We should beware the over-mighty state. A state that gathers all powers to itself drains initiative away from where it does most good ‒ at the local level, at the level of the small group, the family, the individual. And the danger does not end when formal democracy ‒ consisting of elections every few years, free, fair, and transparently honest ‒ exists. An over-mighty state can evolve through a series of free and fair elections, even involving changes in Government, by preserving the apparatus of centralised authority untouched for whoever inherits it to use. Beware that insidious danger. The impersonal state, impervious to the passing whims and fancies of men and women playing politics, constantly threatens to arrogate to itself as much power as it can get.
The only way to protect the people on a continuing basis is to strengthen, and vigilantly keep strong, institutions in the land that are autonomous and can stand up to state power without flinching. Such institutions are the judiciary, a permanent and independent civil service, the media, trade unions, the churches, strong and articulate professional bodies, universities, the private business community. To the extent that any of these find themselves in the service of the state, or under its thumb, they should take steps to get out fast and establish an integrity and a raison d’ȇtre of their own. In that way they serve the people and the nation, ultimately you and me, best.
Often, especially when we are young, we believe that it must be possible for some great saviour to take control of events, which seem in such disorder so much of the time, in order to impose a great reformation on the land which will free everyone from all mischief and all wrong. This is an illusion. It is an illusion, indeed, which keeps returning to haunt mankind throughout the ages. We will probably never be done with it since each generation is as idealistic and gullible in its turn as its predecessor.
The saviour may come in the form either of a ‘great leader’ or of some movement or ideology or party embodied in a government. And, because the great cause seems so good, it may at first seem right to allow complete authority to this supreme governor or all-powerful government. But that is always a terrible mistake. Supreme power accorded to anyone or any institution is always in the end misused. And ideologies once incorporated into power structures tend to be taken to extremes and corrupted ‒ capitalism, for instance, because it is based on greed and socialism because it is based on coercion.
Governments, of course, have an important place and can go beyond their central role of keeping the peace and administering (a very different thing to controlling) the laws to do great and positive good, but only if their powers are kept under constant scrutiny and are carefully circumscribed through the operation of other countervailing powers in the land. Governments with grand designs, ambitious to take upon themselves the total powers which will allow them to achieve such designs, are deadly dangerous. The American commander in the Vietnam war who uttered the unforgettable words, “We had to destroy the village in order to save the villagers” sums up for all time the course supreme power always takes in the end. Let children imbibe that truth with their mothers’ milk.
It is at the level of the individual that life makes sense to me and comes alive with hope. I know the danger of this view, that it can lead to the kind of quietism which advocates that each of us must cultivate his or her own small garden, that it is no good bothering one’s head with useless metaphysical questions or with political matters that are none of our business; each of us can make life perfectly acceptable by absorbing oneself in one’s own occupations and pleasures. I admit I have a great deal of sympathy for this view. But my head, my heart, and my soul tell me (and only my cowardly stomach tells me differently) that this leaves open the way for the over-mighty state to flourish, as evil does, like the green bay tree.
So, as well as in private enjoyment and in the ardent cultivation of one’s own space, it is also in opposition to state power that individual lives must at times be lived. It is in that ultimate sense that individual lives, not states and principalities and powers, carry the hopes of mankind.
Out of the detailed, historic accounts of the momentous events in the old Soviet Union that have emerged one small anecdote has always stuck in my mind. Two young men are having a drink in a hotel bar. It is 1989 and the old regime has crumbled. They have grown up together in the same village near Moscow where the grandfather of one of them ‒ Leonid Brezhnev ‒ and the father of the other ‒ Andre Sakharov ‒ had dachas. When Sakharov was exiled to Gorky, his son was thrown out of university and ostracised. Then the only person who offered him help was Brezhnev’s grandson. Now, in that time of reform the jackboot was on the other foot: Brezhnev’s grandson was out of a job simply because he was the grandson of the despised old dictator. And the man helping him out was Sakharov’s son.
