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Thursday, July 19, 2007
The Republic: Archy
My wife and I are reading Plato’s Republic, and intend to have a discussion about the book and its implications. Since the work is about the function and nature of government, I figured that I would invite you all to join in. We will be discussing the book here, and on my wife’s blog. But before we get into the discussion of the work and its implications, I wanted to start with a note about Plato’s premises.
In brief, there are two premises, never even discussed in the work as questionable, that I find very interesting. The first premise is that human societies must be formally governed; the second is that governments must be Just. (The nature of Justice is discussed at length, but that government must be Just to be what we would now phrase as Legitimate is never questioned.) This essay examines whether these two premises are reasonable: must man be governed by other men in a formal arrangement; if so, what makes a particular government Legitimate?
To be absolutely clear, I want to start with a few definitions. Governance is the process of resolving disputes among people. A government is a formal institution with a defined structure that provides governance when consensus is not possible. (Politics, incidentally, is nothing more than the mechanism of governance. As such, politics are inherent in any situation involving human interaction, and people wishing for politics to not be inserted into any given venue — especially formal government! — are generally calling not for an end to politics, unless they are pie-eyed idealists, but for an end to partisanship.)
Man is, by nature, a social animal: we gather together in groups. Even introspective people (with the exception of a very small fraction of people that have lived as hermits or on the farthest frontiers) seek out others for companionship. It is also in the nature of man that each person has an individual background of experiences and social conditioning, and that our differing genetic make-ups influence our temperaments differently than that of our fellows. Because of this fact of our nature, two other human characteristics exist: we hold differing opinions about any given subject, and we have different abilities and interests in performing various tasks. Human nature thus implies that any interaction among individuals may involve disagreements, and any prolonged set of interactions among individuals will necessarily eventuate in some disagreements. As the number of people involved grows linearly, the likelihood of disagreements grows geometrically.
Obviously, in the case of a lone individual, there is no requirement for any governance other than self-governance; there is no one else to disagree with any decisions you might make. In very small groups, about seven or less, people can operate by consensus. In such small groups, individually-implemented social mechanisms alone (such as refusing to talk to miscreants, lecturing them, yelling at them, taking things away from them, or beating or killing them) are sufficient to provide governance of the group without the need of formal structures. This is, by and large, the state that prevails naturally in immediate families. As the groups involved grow larger and less closely related, more and more formal mechanisms of governance have always come into existence.
While the immediate family is basically communist (in the most idealistic sense of the term), an extended family living in close proximity takes on tribal characteristics: there is a matriarch or patriarch or a small group of elders who act as arbiters when consensus cannot be obtained. A small tribe, a loosely-related group of less than a hundred people, has a need for a chieftain to arbitrate or to make final decisions when consensus cannot be obtained. As the group grows larger, the chieftain is supplemented by counselors, who either take on particular subject areas or population groups or who act on an ad hoc basis as particular concerns arise. By the time that the tribe has become a village, with several hundred people who are not necessarily related, the governing group has become formalized in structure and survives the time in office of any person acting as part of that group. That is to say, a formal government has come into existence.
This continues: a town of a thousand or so unrelated people will begin to see small bureaucracies arise from the institution of counselors. As a town grows into a city, with several thousand unrelated people, the bureaucracies grow, courts form to offload the more routine arbitration and punishments, the final arbiter generally becomes a king, and a new institution forms: the aristocracy. Essentially, the aristocracy comes about because direct governance of that many people is impossible for one person. Thus the king arbitrates the aristocrats, who arbitrate the groups of subjects beholden to them by title (that is, by explicit and formal delegation of executive authority granted by the king).
It is also at the size of a city that alternate forms of government begin to be considered, and democracies, republics, dictatorships, oligarchies, theocracies and the like come into being. But in each case, it is only the form of government that differs, not the essence or existence of government. Above the level of a city, there is really only a small amount of innovation necessary to scale the forms of government to larger and larger sizes: separation of governing powers (particularly in the case of republics and social democracies) or broad delegation of those powers to bureaucrats or aristocrats, federalism of some kind, and hierarchical court systems with appeals.
