“ The Pen is Mightier than the Sword: Is the Blackberry Mightier than the Bomb? The Road to Compliance without Coercion.”

Introduction

This project is about human agency as the ultimate power source of institutional change. It is about the power of Idealism finding utility within the context of Realism. This is important because in an age where dropping the bomb has become a diplomatic tool to effect change, and pre-emptive military action the option of choice for resolving conflict, there is evidence that larger constituencies in the world connected by high technology are beginning to realize that the use of violence is in fact not a sign of power but the absence of it. The true evidence of power is authority that enjoys compliance without coercion.

Any discussion of power is also a discussion of morality and ethics. Unfortunately this is a topic not completely explored because the mere mention of morality and ethics in the same context as politics, and more notably the pretender to all sciences, political science, is an anathema. Just when the hard mathematics and sciences are beginning to invest resources in research on the convergence of ancient religious beliefs and quantum physics, the discipline of political science, always insecure about its pedigree in the academe, still manages to maintain a “more scientific than thou” approach to research. (Sil, p.326).

The fact of the matter is politics is about the discussion of values such justice and fairness and the good society and how to attain it. There was a time when the lines between philosophy, religion, and political science were more blurred. For decades we have been in the grip of a field, which disrobed itself of any discussion of the normative and proactively uses method instead of problems to determine what researches are meritorious of funding, careers, and consequence. How then will a paper that talks about the Power of Idealism in the Gandhian and Kingian molds seeking Realist utility be met? The cacophony of comments like “you can’t institutionalize virtue” and “you can’t legislate morality” may prove to be deafening. But not quite. (Gandhi & King, p.221). If our laws have not been about morality and our institutions not about virtues, what have they been about? Have they really been only about who gets what, when, and how much?

Perhaps the discomfort with the connection between virtue, morality and politics is not all ill placed. Even Hannah Arendt who shares the Ghandian concept of power as civil obedience to authority, the withdrawal of which signals lack of power, wishes to keep the “City of God and the City of Man” separate. She is suspicious of love in politics, which she equates as “pity” for the poor in the French revolutionary “Terror”. Robespierre’s “Terror” transformed sympathy to excuse some of its greatest cruelties. (Schnell, p.224)

Gandhi, the uniter of things spiritual and political, who saw no difference in private and public ethics, shared none of Arendt’s apprehensions. U.S. society’s discomfort may have its roots in a long legal tradition of the separation of church and state. U.S. society is inherently suspicious of anything suggestive of a theocracy. However, ancient spiritual ethics as guides to a good private and public life is not the same as today’s competing agendas of mammoth sized religious organizations. Its wholesale dismissal therefore is a dismal loss to an often terror stricken and confused society flailing about for moral compass.