We have good motives. We have a grandiose vision of the ideal society: poverty has been abolished and racism is a bad memory of the distant past; everyone has free access to as much medical care and education as they want; there is plenty of leisure-time for everyone; exploitation has been eradicated. It is the noblest of dreams.

Yet we find when we try to take steps to bring this dream to fruition that people sometimes do not live up to our expectations. When we try to broaden the social safety net, there are complaints that the lazy people would take advantage of the welfare system, collecting money at home when they could work. When we try to make medical care available to everyone, there are complaints that the unhealthy people would have little incentive to take care of themselves, since the cure for their unhealth would cost them little or nothing out of pocket. When we try to ensure that people of all races, cultural backgrounds, and sexual orientations have opportunities to exercise their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there are complaints of many sorts.

So we begin to admit that we need to tweak things a little bit. First off, we start with the complainers, and we try to enlighten them. In doing so, we find that we must first remove many of their ignorant preconceptions about people of other races and sexual orientations. We explain how cycles of poverty and discrimination lead to conditions that make it appear that minorities are lazy or stupid. We explain that the complainers’ own revulsion at people of the same sex loving each other is just a cultural preconception, or if we’re brave, we explain that the revulsion is based on another example of culture-dependent ignorance that was written into an old book which, no matter how much they cherish it, may well have been written and/or perpetuated by people who wanted to systematize that oppression. We address their complaints about the lazy people and the unhealthy people by saying that, yes, we’re working on them too.

And so we are. We are busy explaining to the lazy people of color that their laziness is the product of years of poverty and discrimination. We try to teach them how to break those cycles. We explain to lazy people who lack color that their laziness is at least the product of poverty, and perhaps feelings of powerlessness. We try to convince them all to work hard to educate themselves in order to break those cycles, but we find that those who are not still children have had bad habits and preconceptions instilled deeply into them already. We find ourselves saying the same things to some of the same people over and over again, and they seem not to be trying to change. So we turn to their children instead, and we try to raise them up to higher standards. We teach them good values, like tolerance and ethics, even if those values put them at odds with their own parents and culture, even if it sometimes requires drastic steps such as forcibly removing them from the bad influences of their own homes and environments. We try to teach them to ignore the temptations of gangs, drugs, and teenage sex, while those same forces try very hard not to be ignored.

It soon becomes clear that the problem is deeply-rooted and web-like. Whenever we try to put our finger on the cause of the problem, we find that cause to be the effect of some other problem. So we turn to the more primary problem and find that it, in turn, is also an effect of something else. Sooner or later, we find a more primary problem that turns out to be reinforced by the effects of a problem we have already investigated. These problems are causing each other in a chicken-and-egg kind of way. It is very frustrating.

Yet we have so much faith in human nature, faith in the ability of humans to exceed and transcend their limitations. After all, we are the species who rose above the animalistic constraints of kill or be killed; through our ability to reason, we have developed keen faculties of morality and justice, faculties that have become so honed that they now dominate single individuals, perpetuating themselves through us and guiding our further development as a species. Who could imagine it to be impossible for people to succeed who set their hearts and minds to the task of eradicating the baser parts of our nature? If we lack the means, no one can deny that we have the desire.

But we also acknowledge that the individual is a very impressionable unit of the species, and that sometimes an individual can learn very unhealthy habits and unhealthy views when he lives in unhealthy surroundings. It soon becomes clear: The way to elevate those wayward individuals, to help them rise to the potential inherent in their nature, is to elevate the society in whose shadow they live. If the society is healthy, the impressionable individuals that constitute it will absorb the ambient good from their surroundings, and they will be healthy in turn. If we think about it further, we realize that a healthy society is not just a means to an end, though; it is a desirable goal in its own right.

Such lines of thinking give birth to social engineering. I was talking a while ago about social engineering in the context of communist Czechoslovakia and asking in what way communism—which began as a noble experiment firmly rooted in the belief that humans, through education and force of will, can completely reforge themselves and their society according to rational principles of social justice—went so horribly awry. This is based on the assumption that communism, as it was put into practice in the twentieth century, bore almost no resemblance to the Marxist vision that spawned it. It seems difficult to believe the alternative: that it began as a passionate vision to dominate the world through totalitarianism, in order that a few men with consonant-riddled surnames could crush the hopes and dreams of millions of people in order to maintain their slippery grip on absolute power. It may have grown to fit that description later, but it did not begin so.

The late 1800s were filled with many such Utopian movements in every part of the world. It was the heyday of the International Workers of the World, of populist politics in the US, of Mother Jones and Eugene Debs, of the Haymarket Riot. Most of these movements in Europe and America were reactions to the injustices and abuses of the unchecked rise of industrialism. Yet it was in Russia where the ideas actually gained enough momentum to foment a revolution, in a Russia that was still largely a feudal agrarian aristocracy with almost no industrial capacity. You can see passing references in both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who were largely concerned with issues other than social justice, to the socialists, communists, and anarchists whose ideas were starting to percolate into Russian society 30 or more years before the revolution in 1917.

