A Theory of Racial Harmony, by Alvin Rabushka
Havender, William R.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "A Theory of Racial Harmony, by Alvin Rabushka" There is all the space and resonance in the world. We read Blake, and compare him with Mailer, read Mary Wollstonecraft and compare her with Doris Lessing, read Godwin and compare him with Paul...
...What are the differing properties of political vs...
...More important, Hecht isable to put the affair in perspective, observing that Fowler "was baffled by the fact that writers such as Hemingway...and Faulkner...
...ax" of a mother did everything in her power to separate them...
...your mind will be changed in the early 1980's, when the electric power begins to run out...
...and further, that we should not simplistically extrapolate from homogeneous to pluralist polities assumptions about the proper roles of government...
...He was a brawling, boozing, lady-killing rake with a genius for high living and hearty laughing...
...Or India...
...This means that the consequences of losing a political contest are much more likely to be damaging than those of losing out in a market competition...
...But however popular, this is an uninteresting solution from the perspective of political theory, because it evades the question of real consequence, namely, what are the political structures that could make it possible to unite diverse groups within a single polity...
...BOOK REVIEW The Life and Legend of Gene Fowler H. Allen Smith / William Morrow and Co...
...this gives his nondiscriminatory competition an opportunity to raise its profits at his expense...
...For if Rabushka is right in his contention that there is aclose connection between the risk of racial and ethnic confrontation and the level of governmental control over economic activity, then the institution of a Marxist government would encourage that state's descent into racial tyranny or civil war...
...Too, the loss of a few market "votes" does not have the same all-or-none consequence for the achievement of ethnically conditioned purposes, so that there is no comparable urgency to gather strays back into the herd...
...More serious are the problems in Smith's account of our hero's romancing of a Colorado debutante...
...10.00 Frank Bolger Agreat brooding rustic giant, Gene Fowler tramped down from the Denver mountains and into the American panorama in the second decade of this century...
...When the excited columnist bellowed threats of going to Mr...
...Perhaps the officers' wives at West Point sweep their own perspectives...
...What chance, for example, would a religious minority have stood in this sharing of the "spoils" ? How would the system have accommodated the great changes in religious proportions that resulted from immigration and successful proselytization...
...should be hailed as kings of their craft...
...And Rabushka's theory suggestssome historical and political reasons for this comparative success...
...When Mr...
...I look forward to every issue...
...By excluding potential customers (or employees) for noneconomic—i.e., discriminatory—reasons, an employer loses valuable business (or raises his labor costs) and thus lowers his profits...
...and conversely, the greater the scope of "public" intervention in economic activity, the greater the likelihood of group conflict...
...These theoretical considerations argue strongly for Rabushka's thesis that the more functions are handled by market exchanges, the less will be the potential for group frustration and discord...
...Instead, it was wisely agreed to separate religion totally from government: Such questions would not be a matter for political decision at all, "majority rule" or no...
...Fifth, competitive markets tend to reward participants on the basis of economic productivity, and therefore contain built-in incentives that counteract discrimination...
...Fowler retreated one night to the shores of Fire Island, struck a match, and made a bonfire of his work...
...By contrast, the best way to ease racial tensions, as Rabushka teaches us, is to administer a healthy dose of classical liberalism...
...To put it more pointedly: The best way to quell ethnic fires is to remove from the political arena the critical areas of social confrontation, and to place them squarely in the domain of voluntary arrangements...
...Similarly, there is little hope for a stable and nonrepressive accommodation including all races and all the present territory in Southern Africa that fails to assure political and economic protection for each racial and tribal group...
...Places like Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Switzerland, all of which, as Rabushka shows, have relatively low rates of taxation, relatively laissez-faire economies, and a substantial degree of decentralized community control (especially in Switzerland) over educational, cultural, and religious affairs...
...At work on a Hollywood screenplay, Fowler and a friend were injured in an automobile accident while driving to work...
...But it was himself Fowler ended up doubting, not Hemingway and Faulkner...
...As biography this book is far from adequate...
...But the most lasting impression of Transatlantic Patterns is of the artistry and delight of Evelyn Waugh—the most anti-American, unhealthy, resolutely reactionary novelist of modern England...
