Machan's Musings - Service and Citizenship
by Tibor R. Machan
Once again a famous public figure chimes in with complaints about how America has seen the end of the connection between service and citizenship. I am talking about David M. Kennedy’s op-ed in The New York Times, a recent exercise in finger-wagging if ever there was one.
Let’s just see—must there be a connection between service and citizenship in the first place? Dr. Kennedy, who is a professor of history at Stanford University, believes that service in the military should be coerced, that conscription is best, and that a volunteer military is a mercenary organization.
Those are false alternatives, to begin with—volunteers can be far more dedicated and dutiful than conscripts, regardless of whether they also get paid. Indeed, citizenship is antithetical to a certain kind of service, or servitude. It was prior to the emergence of citizenship—when those living in a country were deemed instead to be its subjects and serfs—that service was big on the agenda for everyone. They were all supposed to serve the king and the upper classes. With the emergence of citizenship came the idea that people lived for their own goals, not those of the king and his buddies.
So, yes, in a sense American society has abandoned the insidious notion that people are to serve the state or monarch or some other self-selected bunch as soldiers (or anything else, for that matter). Sovereignty for everyone means just that: none of us is a conscript to other people and their purposes. But perhaps there is another, more benign sense of service, the disappearance of which is being lamented. I'm not sure, but let’s be charitable—the service Mr. Kennedy may have in mind is helping our fellow human beings when they are in need, being generous, even charitable, to those who are in dire straits. Maybe it’s this that he sees disappearing from American society.
Here is an idea: Maybe the welfare state itself is to blame. After all, when we are taught by our public philosophers that people have a right to public assistance—health care, minimum wages, unemployment compensation, education and so forth—the idea might come across that, as with all rights, all that’s required from everyone is to stand aside. Your right to your life is, after all, something everyone respects by standing aside, by not murdering you. Same with your right to freedom of speech or religion—these require that others to abstain from intrusive conduct.
On the other hand, generosity or charity, and being of service to those who are in need, require of us that we do something for people of our own free will, because we believe it is the right thing to do, and not because they are entitled. I help others not because I am their servant but because I believe I should help them. If I have already been coerced to support all those government entitlement programs, my helpfulness becomes moot.
So, it seems, the change that is undermining service is actually the introduction of that forced service that everyone must be partake in: the welfare state. It is this insidious, coercive program of assistance for all, deserving or not, that has produced the demoralization that manifests itself when people don't go that extra yard to help their needful fellows. And who is to blame for this? The very people, like Mr. Kennedy, who are eager to put us all into the service of others, into what is best called plain old involuntary servitude.
What Mr. Kennedy & Co. do not seem to appreciate is that coercion kills generosity and charity and, yes, service. It substitutes forced taking and labor for free giving. It turns citizens into subjects, people whose own will doesn’t count and who must, instead, bow to the dictates of the government and fork over their resources—not because they are convinced there is a worthy goal to be served, but because a gun is pointed at them and they have no choice but to pony up the resources to fend off that gun.
Is it any wonder that under such a system voluntary help—even voluntary military service—is a bit hard to come by?
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