“The Greatest of All Reflections on Human Nature”

In designing a government, James Madison once argued in The Federalist, we must recognize the dangers of ambitious politicians. A successful government must have coercive power — it must be able to govern. It also needs leaders to exercise that power, and, as Madison reminds us elsewhere, “[e]nlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” To control those unenlightened officials, the Madisonian design was to divide power and to pit the self-interest of office holders against each other — hence, “[t]he interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” “It may be a reflection on human nature,” Madison explained, “that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”

If government is a reflection on human nature, then we might try to incorporate our understanding of humans into designing and implementing our politics. Behavioral economists, for example, talk about how humans are “boundedly rational,” subject to limits on not just knowledge but computational capacity, and as a result will make decisions based on heuristics that lead to systematic biases. Behavioral public policy as a field has blossomed, driven by ideas about “nudging” and other methods for incorporating cognitive biases into the design of policy. Madison’s own logic similarly reflects behavioralist assumptions: he posited that the ambition and avarice of people holding public office would compel them to defend their own turf, and so a division of power can be maintained if the branches were given “the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others.”

This line of thinking starts with the human as the unit of analysis and projects the implications of those posited behaviors into the realm of politics. But we can also go the other direction and ask how government, and its behavior, might reflect aspects of who we are.

First, we might want to think about why this line of thinking could be fruitful. A thoughtful person, I suppose, might not find much value in thinking about political life in order to understand their own life. After all, they could just be reflective and introspective. Moreover, they might say, we have no reason to naturally believe that the “reflection” that Madison talked about makes sense in both directions: Presumably, we start by analyzing individuals in order to inform our understanding of politics because individuals are simpler than collectives. In contrast, studying politics to understand human individuals might be a bit like studying the entire human body just to understand how gut bacteria operate; the former provides a system within which the latter might operate, but there are both autonomous aspects of the latter that are important and studying the former seems substantially harder.

On the other hand, I think it would take an uncommonly thoughtful and objective person to be able to study themselves in the way we can study politics. Formal politics is written and recorded, so we can thematically study politics across time. Individuals, in contrast, don’t typically write down everything they do, and their memory is subject to predictable biases and errors of recollection. It’s hard, in other words, to reflect on yourself with accuracy and clarity. Formal politics might also be worth studying because it’s extreme — the subject matter of formal politics often implicates life and death, and so studying formal politics provides us the opportunity to understand how humans make momentous decisions under conditions of uncertainty, contradictory incentives, and exacting scrutiny. In both ways — its documentation and extremity — formal politics can be a unique lens through which to understand individual humans.

If we take this line of thinking and apply it to our contemporary politics, I think it’s easy to draw some depressing conclusions. It’s clear that politicians — and partisans generally — have a strong ability to rationalize their views, enabling them to flip their positions and yet feel that those positions are strongly held. That sense that politicians abandon principle, that they flip-flop, is, I think, a major contributor to why politicians are regarded so negatively. (I’m not sure how seriously we should take these data, but in 2013, Public Policy Polling did, in fact, find that Americans have a higher opinion of dog poop, cockroaches, and toenail fungus than Congress.) We might also note the rise of negative partisanship and conclude that humans tend to be tribal animals, bound to protecting their side over just about anything else. Our politics seems bitter, untethered to reality, and, to be frank, incapable of responding to new circumstances — what does that say about us? Maybe politics brings the worst out of us. Or maybe we just were never that good; maybe our politics is what we deserve.

There are aspects of our politics, though, that I think might be more positive — and perhaps even instructive. Two things come to mind.

First, we might think about what we expect out of governmental conduct. We hold commonly, I think, the idea that government is meant to serve the public interest, and to do so, we expect certain kinds of values to be embedded within the actions of government. We expect government to reflect the will of the people (some level of democratic accountability); to be transparent and truthful; to treat people fairly and equally; to provide procedures for exercising its coercive authority in a just way (“due process of law”); to provide for redress when it has harmed people; to make reasoned decisions having consulted diverse perspectives and stakeholders.

These are values peculiar to government. We do not normally expect a corporation to act transparently or to be democratically accountable. And I think we hold the government to those high standards because it is in some way meant to reflect us — it acts on our behalf and, as our representative, ought to reflect the best of who we are. We limit what the government can do, then, not only because we worry for our own liberty, but also because we expect the government to instantiate our contemporary standards of decency and justice. Hence, Thurgood Marshall once explained that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” could be understood as “protect[ing] the dignity of society itself from the barbarity of exacting mindless vengeance . . . .”

