. . . too many of us.
—the author (see below)
The next of the situations in American life which I should like to mention, and the one to which the remainder of this chapter will be devoted, relates primarily to the size and populousness of the country. If I were to be asked by a foreigner what strikes me most about my own people, two points, I think, would come most readily to mind: first, that we are a nation of bad social habits and, second, that there are far too many of us.
Let me stick, at this point, to the second of those assertions. If, as my first ambassadorial chief, Bill Bullitt (see chapter 1), once said, mankind is “a skin disease of the earth,” then there is an optimal balance, dependent on the manner of man’s life, between the density of human population and the tolerances of nature. This balance, in the case of the United States, would seem to me to have been surpassed when the American population reached, at a very maximum, two hundred million people, and perhaps a good deal less.
There is, of course, no way of measuring exactly the burden that man imposes upon nature. It depends in part on the way man lives. But if one looks only at the rate of depletion of vitally important and nonrenewable natural resources—for example, soil and water—it is evident that American society is rapidly consuming its own natural capital. It is exhausting and depleting the very sources of its own abundance. Much of this could be alleviated by changes in the habits of American society, as it exists today. Water could be more economically used; the use of chemical fertilizers could be curtailed; the destruction of grasslands, forests, and wetlands could be stopped; and so forth. But surely, the present environmental crisis is essentially the reflection of a disbalance between human population—its sheer numbers as well as its way of life—and the resources of the territory on which it resides.1 The American Indian, as he existed before the white man came, was no doubt sometimes environmentally destructive, too. Even more so, I suspect, were the first white frontiersmen. But there were so few of them that nature could tolerate their destruction. It is this relationship that has changed in the United States, as it has changed in the dreadfully overpopulated countries of Western Europe. And it is this that I have in mind when I say that there are too many of us.
Size and Government
But there is also another sense in which this is true. We are, if territory and population be looked at together, one of the great countries of the world—a monster country, one might say, along with such others as China, India, the recent Soviet Union, and Brazil. And there is a real question as to whether “bigness” in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.
There is, in the first place, the question of the effect of size on the quality of government. The greater the country, the less the intimacy between rulers and ruled. The more these latter become separated by great bureaucracies and legislative establishments, the more the individual citizen feels isolated from any form of government above the local level. All this tends to the creation of a certain anonymity of federal power. And while this anonymity does not take on in the democracy the Kafkaesque sinisterness that it did under the totalitarian systems (where it was an essential feature of the terror), it still plays its part, contributing to the impression of remoteness and impersonality on the part of government and of insignificance and helplessness on the part of the individual, and thus impairing the very meaning of citizenship. In the times when I have chanced to live in smaller countries, I have envied them the greater intimacy of their political life—the fact that a far greater number of people in government knew one another personally, and that a larger percentage of common people knew at least someone in government. Governmental personalities tended less to be meaningless names to one another and to the constituents, and more to be living, accessible figures. This, to be sure, sometimes favored the intensification of animosities as well as of friendships. But better, I thought, to view with dislike someone you really knew than to fumble in the dark with figures that were no more than remote and inhuman ciphers. It is the anonymous ones that instill the nameless dread, the panic before the menacingly inhuman, the rumbling of the distant drum.
Aside from that, excessive size in a country results unavoidably in a diminished sensitivity of its laws and regulations to the particular needs, traditional, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and the like, of individual localities and communities. The tendency, in great countries, is to take recourse to sweeping solutions, applying across the board to all elements of the population; and these have the drawbacks of all least common denominators. Particularly is this true in the United States, with its highly legalistic traditions, its dislike (as mentioned in the preceding chapter) of any sort of discriminating administration, its love for dividing people into categories, its fondness for regulating their lives in terms of these categories and treating them accordingly, rather than looking at the needs of individuals or of smaller groups and confronting these on the basis of common sense and reasonable discrimination. One of the unique features of American government is, in comparison with other modern systems, its neglect of intelligent and discriminating administration. It is a system that looks to the legislative branch to pass laws. It looks to the judiciary to interpret these laws. It looks to the executive branch to see that laws are carried out and enforced. But nowhere does it provide for the use of flexible judgment and common sense in their administration. Such questions are left, far more than they ought to be, to the courts, which are obliged to settle, by study of the letter of the law, numbers of matters that ought ideally to be decided on the basis of the merits of the particular problem at issue. But the decisions of the courts, particularly those of the Supreme Court, have themselves a normative character, and allow for little discretion in their application. Rarely, if ever, can the workings of federal laws be adjusted to meet unusual but reasonable requirements of the affected locality or individual.
