how the honeybees solve their problem of self-government: After the returning scouts initially report back to the group, they visit sites the other scouts have gone to, especially those that previously drew high praise from the others. When the number of scouts at a site showing enthusiasm for it reaches a threshold of around thirty, that site it is. These scouts communicate the decision to the swarm, which then flies to its new home.
Scientists have found that the bees’ method strikes a smart balance between the care needed to pick an excellent site and the speed needed to keep the colony from weakening from hunger while waiting. Evolution thus equipped honeybees with a smart search engine long before computer engineers ever wrote code for searching the Internet.
The genius of the honeybees’ search engine lies in using open debate about the comparative quality of competing alternatives to increase the group’s collective information, thereby overcoming a daunting set of difficulties including:
• many alternative sites
• multiple considerations applicable to making the choice
• many community members, without a single bee that can gather all the relevant facts in the time available and with many bees evaluating the same facts differently
The people of the United States would face analogous difficulties, as the drafters of the Constitution knew.
Yet people differ from the honeybees in a way that compounds these difficulties. Humans compete with one another for advantage and so have clashing interests. During the drafting of the Constitution, James Madison described the clashing-interest groups as “rich & poor, debtors & creditors, the landed, the manufacturing, the commercial interests, the inhabitants of this district or that district, the followers of this political leader or that political leader, the disciples of this religious Sect or that religious Sect.”4 In contrast, worker bees within a colony don’t compete. Evolution has seen to that because only through the colony’s queen can individual workers propagate their genes.
It’s human nature for voters to want government to further their own interests, for elected legislators seeking their own advancement to attempt to gratify such wants, and for both groups to tend to ignore the burdens that exchanging votes for benefits imposes on other people.
To deal with this whole array of difficulties, the drafters of the Constitution saw open debate as essential. The Constitution contains two features mutually designed to promote such debate. First, it gives responsibility for critical policy choices to a group called Congress, so named because it is a coming together (or congress) of members elected by widely varied interests. It assigns to this Congress the power to levy taxes, appropriate money, impose laws, declare war, and more. Second, the Constitution requires Congress to publish “the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House” on controversial issues. In contrast, in Britain, members of Parliament were allowed to keep their doings secret, thereby shielding them from responsibility.5 These two features of the Constitution, together with the original expectation that Congress would legislate in a way that made benefits and burdens apparent, meant that voters could hold legislators accountable for the consequences of their choices.
The personal responsibility of members of Congress would tend to generate open debate. If, for example, citizens of one city pressed their representatives to get Congress to spend money to improve their harbor, those representatives might run up against other representatives whose constituents would resent the cost but garner support from still-other representatives whose constituents wanted to ship goods through the improved harbor.6 Congress would thus collect information from far afield about the consequences of proposed legislative actions, much as the congress of honeybee scouts collects diverse information about the merits of potential homes for the colony, more than any one scout could collect separately. So, however Congress resolved an issue, the clash between representatives would make it evident to both representatives and constituents who would gain and who would lose from the proposed action and in what ways.
Moreover, the open debate between clashing interests together with the personal responsibility of members of Congress would mean that they would get the credit for conferring a benefit on one group of voters only if they also shouldered the blame for any harm the decision inflicted on other voters. This should give them strong incentives to take into account the interests of both groups. This was the case, for example, during the early 1800s when domestic manufacturers of cloth wanted Congress to set high tariffs on imported cloth to protect them from “the greatest evil—the arts and designs of rivals abroad.” Others opposed higher tariffs because they would increase the price of cloth, and they told their representatives so. These representatives, as Daniel Webster observed at the time, were “afraid of their constituents,” and Congress ultimately produced legislation that balanced the interests of both manufacturers and purchasers.7
Moreover, the drama of open debates would educate citizens about the choices facing the government, even those who didn’t take to schooling in classrooms. The people desired this education. Once the states ratified the Constitution, voters insisted on transparency in the political process. For example, when the Senate violated the Constitution by keeping its proceedings secret, public pressure forced it to relent. As the historian and professor Robert Wiebe stated, “The anger at secrecy, the demand for openness, was a functional response to situations that made democracy impossible.” In the decades after the Constitution was ratified, Congresses actually voted on the great issues of their era, deciding the law itself on hot-button issues such as tariffs. Legislators took positions on the hard choices and constituents understood.8 The Constitution had made the government a drama.
Desire to read about the drama contributed to an upsurge in literacy. From 1800 to 1840, literacy rates among white adults increased from 75 percent to around 95 percent in the North and from 50 percent to 80 percent in the South. With a largely literate public, the United States had more newspapers in 1822 than any other country despite its smaller population. According to the historian and professor Daniel Walker Howe, “Foreign visitors marveled at the extent of public awareness even in remote and provincial areas.”9
One might suppose that the combination of an informed public, open debate, and the selfishness inherent in human nature would tear the country apart. This did not happen because there is another side to human nature—the deeply seated desire to be fair to others in one’s own community. Learning how one’s demands will affect others, as happens in the process of open debate, sparks the desire to be fair. Modern behavioral scientists have found that people are less apt to try to grab for themselves something that a stranger leaves behind if they actually see the stranger.10
The desire to be fair can be seen in everyday events. When many people are waiting to, say, buy tickets for an event, they will usually line up to take their turn and newcomers will generally join the end of the line rather than butt in. First come, first served.
People also behave that way even in extraordinary events. After the Allies liberated Paris in 1944, Coco Chanel offered bottles of her famous Chanel N° 5 perfume to American GIs at a price even they could afford. The soldiers had grown up when travel overseas was a rarity and the Great Depression made money scarce. They could thus barely believe that they were in Paris, let alone that they had survived the Normandy invasion. Now, despite their scant pay, they could bring home to their wives, girlfriends, or mothers a luxury that epitomized Parisian glamour. That luxury was indeed hard to come by. When, the following year, President Harry Truman met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Potsdam, Germany, he had to write home to Bess that he couldn’t get a bottle of Chanel for her.11 Yet, as much as the GIs wanted the perfume, they lined up first come, first served—regardless of rank. Fair is fair. Standing in that line to buy a bottle of perfume for my mother, my own father, an enlisted man, saw the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower, arrive at the Chanel store and go to the back of the
