“Every man must devote a reasonable share of his time doing his duty in the political life of the community. No man has the right to shirk his political duties under whatever plea of pleasure or business …The first duty of an American citizen, then, is that he must work in politics.”
—Theodore Roosevelt
This quote—an excerpt from Roosevelt’s "Duties of American Citizenship" speech—encapsulates Roosevelt’s love of the American system and his belief that we should all work for its betterment. It’s a sentiment that we all recognize, and, within the framework of our long-held assumptions about democracy, it seems to hold a ring of truth.
“[V]oting is the very least of their duties,” Roosevelt continues a short time later in the speech. “Nothing worth gaining is ever gained without effort. You can no more have freedom without striving and suffering for it than you can win success as a banker or a lawyer without labor and effort.”
We hear truth there too. “Nothing worth gaining is ever gained without effort” is an axiom of reality that seldom proves false. And maintenance of freedom really does require striving and suffering. (Indeed, if I had my druthers, I’d rather keep bees and farm hay than have to argue and fight for freedom every day. But needs must!)
Roosevelt’s viewpoint is obviously well-intentioned. I came across this excerpt while reading a piece titled “A Decent Democracy,” which lays out a similarly well-intentioned recommendation for structural reforms that might be applied to democratic systems to make them more effective. Unfortunately, much of the evil that is done in the world is done by people acting on good intentions.
In order to guide this discussion, please recall the following, from a recent discussion on the subject:
Start by asking yourself why slavery is morally impermissible. Really think about it. Write your thoughts down. Chances are, you’ll come up with things like this:
Slavery is wrong because it…
forces people to labor against their will,
forces people into an arrangement they did not choose,
forcibly compels a person’s actions and choices,
creates a condition wherein one person is legally “owned” by another,
imposes punishments for resistance or attempts to escape.
You know, intuitively, that those things are morally forbidden. And yet you accept, to one degree or another, practices that, though they may differ by degree, do these exact same things. And you need to stop. Our whole civilization needs to stop.
In other words, government—even democratic government—subjects you to an arrangement that may differ in degree of severity, but still subjects you to the same morally impermissible impositions that slavery does. And yet most people speak as if democracy has somehow set us free.
So, let us unpack Roosevelt’s quote and see why it represents the same sort of problematic thinking:
“Every man must…”
MUST?
Imagine a spectrum of morality along a scale of objectivity. At the least-objective/most-subjective end, we have customs, such as removing one’s shoes when entering a home. This is understood as the moral thing to do in some cultures (Japan, e.g.), but not others. Then we move through things that most people agree we should do, but upon which no one can really agree as to specifics or the degree to which we should do them: being nice, giving to charity, etc. (And such things certainly are not punishable if we do not do them!) We then pass through ideas of fairness and justice. Nearly everyone agrees on the importance of justice, but it is more difficult to agree on exactly what punishments should fit what crimes, how serious certain crimes are, etc.
But then we get to MUST/MUST NOT morality. This is the most objective. Just about everyone believes that you must not murder in cold blood, and that you must fulfill your obligations under a legal contract that you have signed. And (nearly) everyone believes that some sort of force may be used to hold you to account.
Roosevelt’s use of the word “must” starts the whole claim out on dangerous ground. He is suggesting a category of morality that is punishable if you fail to do what you “must” do. You can say it’s just a choice of words, but in light of the rest of his sentiments, it clearly is more than that.
“devote a reasonable share of his time”
Who decides what is reasonable? Do we establish a political body with the power to decide and enforce their decision? Roosevelt is not suggesting so, but it’s too late—that body already exists. It’s called government.
That the American government was once comparatively rights-respecting matters little: it still has the power to make up rules and enforce them through violence. And it still grew into the government that put thousands of Americans in jail for speaking out against WWI, interned the Japanese, and ruled that a man growing wheat on his own property to feed his own hogs constituted “interstate commerce.” A government that coerces children into taking injections that risk their lives and denies people access to safe and effective medicines.
