A response to Dark Reformation on oligarchy and democracy

I think the focus on ontology is especially important here, because any description of a specific situation will be determined by the ontology you bring to it. Whether you think a group or an individual makes decisions depends upon what you're looking for, what you think counts as a decision. Which means we're also talking about anthropology, which is to say what human beings are. You can't prove in a particular case that this or that individual, or an individual or a group, made the decision; ontologies stand or fall with the intellectual and political tradition they found--they can't simply be "falsified." Let's take the liberal (but not only liberal) ideal of how deliberative decision making should take place. There's a case before the Supreme Court; the lawyers come and argue their positions, drawing upon precedent, Constitutional provisions, and the facts of the case; the justices go into their chambers and continue the discussion, free of partisanship, interested just in the law, the viability of the precedent they will set, the rigor of their constitutional reasoning; they change each other's minds; they arrive at a new synthesis and majority, with a decision that none of them could have put forth without the discussion; and with a couple of respectful dissents, by justices who hew a bit closer to precedents they would like to see preserved in the Court's memory than do their colleagues.

We can imagine something like this because we can imagine it among ourselves--people talk about things openly and honestly, they use examples and reasoning, and they persuade each other, get persuaded, and arrive at new conclusions no one had thought of going in. If we can do it, the Supreme Court, or, for that matter, the Senate, or any other deliberative body can.

So, surely, we can imagine such a free, democratic order established in society as a whole, right? Not so fast. The Supreme Court can deliberate in this way only if they know their decisions flow from and back into a political order in which they are accepted without question--they have not been elevated to the court by one faction aiming to defeat another, they have not gone through decades of law school and practice adhering to one judicial ideology at odds with others, they have not developed loyalties, they don't go home and socialize with members of one political party or section of the media, or care about what the legal activists on one side of the spectrum think about them. And they preserve the authority they have been granted by acting only--but therefore freely--within its limits. I insist that we can imagine judges free of all this, but only in a social order from which all of those features of social conflict have been removed, i.e., one in which there is undivided power.

So, does that mean that, paradoxically, genuinely democratic decision making can take place only within a social order antithetical to democracy? Not quite. Let's return to that deliberative process. If we look more closely at it, and are familiar enough with the terms of the discussion, we will notice that not all justices are created equal. Some have more experience, more knowledge, more intelligence, a better judicial temperament than others--even among the most eminent jurists in the land. Here is where the ontological/anthropological differences become particularly evident. "Power" can take on a lot of forms, and one of those forms, in fact a very basic one, is the natural authority of the master of a particular field over those who have reached such a degree of excellence that they can and willingly do recognize this greater mastery. I said that "some" will be more eminent than "others"; well, if we follow that reasoning, among the "some," one will ultimately be the most eminent. That most eminent (and it might not always be the same justice, since they have different specialties and experiences) justice will be the one making the decision. And this will be the case even if he turns out to be one of the dissenters, because we have to keep in mind that it is not obvious what will count as the "decision"--it may not be the decision about the particular case, but rather the decision to ensure that the discussion itself maintains a sufficiently high level and avoids certain pitfalls resulting from human frailties and, maybe, the limitations of the legal system--that is, a decision to preserve the Courts social role and authority.

That's what you see if you're approaching the situation from an absolutist ontology--the relations between all involved get more and precise and the stakes involved clearer. The approach is better because it leads to more sustained inquiry and better understanding. If you approach it from an anarchist ontology, there's a lot of talk and a decision just bubbles up from the magma of clashes between personalities, idiosyncratic opinions, etc. And everyone just arbitrarily agrees or disagrees with that decision--however detailed your knowledge of the biographical particulars of the justices, it will always come down to something like "that's who he was." In the end, you understand nothing and end up projecting your own proclivities onto the decision.

So, in all of the social institutions, if we look closely enough, we will see the most eminent making the decisions at both the micro and macro levels, as long as we keep in mind that institutions generate very different forms of "eminence," some of them, of course, especially in a system of divided power, distorted forms. And these forms change over time. But we have to be ready to think about what counts as a decision as well--decisions can be multi-layered acts, following up on previous decisions, laying the groundwork for future ones. In every situation there is someone at least marginally "elevated" in the relevant qualities than anyone else--we just need to learn how to look for that person.

