Hope and the universality of human imperfection
'WE THE people, in order to form a more perfect union. . ." So begins the US Constitution, and so began Senator Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia last week. Those remarks sparked such positive and negative consternation because they broke the cardinal rule of political rhetoric, lifting up a question that can be answered only by a deeper question. Obama's subject was nothing less than the American paradox: The people who long for perfection are themselves imperfect.
In this nation, that imperfection has been permanently manifest by the racial divide, which gave Obama his subject. The imperfections of racism spawned the responses of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, "as imperfect as he may be."
But don't let the imperfections of response outweigh the far graver imperfections of a grotesquely unfair social system. People who benefit from an imperfect power structure speak warmly of love, while those who suffer from it angrily demand justice.
But the deeper question goes to the human condition itself: In our unending quest for a better world, how do we deal with the inevitably flawed character of every society, and of every citizen? How does each of us deal, that is, with the inevitable complicity of our leadership - our preachers, our politicians - in what ails society? How do we deal with our own complicity?
One answer has been denial.
A certain class of people claims to be exempt from the temptations and failings of others. They proclaim their own perfection. This was the subtext of the Eliot Spitzer melodrama - not just that a politician's hypocrisy was exposed, but that the politician had made his name as an antihypocrisy crusader. Spitzer's self-proclaimed moral superiority was the ground to which he fell.
David Paterson, his successor as New York's governor, refused to plant a stake in that ground, making his own acknowledged imperfections irrelevant. Yet Paterson, too, is under pressure now to lead with a public persona that will surely contradict the private truth of a flawed person. Spitzer's fate notwithstanding, a certain hypocrisy comes with politics.
So whether officeholders make the claim or not, it is as if, in order to give them power, citizens must convince themselves that officeholders are, ex officio, better than mere citizens. Society invests its hope in the superiority of rulers, elevates them to status from which they exercise power over those who are deemed less worthy. But whether such power is seized or granted, this pattern has led to terrible abuses throughout history.
The empowered may begin as wise rulers, philosopher kings or benign dictators, but their governance inevitably shows itself to be totalitarian. Every command society assumes that some individual - or some collective - is capable of perfection, while the mass of ordinary people are not.
This construct defines, say, the "dictatorship of the proletariat," with absolute power exercised by the Communist Party, but it also points to the universal human tendency to assume that the holders of power are better than others. This attitude gave shape to every form of political organization known to history - until that late 18th-century gathering in Philadelphia that gave Obama his starting point.
The ingenious American framers took for granted the universality of human imperfection. The Constitution is a system of checks and balances because every officeholder in government - from president, to judge, to legislator - is assumed to be flawed. Every power center - from state to federal - is capable of abusing power.
Therefore, officeholders are checked by one another, power centers are in balance, and the entire arrangement is accountable to an electorate, whose prerogatives are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Constitutional democracy, even balancing majority rule with protections for minorities, is the political system that came into being when humans stopped pretending that perfection was possible. The American paradox is that this rejection of utopian ambition is the beginning of authentic political equality.
Barack Obama acknowledges the imperfections of his friend and mentor, Jeremiah Wright, but he simultaneously shows how they are rooted in the imperfections of American history.
By daring to explain himself so forthrightly, Obama has submitted to the checks and balances, too. He not only speaks of American hope. He embodies it.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
