Questioning democralotry

It is an unquestioned truth of the age among “right thinking” people that democracy is the ultimate aim of government. Even authoritarian regimes cloak themselves in the language of democracy, for example the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Those regimes which make no pretense to notional democracy, such as the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, nevertheless offer up apologia to the wider world that their own form of government serves the aims of democracy, insofar as there are means of popular expression through consultative assemblies and audiences held by the myriad royal princes with commoners. Despite the occasional sermon by a state-sponsored Salafi cleric that democracy is “un-Islamic,” the Saudi monarchy can not avoid the reality that internationally the norms are strongly shifted toward consensual democracy. And in fact there is a strong precedent within Islam toward election of political leaders. This is after all what distinguishes the Sunni majority from the Shia minority, for the Shia hold to the position that the blood descendants of Muhammad have a particular charisma which should give them precedent, while the Sunni argue that the Islamic community should be the ultimate arbiter of leadership. But even the Shia rarely shift from transforming the sacral kingship of the Alids to a temporal one, and in any case their “imams” are helpfully no longer present upon the earth.

Within the United States the word democracy has a charm and power which is without parallel. Democracy is as American as apple pie. Or it has been since the Age of Jackson, when the self-conception of the American elite that they governed a republic was finally shattered by the ascendancy of universal white man suffrage and democratic populism. In our age most monarchies in name must operate as de facto democracies, while dictatorships in fact protest their democratic credentials de jure.

But just as scientific theories which explain everything often explain nothing, so the all encompassing nature of democratic values has collapsed many distinctions and strands in a properly functioning political organism. The problem is widely understood, notably the perfect weather vanefor mainstream conventional wisdom Fareed Zakaria coined the term “illiberal democracy” in the 1990s to illustrate a common and unfortunate juxtaposition. Though the general Western consensus is that liberal democracy is the best-of-all-governments, it is also understood that liberal and democratic are not integrated into a seamless whole. The democratic will of the populace can often express itself in constraints upon individual liberality.

Democracy operates at the level of the populace, liberalism focuses on the atomic unit of the individual. The former may be reducible to the latter, but that is not a reduction which is necessarily entailed by the nature of either. When viewed at the scale of the freedoms of women and people of minority religious inclination one can make a plausible argument that the authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein was more liberal in terms of the latitude given to these than the mass democratic regime of contemporary Iraq.* The authoritarian regime of Assad family’s Syria famously enforces a degree of liberality in terms of the rights accorded women and religious minorities to express their own individual distinctiveness in a majority Sunni society. If that regime falls there will almost certainly be some constriction upon the liberality accorded due to popular Sunni Arab conception of the proper and fitting role for women and religious minorities in societies where Sunni Muslims are the dominant group (i.e., women and religious minorities should take up a subordinate and secondary role).

These specific quibbles with the nature of the implementation of democratic regimes and politics does not often mature into a critique of the legitimacy of democracy as we understand it. A suspicion toward mass democracy amongst the political elites in places like the People’s Republic of China is grounded more in concerns about the stability and execution of representative democracy in such a large state, torn various frictions and tensions due to the weight of recent history. A notional objection to democracy by Islamic radicals and reactionaries does not generally result in the elucidation of what sort of political order would replace democracy in anything more than slogan.**

This is why arguments such as Alain de Benoist’s in The Problem of Democracy and Michael Nylan and Thomas Wilson’s in The Lives of Confucius: Civilization’s Greatest Sage Through the Ages are so useful. These are obviously two very different works. Alain de Benoist is the man behind the French “New Right.” He is a rejector of many of the consensuses of our age, questioning the viability of multiethnic societies, skeptical of the presumed role of Christianity in fostering deracinating universalism, and the notional tendency toward “leveling” and abhorrence of hierarchy in the air in the modern West. In contrast Nylan and Wilson are scholars immersed in the abstruse project of interpreting and distilling the essence of the society and thought of pre-modern China through the lens of Westerners with nominally positivist presuppositions. Where Benoist’s message is explicit, The Lives of Confucius offer the possibility of an implicit repudiation of the nature of politics as we practice them today. The Lives of Confucius offers no argument as such, but the outlines of the possibilities of an argument through the implications of their narrative are there for the taking, if you so choose.

Alain de Benoist’s message is particularist and specific, and full-throated insofar as he makes the case that modern democracy is no democracy at all when viewed in light of the historic and concrete democracies of pre-Christian antiquity, in particular that of Athens. Nylan and Thomas’ narrative focuses predominantly on the reconceptualization of the life and lessons of Confucius from the pre-Imperial period down to the last gasp of the Manchus. There is only a cursory examination of reinterpretation of Confucianism by modern thinkers, whether in East Asia or the West, and hardly any coverage of the parallel non-Chinese Confucian cultures of Korea, Tokugawa Japan, and early modern Vietnam. But even within a conventional classical Chinese framework it is clear that the life of the seminal sage was reframed and formulated repeatedly in light of the historical conditions. The Confucianism of the 8th century had to face the challenge of Buddhism. The Confucianism of the 19th century had to confront the ascendancy of the West and post-Meiji Japan. Today the nominally Communist People’s Republic of China is rehabilitating Confucius for the modern age of Chinese capitalism cloaked on Marxism!

The Problem of Democracy is less inductive and more a priori. One may conjecture that this is in keeping with the author’s French intellectual heritage, whereby one engages in a process of logical inference from truths with are known. By this measure the “gold standard” of the definition of democracy is the political order of ancient Athens, where democracy was an expression of the will of the people, the people being the citizens of Athens, the citizens of Athens being males of a particular age whose parents where also Athenians. Additionally, Athenian democracy did not operate so much through the intermediation of a “representative” form as is common and practicable today. It was famously direct democracy, the unfiltered will of the body politic. Liberty was understood to be the liberty to be an active participant in the political and social life of the polis, not value-free individual self-actualization. Bliss was communal, not personal. In this ancient framework a liberal democracy does not require the modifier liberal, as the operation of democracy itself maximizes liberality by definition.

This use of such a specific measure though seems at variance with de Benoist’s assertion that democracies are properly understood as historically contingent organic entities, which evolve out of a society’s own collective will. Can not the democratic order today be seen as the logical conclusion of the arc of the ripening of Western civilization? Additionally, I do not accept Benoist’s supposition of the Indo-European roots of Athenian democracy, and the Oriental aspect of Near Eastern authoritarianism. As a matter of fact one can see clearly a correlation across many societies with scale of social complexity and historical time of depth and a shift from elective and democratic precepts toward despotic ones (before the “regress” of despotism toward more decentralization after political chaos). A clear example of this evolution can be seen in Mesopotamia. Sumer in the early 3rd millennium had not developed despotic kingship. Rather, the city-states were a hodge-podge of political systems, with oligarchic arrangements predominant. Over the centuries we can see a slow shift toward more naked despotism, culminating in the emergence of Sargon of Akkad, who was the first of many Mesopotamian monarchs who were the realization of rule by one man. We see no such evolution in Egypt, but it seems likely that this is a function of the fact that Egyptian literacy becomes common only during the phase of despotism, and not during the period of integration and political competition. And, as de Benoist admits, the process is not always linear, but may be cyclical. Though the outlines are not well understood, it seems possible that the principalities of Mycenaean Greece were more authoritarian and despotic than those of Iron Age Classical Greece. Why? It is notable that the city-states of the Bronze Age period seem to have encompassed a broader swath of territory than the polis of the Classical Era, and that may be a material consequence of the necessity of a more well developed state apparatus in the production of bronze, as opposed to the more local economic possibilities enabled by the spread of iron.

