The election is coming up, and I've been pondering a question for a while. Why support democratic government when democracy is so easily corrupted and politicians so unreliable? Why not just support the ever more predictable choice of authoritarianism? After all these experts are experts, experienced in the law and social sciences, and surely they are right and the rest of us can have a peaceful life if we only support their decisions and go with them. After all, they have access to information the rest of us don't have and know best. Following this reasoning. I should bow to the President's "Will" and support the re-election of the Republican Party. That is the premise of authoritarianism after all, and a lot of people seem to believe them.
It's hard not to break out laughing at this point. But I'm trying to be serious.
Aside from the fact that I know enough about the reality to know that the above paragraph is balderdash on its face. Even if presented with officials who made such claims and trotted out power point presentations, charts, graphs and studies "proving" that they are right (and those of us who doubt them are wrong), I still could not support this authoritarian approach. Democracy is still necessary, even if there are an entire class of "experts" who claim to have our best interest at heart and want to rule us.
Do I feel this way merely because I am an ideologue when it comes to democracy? No. I have strong logical reasons. And I will try to outline them.
First I will lay out what I mean democracy. Democracy means "rule by the demos" or the people. Ultimately people rule even when tyrants rule. Until we get "Makinocracy" or some such thing, it is the people of one form or another who will rule. "Meritocracy" is a notion that requires a God to decide who actually has the merit to rule. Democracy is appropriate in the form we've found for it. The People should decided who sits at the top of all command chains, of all the groups that rule our lives. They should have the right to make that decision, because of the principle of "consent of governed" and because it is ultimately our common earth and not something that belongs to a few people. Why this should be so requires some argument, but there are cogent reasons.
Merit:
Experts can tell us that they know better, but reality shows us time and time again, that they may know more about a subject, but they don't always know better. I am knowledgeable about many things, but I am expert only on some of those things. It is the same with everyone. A person with the potential for Buddha can be a figurative wheel turning king or a literal, but he can't be both at the same time. A political leader can be an author, a poet, a soldier, and a businessman, but at any one moment he/she has to play only the role he/she is currently assigned.
Human beings are capable of many things, but we all are limited. Albert Einstein was a genius about Physics, but if I want advice about cooking dinner I will go to a different Einstein. The biggest problem with this world is that nobody can see everything with perfect clarity that is broad and deep, except a few perfect (and mostly legendary or mythic) individuals. Most of the people who claim perfection are suffering from hubris and lying. And we all know what Universe does to those of us who suffer from hubris. There are many people with phenomenal knowledge, smarts and wisdom, and even they have limitations. At least I haven't found anybody who doesn't up until now.
The best systems are those where criticism is accepted, different points of views aired, and mistakes caught before they create so much trauma that the system dies a miserable death. The story of the boy with his finger in the dyke is an allegory about systems. There are times when all of us see a critical thing that nobody else has noticed. And the role of democracy is to see that those critical things can be pushed "up to the top of the chain of command" so that the chain of command of militaries, police, justice systems, or repair crews, can react in time. The guys at the top may be expecting a storm, when it is just a tiney finger-hole.
When the staff officers of the French were building a maginot line and training horses to draw gun carriages, a little known Colonel DeGaul was trying to develop a real armored unit. When the US was insisting on building more battleships while the Japanese were preparing to attack Pearl Harbor little known Officers such as Doolittle was preparing for an Air Based Navy.
The best ideas don't usually appear at the top of the chain of command, not in the military and not in other chains of power either, and they often get stiffled unless there is openness and open debate. That doesn't mean that a military should be run like a democracy. It simply means that civilian control and a free society are the best means to support the military, and that a military ultimately must be accountable to civilian masters. There are other reasons for this too.
Meritocracy:
The trouble with meritocracy is that it begins deserved and soon devolves. It is said that when extraordinary gene combinations occur, within 3 generations those extraordinary genes have normalized. That is the Grandfather may be a genius, but his great grandchildren will certainly not be statistically different from the run of the mill. Unfortunately meritocracies soon devolve into aristocracies. And aristocracies are often de-meritocracies. When people are born to wealth and power they have no appreciation of the life of common folks. It was funny when Bush Senior didn't know how to buy groceries. It is not funny when his son pretends to be a man of the people except when he is raising funds. Now I'm not saying that everyone with wealth is a craven idiot. Far from it. It is just that with wealth comes a certain blindness about common folks. Like with Edmund Burke there tends to be a loathing for the very notion that a hair-dresser may make decisions about whether to elect him as a member of Parliament -- or a member of Congress. There is a tendancy to loathe ideas as well. Burke and John Paine had a famous tiff, which started largely because John Locke was a self-made man and Burke believed in aristocracy. But Paine was right when he said (from Wikipedia):
“Notwithstanding the nonsense, for it deserves no better name, that Mr. Burke has asserted about hereditary rights, and hereditary succession, and that a Nation has not a right to form a Government of itself; it happened to fall in his way to give some account of what Government is. "Government," says he, "is a contrivance of human wisdom. . . Admitting that government is a contrivance of human wisdom, it must necessarily follow, that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights (as they are called), can make no part of it, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary.”
The goal of all of us, is to get power, wealth and wisdom. And then we dream of passing it on to the next generation. However, since wisdom is not hereditary, even if we established a perfect meritocracy, that dream never passes as more than an echo in the wind to the next generation. Instead what starts as meritorious becomes meretricious, as the next generation tries to live off the good name of the previous one.
The Republicans (or at least key ones) would make a Burkian style Republic possible. In the process they have created a meretricious society where hypocrisy and corruption rule instead. Oh well. They call inheritance taxes "death taxes" and are doing their best to create a permanent wealthy class of people. Unfortunately, as Paine noted, wisdom is not inheritable, and therefore aristocracy destroys meritocracy. The best proof of this is Bush. His father at least deserved some merit for wisdom. The son?
Chris
Posted by cholte at October 12, 2006 03:50 PM