God, Man, Nature, and political legitimacy (and Bush's lack of it)

[starroute]

All the recent religion threads, and the questions about whether they belong at DU or not, have gotten me thinking about why I believe that religion does have a place on a board devoted to politics. And the connection that immediately sprang to mind was in the area of political legitimacy.

On the face of it, there's no obvious reason why one person should have authority over another, or why a group should have life-and-death power over its members. That may be why people have always looked for a supernatural, religious, or philosophical basis to justify the legitimate authority of governments -- or, for that matter, the overthrow of governments that seem to have lost their legitimacy.

Back at the start of civilization, the idea was simply that kingship had descended from heaven. Often the founding myth of the kingdom was that the first king had been a god, and that an unbroken succession of direct heirs had passed his authority down to the present rulers. Or, as in China, various portents and natural events might be taken as signs that a king either did or did not have the Mandate of Heaven.

By the Middle Ages, this had evolved into a more sophisticated trickle-down theory of legitimacy. In the feudal system, kings derived their authority from God, and that authority was then conveyed down through the great feudal lords, lesser lords, knights, and so forth.

But the most dramatic change came in the early modern era, with the rejection of the idea that kings ruled by divine right. The leaders of the 18th century Enlightment were firmly against the notion that God could intervene directly in the natural world. However, that did not mean that God was out of the picture. Instead, they believed that the individual human soul was a microcosm of the Mind of God.

That is where the Founding Fathers were coming from, and why they spoke in terms of governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." The consent of the governed has been our equivalent of the Mandate of Heaven -- both the source of the authority of government and the assurance of its legitimacy.

However, that 18th century consensus has now broken down. It is no longer supported by current ideas about the human mind or by trust in a human ability for dispassionate decision-making. The weakening of the mainstream Protestant denominations is one sign of this breakdown. The decline of our educational system is another. The (still generally unacknowledged) constitutional crisis into which the 2000 election plunged our society is a third.

Simply put, the Republicans no longer believe in traditional American ideas about legitimate government. The religious right is doing its best to go back to some version of divine annointment. The Straussian right seems to believe that legitimacy is an illusion fostered by the strong as a means of imposing their will on the weak.

We, as Democrats, do still believe in democracy as the source of legitimacy. But somehow, this has been making us weak instead of strong. The Republican dirty tricksters have run rings around us while we keep trying to play by the rules. And the fundamentalists propose measures that would destroy the very root of our Constitutional system, without our being able to make it clear to the general population why this is so wrong.

So I'm asking for discussion on the theme of how to redefine political legitimacy in a progressive manner. My basic assumptions are:

1 - We need to redefine legitimacy in a new way that will be fully in tune with current leading-edge thinking.

2 - This new definition cannot fall back on old-fashioned top-down definitions of authority. If anything, it must be even more bottom-up and radically democratic than the definition which has served us for the last 200 years.

3 - The new definition should draw on current science, systems theory, brain research, and anything else that seems relevant. But it also has to involve a transcendent element -- not necessarily "God" or a "soul," but something larger than ourselves whose authority we can all accept as trumping our petty Earth-bound quarrels.

4 - This definition should help to clarify and resolve all the most insoluble issues of our time. For example, corporations have gotten away with claiming the rights of individuals because of the fading of the old idea of the individual as possessing a moral soul. Somehow, we have to change things so that corporations are naturally perceived as having only limited rights, granted to them by the people whose lives they affect (and not by whatever government they can get the best deal from.)

5 - Ideally, this definition would also be exportable -- it would be as capable of speaking to people in China or the Middle East as to Americans and Europeans. It would be a definition that would make it possible to create a worldwide system of political authority that would directly represent the world's people. (Unlike the United Nations, which represents only the world's governments, and has always been top-down and undemocratic.)

(Not asking much, am I?)

I have a few notions of my own, involving such things as emergent systems, non-zero-sum games, and the self-organizing universe. But they're still pretty vague, I'd like to see this kicked around by others for a while before I start trying to express my own ideas.

Who's willing to play?

[arendt]

1. One person's "religion" is another person's "worldview"

Cognitive science people talk about worldviews -
the sum total of knowledge that a person takes
for granted in his interactions with the world.

Each religion has its own worldview. Scientists
have a worldview.

Only in the sense of both having different worldviews
can science and religion be said to be in "competition".

But, there are many kinds of scientists. There are
classic geeks who can't tie their shoes. There are
shameless careerists who will do whatever it takes
to climb the career ladder, short of outright plagarism
or fraud. And, rarely, there are politially aware
scientists who understand that the religious fanatics
are out their stacking wood for a new generation of
bonfires.

I agree the political system has brokent down. But,
I say that is because "democracy does not scale".
(I have posted on this extensively, and can dig up
a bookmark if you want.)

Fundamentalist religion is the reaction of people
in over their heads. They don't understand the world
science has created. They don't want that world to
be fixed. They want to go back to a world where it
doesn't take any brains to get ahead, just obedience.

