3. The Palace versus the Forum
Why does democracy correlate so closely with violence? Correlation is not causation, so we need to understand what mechanisms - if any - contribute to violence in a democracy, or, rather, the Forum polity.
To recall S.E. Finer's observation above: "The Forum polity is comparatively rare in the history of government, where the Palace polity and its variants are overwhelmingly the most common type. Only in the last two centuries has the Forum polity become widespread. Before then its appearance is, on the whole, limited to the Greek poleis, the Roman Republic, and the mediaeval European city-states. Furthermore, most of them for most of the time exhibited the worst pathological features of this kind of polity. For rhetoric read demagogy, for persuasion read corruption, pressure, intimidation, and falsification of the vote. For meetings and assemblies, read tumult and riot. For mature deliberation through a set of revising institutions, read instead self-division, inconstancy, slowness, and legislative and administrative stultification. And for elections read factional plots and intrigues. These features were the ones characteristically associated with the Forum polity in Europe down to very recent times. They were what gave the term 'Republic' a bad name, but made 'Democracy' an object of sheer horror."
The major reason for the stability of Venice, for instance, in contrast to the violence and disorder of the other medieval city-states, was the fact that the Great Council in the former was closed to new members: in the latter, there was a perpetual jostling for political positions and power1.
And there we have the reason for the correlation between democracy and violence. In a democracy, power - by definition - is available to anyone who can take it. In a Palace-type polity, access to power is severely circumscribed - within the ruling dynasty.
Consider ancient Egypt. In 3000 years of Egyptian history, and over thirty-one dynasties, never was there a single rebellion!
As Henri Frankfort observes: "The famous saying of Louis XIV, letat c'est moi, was levity and presumption when it was uttered, but could have been offered by Pharaoh as a statement of fact in which his subjects concurred. It would have summed up adequately their political philosophy.
"There can be no doubt about this. The practical organization of the Egyptian commonwealth implies it; the texts and monuments proclaim it; and it is confirmed by the absence of any trace of revolution in three thousand years of recorded history.2"
Indeed, the first outbreak of violence was entirely due to the collapse of the Old Kingdom, which had seen three hundred years of stability. The First Intermediate Period reveals how dependent Egyptians were on continued Pharaohnic rule for stability.
In the Dispute of a Man, Weary of Life, a poem born of anarchic conditions, there is an internal debate regarding suicide - so terrible were the prevailing conditions.
To whom can I speak today?
The gentle man has perished,
The violent man has access to everybody.
To whom can I speak today?
There are no righteous men,
The earth is surrendered to criminals.
... ......
Death stands before me today
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going outdoors again after being confined.
Death stands before me today
As a man longs to see his house,
After he has spent many years held in captivity.3
Other variations harp on the same theme of violence:
Men shall fashion arrows of copper, that they may beg for bread with blood. Men laugh with a laughter of disease.4
People not only did not deplore the alleged 'despotism' of the Pharaohs - they loved them .5
In China, peasant rebellions were not expressions of hatred for the monarch or the bureaucracy. These rebellions broke out when a natural calamity occurred. "The real enemies of the peasant were natural disasters and extremely poor communications; so that when flood or famine occurred and no help came, entire peasant communities could be reduced to total destitution....The local famine and the subsequent food riot was an endemic feature of West European life into the early nineteenth century."6
In Japan, the Shogunate was so peaceful that the Japanese forgot the use of firearms and were unable to repulse the democratic Americans - who roused a peace-loving nation to militarism. "...The most extraordinary feature of the Japanese armed forces was not just the ever-diminishing numbers of effectives nor their progressive loss of military skills, but their abandonment of firearms. The harquebus came in 1543. It had played the crucial part in the battles that ended the civil wars. But once the wars ceased the Japanese simply turned their backs on these unworthy, unchivalrous weapons....7" "The consequence was that the country lay wide open to the incursion of the West in 1853."8
When the Roman Republic gave way to the Roman Empire - a significant transition from the Forum-type to the Palace-type polity - slavery disappeared 9 because the endemic wars of the Republic ceased (there were other - related - reasons, which I have explored in another essay). Five hundred years of violence came to an abrupt end, so that Virgil felt it necessary to elevate Octavius to the level of a deity:
....deus nobis haec otia fecit
... mihi semper deus10
What about the pathologies of the Palace-type polity? Firstly, the palace coup or assassination usually affects only members of the palace, not the populace. Secondly, succession disputes are resolved by armies - not by the people. In both cases, violence is minimized, not maximized. Thirdly, the great advantage - for these very reasons - of the palace-type government is that tyrannicide is possible with very little violence. In a democracy, tyrannicide is impossible without great violence among contending parties. Indeed, when an entire people tyrannizes over minorities or weaker foreigners, tyrannicide is impossible - you can't kill a whole people!
