One way to interpret Thidwick is as a cautionary tale to the effect that we can be complicit in our own oppression. When the Bingle Bug invites the Tree-Spider to move in, he claims that Thidwick won’t mind. Thidwick acquiesced, even though he apparently did mind. How often do we acquiesce to encroachments on our freedoms because of perceived obligations that in reality are nonconsensual and thus nonexistent? Contrast Thidwick’s predicament with that of Horton the elephant in Horton Hatches the Egg: Horton is taken advantage of by Mayzie, to be sure, but Horton did agree to take care of her egg. He feels he must honor an agreement he voluntarily made, even if it’s true that Mayzie is irresponsible. Thidwick, on the other hand, never agreed to give rides to any of the creatures who came after the Bingle Bug. Thidwick’s tale reminds us that we are self-owners and that we cannot acquire property nonconsensually. It also reminds us that we sometimes forget this and allow others to encroach on our freedoms. As Mack the turtle notes in opposition to King Yertle, “We, too, should [and do] have rights” (Yertle).4
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Rebellion in Sala-ma-Sond:
The Social Contract and a
Turtle Named Mack
Ron Novy
So Yertle, the Turtle King, lifted his hand
And Yertle, the Turtle King, gave a command.
He ordered nine turtles to swim to his stone
And, using these turtles, he built a new throne. (Yertle)
From atop his nine-turtle stack King Yertle claims dominion over all he looks down upon: “Oh, the things I now rule! I’m king of a cow! And I’m king of a mule” (Yertle). With two hundred more piled on, he proclaims, “I’m king of the butterflies! King of the air! Ah, me! What a throne! What a wonderful chair!” (Yertle). He estimates that by adding just a few turtles more (well, 5,607 turtles more), he will be king of the moon as well. But from below the growing pile of his fellow citizens, a plain little turtle named Mack cries out,
Your Majesty, please . . . I don’t like to complain,
But down here below, we are feeling great pain.
I know up on top you are seeing great sights,
But down at the bottom we, too, should have rights. (Yertle)
It does not end well for King Yertle. He ignores the pleas of his subjects, and a revolt—a revolting burp anyway—brings down the great throne of unhappy turtles with a violent shake. Revolting against a government is a serious thing, so how might we justify the overthrow of King Yertle?
A Turtle’s Life: Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short
If a covenant be made wherein neither of the parties perform presently, but trust one another . . . it is void: but if there be a common power set over them both, with right and force sufficient to compel performance, it is not void.
—Thomas Hobbes1
So why is Yertle king and Mack his subject? One of the oldest and most popular explanations for how we came together in civil society is called “the social contract.” While social contract theory varies as much as social contract theorists do, at its heart the social contract claims that for a government to legitimately rule requires that it have the consent of those who are to be governed. This consent is codified by their entering into literal or implicit contracts with one another to create that civil society.
Imagine a time lost in the mists of history before turtles lived together in little turtle tribes or big turtle nations—a time of not quite enough food and too few livable ponds, a time with not enough resources for all turtles to thrive. Since the turtles are all more-or-less equal in needs and abilities—for instance, they all need the same sorts of things to eat and have the same sort of capacity to find food—there is conflict; as philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) puts it, “They are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man [or turtle] against every man [or turtle].”2 Despite living in this state of war—what Hobbes calls “the state of nature”—like us all proper turtles desire to live well and to avoid death, servitude, and things similarly unpleasant. As reasoning and reasonable creatures, each of the turtles recognizes that avoidance of death—a distinct possibility in the war of all against all—and a chance at thriving—which is impossible due to this struggle—may be accomplished by making an agreement with one’s neighbors: a contract in which they agree to treat each other in certain ways, say, to share access to the delicious cattail roots at the north end of the pond, and not in others, say, to not raid one another’s earthworm supply.
Having an agreement among the parties is fine and good so far as it goes in expressing our desires, but given Hobbes’s assumption that all turtles are and can only be self-interested, such agreements will hold only so long as each of the turtle contractors benefits satisfactorily from the arrangement—after all, trust can only get a turtle so far. Without some sort of mechanism that can punish a turtle who fails to keep to her agreements, the combination of scarcity and the turtle’s self-interested nature will lead to conflict over resources and so a return to the state of nature. In this time before government, “there is no place for industry . . . no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man [or turtle] is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”3
Yet each individual recognizes that a state of war with her neighbors is undesirable and puts her own life at risk; and so, she comes together with those neighbors to form a social contract—an agreement regarding how each is to treat the other contractors and the creation of a “sovereign,” an entity that can enforce the agreement. Basically, the contractors grant the sovereign permission to punish them if they violate the agreement. With the ability to trust that your neighbor will not kill you in your sleep or steal your earthworm stash, the contractors can direct their energies toward living well and accumulating goods. In this way, our rational self-interest requires acceptance of the social contract; and, with this decision to submit to the authority of a sovereign, civil society is born.
