Editorial

...This was the raison d'etre of the World Food Conference, a quasi-political get-together harmless to every inhabitant of this wildly spinning orb except the starving souls who might have been saved...

...Certainly the assembled worthies spent enormous energies maneuvering for hollow titles...

...This would have opened the problem to useful discussion and possibly to intelligent policy decisions...

...As I see it men often come together in political groupings because of a primeval and mysterious instinct that raises their fur at the first whiff of gaud and pomp and pretentious purpose...

...I am motivated neither by perversity nor by cynicism in adding these subtle variations to Mr...

...Surely there must be another reason for men's time-honored need to come together and to stay together in political organization, and after rigorous cerebrations over the dim past and the lurid present I believe I have excogitated a theory of political organization that supplements the stateof-nature political philosophies of men like Hobbes, Locke, and Nixon...

...Governments, which are originally called into being to protect, soon or late threaten...

...Instead after many grunts and shrieks accompanied by a great deal of feasting the conference brought forth thisself-serving resolution to rub elbows again soon...

...Rather I am moved by an unstinting realism, informed by the historical record of some four thousand years of "good government," and by a desire to outline history's most thoughtful explanations for government before I uncork my own addendum...

...According to the press, they quibbled, harangued, and ate...

...They swapped lies about the extent of hunger in other countries or—if it served their prehensile purposes—the extent of the problem in their own progressive, just, and cruelly exploited paradises...

...And the assembled delegates became so distraught at the dimension of world hunger when it was outlined to them at the first morning sessions, that they completely exhausted the cafeteria's supply of plates and silverware within one hour of adjournment...

...And what of the achievements of the Republican Party...

...History is festooned with similar examples, the most recent being the government of Italy which serves no apparent purpose save to allow politicians from the Italian peninsula to gather in a more plush and notable setting...

...They did not attempt to advance civilization one centimeter...

...The menu posted at the conference center offered diners a choice of four kinds of pasta, four kinds of meat, two vegetables, dessert, and wines, beer, mineral water, or cola...

...If governments merely exist to wring taxes from their citizens, how does one explain the existence of the French government, whose tax collectors are met with hot foots and guffaws...

...There are those who do not see things so darkly...

...according to them men come together to form governments so that they might build great cities, construct highways, irrigate fields...

...They devoured vast provenders of Scotch smoked salmon, fettuccine with truffles, steak, prosciutto with melon, and Chateaubriand...

...Admittedly such salutary purposes have occasionally been served, but I am deeply impressed by the fact that it is only a matter of time before every government blooms into an injurious tyranny...

...It is absurd but it is not without its uses, for it proves irrefutably Tyrrell's supplemental theory of political organization...

...They could have admitted that their long-term problems include such intractable obstacles as primitively socialized economies that are in chaos, local customs that are inimical to modern agriculture, and widespread illiteracy that prevents technical development or even birth control...

...Assuredly starvation is one of the cruelest forms of death and, though its frequency might have been exaggerated in recent months, starvation is certainly a calamity deserving organized attention...

...In no time they are milling together and launching sonorities...

...Oh, occasionally there is a useful purpose served, as Hobbes has argued more or less persuasively, but not often...

...Just as randy toms instinctively congregate and wail around a lady Felix domesticus in heat, a certain kind of human being instinctively congregates with his fellows when the air becomes laced with the scent of political purpose...

...It is not only a supplementary explanation for the origins of government but an explanation for why men join together in any political or even quasi-political powwow...

...The unavoidable fact of political history is that men who originally band together to defend themselves, eventually enrich themselves...

...How does one explain the perdurable government of Poland or the comical governments of Italy...

...Yet I suspect that if they are not within reach of present United States policy, a policy that has cost us well over $25 billion in the past twenty years, their fate is sealed...

...I say a certain kind of human being, for from the dawn of civilization many superior individuals have remained blissfully immune to this primitive impulse, and the majority is only mildly susceptible to it...

...Clearly the participants at this fabulous conference did not join together to defend themselves against thugs or to bethug others...

...Hobbes' theory applies here nor any other theory save my own...