It should also be noted, as an aside, that the tools of government are nothing more than the tools of the family as noted above, with the addition of legal immunity for any actions taken in the course of governing. It is not murder when the government kills, as long as the government follows whatever process they have defined for killing legally. Our gracious host noted this some time ago: the government differs from non-governmental institutions primarily by its ability to legally coerce obedience by the use of armed force.
But that is just the historical way that things have been done. Is it necessary that things be done thus? That is the heart of the question now at issue: whether or not man must be formally governed. There are critiques of the idea that man must be governed by a formal institution (separate from the many, many arguments about how man should be governed), most notably anarchism and, more seriously, anarcho-capitalism. Neither of these proposed alternatives, though, is workable given the nature of man.
Anarchism, no formal government, is easy to dispose of as a workable system. Anarchy in any isolated group larger than a few dozen people always devolves into tyranny: in the absence of government, disputes are resolved the Hobbesian way, by who is stronger. Those who are strongest become warlords or mob bosses or presidents for life or some other form of tyrant, eliminate or co-opt their opposition, and claim the right to rule by simply being powerful enough to force everyone else to submit. If there is any example of an anarchic situation in history which has not resulted in tyranny arising, I cannot find it. Some current examples of the process in motion are Gaza after Israel’s withdrawal and Somalia since the early 1990s (note the outside intervention angle here, as well, to head off the rising tyranny). Were we all angels, anarchism would be ideal. It need hardly be noted that not all of us are angels.
Anarcho-capitalism is a rather radical libertarian concept built around the idea that a society needs no government: all services can be provided by people and groups freely exchanging goods and services in a completely unregulated market. (As Steven Den Beste used to say, don’t write letters: I realize that this is a very incomplete summary of a much more complex idea.) In theory, this is better than anarchism, because it provides a regulatory mechanism (the market) for obtaining goods without the use of force, and better than any stronger form of government, because it does not require the use of government-wielded force to enact that regulatory form. In practice, though, anarcho-capitalism requires that we be angels to as much or more of a degree than does anarchism. Without that, various groups providing services in different ways and at different price points would amass power asymmetrically, as a function of better wealth generation. While this is not inherently bad, it would lead to the less scrupulous groups taking power in the manner of warlords, but with a corporate face. At best, anarcho-capitalism would slide into a kind of soft fascism. At worst, it would slide into anarchy and thence into outright tyranny. Most likely, it would be like being governed by the mafia.
So if history consistently suggests that mankind seeks to be governed, and that all human societies evolve formal governments as their size and complexity increase, and if the alternatives fail to provide an orderly and prosperous society, then we must conclude that government is indeed necessary to human societies. This then leads to the second premise Plato adopts, or more correctly, to the question arising from that premise: what makes a particular government Legitimate?
“Legitimacy" for a government is a fairly new term; essentially, it merely means that a government has a right to rule for some reason. More specifically, a government that is seen by other nations as being legitimate will be recognized by those nations, and usually there will be an exchange of ambassadors. While the term is new, the concept is not. Governments have seldom been granted a priori recognition even by the people they govern. More frequent are a variety of challenges to the government’s power to govern, ranging from ignoring the government to disobedience to revolution.
The source of the government’s power to govern was usually defined, then as now, as a “right” or a “mandate.” The “Divine Right of Kings,” “The Mandate of Heaven,” and “the consent of the governed” are all ways of expressing reasons why a government should be considered Legitimate. Since governments are inherently venal and self-serving, they resort inevitably to justifying their powers through more respected institutions such as a religion or “the people.” Well, almost inevitably; the more honest treat recognition at home the same way all governments treat recognition abroad: are you willing to fight them to dispute their power to govern?
