Nate Schwab

WRIT 1301
Professor Williams
October 12, 2010
Never Stop Questioning

In the 1950s science fiction novel Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein offers a
jarring take on what Americans consider their unalienable rights: life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. As his mouthpiece character states, “What ‘right’ to life
has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? Liberty … must be redeemed regularly
with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. I can ‘pursue happiness’ as long as
my brain lives – but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure
that I will catch it.” These unalienable rights illustrate just one example of a norm
that has crept into society unchecked. Just because it is never debated or
challenged, should it remain uncontested?

Many of our cultural norms are simply accepted because they are just that,
norms. Suppose someone comes up to you and states that possessing personal
freedoms and liberties inevitably leads to a decreased standard of living. Your knee-
jerk reaction would likely be to argue for liberties; after all, this ideal has been in the
realm of American cultural consciousness for over two hundred years. Moving
beyond a strong sense of nationalism, however, one could make the argument that
liberties corrupt. They allow for personal choice, which, like a capitalist economy, is
chiefly motivated by the invisible hands of self-interest and greed. At their core,
humans exist in a state of Hobbesian anarchy. It is only through a developed
cultural consciousness that they learn to quell their Hobbesian tendencies, but
liberties can effectively reverse this development by allowing for diversity of
thought and action. It should be noted that the above argument doesn’t reflect my
personal views; it was created to illustrate the fact that norms can, and should, be
challenged.

In 1993, the Clinton administration nominated Lani Guinier for assistant

attorney general for civil rights. Guinier’s nominated was eventually pulled, largely
due to nuanced differences in civil rights policies between Clinton and the law
professor. Guinier embraced a concept called power sharing. As she put it, “The
rules should reward those who win, but they must be acceptable to those who win.”
Under power sharing, it would be easier to subtly subvert the concept of majority
rule, a critical element of democracy. Clinton, on the other hand, supported the
version of majority rule “where the winners can make the rules that allow them to
keep winning indefinitely.”

Democratic rule and its characteristics are strongly established as the norm.
It’s hardwired into our culture that the winner takes all; just look at sports – the
loser walks away with nothing. This is not a liberal vs. conservative issue; this is a
cultural norm that transcends politics. Now imagine power sharing were to be put

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into effect: “Voting would then not be a straightforward market competition
between two competing brands, but a social process in which cultural factors –
history, psychology, power relations, artistic output – would play a role in deciding
how all the parties would treat one another.” In other words, there would be less of
a gap of power between the winners and the losers; the losers’ ideas would not be
exiled into oblivion, but shared and improved upon by working together, a notion
altogether rare in this culture. Is this concept a threat to democracy? The traditional
line of thinking, wrapped up in the status quo, would argue yes. Christopher
Newfield argues that, had Guinier been appointed, this culture of compromise and
sharing would have fostered an increase in intellectual resources and America
would have progressed in the nineties.

Certainly there are those that would argue power sharing undermines all the
fundamentals of democracy and spells a definitive threat to America. These people
would likely have an even larger issue with a challenge to capitalism, one of the
most pervasive norms in the west. Capitalism has certainly done many positive
things for America: it encourages an entrepreneurial spirit, it self-regulates, and it
upholds personal liberties. The words “communism” and “socialism,” on the other
hand, are typically uttered with disgust, and they hold a definitively dirty
connotative meaning. One should take look at the facts, however, before giving into
the knee-jerk reaction of revulsion. The People’s Republic of China is an
authoritarian state (which goes against another American norm, but this is not
where my argument is leading), as well as communist, and by most economists’
predictions is set to reach global economic hegemony anywhere from thirty to forty
years from now. Robert Fogel cites strong investments in education, the continued
role of the rural sector, smooth and easily-negotiated economic reforms, and (oddly
enough) strong capitalist tendencies in this meteoric rise. This all comes full circle
to my original superficial argument that liberties lead to corruption. Based on the
facts, could one logically assume that taking away certain liberties (e.g.
communism) leads to a more robust, super-economy?

It is for this reason that norms should not be just taken at face value. Cultural
consciousness exists for an important reason – to shape morality in an otherwise
Hobbesian wilderness – but the status quo should be constantly questioned,
regardless of how deeply ingrained it is within us. Regardless of the arguments I
have posed in the above text, I am not explicitly advocating the breakdown of
democracy, liberties, or capitalism. I am merely stating that other theories and
methods have merit, too, and it would be a fool who would automatically reject
them based on principle or some misguided sense of righteousness. Always
question, never grow complacent.