Greetings,

Several weeks ago the Government class discussed the basics of Plato and Aristotle’s philosophy.  One goal I had in this was for students to understand . . .

• How fundamental ideas about the nature of reality, and the nature of God, help form one’s ideas about government.
• How one’s view of the nature of humanity (is mankind a body & soul? What is the relationship between our body and soul?) impact how one governs.
• What relationship should context & history have in a given situation?

I shared an example from my own life that illustrates some of these issues.  Many years ago I lived in a townhouse community run by an HOA.  The development placed about 5 trashcans every 1/4 mile or so.  When people walked their dogs (and we had a high population density of dogs) we commonly deposited the refuse in the trashcans.  But during warmer weather, more people walked their dogs, and the additional heat made the trashcans, well, stink.  This was unfortunate.  Was it a “problem?”

The HOA came up with a rule: No more deposited dog waste in trashcans.  This, they hoped, would solve the problem.

One can view their solution in two basic ways, from a Platonist and Aristotelian perspectives.

The Platonist would argue. . .

•  The law is a good one because it seeks to better the condition of all.  The neighborhood would become a nicer neighborhood.
• The people would be encouraged to accept more direct personal responsibility for their pets — taking the refuse to their own trashcans would help them be more responsible overall.

The Aristotelian might respond. . .

• The law is foolish because people will likely not obey it.  They will either continue to deposit the refuse in the trashcans, or worse, simply not pick it up at all.
• The law cannot be enforced.  The HOA has no mechanism to police the area.  Thus, people’s disobedience will only encourage a more hostile attitude towards the HOA than they may already have.  In other words, a good law can only be called “good” if people actually obey it, no matter how good in theory the law might be.

I hope students enjoyed this unit.  I then wanted to have the students see how some of these ideas applied in the making of our own government.  To that end we spent the last few days reading Madison’s diary of the constitutional convention debates. We see that different people had different perspectives, different notions of what “liberty” meant and how to achieve it.  They wrestled with the big ideas, referencing key political texts, but also worried how those ideas would apply in the current political climate.  Some of there more lengthy debates seem immediately relevant today, others quite arcane.The decisions they reached sometimes came from unanimity, but more often came through compromise and disagreement.  And despite their brilliance, they failed dreadfully in not foreseeing a popular presidency, and what this meant for the Vice-Presidency.

I had a few main goals with this particular unit:

• I wanted students to see that political agreements required a great deal of compromise.  I don’t mean to use compromise as a word of praise or derision.  Some compromises achieve great things, others, like the compromises made on slavery, condemn the future to deal with an issue that has had time to fester.
• I wanted students to consider whether or not the many compromises they made had roots in their agreement on fundamental principles, or whether America was built on band-aids to the deep divisions between Americans at that time (and now).  If they agreed on fundamental principles, what were they?  If they had no agreement on such principles, why not?
• What did the Constitution do particularly well?  In what areas did it fail?
• Many of the men at the original Constitutional convention had years of experience in law and government, and an education that rooted them to the classical world.  And yet at times the decisions made seemed based more on arbitrary circumstance than profound guiding principles.  Should this worry us, or is this the way of the world?  Or perhaps it’s a gift, a reminder that we are all in need of God, that none of us, however intelligent, will ever have all the answers or the stamina to decide them fairly?

Thanks again,

Dave

Greetings,

This week we looked at the transition from the ‘Nation-State’ to the ‘Market-State,’ with all its attendant implications.

The ‘Nation-State’ (1914-89) was the era that you and I grew up in.  Sometimes its easy to assume that our experience is somehow universal, but in fact that America was different than the America of Thomas Jefferson, and the America of our children will be different as well.

What characterizes this era?

We see here that, in Bobbitt’s words, “Government’s are responsible to and for the people.”  In contrast to Washington, Jefferson, etc., whereas before, people found their identity in ‘the state,’ now ‘the state’ finds its identity in ‘the people’ (my thanks to Addison Smith for this insight).  Gone is the more aristocratic, patriarchal attitude of the founders.  One can see beginnings of this shift in Jacksonian Democracy.  The closing of Lincoln’s ‘Gettysburg Address’ puts forward a new basis for government’s relationship to the people.