The Greeks were pioneers in alternatives to kings and tyrants as forms of governance. Indeed, “-archy” is a Greek suffix meaning “to rule.” Plato put his criterion for Legitimacy as Justice. By Justice, Plato meant an array of virtues, as he discusses at length in Book One. These virtues include excellence of the soul, wisdom, ability, and a capability for common action. However, this definition of Justice was not universal within Greek society at the time, as note Thrasymachus’ contention that, for a ruler, doing good is evil and doing evil is good. (Socrates’ shredding of this argument is most entertaining. The modern Left is not unique or unprecedented in redefinitions of troublesome words, and there are tools for dealing with the problem.)
A problem with using Justice as the justification of a government’s right to rule is that notions of Justice — of what is “right” — are quite fluid; our definitions of “virtue” change almost constantly. As a current example, consider the health care debate, where one camp holds that only universal, single-payer coverage can be Just, while another camp holds that universal, single-payer coverage is inherently Injust, and there are twenty other camps besides. This mutability of ideology leads to a situation where a government that is Legitimate now may not be Legitimate tomorrow, even though there has been no structural change, merely because of changes in transient public opinion. Such a government cannot be stable: in the best case, we end up with ineffectual and constantly falling governments, as Italy had for a long period after World War II; in the worst case, different notions of Right and Justice could easily lead to civil war, as they have done once before in the United States.
Raw exercise of power, while useful in an international context, is pure tyranny in a domestic context. A government that maintains its rule by power alone, rather than because it possesses a characteristic that its people find conducive to good governance such that they will accept its rule, cannot help but be a police state. Otherwise, it would be overthrown by others who can amass sufficient power to themselves, and who want to exercise more power by controlling the resources of the State. Indeed, to a large extent, this is exactly what has led to the rise of Sunni jihadi terrorism in its current form: the terrorists seek to co-opt or overthrow the tyrannical Arab governments. The attacks on Westerners appear initially to have been little more than a way of trying to undermine those governments’ supports. (The Shi’a jihadi terrorism, oddly enough, is largely a tool of Iran’s existing government to maintain its power base and to extend its power over Sunni countries; hence the Sunni and Shi’a terrorists are attacking the same basic targets, for the same basic reasons. Jihadi terrorism is fundamentally about who should rule the Muslim world.)
A common justification for European governments in the past has been the “Divine Right of Kings” to rule because their god so ordained. This is the basis of the alliance between Church and State during the Middle Ages, for instance. For arguments as to why the Divine Right of Kings is bad, see the history of the American Revolution and the various documents written around the time, especially Paine’s Common Sense: “The Heathens paid divine honours to their deceased kings, and the Christian World hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones. How impious is the title of sacred Majesty applied to a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling into dust!” For now, suffice it to say that there is a very good reason that Church and State are best kept apart even if there is a common religion among all people in a given country.
The Chinese ”Mandate of Heaven” is similar. At its base, a government has the Mandate of Heaven if it is providing general prosperity and is lucky. If either of those conditions does not apply, the government is said to have lost the Mandate of Heaven, and the people will not support it further. While the Chinese Communists deny the validity of the Mandate of Heaven (though they used the notion of its passing against the government they replaced), I suspect that the Chinese people probably still see that as the basis of the Communists’ legitimacy, and if the Communists either start losing face in international relations or start running into very serious economic problems, Communist rule will be in serious jeopardy quite quickly.
In modern Western societies, which are typically soft-socialist representative democracies, the justification for governmental legitimacy is generally phrased as “the consent of the governed,” a phrase taken from the Declaration of Independence, but used in a slightly different context here. This means, at its core, that the government is legitimate because the people agree that the government is legitimate. While this is fine as long as everyone so agrees, there are numerous problems with such a structure. For example, if a region secedes, does the government become illegitimate? If so, is the government illegitimate only in the area that seceded, or throughout the country? Does any written Constitution a country might adhere to have to be overthrown if some number of people no longer consents to the Constitution? How do you decide how many people, or which people, have to disagree?
