The Healthy Political Society

By Baba Galleh Jallow

Great political thinkers agree that all political action aims at either preservation or change. Preservation is motivated by the desire to preserve the good or prevent a change for the worse. The desire to change, on the other hand, is motivated by the desire to bring about something better, to build a healthy political society, to realize the ultimate aim of human society, which is the attainment of the best possible life, the common good for all members of society.

In order to bring about the good political society, we need to have a fairly accurate knowledge of what constitutes the good itself. This is a particularly contentious issue and a daunting task, but one which we must nevertheless address. Gaining knowledge of the good requires that first of all, human beings recognize their limitations as finite and fallible beings. It requires the keeping of an open mind at all times, under all circumstances, the toleration of ideas and views contrary, even hostile to our own. It requires the encouragement of healthy debate and ultimately, a readiness and willingness to accept our mistakes and improve on them.

No society can attain any meaningful level of progress or get anywhere near the realization of the common good without allowing the growth and flourishing of a free marketplace of ideas at which all members of political society, particularly responsible for running the affairs of a nation, are always ready and willing to trade their views and opinions for better ones. This is not to suppose that those in political authority are always wrong in their views and opinions. It is merely to suggest that in most cases, their authority tends to blind their better judgment; that in most cases, the intoxicating effect of power tends to impress their minds with mistaken and often dangerous ideas which are nevertheless very attractive to them. Even where people in political authority have very good ideas, it is possible that there could be better ones in the free marketplace of ideas; or there could be ideas which could serve as valuable additions to their own.

All human beings have their individual opinions on what constitutes truth and falsehood, good and evil, justice and injustice, right or wrong. A healthy political society or a political society genuinely interested in becoming a healthy one must seek to replace these diverse, often divergent and conflicting opinions on truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and evil, justice, injustice and wrong with true knowledge of these. Centuries of serious study and reflection by the world’s greatest minds have proved that there are such things as universal standards of virtue and vice - of good, evil, truth, falsehood, justice, injustice, right and wrong. True, there is often need for specification and qualification as a result of the fact of human diversity, of the peculiar characteristics of human societies. But unless people choose to ignore the reality because recognition would cause them inconvenience of some sort, there is no denying the fact that there are things that are universally acceptable or unacceptable. Murder for instance is wrong regardless of where it is committed. So is theft - including the forcible appropriation of people’s legitimate, inoffensive and harmless liberties. Most of these universal standards are enshrined in what are called universal human rights.

It is true knowledge of these universal standards of virtue that a healthy political society should seek to cultivate with a view to having them take the place of untried opinions. This is not to say that opinions, right or wrong, should be dismissed out of hand. For it is from the plurality of opinions that we can identify the path to true knowledge. Therefore, in a healthy political society, political opinion and political knowledge must be allowed, even encouraged, to co-exist peacefully.

Of particular interest to the search for true political knowledge is an understanding of the oceanic concept of law. Like all great political virtues, there is a universally acceptable standard of what constitutes law. The harmony or lack of harmony in a political society is mostly a function of the nature of its laws. A society relapses into barbarism and anarchy when those in political authority take to promulgating unjust laws for the purposes of furthering their own selfish interests at the expense of the national interests. If there is one thing that differentiates a progressive political dispensation from a backward and redundant one, it is found in the character of at least some of their laws. A progressive political dispensation will never promulgate an unjust law; or when it does, the society to which it is responsible will challenge and void such a law. But a backward and redundant political dispensation feels responsible to no one but itself and so will pass any law that it feels will serve its own parochial interests.

Most political philosophers accept the definition of law proposed by St. Thomas Aquinas. Of course, a redundant political dispensation will be quick to dismiss this proposed definition even before hearing it on the grounds that it is an alien or western definition. Such timid escapism, however, does not affect the validity of St. Thomas’ definition of laws as an ordinance of reason for the common good, made and promulgated by political authority. Thus, a just law must be derived from reason; and it must serve as a force of reason. A law must also serve the common good, rather than the perceived good of particular interests such as a backward and redundant political dispensation. Ultimately, a just law must be compatible with the precepts of natural law as enshrined, for instance, in the universal declaration of human rights or as stipulated in what is termed divine law - the law according to the Quran, the Bible, and other revealed texts.

A law that is lacking in any of these elements or attributes - reason, the common good, compatibility with natural law - is no law at all. It would simply be an unjust instrument of coercion imposed through an abuse of political authority. Examples of these so-called laws would be laws that seek to stifle contrary views and opinions, laws that place unnecessary obstacles on the growth of institutions necessary and vital for the emergence of a healthy political society (e.g., Decrees 70/71), and laws that discriminate and persecute citizens on the basis of political bias or contrary opinions. All such laws are laws only by name and are not deserving of the slightest respect. True, they could be imposed by force; but no citizen is morally obliged to obey them, because they are contrary to the dictates of reason and to the achievement of the common good.

By their very nature, unjust laws - which, again, are actually no laws at all - are extremely harmful to the well being of political society. The existence of such non-laws are always an indication of the presence of tyranny or a move toward tyranny which is universally acknowledged to be the worst form of government. Tyranny is the worst form of government because it is in direct contradiction to the attainment of the common good. It is the worst form of government because rather than being the good social doctor all political authority is meant to be, tyranny seeks to purge the body politic of all its vibrant and healthy members, leaving only the diseased and mediocre, who will unquestioningly fawn, stoop, crawl and cringe to serve their own selfish interests and other interests far removed from the common good. Tyranny must therefore be opposed and discouraged at all times because it is openly hostile to those sections of political society who are purely motivated by a genuine desire to contribute to the common good by seeking to enlighten political society. It must, ultimately, be stripped of its benign and oily mask and its ugly face exposed to the scorn and ridicule of all right-minded persons because it seeks persistently to stifle initiative, and through the brutal politics of exclusion and fabrication, to silence those members of political society who are animated by nothing but a moral impulse fired by love of truth and love of country. So long as a nation is violated by the nauseating vestiges of tyranny, that nation is far from achieving the ultimate aim of a healthy political society: the common good.