Essentially, the Nation-State will end up creating a sense of unity and community.  Many of us remember growing up playing with kids from ‘the neighborhood.’  ‘We are the World,’ and ‘Hands Across America’ were major cultural phenomena.  We listened in with all our friends to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 to see what the #1 song was for the week.

Politically, if we are a family, we take care of the family.  So programs like Social Security to take care of the elderly and Welfare to care for the poor make sense within this rationale.  Iconic presidents on both sides of the political spectrum arise like FDR and Reagan that can rally the whole nation behind them.

It is easy to romanticize this era, and it has many strengths.  But this was also the era of ‘Total War,’ for if whole populations make up ‘the State,’ then whole populations can be the targets.  The horrific devastation of World War I & II come out of this mentality.  Also, mass groups define themselves at times by who is outside the group as well inside.  So the Nation-State era also experienced terrible levels of ethnically motivated violence of which the Holocaust is only the worst example.

The ‘Long War’ of 1914-89, like all epochal conflicts, inevitably forces states to innovate.  And so they did.  The weapons that won this war (nuclear weapons, the computer, international trade) just as in the past, ended up destabilizing the nation-state order and helped bring about our current one, what Bobbitt calls the ‘Market-State.’

We might contrast the two orders by recalling some common experiences then and now.  In the Nation-State, you had to go to a few centralized locations to ‘consume culture,’ for example.  If you wanted to hear a couple songs from an artist, you had to buy the whole album.  If you want news, go to one of the 4-5 major outlets, most of which said much the same thing.  It was the era of the ‘water-cooler’ show, where everyone tuned in to see the Cosby Show, for example (‘Seinfeld’ may have been the last show truly like this).

Now, thanks to technology, identity politics, Vietnam and Watergate, among many factors, we have many more choices.  We can individualize our lives in ways not possible even 15 years ago.

I wanted the students to think about the implications for modern America, and the modern state in general.

First, we noted that governments now have a much harder time controlling the message they want heard. Government’s simply won’t be able to mobilize mass opinion as they could before.  The Arab Spring is one example of this, but there are countless other smaller ones.  Note the leaking of the Abu Ghraib scandal, for example.  Perhaps a downside to this is that with the wealth of options available, we never have to listen to the ‘other side’ if we don’t want to.  Might this contribute to the current rancor in politics today?  Both Bush and Obama have been compared to Hitler, which in my opinion does not foster healthy, responsible debate on their relative merits.  Still, every president or senator is bound to have plenty of critics.   In one sense then, governments have much less power than they used to.

But on the other hand, technology puts a tremendous amount of information at the government’s disposal.  What will happen to the concept of privacy, for example?  The globalized market de-emphasizes territorial boundaries among states.  In the same way, traditional notions of private and public boundaries are also changing.  Will our interpretation of the 4th Amendment also change?

Regardless of where we might stand on these developments, we must avoid a) Vainly wishing for a mythically pristine bygone era, or b) Assuming that every change is inherently good because it is change.  The Market-State, like any other model, will give and take away, and we need to be discerning to maximize its strengths and minimize its weaknesses.

Dave Mathwin

Greetings,

This week we continued looking at the development of states, attempting to make the connection between the various elements in society that propel change.  We looked this week at the ‘State-Nation,’ and the ‘Nation-State.’

Th ‘Territorial-State’ (1648-1776) was a conscious move away from the monarchical ambition and religious motivated violence of the previous era.  They sought order, symmetry, balance, and proportion.  This required careful international diplomacy, and sought to prevent any inward social upheavals, for good or ill.

A variety of factors lead to the breakup of this constitutional order.  For one, the Enlightenment grew stale and begged for a more ‘Romantic’ counter-reaction.  But perhaps more than that, the expansion of Territorial States stretched the logic of their identity based on contiguous property (and not ideology, which travels in the minds of men).  The French-Indian War is perhaps the most striking example of a Territorial-State conflict that gives birth to the ‘State-Nation’ here in America.

The French-Indian War created a sense of identity, a sense of a ‘people’ in the English North American colonies.  This ‘people’ would naturally now not want to be treated as pawns in an international game.  They would inevitably demand rights, and this is at least part of the roots of the conflict between the colonies and England.

A look at the Declaration of Independence and Constitution gives us insight into the emerging world of ‘State-Nations.’