I presume that no one would argue that a government is not legitimate just because a single person refuses to consent, so those questions would have to be answered. (If you would argue that a single person refusing to consent to a government’s legitimacy makes that government illegitimate, how do you propose to structure a country’s governance to obtain every person’s consent? When I change my mind and no longer consent, then what? How does this differ, in practice, from anarchy, since no government would last longer than the time it takes someone to register their refusal to consent? Can I consent up until I am charged with a crime, and then refuse to consent before I can be sentenced? Can I start consenting again later?) What if someone refuses to consent to those answers? For that matter, how would a person make known their refusal to consent, and what would be the consequences of refusal to consent?
Even if you take the position that broad consent, rather than essentially unanimous consent, there are still problems with this test based on the core assumptions underlying the test. These assumptions most troublingly include the idea of civil rights (that is, rights granted by government, rather than preexisting government) as the basis of allowable personal behavior and majoritarianism (the notion that if most people think a given action is correct, then that action is correct). One problem with civil rights, if you believe in liberty, is that civil rights are granted, and thus revocable, by the government at its sole discretion. This works reasonably well when everyone agrees what those “rights” should be, but works very badly once that agreement is no longer obtainable. For example, again, look at the health care situation in the United States at present: is health care an appropriate civil right or not? That example brings up a second problem: a right cannot, by definition, impair the enforcement of that right by others for themselves; my ability to speak my mind does not prevent you from speaking your mind, and my use of my property does not prevent you from using your property. But civil rights are often privileges, rather than true rights, in that they require the impairment of others’ rights to function. Using health care once again, if your “right” to unlimited health care requires me to surrender my property involuntarily to you (through taxes, generally) to your benefit and not to mine, then health care is not a right but a privilege. Thus, civil “rights” inevitably involve the imposition of penalties on some to the benefit of others.
Majoritarianism has its own set of problems. Majoritarianism holds that what most people want, everyone should get. It arises from the concept of democracy: that each citizen should be a direct part of the government decision-making process. Even in a somewhat representative system, majoritarianism demands that the representatives act as aggregators of opinion rather than acting according to what they believe to be right. However, this fundamentally is distinguishable from mob rule only in that the beatings and thefts and so forth are carried out by agents of the government, rather than a torch-wielding mob. If the majority wants the minority to fork over everything that they own, majoritarianism requires that to happen. Majoritarianism is fundamentally incompatible with liberty; if it is a subtle and quiet tyranny, it is nonetheless tyranny. Consider this: what if you are in the minority in a majoritarian system? What protections do you have then from those who would take what you have, or simply do not like you for whatever reason? How hard, for example, would you work if you knew that any time you acquired significant wealth, it would be taken from you and given to others to use? In such a system, productivity and wealth do not increase at high rates; in many such systems, productivity and wealth actively decrease.
But it turns out that a test for legitimacy that does not suffer any of these problems has been proposed. The Declaration of Independence states:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Here, the test is that government is legitimate if it protects the natural rights (that is, rights that preexist government) of those citizens, in particular those rights that provide for a person’s safety (the right to life and associated rights, such as self defense), freedom (the right to liberty and associated rights, such as free association) and happiness (the right to property and associated rights, such as choice of employment). Note that the “consent of the governed” clause, here in context, differs dramatically from the contextless modern use that was noted above: the consent of the governed is not to the laws, the policies or the outcomes of governance, but to the structure of governance; that is, to the constitutional organization of government, the rule of law, and adherence to the mechanisms of decision-making defined by the constitution and the law. Perhaps the better formulation, given the debasing of “consent of the governed,” is Lincoln’s, from the Gettysburg Address: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Government is to be of the people; those who govern are not to be a separate class, but drawn from the common stock of the land. Government is to be by the people; all citizens must be represented. Government is to be for the people; those who govern must work for the betterment of all, and are accountable for their actions to each. “Consent of the governed” in the Declaration is fundamentally equivalent to “government … for the people” in the Gettysburg Address.
