Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1701

Penciled pages on notepad paper, missing the opening page, no explanation or date. Reference to Edgar Ansel Mowrer?

 

 

 

 

. . . final fallacy as basis for a realistic foreign policy in the interest of American security and ultimate world peace. He assumes that sovereignty can consist with freedom and peace, notwithstanding that the only two powers possessed by any sovereign are subtlety and force — whether practiced abroad or at home, whether imposed upon subjects by conquest or accepted by citizens with consent and acclaim.

      Mr. Mowrer takes no account of anything but sovereignty and their kind of procedures existing in the world of men. He shares the common aspiration for security and peace but he contemplates no instrument or agency for its realization, only that of sovereignty, that which is now as always the sole instrument of government, the exclusive agency of both slavery and war.

     This poverty of premises is what reduces him to a kind of despairing faith that /?check original/eighth of the great illusions that he plays up so graphically in his sovereign power policy for international force.

     For illustration he draws the picture of three rude ‘sovereigns, “individual sovereigns.” in the persons respectively of Bad-man Bill and Bad-man Dick and Storekeeper Joe who, as being necessary or relevant to his demonstration, are the sole inhabitants of the frontier town of Roaring Camp in which everyone has taken up arms and there is no “law.” The two bad-men (two bad sovereigns) are represented as having no profession but that of arms, and the same is true of Storekeeper Joe, for he too has armed himself, and Mr. Mowrer throughout all his allegory, does not picture him or any of them in any act or deed but exercise of “sovereign” power — the power of force or of subtlety backed by guns.

     In this setting the problem of peace, as Mr. Mowrer presents it, is the problem only of storekeeper Joe. (The other two armed “sovereigns,” being bad-men, presumably have no desire for peace.) Now Mr. Mowrer’s Joe is a “prudent” and practical “sovereign,” so he does not bemuse himself with any of the seven “illusions” that Mr. Mowrer deplores. He takes his card right out of the book of Machiavelli. He “compromises his morals,” and makes friends with “friendly Bad-man Bill” and enters into alliance with him against Bad-man Dick. He doesn’t particularly like Bill; he has a distaste for Bill’s admittedly murderous ways and he is in considerable danger of being forced to buy “protection” from Bill, but he none-the-less “continues to be friends with Bill, to stick up for Bill — and if necessary, to fight for Bill. For he knows that without Bill’s support he is “lost” and will have to “submit” to Dick. Joe is in quite a dilemma but, “Like an honest democratic sovereign state operating in an ungoverned international world, Joe compromises with his own moral principles. As a ‘sovereign’ individual, there is not much that he can do.” And now for Mr. Mowrer’s solution for Joe:  “What he eventually does is unite with other honest men” in a “sort of voluntary police force.” “In other words Joe joins with other like-minded ‘sovereign’ individuals in an alliance, league or confederation.” He “pools his ‘sovereignty’ with theirs in a real government that can make law and enforce peace …”

     “So could the sovereign state,” says Mr. Mowrer, and this is the consummation we are to expect when our sovereign United States buys “extra guns” and compromises its moral principles as proposed by Mr. Mowrer in a foreign policy like that exemplified by honest Joes in Alliance with Bad-man Bill against Bad-man Dick. Will it eventually pool its sovereignty with other “honest storekeepers” in a government (international) that can make laws and enforce peace?

    To make any sense at all, Mr. Mowrer’s allegory depends absolutely on his naive assumption that the problem of all the honest Joes was fully solved when they finally pooled their separate sovereignties in a supersovereignty to make laws and enforce peace. But does it?

    Their new sovereignty makes laws and enforces peace, as between the honest Joes — who no longer have any sovereignty (no guns) — to be sure. But can it enforce peace, or even attempt to do so except at the cost of war — a cost not paid by their new sovereignty but in the lives and treasures of the honest Joes themselves. This is just where Mr. Mowrer’s solution utterly fails. After all his moral compromise, alliance and specious diplomacy Honest Joe’s problem was not solved; it was only magnified a million fold. He and his kind find themselves less secure — even more helpless now than before. And if they did not gain security but lost instead all power of defense, how could a further merging of the sovereignties, even in a single pool /?/, reverse that effect?