• We have the basis of the particular relationship between government and the people rooted in universal ideas (all men are created equal)
• We have recognition that the ‘people,’ not territory or states, are the basis for political power, i.e. “We the people. .  .”
• At the same time we still have a somewhat aristocratic, paternalistic attitude towards ‘the people.’  Government was responsible “for” the people, but neither George Washington, John Adams, Robespierre, or Napoleon would have thought in terms of government “by” the people, or “of” the people.

Napoleon is a great example of someone who understood how the socio-political landscape had changed, and understood how to take advantage of it.  The French Revolution destroyed not only the aristocracy, but the professional army led by aristocrats.  Napoleon had mass, energy, and ideology at his disposal, but lacked the well drilled and trained armies of the rest of Europe.

With a “people” now organized in France to form a “nation,” Napoleon could mobilize more support for his campaigns.  He had the supplies, backing, and motive to take his army far (we are liberators of the oppressed).  His took this energy and channeled, achieving superiority of mass at points of his choosing.  This rag-tag ball of energy created by the French Revolution and harnessed by Napoleon made quick work of the rational, balanced, symmetrical, and aristocratic armies of Europe.

But then a curious thing happened.  The countries Napoleon occupied inevitably brought with them the ideology and ‘constitution’ they espoused.  If France was so great, why couldn’t Prussia or Austria be great too?  If they wanted to resist, they would need to raise a new army rooted in this new sense of solidarity, this new sense of a ‘people.’  The old aristocratic officers had been discredited by their initial defeat at Napoleon’s hands.  The armies that defeated Napoleon from 1809-1815 from Spain to Russia, from Prussia to England, were in sense, Napoleon’s accidental creations.

Napoleon’s success and ultimate failure have many lessons.  For our purposes I want the students to see how elements of society fit together and in a sense, carry the same message.  Different ideas and actions create new social and political contexts.  Without awareness of the ripple effects of these changes, nations will end up behind the 8 ball, much like Spain of the early 17th century, France and England in the late 18th century, the Austro-Hungarians in the early 20th century, and so on.

We discussed in class the various ways the transition from these two state models might manifest itself.  The “State-Nation” built itself on universal ideas, (i.e. “all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”)  These grand, sweeping ideas have their incarnation in Beethoven’s music, for example.

But the music of the next model, the “Nation-State” reflected different values.  It was more group oriented, so the music aimed not everywhere but for the broad middle, creating more “popular” and “accessible” music.

Later we had. . .

And then. . .

The ‘Nation-State’ (1914-89) was the era that you and I grew up in.  Sometimes its easy to assume that we experience is somehow universal, but in fact that America was different than the America of Thomas Jefferson, and the America of our children will be different as well.

What characterizes this era?

We see here that, in Bobbitt’s words, “Government’s are responsible to and for the people.”  In contrast to Washington, Jefferson, etc., whereas before, people found their identity in ‘the state,’ now ‘the state’ finds its identity in ‘the people’ (my thanks to Addison Smith for this insight).  Gone is the more aristocratic, patriarchal attitude of the founders.  One can see beginnings of this shift in Jacksonian Democracy.  The closing of Lincoln’s ‘Gettysburg Address’ puts forward a new basis for government’s relationship to the people.

Essentially, the Nation-State will end up creating a sense of unity and community.  Many of us remember growing up playing with kids from ‘the neighborhood.’  ‘We are the World,’ and ‘Hands Across America’ were major cultural phenomena.  We listened in with all our friends to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 to see what the #1 song was for the week.

Politically, if we are a family, we take care of the family.  So programs like Social Security to take care of the elderly and Welfare to care for the poor make sense within this rationale.  Iconic presidents on both sides of the political spectrum arise like FDR and Reagan that can rally the whole nation behind them.

It is easy to romanticize this era, and it has many strengths.  But this was also the era of ‘Total War,’ for if whole populations make up ‘the State,’ then whole populations can be the targets.  The horrific devastation of World War I & II come out of this mentality.  Also, mass groups define themselves at times by who is outside the group as well inside.  So the Nation-State era also experienced terrible levels of ethnically motivated violence of which the Holocaust is only the worst example.