Why communism degenerated from the most ambitious experiment in social justice in the history of mankind into such far-reaching totalitarianism is left to be answered by the historians who understand these things far better than I do. The interesting question for me is the pale shades of such thinking that lie at the base of the agenda of political correctness in the US.

Marx became a very popular political philosopher in the US in post-’60s American academia, probably because his vision of human civilization’s inevitable march toward justice meshed so well with the American left-wing intelligentsia’s own attempts to purge the nation of racial and economic inequality. (His popularity also attests to the size of the divide between him and totalitarianism; it has been perfectly safe to revere Marx without anyone assuming you endorse Stalin.) I seem to remember that Marx ranked very high (slightly below Jesus?) a couple of years ago on some well-circulated list of the most influential people in history. To people who have never read his writings, Marx’s ideas are very compelling, for they allow idealists to anchor an elaborate and majestic vision of the potential of human civilization on their faith in the malleability of human nature by means of education and proper upbringing. (This in turn owes much to Locke’s notion of the Blank Slate; for a very interesting discussion of the ecological relationship between this philosophy and modern conception of human nature, I whole-heartedly recommend the book of the same name by Steven Pinker.)

People who have read Marx’s writings, on the other hand, find him slightly less compelling, not because of any shortcomings in his ideas, but because he would also rank very high on a list of the most long-winded and tedious writers in history (just slightly below his ideological arch-nemesis, Adam Smith, who tops the list because he would often spend pages on end discussing the advantages and disadvantages of various ways to calculate, say, the value of a barrel of nails). I’m not droning on about Marx because I think the entire political correctness movement is pinned on his ideas. He merely seems like a good place to start when talking about the dangers of social engineering. One could just as easily begin with Orwell. (Not that I’m going to begin with either of them, though.)

The architects of our representative democratic republic were not just designing a fair and workable government when they donned their wigs and waistcoats in Philadelphia. The philosophical debate that led to the ideas they were trying to implement in a robust constitutional framework had been raging for centuries. The ideas that were penned into the constitution hinged on a wide range of assumptions and philosophical beliefs about human nature. After all, only if one considers people to be basically good and just creatures, capable of agreeing on and instituting laws for the common good, even if they must necessarily limit their own freedom in the process, can one even begin to imagine such a thing as democracy.

What about morality? I bring up the founding documents of the US only because the values expressed therein form such a cornerstone of how Americans view the web of relationships between the individual, society, and government. It’s actually a bit strange if you think about it: The Declaration of Independence was written 228 years ago by a group of men who were trying to justify that the King of England no longer had sovereignty over a certain group of his colonies. And yet we quote that rhetoric to this day when we talk about issues of right and wrong in both public and private spheres, in addition to such seemingly esoteric notions as unalienable rights bestowed upon individuals by their creator, rights that are somehow so bound up with our existence as human beings that they cannot be stripped away in the temporal world, except in Guantanamo Bay.

So wait a minute. . . am I to understand that there is an authority that can supersede the right of my government to legislate over me? and that this authority, without so much as a wave of its hand, can emasculate the vast power structure of the government, any government, when the government tries to overstep its bounds? Where is this authority? I would be honored to meet it.

Oh, my naïve little one, you say, you will never meet this authority. It is an abstract concept, an absolute morality, a philosophical argument—couched in the judicious use of the term “Creator” in that document because, as conventional wisdom has it, those men did not want to weave into the moral fabric of this new country any particular theological doctrine.

So wait a minute. . . you’re telling me that there is a philosophical argument with more power than my government with all of its guns, policemen, jails, litigation, procedures, and paperwork? And were my government to try to make a decree that contradicts that unseen and esoteric authority, channels exist by which I, a puny and insignificant individual, can triumph over such a vast and incomprehensible power structure because, you say, there are ways in which I have more power than the government, “power” in a far more fundamental sense of the word than simply that I elect certain people to office? that in fact the government only has a right to exist as long as I give it my consent? Nonsense.

But we have internalized the rhetoric that argues for that system; it sounds completely natural to think that way. The philosophical arguments of the founding fathers have insinuated themselves into our individual moral beliefs—to such an extent, in fact, that they form the framework on which many of our beliefs as individuals hang, without which many of those beliefs mean nothing—whether we realize it or not.

But the notion of absolute right and wrong is a beautiful and very dangerous idea. The founding fathers walked a very narrow path: They built a country on the notion of an absolute morality, but they did not enunciate its nature or its source. They merely plucked bits and pieces of it from the air and made those pieces axiomatic (“We hold these truths to be self-evident”): the equality of all individuals; the notion that government derives its power from the consent of the governed; the notion of unalienable rights.

