Positive Liberty

Wow. What a fantastic episode. If it had a flaw, it was that so much happened in such a short time; this should have been the last half of the season, rather than a single one and a half hour finale. There’s so much to write about. But it’s proof that BSG is the most intelligent series on television.

Was Roslin right to try to steal the election? There are two immediate answers that come to mind: the Straussian and the Popperian. For the Straussian, it’s obviously right. It’s an act of statesmanship that sometimes requires breaking the laws, and subjecting the people to tyranny, for what is in the state’s best interests.

Today, under the influence of the modern, ultrademocratic theories of the Progressives, we are prone to be shocked at such a notion, because we believe that government’s legitimacy rests on nothing other than the majority will. Thwarting the process of determining that will is thus the ultimate perversion, and really the greatest political crime possible. (Note how obsessed we are with campaign finance reform which we continue—after a century of such tinkering—to imagine will somehow finally end up with a system that determines the pure, unbiased Will of the People, untainted by private interests). If you think about it, though, this notion contains a fundamental contradiction, because it assumes there is something underneath “the outcome of elections” which determines the legitimacy of that outcome—namely, substantive rules of fairness such as “50% plus 1 wins”—which does not itself depend on the will of the majority for its validity. So a truly pure majoritarianism, like that advanced by Oliver Wendell Holmes, is untenable because majoritarianism depends on “metanorms” that cannot be derived from majoritarianism itself.

Back to Strauss. The Straussian, I believe, would argue that the statesman, having the insights of political philosophy, is not only right but even duty bound to go beyond the traditional constitutional limits when the life of the state is at stake. Some Straussian praise of Lincoln seems to appeal to just this view—they often quote Lincoln’s famous comment on his suspension of habeas corpus, “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” This does an injustice to Lincoln and his cause, I think, and gives aid and comfort to silly paleo-libertarian attacks on Lincoln. In fact, Lincoln himself, when faced with a situation not unlike that faced by Roslin, seems not to have considered stealing the 1864 election or canceling it. On the contrary, in the darkest moment, when it appeared Lincoln would lose the election, he wrote the following, and required all his cabinet members to sign it:

This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards. A. LINCOLN.

Of course, it never came to the point where Lincoln had to actually choose whether to steal the election or not. But would he have been right to do so? To the Straussian the answer is obvious. The polis exists to advance toward goodness, and the statesman exists to make the people good. If they turn away from the good, then it is the statesman’s job to force them into the right path.

Karl Popper rejects this argument, and he begins with its source: Plato. The “open society” depends on the dissemination of information. The right answer is therefore not to manipulate the people in the service of what is thought to be best for them, but simply to tell the people what they need to know to make the right decision. Popper rejects the notion of the Noble Lie, of which Straussians are so fond, because for Popper, a society is worthless if it’s based on a lie, no matter how “strong” that society might be by other criteria. But, writes Popper,

[Plato] does not really believe in [the truth] for he bluntly declares in other places that it is one of the royal privileges of the sovereign to make full use of lies and deceit…. [W]e find that the appeal to the principle of collective utility is the ultimate ethical consideration. Totalitarian morality overrules everything, even the definition, the Idea, of the philosopher.

1 K. Popper, The Open Society And Its Enemies 138 (5th ed. 1966). This, Popper claims, is further evidence of Plato’s ultimate goal of “arresting all political change.” Id. at 140. Such a society is not a living society, it is dead. Popper’s colleague Jacob Bronowski likened it to the stone faces on Easter Island: “Every so often some visionary invents a new Utopia: Plato, Sir Thomas More, H.G. Wells. And always the idea is that the heroic image shall last, as Hittler said, for a thousand years. But the heroic images always look like the crude, dead, ancestral faces of the statues on Easter Island—why, they even look like Mussolini! That is not the essence of the human personality…[which] is changeable, sensitive, mutable, fitted to many environments, and not static.” J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 425 (1973). Thus Popper’s answer would be that the essential blame is not on Baltar, but on Roslin, for her failure to tell the people what she knows about Baltar before the election.