The ‘Long War’ of 1914-89, like all epochal conflicts, inevitably forces states to innovate.  And so they did.  The weapons that won this war (nuclear weapons, the computer, international trade) just as in the past, ended up destabilizing the nation-state order and helped bring about our current one, what Bobbitt calls the ‘Market-State.’

We might contrast the two orders by recalling some common experiences then and now.  In the Nation-State, you had to go to a few centralized locations to ‘consume culture,’ for example.  If you wanted to hear a couple songs from an artist, you had to buy the whole album.  If you want news, go to one of the 4-5 major outlets, most of which said much the same thing.  It was the era of the ‘water-cooler’ show, where everyone tuned in to see the Cosby Show, for example (‘Seinfeld’ may have been the last show truly like this).

Now, thanks to technology, identity politics, Vietnam and Watergate, among many factors, we have many more choices.  We can individualize our lives in ways not possible even 15 years ago.

I wanted the students to think about the implications for modern America, and the modern state in general.

First, we noted that governments now have a much harder time controlling the message they want heard. Government’s simply won’t be able to mobilize mass opinion as they could before.  The Arab Spring is one example of this, but there are countless other smaller ones.  Note the leaking of the Abu Ghraib scandal, for example.  Perhaps a downside to this is that with the wealth of options available, we never have to listen to the ‘other side’ if we don’t want to.  Might this contribute to the current rancor in politics today?  Both Bush and Obama have been compared to Hitler, which in my opinion does not foster healthy, responsible debate on their relative merits.  Still, every president or senator is bound to have plenty of critics.   In one sense then, governments have much less power than they used to.

But on the other hand, technology puts a tremendous amount of information at the government’s disposal.  What will happen to the concept of privacy, for example?  The globalized market de-emphasizes territorial boundaries among states.  In the same way, traditional notions of private and public boundaries are also changing.  Will our interpretation of the 4th Amendment also change?

Regardless of where we might stand on these developments, we must avoid a) Vainly wishing for a bygone era, or b) Assuming that every change is inherently good because it is change.  The Market-State, like any other model, will give and take away, and we need to be discerning to maximize its strengths and minimize its weaknesses.

Greetings,

Towards the end of this week we began preparation for our look at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 by examining how nations change over time, and why.

To help guide us we will be using Philip Bobbitt’s framework from his book, “The Shield of Achilles.”  I have picked this because we need to have some kind of general categories to work from, and Bobbitt provides them, though one can debate his specific conclusions.  One of the strengths of Bobbitt’s work for our project is that he is more concerned with showing the possibilities than arriving at specific conclusions.  Bobbitt chose the title because he wanted to emphasize the connections between various aspects of society, and he refers to the famous shield given to Achilles by his mother Thetis.  We might expect that the shield would have military insignia exclusively, but in fact that shield had depictions of numerous scenes of life in general, as the diagram shows.

I want the students to see these same connections.

Bobbitt makes several points worth noting.

• Many historians will seek for the one defining turning point in the history of the western idea of the state.  Bobbitt points out, rightly I think, that there are many such turning points in history, and that we are in the midst of one now.  By understanding how these changes happened before, we can better prepare for our own future
• People remain who they are from birth, but the way they relate to the world will change over time.  For example, as a young boy I thought of myself as a future NFL wide receiver.  What if I still thought of myself that way?  What if I left my job, trained hard, and showed up at Redskins training camp next year hoping to make the team?  This would be silly, but also destructive.  What would happen to my family, for example?  So too, nations must accurately assess their own identity and match it to the reality they face.  When nations fail to do so — when their concept of their own identity does not fit well with reality, that nation suffers.
• Bobbitt also encourages us to see the various state models over time as opportunities.  Often people, like nations, get stuck wishing and acting based on a bygone past.  How much better if we could accept things we could not change and make the most of them?  What are those things that can be changed, and things that cannot?  How should we act and plan accordingly?

We proceed recognizing that elements of a state’s internal order (politics, economics, culture, military, etc.) will all share a common rationale.  When we looked at the “Territorial State” (1648-1776) model we saw its origins in the rejection of the “Kingly State” (1588ish-1648) and its identity.