The point is not to fixate on whether Mycenaean Greece was actually more authoritarian than Classical Greece due to the shift from bronze to iron. Rather, political orthodoxies can move in cycles, and, those orthodoxies show broad cross-cultural tendencies. de Benoist does not, in my mind, appropriately balance the reality of specific particularity as well as human universality. As an work of scholarship rather than an intellectual polemic The Lives of Confucius allows us to examine both of these dynamics. The core readership will not be Chinese, and so view the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties from the outside. Additionally, because of the cyclical nature of Chinese history one can see clearly the waning and waxing of various interpretations of the life of Confucius and his philosophy. When viewed from afar and across the ages the preeminent aspect of the life of Confucius and his disciples is the this worldliness of their ideas and their pragmatic human moderation. The dominant thread of indigenous Chinese philosophy to emerge out of the period of intellectual competition during the period before the First Emperor is a political and ethical one, not a metaphysical one (metaphysics was fully integrated with Neo-Confucianism ~1000 though). This is in contrast with Western antiquity, where the ethical and political streams of the Hellenistic Era such as Stoicism gave way to more abstract and metaphysical schools culminating in Neo-Platonism (and which gave rise to magical theurgy). Though one may draw broad lessons for a proper political order from the early history of Christianity, the religion famously is only secondarily concerned with the domain of the Caesars and the city of Rome. The ideal “philosopher-king” of the pre-modern West was Marcus Aurelius, a pagan and a Stoic. The most Christian of monarchs, such as Edward the Confessor or St. Louis, were archetypes of exemplary behavior in the life of the spirit, not in their concrete temporal attainments under duress.

What does the life of Confucius and the many faces of Confucianism tell us? Confucius and his followers were pragmatists, and so they had to be through thick and thin as despots gave way to enlightened emperors. But a key maxim of the Confucian way is that man is a social being, and can only properly be understood in light of his social relations with others. These social relations have a natural and organically developed structures. The relations of family, the relations of superior to subordinate. Humans flourish in the context of these relations, and not as atomized individuals. It seems that the fundamental insight that this Confucianism-writ-large can give us is that a hedonic model evaluated at the level of the individual will be self-defeating in allowing the individual to flourish over the long term. Most humans only flourish in the proper social context. Modern liberal democracy has confused this insofar as the ends consist of the maximization of individual well being, without understanding that this does not make sense except in light of a positive broader vision of what society is to be. Confucianism’s emphasis on personal ethical behavior is part of a holistic continuum with proper engagement with the public sphere, not an invitation to withdrawing from society as is not uncommon in some forms of Christianity, Buddhism, and Daoism.

In many ways this is consonant with with Alain de Benoist’s vision of a properly functioning democratic order, where the political body is an expression of the social body, rather than the competitive faction of individuals. A crass Benthamite utilitarianism makes sense only for H. individualis. Some of these individuated individuals do exist indeed (I probably lean toward this direction myself!), but the main confusion that occurs in the contemporary political discussion is that individualis is species-typical, as opposed to socialis. Across the variety of socialis there is a natural range of variation in terms of differences in social values and expression. The emphasis on the problems of Western liberal democracy in de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy come to the fore here, because it is in the West that a reduction of political order as only an enforcer of legal currency which mediates relationships between atomic and invariant individual units of equal value and invariant character has reached its most advanced state. Concrete particularities of ethnicity, religion, class, locality, etc., are marginalized as so much epiphenomenal cultural sugar, as essential as whether you prefer sushi or modern French cuisine. That is, matters of facultative taste rather than mattes of obligate identity. But the reality is that even the self-identified deracinated cosmopolitan elites themselves have their own markers of identity and group affinity. They too are primarily social beings, and must operate in the currency of common values and forms, which they find aesthetically pleasing and intelligible. In this way the modern liberal democratic “neutrality” is a charade, as the neutral background is often, unsurprisingly, the norms of the cosmopolitan elite.

The Chinese model is of illustrative importance because it shows a continuity of political and cultural identity of extreme robusticity. Confucianism in all its flavors worked for over two thousand years to maintain a subsistence level society with some sense of self, its connection to the past, and to generations unborn. Despite all its flexibilities and changes over the centuries it never neglected the reality of H. socialis. Society is not the sum of its parts, but a harmoniously functioning whole. How we get there is up to us, and need not be enshrined in a particular canon derived from the a priori ruminations of political philosophers. Human social life lives, and when it dies it is reborn anew.

* Of course one should also point out that the Shia Arab plural majority of Hussein’s Iraq was constricted in its individual and communal free expression.

** The Islamic Republic of Iran is in many ways a more conventionally democratic state than Muslim majority nations which have not gone through a democratic revolution, yet. Clerical “guidance” and military interference by the Revolutionary Guards does not negate the de jure reality that the Islamic Revolution introduced a broader democratic politics into the Iranian society and culture. This despite the clerical classes original rhetorical suspicion of universal suffrage and democracy throughout the 20th century.