For Hobbes, this sovereign must be an absolute authority to ensure the survival of society and so also its individual member turtles. To leave any power with the citizenry, Hobbes argues, is to give those with that power the ability to abuse the contract and their fellow citizens. Given the choice of abiding by the social contract or returning to the state of nature, no rational turtle would choose to abandon the contract and so willingly accepts rule by an absolute sovereign. A proper king, therefore, is necessary to secure and enforce the social contract. But a proper king does so to the benefit of those who created and granted power to the sovereign. If a king only rules for his benefit, if he neglects the welfare of his subjects, then as Bartholomew Cubbins would so elegantly put it, “He’s no king at all” (Oobleck). The contract exists for our benefit, and the king exists to enforce it. And for Hobbes, this seems to work out pretty well.
Brussels Sprouts for All
Imagine turtle life in the state of nature: each turtle at war with every other, no law, no commerce, no public works, no libraries, no Internet, no fun. Suppose that Terri the turtle and her neighbor Arthur both really love Brussels sprouts, but only Terri is doing something about it: she has planted a garden. She tends the young plants for months until they are ready for harvesting. Arthur sees his chance, and late one evening he tiptoes into the field and takes all the yummy green orbs he can carry. Something that—while not very nice—isn’t illegal, there is, after all, no civil society and so no law to violate. When Terri wakes she sees that her months of hard work are for naught and pledges to never commit so much of her time and resources to a project from which she can’t be sure she’ll benefit. Arthur feasts; Terri does not.
Suppose instead that Terri and Arthur have decided to pool their resources to raise the Brussels sprouts garden and to split the harvest between them. As the harvest approaches, can Terri be sure Arthur won’t turn on her and take the whole crop for himself? After all, there is nothing guaranteeing either of them will abide by their agreement. Recogn
izing the possibility of betrayal, late one night, Terri sneaks into Arthur’s house with a shovel and wallops him until he is dead. Terri feasts; Arthur does not.
Or imagine instead that Terri and Arthur each plant a private Brussels sprouts patch. Arthur is quite muscular and tills the ground extraordinarily well. Terri isn’t quite so strong, so her plot is less well tilled. On the other hand, Terri is very experienced with keeping worms and other creepy-crawlies away from her plants, while Arthur hasn’t a clue about this, so Arthur’s plants are a bit scraggly and sickly. They both recognize that if they could combine their abilities, each would have a much better chance at a garden full of delectable little green cabbages. Each one’s inability to do everything needed to ensure a good harvest fails to maximize the Brussels sprouts yield of either harvest. If only they could trust one another enough to combine their efforts, they’d be wading in a sea of vegetables.
What if they could trust each other? What if there was a mechanism that would punish Terri or Arthur for breaking their agreement to pool their resources? This is the social contract in a nutshell: an agreement between parties regarding how they will interact with one another, and a mechanism—the sovereign—for punishing violators of that agreement. In this case, neither Terri nor Arthur will end up with all of the Brussels sprouts, but also neither turtle will end up with none at all. Instead, they each get some of what they want and without the risk of being killed or hoodwinked in the process. In this way, rationality and self-interest work together to encourage individuals to join together in a social contract.
However, on occasion, the sovereign created by the social contract—King Yertle in the case of Sala-ma-Sond—may overstep his bounds by acting against the citizens’ interests, the protection of which is the whole point of the sovereign’s existence. When Mack appeals to the king, telling Yertle that he and his fellow turtles are starving, he is rebuffed:
“You hush up your mouth!” howled the mighty King Yertle.
“You’ve no right to talk to the world’s highest turtle.
I rule from the clouds! Over land! Over sea!
There’s nothing, no, NOTHING, that’s higher than me!” (Yertle)
This is a problem for Mack: what to do with a tyrannical sovereign. When the sovereign no longer serves the end for which he was created, can you overthrow him? What are the moral reasons one might give for revolution? To address these questions, it may be helpful to turn to that philosopher who was so influential for our own revolutionary history.
To Protect (the Private Property of) Turtles
Men being . . . by Nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this Estate and subjected to the Political Power of another, without his own Consent.