...Because differences in the kinds of goals that people seek are commonly rooted in their cultural or ethnic heritage, ethnicity provides a logical and convenient basis for aggregation into groups for the political attainment of shared goals...
...Stated so baldly, his thesis will doubtless seem simplistic, yet Rabushka supports it with an impressive body of theoretical and empirical argument...
...In contrast, there is by definition no coercion in market transThe American Spectator May 1978 31 actions...
...Send to: that have lately experienced large increments in the level of state economic intrusion (especially of taxation), as witness the truly surprising reemergence of long-dormant Welsh and Scottish nationalism in Great Britain, or of French nationalism in Canada...
...Those who read the completed manuscript thought it was splendid, but the book was never published...
...And it threatens to occur any day between the French and English in Canada, the Moslems and Christians in Lebanon, the Serbs and Croats in Yugoslavia, and the whites and blacks of South Africa...
...The Great Plutonium Scare" and "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear" have changed my mind...
...The Last Of The Bison," as Ring Lardner dubbed Fowler, was not one to brook stuffiness and pomposities...
...He capped off his volley by instructing a copyboy to look over the column and try to "put it in English...
...In actuality, the details of the political bargain struck between ethnic communities is of the utmost importance if "majority rule" is not to devolve into majority oppression, with attendant civil war, partition, mass emigration—and even genocide...
...Or that the answer to the world's ills is the de-industrialization of America...
...If Pulitzer prizes were given on an unbiased basis to outspoken and authoritative journals, one would certainly be given to ACCESS TO ENERGY...
...First and most important,political action necessarily entails action in large groups...
...ut if Smith's run through the life of .0 Gene Fowler is meager biography, it is a glorious succession of robust and hilarious anecdotes—from an account of schoolboy Fowler's revenge on a beer pilferer by one day refilling an empty bottle of beer with a substance of similar coloration from nature's own nozzle, to a chronicle of his wild excursion into Movieland...
...Or put another way, the risks of the market are considerably smaller than the risks of politics...
...More than that, it is fun to read...
...Green is a decent critic when he puts aside his dot cricket and settles down to the set book...
...These limits will vary in societies with differing degrees of ethnic heterogeneity...
...He went on to advise Miss Parsons that she didn't "need to be a bitch about this thing...
...Smith likewise alludes to Fowler's lifelong obsession with Egypt, but doesn't bother to trace its manifestations throughout his career, most notably in his writings...
...That was how they found her...
...Mrs.V.A., Sheboygan, Wisc...
...Please enter my subscription for the newsletter...
...Because we are good enough to have the volume: Our circulation exceeds 2,500 copies, many of them read by hundreds of readers...
...On the American intellectual scene such sweeps of perspective come more naturally than they do on the British scene...
...To that end he collected, sifted, and finally set down on paper the story of a notorious Denver madam who, reputedly, had bedded some of the most colorful figures of an era that spanned several decades, from frontier outlaws to latter-day eminentoes...
...By extension, it is easy to visualize a similar potential for group contention in a host of other areas that governments traditionally control: setting tax policy, enforcing the law, distributing government jobs (this is especially significant if the government has nationalized most of the economy), determining the foreign alliances entered into, and so forth...
...Join the Sierra Club...
...either the PLO knows not at all, or else knows very well, the opportunities for the exploitation of a minority that are implicit in unlimited "majority rule...
...Paul, Minn...
...Could I not carry out a somewhat similar exercise if I attended church at West Point and compared the officers' wives there with my own circle of perspective-sweepers, who at the drop of a hat compare Martin Green with Susan Sontag and Walter Matthauwith Walter Benjamin and Indira Gandhi with Benny Goodman...
...Having received an advance to produce a book, Fowler holed himself up for thirty days, and the result was an autobiographical novel entitled Trumpet In The Dust, published several months after his fortieth birthday...
...The main insight we gain, then, for dealing with the real problem of ethnic conflict is that we no longer should ask how we can tinker and cobble together an "equitable" partition between communities of the control of public affairs—"two governorships for you, one generalship for us, three ministries for...