     When, if ever, all the single sovereignties have yielded up their arms to the power of a super-sovereignty — with all the ideal and proper safeguards against abuse of power — there will be no more wars, indeed, because it takes two powers to make a war. But one power is sufficient, even most efficient, to make conquest. Shall we say that conquest is preferable to war? Free people in all times, when they could choose, have chosen with all their might and always will choose the lesser evil of war.

 

     Some will say that a united sovereignty will not be greedy for power — that having all power will not exercise it all. Did any sovereignty ever relinquish, without strug­gle or war, either conquered or delegated power? What sovereignty, however nobly established, ever failed to extend its sovereign powers, alike in the enforcement and multiplication of its laws and its adventures in wars. What sovereignty today as in the past would not continue to expand its budgets and its controls, even if there were no wars? Even “free” men prefer conquest when it is benevolently and sufficiently disguised.

     To Mr. Mowrer there is obvious security and no danger in the concentration of sovereign political power. Yet he seems to warn us. He tells us, “There is no sub­stitute for power. Enlightened public opinion will not do.” Upon what then would he rely to restrain a united sovereignty from the conquest of mankind?

    Mr. Mowrer is a “realist.” He thinks power is real; seems to see nothing else. Yet there is nothing less enduring, much that is vastly more so. He needs to open his eyes, broaden his premises to take account of that which is relevant to security and peace instead of that which is relevant, only to war. There is indeed a world of power, a world in which men plot and scheme to conquer and to rule and in which no method but force and violence abetted by subtleties of fraud and cunning prevail. All this is normal to the savage and animal world. But among civilized men there is in addition a wholly different kind of world — a world of honor and obligation, a world of obligations freely undertaken and mutually performed, a system of world-wide impersonal service for others by a golden rule system of production and universal exchange. The first is primordial. We have emerged part way into the second and thereby part way out of the first. Only so far are we free. Our peace and salvation lies not in the old but in the new. We must take it in account, study its processes and ways so that true knowledge can serve /?/ and bless us with creative power in this our social as it has in our material and physical world.

      If Mr. Mowrer’s men of Roaring Camp had done nothing opposite and contrary to what he describes there could have been nothing but savage desolation there. What they did do was to practice some degree of golden rule contract and mutuality by exchange. Most of them emerged somewhat out of the practice of sovereignty by moving into the practice of society. Only the few bad-men remained wholly and crudely political. Eventually the whole sovereignty over the town was relegated to them or at least to their methods of compulsion as government under the traditional and accepted forms. It is true the Joes had a revolution by ballots periodically or bullets once in a while, but the most thereby accomplished was a change of personnel with the old methods retained. The government, in the person of these elected bad-men assumed the obligation of preventing or punishing any casual violence or crime except that permitted by custom and perpetrated by themselves against the general property and persons of the population as advance payment for promised services. The honest Joes, each occupied with his individual affairs, paid as little as and took little notice of how the enforced collections were spent or any services performed, each thinking that any political diminution of the others’ property and business would be of advantage to him, and each demanding further laws and restrictions to correct any injuries that he supposes his fellow themselves to be inflicting on him or on those towards whom his sympathies extend. The common or natural law of freedom was more and more neglected and set aside, old restrictions seldom or never repealed and new “laws” increasingly demanded for correction of injuries caused by the old. Thus the local sovereignties grew. And when they conflicted or encroached there was always a state or higher sovereignty in which the local sovereignties merged. And finally these sovereign states pooled the fringes of their conflicting sovereignties in a federal sovereignty that by similar extensions has now become supreme over them in almost all respects.

     Sovereignty almost never divides, it only combines. Whether by conquest, by alliance or federation, sovereignty ever embraces larger powers over larger numbers in fewer controlling hands until but a single sovereignty remains, whether we wish it so and strive for it or not. And all this results from the honest Joes’ limiting their production and exchange to those properties, commodities and services that are separately and privately used or consumed, thus relegating to the sovereign coercive power nearly all those properties and services that are not private and individual but in which there is a community-wide common participation, such as are called public or community services. These have not been lifted out of the dominion of cunning and force, the dominion of diplomacy and war in which authority is exercised from above and services, if any, handed down as from rulers to favorites, masters to slaves. The methods of free enterprise . . .

