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COMMENTARY
June 22, 2005
In praise of slow
It is good to take short breaks from writing, as have I just done, if for no other reason than to catch up on reading and thinking. Especially for me, for I find I am slow-witted, and it takes me much longer than it would seem to take most other pundits to reach conclusions.Of course, according to me, they usually think too fast. Moreover, we live in an “urban” society that thinks much too fast, and the results may be seen all around us. It is called “leaping to conclusions”, and we have behind us now, in this country alone, the accumulation of at least three score years of accelerating legislation, which we are now at leisure to repent. Instead of Left and Right, perhaps we should use the words Fast and Slow to describe the two “ideologies” which rival one another for the government of our world. To my mind, the fast people have been ascendant for a long time, which explains the increasing acrimony, since the slow people can never be quite got rid of. Vice versa might be possible, but the slow types have been out of power so long in Canada, especially, that we could almost forget about their characteristic errors. Not everything done fast is a mistake. There are flukes. There are geniuses who move at speed with a kind of perfect pitch in whatever form of music they are making. Such people will never be statistically significant. More familiar is the phenomenon of El Thicko moving at speed, to legislate something in the long train from “social assistance” to “no-fault divorce” to “same-sex marriage” -- with a million arbitrary and ill-considered acts of government regulation in between (most designed to ameliorate the effects of previous legislation). To a man of slow wit, such as myself, it makes no sense to rush into something before considering unintended consequences. And verily, such a review would have eliminated most of what our governments have done since, say, 1945. I mean this seriously: that almost everything a government does, that is not a specific response to a potential or actual catastrophe, is likely to prove counter-productive over time. Unfortunately, the fast-witted people have been redefining “catastrophe” until it has come to mean opposition to anything they want to do next. Not for the first time (remember, I am slow-witted), I’ve been reminded of how our entire, centralized Parliamentary system encourages oversights, corruption, and demented experiments in “social engineering”. This is because the same people who run the government, write the laws, as they are going along. And they like it that way, for since Eve and Adam, humans have been attracted to arbitrary power. Among the sages of the 20th century, I think Friedrich Hayek had the clearest view of what had failed, and would continue to fail, in our secular systems of governance. It was he who insisted that sooner or later, we must institute an effective separation of powers. My own reminder of this, came with being in Philadelphia last week, and walking among buildings where the U.S. Constitution was debated and written and signed -- by some of the slowest-witted revolutionists who ever lucked into seriously influential positions. The idea of a “separation of powers” was ever to the fore in their minds, but their notion of how to achieve it was understandably murky (the thing had never been accomplished before). We cannot truly say they pulled it off in the Constitution they designed. They did, however, make some progress in that direction, which has yet to be followed up. The functions of government are essentially two, with perhaps a third arising to distinguish between them. One of them is to write laws, the other is to run an administration -- which is to say, collecting and spending money. Put these two functions in the same hands, and you have the formula for constantly expanding, ever more arbitrary government. It doesn’t matter whether that government is imposed or elected; though if it is elected, it expands with a pretence of popular support, and thus without the natural restraints upon tyrannies. In Hayek’s view, there is need for two quite different Houses. One, which is usually called a Senate, or upper house, should make laws, without any power to spend money, other than upon its own deliberations. The other, usually called an Assembly, or lower house, should tax and spend, but within the restraint of laws it can’t rewrite. The two Houses need to be elected in different ways, and some kind of constitutional court is needed to keep each within its scope of competence and authority. Since Canada is anyway on the verge of breaking up, after three-score years of quick thinking, it is likely we will soon have opportunities to think through our constitutional arrangements again. We need some very slow thinking on what the new arrangements should be, after that catastrophe. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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