The Kingly state built itself around the king.  The “bigger” the king, the grander the people.  So, for example, the French took pride in the fact that Louis XIV could eat far more than other men.  It made him seem larger than life, and this in turn spilled over into the people.  Frequently other monarchs of this era (like Henry VIII, Elizabeth I) pictured themselves in outsized proportions.

If the king’s religion formed the religion of the people, than those that did not share in that religion must either have second-class status (like Catholics in England, or Protestants in France) or be banned entirely from participation in the state.  Furthermore, the wars of the state could in theory be universal in scope, because religion is not bound by geography.

The transition to the “Territorial State” came about due primarily to the physical and moral exhaustion brought about by the wars of religion.  Now states feared above all “enthusiasms,” or anything that might upset the apple cart.  Now rulers sought to keep wars local and short, because the only justification for war had to be acquisition of contiguous territory.  The universal ambitions of previous monarchs made no sense anymore.

The age of the Territorial State is the age of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, with a focus on what can be known and measured.  Economically, the “mercantile” philosophy dominated the era, with its strict control on imports.  Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations would do much to undermine this philosophy, and coincidentally, appeared at the same time as the American Revolution.

In his magnum opus, The City of God, St. Augustine wrote how people define themselves not so much by what they do, or even what they believe, but by what they love.  This penetrating insight led him to develop a whole theory about how the church and state operate and what goals they pursue.

St. Augustine had a classical education and certainly Plato influenced him a great deal.  In fact, Augustine may very well have had the last few books of Plato’s Republic in mind as he developed his theory.  For Plato argued essentially the same thing, that every form of government results from the accumulated desires of the people it governs.  In other words, every society gets the kind of government that reflects their “soul” as a nation, or every nations gets the kind of government they deserve.

Plato spends the majority of The Republic laying the groundwork for the perfect state.  His vision contains much that we should admire, and other aspects we should utterly reject.  He had far seeing and radical ideas for his day, ideas that would remain radical for many centuries (such as the equality of men and women, and his goal to educate women the same as men).  He had others that map out a modern plan for the worst state tyrannies, such as his proposal to have the state erode the family as a vital part of the state.

Some accuse Plato of living too much in an imaginary play-world, but by the end of the dialog Plato discusses the visible imperfections of governments.  We would approach the issue likely by looking at the structures of governments and the distribution of powers.  Plato starts with the soul, and believes that each form of government, be it oligarchy, democracy, monarchy, or the like, has its roots in souls of the people in the state.  In other words, an oligarchic state will have a preponderance of “oligarchic souls” that comprise it.  I suppose Plato might say that each state gets the form of government it deserves.

He starts by discussing what he calls a “timocracy,” a state where people dedicate themselves to honor.  Most of these societies (Sparta and Macedon serve as examples) find that achieving honor comes most quickly in war.  Thus, their drive for honor makes them a warlike state.  Socrates describes the timocratic man,

He should have more of self-assertion and be less cultivated, and yet a friend of culture; and he should be a good listener, but no speaker. Such a person is apt to be rough with slaves, unlike the educated man, who is too proud for that; and he will also be courteous to freemen, and remarkably obedient to authority; he is a lover of power and a lover of honour; claiming to be a ruler, not because he is eloquent, or on any ground of that sort, but because he is a soldier and has performed feats of arms; he is also a lover of gymnastic exercises and of the chase.

Timocracies have the main advantage of dedicating themselves to something “spiritual,” beyond mere material gratification.  But, as is often the case, this kind of intense dedication and shunning the world has its consequences.  First, due to the intense desire to preserve honor, powerful timocratic men will not want to “put themselves out there” for fear of failure and loss of face.  More significantly, his heirs likely will not take satisfaction in his purely “spiritual pursuits.”  His descendants will want honor to translate into something more tangible, and so timocracy generates into oligarchy, where the souls of men seek the accumulation of wealth.  Plato penetratingly blames the avaricious nature of timocratic man — he is avaricious of honor itself — for creating the more common form of avarice in his descendants.  The timocratic man cares not for the education of the soul towards eternal beauty, so he is more apt to succumb to the temptations of avarice in the first place.

The defects of the oligarchic soul, and thus the oligarchic state, are many. . .

The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals is ruin the of timocracy; they invent illegal modes of expenditure; for what do they or their wives care about the law? And then one, seeing another grow rich, seeks to rival him, and thus the great mass of the citizens become lovers of money.