As we have seen, in India the killing of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh guards provoked a murderous backlash; whereas, in Bangladesh the killing of Sheikh Mujib by a group of army officers had no negative effects on the nation. In Bangladesh, there have been two military coups, and neither was accompanied by bloodshed. In Pakistan, there have been three peaceful military takeovers. Indeed, the successive military takeovers in East Asia have not only failed to upset the social order, but the military rulers have taken their societies to levels of hitherto undreamt-of wealth and prosperity. Indeed, it has been argued that democracy, by virtue of its turbulence and violence, may, in the third world, have anti-developmental consequences. According to Adrian Leftwich: "....development cannot simply be managed into motion by some idealised system of good governance, evacuated from the world of politics. For neither democracy nor good governance are independent variables which have somehow gone missing in the developing world: they are dependent ones. And whatever their relationship with economic growth and development may be, both are the products of particular kinds of politics and can be found only in states which promote and protect them. Indeed, they are a form of politics themselves and not a set of institutions and rules. ...Indeed, to insist on democratic institutions and practices in societies whose politics will not support them and whose state traditions (or lack of them) will not sustain them may be to do far greater damage than not insisting on them. Moreover, the kind of political turbulence which such insistence may unleash is bound to have explosive and decidedly anti-developmental consequences. "11 (The italics are original). We have seen how the great African Civil War was unleashed by insisting on democratic reforms. As Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz have observed: ""Democracy...simply has no proper role for political losers in Africa....Politicians are expected to represent their constituents properly, that is, to deliver resources to them. It is, therefore, comprehensively useless to be an opposition politician...."12 Therefore, the spectre of losing an election alone will be sufficient to unleash violence in such a society, as happened in Zimbabwe.
No deeper psychological study of the pathologies of democracy have been undertaken than Plato's Gorgias.
Before plunging into the dialogue, let us review Socrates' attitude towards politics. Active participation in government was highly valued in Athens. Yet Socrates refused to participate in politics.
In the Gorgias, he tells Polus: "I am no politician, Polus. "13 And Callicles makes fun of him, claiming that he lives "shunning the city centre and market place, in which the poet said that men win distinction, and living the rest of his life sunk in a corner and whispering with three or four boys, and incapable of any utterance that is free and lofty and brilliant" .14
In the Apology, he says: "It may seem curious that I should go round giving advice like this and busying myself in people's private affairs, and yet never venture publicly to address you as a whole and advise on matters of state. "15 He clearly tells his audience, "If I had tried long ago to engage in politics, I should long ago have lost my life, without doing any good either to you or to myself. "16
Socrates, then, clearly maintained that he was in no way associated with politics; indeed, he disdained the crowd, and disapproved of Alcibiades for the latter's fondness for the mob. Throughout the Gorgias, Socrates constantly refers to speechifying before the public as 'flattery'. The word 'flattery' occurs no less than 24 times!
And yet Socrates tells Callicles: "I think I am one of very few Athenians, not to say the only one, engaged in the true political art, and that of the men of today I alone practice statesmanship. "17 This apparent contradiction is cleared up when we consider what he had told Callicles a little earlier: "And now, my best of friends, since you are just beginning to enter public life and invite me also and reproach me for not doing so, shall we examine each other and ask, Come now, has Callicles ever yet improved any of the citizens? Is there any man who previously was evil, unjust, undisciplined, and senseless, and through Callicles has become an upright and worthy man, be he stranger or citizen, slave or free? "18
And here we have, in a few lines, Socrates' entire view of politics, one that would find later culmination in the Republic in a very different way: politics, for Socrates, consists not in trying to move the public by clever speeches, but in trying to make men better as human beings. It is true, admits Socrates to Callicles, for whom might is right, that power comes through flattery, oratory and rhetoric. He, however, distinguishes between the higher and the lower rhetoric. "...Even if there are two sides to this, yet one part of it, I suppose, would be flattery and shameful mob appeal, while the other is something fine the effort to perfect as far as possible the souls of the citizens and the struggle to say always what is best, whether it be welcome or unwelcome to the hearers. But you yourself have never seen rhetoric of this kind, or if you can mention any such orator, why do you not tell me his name at once? "19
Callicles admits that he has never known any such rhetorician they've all been demagogues.
