Democracy is the most conservative force in politics (The 2 types of authority)

 

 

Two Types of Authority

Weber had his 3 forms of authority: traditional authority, legal/rational/bureaucratic authority, and charismatic authority.  I prefer to look at most of the history of civilization, or at least huge swaths of it, as a struggle between 2 forms of authority, which I call executive authority and ecclesiastic authority.  By "ecclesiastic" here, I do not necessarily mean anything related to any church or organized religion, though religion, in its various guises, can and often does become deeply involved in both forms of authority.  Instead, I am referring primarily to the original sense of the word, ἐκκλησία in Greek.  For centuries, the ekklesia meant the popular assembly that in many respects held significant power in several ancient Greek city-states.  Different city-states had different kinds of ekklesia, of different numbers of people, with different powers and responsibilities.  The most famous ekklesia, of course, was that of Athens, which at times in that city-state's complex history numbered as many as 6,000 people.  But Sparta had its own ekklesia, though it was smaller with more limited powers, as did many of the other city-states.  Indeed, some kind of council has existed as part of the decision-making process of a wide variety of societies throughout the history of the world.

Many archaeologists believe that the Indus River Valley civilization was quite democratic and egalitarian.  Perhaps a vestige of this earlier communal decision-making process persisted thousands of years later in the form of the Sanghas and Ganas, in the Buddhist and Hindu tradition.  The Ancient Phoenician version of the popular assembly was known as the mw-'dwt.  Among ancient Germanic tribes, there was a comparable institution known as the Thing or Ding or Moot.  All of the above were probably, at least to some degree, somewhat ritualized holdovers from archaic tribal meetings, the likes of which we can see going back many centuries, if not millennia, among peoples as diverse as Native Americans, Polynesians, the people of Australasia and Oceania, and so on.  In almost every society that has ever existed, there are elders that must be respected.

The point here is that very few, if any, societies have been either purely monarchical or purely democratic in their organization; rather, most are some kind of combination thereof.  In many societies, there often is some kind of singular leader, particularly for military purposes, but this leader could not exist without being surrounded by a thick layer of assistants, advisors, administrators, delegates, and in many cases bureaucrats, regional governors, perhaps most importantly judges, courts, and so on, who often subtly or not-so-subtly exert their own will for their own interests, and moreover provide a sense of continuity for their society that transcends the reign of the current executive, who often doesn't last very long.  Remember, life expectancy was not that long for millennia of human existence, and especially not for a military leader, who might have to fight in war - and besides, a person can often only ascend to executive authority after a long and sometimes difficult process, which might involve waiting for the previous executive to die, by which time the reigning executive might already be fairly old.

Even absolute monarchies - the history of which is fairly short, essentially only arising in the 17th century - could only arise once a huge bureaucracy, that is, ecclesiastic authority, had developed, and remained fundamentally dependent upon it.  After all, why should anyone accept that the eldest male direct descendant of the previous monarch is the current monarch?  This is only accepted because of tradition - and tradition cannot maintain itself: it needs human beings to actively maintain its influence and force. 

The executive authority and the ecclesiastic authority, in almost every society, therefore, are locked in a complex and delicate dialectical relationship: the sovereign executive needs the ecclesiastic authorities to legitimate his power, and the ecclesiastics need the executive to execute their ideas.  And yet, throughout history, the two forms of authority are pitted against each other in a relentless, centuries-long struggle.  They necessitate each other and they oppose each other.  Now one side is ascendant, now the other side.  Sometimes the ecclesiastic authority becomes a mere rubber-stamp for the executive's decisions; at other times, the executive is a figurehead for the bureaucracy.

The fundamental issue is this: how long and difficult is the political process of an idea becoming an implemented policy?  In a perfectly executive system (which does not, of course, actually exist, and never has) the idea, as soon as it appears - so long as it appears in the executive's head - is implemented immediately and universally within that executive's sovereign domain.  In an ecclesiastic system, on the other hand, the idea of the executive must pass through ecclesiastic authority - one, two, three, perhaps infinitely many - before it is finally implemented, if at all.  By that time, it will have been revised, altered, expanded upon, debated over, partially erased, rebranded, made more palatable, watered down, domesticated, reinterpreted, bedecked with commentary and metacommentary, and mostly forgotten.  It may not have originated in the executive's head at all, but skillful ecclesiastics will make the executive believe that it did.  In a sufficiently ecclesiastic regime, nothing much changes.  Whatever wild ideas may be floating around, it essentially remains business-as-usual.

The lifeblood of the ecclesiastic regime is tradition.  To the extent that anything ever changes, politically, the ecclesiastic authority is forced to revise the past, and effectively invent a new past, a new golden age, and to try to convince the public that their innovations are in fact a return to the past rather than a step forward.  This is because the public is the most conservative segment of society.  This is not to say that the public never changes their beliefs or their practices - they do, constantly, and unpredictably.  They are, in fact, always changing.  But they change in a thousand different directions, most of which oppose each other, usually canceling each other out, and so the net movement is essentially zero.  Over time, the average (mean) remains nearly the same, though the variance gradually increases.

I was going to say that democracy is like a huge, heavy ship - say, an oil tanker, with an enormous amount of momentum going in one direction, which makes it very difficult to turn around.  The truth is that democracy is more like an oil spill.  Try to push it in any direction, and it just slips around you.  It doesn't go anywhere of its own volition, but mostly follows the currents, gradually spreading, becoming dissolute and thinner.

In Rome, the Senate was comprised of people from the richest and most powerful families, or in some cases simply the most ancient families, even if they had fallen from prosperity and influence.  (This is typical of ecclesiastic authority, going back to Rome's predecessors in Greece.) 

To understand the dialectical relationship between executive and ecclesiastic authority, it is better to study the history of China.  Although the state as we know it arose first in the Middle East, it was in China that it decisively manifested into its most developed and effective form, the form that would be the basis of the state throughout the world.  Chinese history is a constant and fascinating tug of war between the Emperor, representing executive authority, and ecclesiastics - at first, advisors. scholars, poets, monks and sages including the Legalists, Daoists, and most especially Confucius and his followers, and later a fully fledged and highly complex bureaucracy of Mandarins.  It is precisely these ecclesiastics who maintained the conservative traditions of Chinese culture, such as sacred scriptures, which they often had to protect, sometimes through trickery and at the cost of their lives, from the executive authority and his goons.

In order for a government to change anything about society, an executive must gain, however briefly, some advantage over the ecclesiastic orders.  There are many reasons for this.  One is simply that ecclesiastic authority is too diverse to bring about focused energy towards any particular project.  In many ways, one could examine the relationship between executive and ecclesiastic authority via information theory.  In some ways, ecclesiastic authority represents a kind of entropic force, degrading the signal of a policy until it becomes indistinguishable from its background: a kind of mean-reversion, just as hot water will dissipate into cold water until they become a uniform lukewarm.  In short, we can say that ecclesiastic authority is a conformative force, conforming this set of policies not only to the present, but also to the past.

Another reason that ecclesiastic authority (and therefore democracy) tends towards conservatism is that executives tend to live in capital cities, which are often modern metropoles, the centers of cultural innovation, whereas ecclesiastics include local magistrates, for regions including small towns, villages, and rural areas.

Note: I am saying that democracy is the most conservative force in politics.  I am not saying that democracy is the only conservative force in politics.  Quite often, there are many other conservative forces.  Indeed, many executives - I would daresay, most executives - are also profoundly conservative.  (Stalin was one such example of a conservative executive.)  Conservatism is the overwhelming tendency and force in human relations.  Scarcely any political force exists, or has existed, of any historical consequence, that did not at least present itself as a conservative force.