Likely enough.

And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls. And in proportion as riches and rich men are honoured in the State, virtue and the virtuous are dishonoured.

Clearly.

And what is honoured is cultivated, and that which has no honour is neglected. And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and money; they honour and look up to the rich man, and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man. They next proceed to make a law which fixes a sum of money as the qualification of citizenship; the sum is higher in one place and lower in another, as the oligarchy is more or less exclusive; and they allow no one whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in the government. These changes in the constitution they effect by force of arms, if intimidation has not already done their work.   And this, speaking generally, is the way in which oligarchy is established.

Yes, he said; but what are the characteristics of this form of government, and what are the defects of which we were speaking?

First of all, I said, consider the nature of the qualification just think what would happen if pilots were to be chosen according to their property, and a poor man were refused permission to steer, even though he were a better pilot?

You mean that they would shipwreck?

Yes; and is not this true of the government of anything?

I should imagine so.

Except a city? –or would you include a city?

Nay, he said, the case of a city is the strongest of all, inasmuch as the rule of a city is the greatest and most difficult of all.

And here is another defect which is quite as bad, namely, the inevitable division: such a State is not one, but two States, the one of poor, the other of rich men; and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another.

That, surely, is at least as bad.

Another discreditable feature is, that, for a like reason, they are incapable of carrying on any war. Either they arm the multitude, and then they are more afraid of them than of the enemy; or, if they do not call them out in the hour of battle, they are oligarchs indeed, few to fight as they are few to rule. And at the same time their fondness for money makes them unwilling to pay taxes.

How discreditable!

It is the lack of harmony, the lack of balance (which carries us back to our discussion about music), which brings down the oligarchic state.  The pursuit of money leads to grossly top-heavy state with no guiding principle other than the accumulation of property.

The timocratical soul loves honor, the oligarchic loves money, and the democratical soul loves the empowerment of choice.  The oligarchic soul fails to pursue wisdom, so he passes no guiding principle down to his children to help them govern the desires his own accumulative practices enflamed. He despised the poor, so he never bothered to train them either.  The door now stands wide open for democratical man.  Plato writes,

And then, again, after the old desires have been driven out, fresh ones spring up, which are akin to them, and because he, their father, does not know how to educate them, wax fierce and numerous.

Though Plato has some praise for democracy, he believes that democratical soul may be the poorest of all, for in the end he pursues nothing outside of himself, nothing outside of whatever he desires at a given moment.  It is this passion for choice that Plato believes guides democratic man — a passion ultimately for “the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures.”  He writes,

Yes, I said, he lives from day to day indulging the appetite of the hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he becomes a water-drinker, and tries to get thin; then he takes a turn at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once more living the life of a philosopher; often he-is busy with politics, and starts to his feet and says and does whatever comes into his head; and, if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or of men of business, once more in that. His life has neither law nor order; and this distracted existence he terms joy and bliss and freedom; and so he goes on.

The democratic state, then, can have no harmony, because democratic man himself has no internal harmony.  He pursues many things, but none of them well, none with any depth.  The virtues of patience, moderation, and deliberation stand as enemies to “Choice” — they impede choice because they slow down “Choice.”  Thus, democratic man eventually dispenses with them, and with him the state.  Finally the disharmony and competition engendered by “Choice” becomes unmanageable.  At this point, we crave the end result of choice, self-gratification, more than what attained us this gratification, which was Choice itself.  We will then want a tyrant to control the conflict and make sure we can still attain the life of pleasure that Choice brought us.

Plato’s harsh critique of democracy should give us pause and have us consider a few points.  A quick glance seems to show that the decline of the Church in the west has brought about the rise of the god “Choice.”  We spend much time, money, and resources developing technology to enhance our seemingly limitless ability to choose.  Policies like abortion and homosexual marriage receive their justification from the concept of choice itself: we chose it, and that fact trumps all others.  Christians may rightly object to such practices, but must realize that “Choice” stands as a fundamentally different god.  Death has also come under the dominion of Choice, as some states now legalize assisted suicide, which allows for us to exit this life on our terms.