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Yes, there could never be a good reason for voting. In that case, even a body with many members, like a Supreme Court, should have one person in charge who makes the final decision. But, there will always be deliberation--the person making the decision will want to hear from others, so we should have an understanding of what that process entails. Second, part of my point here is contend that absolutist ontology provides us with the most power way of analyzing what is actually happening when, under contemporary conditions, there is a vote. But I'm also addressing the monarchy vs. oligarchy distinction prompting the original post. Things that look like oligarchy are in fact monarchy if you know where and how to look. That's important, because the discussion can't proceed productively on the empirical, anecdotal level--"what about..." The question is how to scrutinize the examples themselves.

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Yes, this is very important. The relation between the emergence of the monotheistic revelations and the existing ancient empires is one starting point for thinking about this--Gans stresses this relationship in Science and Faith and elsewhere. Clearly I'd be going in a different direction from Gans, who sees a linear relation between the Christian revelation and market society and liberal democracy. In no way, as far as I can see, does the revelation of I AM or the later Christian "why do you persecute me" compromise central power, i.e., absolutism. Certainly the writers of Scripture didn't think so, nor did anyone else for quite a while. I would agree with Gans that the monotheistic revelations reveal God as residing in reciprocal relations between (amongst) those on the margin. But those on the margins are not monadic individuals who relate to each other on one-to-one terms--that's an illusion generated by the relation between individuals on the market (the Marxists had a point here). We are always articulated in reciprocal relations within institutions, which are themselves articulated in relation to central power. Reciprocities fray and break down--I would further say that the monotheistic revelations become compelling once the ancient empires enter history, and the emperor gods are exposed as weaker than some other God. The originary scene then needs to be (and can be, because central power has been shaken) recovered or, more strongly, remembered--that is the means by which we identify and repair impaired reciprocal relations, or injustices. Remembering the originary scene is the source of the "intelligence" that a monarch who wants a reciprocal relation to those he rules, and doesn't want to simply be interchangeable with a bigger imperial power (who could replace him without anyone noticing), would systematically draw upon. I'm coming to think of this in terms of the clarity of commands. If divided power is a result of misrule, that misrule must itself present as insufficiently clear commands--the sovereign didn't really know what he wanted his subjects to do. Unclear commands leave open a margin for lesser powers to assert independence, first of all in the name of the sovereign himself. An unclear chain of command is the source of injustice, and this would cover a lot of what we ordinarily think of as unjust--for example, a boss telling his workers they must work for 20 hours a day would be giving an unclear, because impossible, and therefore unjust, command. The sovereign has an interest in providing avenues of appeal for such commands, which ultimately enable him to keep clarifying his own. Seeing an unclear command is only possible if a clearer command informs one's vision, and that must be from God or, more precisely, a remembering of the originary scene, which enjoins reciprocal answerability; so, speaking out against the unclear command, in a way that requests clearer ones and acknowledges the sovereign as the ultimate judge, is speaking in the name of God, however minimally.

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Yes, I accept your restatement of my argument. The statement "the Supreme Court decided...." is fine for some purposes--if you're reading a newspaper, you don't need to know that Sottomayer deferred to Breyer's authority and wisdom 4 hours into the deliberations, etc., so, it's not quite as meaningless as "green ideas sleep furiously"--corporate bodies have a reality of their own. But there are nine individuals there, so obviously something else happened. Now, we could further develop the analysis by saying that the second most eminent "decided" not to resist the decision of the most eminent (which is to say he refrained--decided to refrain--from attempting what would have been the equivalent of a coup) and the third did the same regarding the second and so on down the line. Ultimately, though, a hierarchy was manifested or established in the decision. We understand better the more we pinpoint the decision with precision, rather than dispersing it across a field. I think this becomes clear if you were to ask yourself, what would you do to try and influence the decision, or to predict it--you would target the center, where you think the decision is going to come from.