One of the great themes in my old political theory and political sociology classes at university was the clash between elite theory and democratic theory. Elite theory holds that politics is nothing but the circulation of elites, with history as the graveyard of aristocracies. The so-called plural democracies of the modern age are described by the likes of Schumpeter as regimes of competitive elitism in which organized minorities with particular agendas put themselves up for office and are chosen by an electorate whose role, once they have made their choices, is over. Democracy in this sense involves no more than the right on the part of the individuals composing the demos to choose which elites are to rule over them.
I’ve never cared for the doctrine. Politics does, however, seem to have been the realm of elites competing against each other for power, with the people as little more than passive by-standers. Against this I have made a consistent commitment to the democratisation of power, knowledge, and politics. It is by far the much harder option to take. Victory in politics does seem to continually go to active, organised, informed minorities. The view turned Marx's principle of self-emancipation on its head with the Leninist view of the revolutionary vanguard. Here, elitism replaced Marx's democratization. For elitists, Lenin is the realist and Marx the utopian here. It is a view that is smuggling its way into the environmental movement, with researchers in social movement theory arguing that only a 5% critical mass of the public allied to an organised political movement is required to effect great shifts. I don’t have the studies to hand and the figures I am giving here may be slightly off. I don’t investigate any further for the simple reason I don’t care at all for it. I do argue for the concentration of power as opposed to trying to convert everyone to a cause, so to that extent my argument for building a mass constituency and mass movement is an argument for ‘critical mass.’ But I’ll argue for 'mass' here along the lines developed in my introduction to the thought of Istvan Meszaros (check the links under "Books"). Such a notion is very different from the elites who prevail in elite theory.
I will stand by my view, even though my knowledge of history and politics tells me that active, organized vanguards are the ones that tend to prevail. I know they do. And I know also that the people continue to complain, continue to be on the receiving end of a bad politics, and continue to demand a new politics. I’ve never been one of the elites and have no interest at all in being one. I wince whenever at a political or social event I see the usual faces armed with their party cards issuing invitations to ‘build the revolutionary party,’ because I see the counter-revolution doing its work, choking off democratisation and canalising its energies into the old sterile forms. I’ve seen it sterilize left-wing politics my entire life, and I loathe it. Elitists make me bristle. What attracted me to Green politics were the principles of ecology, particularly the interconnection of all things. I was interested in the conception of interactive cooperation within integrated systems, the realization of a politics that was in tune with the way that nature actually functions. Such a politics is the very antithesis of competitive individualism and elitism, the thirst that some have for power over and against others. I argue for power with others. I believe that ecology still has the potential to live in accordance with these principles. I believe the error being made here is a result of being drawn into the bear-pit of politics and being transformed by its power struggles rather than transforming them. The key, as ever, is building that ancient bridge between contemplation and action, incarnating the transcendent truth of the ancients or the climate truth of the moderns in the practices of time and place. It’s a delicate operation and one I have spent a lifetime trying to delineate.
The democracy I argue for is much more difficult to achieve than elitism, and has been a long time coming. But it is far better, and far more stable and enduring, and more worthwhile than the constant battles of elites which is leading civilization to a self-annihilation.
Is politics just about the bossing of the many by the few? Or is there yet some truth in the ancient notion of politics as creative human self-realization – all humans?
My views are increasingly those of Tolkien:
“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) … the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.”
Tolkien, Letter to his son Christopher Tolkien (29 November, 1943)
There are other statements to this effect by others:
"To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
Douglas Adams
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
-- Bertrand Russell
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
W.B Yeats - The Second Coming
Which has been experimentally tested and demonstrated in the Dunning-Kruger effect. The first paragraph of that page says it all:
‘The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.’
The cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."
Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David (1999). "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 77 (6): 1121–1134.
The problem is that no elite which is humble in thought and action, openly considering that it may be mistaken, is likely to survive long against its less-than-humble rivals for power. No wonder we always seem to be governed by sociopaths.
I will continue to try and break the constraints of all theoretico-elitist models in knowledge, power, and politics.
It is one thing just to use the earth: it is quite another thing to receive the blessing of the earth and to become at home in the law of this reception, in order to shepherd the mystery of being and to pay attention to the inviolability of the possible.