There arises a difficulty, which is inherent in basing a government on a framework of notions rather than on a list of specific ordinances: When new issues arise that must be answered but have no precedent in the constitutional laws of the country, we can only hold these new issues up to the light and peer at them in order to try to figure out how they fit into the extant framework. This process turns a democratic republic into an ongoing philosophical debate about what is right and what is wrong, about the ultimate extent of the abstract moral authority that rules us.

I’ve been slicing and carving away at this amorphous problem for many paragraphs now, and I know you’ve been hoping I would get around to the point eventually. Lucky for you, I think I’m finally able to state the nature of the problem as I see it. There are two parts:

(1) The part of our individual moral framework that stems from internalizing the founding American rhetoric, arguably the system of beliefs which unites us as Americans, addresses the macroscopic scale of the government and the microscopic scale of the individual, but ignores everything in the middle (except the matter of the 50 states, but I’m lumping them in with the government). Thus it remains silent on the subject of social movements, which can gain far more momentum (power) than individuals, but are quite different in nature from government, though there are times at which social movements (women’s suffrage, civil rights, etc.) by virtue of their scale can approach that of government in their pervasiveness.

But recall also (2) the unenunciated nature of the absolute morality on which the nation is built. Since we have that assumption subtly built into the country’s structure, it is possible for you and I to agree on the rightness of the enunciated principles, but to disagree emphatically about their source. That of course is directly in line with the integrity of personal belief. However, depending on the extent to which we believe we have access to that source, it is possible for me to believe that my convictions are “righter” than yours. Since the nature of the underlying absolute morality is not explicitly stated, but only alluded, you with your Bible, for instance, can appeal to an absolute system and claim it to be the proper one to inform decisions about issues that are not explicitly addressed in the documents, while I with my liberal biases can appeal to a different absolute system and claim it to be the authority, and even she with her seemingly relative morality of multiculturalism, where no one has the right to undermine someone else’s own personal beliefs, even she can appeal to an absolute system. But because we disagree about the undelineated moral framework of which the particular laws are merely shadows, no one can prove that his or her system is in fact the absolute underlying authority.

Into this nebulous region between axioms and consequences, between macroscopic and microscopic, spring social movements which try to amass enough popular support to influence the government to legislate according to their beliefs on the similarly nebulous matters that occupy that region. The NAACP gets organized, the ACLU, NOW, the Moral Majority, and so on. As corporations have become global in scale, some of them amassing incomes that surpass the GDP of many small countries, we can even throw corporate and industry lobbyists into that group. Some groups, instead of lobbying the government, try to lobby individuals, in order to convince them that a certain belief, and hence a certain resultant action or choice of candidate, is the only morally defensible one. Each of these groups seems to work through channels inherent in the democractic system—by convincing people to vote a certain way, often by convincing them to hold a certain opinion; or by trying directly to influence the government to legislate so that galvanizing popular opinion is not necessary. (It doesn’t matter, for instance, if the majority of people in the country believe that abortion should be legal. If you can influence the lawmakers directly, you can see to it that your own moral beliefs become the law of the land, and popular opinion becomes largely irrelevant. To be fair, though, a parallel example on the other side of the political spectrum would be that of directly influencing lawmakers to legalize gay marriage, even though a majority of Americans finds it unpalatable.)

So sometimes, recalling the little parable that began this diatribe, we find ourselves unable by logical persuasion to convince people that we are right. But we are so certain of our convictions (how could it be otherwise?) that we find ourselves unable or unwilling to live in a society that doesn’t reflect them. And we are so certain that our beliefs are cut from the same cloth as the moral framework that clothes the society that we view contrary beliefs as unenlightened somehow, or prejudiced, or sinful, or backward.

So the problem seems to arise when one group views its social model as morally superior to another group’s, and tries to subvert the democratic process in bringing about a society that reflects their model. When we are arguing about ideas on their own merits, the better idea usually has a habit of rising to the surface. (The truth is its own best defense, after all.) But when we have a collision of conflicting moral frameworks, each with different assumptions built in, then there is no common ground on which to argue about ideas on their own merits. We instead, and often without realizing it, switch to arguing about the rightness and wrongness of axiomatic frameworks. Faggots are sinful, you say, because the Bible has decreed it, and so you cannot willingly live in a society that allows them to marry. But I don’t believe literally in the Bible, especially in the words of Paul, so I can’t accept your argument. But if I don’t believe in the Bible, you say, then I have no moral framework from which to argue; I have only a thorny briar of lies.