A good example of this will be found in the current abortion conflict. Both sides seem to assume that this question should be decided by a sweeping national decision, applicable to every woman in the country, regardless of the circumstances of the particular case, as though there were not endless variations in the ways this problem presented itself. The greater a country is, and the more it attempts to solve great social problems from the center by sweeping legislative and judicial norms, the greater the number of inevitable individual harshnesses and injustices, and the less the intimacy between the rulers and the ruled. When I am confronted with the question “What is your position on abortion?” I can only reply, “Whose abortion?” I see no reason why the same rule should apply to tens of millions of women scattered across the land.
And there is a further quality of greatness of size in a country that deserves mention here. One might define it as the hubris of inordinate size. It is a certain lack of modesty in the national self-image of the great state—a feeling that the nation’s role in the world must be equivalent to its physical size, with the consequent relative tendency to overweening pretensions and ambitions. I don’t mean to say that the great power is always and everywhere imperialistic. There have been times, to be sure, when the United States was very much just that. The turn of the century, the period of the Spanish-American War, was one such time. But there have also been times when little of that sort of thing was observable. The fact remains that, generally speaking, the great country has a vulnerability to dreams of power and glory to which the smaller state is less easily inclined. Such dreams can be, and usually are, benevolent in intent, at least in the minds of their authors. But since the belief that one country can do much good for another country by intervening forcefully in the latter’s internal affairs is almost invariably an illusion in the first place, the entertainment of such dreams is usually no more than another example of the proverbial road to hell, paved with good intentions.
Bureaucracy
Mention was made above of the significance of bureaucracy as one of the factors impeding any sort of intimacy in the relationship between the citizen and the governmental establishment. When the distance between the two becomes too great, it is democracy that suffers, bureaucracy that gains. And this mention calls for a few words of explication.
How to determine the number of human hands actually required for the performance of any given governmental function is not as easy a problem as it appears on the surface to be. Most of those who have served for any length of time in a large government office—or in any large organization, for that matter—will readily confirm, I believe, two observations that this writer carried away from his years in the State Department and the Foreign Service.
The first of these is that the growth of bureaucracy is largely self-engendered, in the sense that only a small part of it derives from the real requirements of the function to be served, the greater part being the product of tendencies and pressures arising within the bureaucratic process itself. The bureaucratic apparatus, in other words, grows, like a fungus, from purely internal causes, not connected with any real and legitimate need. Such growth is a form of illness in any large clerical organization and is, as such, not only illogical and unnecessary but at times directly detrimental to the ability of the unit in question to serve the purpose for which it was established. The State Department of the years of his service there often used to appear to this writer as a large, poorly designed, and overelaborate machine, the greater part of the energies of which were consumed in the effort to overcome its own internal frictions, the frictions being, of course, the products of over-staffing and bureaucracy. These last mean: more people involved, more internal correspondence, more staff meetings, more levels of authority, more offices to be consulted before anyone could decide anything. I have sometimes insisted that you could set up an American embassy in the middle of nowhere, with no host government to be accredited to, and its staff would be so preoccupied with its internal problems that within a year they would be complaining of shortage of personnel.
Second, it was clear to me then, on the basis of governmental experience, that there did not yet exist any science that could analyze the causes of this disease or design a cure for it. If any such science has yet been developed, I am unaware of it. The only instances known to me where this tendency to uninhibited self-engendered bureaucratic growth has been successfully halted or reduced have been ones where the methods employed were brutal and surgical ones, usually unjust to many of the persons affected, and usually flowing from causes and motives unrelated to the problem itself. I recall being told by our ambassador to one of the East European Communist countries that when the government of that country, for purely political reasons, forced the curtailment of the size of the American embassy staff from eighty-some to fifteen, it was in his estimation the best thing that had ever happened to them. All went better. The remaining few coped nicely with their assigned duties. The U.S. government, left to itself, would, and could, never have effected this improvement. And a particularly unfortunate result of this absence of any science of organization is that when new units have to be created within the governmental apparatus, the bureaucratically bloated existing unit often comes to be taken as the model, so a certain measure of unhealthy growth is built into the new unit from the very start.2
It was, and is, of course, not only the federal government that is affected by these tendencies. They are observable as well in smaller governmental entities, such as state, municipal, and local authorities. They make themselves felt in most large and complex nongovernmental offices—industrial, commercial, educational, and charitable. But for obvious reasons they assume a particularly large place in the governmental apparatus of the great country. This is true not just because the legitimate needs, constituting as they usually do the original point of departure for unhealthy bureaucratic growth, have greater dimensions but also because growth of this sort enlarges personnel requirements not just in an arithmetic relation to the original needs but in a geometric one, so that each increase in the real needs produces an even larger proportionate growth in the bureaucratic superstructure. For this reason, the governmental apparatus of the great country grows around itself a thicker and more formidable bureaucratic coating than does the smaller unit. And this, in turn, enhances the isolation of the individual citizen, whose own personal dimensions suffer no proportionate enlargement, and who finds himself even further repelled by this abnormal protective coating of the government.