Obviously my sympathies are much more with the Popperian argument, but the problem is that, as Adama says, Roslin has no proof, only a (possibly drug- or cancer-induced) vision. How convincing would that have been to a voting public that is absolutely irrationally desperate to find a place to land? Telling the people the truth is often not effective, and sometimes unwise. For all our allegiance to democracy, there are times when the people cannot be told the truth, the whole truth, or nothing but the truth. If the weakness of the Straussian argument is that it opens the door to the tyranny of anyone who claims an untestable “higher vision,” the weakness of the Popperian argument is that it is impossible to protect the majority from its own folly simply by open discussion. Popper himself finally admits this in his important footnote on the “paradox of tolerance” See Popper, supra at 265 n. 4.

For me, the answer is a little different, and it depends on understanding that democracy is an instrumental, and not a fundamental good. As I’ve said, the democratic rule of the majority is not sufficient to establish its own legitimacy. Its legitimacy must come from somewhere else. Democracy, according to the American founders, is legitimate not because the majority is always right, or because a democratic process somehow always comes to the right conclusion—far from it. Democracy is right only insofar as it serves the greater value of individual liberty. Democracy is justified by its service of that value, and when it betrays that premise, a majority becomes a mere mob, with no greater claim to lawfulness than any other gang. Liberty therefore puts boundaries around the choices that the majority can make, and renders some choices off limits. The people simply have no democratic right to vote for someone who will deprive them of their liberties, and they can be stopped just as a child can be stopped from burning his hand on a hot stove, or a bank guard can be stopped from robbing the bank where he works. There appears to be some reason to believe that Franklin Roosevelt’s close advisor Harry L. Hopkins was working for the KGB. Suppose the people were to actually choose him, or the people of the Colonies choose a Cylon operative, as president. This would undermine the principles that give democracy lawfulness, and would, in my view, justify nullifying the election—not because of some special insight of statesmen and philosophers, but because by the basic rules of logic, the election has exceeded the bounds of legitimacy. I think this answer combines the basic insights of both Popper and Strauss.

So, while I recognize the extreme danger of such a proposition, Roslin is right to block Baltar from the presidency (although perhaps stealing the election is not the best way to do it). The people simply do not have the right to elect him president any more than they have the right to elect to enslave one another—which is essentially the same thing. Of course, I understand how dangerous a slippery slope it is to say that an election can be barred for such reasons. So does Roslin. That’s why she has such a terrible feeling of guilt on election night, despite her strong belief that she’s in the right.

It’s the real essence of tragedy, and brilliant, brilliant writing. It’s marvelous how well the episode follows the lines of a classical tragedy. No character is motivated simply by some irreducible malevolence, like the villain of a comic book or a James Bond movie. Instead, the characters are moved toward their ends by entirely understandable causes. Ayn Rand once pointed out how, in Les Miserables, Javert pursues Jean Valjean, not because he’s a big meanie, but because he’s pursuing the virtue of lawfulness; while Valjean evades him, not because he wants to continue a life of crime, but because he has reformed. This is far more believable than a mere clash of ipse dixit Good versus ipse dixit Evil, because every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good. The reader can sympathize and understand with both, and thus experience the full measure of the clash between the characters. Similarly, we entirely understand Baltar’s (or at least his supporters’) desire to stay on New Caprica, as well as Roslin’s need to avert his election, and Adama’s ultimately regrettable insistence on setting the election right.

There’s so much more here. Did the Cylons really reform for that one year? Why do the Cylons accept surrender now, when they refused to accept surrender when President Adar offered it a year ago? Did Sharon really know all along? (I suspect the answer to that is—sorta. Cylons probably have this information, but are unaware of it until something triggers it. I suspect that Dean Stockwell really didn’t think he was a Cylon till he saw himself….) But more than all of these, I think it’s fascinating how much Baltar’s “Oval Office” resembles Mel Brooks’ governors’ office in Blazing Saddles. I guess Ron Moore is familiar with all the classics.

Update: I often wonder how much BSG’s writers are influenced by ancient myths and literature. Glen Larson, of course, was explicitly influenced by such sources in the original series. In any case, it’s interesting to compare this episode to the eleventh chapter of Numbers.

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