...column Sensing the News ACCESS TO ENERGY is the best single concise.source of up-to-the-minute facts — facts to confound the anti-science, anti-technology, anti-free enterprise demagogy of the eco-freak doom-criers...
...In contrast, we find high amounts of communal dissension in societies with a sizeable degree of state economic intervention, such as South Africa, Rhodesia, Ethiopia, Burma, the Philippines, Cyprus, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Spain, Belgium, and Northern Ireland...
...the losers are necessarily coerced into accepting the result (the "majority" does, after all, "rule...
...It only costs $9 to give it a try for one year...
...I was never anything but a half-assed wag...
...Paine's essays lead us to reflect on the absence of any equivalent in the McGovern campaign...
...Technologically informed, he consistently explains the technical aspects into understandable English...
...This is a simple enough piety in a country like Sweden, but in ethnically varied countries seriously divisive questions commonly arise...
...This feature is all the more compelling when one considers how low the probability is of a small ethnic minority ever winning a political contest...
...Green'swork has achieved a certain celebrity...
...But it is not because of these modest literary apercus that Mr...
...All persons would be equally free to join any confession they wished, or none, without the power to coerce others...
...We are informed that Fowler and Damon Runyon were no better than friendly enemies for much of their lives, but the matter is not pursued in depth, and the author's only explanation of their mutual enmity is that Fowler resented playing the rube to Runyon's worldly sage (somewhat inconsistent with Smith's assertion that Fowler was constantly in quest of a father image...
...The American Spectator May 1978 33 And lastly, we can see how foolish it is for us to disregard the Marxist leanings of the "liberation" movements in Africa, Palestine, and elsewhere...
...Which "national" literature should be studied...
...For the PLO has uttered not one word concerning the guarantees against undue governmental encroachments against one or the other community that alone could make such a polity feasible...
...J. B.C., Beaumont, Tex...
...Rabushka's theory also sheds light on the distribution of intercommunal discord in other parts of the world...
...Leavis' classroom, and he is in for a nasty rap over the knuckles if the Doctor catches up with him...
...Or Belgium...
...This might have been handled by setting up a political condominium that would have raised money for all faiths through taxation, and divided the money between them for church buildings, schools, and operations, much as in Germany or Holland today...
...These are serious questions that in their nature have no single right answer, yet it is precisely single answers that one risks getting as the outcome of a political face-off...
...From the hospital Fowler wired his agent promising "ten per cent of my cuts...
...We find also that ethnic disharmony has recently increased in old pluralist societies 32 The American Spectator May 1978 Run the USA on chicken manure...
...That is, social domains that in relatively homogeneouscountries can be peacefully mediated through political mechanisms may become arenas of serious ethnic contention when so governed in heterogeneous societies...
...Therefore, the independent action of individuals in markets results in group boundaries becoming diffuse and indistinct...
...We have, after all, the example of the United States, which by comparison with these other nations has been amazingly successful at this very task...
...Smith reluctantly fingers Ring Lardner as the villain...
...A special feature of this process is that, since a political contest can be wholly won or lost by only a small number of votes, the marginal return for securely marshalling even the last, most reluctant supporters within one or the other ethnopolitical camp can be huge...
...but instead how we can practicably reduce the scope of that government's activities so that no group could feel threatened by it no matter who ran it...
...The ultimate extreme in setting such limits is, of course, the total partition of the various communities...
...This is the solution that is most often embraced: by the Turks and Greeks on Cyprus, the Jews and the Arabs, the Muslims and Hindus of colonial India, the Bengali and Urdu speakers of former Pakistan, the Catholics and Protestants of Ireland and elsewhere...
...It is clear, then, that the simple incantation of "majority rule" is in no way sufficient to insure equitable and amicable racial or ethnic consociation...
...But the device has, by and large, worked: It did achieve its intention of permitting citizens to attain a diversity of religious ends while minimizing conflict between them...
...And while you're at it you can tell Mr...
...The market, on the other hand, permits people to act as individual agents in setting and attaining their goals...
...Now, Mr...
...That this belief can be so ubiquitous, recurring independently, like the law of gravity, in countries that otherwise differ vastly in race, language, history, religion, and industrial advancement compels the observer to examine with care its source and nourishment, for there may be some crucial flaw in our concept of democracy that engenders racial and ethnic conflict...
...Ad hoc ways could no doubt have been found to cope with the rigidities of the system, but only with recurring crises...
...While ethnic conflict was not really a burning question in this country in 1776, religious differences certainly were...
...Bolstered by liquor, Fowler proceeded to the top floor where he "would put his life down as a chip and gamble for it...
...Fowler soon left the Denver scene for New York City and a job with the 34 The American Spectator May 1978...
...The attainment of the ends of the majority thus in no way precludes minorities from pursuing their ends as well...
...Green is an inattentive student, prone to daydream and play hookey from Dr...
...Too, we can immediately perceive the shallowness—the arrant insincerity of Yasir Arafat's "dream" of a secular state of both Arabs and Jews...
...it is likely that many areas of societal action that we in the West reflexively expect national governments to direct (such as taxation, economic policy, and perhaps even law enforcement) will have to be left, not to the random mercies of "majority rule," but to some kind of local community control...
...It seems that Fowler, whose admiration for Lardner was boundless, showed the ms...
...Too, how a citizen interacted with his government—in access to public education, to government jobs, to the protection of the courts, etc.—would not be a function of his religion...
...COMMENTARY Issue after issue, [the editor] cuts through the simplified thinking of the mass media...
...He says apt and original things about Evelyn Waugh and William Dean Howells and Mark Twain and particularly about Kingsley Amis, whose unease and change of politics Green charts with sympathy, partly because he shares Amis' early allegiance to the English moralistic Left of Leavis and Raymond Williams...
...If so, our newsletter is not for you...
...Beckmann cuts through ecology cant and propaganda with style as well as substance...
...Third, single "ends," those of the winners, tend to prevail in political contests, whereas in market actions a diversity of ends can be simultaneously accommodated...
...The peppery, often acidly humorous Access to Energy blends science and technology with political reality...
...Once more, Hecht's version differs...
...Hecht has both parents strenuously opposing the relationship, with Fowler nobly bowing out upon being presented by the father with an emotionally loaded set of alternatives...
...In another instance, Smith refers to Fowler's dilemma over covering an assignment while Grandma Wheeler, the woman who had raised him (his father skipped out before his birth), lay dying...
...Fourth, political power is concentrated, while market power is highly decentralized...
...Whether race and ethnicity rather than marginal productivity become the basis of allocation and reward will duly reflect the regnant political balance of the moment...
...And here, the doubts about his qualifications will not go away...
...CONSERVATIVE DIGEST A witty and profoundly informative newsletter...
...And how should birth control be presented in Northern Ireland...
...Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, the Sudan, Sri Lanka, Trinidad, and Guyana are conspicuous examples...
...Perhaps they all gather round after morning service and compare Dwight D. Eisenhower with Doris Lessing and James Bond with Simone de Beauvoir...
...It accepts no advertising, subsidies, contributions, grants or dips into taxpayers' money...
...The more a society is guided by political rather than by market processes, the more its ethnic groups must contend with each other (even if only in self-defense) to prevent the "keys to the kingdom" from passing into the hands of rivals...
...It is because of his larger claims as a polemical historian of culture...
...Access to Energy has been published every month since September 1973, when (6 weeks before the Arab embargo) it offered bumperstickers Make America an Arab Sheikdom...
...Do you believe an industrial giant can be run on sunbeams, summer breezes, fumaroles and chicken manure...
...if you believe in feudal energy sources, you will be much happier reading Ralph Nader's harangues or Amory Lovins' fantasies...
...Its only income are subscription fees: YOU ARE THE ONE who will not renew if it isn't good enough...
...Renew our subscription for ten (10) years...
...Thanks for the bright spot...
...Hecht's memoir also recounts a love-sick Fowler departing for a downtown hotel with "only one thought in his head—suicide...
...But the same enterprises, when run by governments, are shielded from both effective competition and the prospect of economic loss as a consequence of practicing discrimination, and hence have no such automatic incentives...
...A few pages later, the author bumps her off parenthetically...
...What should the language of instruction be in French Canada...
