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Linearity, circularity and reciprocity
January 14, 2001
By Denis Solomon
HAVE you ever parked your car, and then been told by a policeman (usually after you have put on the crook-lock, locked the doors and set the alarm), "You can't park here"?
The only response to that statement is: "But I just did!" To say someone can't do something he has just done is meaningless. To say he can is redundant. If, instead, the policeman tells me that if I don't move I'll be towed away, or gives me a ticket and I have to pay or face the magistrate, then something meaningful is happening.
Much of the argument we have heard, even tonight, about possible resolution of the political crisis has consisted of people examining the Constitution to try and prove what the President "can" or "can't" do. This is meaningless, for the simple reason that he has already done it. If that constitutes a crisis, the solution is not therefore to be found in the Constitution.
I would like to look at the situation in a very different way, in the light of three concepts—spatial concepts—that may help us to visualise it and to focus on points where solutions might be applied.
Those concepts are linearity, circularity and reciprocity.
By linearity I don't mean linear logic, though that also has a bearing on the situation. When President Robinson announced his refusal to appoint seven defeated election candidates to the Senate, he was at pains to emphasise his fallibility. Bring me rational, logical arguments to show I am wrong, he said, and I will be corrected. But his stance was based not on logic but on morality, on philosophical principle. It could not therefore be refuted by logic.
Logical disputation requires commonly accepted premises. Kirk Meighoo pointed this out when he was interviewed after Robinson's telecast, and I asked in my newspaper column, once you admit the principle of democracy, what argument can there be that laws must not be interpreted according to democratic principles?
However, the linearity I want to talk about is not the linearity of Aristotelian logic, but linearity in the flow of power or authority. In the theory to which everyone pays lip service, this is linear, and its direction is from the bottom up. In theory, power flows upward from the people to their leaders. But the reality, in our country, is just the opposite. The flow of authority is from the top down, as much today as in the days of the colonial governors. It did not start with Panday. What has caused the crisis is not what the man at the top is trying to impose on us at the bottom, but the fact that we have suddenly discovered that there are two men at the top.
Mr Robinson obviously realises the implications of this for his credibility as a guardian of democracy, for he was at pains in his televised address to suggest that he was not at the top, but "in the centre". This was the weak point in his argument. To claim it was his duty to apply a curb to Mr Panday's "creeping dictatorship" inevitably raised the question as to where he derived the authority to interpret the Constitution differently from Mr Panday, and to impose his interpretation, unless it was from the same authoritarian instincts as Mr Panday. This is why Mr Robinson laid so much emphasis on his 45 years of experience, and on God as the first element acknowledged by the Preamble to the Constitution.
The inference, for those who wish to draw it, is twofold: first, that experience brings wisdom, and second, that God will always make sure that a man with the necessary wisdom will be on the spot when needed. I personally think that anyone who accepts either of these premises is living in a fantasy world.
However, many people and nations have indeed adopted such a fantasy, in absolute or modified form, as the basis of their polity. It is called monarchy, and it is linear: the line stretches from God at the top, through the monarch and down to the people.
A particularly crude version of this was proclaimed by Mr Ken Valley Wednesday night at the TV6 meeting on the crisis. The President was the arbiter of constitutional disputes, period. No one asked whether Mr Valley would take the same view if the President were Basdeo Panday and the Prime Minister were Patrick Manning.
In a Republic, or in today's constitutional monarchies, the flow of political power is, in the final analysis, linear, or supposed to be: from the bottom up. Government by consent of the governed. But only in the final analysis. In the everyday administration of the State, power is not linear but circular. Once no fount of ultimate authority is recognised at the top, in the shape of God, King or President, the line of authority has no starting point, and each institution derives its powers from the others.
Herein lies the difference between European and American republics (by American I mean Western Hemisphere, not just the USA). European republics are an outgrowth of monarchy, and they retain elements of it. Their constitutions give their Presidents powers greater and more specific than the power of arbitration that Mr Robinson is now claiming for his office. One such power that springs to mind is the power of the Italian President to dissolve the legislature on his own initiative.
This is the recognition of the need for an archetypal king or father figure to whom one concedes authority simply on the strength of his supposed age, wisdom and experience. Since we have learned that neither age nor experience necessarily brings wisdom, what happens in such cases is that once a person is elevated to that kind of Presidency, everybody convinces himself that he is in fact wise, and acts accordingly.
Never mind that the day before his elevation half the nation may have considered him the worst crook on two legs. To the extent that they have presidents with residual powers, European republics are not republics but non-hereditary constitutional monarchies. Conversely, countries like Britain and Holland might be described as hereditary republics.
On this side of the Atlantic, republics represent a rejection of monarchy. The American President is a father figure in only the most limited sense. At any one time, the President of the United States is actively hated by at least 40 per cent of the population. Impeachment for wrongdoing is an ever-present possibility.
The flow of authority is therefore not up and down, but circular. Each of the three arms of government is responsible to, and kept in check by, the others.
• This was the first part of an edited version of a contribution by Denis Solomon to a forum on the constitutional crisis held at the Tapia House on Thursday January 11.
Linearity, circularity and reciprocity: The conclusion.....
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon