Professor Falola,
Thank you very much for your question. I will try to be very brief in explaining my position and response. But first, I appreciate that a person like you with great experience and high standing can recall the contribution that Professor Agbese made to pro-democracy struggles in Nigeria in the past. I have heard of others apart from the ones you mentioned who used some Nigerian Diaspora Organization in the U.S. as a stepping stone for a more lucrative position in Nigeria. This is an example of what I meant when I said that a single event should not be used to portray a person in a manner that makes him or her look as someone who is just after himself or herself.
With regard to registration of associations or organizations, there are so many dimensions to the issue. In principle I have no objection to groups meeting freely without registration depending on what they are doing, but in practice I have a hermeneutic of suspicion about that because there are different types of groups in a liberal democratic society. But let me begin by saying that a lot about your question has to do with the distrust of the state and the struggle for maintaining social order in a complex society. This is a huge issue that I cannot discuss here. But if after hundreds of years, modern people cannot still create a state that they trust, it suggests we should raise large questions about the nature of the society they have created. Fukuyama wrote a book on Trust where he criticized neoclassical economists for not taking trust seriously as a foundation for creating a well-functioning society. They just focus on exchange.
The freedom do associate in a liberal democratic society is I believe part of a larger pantheon of themes that are characterized as the liberal ideology of liberating human beings from tyranny and oppression. So in this respect, progressive groups such as the one you mentioned in Texas can freely organize and be subversive or operate without formal public registration. In doing so, they have contributed to creating a more just and fair society. The only problem is that this same right or freedom the groups in Texas enjoyed whether registered or not can equally be enjoyed in a liberal democratic society by hate groups such as the ones in Charlottesville. There are lots of things that hate groups can do to make life horrible for others without breaking the law actually.
Some weeks back, I reviewed a documentary film on Charlottesville and other similar groups across the United States whose ideology is white or racial supremacy. When the incident at Charlottesville happened last year, or was it in 2017, I was out of the country. I wanted to really understand what happened and decided to order the documentary film titled "Documenting Hate." One of the major challenges the authorities had which constituted a serious security problem is that many of such groups across the country operated without registration. Security agencies had to use video recordings to capture certain consistent faces that appear in such events and try to track and identify the relevant individuals. I have also used a documentary film on the history and activities of KKK groups where they preach hate message. But in this case, the police are there to even protect them because of the freedom of expression. It is hard for me to see anything that groups with progressive agenda can do to defy the state that right-wing groups cannot equally do. It is like a draw game. Other factors will make the difference but not simple freedom to associate without registration.
Registration of associations can be used by the state to jail or track individuals and prosecute them, but lack of registration also create security situations in the country that people only become worried about when violent events happen. So part of the question is the distrust of the state, depending on what it is, and then part of the question is whether the lack of registration automatically guarantees a better and progressive society, given that any right that a progressive group can claim to propagate its ideas in defiance of the state as in Texas, can equally be claimed by hate groups or something similar in propagating their messages or vison of the new society somewhere in the United States. In my assessment, progressive groups require more effort to build themselves because they are trying to build bridges and promote a more inclusive and just society. It is easier to organize hate groups, because they appeal to the narrow selfish human interests, and they can be smaller in size but much more energetic. And as Mancur Olson argues in "The Rise and Decline of Nations," for social groups to shape public policy, they do not have to be many in terms of membership. They can be small but if they are highly motivated and well-organized because of the gain and satisfaction they can get from their activities, they will make far more impact that is disproportionate to their size in society.
In support of the line of reasoning that groups should not be judged by someone with regard to the validity or utility of their ideas in the public square, Juan Stuart Mill, I believe in his book "On Liberty" argues that ideas as articulated by different groups or individuals should be allowed to compete in a free market place of ideas where the market or the public square can decide which one is right and which one is wrong in the long run. This is where politics and consumer behavior almost overlap. But here we are almost at a point similar to Nozick's reduction of justice to commutative exchange. In other words, in so far as there is a willing seller and buyer, whatever result that comes out of a transaction is just even if it is unfortunate. In this case, if organizations as the sellers of ideas in the public market place are matched with buyers or consumers of their ideas, whatever result that comes out of the transaction is fine. Of course there is a commitment to protecting human dignity. No group should violate the human dignity of others. The problem is that people hardly angry on what these boundaries of human dignity are especially in a neoliberal hegemonic economic system which we take for granted. That is why we need the state to intervene through the courts etc. On the surface, the liberal society claims to offer a lot to human beings, but it fails because laws alone cannot inform human conduct if there is no virtuous cultivation of moral and ethical restraints as Alasdair MacIntyre would argue in his work on virtue ethics.