This phenomenon of bureaucratic enlargement is particularly dangerous in the democratic society, because as the administrative superstructure grows, so—alas—does the number of persons who have a stake in it and an interest in its perpetuation. If it should indeed prove to be true that the only effective way of combatting such growth is the brutal surgical incision, then the democratic government will be the one least likely to master the problem. Aside from the fact that such an approach would bring injustice to a host of innocent people who are not at fault for being employed where they were not really needed, these people are not without means of self-defense. Their numbers are such that they constitute in themselves an appreciable electoral force, and they would, if their positions were seriously threatened, find considerable support for their cause in Congress—an institution which is, incidentally, not without its own bureaucratic crust, and has no greater awareness than does the rest of the government of the causes of this unhappy condition, or the possible cures.
Thus we are safe in assuming that even if an adequate science of large-scale organization were available, and even if the causes and possible cures for bureaucracy were made evident, the only effective remedial measures would be so uncomfortable for everyone concerned that the tendency would be to regard the treatment as more painful than the disease and to leave well enough, or what appears to be well enough, alone. We must, then, learn to see the governmental apparatus of any country as largely helpless in the throes of this particular sort of elephantiasis, and handicapped, accordingly, in its ability to be to the ordinary citizen all that government, in normal conditions, could and should be. But here again, the severity of this problem grows, and grows exponentially, with the size of the country and the government, so that the government and people of the great power are more heavily burdened by this disease than are those of the smaller entity.
Decentralization
It is under the influence of these views about the disadvantages of “bigness” that I have often diverted myself, and puzzled my friends, by wondering how it would be if our country, while retaining certain of the rudiments of a federal government, were to be decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment. I could conceive of something like nine of these republics—let us say, New England; the Middle Atlantic states; the Middle West; the Northwest (from Wisconsin to the Northwest, and down the Pacific coast to central California); the Southwest (including southern California and Hawaii); Texas (by itself); the Old South; Florida (perhaps including Puerto Rico); and Alaska; plus three great self-governing urban regions, those of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—a total of twelve constituent entities. To these entities I would accord a larger part of the present federal powers than one might suspect—large enough, in fact, to make most people gasp.
It would, of course, be pointed out that this would involve many new complexities and not a few inefficiencies. That would indeed be true. The regions thus created would be strikingly varied in character and in the problems they presented for effective government. There would be much room for local innovation and for departure from older national norms. But a case might be made, I think, for the thesis that nothing is more greatly to be feared, in the realm of governmental theory, than the effort to create governmental systems that are logical, uncomplicated, efficient, and vast in scope. That is not the way people themselves are constructed; and a governmental system that strived too hard for these apparent advantages would be bound to do violence to people’s deepest needs.
Let me emphasize that what is suggested here is not a change based on ethnic or racial distinctions. Several of these proposed individual republics—New England, the Old South, the Middle West, and the great urban regions—would embrace within their borders a good cross section of the diversity of cultures, traditions, and ethnic and racial colorations now borne by the country as a whole; yet each of them would be marked by certain peculiar cultural and social qualities that would set it off from the others. Ease, flexibility, and intimacy of government, not a quest for racial or ethnic uniformity, would be the purpose of such a reform.
A more serious objection to what I have just suggested is that it is too late: that there are no longer any significant sectional differences in America; that the melting-pot process has gone too far; that modern means of communication, notably television and the cult of screened images generally, are destroying local differences and pressing us all into one mold, forcing upon us a national uniformity, making us increasingly less distinguishable one from another. Beyond which, it will be argued, nothing could resist the leveling effect of the great monopolies, constantly growing with the effects of the recent takeover fever, that dominate our national economy. All the forces of modern free enterprise, we will be told, work in the direction of uniformity—of leveling and equalizing—of the creation of a colorless uniformity of habit, of outlook, and of behavior, before which local and sectional differences in way of life, tradition, and conception have no chance of survival.
