The notion of the state has been examined and clarified from the time of Plato and Aristotle. Caesar acknowledged his indebtedness to Plato in stating what a state should be. Cicero’s idea that the State is the affair or property of the people, and its mission is to be a community, a community of subordinate autonomous communities, a commonwealth for ethical purposes; if it fails in its mission, it is nothing. From then onwards while ideas regarding the state have developed, Cicero’s has persisted even to date. The idea that prior to the State are the people who are sovereign is from the Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmino (1542-1621) and it has found its way to the constitution of the United States of America.
Ideas that surfaced subsequent to the former ideas may not have been progressive enough to have developed coherently and may not have been true, just and fair, communitarian and liberating in accord with human dignity and worth. Even ideas only partially true and just have many decades been made persuasive and even plausible to many until they were found wanting and discarded when they caused irreparable harm to the community by distorting relationships and the life of the people. Some have traversed the rights of the community and imposed their personal idea of the state and abused power.
The state is an agency of a community of people. A community is dynamic and has the potential to grow so that all citizens, especially those in public service, according to each one’s position and capacity, show individually and socially responsible. In our context the community of the citizens of Sri Lanka is a nation community claiming a common territory within definite borders.
This agency organises itself to attend to various functions to serve the community while recognizing certain basic natural and human laws as their legitimate foundation. Based on them the state legislature enacts further laws not for their own sake but to achieve various definite ends and it enforces them for the benefit of the common good. The State is sovereign and yet makes itself and all citizens subject to the law. It is necessary to have an accurate understanding of the state that it may be invested with just and proportionate jurisdictions demarcated by the will of citizens that the citizens may expect integrity in its operations. Even a majority of citizens does not have the power to vest the legislature or any figure of state an excessive and unlimited power. It is therefore quite foolish for anyone to lay claim to such power under any pretext.
INTEGRITY AND STATE AUTHORITY
Citizens are both subject to the State and dependent on the State and are sovereign. They are not owned by the State like slaves. (People, however, individually and collectively could become slaves of drinking, gambling, sexual depravity and forms of corruption and political ideologies leading them to distorted reasoning). People do not belong to the State but the State belongs to the community of people. And the people is not a mere gathering of human beings brought together anyhow but a mass associated in a covenant, an agreement with respect to natural law, truth, freedom, equality and justice and a partnership for the common good.
Above and beyond but enveloping every community is the community of rational minds that could communicate. A good upbringing and a wholesome education sustain the rationality of a people and enable them to communicate ideas to one another. The most important things that could be and should be systematically communicated for the healthy social upkeep of society are values, values that endure, rather than transient sentiments or feelings. Governments and state apparatus, that direct its administration with authority, should consist of men and women known for their integrity of character and their ability to communicate and serve by upholding values: truth, justice and fairness, freedom and equality in the relationships among the people.
PRINCIPLE OF SUBSIDIARITY
Citizens have from time immemorial have freely associated themselves in other groupings and communities and take initiatives to serve themselves in common without prejudice to the well-being of other communities, before state institutionalization of common affairs. Patient persistence is a quality of private initiative. When the rulers do not take cognizance of this principle, they unnecessarily complicate matters of governance as happens in Sri Lanka. State interventions should not hamper private initiative. The principle of subsidiarity accomplishes at a lower and local level that which does not need close attention and interference at a higher level.
It is the function of the State to administer the well-being of all equally and justly. It is therefore quite improper for a temporary holder of state office to obstruct all private initiative and centralize power around himself as the power holder. Further, it is improper and unethical for politicians in power to use the resources and finances of the State to institutionalize services and provide various public facilities and amenities for the people and pretend to be a generous benefactor or a philanthropist of the people as if he has unstintingly pocketed out his own private money for them. Sri Lanka’s uncouth politicians hijack public properties and the donations of philanthropists and name it after themselves after using people’s money to build an enclosure wall around the philanthropists property!
It is honour enough for a politically involved social worker to be recognized as an honest person whose interventions provide social benefits for the public community. Anything beyond that is the display of immature politics of puerile, grungy and selfish minds. However, grateful succeeding generations, not family members, recognize the social contributions of notable citizens and immortalize their memory after their death.
OUTLANDISH IDEAS OF STATE UNDEMOCRATIC
True, just, right and fair ideas are important as they influence the right understanding of not only of the state but also of grass roots politics and political ideologies. Perverse and stiff-necked understanding of the State could lead to dictatorial attitudes that eat into civic life. Outlandish ideas are not only proclaimed in our midst as new visions and easy solutions to complex problems, outlandish decisions of short-sighted politicians are promoted as state policy. When such policies are adopted and get stratified over the years they lead the nation to disorder and stagnancy.
Outlandish ideas may even reverberate even beyond our borders even though such broadcasters are quite unaware that they are articulating and formulating crude and makeshift forms of state. Those giving expression to their bizarre notions about what they plan to do with the sub-agencies of the state are indeed puerile because they are incapable of understanding human nature with its potentiality for greatness and heroism as well as its capacity to indifference and lethargy and even descending to the basest levels of depravity, immorality, wickedness and malevolence.
They are also unaware that through force and compulsion they are already sowing seeds of enmity and showing forth the face of evil that is to come. They could never motivate and inspire people to reach beyond themselves to exceptional human deeds of high quality for the sake of others.
Nevertheless, ignorant as they are, lacking knowledge and understanding of principles of democracy and social responsibility, they broadcast their threatening and retrograde ideas widely and do not care about the heritage of civilization, cultural refinement and the progress of human freedom, human solidarity and fraternity and community advancement that have been brought about not only by the progress of human thought but also at great cost to many members of the universal human family in its history.
In Sri Lanka due to ignorance, lack of knowledge and understanding as well as superficial and crass social attitudes among the raw political green-horns with fascist tendencies, unacceptable and undemocratic and anti-social views on the state, governance and politics surface intermittently now and then. They hold on to a perverted theory of state in which autocratic rule turns the law into their personal whim imposed on others. These need to be subject to thorough criticism and investigation and debunked and rapacious politicians exposed.
The movements that present to the people the right ideas of the State and government should find support among the people that democracy, the dignity of people and their freedom may be saved.
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