...Should anything happen to prevent you from publishing ACCESS TO ENERGY prior to 1985, you owe us no refunds, as we have already received our money's worth many, many times over...
...0 BOOK REVIEW A Theory of Racial Harmony Alvin Rabushka / University of South Carolina Press / $5.95 William R. Havender However unjust the present regimes of Southern Africa, it is sad that their opponents should chant so ritualistically for "majority rule," without a word about the special problems of associating within a single polity two or more disparate societal groups...
...Since then, it has become an influential journal, widely quoted, widely read and, yes, widely resented, too...
...Or in a "secular" Palestine, concerning Herzl...
...It follows that the single most important step in reducing intercommunal conflicts is finding the proper limits for the scope of governmental activity...
...Take public education as an example...
...Fowler, he writes, was worried that people might get the wrong idea: "I don't want to enter the literary world as an expert on whorehouses...
...What is most convincing, he distinguishes the political mode of social allocation and decision-making from the voluntary exchange, or market, process, and suggests that the political resolution of social questions which could otherwise be handled by the market vastly raises the probability of ethnic and racial confrontation...
...It is a striking feature of communal conflict in these many lands that the combatant groups share the same perception of government: They all regard its control as far too vital to their own security William R. Havender is a free-lance writer living in Berkeley, California...
...The trouble is that through the cracked and dusty classroom window he could see brightly painted butterflies dancing outside—the Brides-head Beauty and, most entrancing of all, the giant Nabokov fritillary...
...But if you are interested in the latest scientific and technological developments in the energy field, and in the economic and ideological background of energy issues, then we invite you to subscribe to ACCESS TO ENERGY A pro-science, pro-technology, pro-free enterprise monthly newsletter Access to Energy is edited and published by Dr Petr Beckmann, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, independently of the University or any other institution...
...Perhaps not...
...That balance can easily shift, of course, and the consequences for ethnic groups that move out of political favor can be dire indeed...
...to the prudish author, who advised him to destroy it...
...Above all, he was one of the best reporters in the Golden Age of American journalism, though he modestly deflected such praise during his romp across the continent snapping, "Forget it...
...80306 Enter my subscription at $9 per year (12 monthly issues) beginning with the current month...
...C. H., Lafayette, La...
...Participation is voluntary, and contacts and exchanges do not take place except when each participant judges himself better off as a result...
...Second, coercion is an essential part of any less-than-unanimous political action...
...Hearst that I called him a son of a bitch for turning such a bitch as you loose on this town...
...And this same paradigm could account as well for the exacerbation of racial and ethnic tensions, leading in some cases to civil war or mass emigration, in former colonies which in the process of obtaining their independence exchanged a relatively benign and noninterventionist colonial government for one or another flavor of state socialism...
...We read Blake, and compare him with Mailer, read Mary Wollstonecraft and compare her with Doris Lessing, read Godwin and compare him with Paul Goodman, and so on...
...and, best of all, none would be taxed...
...When Louella Parsons, the imperious tattletale and Hearst favorite, demanded to know what right Fowler had, as managing editor of the Hearst-owned Daily News, to be "butchering her stuff," Fowler fired back, "I do it because you are totally and incurably illiterate...
...One need only glance around the world, however—at Ireland, Cyprus, Lebanon, Palestine, Ethiopia, Nigeria, the Indian subcontinent, Malaysia, Uganda, even Canada and Belgium—to see the manifest untruth of this belief...
...D.O.H., St...
...But if you wish to improve your knowledge and powers of decision making, Access to Energy may be for you...
...its chances of attaining its ends through the market are far better...
...A. Harrigan in synd...
...Yet—I hesitate to interrupt the sweeping —is the contrast, well, quite fair...
...E.B., Beaverton, Ore...
...Accused at one point of being too wordy and flowery in his prose, Fowler began the story of a murder, "Dead...
...This tells us that lasting serenity within the present borders and with the present populations of Northern Ireland, or of Lebanon, cannot be brought about by any number of televised peace marches by Joan Baez, but only by political reform that identifies the specific areas where the groups pose a political menace to each other, and removes this threat by delegating those government functions to the respective religious groups...
...There is, therefore, a strong incentive to sharpen ethnic boundaries whenever group "ends" must be sought through political mechanisms...