As a source of legitimacy, this is far superior to the alternatives noted above.
- Unlike a government founded directly on virtue, a government founded on respect for natural rights is much less susceptible to sudden definitional changes. To be sure, there have been many attempts to redefine natural rights by twisting them into an unrecognizable shell, and even more attempts to substitute civil “rights” for actual rights. Nonetheless, all that needs to be maintained is the meta-definition, that natural rights are those things a person can do without preventing another person from doing the same should the other so choose. The individual rights, their scope and their importance, can be debated at length without compromising the structure and purpose of government.
- Unlike a government founded on raw exercise of power, a government based on the protection of natural rights cannot be a tyranny. The right to liberty, at least, prevents that. But the other natural rights reinforce this: a government so founded would have the powers to protect its citizens from force or fraud, but essentially no power to coerce outside of the due process of law. This is actually one of the reasons that I am uncomfortable with anti-abortion groups defining themselves as representing the right to life: to do so constricts the meaning of that right down to the right to live, rather than the right to be generally free of forceful coercion. Moreover, how many people would describe themselves as supporting the right to life, and would simultaneously champion the use of the death penalty? If you state the right to live as an absolute, rather than stating the right to be free of coercion including forceful threats to life, you cannot then justify the taking of life even as retribution for or prevention of infamous crimes.
- Unlike a government founded on divine approval, there is no requirement to look outside ourselves for the basis of government; and thus, any challenges to the central faith upholding that government do not doom the government to failure. Moreover, no Church can claim government sanction to coerce in the name of the government, a common problem through history. Even further, both politics and government can imbue a disagreement with deadly fervor; to combine the two is unwise in any case. A government founded to protect natural rights could not be self-consistent and yet deprive its citizens of their right to believe as they choose.
- Unlike a government founded on the consent of its people to its policies, a government based on respect for natural rights and requiring its people’s consent only for its structure is not subject to failure because of the outcomes of its policies. Since such a government respects true rights, it cannot fall into the trap of continually eroding those rights in favor of opportunistically-chosen “rights” of the moment, to the political benefit of those in power and the lasting detriment of the rest of the citizenry. Perhaps most importantly, such a government implicitly protects minorities by its very nature and structure. The right to be unusual in your beliefs, desires, and practices flows from the rights to speak, believe and act as you will, so long as you do not, in doing so, impose your beliefs on others by force.
It can be argued — I would in fact argue strenuously — that our government has strayed widely from its foundational principles. Nonetheless, I believe that those foundational principles are the most sound ever proposed to govern a nation, particularly a large and diverse nation. No other proposed source of legitimacy can claim so many benefits, so few flaws, as respect for and protection of the natural rights of man to be safe from fraud or force and to seek after their own happiness.
Comments
Bravo, Jeff. An excellent disquisition on the fundamentals of political thought. It’s a pity so few persons are interested in core political concepts; I covered much of this ground in an essay I wrote some time ago, and got mostly shrugs in response.
Apropos of nothing, I never did tell you how flattered I always was to see a quote from Eternity Road or the old Palace of Reason at the top of Caerdroia. I’ve received few compliments to equal that. Thank you, sincerely.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 07/21/2007 at 08:59 AMYou keep saying things worth quoting.
But let me pay you the complement you truly deserve: reading you and thinking about what you say — when I agree and particularly when I disagree — has improved my reasoning ability.
Here’s what I really don’t get, though (back to the topic of the post): the recipes for health, wealth and happiness for an individual and for a society are both well known and understood, are both simple to follow, and are both actually pleasant to follow. How is it that so few individuals and so few societies manage to follow the recipes?
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 07/21/2007 at 12:10 PM
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