So what does it mean when you (more properly, your social movement) have a vision of how society should be, but many of the constituent members of that society seem not to share your ideals or, worse, even reject them? What does it mean to embark on a mission to change the individuals for the sake of a better society? In a pure idealized democracy, the kind that never actually exists except on paper, the society goes in the direction of the majority of the people. Even if the people are wrong, misguided, or stupid, they and no one else have the right to decide for themselves the nature of their society. One might argue that it was precisely to protect against such mob rule that our country was constituted as a representative democracy. In fact, only such reasoning can justify the existence of, say, the electoral college.

But consider whether or not a group of reformers who become frustrated at the ignorance of so many others—and thus deem it necessary to try to mould them in order that the sociological changes they have in mind can be pursued—seem inherently undemocratic somehow. For example, if 70% of the people in my town hate faggots, but I am a member of the 30% who respect the rights of homosexuals, what do I do? I can accept that I am in the minority and accept that the majority should have their way. But I am also educated and open-minded, so clearly I see that those 70% are closed-minded and prejudiced; in order for the society to reflect the set of values I know to be more enlightened, I work to convince those 70% that they are unenlightened and need to elevate their moral code.

To keep the example simple, let’s follow this route: When they refuse to listen, I decide to become a teacher, and I try to impart my wisdom to their children before the children fall into their parents’ bigoted and prejudiced ways. Those parents, for their part, decide to home-school their children, in order to instill in them the proper moral underpinnings and protect them from being corrupted by my vacuous and hedonistic non-beliefs. We both believe we have right on our side, and we both have a vision of society toward which we are working, but we are both subverting the democratic process by using education as social engineering. While far more extreme examples of this exist (the Hitler Youth in Germany and the Young Pioneers in Czechoslovakia come to mind), using education as a means to indoctrinate young people into a given moral framework is a very dangerous practice, no matter how well-intentioned.

For example, to bring the matter to an issue of current significance, consider the example of the US government working to foster the development of the mujaheddin in Afghanistan in the 1980s to resist the Soviets The US, through USAID and the University of Nebraska, spent millions of dollars developing and printing textbooks for Afghan schoolchildren. The textbooks were filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of a covert attempt to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation. For instance, children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines. Lacking any alternative, millions of these textbooks were used long after 1994; the Taliban were still using them in 2001. In 2002, the US started producing less violent versions of the same books, which George Bush said would have “respect for human dignity, instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry.” Bush failed to mention who created those earlier books (paraphrased from cooperativeresearch.org; see also The Washington Post, 3/23/2002 and CBC, 5/6/2002.) It was justified at the time because we were working to thwart the efforts of the Soviets, who were most likely being similarly underhanded. In the name of spreading freedom and democracy, we subverted both. It wasn’t the last time.

I was confronted by the same issue (though admittedly in a less insidious form) when I was studying to be a teacher at U of I several years ago, when in Educational Policy Studies 201 we read excerpts from the primers for school children that were put into wide circulation in the US at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The primers superficially taught seemingly apolitical skills such as counting, reading, and writing, but the examples they used subtly communicated a certain value system: industriousness, loyalty to an employer, the dependence of the nuclear family on a one-wage-earner/one-care-taker model, and so on. The schools were in effect being used to circumvent the dominant social model of the day. When the industrialists found it difficult to convince enough adults to work in the factories—after all, they were used to being self-employed craftsmen in the old-world model—the industrialists turned to the schools in an attempt to engender the value system that was most conducive to the social order they envisioned.

Nonetheless, I earlier mentioned the possibility that we are united as Americans by our common belief in the founding American rhetoric. (It’s either that, or that we happen to inhabit the same landmass; I don’t know about you, but the latter doesn’t arouse much patriotism in me.) A necessary part of citizenship, then, a necessary part of having a functional society at all, is the communication of moral standards from one generation to the next, and between individuals laterally, all with a conduit to the legislative body who can make laws that reflect the values of the people. There is no other way to have a coherent society. So part of the process to which I’ve been objecting so emphatically is in fact a necessary part of living among people. A society simply cannot exist without it. I freely admit that it is unavoidable to indoctrinate children into some moral framework, unavoidable to try to influence your peers and contemporaries to see the world the way you do. But which moral framework should be taught in the schools? Which should influence the laws? Which should we pledge allegiance to? Which should we fight to defend? I have had these questions for years now, even before my EPS class put them into words for me, and I still have no answer.

But I do know this: Whether it’s an attempt to breed an army in Afghanistan, an attempt to build a worker’s utopia in Russia, an attempt supposedly to breed ignorance and bigotry out of children in America, or an attempt to protect children from the dangers of the secular world and raise them in a good Christian value system in which the parents wholeheartedly believe—despite the extent to which I agree or disagree with the particular motives of any particular group of people who would use social engineering as a means to an end, I cannot help but to find the whole thing creepy.