     The minds of the learned and the wise have long been sunk in the history and traditions of the ancient and classical slave states in which almost all production and distribution, public and private, was by slave or slave-supported enterprise, when free enterprise was but little existent and less valued or observed. Nearly all industry was domestic; husbandry and agriculture were for subsistence mainly instead of exchange, commerce when not piratical was precarious and traders for the most part and with some justice classed with jugglers, mountebanks and thieves.

 

     But Mr. Mowrer is not without positive resource. Upon the prostrate seven fallacies and unrealities he erects a structure, paints a brief but graphic picture of his own. And he dips his brush in quaintly American pigments for examples of smart compromise and political finesse that he suggests for a foreign policy to maintain peace.

     For model of international probity and propriety, he takes the suppositious course of storekeeper Joe in bandit-ridden Roaring Camp, an “ungoverned frontier town.” Like an honest democratic sovereign state operating in an ungoverned international world, Joe compromises with his own moral principles. “After arming himself, his clerk and young son he comes to” a working agreement with Dead-shot Bill against Dead-eye Dick, even if this “takes the humiliating form of buying protection. But if Joe is something of a man himself he may not have to pay tribute. He may enter into an equal (?) “alliance” with a “friendly Bad Man against an ‘unfriendly’ Bad Man.” He acts as morally as he can, disassociates himself from his friend (?) Bill’s wickedness, attacks no one, fights only to defend himself or his friends. Thus Joe, as a virtuous and powerful “sovereign” deals realistically with the other and wicked, warring individual “sovereigns” by whom he is beset. Joe’s wife may with truth call Bill a murderer, but Joe still drinks with, fights for and clings to Bill lest he be killed and robbed by Dick. As a putative “sovereignty” such is Joe’s realistic foreign policy for dealing with all the rest of Roaring Camp’s “collection of sovereign individuals, each of whom acts like a sovereign state.”

     But in fairness it must be said that this is only Mr. Mowrer’s interim precept and ideal. While this is breaking down Joe takes history lessons in the virtues of united sovereignty until he and most of the other “honest” Joes (who somehow must have come to outnumber — and out-shoot — the Bills and Dicks) are relieved of their guns by a “united” or collective sovereignty that now puts all the Bills and Dicks in jail (or elects them to public office with sovereign power) so that all the honest Joes live in security and peace thenceforth.

     Such is Mr. Mowrer’s lesson of peace for all the erstwhile “sovereign” Joes and all their house /?/. But is it really realistic or has it turned out to be “illusion” number eight? Mr. Citizen Joe is now a free man, so far as the old Bills and Dicks are concerned. While he had guns he could compromise with them, but to his new and collective sovereignty he must, as an individual, promise and unqualifiedly obey whether he will or no. But he has come to believe that this new sovereignty, through having nothing of its own, possesses a magic that he never dreamed of Bill or Joe. He thinks it sacred and endowed with such subtle alchemy that, for all its crimes and wastes, it gives back to him freedom and peace, substance, service /?/ and security in greater measure than it, willy nilly and increasingly, takes all these away. And so it has become Joe’s bounden duty, even his solemn joy, to yield up his substance — even his life — to support and defend his collective sovereign Bill (who now has all the guns and jails) against any of the sovereign Dicks (maintained by foreign Joes) who menace the peace of sovereign Bill precisely as Bad-man Dick in ye old time menaced old Honest Joe’s friendly Bad-man Bill.

     Our Honest Joes, now numbered in millions, find themselves in precisely the same or worse situation with respect to their own armed national sovereignty vis a vis the armed sovereignties of the millions of foreign Joes than Mr. Mowrer’s Joe of Roaring Camp enjoyed when he compromised morals in exchange for a “working agreement” with friendly Bad-man Bill vis a vis unfriendly Bad-man Dick — (now known to many as Bad-man Joe.)