For that reason, I think those values we hold as peculiarly public values are also values that we’d do well to internalize into our own lives. Open communication, sticking to truth, feeling accountable to those around us, trying to be fair and reasonable with others, offering redress to those whom we have harmed — these aren’t just values that we expect of the state, but also reflect some of the highest duties that we owe each other. When government lives up to those standards, we ought to recognize and learn from that; and when it fails, we rightly ought to criticize it. In that sense, I think Louis Brandeis was right to conceptualize government as “the potent, the omnipresent teacher,” the one who “teaches the whole people by its example.”

A second example: budgets. Government necessarily balances a plurality of interests, and a good government — we can debate about whether ours succeeds at this — accommodates that diversity. Budgets are, I think, the best example. We could approach the question of how to allocate money with some moral principle — say, we budget as utilitarians seeking achieve the best outcome for the highest number of people. But I suspect the upshot of that calculation would be that all of the national budget should go toward buying food and shelter for people across the globe. Laudable as such a budget might be, it does not perform what we expect out of government — we expect government to serve, in some way, its own people; to provide a litany of different services to us, from education to firefighting, consumer protection and trust-busting to military defense and conducting international relations; and so on. If we tried to design a budget based on any single principle, it would be a bad budget because the government has so many different obligations that are not easily balanced in any moral framework. How do you talk about the value of, say, increasing funding for the National Endowment for Humanities versus buying an extra fighter jet versus providing more funding for food stamps versus putting funds toward establishing a new national park versus an extra grant for basic scientific research? Each has different values — values that we can’t easily compare.

I don’t want to make the argument so strong as to suggest that we can’t morally evaluate a budget. We certainly can and should. But what I want to emphasize is that we might learn from how budgets combine different interests in a way that probably promotes the public interest better than any single understanding of the public interest. There could be intrinsic value, in other words, of recognizing different sources of input and combining them even if they do not combine in a coherent way that is easily organized by a moral or philosophical principle. This most fundamental form of politicking — battling over how to allocate resources — might hold some insight into how we ought to negotiate our own lives as social animals.

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Rose: It’s been a pretty quiet week, although I did have a good number of calls with old friends, all of which was nice. Also, I read some delightful essays this last week: David Runciman on the 2018 midterms (I was especially intrigued by his argument that social democrats across the globe are failing to paint a vivid picture of their ideal world, whereas nationalists can simply harken back to an imagined, glorified past); my old political theory professor, Susan McWilliams Barndt, on QAnon and the insecurity that comes with the internet (I also recently reread her 2016 essay on Trump, which I think is worth thinking about); Charles Duhigg on venture capitalism and how it can distort innovation (this seems to distort a foundational idea in competition law!); Tom Shippey on Edward the Confessor (I know that sounds boring, but it was a really fun read!). Also, we went to a Chinese grocery store this last week, and the cashier gave us a free calendar, which reminded me a lot of the Chinese supermarkets at home. I didn’t take many pictures this last week, but here’s a few.

A Chinese Calendar

Christmas near Chinatown

A View from the Canal

Bud: Next week is the last week of classes for this term. It’s kind of bittersweet — I’m definitely sad that my competition law class is finishing up, but it’ll be nice to have more free time to address the quickly proliferating number of tabs on my browser/stacks of books piling up on my desk. Also, I’ve started writing down questions that I think could be potentially interesting research topics, and I’m pretty excited about some of them.

Thorn: I remember thinking when we first made our turkey that it would take us forever to eat it, since it was like twelve pounds and there are just two of us. The turkey disappeared very quickly and, alas, we had to get back to our normal meal planning after a few days respite.

Future topics:

* A young people’s constitution — I listened to a podcast earlier today about the National Constitution Center’s Constitution Drafting Project, where the center brought three teams together to write different constitutions (libertarian, progressive, and conservative). Meanwhile, I’ve also been listening to a lot of Talking Politics, and David Runciman loves to talk about generational divides in American and British politics. So I thought it might be interesting to think about what a constitution written based on American young people’s values might look like.

* Progressive nationalism — I’ve been reading Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, and in it he makes an argument about the way that British nationalism has always been tied to a notion of Englishness and whiteness. Gilroy was deeply skeptical of progressive attempts at nationalism precisely because the imagined past of Britain was a very homogeneous society; he thought British nationalism was therefore invariably tied to racism. I’ve been wondering about whether that critique holds weight for the United States and whether progressive ought to think about how to employ a rhetoric of patriotism and nationalism toward their political goals (an example that came to mind was this Politico article’s discussion of the American flag).