monarchism – Page 3

Formalism and Coalition

Aretae insists that all government is coalitional.

Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing to widen the coalition further, and spread power about randomly.

The point of formalism is that power should be aligned with some form of responsibility, so that the powerful not benefit from destructive behaviour, and that attempting to obtain more power should be illegitimate, so that energies not be directed to destructive competition for power.

Formalists tend to believe that stable, effective and responsible government would follow a largely libertarian policy, choosing to limit government action to maintaining order and protecting private property, and taking its own loot in the form of predictably and efficiently levied taxation rather than by making arbitrary demands of random subjects. Such a policy would maximise the long-term revenue stream from the state.

Given a policy which sets limits on government, it becomes reasonably straightforward to deal with those centres of power which are not sovereign but which cannot be eliminated. They get subsidies, but not power over policy. Given that the sovereign chooses, for reasons of efficiency, to take taxes and buy food with them rather than to take food directly from whereever he fancies, there is no problem in giving pensions or subsidies to those whose support is needed.

The key formalist idea is that if those with informal power go beyond what they are entitled to but seek to influence general government policy, then they are doing something anti-social and immoral. All those who have an interest in the continuation of stable, effective and responsible government will see such an attempt as a threat. Fnargl does not have a ring, and I do not much fancy engineering weapon locks implementing a bitcoin-like voting protocol, so a combination of popular will and, in due course, force of tradition is all we have to fill the gap. In as much as there is a general interest in anything, there is a general interest in good government, and I do not think it is all that far-fetched to to see sovereign authority as something that people will reflexively stand to defend, were it not that that they have been taught for 250 years to do the opposite.

What’s striking is that our current political morality holds the opposite view: that attempting to influence policy is everyone’s right, but to receive direct payoffs is unjust. The powerful are therefore rewarded indirectly via policies with enormously distorting effects on the economy or on the administration of government, whose general costs greatly outweigh the gains obtained by the beneficiaries. Further, it is easier for them to seek to protect and increase their power, than to seek reward for giving it up, even if the general interest would benefit from the latter.

I could do with an example to illustrate this — if a person has necessary power, such as a military officer, then he should keep his power and be rewarded for it. If alternatively his arm of the military is no longer needed, but he still has power because he could potentially use the arm against the sovereign, then it is preferable to pay him extra to cooperate in disbanding the arm, rather than to maintain it just to keep him loyal. The same logic might apply in the organisation of key industries, or sections of the bureaucracy.

It would not necessarily be easy to resolve these things perfectly, but it would be made easier by recognising that concentrating power over general policy — sovereignty — is a good thing, as far as it is possible, and that the sovereign who has control over policy has the right to use it in whichever way he sees fit: to hand out cash presents as much as to award monopolies.

The exercise of democracy makes things very much worse, by adding to the number of those with necessary power anybody who can sway a bloc of voters, and enabling them to make demands for more inefficient indirect sharing of the loot.

Monarchism and Stability in the Middle East / North Africa

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution posts a link to a paper by Victor Menaldo, The Middle East and North Africa’s Resilient Monarchs.

It’s well worth a read; it’s not long, though frankly I’ll need to spend more time with it than I have this evening.

First and foremost, it’s a challenge to the Bueno de Mesquita theory that all that matters is the size of the ruling coalition and the selectorate — a theory that I found valuable but simplistic. Menaldo addresses political culture, observing that the political culture serves to distinguish regime insiders from outsiders. He finds that monarchical governments have less conflict and better economic development.

Particularly interesting to me is the account of elites within the monarchical society. These kingdoms are not the absolute autocracies of my “degenerate formalism”, but actually existing monarchies, in which the extended royal family and other important groups hold significant power. Menaldo’s argument is that the fact that the political culture defines who shares in power, the struggles between in-groups are limited. Unlike a faction in a revolutionary republic, you can lose a power struggle and still be an insider with some power.

In my view, this is also the strength of our somewhat corrupted democracies: if you’re an insider but you’re losing, it’s still not worth being extremely destructive. Better to admit defeat and preserve the system that keeps you an insider even as a loser.

Because of that, this paper doesn’t really make my argument: it shows that monarchy is better than a revolutionary republic, but not that it is better than a western democracy. Still, it’s useful that it’s showing some of the strengths that monarchy has.

