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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?
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