Our founders certainly had awareness of this problem.  In the Federalist #10 Madison ingeniously turned Plato’s argument somewhat on its head.  He claimed that the multiplicity of choice would create a multiplicity of factions.  So long as none gained too much of a majority they would cancel each other out, and preserve liberty thereby.  Whether this has proven true in the long run remains to be seen.  Plato would surely argue that a government with disharmony actually built into the system (as opposed to it being a by-product in timocracies and oligarchies) could never have any real stability.  Without this stability, tyranny could not be far away.

We will have to wait until later to consider a defense of democracy.  For now, I hope that Plato’s critique will sink in to the students and help them see the strengths and weaknesses of democracy more clearly.

Greetings,

This week we began looking at tort law and its relation to the democratic process and democratic values.  As the year winds down and the seniors focus on their thesis presentations, I think this unit works well at dealing with some interesting concepts in a lighter and more relaxed classroom atmosphere.

Tort law deals with the realm of damages and liability in civil courts.  No one goes to jail in tort law cases, but they can still generate a great deal of controversy.  Many of us may have some familiarity with tort law through the famous (or infamous) McDonald’s “Hot Coffee” case from 1992, when 79 year old Stella Leibeck spilled coffee on herself and eventually had a jury award her about $175,000, though the actual settlement amount remains  unknown.

The actual facts got lost in the hype surrounding the case, and the internet does a good job of giving us the story we may not be aware of.  On the one hand, it seems ridiculous that McDonald’s should be responsible for a customer spilling coffee on themselves.  But on the other hand. . . .

• By company mandate, McDonald’s kept its coffee at around 185-190 degrees, about 50 degrees hotter than coffee is normally served.  At this temperature, serious burns can result within 2-7 seconds on continued skin contact.
• Over period of several years, McDonald’s had received several hundred complaints from customers stating that they had been burned by their coffee.
• Mrs. Leibeck’s burns were extensive.  She required a long hospital stay that involved skin grafts over a large area (the internet has pictures of the burns, and they are extensive).

The case ended up being the subject of a documentary, and spurred on debates surrounding tort reform in various law schools.

The multiple layers of issues make these cases intriguing.

Product Liability

If a product injures you, company liability depends on how you used the product.  If you are mowing the lawn with your lawn-mower in a normal fashion and it blows up and injures you, the company has liability.  If it blows up while you try and use the lawn-mower to chop down a tree, the company has no liability.

In this case, jurors believed that Mrs. Leibeck used the coffee as McDonald’s intended it to be used.  Nothing strange or out of the ordinary happened.

Knowledge

If a product injured someone due to a flaw in the design and the company had no prior knowledge or suspicions, the company will have less liability than if they knew everything and covered it up.  Of course all kinds of grey area exists in between these extremes.  On the one hand, 700 complaints about burns is a large number.  On the other hand, 700 complaints represents about .0001% of all the coffee they sold during that time.  How we see the 700 previous complaints will be crucial for how we assess fault in the case.

Time

In a grocery store, if an employee drops a few bananas by mistake and five seconds later and breaks a hip, would the store be liable?  Perhaps, but that liability would increase dramatically if it had been on the floor for an hour, with customers complaining about them, and the store doing nothing about it.  We had a good discussion over whether or not the number of complaints over time increased or lessened McDonald’s liability.

If a court finds a company liable a jury assesses damages, which come in two forms.

Compensatory damages literally compensate the victim for whatever they lost.  Some aspects of this kind of penalty are easy to assess, like doctor’s bills, time missed from work, and so on.  Here the wealth of the person injured is not a factor.  Just as we return stolen property from mansions, so a wealthy person deserves just compensation.

But very quickly compensatory damages enters murky waters.  If one is physically scarred from an accident due to negligence, how much is that worth?  Would it depend on where the scar was?  Would we compensate a woman more for a scar than a man?  What about emotional scars?  What about lost opportunity?  The subjective nature of these judgments can result in very different jury verdicts (Mrs. Mathwin has a friend who served on a jury in a liability case a few years ago. The jurors disagreed wildly, with some wanting to award the plaintiff a few hundred thousand and others nothing.  Eventually they simply took the average of what each of the 12 jurors thought the plantiff should receive, and that dollar amount — about $25,000 — became their ruling).

