The Authority

A set of evocative statements. The taking over or the founding of institutions that enough people would respect and support (judiciary, legislative, executive, etc.), enough for the indifferents to go along. And then a mechanism of reinforcement of that specific set-up, i.e. a constantly reframing narrative coupled with means of enforcement of that narrative and those institutions. In many cases, a dramatic break added to give force to the narrative, and establish the new.

Legitimate authority and de facto authority, and the mix is political power. In contemporary society the mean to establish the narrative, i.e. to build and reinforce consensus on it, is media. For the institutions, we have surveillance and isolation (physical and / or mental). Overall, authority maintains the stability of the new set of values, the metric that has been introduced in order to provide readability to the running events.

The narrative is about the origin, or the foundation – or foundations. The narrative is the creative act that is forgetting the fiction that is within that origin. Both mythology and religion provides that. The narrative links the current with the atemporal. The metric, and hence the hierarchy (who is following whom and why) definition, is then justified to be acted upon. Every societal structure is self-justified, but only in modern democracy that circularity comes well in evidence, and hence becomes disturbing. Why? Modern democracy is based on reason but reason, by definition, does not have the ability to point to an origin, and hence a break with the causal chain needs to be established as an exception – the exception(al), the founding fathers, the character of the nation, the us vs. them, etc.

How do the people accept that disturbing circularity, that evident self-justification? How do people accept a narrative and the consequent hierarchy, the institutions that maintain that, and its use of means of enforcement? How is legitimacy given to the authority in modern democracy?

The rational answer that is given is that modern democracy gets its legitimacy through elections. People evaluate pros and cons of the candidates and make a choice. But this is an internal mechanism that does not impact the circularity of how modern democracy is founded. That is one of the reasons why elections are becoming more and more media events. And perhaps the amount of support an election require – and we can have a quantitative measure of that with the cost of the elections – is related to the perceived lack of legitimacy that a political system has.

Limiting the identity of a people has been a powerful mean to give force to the narrative. Modern democracy is based on a spatial and cultural delimitation of the nation – people need to have a geographic and cultural place they feel they belong to. A specific land is defined by a common history, tradition and values. We define what is us and what is them. A larger narrative is created and a character attributed to the people born in that land. The story must be fascinating. It must establish respect. Awe and respect – and those are essential components underlying all religions, and reinforced by rituals and celebrative gatherings.

We go back to the original narrative, or to a narrative that support that origin and hence to the legitimacy of the political system. The combination of charismatic and traditional (including religious) factors that need to be added to the narrative enter into the scene through the campaigns the lead to the elections. It must confirm the hierarchy, hence the elite, and the institutions. It must be of popular appeal.

It is a mix of physical, psychological, and cultural coercion (de facto authority vs. morally legitimate authority) that allows the maintenance of the established hierarchy. There is no substantial difference with more traditional societies. However, our modern narrative and technologies allow the coercion to be unforced through consensus manufacturing – through education, health system, criminal justice, commerce and economical system, etc. It is self-justification where the people actively participate in the self-reinforcing circle.

Is the extraordinary narrative support that modern democracy needs a sign of the weakness of it? Or just a sign of the nature of structured power in a secular society? Although there has been quite a lot of hype about the renaissance of religious beliefs during the last decades, I believe that religion in contemporary society is one of the many complementary narratives we have access to in order to fill the space left open by the unrewarding application of reason. Instead of searching for how to overcome the ontological and epistemological limitations of reason, it is certainly easier to fall back to the old known.

It is a quite accepted fact that reason alone can not bring to normative consensus – i.e. to a pure secularization of society and to a pure moral and political realism. The issue is both with reason and its limitation and with the fact that people are not naturally or culturally drawn to either reason or any disciplined approach to probing reality unless a clear reward is on sight. Why should people go through the discipline, the pain and the anxieties that alone can guide through the unknown and the likely unsuccessful journey to new views of reality, especially coming from a society where contentment and comfort is the ultimate goal?

We hence have the democratic set-up of powers and the limitation of reason on legitimatizing that set-up. This basically describes the impasse we are currently living through. And I want to propose that the issue is not reason vs. unreason but it is instead the way reason is presented and used. Reason allowed humans to expand their horizons and to see the common through the differences. But reality can not be homogenized by reason. Myth / tradition / religious factors will always be present, and push towards a limited temporal and spatial tribalism / community based consensus – the limit of this tendency being (perhaps Stirnerian) individualism. We now need to work beyond the Bronze and the Iron Age approaches to politics, and towards a world that is capable to handle a counterpoint of perspectives and of shifting harmonies – including dissonances.

We don’t need to shift away from rational justification and return to more traditional consensus-building means like myth and religion – patterns that are sometimes showed within the climate change narrative. We certainly need to deal with the fact that humans have reached a population level and a technological power that can alter the course of the planet at a faster pace than ever before. Whether we want it or not, this will give direction to the future. Dramatic events, even wars, may certainly delay the process of integration of the planet, as those in the last century did, but will not stop it. Modern democracy needs a major revision. And this revision needs a new approach to the structuring of a legitimate power. Is it time for a dynamic meta-constitution?