It strikes me as odd that people spend good money and travel thousands of miles to stone an effigy of the Devil when there are so many live devils cavorting right here at home, a stone’s throw away, so to say.
This is the ritualization of politics and the unburdening of moral responsibility in a neatly innocuous package. The spiritual rewards sought by the stoners mask the real rewards accruing to the unstoned. A more recent variant is the clever diversion of politics into the swampland of legalese – conferring rights to things instead of the things themselves, the promise of possibility substituting for the concreteness of reality. The 40 percent of school-age children out of school in Pakistan all enjoy the constitutional right to a free education. The 30 percent of children stunted in India all have been gifted the right to food.
Having stoned the Devil and prayed to God, people can consider their dues paid and duty done. At home, amongst the real devils, it will be back to Allah maalik hai. One of the best definitions of the ‘modern’ in ‘modernity’ is that it exalts reason above revelation. If that is true, then we must certainly be considered pre-modern. I am not saying one is better than the other – reason has a lot to answer for; just that the these are two different worlds and the difference matters. Hobbes (1588-1679) characterised the same distinction as the ‘The Great Separation’ of religion and politics; the realisation that the organisation of society is not divinely ordained but the outcome of human agency. Humans can make changes, not wait for them to happen. Prayers are optional.
The relationship between political behaviour and morality has exercised many minds; the ancient Greeks characterised it as the conflict between Kratos (political force) and Ethos (moral behaviour). Plato, Aristotle, and the Christian Church sought a moral order by putting power in the hands of the most virtuous. In one way or another, virtue was to be instilled through education. And yet, in Meno, Plato has Socrates arguing that virtue cannot be taught because there are not enough virtuous teachers to teach it. The fate of Socrates suggests that even if they are to be found they are unlikely to be allowed to survive, let alone teach. Socrates notwithstanding, efforts continue to this day to prove that morality can be taught in societies bereft of morals.
Machiavelli (1469-1527) is said to be the first to break with this quest for a moral order and argue, in The Prince, that the effective use of power was all that mattered; the utopian dream of a just order could be dispensed with. [Prime Minister Modi should proudly (with garv) remind the world that Chanakya (375-283 BC), counsellor and advisor to Chandragupta Maurya, pre-dated Machiavelli by 1,800 years. Amit Shah is a follower of Chanakya not of Machiavelli and it is an insult to call Chanakya the Indian Machiavelli.]
Hobbes seconded Machiavelli while claiming also that an all-powerful ruler would find it in his self-interest not to abuse his power. In any case, he said, there was no point relying on the moral awareness of rulers because there wasn’t enough of it to go around. Shakespeare had a child articulate the same wisdom in Macbeth. When the mother of Macduff’s son says that traitors are those who lie and swear and all of them should be hanged, the son asks “Who must hang them?” “Why, the honest men,” the mother replies to which the son responds as follows: “Then the liars and swearers are fools, / for there are liars and swearers enow to beat / the honest men and hang up them.”
Rousseau (1712-1778) took a different approach, suggesting that the right balance of power and morality could be attained when power belonged equally to all people and they enacted the legislation that determined the application of power. Even so, he feared the balance of power would shift to the self-interested.
Rousseau’s fear has been borne out. In our time, with the wide-spread adoption of representative governance, the first of his conditions has supposedly been conceded. The second has not; legislation is enacted not by the people but by their representatives largely in the latter's own interest. Contra Hobbes, their self-interest does not preclude the abuse of power.
Not surprisingly, representative democracy is in trouble all over the world. Less than 400 years-old as an experiment, it has degenerated into variants that are less than wholesome and the cause of much hand-wringing. The bottom line remains the unbridged gulf between power and morality.
But is it unbridgeable? It is surprising that Rousseau did not stress more the experiments in Ancient Greece to keep representatives without morals out of power. Knowing that power attracted the power-hungry, they opted to select political officials for fixed terms through sortition, i.e., random selection by lot. The method ensured that citizens were represented in government while eliminating the buying and selling of votes and the monopoly of power, all the ills that plague representative governments today.
Long forgotten and out of favour, except for juries, sortition is now being reconsidered as a way out of the morass of current electoral malpractices that have stymied reform for decades. A number of models have been proposed (lottocracy, open democracy, demarchy) to cater to specific conditions and contexts. Details of how randomised governance could be implemented in the USA (‘A thought experiment in social reshuffling’) have made it into the mainstream media. They promise not just more moral governance but reduced inequality which is one on the main outcomes of abuse of power by representatives who have succeeded in stacking the rules in their favour.
Starting over with a radical break is the only way out for the many countries where there are no prospects of reforming existing forms of governance. The grip of the power-hungry is so tight, the resources required to be elected so forbidding, the choices given to people so noxious, the recourse to horse-trading so entrenched, the violations of rules and regulations so blatant, the crushing of dissent so overt, the ability to negate the popular mandate so pervasive: anyone contemplating piecemeal reforms in these conditions has to be living in a fool’s paradise. All that helpless citizens can do is pray for saviours who promise the moon and turn out to be more of the same.
The way out requires dispensing with prayers. Citizens need to mobilise behind movements to wrest the power to govern themselves. Sortition, with its recent innovations and adaptations, can provide the intellectual foundation for the transition to better governance.
Bibliography
Michael Marissen, Bach Against Modernity, Oxford University Press, 2023.
Radha D’Souza, What’s Wrong With Rights: Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations, Pluto Press, 2018.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil, 1651.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1623.