—John Locke4
John Locke (1632–1704) imagines quite a different world prior to the formation of civil society. Unlike Hobbes’s state of nature as a “war of all against all,” Locke imagines a state of nature without the conflict induced by scarcity—a state in which individuals have the “freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions . . . without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.”5 In Sala-ma-Sond this means that each turtle is free to live without the interference of others regarding her “life, health, liberty, or possessions.”6 In this era before the social contract, we are bound together not by political structures (which only come into existence with the social contract) but by an innate morality and voluntary agreements. Nonetheless, the state of nature, for Locke, “is not a state of license; though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it.”7
The opportunity for conflict in Locke’s state of nature is pretty much limited to disputes over property. The problem is that there is no authority to which to appeal if we feel we’ve been wronged. So each of us must seek equity on our own terms. As the parties involved are unlikely to agree regarding what one owes the other, it risks a long-running tit-for-tat feud or even violence. By contracting together to create a civil government, the turtles gain a standardized measure and method for property disputes.
But why is private property so important for Locke? Locke held that the earth was given to all of us for our subsistent use—essentially the earth is a commons to be used by all. Nature’s raw material becomes a turtle’s private property once that material has been mixed with that turtle’s labor—this land becomes hers in the act of tilling, that fruit becomes his by the act of collecting it, etc.8 As indicated above, this labor theory of value is not unlimited—taking more than one’s fair share is theft from the rest of turtlekind. For Locke, this understanding of individuals as proprietors with private property in need of protection is the drive to escape the state of nature and the creation of civil society. We have a natural right to our property and thus need a means to secure it against others.
Civil society then is created via the social contract, but it is a contract designed for the protection of private property, and thus our natural rights. Each contractor surrenders the right to individually protect herself and to individually pursue transgressions and instead places that power in the state creating “one body politic,”9 in which each member is subject to the will of the majority. With government, the contractors gain a set of laws, judges to adjudicate disputes, and an executive power to enforce those laws. But unlike Hobbes—for whom the formation of the social contract was a one-off event—Locke leaves open the possibility of tearing up the contract. Given that the state was established as a means of protection, if it were to fail to provide for the contractors’ lives, liberty, and property, the contractors have a right—perhaps even an obligation—to replace it with a new contract. Yertle has long since given up promoting or respecting the denizens of Sala-ma-Sond’s rights. He is no king at all but a morally bankrupt tyrant, and thus ought to be overthrown. According to Locke,
Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience. . . . [Authority] devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.10
Mack has the right idea; it is time to be rid of King Yertle. But what ought to replace him? What principles of government would best represent all turtle interests? Surely, Mack wants to respect his fellow turtles and their freedom. He doesn’t merely want a new king, or to be king himself. Mack is about justice, isn’t he?
Free and Rational Turtles
There is only one innate right, freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with universal law.
—Immanuel Kant11
For Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), rational individuals have an innate freedom—a freedom, it turns out, that can only be preserved within civil society. “Freedom” means something very specific for Kant: the right to choice; that is, to deliberative actions. To speak of “rights,” then, is to speak of actions that have an influence over the choices of other rational beings. In this way, the interest of the state isn’t so much the welfare of its citizens but rather to guarantee the largest possible amount of self-determination for its citizens. In a sense then, the worst thing that can be done to a rational individual is to make decisions for her; that is, to infantilize her. As Kant puts it, “Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law.”12 So, individual freedom of action amounts to a lack of constraint imposed by the choices of others.
The state then acts to constrain choices only if not doing so would result in constraining the choices of others. As such, the state is a necessary condition for—and a means to—securing freedom.
As we are equally free, we are equally subject to the laws of (and opportunities in) the state. The social contract then captures restrictions upon actions available to the state; or, as Kant puts it, the sovereign must “give his laws in such a way that they could have arisen from the united will of a whole people and to regard each subject, insofar as he wants to be a citizen, as if he has joined in voting for such a will.”13 So, it’s reason that establishes the social contract, such that no law may come to pass that “a whole people could not possibly give its consent to.”14 On the one hand, consider a law granting access to Sala-ma-Sond’s library only to turtles with striped shells: such a law would be unjust as it would be irrational for those without stripes to accept fewer privileges for themselves. On the other hand, imagine a law establishing a tax to build that library. Assuming that the tax is administered equitably, it would be just. Even if a particular turtle objects to financing library construction, it may be being built for legitimate reasons known to the state but not to that individual. That is, if the rational citizen did have full knowledge of the project, she would give her consent.
While the state embodies the social contract as it does with Locke and Hobbes, for Kant the contract is not an instrumental thing resulting from the voluntary, self-interested deal making of individuals. Instead, the agreement is the result of our recognizing the necessary environment for our freedom. In this way, right itself is the basis of the social contract.
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