Socrates' death at the hand of the democracy was in a way inevitable. For he questioned a fundamental postulate of democracy: that the individual is rational and able to make the wisest choice not only for himself, but for the whole of society. Thus Pericles asserts: "The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. "20 Two thousand four hundred years later, these words were echoed by J.S.Mill: " There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence" .21
By identifying virtue with knowledge, Socrates ensured that the individual would be proven irrational - and so wicked - again and again. He was a danger to democracy. Socrates has therefore hit upon one of the greatest pathologies of democracy. "For rhetoric, read demagogy," observed S.E. Finer. We immediately think of the speeches of Hitler, but lesser cases will do just as well. Think of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike's speeches promising the Sinhalese their language as state language; think of Milosevic's speeches urging his compatriots on to murder Muslims to avenge a war that had occurred 600 years ago; and think of the eloquence of George Bush and Tony Blair today.
It is, therefore, absurd to make a distinction between 'liberal' and 'illiberal' democracy 22: no one today will question that America is a liberal democracy. And yet the violence unleashed by that liberal democracy - with the greatest war machine ever possessed by man - makes lilliputs of alleged despotic monsters.
Consider world arms sales. The 'liberal' democracies account for around 80% of the total, with America leading the pack by a wide margin. And are these exports carried out for rational reasons? Take Britain, which has an industry whose proceeds amount to £ 5 billion per year, less than .5% of GDP. The industry employs only 90,000 people, and requires government assistance to the tune of £ 400 million a year. The arms industry is clearly run by irrational principles.23
According to Richard Vinen, the evils of twentieth-century Europe were partly the direct product of the liberal class. He says: "In truth, the very forces that shook Europe came, in part, from within the liberal intelligentsia" .24 He quotes Virginia Woolf's diary: "On the tow path we met and had to pass a long line of imbeciles...everyone in that long line was a miserable shuffling idiotic creature....It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."25
Norman Davies comes up with some literary gems as well. "If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace with a military band playing softly, and a cinematograph working brightly; then I'd go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the Hallelujah Chorus."
In 1908, thirty-three years before Auschwitz, this prophetic piece issued from the pen of D.H. Lawrence. H.G. Wells, in his Anticipations (1902), revealed a remarkable enthusiasm for eugenics: "And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races, the black...the yellow men...the alleged termite of the civilised world, the Jew?" 26
In Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness (1902), we find a similar juxtaposition of the tendency to do good and evil in the pamphlet written by the white man Kurtz in the jungle for the 'improvement' of the black man: "'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' &c., &c. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know....There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'"27
Thus, the idea of mass murder was already 'in the air', and, as Conrad demonstrates and Vinen avers, the idea emanated from the liberal intelligentsia, people who had the best of intentions for mankind. Hence, the recent fad for dividing democracies into 'liberal' and 'illiberal' is not only chimerical, but a violent distortion of the facts.
We shall also see below how civil society spontaneously generates violence: at this point it is important to note that the idea for one of the worst crimes in the twentieth century actually germinated within civil society.
For other and earlier crimes, there is the classic account by Vittorio Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed. "When a people is unable to repel the intruders who have seized its land," says Lanternari, "as in the case of the Plains Indians in North America or the Maoris in New Zealand, almost invariably a new religious cult springs into being which inspires the natives to express opposition to foreign rule. Thus, by making a display of their religious independence, the people strive to fight the racial segregation, forced acculturation, or destruction of tribal life imposed both by missionaries and by the colonial administrators ".28 Both the Catholic and Protestant missions were guilty of persecution, and both when abetting the authorities, and when working on their own. In his preface, the author notes: "The anti-Western attitude which emerges from this study is not the personal attitude of the author but that of the native peoples expressed through their own ideas and, often, in their own words. Their feeling toward the missions is only one facet of their general stand in regard to the white man."29
As for the distinction between liberal and illiberal democracy, it is vacuous. The United States for one, has, in fact, never been a liberal democracy, according to Howard Zinn. He observes:
"We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which the U.S. government drove millions of Indians off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.
"We must face our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism.
"And we must face the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."30
Indeed, seven paragraphs in his article are devoted to articulating how president after president lied to the nation about going to war.
Alexis de Tocqueville's account of Democracy in America is widely quoted and warmly appreciated. Less well known is his On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France (Philadelphia, 1833) (written with Gustave de Beaumont). His observation that "while society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism" could have been made today .31 The statistics behind the observation could have been culled from a modern almanac: the population of New York State was 1/35th black, while the prison population was 1/4th black; in Massachusetts the figures were 1/74th and 1/6th; in Connecticut, 1/34th and 1/3rd; in New Jersey, 1/13th and 1/3rd; in Pennsylvania, 1/34th and 1/3rd. Thus was born the coloured criminal in the North, the free states. Indeed, after emancipation, the first civil right that black people sought was, significantly, not the right to vote, but the right to serve on juries 32 in order to prevent their re-enslavement under the Thirteenth Amendment, section 1 of which said: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a means of punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States....". Today, African Americans constitute 14% of the population, and 44% of its prison population.
The liberal-illiberal distinction is not only empirically, but also logically, unsound. Logically, the distinction amounts to the fallacy known as the "no-true-Scotsman move": "No Scotsman would do such a thing. But one did. Well, no true Scotsman would."33
"No democracy is violent. But some are. Well, no true democracy is." For 'true', read 'liberal'.
The first doubts as to individual rationality had been raised by Thucydides. This historian was probably the first student of the mob. He noticed that Athens was a congeries of mobs. The individual could easily be swayed into irrational and destructive acts, as we saw above.
The coup de grace to the rational individual was delivered by Plato. It is a permanent embarrassment to westerners that their greatest philosopher is the greatest critic of their most cherished belief. For Plato's teacher, Socrates, as we have seen, the individual was not inherently irrational. He was basically ignorant, and through suitable education could be made virtuous and wise. Wisdom and virtue were identical. Therefore, it was impossible for an individual to know what was good and do the opposite. In short, he ruled out akrasia, or incontinence (as well as hypocrisy!). However, he never explained what sort of education would make people wise and virtuous; his own method of interrogation the elenchus was hardly conducive to wisdom. At the end of almost every dialogue, we find his interlocutor hopelessly befuddled or furious or both and not a whit wiser!
Aristotle held a similar view. "Now we may ask what kind of right belief is possessed by the man who behaves incontinently. That he should behave so when he has knowledge, some say is impossible; for it would be strange so Socrates thought if when knowledge was in a man something else could master it and drag it about like a slave. For Socrates was entirely opposed to the view in question, holding that there is no such thing as incontinence; no one, he said, acts against what he believes best people act so only by reason of ignorance. Now this view contradicts the plain phenomena....34 " For Aristotle, the rational animal reasons out his actions from general principles. Therefore, he too finds it well-nigh impossible to make room for human fallibility.
Socrates' pupil, on the other hand, made room for akrasia. His vivisection of the soul provides the starting point: there's the rational part of the soul, then the passionate or spirited part, which has to do with the emotions, especially anger and also fear, and then the appetitive part which has to do with physical needs, such as hunger and sex. Anticipating Freud, Plato assigns to the last a terrible and independent autonomy. In the Timaeus he observes of both men and women:
"Wherefore also in men the organ of generation becoming rebellious and masterful, like an animal disobedient to reason, and maddened with the sting of lust, seeks to gain absolute sway, and the same is the case with the so-called womb or matrix of women".35
For Socrates, courage is an intellectual achievement: "...Knowledge of what is and is not to be feared is courage".36 For Plato, courage is an emotional achievement: "This power in the soul, then, this unfailing conservation of right and lawful belief about things to be and not to be feared is what I call and would assume to be courage."37 Thus courage is not knowledge anymore, but a "power". Only the spirited part can guard against cowardice; and and this is vital the spirited part is immune to reason. The emotions alone can reach it; therefore, a suitably artistic 'musical' - education must be used to inculcate virtue.
And this is another point of difference with Socrates. For the master, virtue was a democratic product, open to all; for the pupil, virtue is the exclusive preserve of an elite. The mass of humanity can only achieve a simulacrum of virtue, through the benevolent despotism of an elite.
Plato proved more prescient than his teacher. He had anticipated the power of indoctrination, of literature and music to arouse emotions and channel them in whatever directions those in authority wish.
