is a means to an end; the action that leads to happiness should be that which produces the greatest happiness for the most people. It would seem, then, from the latter argument, that the current bureaucratic culture is liberal only to the extent that it affords a greater proportion of the society a satisfactory, happy life, one in which happiness becomes the ultimate good and freedom merely a means of getting there.
If on the other hand, what it means to be free is tantamount to being happy, the individual would prefer this choice to any other choice. But this could be fraught with problems. Let's assume that every educator decided to establish a medical school and nothing else. From the point of view of the individual who sees the exercise of freedom as an intrinsic good, the exercise of this free will by the respective educators would lead to happiness. But while this might be fine from the individual perspective, social reality might prove otherwise. The individual is still a member of the society, and if the society were to suffer from a dearth of lawyers, or accountants, or teachers, his/her happiness will be short-lived, as the need for people with the scarce skills is likely to offset his happiness. But this is the kind of freedom that the liberal political culture contemplates - one set in a decentralized, relatively anarchic polity - and it is what makes centralization all the more attractive and unfortunately inevitable. However, this does not mean that life is doomed under a centralized system; the happiness of the whole is and does translate into the happiness of the individual. For people living under a bureaucracy, “they are free because they are happy.” This perspective changes the meaning of what it means to be free, since freedom is weighed in terms of the quality of happiness it produces. Freedom and happiness are thus taken to be synonymous to each other. Carr is aware of the impact of this confusion on liberal thought, pointing out that the substitution of words (rich with liberal meanings) with words describing a bureaucracy is tremendous; the individual is less likely to find bureaucracies objectionable if he internalized liberal values with bureaucratic rationale. Carr calls this “subtle co-option," and it is, I believe, the single, biggest threat to American liberal idealism.
Our complacency with bureaucracy has equally transformed our view of "American individualism" and its place in our polity. In our pop-culture, we are infatuated with the image of the individual with unencumbered freedom whose strength and self-determining capacity we are too willing to admire. At the same time, we more readily sympathize with such characters when they eventually meet their tragic end. We do this because of our awareness of the fact that these characters represent who we are at heart, they remind us of whom we'd love to be. At the same time, we are also aware of the improbability of realizing that goal in the contemporary society that demands cooperation rather than self-serving individualism.
In the movie, A Thousand clowns, this image is embodied in the character Murray. Murray is independent, jobless, and irresponsible (at least, from the perspective of the society). He is "his own man" and does not like to be told what to do. He mocks the outside world, and views it as essentially monolithic with individuals subservient to the dictates of the society. Murray is convinced that those who have conformed to living within such societal confines have lost their freedom, and he is not ready to do the same. The dramatic irony is that Murray soon learns what his brother and others have tacitly accepted - that to be truly satisfied and happy, conformity is essential. Faced with the choice of losing his nephew Nick to the Bureau of Child Welfare, Murray is left with no real option other than capitulating. He finds a job, and like everyone else, loses his freedom. We fantasize with characters like Murray and then come to terms with the inevitability of the transformation from a decentralized polity to a centralized one. Such characters serve as comic reliefs in helping us deal with the realities of social life; they also remind us of the liberal ideals we so tenaciously cling to. But how tight is our grip? Does it loosen with increased bureaucratization?
The Future of American Political Thought
If we must contemplate the future of our polity and the effect bureaucratic culture would have on our political culture, we must start by analyzing what effects (if any) this change has already had on our political thought.
Our founding fathers were essentially driven by liberal ideals - freedom, equality, fairness, independence - to overthrow the British colonial power, and in its place they established a government to ensure and protect the same ideals. The case for independence from Britain was eloquently made in numerous pamphlets, but most notably in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense so that many colonists were convinced that their fates, and indeed that of their nation, needed to be in their own hands. This notion of political self-determination was one of the catch-phrases of the 1776 revolution and was the precursor to the representative government the founders would later form. Interestingly, most of the accusations against Britain tenable in the revolutionary years could be made against America today. It is my opinion that America is gradually shifting from its liberal ideals, and the reason is attributable to the transition from a once decentralized state, which is perfect for such ideals to flourish, to a more centralized political system.