I'm too burned out to get into this in any detail,
but I am interested. I'm bookmarking this.

arendt

[starroute]

3. It's true that democracy doesn't scale, but that's always the case

Feudalism didn't scale to meet the needs of the modern nation state. Rule by divine emperors didn't scale well past the time of ancient Egypt and Assyria. (The collapse of the Roman Empire is the most obvious example of its failure.) Tribal systems of authority based on descent from a common totemic ancestor didn't scale well to the more complex and cosmopolitan societies of the late Neolithic.

But what I'm interested in at the moment is the other side of the coin -- the cognitive structures which make possible the development of new systems of authority. For example, I'd say that if democracy doesn't scale well now, it's because it had certain limitations from the beginning. The founding fathers didn't fully trust the common folk, so they set up a system of representative democracy. This worked reasonably well so long as the country was small enough for people to know their representatives personally, but it doesn't now. On the other hand, modern forms of communication have made true participatory democracy far more possible.

As long as your current system of authority is doing its job, you don't have to think about the philosophical assumptions which underlie that system. But when the system breaks down, and the original philosophical assumptions are no longer generally considered true, you need to go back to first principles to come up with its successor.

I see the people here at DU as having a lot of common ground. There isn't really a division between religion and science, either -- for the most part, atheists and agnostics, followers of esoteric and New Age paths, and liberal Christians share a very similar worldview. There are also others beyond the usual DU sphere who are pretty close -- libertarians, for example, aside from their extreme individualism, often have a lot in common with the DU outlook.

What I'm looking for is a new approach to government, probably based on the idea of creativity. It would incorporate a lot of the current thinking about intellectual property and open source issues -- what kinds of freedom people need to work well together, how large groups can be structured to accomplish complex projects, and so forth. It would draw heavily on Richard Florida's ideas abut the Creative Class (and might also do well to draw on the older work of Jane Jacobs on what makes for cultural vibrancy.)

Such an approach would regard governmental (and business) structures as legitimate only to the extent that they serve both human creativity and the creative evolution of the planet as a whole. I think it would eventually lead to far more flexible, ad hoc, participatory systems in every area of life.

A creativity-based theory of government would not make any statement as to the ultimate source or goal of human creativity -- so it would be equally accessible to atheists, new-Agers, and theists. And it would provide a ready-made framework of understanding for many current strongly-held positions of the left, such as that countries should not go to war on the basis of secret decision-making, or that outlawing gay marriage (and thereby stigmatizing a particularly creative segment of the population) is counter-productive.

Thanks for your thoughtful response, arendt, but I thank that as usual I'm being too theoretical for most people. I expect that I'll end up going back to dropping bits and pieces of my ideas in wherever they seem relevant.

[Hammie]

2. We weaken ourselves

"We, as Democrats, do still believe in democracy as the source of legitimacy. But somehow, this has been making us weak instead of strong. The Republican dirty tricksters have run rings around us while we keep trying to play by the rules. And the fundamentalists propose measures that would destroy the very root of our Constitutional system, without our being able to make it clear to the general population why this is so wrong."

We depend too often on Judicial fiat to accomplish our goals. It has been effective in implementing necessary change, but it tarnishes our "democratic" appeal. It is hard to claim that we stand for popular sovereignty when we circumnavigate it so frequently. In our haste to do what is right, we risk destroying the source of our own legitimacy.

[JohnOneillsMemory]

4. Brain analysis reveals innate 'empathy.' Seems that Paganism is universal.

The physical realities of living in a body and in a brain seems to be the boat that we humans are literally all in.

This idea has been held at intellectual arm's length by those people who want to believe that humans are different from other animals in some way that elevates them to a status of god-like nobility.

Now that brain scans have revealed that there is an innate empathy for other humans, Darwinism and evolution doesn't look as savage as some feared. ('Survival of the Fittest' doesn't warm many hearts. It is the stuff of Hitler, Eugenics and the Dominionist Bush maladministration.)

I have noticed the similarities in psychology and theology of humans deep-seated need to believe in god-like (powerful yet beneficent) parents, planets, deities, and Universe. I've decided that there is an emotion tied to survival of our species that might be called the 'Optomism Imperative.'

That is, in order to survive first our parents (males are frequently quite abusive and violent) and then a hostile planet full of predators, bad weather, and food that runs away from us, we need to believe that our perceived source environment, be it family, jungle, or cosmos, actually WANTS US TO SURVIVE. This infuses a struggling human with the emotions of HOPE, FAITH, AND OPTOMISM which give us the motivation we need to leave the cave and look for food or sex, the building blocks for long-term survival of our species.

The societal construct that institutionalizes the OPTOMISM IMPERATIVE for strong and weak alike is called CIVILIZED JUSTICE.

How's that for EVOLUTION SCIENCE VALIDATING SOCIAL JUSTICE?