If any further proof for the irrational man was necessary, they were provided by Sigmund Freud.38 He channeled the entire western tradition of the irrational - against the other tradition - into his view of man: a personality constantly at war with the superego and the id. (Two very good directors, who have recently caught this tension on camera, are Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut and Adrian Lyne in Unfaithful.)
Of late, the discipline of economics has been debunked by behaviouralists: Daniel Kahneman interestingly, a psychologist, rather than an economist - won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that individuals cannot choose rationally between alternatives, or assess risks properly. The 'individual' values the security of the herd: all this explains the recent stock market bubble and crash when investors egged on by newspapers and analysts - madly rushed into the technology shares of firms that could never have prospered, and then sold just as suddenly.39
For neo-classical economic theory holds that as a person's income increases, he achieves greater utility or satisfaction. In technical jargon, his 'budget line' moves outward toward a higher 'indifference curve'.40 Empirical studies have revealed that this is not so: one's satisfaction does not rest on one's own income, but on one's income relative to that of others higher up the scale. Therefore, in reality, individuals do not try to maximize their own income, but to earn more than the Joneses.41
Before continuing reading this essay, please answer the following question. Which should one choose: $50,000 per year while others earned $25,000, or $100,000 while others earned $200,000? Give it a moment's thought, then read on.
If you chose the former option, well, you are all too human and like the group of Harvard students who were asked the same question. So, if you work harder and earn more, you won't be very happy if others around you earn more also only by making sure that they earn less than you, can you ensure your own psychic satisfaction.42
Individuals, therefore, would rather be worse off to make somebody else worse off than themselves.
The proposition
I earn $100,000
is less significant than the proposition
He earns more than me.
The first proposition states a quality of the individual; the second states a relation. The relation appears as a quality.
Thus, individuals set great store by such relations as
x is richer than y
They don't realize that this is a relation, not a quality. Relations appear to people as qualities; so when y makes a fortune and becomes richer than x, x feels unhappy - even though y's fortune has not affected him in anyway. Again, if y loses his fortune, then x feels happy, even if his income throughout these vicissitudes of y has remained the same. As Bertrand Russell observed: "...the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences...."43
Economics has always struggled to explain altruism. Altruism can be similarly explained in terms of a relation of relative deprivation appearing as a - painful - quality. (NB: the relatively deprived must pose no danger to ourselves, and must not have been deprived by ourselves, of course.) Family life, also, remains unexplained by economics: being a father, mother or offspring appears as a quality to the individual, a quality that is deeply internalized. Therefore, the confusion of quality and relation is responsible for some of our finest - and some of our worst - behaviour.
This confusion has been institutionalized everywhere - most notably in the Olympic games, where hundreds of athletes from all over the world confuse a relation with a quality! And the entire world watches with bated breath!
From games to war is a short step.
For all x, for all y, if x is German and y is French, then x is more powerful than y.
In symbols,
(x)(y)((Gx&Fx --> Pxy)
This is a formulaic representation of the First World War. The reader will note that the consequent is entirely a relation, but it appeared to the Germans and the French as though it stated a quality.
The slaughter of the First World War would have been impossible without the indoctrination of each schoolboy and reader of newspapers Plato's 'musical' education alluded to above..
There was no rational reason for the war: in 1898, Ivan Bloch, a Russian banker, wrote a book that was published in English as Is War Now Impossible? Yes, he answered, because war was too destructive to be sustainable. In 1909, Norman Angell argued that it was a "great illusion" to think that any industrialized nation could benefit from war. A Lloyd's underwriter told the Committee of Imperial Defence that, were a German ship sunk by the Royal Navy, he would have to pay compensation. "Britain, France and Germany were all industrialised countries with highly educated populations and more or less universal male suffrage," observes Richard Vinen. "Why should states that were so well placed to calculate their interests rationally embark on a war that was to bring such destruction?"44 Answer: precisely because they had educated populations with the vote. As Vinen said of the Great War: "The fact that the war proved so long and so destructive was the result of the 'sophistication' of western European societies, not the 'primitive' nature of east European ones."45
Every nation in western Europe preferred to be worse off just to ensure that the others were even worse off than itself. Only by understanding the confusion between relation and quality can we comprehend the irrationality of the War.