Punitive damages punish the company for their wrongdoing, and should deter the company from acting in a similar fashion in the future.  Here the wealth of the company does need to be a factor, for hypothetically if the company had enough resources, the fine might be so small that it would be more profitable for them to continue the negligent behavior.  This is part of the reason why punitive damages can far exceed compensatory damages.

Many thanks,

Dave

Greetings,

This week we began our own Peloponnesian War game on Friday, and in class we delved into the diplomatic tension that ended up bringing on a war between Athens and Sparta.

Athens and Sparta represented two different ways of life, with two different basis of military power.  During the Persian Wars between 490-479 B.C. they attained to a measure of foreign unity only because of a common foe.  Afterwards they resumed their normal role of a “cold” animosity.  Just as the war began the Greek world looked like this. . .

Sparta had an army no one could touch, and the same applied to Athens’ navy.  In a way, they had achieved a kind of ancient M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction).  Both could do each other in, hypothetically, in different ways.  Then Athens decided to build a wall around its city and still preserve access to the sea.  It looked something like this:

Some of us may remember Reagan’s idea of a “Star Wars” missile defense system.  Many objected to the idea along the grounds that the project would not work or be too expensive, but many in Europe objected to it as well.  Why would even our allies object to a defense system?

• Some probably thought that if the Soviets could not use their long-range weapons to hit the U.S., they would concentrate on their medium-range missiles and obliterate Europe instead.  Thus, some saw that U.S. actions might have an enormous impact on their lives, and yet they had no say in the making of those decisions. Arnold Toynbee called this the complaint of, “No annhilation without representation.”
• Others saw that if the system worked, M.A.D. would be obsolete.  The deterrent to war from the U.S. perspective would be gone, which might make offensive action from us more likely.  Or, would the Soviets do a first-strike before the system became operational, knowing that their “time was short?”  In this way, many saw the building of a “defensive” system as an essentially offensive act.

Many in Sparta saw the situation in Athens the same way.  If the Spartans could not invade and sack the city, then the Athenians had much less of a deterrent to venture far and wide with its navy.  The walls had the direct purpose of defending themselves from attack, and after all, the Persians had sacked Athens during the Persian Wars.  But, this was not how others interpreted their actions.

When the Cold War began in the late 1940’s Secretary of State George Marshall urged those around him to delve into Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, for he believed that the conflict had significant parallels to the problems they would face.  He proved prescient.

Athens faced a crucial decision between the years 434-433 B.C.  Corcyra had maintained neutrality in the run-up to what would be the war but faced a crisis.  Corinth threatened them with invasion, and they knew that in time, they would likely fall in a protracted war.  As a neutral they had no allies, but they could turn to Athens (Corinth was a Spartan ally, so they certainly could not ask for Spartan help).  Athens heard from both delegations, and Thucydides records that the debate hinged on a few key points with one of them being the idea of the inevitability of war.

The Corcyrans argued that conflict with Sparta would come sooner or later, but it would certainly come.  Thus, you should ally with us because when war comes you want us as friends rather than enemies.

Corinth countered with the opposite: peace was the current reality between Athens and Sparta and that had every reason to continue.  War would only come by overt disruption of the peace, and Athenian ships tangling with Corinthian ships might be just the thing to bring on war.

In the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 General Curtis LeMay believed that Kennedy should order a full-strike against the missiles in Cuba and initiate war with the Soviet Union.  He knew that at the time we had a significant lead in nuclear weapons and would therefore win any kind of nuclear conflict.  Yes, millions of U.S. citizens would die, but the Soviets would no longer exist and trouble us no more.  If we waited, the Soviets would close the gap on our lead and then when war came millions more Americans would die and our victory would be much more in doubt.

Athens had the same decision to make, and decided to attempt a halfway solution.  They allied with Corcyra, but only for minimal defensive purposes.  Most of the students approved of this option as a way to get the best of both worlds, and it could have possibly worked out.  In actual fact, the presence of Athenian ships at the Battle of Sybota made Corinth hopping mad, but were not enough to tip the battle decisively in Athens and Corcyra’s favor.  The Corinthian fleet would live to haunt Athens at a later date.

Next week we’ll delve into the actual fighting as the war began.

If you are interested in the speeches of Corcyra and Corinth as Thucydides records them, they can be accessed online, beginning with Book 1, Chapter 32.

Blessings,

Dave