...Indeed, from the dearth of debate about this topic one might easily infer that it makes no difference what kinds of governmental structures emerge in Rhodesia and South Africa: that as long as the outcome is consonant with "majority rule" the particular arrangements are but clerical details best left to pragmatic negotiation between experienced diplomats...
...Cultural Watchdog Newsletter Can't wait to read it every month...
...Green and his students get to sweeping their perspectives, they really sweep 'em...
...This is the reason for directing your attention to Alvin Rabushka's A Theory of Racial Harmony which, while small and quickly read, throws a lapidary light upon this problem...
...And what prospects would new religions, like Mormonism, have had under such a plan...
...Access to Energy is fiercely independent and beholden to nobody...
...To: Access to Energy Box 2298-AS, Boulder, Colo...
...The father dies, and the mother finally convinces her daughter that wedding a man of such low station would be folly...
...But it is clear that this would have built in problems rather than moderated them...
...a recipe for religious toleration and cooperation this surely was not...
...Fowler cronies recall dozens of such tales, and many swear that somewhere out in the lost and forgotten saloons of the Denver hills there are gin-palace boozers still spinning from the Fowler right-cross...
...Hearst, Fowler cracked, "Go right ahead...
...How come we offer for $9 what others sell for $50 up...
...Or in a unified Cyprus, concerning Makarios...
...LIBERTARIAN REVIEW ACCESS TO ENERGY is a ray of sunshine amidst the gloomy news...
...Democratic politics, after all, is a game of putting together winning coalitions, so that, like it or not, playing it effectively means being associated with a group...
...Which countries with diverse populations enjoy racial and ethnic tranquility...
...There have been, to be sure, some sad exceptions to this practice —for instance, in the long-lived and only recently interred "custom" that a Catholic could not become President—and some frictions in defining just what was to be regarded as a bona fide religion...
...This version differs in several salient ways from the one set down by Fowler's long-time friend, Ben Hecht, in Letters From Bohemia...
...For one thing, he lacks the intellectual stamina...
...I like your forthright style — coming out of the corner with fists flying, without this "yes, yes, but maybe" stuff...
...And how...
...This newsletter is an incisively written tell-it-as-it-is journal that is fast developing a nationwide following...
...Keep swinging...
...What interpretation of history should be inculcated in Rhodesia concerning the veneration (or abomination) of Cecil Rhodes...
...each religious organization would be voluntarily financed...
...Access to Energy does not aim to please everybody...
...The best example of Smith's shortcomings as biographer is his retelling of the Madame Silk episode, One of Fowler's goals had been to publish a book before he reached forty...
...According to Smith, the girl's father gave tacit approval to their courtship, while her "blue-blood battleFrank Bolger is a writer living in South Orange, New Jersey...
...market actions that sustain this proposition...
...Instead, we must be prepared to rethink the functions of governments in ethnically or racially mixed societies, to find structures that, while consonant with "majority rule" in the social domains where this remains appropriate, will limit the political harm that ethnic collectivities can inflict on one another...
...Government seems to be viewed as a dispenser of injury and inequity rather than as a bringer of benefits and justice—except when controlled by one's own clansmen...
...What is more, Smith repeatedly drops hints concerning Fowler that could keep a roomful of Freudians buzzing for twenty years: repressed atmosphere, mother complex, yearning for a father image, a love for children that was "well-nigh psychoneurotic"—all the familiar ravings from the atelier of the professor of Vienna are tossed out, but almost as quickly forgotten...
...Pleasantly soused, facing a heady wind, Fowler stepped out onto the two-foot ledge deciding that if one lap around found him on the cold side of eternity he wouldn't fight it...
...The chronology of events, when dates are mentioned at all, is confusing and frustrating...
...and well-being to risk its passing into the hands of their rivals...
...Rabushka, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, argues that the risk of racial and ethnic antagonisms is greatly reduced in those societies where the role of government in the lives of its citizens is minimized...
...my check is enclosed...
...Any such outcome, it is assumed, would have an equally good chance of achieving peaceful relations between the races within a unitary state...
Vol. 11 • May 1978 • No. 7