The scramble to colonize Africa from which no European nation bar Belgium derived any material benefit was largely a product of literacy, newspapers and national pride - that is, the irrational. Novelists and travelers glamourized the conquest of Africa: Tarzan and Allan Quatermain were born. There was no rational reason for thousands of Africans to die. At the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan, 10,000 Sudanese died, and only 48 British and Egyptian soldiers because the former had not yet learned to use the machine-guns they had. In 1905, natives rebelled against German forces and settlers in Tanganyika 75,000 natives perished in the killing and famine that followed. And all to increase newspaper circulation and politicians' votes.46
Contrast the free play given to the irrational element in a democracy with the restraint on the irrational practiced in ancient Egypt. The bogeyman of the Egyptian was "the passionate man", a source of danger to himself as well as others. Against him stands "the silent man". No quarter is given to the Periclean idea of "doing what he likes".
As for the passionate man in the temple, he is like a tree growing in the open. Suddenly [comes] its loss of foliage, and its end is reached in the shipyards; [or] it is floated far from its place, and a flame is its burial shroud.
[But] the truly silent man holds himself apart. He is like a tree growing in a garden. It flourishes; it doubles its fruit; it [stands] before its lord. Its fruit is sweet; its shade is pleasant; and its end is reached in the garden.47
Henri Frankfort observes: "The Egyptian way of life, signposted by the wisdom of the ages, appears as one not of struggle but of harmony".48
Such a culture of self-restraint must inevitably arise in a palace-type government. In Egypt, the value that dominated all others was that of 'maat'49 - order, justice, harmony. Where democratic society is horizontal, palace-societies are vertical. Thus we have the Yin-Yang dichotomy of Confucius: he applied the idea to human relationships, especially those of the ruler-ruled, father-son, husband-wife, the first in each pair being superior to the second. "This hierarchical theory of human relationships was pervasive in Confucian China."50 Indeed, throughout non-western civilization, hierarchies have existed to restrain individuals.
To see why such a culture of restraint and hierarchy must inevitably arise in a palace-type government, consider the relationship between ruler and ruled - as opposed to that of ruler and citizen. In the former relationship, everyone knows that he or she is subordinate to the monarch.
The king is more powerful than y, where y is anyone who is not the king.
This relationship of subordination is then replicated throughout society. The kings appointees are more powerful than others, bureaucrats and soldiers are more powerful than other subjects....
Thus the king's absolute power appears as what it is - as a relation with his subjects, not as a quality of the king or his subjects. This is a highly rational arrangement. As Sheikh Sa'di observed:
It is best to cherish the army as thy life
Because a sultan reigns by means of his troops.51
In a Forum-type polity, relations will necessarily appear as qualities. The relation will be one of equality (that is, political equality), not subordination, and this relation will appear as everybody's quality. Now, we have seen that individuals resent equality - they would go to any length to be superior to others, and in a Forum polity, that is always possible.
x is as powerful as y
is a highly unstable state of affairs because, as we saw in the Gorgias, everyone wants to be more powerful than y.
The notion of an horizontal civil society has been vigorously promoted abroad by western governments and aid agencies. Yet civil society is a major source of violence. We have seen how the Israel lobby can direct violence against foreign people; how the Cuban-American lobby has been throttling a puny island; how Christian fundamentalists influenced George Bush to go to war against Iraq.
John Keane has argued that violence is intrinsic to civil society. "A highly developed civil society can and normally does contain within itself violent tendencies,"52 he observes. Again: "Those who work for a (more) civil society must recognize not only that violence is often the antithesis of civil society, but also that every known form of civil society tends to produce the same violent antithesis".53
However, on the reasons for this built-in tendency towards violence, Keane only approximates the truth. He observes insightfully: "The openness that is characteristic of all civil societies - their nurturing of a plurality of forms of life that are themselves experienced as contingent - is arguably at the root of their tendency to violence." These plural forms of life are unable - and unwilling - to see the whole picture: how their actions affect other people. An irresponsible inwardness develops towards others, both within the society and without.
Something approaching the belligerent formula above - x is more powerful than y - begins to work, and the group sets itself up in opposition to all other groups, with temporary alliances for strategic purposes. The formula clearly shows the irrational individual at his finest - or worst.
Thus farm lobbies feel no compunction for the misery they cause to third world farmers - the vast majority of the planet's people held hostage by a microscopic minority. Similarly Christian fundamentalists care neither about the American soldiers dying in Iraq, nor for the Iraqi civilians dying in their hundreds of thousands.