     Mr. Mowrer blames the American Joes for their “century-old reluctance to think and act intelligently about foreign affairs.” Although in domestic affairs they continue to turn out political adepts from Thurlow Weed to Ed Flynn of the Bronx, they have still not taken instruction from their “greatest of political teachers, foreign enemies.” So now their minds are “cluttered with the seven illu­sions and fallacies” that Mr. Mowrer so keenly dissects. But “storekeeper Joe,” in his beginnings at least, was not so naive. The sweet spirit of bossism that was to flower and flourish from Tweed to Flynn already surged in his heart. This made him a “political adept.” Seeing no alternative, he compromises morals, is so far instructed by his “foreign enemies,” Bill and Dick, as to load himself with artillery and thereby support a “realistic” diplomacy and qualify for the “security” of alliance with the one against the other of them, primus inter pares, as (if) it were. But the fine balance is not long maintained. Eventually, however, these three personal sovereignties, along with a lot more of similar kind, become united into one political sovereignty that takes over all the arms, establishes legitimate “laws” and holds Joe and Bill and Dick in peaceful if both proud /?/ and humble servitude.

     The big trouble is, there are a lot of other and foreign political sovereignties all armed against each other and having alliances and wars under realistic foreign policies not to be distinguished, in principle at least, from that so admirably pursued by Mr. Mowrer’s original compromising, gun-toting, alliance-seeking Joe.

 

     Each of these political sovereigns is “a real local government” that can make law and enforce peace” among its own sterilized Joes. This benison of local peace comes to them at ruinous cost in preparedness program, deadly war and its fearful aftermath. But the remedy is simple and obvious to Mr. Mowrer’s unblinking eyes. Roaring Camp Joe and his confederates have clearly blazed the way. They pooled their “sovereignty” in a real government to enforce local peace. So could these sovereign states pool theirs in a world sovereignty with power exclusive to enforce world peace. Such is Mr. Mowrer’s dream. Would that it might be real. It was Joe’s vague dream of peace before he pooled his sovereignty and arms with other realists like him, but its aftermath has been diplomacies, destruction and wars. Mr. Mowrer tells us that to ignore the basic problem of power in politics is a waste of time, yet are we to suppose the proposed world sovereignty would not constantly extend its powers as other sovereignties do. He must think that to concentrate all sovereignty would not concentrate all power, the aim and object of war. Certainly there could be no more inter-sovereign wars, but the way would be wide open for world conquest and subjugation and no force to resist. There would be world peace to be sure, but it would be the peace of world-slavery and of the grave.

 

     Why, then, must so many cling to Mr. Mowrer’s pipe dream of last resort? They are bogged in illusion only to escape despair, for the human spirit happily is indomitable in its ultimate faith. Well do we sacrifice our fortunes and our lives to the unreal idols, illusions of our day, for such is our earnest of a true reality to which we have not awakened — reality beyond the illusion that lures only to destruction, the reality in which we are blessed and served and in which alone we fulfill our undying hopes and dreams.

     We feel the primordial Dream that organized photons (light) into atoms, molecules and cells, that organized cells into all the living forms, that has organized men into at the very least, towards hopeful beginnings of a civilization in the blessedness of peace. We feel the urge, the aspiration, but we only dimly sense and little understand its mode or method of fulfillment. As we enter only partly into our Promised Land of peace and its reality we are hindered by our clinging to the ideals and illusions of our crude and bondaged past. Our Great Illusion is our inveterate faith in force and finesse, alliance and compromise, “big-stick,” dagger or diplomacy, and that freedom and peace shall be our reward as soon as we relinquish and unite these sovereign powers into a single sovereign hand. Purblind to almost all the reality that advances and saves, we sacrifice ourselves to the Great Illusion of force that enslaves and destroys.

     Let us take for illustration Mr. Mowrer’s neat little allegory of Roaring Camp Joe and his sovereign pals. He proposes these characters as representative of conflicting sovereign peoples or nations. In their described behavior he purports to offer us the pattern of all that is relevant in the behavior of a society as bearing upon the problem of peace. Yet in all his illustration there is not a single act or intent related of any of his parties that is not an act of diplomacy or war. He would make us logically suppose that even civilized men either do nothing else or that no other thing is relevant to their progress and peace. This in all its nakedness is the unreal premise from which all his deductions are drawn, his great and fateful illusion in which so many of us unhappily share. To turn his own homely figure against him, he is like a dog “howling up a tree where there is no __________.” And worse, for such events as he relates are worse than irrelevant; they are precisely the kind of behavior on which war feeds and destroys both freedom and peace. The parallel were more apposite and complete, even if extreme, had Mr. Mowrer’s dog been engaged in prayers and sacrifices and in howling propaganda to the rest of the pack in favor of a tree-full of united wildcats (world sovereignty) poised to spring upon them.