Unity in Disunity

As Jonah Goldberg recently noted in the Los Angeles Times, “All presidential candidates vow to unite Americans.” He provided recent examples. Many more could be found if we look back in time. In contrast, “nearly every pundit and public intellectual laments the lack of unity.” He sees that gap as evidence that unity is “the single most abused, misused and misunderstood word in American politics.” 

Goldberg’s analysis is insightful. He recognizes that current political appeals to unity are really appeals to power (“If you people would just get on board with me, we could achieve what we are united about”), so that such unity’s goodness “depends entirely on what you do with it.” What do we tend to do with it? Partisans try to “steamroll political opponents with forced unity and power not granted by the Constitution.”

That recognition leads me to ask, is real unity, as opposed to political unity of 50 percent plus one against a minority (as with James Bovard’s assertion in Lost Rights that “Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner”), even possible today, or is it a chimera whose allure leads us into a great of trouble?

The answer turns on precisely what we are trying to agree upon. When we talk in broad generalities and aspirations, we appear to be unified. We may agree, for example, that we all want people to have food, clothing, housing, medical care, education, etc. But that seeming agreement falls apart as soon as we consider specifics. We differ on almost every aspect of almost every specific good. 

In other words, we want different types, qualities and quantities of all of those goods and services, provided in different ways, at different times and places, for different people. Given the vastly varied specific desires and tradeoffs that characterize us, not to mention whom we think should pay the bills, this means our specific ends and goals will conflict rather than align.

When discussing this issue in my classes, I like to use the example of breakfast. Are students’ families unified about breakfast? Does everyone agree it is “the most important meal of the day”? Does everyone even eat breakfast? Do they all drink the same thing, or do people choose a wide gamut running from coffee to tea (sometimes decaffeinated) to colder forms of caffeine like soda and energy drinks, to milk and a variety of juices? Are all agreed on when, where, what, or how much to eat? Who should have to pay for it, cook it, and clean up afterwards? Do we agree on the dress code that should apply, either at breakfast or afterward?

Now multiply by the uncountable number of decisions that must be reached in society every day, and our fundamental disunity becomes clear. And rather than disappearing when we get to public policy, that disunity can grow further. Public policies that take from some to give to others, for a start, create inherent disagreement from those whose pockets are involuntarily picked. And such efforts have increasingly become the central focus of government policy, so much so that reducing what we take from some also triggers disagreement, because it would entail giving less to others than they are currently given now. When government focuses on such issues, real unity is very unlikely, and coercion will be part and parcel of policy.

That makes the central concern not that of implementing specific ends we agree on, but how best to mutually achieve our different and conflicting ends. It is whether we can find a way to “disagree better” than the political hash we make of things now. And doing so requires us to recognize that we share far greater agreement about what all of us want to avoid for ourselves than about specific things we want. 

In contrast with political “successes” which consist in taking others’ resources, there is one area in which we could agree if we were given the chance — all of us want freedom to peacefully pursue our own goals. Each of us wants ourselves, our rights and our property defended against invasion. You see this in the traditional functions of government which, in a nutshell, are to protect us from violations by foreign powers and by our neighbors. As Lord Acton put it, “liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition,” because freedom to choose for ourselves is always the primary means to our ultimate ends, and that liberty requires “the limitation of the public authority.” But we are incredibly far from agreement on that today.

Despite vast differences in our personal circumstances, preferences and goals, all individuals gain from “the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates,” as John Locke put it, for our “pursuit of happiness,” in Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence. This means defending people’s personal freedom, property rights, and rights to trade and contract.

David Hume put it this way:

The convention for the distinction of property, and for the stability of possession, is of all circumstances the most necessary to the establishment of human society …after the agreement for the fixing and observing of this rule, there remains little or nothing to be done towards settling a perfect harmony and concord.

In other words, once property rights are clearly established and uniformly defended, all subsequent arrangements are voluntary. No one can impose his will by violating others’ rights. The traditional definition of justice — “to give each his own” — is met, and all of us in society (except for predators who would be denied prey) would gain. Well-established property rights and the voluntary market arrangements they enable let individuals decide for themselves, limiting each of us to persuasion rather than coercion. Except in the very unusual case where we must all make the same specific choices, this allows us to better match our choices to our abilities, preferences and circumstances. And defending our rights is within the competence of government, unlike when it goes further.

As Herbert Spencer summarized this point, “To guard its subjects against aggression, either individual or national, is a straightforward and tolerably simple matter; to regulate, directly or indirectly, the personal actions of those subjects is an infinitely complicated matter.” That is, because we disagree on our specific ends, when government overrides people’s choices instead of protecting their ability to make their own choices, it imposes domination rather than allowing cooperation and mutual consent. That is also why claims of political unity generally mean the imposition of injustice on some to feather others’ nests.

In sum, respecting all of our property rights reduces the risk from predation for each of us, allowing us all greater freedom to pursue our own particular goals. That is, we can “disagree better.” But our current binging to add rights and privileges for some at the expense of others’ equal rights and privileges cannot bring real unity. It does, however, make government potentially the most dangerous predator of all, needing to be controlled (as with the Bill of Rights, which Justice Hugo Black described as the “Thou shalt nots” to be applied to government) even when who is in charge is determined by majority vote.

In contrast, most of the appeals to, or promises to bring, unity we currently hear on behalf of politicians really amount to saying “those of us in this group are unified in what we want, and we mean to get our way, regardless of others’ desires.”

We disagree on a vast panorama of specific ends. So when “unity” means government policies will substitute for choices we would make for ourselves, it means domination, even though we do not want to be dominated. That kind of unity is not good. In contrast, if it means coming together in a common commitment to honoring one another’s rights and the liberty and social cooperation it allows, it advances our common interests. The unity of such peaceful and productive disagreement is good because it provides the greatest unity actually possible towards our often-inconsistent ends.