Last week [April 1999] I heard a radio report about illegal immigrants night after night pouring unchallenged across a private American farm on the Arizona border. Our Federal Border Patrol is there to stop that flow. It does not. Nor does the State of Arizona know what to do. What are governments for? Why do we put up with them?

President Lyndon Johnson used to say that governments exist to provide justice. Others see law and order as what government is for. Professor Russell Kirk presents many views about “why government” in his 1974 book, THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN ORDER. Ponder with me the following views selected from the intellectual climate surrounding the American constitution.

England made us. One rational but chilling English thinker who impacted our founders was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). His England was torn apart by civil wars. He wondered what sort of creature requires the heavy hand of government. Hobbes saw all of us as naturally violent. Our violence flows from “a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire after power, that ceaseth only in death.”

To Hobbes, people who want a life have to accept a powerful government, which he called Leviathan. What moves citizens to obey is neither love nor loyalty but self-interest and sheer terror of being left naked unto our enemies. Without governments our lives would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Hobbes preferred even a bad government to no government for five reasons. 
 

(1) A government willing to punish people out to harm me allows me to venture outside my home.

(2) Thanks to government, I can become rich, if I work with others to achieve things none could achieve by himself. 

(3) Government guarantees  me a life which is not “nasty.” That is, I can develop my spirit, seek higher things, including God, practice a religion.

(4) Government allows me to be better than a brute. I can go to school and develop my power to think. I can work with others in scientific institutions.

(5) My life does not have to be short. Government assures me access to doctors who must cure me, not kill me. Government compels grocery stores and restaurants to give me wholesome food. 

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Americans are taught that we owe much to Hobbes’s younger, more optimistic contemporary, John Locke (1632-1704). People have natural rights and cannot realize those rights all by themselves. They therefore create governments. For Locke the core human rights are life, liberty and estate (i.e., land and property). Both Hobbes and Locke were long on reason and short on warmth and human sympathy. 

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) did not think highly of  mental games imagining humans in some pre-historical state of nature casting about for reasons to found governments. Rather, we humans simply have to make the best of those national and international systems which we inherit, are born into and grow up within. Burke finds room in his society for thinkers and prophets who imagine people first binding themselves together in order to unite themselves more closely to God. Society, to Burke, is a communion with the dead as well as with the yet to be born. He saw society and government as resulting from more than merely commercial, calculating contracts.

Burke says that every human has the right to control his own impulses and appetites. He also has the right to expect others to help him control himself. What is government for if not to build something good, some “common wealth” for all of us? Burke wrote in 1789: “If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. ...(Men) have a right to the fruits of their industry, and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death.” Burke implies that that none of this beneficence is possible without  government.  He goes on: “In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things.” Both libertarians and welfare statists find something to ponder here. 

In North America, the crusty John Adams wrote in April 1776: 

“...the happiness of society is the end of government...the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best...” 

Three and a half centuries ago, Sir William Berkeley was the  popular Royal Governor of Virginia. Of him, his contemporary, William Byrd,  wrote, 

“Our government is so happily constituted that a governor must first outwit us before he can oppress us. And if he ever squeezes money out of us he must first take care to deserve it.”

It is not easy to dredge up profound reasons why we obey the laws, pay our taxes and lope after our our leaders as they make war against Yugoslavia in our name. But thinking about why governments exist at all and what they are supposed to do for us is the price of being American.

-OOO-
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for Asheville TRIBUNE

[NOTE: revisited 04/15/05 and 11/22/2007]