This whole issue is similar to the debate in economics, which should not surprise us as liberal ideology traverses both economics and politics. The related question in economics is why should there not be free trade? The argument is similar. If we allow the government to regulate businesses by requiring all producers of goods to be registered it will lead the state to deny some people their freedom to engage in free commerce. There is evidence to support this. But on the other hand, while free trade or unregulated trade sounds like a good idea about granting the individuals the freedom to engage in transaction as willing sellers and buyers with no one's interference, yet Joseph Stiglitz has demonstrated how the idea of free trade that is unregulated has been used to the disadvantage of the masses in many countries, both in the developed and in the developing world.
Along the same lines, one would argue that not allowing people to cook food and sell it anywhere they have space to do so in the U.S. is limiting people's freedom because there are willing sellers and buyers and frankly the price may be cheaper if allowed. But because of public health concerns etc. the government said, no. Thus, to cook and sell food one must be registered. It seems like there is public support for this. Depending on the nature of the state, registration is a kind of quality control on what someone claims to do and whether they are doing it well. Not all people may be informed enough to judge what various groups claim to be doing. Left-leaning groups will complain that the right wing state will use registration requirement to silence them, and Right-leaning groups will equally complain that the left-wing state will use registration requirements to silence them. Ideally, customs and traditions of respect for the human dignity of all should regulate human conduct beyond the law, but liberal society broadly conceptualized generally undermines customs and traditions in order to create a more homogenized society, notwithstanding the talk about multiculturalism.
Moreover, there are some who would argue that in our world today, the production, spread and consumption of certain ideas can be potentially damaging as the consumption of some kind of food. There are many ideas that were distributed in the social media by the Russians during the last presidential elections in the United States. Some of it was intentionally and deliberately aimed at poisoning the population consuming the information, which cannot be traced initially to anyone specific producer or group at the time. But when people believe the poisoned information like food, they begin to hate or fight each other with great public repercussions as we have come to realize after the 2016 elections. Now there is effort both in the United States and other countries to increasingly regulate the social media in many countries because the consumption of its product can be dangerous sometimes especially when the product is there but we cannot identify who exactly is responsible for it and why? Knowing who is responsible for producing it can really help in maintaining social order. European countries are struggling with this concern very much now.
For me, at this stage, what I feel about liberalism is that what it gives you with one hand, it takes away with another. It is the recognition of this that led MacIntyre to emphasize virtue ethics instead of simple reliance on the law to regulate our complex human society. But as a society, we are too much in a rush and few in society care to cultivate virtue ethics because that slows people down in their pursuit to reach their state of "Nirvana" so to say.
To conclude, in my assessment, registration is in theory not a big deal at all. The freedom to associate is one of those juicy promises of liberalism to humanity. But lack of registration or registration should be understood within the broader context of the structure and process of liberal democratic society, which promises a lot in terms of freedom and liberation of people but conducts itself in such a way that results in making people fight each other as it heightens egocentric behavior while undermining the genuine sense of community. Any strategy that can be used by a progressive group to defy the state can also be used similarly by some kind of hate group on the far-right. At the end, it is like a dog eat dog world, a Social Darwinist social order that is packaged as liberalism's attempt to emancipate and free people from political tyranny.
Yet, the major tyranny that liberalism fails to address is the tendency of tyranny within many of us human beings today in our psyche, where human appetitive desires take over and contorl the mind, reason and the soul. The social crisis in the wider society is a manifestation of this inner crisis in the human psyche that we encounter today at a more egregious level. Religion has tried to address it but in my assessment, I have the feeling that this human appetitive desires that have taken over the human consciousness have also gotten a privileged seat at the inner-sanctum of many religious places of worship. Such religious organizations may be free to organize as part of civil society without registration, but that does not help us in terms of guaranteeing a pathway to "Dar es Salaam," the "New Jerusalem," or the "Neoliberal Utopia," among other visions of human ideals.
Thank you very much.
Samuel
Bethel University
Department of Anthropology, Sociology and Reconciliation Studies,
Bethel University, 3900 Bethel Drive, #24, Saint Paul, MN 55112.
Office Phone: 651-638-6023
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