Perhaps, perhaps. It would be sad if it were true. But again, perhaps, not all is lost. If sectional differences have indeed been weakened by these forces, they might be reinvigorated, stimulated, and encouraged by the sort of decentralization I have suggested. If traditional and cultural differences are in danger of obliteration, perhaps they could be rescued and sharpened by this very different sort of a framework. Perhaps the interaction among different values, different outlooks, and different goals, which here as elsewhere has served in the past as one of the greatest sources of intellectual and aesthetic fertility, could be allowed once more to fulfill that function.
A pipe dream? Largely, if you will. It is indeed hard to imagine any such changes, bound as they would be to tread painfully on a great many entrenched political interests, having their origin, or even finding any response, in the present American political establishment.
Im migration
I cannot leave this subject of the size and populousness of this country without devoting a few words to the delicate and difficult subject of immigration. Ours is, of course, a country of immigrants. In the pedigree of every non-Native American, other than the first-generation ones, there lies at least one immigrant, often a considerable number of them. We could justly be called an immigrant society.
We have prided ourselves, throughout much of our history, on the welcome we gave to the arriving immigrant, and even on the lack of discrimination we showed in the extension of this welcome. We have gone on the assumption that such were the spaciousness and fertility and the absorbent capacities of this country that there was no limit to either the number or the diversity of ethnic characteristics of the immigrants we could accept. We have gone on the further assumption that such was the universality of the values incorporated into our political system that there could be no immigrant, of whatever culture or race or national tradition, who could not be readily absorbed into our social and political life, could not become infused with understanding for, and confidence in, our political institutions, and could not, consequently, become a useful bearer of the American political tradition. Particularly has the possibility never become apparent to us that in some instances, where the disparity between what these people were leaving behind and what they were coming into was too great, the new arrivals, even in the process of adjusting to our political tradition, might actually change it. One need only look at our great-city ghettos or the cities of Miami and Los Angeles to satisfy oneself that what we are confronted with here are real and extensive cultural changes.
I shall not argue about how justifiable these attitudes proved to be in the past. Perhaps there was more to be said for some of them in the early days of this republic than there would be today. But, in any case, that is water over the dam. We must look at these assumptions in terms of the situation we now have before us.
If there are any grounds for my belief that the country is already overpopulated—overpopulated, above all, from the environmental standpoint—then that would in itself suggest that we should take a new look at the whole problem of immigration. But we also ought to ask ourselves, before we assure ourselves that we could comfortably accommodate further waves of immigration, where, if anywhere, the limits of this complacency are to be found. This is a big world. Billions—rapidly increasing billions—of people live outside our borders. Obviously, a great number of them, being much poorer than they think most of us are, look enviously over those borders and would like, if they could, to come here.
Just as water seeks its own level, so relative prosperity, anywhere in the world, tends to suck in poverty from adjacent regions to the lowest levels of employment. But since poverty is sometimes a habit, sometimes even an established way of life, the more prosperous society, by indulging this tendency, absorbs not only poverty into itself but other cultures in the bargain, and is sometimes quite overcome, in the long run, by what it has tried to absorb. The inhabitants of the onetime Italian cities along the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea (the scenes of some of Shakespeare’s plays) made it a habit, over several centuries, to take their menial servants and their ditchdiggers from the Slavs of the poorer villages in the adjacent mountains. Today, finally, the last of the Italians have left; and the beautiful cities in questions are inhabited entirely by Slavs, who have little relationship to the sort of city and the cultural monuments they have inherited. They have simply displaced the original inhabitants.
Surely there is a lesson in this. The situation has been, or threatens to be, repeated in a number of the advanced countries. It is obviously easier, for the short run, to draw cheap labor from adjacent pools of poverty, such as North Africa or Central America, than to find it among one’s own people. And to the millions of such prospective immigrants from poverty to prosperity, there is, rightly or wrongly, no place that looks more attractive than the United States. Given its head, and subject to no restrictions, this pressure will find its termination only when the levels of overpopulation and poverty in the United States are equal to those of the countries from which these people are now so anxious to escape.