It is no accident that the archetypal civic association - the Roman Catholic Church - has had such a violent history. Robin Blackburn has pointed out that the Atlantic slave trade was actively encouraged by the Church - that is, by civil society. Today, we see the same inwardness towards the unfortunate boys who have been sexually abused by priests protected by the Church until recently - and still today. He writes: "Then again, the history of New World slavery, as I will try to demonstrate, shows that civil society, in a modern sense of the term, can itself powerfully - and, as it were, 'spontaneously' - contribute to highly destructive pattern of human conduct."54 The Protestant Churches equally promoted slavery. "The Reformation was no less broadly supportive of the validity of slavery than the Renaissance or Catholic theology....Protestantism, associated with the emergence of a more independent civil society, failed to produce a critique of the Atlantic slave trade or of colonial slavery despite the fact that there was, as yet, no significant Protestant stake in either."55
Thus, it is not the "openness" of civil society, but its closed character that lends itself to violence. Civil society unleashes the irrational element in the human psyche: we saw above how the blueprint for the Holocaust emerged within civil society. By letting the individual "do as he likes", the whole is sacrificed to the part. Kahneman has amply demonstrated how interested individuals are in the loss of welfare of other individuals.
This is madness.
Notes:
1 S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, p 995
2 Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), p.31
3 Ibid., pp. 141-144
4 Ibid., p. 86
5 Ibid., p. 43
6 S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, p 521
7 Ibid., p 1115
8 Ibid., p 1125
9 William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1955), p. 113 -117
10 Virgil, Ecloga I, Vergil's Bucolics in Latin, The Project Gutenberg Etext of Vergil's Bucolics in Latin, March 1995
11 Adrian Leftwich,'On the Primacy of Politics in Development', Democracy and Development, ed. Adrian Leftwich, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 18
12 Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), p. 56
13 Gorgias, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, trans. W.D Woodhead, 473e
14 Ibid., 485d
15 Apology, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tredennick, 31c
16 Ibid., 31d
17 Gorgias, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, 522d
18 Ibid., 515a
19 Ibid., 503a
20 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), II.37.
21 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chapter 1, http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/m/m645o/m645o.zip
22 http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/other/democracy.html
23 Chart created from data in The Economist, "A Survey of the Defence Industry", July 20th 2002, p.6
24 Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, p. 12
25 quoted in Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, p. 13
26 Lawrence and Wells quoted in Norman Davies, Europe: A History, p. 860
27 Joseph Conrad , Heart of Darkness, Project Gutenberg E-text, May, 1996
28 Vittorio Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed, (New York: New American Library, 1965 ), p 20
29 Ibid., p. xii
30 http://progressive.org/media_mpzinn030806
31 quoted in Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America, p. 129
32 Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America, p. 171
33 "no-true-Scotsman move" in Antony Flew, ed., A Dictionary Of Philosophy (London: Pan Books, 1979)
34 Ethics, trans. W.D.Ross, rev. J.O.Urmson, The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1145b22-27
35 Timaeus, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, trans. B. Jowett, 91b-c
36 Protagoras, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, 473e
37 Republic, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, trans. Paul Shorey, 431b
38 J. M. Roberts, Twentieth Century: The History of the World: 1901 To The Present, pp. 321-3
39 The Economist, October 12th 2002, p. 76
40 Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics, Appendix 6, (Singapore: McGraw Hill, 1992), p. 97
41 Samuelson and Nordhaus are aware that individuals and firms do not attempt to maximize their income, and yet insist that this is rational behaviour: economists are famous for not agreeing with each other, but they are less well-known for irrational self-contradiction!
42 The Economist, August 9 2003, p. 60
43 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1961), p. 715 (I owe a great deal to Russell's discussion of relations and qualities here.)
44 Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, p. 44
45 Ibid., p. 46
46 J. M. Roberts, Twentieth Century: The History of the World: 1901 To The Present, pp. 90 - 92
47 Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion, p. 66
48 Ibid., p. 83
49 Ibid., p. 54
50 Ninian Smart, The World's Religions (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), p. 115
51 Sheikh Muslih-uddin Sa'di Shirazi, The Gulistan of Sa'di, trans. Edward Rehatsek, The University of Adelaide Library Electronic Texts Collection, Book 1, Story 6
52 John Keane, Civil Society, (London: Polity Press, 1998), p. 136
53 John Keane, Civil Society, p. 141
54 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, (London: Verso, 1997), p. 6
55 Ibid., p. 64
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