Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2119

Transcribed recording by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath about parliamentary procedure

No date

Parliamentary procedure is not a tool for conflict or getting the best of another. To be effective, it pre­supposes the people who have come together and are using it want to work out a common course of action that will work because it is acceptable to everyone. If they have anything else in mind, it won’t work. Then it may become a game without a constructive purpose — although not for long unless force is introduced, since the meeting will simply break up.

The use of parliamentary procedure in debating is a very exceptional use; here the participants have come together with the very specific purpose of carrying on a highly formalized style of combat. It is a matching of wits to best the other fellow within a specific set of rules. This is useful as a means of learning the procedure, and very likely that is how the activity of debating got started in the universities.

There is still another consideration. When the group is trying to work out something in good faith but one or a few in the group are deliberately trying to sabotage the proceedings and distort the results, they may be able to do so for a time by use of a superior knowledge of the rules than the rest of the group know. The rest, in their good faith, will uphold the rules even though they find the results in some instances working against them, before letting the meeting break up and give up their constructive objective. This is what the communists in the United States did very effectively in the first half of the 20th century. It is exactly analogous to their perversion of the principle of free speech — which of itself is a sound principle. This was a deliberate strategy of the communists: to find out the rules of the game that the opposition would adhere to, then use those rules in such ways as to destroy the opposition.

Parliamentary procedure, as any kind of contractual conven­tion in the free market place, presumes the good will of the participants. It will not turn wolves into lambs, and that was never its purpose. When wolves get into the sheepfold, that is a different situation altogether than the one for which rules of parliamentary procedure were devised.

The rules have also been given a bad name by association — by the fact that they have been used effectively by groups of thieves — national legislative bodies — whose purpose at the outset was to decide on ways of aggressing against persons outside the meeting. Within the meeting, however, the rules served such honor as is sometimes found to exist among thieves. The rules themselves are benign means of reaching accord about means.