(I believe this growth was inevitable—that even a constitutional republic will slowly grow beyond its original purpose, arrogating powers the citizens never wanted it to have and progressively adding layers of protection to shield itself from the scrutiny and oversight of those citizens. Constitutions appear to be good ideas—something that we are better off with than without. And yet our constitution either contained the seeds of its own perversion or was powerless to prevent it. Think about that over your morning tea. It’s a sad but important realization.)
“doing his duty in the political life of the community.”
DUTY? In light of the word “must” earlier in the sentence, we must assume this is an enforceable duty. EnFORCEable. But it isn’t. This is not the sort of “duty” that one is morally permitted to enforce through physical coercion.
Let us return to our observations as to why slavery is morally wrong. The notion that a person must do his duty to work in politics
forces him into an arrangement he did not choose,
compels his actions and choices, and
suggests a kind of ownership:
You did not choose to live in this “democracy.” You signed no contract. Yet somehow your agreement is presumed and you are required to perform certain tasks on its behalf. You may not say no.
Of course Roosevelt did not suggest actually enforcing these duties. But it does not matter—his sentiment reinforces everything that is wrong with democracy and involuntary governance, and with most people’s deeply flawed understanding of them.
In case you had any doubt, he makes it clear in the next sentence…
“No man has the right to shirk his political duties”
Tragically few people understand what a “right” actually is. But honestly, for a president separated by only a century from the Framers, Roosevelt’s understanding of the word is woefully inadequate.
In my upcoming book, I develop an academic definition of rights as
The individual’s exclusive, inalienable title to personal control over an infinite range of thoughts, actions, and choices—held in equal measure to all others, violated through coercive force, defensible via protective force, and respected through inaction.
But honestly, we don’t need anything that fancy. Simply put, a right is…
Anything you want to do that does not initiate force against another.
Way out on the margins, we have difficulty knowing exactly what constitutes force in every case. Smoking a cigar in your back yard and having a little of the smoke waft into your neighbor’s yard isn’t force, but polluting every well in the area by dumping toxic waste into your yard almost certainly is. Questions like those can be tough But 95 percent of the time, it’s easy—we know exactly what constitutes force, and why.
This is the only morally and philosophically defensible way to define a right. Every other way requires that force be initiated.
If we define a right as a “right” to be given something, that something must first be taken by force from someone else.
And if we take away the right to determine the course of one’s own life, as Roosevelt does here, then it also implies the use of force:
“You have said that you do not voluntarily choose to do X (to “ work in politics,” e.g.). You do not have the right to make that choice. You must do as we say.”
You might well protest, “That’s not what Roosevelt meant!” Such a protest is both unconvincing and counterproductive. He said it, and—man of action that he was—we must assume he meant it. Warping of the word “rights” contributes to people’s fundamental misperception of its true meaning, and eventually leads to all the horrors associated with that improper understanding. I know Roosevelt was an accomplished man and a revered figure, but that does not make his misuse of the word acceptable. If he didn’t know better, he should have. If he did know better, then his misuse of the term is inexcusable.1
All of this points up the problem with democracy. We are ultra-social creatures, and so we get it in our heads that we need collective solutions for everything—that the rights and freedom of the individual must be subordinated to the collective. This is bad.
Yes, we are ultra-social.
Yes, cooperation is our great strength.
Yes, we have to find ways to live together.
But NOT at the expense of the rights of individual. Not at the cost of using force against people who have not first initiated force against another. Any society that must do this in order to exist does not deserve to exist.
We have to evolve to a better way.
Sentence edited. Removed “unforgivable”—a word that reflected my anger at the ongoing sacrifice of the rights of the individual upon the pyre of the collective, but which, as a commenter pointed out, was not really an accurate choice of words.
Very good. Always follow the logic! In the early seventies I joined a a small group in Sydney called AIR. Alliance for Individual Rights. My interest in politics was very limited though. I think the very word politics has something in it that is alien to the individual. My only criticism is the word unforgivable. If anything is unforgivable then someone or something is forever damned. No good can come of this idea. It will lead only to fear and lies. And many believe it. Inexcusable is fine.