There will be those who will say, “Oh, it is our duty to receive as many as possible of these people and to share our prosperity with them, as we have so long been doing.” But suppose there are limits to our capacity to absorb. Suppose the effect of such a policy is to create, in the end, conditions within this country no better than those of the places the mass of the immigrants have left: the same poverty, the same distress. What we shall then have accomplished is not to have appreciably improved conditions in the Third World (for even the maximum numbers we could conceivably take would be only a drop from the bucket of the planet’s overpopulation) but to make this country itself a part of the Third World (as certain parts of it already are), thus depriving the planet of one of the few great regions that might have continued, as it now does, to be helpful to much of the remainder of the world by its relatively high standard of civilization, by its quality as example, by its ability to shed insight on the problems of the others and to help them find their answers to their own problems.
Actually, the inability of any society to resist immigration, the inability to find other solutions to the problem of employment at the lower, more physical, and menial levels of the economic process, is a serious weakness, and possibly even a fatal one, in any national society. The fully healthy society would find ways to meet those needs out of its own resources. The acceptance of this sort of dependence on labor imported from outside is, for the respective society, the evidence of a lack of will—in a sense, a lack of confidence in itself. And this acceptance, like the weakness of the Romans in allowing themselves to become dependent on the barbarians to fill the ranks of their own armies, can become, if not checked betimes, the beginning of the end.
However one cuts it, the question is not whether there are limits to this country’s ability to absorb immigration; the question is only where those limits lie, and how they should be determined and enforced—whether by rational decision at this end or by the ultimate achievement of some sort of a balance of misery between this country and the vast pools of poverty elsewhere that now confront it.
Unfortunately it appears, as things stand today, to lie beyond the vigor, and the capacity for firm decision, of the American political establishment to draw any rational limits to further immigration. This is partly because the U.S. government, while not loath to putting half a million armed troops into the Middle East to expel the armed Iraqis from Kuwait, confesses itself unable to defend its own southwestern border from illegal immigration by large numbers of people armed with nothing more formidable than a strong desire to get across it. But behind this rather strange helplessness there lie, of course, domestic-political pressures or inhibitions that work in the same direction: notably, the thirst for cheap labor among American employers and the tendency of recently immigrated people, now here in such numbers that they are not without political clout, to demand the ongoing admission of others like themselves.
Let me make it clear that I am not objecting, here, to the quality of the people whose continued arrival, as things now stand, is to be anticipated (although I would point out that the conditions in our major urban ghettos would suggest that there might even be limits to our capacity for assimilation). We are already, for better or for worse, very much a polyglot country; and nothing of that is now to be changed. What I have in mind here are sheer numbers. There is such a thing as overcrowding. It has its psychic effects as well as its physical ones. There are limits to what the environment can stand: the tolerable levels of pollution, the strain on water supplies, and so on. There are limits to the desirable magnitude of urbanization; and it is, after all, to the great urban regions that the bulk of these immigrants proceed.
I might point out that these are problems that might more easily be coped with if the United States, as was fancifully suggested above, were to be divided into a relatively small number of constituent republics, and if each of these were to be given control over immigration, at least in the sense of controlling the rights of residence. In that case, it is not inconceivable that certain of the major southern regions where things have already gone too far would themselves become, in effect, linguistically and culturally, Latin-American countries, and would find in that way their own level with relation to the adjacent already Latin-American regions (which might for them, incidentally, not be the worst of solutions).
But since there obviously will be, in the foreseeable future, no such decentralization of the country, these speculations are idle. And the reason why I bring up the subject at all is to emphasize something that gives me considerable uneasiness: and that is the growing evidence (and this, as we shall see, is not the only manifestation of it) that there are grave problems of the American future that are not going to be and probably cannot be, as things stand today, adequately anticipated or confronted at the national political level.
This conclusion, if well founded, is an extremely serious one. It says something about the enduring viability of American democracy, as we now know it. But I am reaching, here, ahead of the evidence. There are other situations that would support the same conclusion. These must also be mentioned before the implications of this conclusion are confronted.
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The New York Times, on April 11, 1991, cited the former governor and senator Daniel Evans, who chaired the National Academy of Sciences panel that prepared the report for President Bush on global warming, as saying that population growth was “the biggest single driver of atmospheric pollution.”
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Memory brings up the following. During World War II, when Pan American’s flying boats provided the only form of aerial transportation between the United States and Europe, and the Azores offered the only adequate and fully serviceable refueling stop for these planes, the airline maintained a servicing station in the Azores, manned by eleven Americans. When, later, the U.S. Navy decided to establish a small seaplane base there, to fly antisubmarine patrols—a base the dimensions of whose operations could not have been much greater than those of the existing Pan American unit—the Navy, asked to estimate the size of the personnel that would be required, came up with a figure of two thousand.