Bring on the robots

Political promises have been with us since humans selected the first leader of the first clan in the first cave.

So have lies.

But it is only relatively recently that we've dropped the pretense of believing that political promises are what we usually mean by that word - assertions that something will or will not be done.

Instead, we now assume that everything a politician says is the precise opposite of a promise: A prevarication. A dissembly (a term I just made up, sort of like a political promise). A lie.

It's hard to otherwise explain why politicians have now largely dispensed with promises in favor of "pledges," which are like promises but more serious because they are pledges.

I'm not sure when a promise ceased being good enough to satisfy even the low standards of a political campaign. In modern times, the political promise may for intents and purposes have died on the lips of George H.W. Bush, when he vowed "no new taxes."

Or it could have expired on the lips of Lyndon B. Johnson during the Vietnam War. Or on some body part or another of Bill Clinton's.

In any case, the political promise - even or perhaps because we're in the days of YouTube - no longer provides even a minimal assurance of a candidate's intentions. Political promises command the same respect as the New Year's resolutions that seemed like such a good idea last night.

That's why voters now demand pledges, which are promises dressed up with solemnity, whatever that is, though presumably we'll know it when we see it. Perhaps a pledge requires a politician to look extra dour when he's promising something.

Columnist Michael Gerson this summer asserted optimistically that the days of the political pledge are waning. Too confining, too rigid.

After all, America's leaders need the freedom to adapt to changing exigencies. They need to rely on the best thinking at the time in order to make decisions that will better the lives of their countrymen.

Who am I kidding? I hope Gerson is right. But I suspect that we'll see more pledges than ever in 2012.

Part of that is the fault of our shrinking attention spans, our incapacity to process the gradations between political extremes. If we know what a politician has pledged, then we know what the politician believes.

Except, we don't. Not really.

The only way we believe a pledge is somehow binding is if we also somehow believe that signing a piece of paper, or swearing an oath (or whatever it is a politician is asked to do to prove subordination to the hive mind), means something to a class of people we already don't trust.

It's like trusting a con man not to cheat you because he promised. In writing. Or trusting in fiat money, to use an example for the Ron Paul fans in the room.

Pledges can be broken as easily as promises. Just ask all the Democrats who will swear an oath to support a Republican for president so they can make mischief in that party's primary.

To really get at the heart of the problem, to bind politicians to their word, we need more than a promise. More than a pledge. More than a blood oath carrying the penalty of violence.

I know this will sound radical, but I honestly don't see much of a choice: We need robots. We need political agents who are nothing more than a mechanical collection of our wishes, irreversible and never changing.

Perhaps one day soon we will be able to select creatures who are all pledges, from hat to heel. They'll be nothing but a set of preprogrammed positions, articulated by the simple firing of electrons. The question then is why we need the politicians at all.

Donald Luzzatto is editorial page editor of The Virginian-Pilot. Email: donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.