...Indeed that was about the only resolution hammered out at these incomparable proceedings...

...Men learned that government not only protected the weak from roving packs of thugs but also allowed the weak to partake of the pleasures and profits of thuggery with comparative impunity: thus, the larval stage of that insidious concept that today's politicoes have powdered and perfumed and christened the welfare state...

...Men gather in these organizations for the same reason they often gather in governments...

...What possible purpose did it serve...

...I suggest Paris...

...And if governments are formed to advance civilization how are we to account for the political contraptions which govern muchof Asia, most of Latin America, all of Africa, and Arkansas...

...and that resolution will only influence the diets of conference participants, for it was resolved that the participants will meet again soon—preferably in a country whose waiters are unstinting with the coffee...

...What of the Rotary, the Modern Language Association, or the Chamber of Commerce...

...Still, as I have said, my theory of political organization not only supplements those theories hatched by Hobbes and his colleagues but it probes beyond...

...Otherwise life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"—a concatenation of epithets curiously suggestive of the names of senior partners at an old Wall Street law firm...

...According to them, they jetted into Rome's international airport to prevent the imminent starvation of five hundred million people in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and sub-Saharan Africa...

...If the problem can be assuaged by political organization or by quasi-political organization, then no time should be wasted in taking the necessary steps to organize and to act...

...Obviously men are not drawn to these organizations to defend themselves from their more savage neighbors or to raise boodle or even—if I may gild the lily—to improve the lot of their fellow man...

...They could have admitted that short-term relief is risky and expensive due to Arab oil profiteering, terrible distribution facilities in their backward countries, and corruption...

...Lunches cost 4000 lira, a princely bill by Italian standards...

...Hobbes' theory...

...They got together motivated by an instinctive need for ontological camaraderie...

...Naturally they chased every unescorted Italian signorina into the countryside, and some chased unescorted fanciulli . They harangued against the niggardliness of that infamous international glutton thathas from 1965 to 1972 provided at least 84 percent of the world's food aid...

...Alas, time is being wasted and time will be wasted until the emergency passes, for neither Mr...

...In short men come together in government so that they might pool their knowledge—so that they might scotch the environment before it scotches them...

...Where libertarian or statist explanations of government grow dubious my theory saves the day...

...During the conference's first press briefing, one of the first questions raised was, "Where do we eat...

...they gather, drawn by their collective unconscious to chatter, to strut, and to loll voluptuously in the body heat of like-minded boors...

...The plumed delegates of the Third World could have admitted that many of their countries have done very little to feed their own poor even when their lands have been fertile...

...The New York Post reported that an international incident ignited when two African delegates, suspecting exploitation at the hands of a conspiracy of Italian waiters, solicited the support of many Third World magnificoes—at issue was the Italian custom of serving only half-filled cups of espresso with the Africans' Danish pastries...

...From this Roman holiday only one resolution issued that will have any immediate influence on human diets...

...Take for instance the Holy Roman Empire of yesteryear...

...They will go the way of colonialism...

...There were offensive reasons...

...Of course once governments were established there accumulated reasons beyond the purely defensive for sticking together...

...But aside from these diplomatic formalities the only accomplishment was one puny resolution...

...The delegates swarmed to Rome for one and only one elemental purpose: to wit, they swarmed together to loll together...

...At any rate, surely these are not the only reasons men form governments...

...What other impulse conduced the representatives of one hundred thirty countries to gather recently at the celebrated World Food Conference...

...But a certain nuisance minority feels primordial quivers and swarms together when what I choose to call political scent is in the air...

...What does the American Association of University Professors accomplish...

...And now my theory can be anointed and sent marching off into the pages of political philosophy along with the thoughts of Hobbes, Locke, and all the other grandees...

...It was mere grandiosity and gas, a haven for the politically aroused of the time...

...If citizens form governments merely to protect themselves from their neighbors how does one explain those governments that have never been able to protect themselves from anyone...

...It is a scent that wafts from our genes, as primitive and inexplicable as the impulse to procreate but not nearly so fruitful...

...It explains the origins not only of political organizations but of quasi-political organizations, hardly any of which ever accomplish anything...