In his writing about the Western frontiers, Turner alludes to this point. He observes that the Western frontiers created the need for centralization, a need which made its conquest by the colonists easy. But when “all the free lands were gone and the continent was crossed,” Americans looked to something else to conquer. Turner, in conclusion, hints on what the government might do to divest itself of all that power: imperialism. During the quest to conquer the West, America was essentially in isolation, but after the conquest, it turned to imperialism for a way to fill that void.
This imperialistic culture, a product of the bureaucratic culture, is still very much intact today, and it was the very impulse the colonists opposed in their resistance of the British imperial power. If Lord Acton is right (and there is no reason to doubt he is) there is no system of government which amasses power and in the process corrupts itself the way a bureaucracy does. (Acton's notion that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" may well embody the absolutism of bureaucratic power which is evident in the latter's desire for efficient management, an unending desire that only craves for more power in order to be more efficient).
Compelled by this desire, we have grown from a nation which sought to manage its political affairs to one who seeks and to some extent does manage the affairs of other nations. This transformation in our polity is a product of our compulsion with bureaucracy, a product of the “bureaucratic mentality” - an attitude which expresses an acquiescence to and tolerance for bureaucracy, believing in its ability to solve all of our problems. Our bureaucratic mentality gives rise to an imperialistic impulse which in turn creates a dissonance in our political thought. When we think of freedom, we are immediately reminded of freedom of choice and the right to political self determination - key fundamental ideals of liberalism. But a look at the United States and its actions abroad would reveal the opposite. Our government is notorious for stage-managing the political affairs of other states.
The United States currently has a number of territories under its control. These territories, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and their like are politically semi-autonomous; Technically, they (just like the US under British colonial rule) have some of their rights determined by a foreign power, an unnecessary bureaucratic hierarchy created merely for American convenience and satisfaction. Our acquiescence to the continued exertion of US power over these states may well be an example of how our political thought has been transformed by our bureaucratic culture; our liberal mindset has been replaced with its bureaucratic counterpart so that what may have been objectionable now seems acceptable and inevitable. Having so “subtly co-opted” to this arrangement, it is little wonder then that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has drawn very little American opposition.
The same trend is visible on the domestic front. Bureaucracies seem to have taken over the management of people‘s lives. Every conceivable aspect of the American society has been affected by the culture of centralization. Schools are largely bureaucratized. They are fields for the training of students who would be tomorrow’s bureaucrats. The corporate world is also bureaucratized. The concentration of companies, and the expansion of hierarchies within them, has led to massive corporate bureaucracies, and because of the nature of bureaucracies, the larger a bureaucracy gets, the more layers it craves; supervisors are needed to ensure that the subordinates perform efficiently, and more supervisors would be needed to supervise the lower tier supervisors.
As a result of all the above transformations, the individual’s concept of individualism is lost. It is replaced by the mores of cooperation and social responsibilities. Even if the individual retains some notion of liberalism, these notions will be replaced by the social realities of centralization. No longer does the individual see himself as the liberated individual in Murray, he now acts in accordance with the dictates of the society; his industriousness is equally eviscerated. We are fast losing our individualistic attitudes. But how could we make sure that we never lose them completely?
Conclusion
The concept of individualism in America is not doomed forever; it could still be revived. Carr suggests this could be done by focusing on social justice, since social justice is the end of liberal ideals. This takes us back to where we began: ontological horizon. We have to extend our ontological horizon in order to bring the ideals of liberalism into the clear view of our psyche. But this needs to be a conscious effort.
The Hegelian model for change is predicated on the claim that historical progress is the product of reason. Following this model, therefore, it would seem plausible that consciousness shapes social reality. So to be successful, we must first be aware of who we are and how and why the liberal ideals we hold so dear are important to us. Consciously thinking about this will ultimately help us preserve liberalism in our political thoughts. When we fail to do this, then the radical transformation we fear will prove to be inevitable and the reality of our social life will precipitously lead us away from our most cherished ideals.
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