Martin Heidegger
I’m reading this article on the real Benedict Option
‘As I returned to work, I was faced with a question: what will my students benefit more from? Me trying to “make a difference” in their lives by coming up with the perfect lesson, the perfect solution to their problems, or me obeying reality–paying attention to them and putting more effort into the little details of planning my lessons.
I decided to follow the latter option, knowing it’s the one Benedict would’ve chosen. I hesitated at first, knowing that this option would imply a risk. If I give up my idea of the perfect lesson or solution, I have to abandon myself to the will of Someone other than me…Someone who is mysterious and unpredictable. I was letting go of control…little did I know the freedom I would gain from this risk.’
The need for control is a neurotic response to a lack of power in a world governed by concentrations of power. Freedom in any meaningful, fulfilling sense consists in surrender, a letting go in order to embrace something greater than the ego in a world of interdependence.
‘I came to the conclusion that my “big ideas,” as exciting as they may seem in the moment, never stand the test of time. Following Benedict’s method of obedience to the little details God placed in front of him was much more effective and satisfying. Perhaps this is why his charism continues to impact the world 1500 years after the fact. His method was rooted in his trust in God, and not in his schemes of “changing the world.”’
I agree very much. The problem is that such an attitude comes with the considerable demerit of leaving the world in the hands of the neurotic power worshippers and controllers.
‘The news today about "Atomic bombs" is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope "this will ensure peace". But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we're in God's hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.’
Tolkien, No. 102: From a letter to his son Christopher Tolkien (9 August, 1945)
Which leaves us with the challenge of stopping the Babel-builders as they carry on with their mad schemes to take and keep control for themselves, destroying the world in the process.
'Power' is an ominous and sinister word in all these tales, except as applied to the gods.
Tolkien, No. 131: letter to Milton Waldman (c. 1951)
How to contest power with humility; how to restitute power to its sources without becoming power idolators ourselves.
I shall end here with a few more words continuing the theme of literary ecology developed in my most recent posts.
“Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time.”
“A story must be told or there'll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving.”
Tolkien, Letter to his son Christopher (30 January 1945) — in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981), p. 110
We need to learn what Tolkien meant by the right of subcreation within Creation. Tolkien held that “all tales may come true” on account of the subcreative link between human and divine making. For Tolkien, the highest function of human art lies in the creation of convincing secondary worlds; this is a subcreation in which the human maker imagines God’s world in and after the act of making, just as Johannes Kepler considered that he was thinking God’s thoughts after him in his astronomical endeavours. In a poem addressed to C. S. Lewis, Tolkien wrote of the human power to imagine both good and evil:
“Though all the crannies of the world we filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and their houses out of dark and light and sowed the seed of dragons, ‘twas our right (used or misused). The right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we’re made.”
It’s all a fairy story, will come the dismissive voice of those raised in the positivist age. That that age stands on the eve of destruction suggests to me it needs to be a lot less proud with respect to what it claims to know (and can be known) and a lot more humble with respect to what it doesn’t.
The act of subcreation incites the moral imagination and draws readily on both the subconscious and conscious resources of the mind. Tolkien considered this to be particularly true with respect to language. Language, he argues, is something that embraces and infuses the whole person; language is intimately connected to the being of a person as a whole, something much greater than the mind.
Powerful archetypes and universal themes are incarnated in the human art and making that constitutes the act of subcreation; the transcendent truths that exist at a level of abstraction in thought thus take concrete, particular and definite form in the invented world. And there they live, and there they need to live. In being analysed, they die. Positivism is the age of death:
“Myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected.”
“The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning.”
Universal truths take form as myth whilst nevertheless preserving their qualities as truths. In their material incarnation they retain their independence as transcendent truth. Successful story-telling thus generates joy in the tasting of a grace that is given from a realm beyond the subcreated world. Tolkien considered the craft of the storyteller not only to be a gift and a blessing, but to be a skilled “making” when used for good. Frodo’s words to the hobbit Sam Gamgee make it clear that Tolkien valued Sam’s ability as a gardener and a forester as well as a storyteller:
“Your hands and your wits will be needed everywhere. You will be the Mayor, of course, as long as you want to be, and the most famous gardener in history; and you will read things out of the Red Book, and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger and so love their beloved land all the more. And that will keep you as busy and as happy as anyone can be, as long as your part of the Story goes on.”