What Is the Nature of Power? Sean Martin
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What is the nature of Power? Sean Martin “When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won’t do to get it, or what he doesn’t believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn’t believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire . or preserve his freedom.” — Malcolm X “At this point suddenly I can hear in my head many voices interrupting me. They all say: “Who among us likes violence? But nonviolence has been tried.” It has not been tried. We have hardly begun to try it.” — Barbara Deming Thomas Hobbes, a 17th century English philosopher credited with developing the first modern system of social contract theory, defines power very generally as the capacity to satisfy present and future desires.1 This definition is a useful starting point in our discussion because it reminds us that power is not an end in itself, but an instrumental means by which we hope to secure our interests, most essentially the fulfillment of our basic needs and desires. If, in the effort to fulfill one’s desires, one ends up frustrated, or worse, destroys the very things that make the struggle seem worthwhile in the first place, then it is accurate to say that one is powerless. Consider a situation where two schoolchildren wish to play with the same toy. If, in their determination to secure access to the toy, they end up destroying it (or otherwise rendering it unusable) then neither can be said to have expressed a capacity for power in the sense Hobbes describes it. This illustration is all the more apt to our purpose here if we imagine a number of children who wish to play a game (say, flag football) but because they cannot agree on which child will play quarterback, the game never gets under way. Hence, in social settings, power depends to some degree on the cooperation of others with our ends. Further, Hobbes’ definition emphasizes that genuine power must be understood in terms of our future, long term, interests, and not measured merely by one’s ability to achieve some immediate result. We may accomplish some desirable end now, but if doing so undermines our capacity to achieve future, perhaps more essential, ends, then the power demonstrated is clearly of a limited nature. Some of the goods we seek are valuable for the immediate benefits they bestow upon the recipient. Some of the goods we seek are valuable in that they create opportunities and conditions that make securing further goods more likely. A ripe apple is a good and worth securing in that it satisfies hunger and nourishes the body. But its duration and fecundity is limited. Once eaten, our future need to satisfy hunger is no longer met. Whereas a well-tended apple orchard is a good worth securing, not simply to satisfy our immediate desires, but to provide nourishment for the indefinite future. Learning some valuable fact (e.g. that eating citrus prevents scurvy) is certainly good if we’re planning to sail across the Atlantic, whereas developing the skills to understand and discover such facts (e.g. mastering the scientific method) will better secure access to numerous valuable facts down the road even when the benefits of doing so are not immediately apparent. In each of these illustrations, the latter element (a cultivated orchard, or the mastery of scientific method) constitutes a greater and more lasting form of power though they are far more difficult to obtain. As implied in the quote by Malcom X above, freedom is a basic or essential good, the central importance and fecundity of which justifies the sacrifices needed to secure it. It is a primary good that makes possible the acquisition of innumerable additional goods that would otherwise have a diminished value in its absence. A printing press in East Germany in 1963 may be structurally identical one in London at the same historical period. But the worth of such a good (and a printing press is certainly a valuable object) is determined as much (if not more so) by the social conditions in which it is employed (freedom of the press, in particular) as by the material or functional qualities the object independently entails. Likewise, freedom is not the sort of good that can be secured through this or that discrete act. It is a state of being that presumes duration and requires the careful cultivation of mutual trust and respect within a complex social setting where the interests and goals of distinct individuals may be in tension or conflict. It requires taking care of our relationships with others, building cultural norms and institutions capable of resisting those who would trade it away for some short term interest. Familiar debates where liberty is balanced against security interests are a case in point. In other words, working for freedom is more akin to cultivating an orchard than to acquiring an apple. Achieving freedom is more akin to developing the scientific method than to securing this or that useful fact or technological gadget. Likewise, genuine power in this respect, depends on establishing those social conditions and relations of trust and respect conducive to the security and endurance of the long-term interests of those who wield it. So the questions of whether violence is more effective (or “works better”) than nonviolence rests on whether one or the other is more likely to achieve such conditions. Discussions of strategy, whether of a violent or nonviolent nature, boil down to how best to secure and wield power. The most persistent challenge foisted upon proponents of nonviolent action is the claim, or rather, uncritical assumption, that in many (perhaps most) cases, the use of nonviolence is at best a naïve chimera, at worst a dangerous utopian fantasy. The conventional “wisdom” is that you can’t defeat a ruthless and determined adversary with moral pleading. Hitler, Stalin, and the leaders of ISIS will not join in your refrain of Kumbaya. More modest skeptics simply state that, though nonviolence is certainly morally preferable, perhaps even indispensable when confronting a more-or-less liberal- minded foe (such as the British in the struggle for Indian independence or the U.S. government in the struggle for Civil Rights for ethnic minorities) but it just won’t work in situations where the powerful are willing to use ruthless tactics like torture or the unrestrained murder of civilians. Such claims are often accompanied by a litany of familiar (though highly selective) illustrative historical cases of brutal and tyrannical regimes that employed repression and unrestrained violence upon their adversaries, both imagined and real. But a more careful examination of history will show the matter is not so clear cut as such illustrations imply. As some of the authors included in this chapter (e.g. Gene Sharp, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan) point out, the record is not so clearly in favor of violence in such cases. When we consider whether a strategy will “work,” we should take care to analyze the goals that are sought, as well as the full range of costs and benefits implied by competing approaches. The view that violence “works” is often corrupted by the way in which the concept of power is conceived. It is also often distorted by a failure to clarify the ends a violent campaign is claimed to promote along with a selective and partial accounting of the effects violent means incur in a given case. This combination of uncritical analysis often leads what logicians refer to a false dichotomy, where the assertion that something is better than another fails to adequately account for plausible alternatives. Surely, there are cases where violence might be preferable to moral pleading. But as Sharp makes plain, this is hardly a justification for violence, as nonviolence, properly conceived, is neither passive, nor reducible to mere protest or moral pleading. One might say, for example, violent resistance is certainly better than simply conceding to an oppressive regime, and this would be correct insofar as it goes. But an honest assessment, one genuinely aimed at discovering what one ought to do in the face of oppression, must consider whether violence is a more effective means than nonviolence in developing genuine power. As Deming notes above, and many of the authors in this chapter would heartily agree, the full potential of nonviolence has not yet been determined. Gene Sharp has identified at least 198 distinct methods of nonviolent defiance and more are being developed every day. Until we come to appreciate the full scope of nonviolent methods available to us, it is fallacious to claim that violence works better than nonviolence.3 Violence has the benefit of showing immediate and often dramatic results. The effects of “successful” violence are readily apparent in the short term, an enemy is eliminated or suffers some harm. Violence can certainly harness a form of power (destructive power) that, when “successful,” will bring harm and fear to one’s enemies. But what is true of those who wield this form of power is no less true of their adversaries. After all, it seems clear that in cases of successful violence, at least one of the competitors in some contest must lose, i.e. that violence can only work (at most) half of the time. And as several of the authors in this chapter make plain (e.g.