108. HELLER ON POLITICS
Bill Moyers was an outstanding interviewer who was able to get extraordinary people to sit at his table for interviews. In 1988 for public television, Moyers travelled the country interviewing a diverse group of thoughtful people about the ideas that shape our future. Doubleday published the interviews as A World of Ideas, which was edited by Betty Sue Flowers. Three decades later, I find insights from those interviews to be illuminating in our quest for a life that is lived to the potential for which we are ordained. From time to time in TTS CLUES, I will cull from the interviews insights that I think worth pondering today.
For the third in this triptych from Moyer’s interviews, we turn to Catch-22 author, Joseph Heller, to hear what he had to say about the kind of political environment that serves us best. Before that, however, we hear his bias with these words. “Of course, everybody agrees that the quality of our government is not what it should be. But it’s never been much better than it is now, and that could be said of just about every Administration in our history.”
Heller sees two opinions about what constitutes good government. “One, which we might call the traditional or conservative opinion, believes that the government should do more than preserve order and defend against foreign attacks and provide every member of our society, now including blacks and women, with an equal opportunity to advance as far as they can, and if they don’t succeed, to suffer whatever miseries are afflicted upon them … . The second view is that the government has the obligation to promote the general welfare and provide for the economic needs of the people to the extent that it can.”
Moyers: “The founders were aware that the highest role of government at times would be to correct excesses and to prevent bad things from happening.”
Heller: “Yes, but what would be a bad thing?”
Heller: “There’s no other form of government that we can envision that we would prefer to democracy. We would prefer that we had a better class of public officials than we have, that they were more committed to the responsibilities of their office than to the people who financed their coming to office. …
“You know the ideology of democracy is a perfect ideology. The faults come from the human application. There are parochial loyalties in people — ambition, greed, self-interest. People find loopholes to fight for their own ambitions. We all know that a lie is a vice. We know that greed is a vice. We know that patriotism is virtue, provided we can define what patriotism is, and provided there is a national cause which calls upon it.”
“I think that you and I and even professional politicians would agree that an efficient level of government is preferable to an inefficient level. An unselfish Administration is preferable to a selfish Administration. All right-thinking persons would agree on those objectives. The problem we face is how to achieve them.”
Q: What kind of government would you prefer to live in?