It’s not without weaknesses, either. As with other work of this kind, I don’t really take the mathematics seriously. Checking that a statistical analysis bears out the impression you get from drawing a couple of graphs and watching CNN is not what I call verifying a testable hypothesis. And a relatively small data set of somewhat subjective categorisations of events seems inadequate for the amount of analysis being done on it.

Also, the paper, as far as I have seen, does not explore the possibility that foreign influence is the explanation for the difference in violence. Bahrain faced nothing like the outside pressure that Libya or Syria did. I don’t think foreign action is affected directly by whether the regime is monarchical or republican, but there might be an indirect link with foreign policy stance.

Queens and Kings

It has been agreed at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting
that the laws governing the succession of the British Monarchy will be
changed to give older sisters priority over their younger brothers.

There are pros and cons to this decision, but on balance I think it is
probably for the best.

The drawbacks: first, making any change at all weakens the authority
of tradition. If this can be changed because fashion requires it,
what will be changed next? I’m not too disturbed by this argument,
because a couple of hundred years at least of tradition will have to
be upended when we restore the monarchy as the government and get rid
of parliament and elections and the rest of it.

Second, I would prefer to have a King than a Queen. I worry that a
woman is more likely to be dominated by an outside establishment than
a man is. Note that the considerations are quite different than when
drawing up requirements for a job. When appointing someone to a
position, the reasonable thing is to evaluate their qualities as an
individual. If the best man for the job happens to be a woman, that’s
perfectly fine. But a monarch is a different matter: nobody is making
the appointment, the whole point is that we get who we get, and
individual qualities don’t come into it. Given that, we want the best
odds of getting a sufficiently strong personality, and the odds seem
better with a law that disproportionately selects males. A
restoration is likely to need exceptionally strong characters for at
least a couple of reigns.

The conventional wisdom is that of the last four ruling queens, three
at least were very successful. In the cases of Victoria and Elizabeth
II, I have my doubts: I think their reputations rest more on their
acquiescence towards the ruling establishment than anything else.
Elizabeth I kicked serious arse, though, which goes a long way towards
alleviating my worries on this score.

So much for the disadvantages. The advantages are clear. The monarch
must have as strong a claim to his title as possible. If this step is
not taken now, it will always be floating around as a possibility, and
can be used as a weapon against any King with an older sister. If we
are going to have the potential uncertainty settled for good, it can
only be settled in this direction.

And, as a more minor point, it is satisfying that this is being
treated as significant. We are talking about which of the Queen’s
great-grandchildren will become monarch; the implication is that that
monarchy will be with us for another three generations. A lot will
happen in that time, and through all of it, the option will be there
in the background to write off the demagogues and the apparatchiks and
take another path.

It is also satsfying that this has not, so far, been a matter for
public consultation or debate. I’m expressing an opinion here, but I
don’t want the decision to be based on popular opinion — much better
that it be announced by a ruling clique, even if that be our current
shower of politicians.

Into the bargain, they’re allowing a monarch to marry a Catholic.
Again, I’m unsure. I can think of no direct problem with having a
monarch who is married to a Catholic. But have I thought of everything?

Nothing To Envy

I’ve started to take more interest in North Korea. The reason for this is an embarrassment: I have argued that a possible route to a form of government closer to what I want to see is that a one-party state comes under the control of a single strong leader who is able to convert it into a hereditary monarchy, by concentrating power to himself so strongly that he is able to leave it to his heir. It later occurred to me that the country which has come closest to doing that is North Korea, now anticipating the succession of the third generation of the Kim dynasty.

Like I said, an embarrassment. Probably the one-party-state to hereditary monarchy thing isn’t such a good idea. But I’m amusing myself by studying my own reaction to this inconvenience to my theories. It’s interesting to play at being rather more attached to the theory than I really am, and look for cynical ways to rebut arguments based on the evidence of North Korea.

The most fun approach would be to argue that North Korea is actually really well governed, and the problems it is perceived to have are either falsified by the media, or are the results of steps taken against it by jealous republicans abroad.

It is the sheer ludicrousness of that argument that has induced me to look at the question at this “meta” level. North Korea is pretty much the poorest and most backward country in the entire world, while the part of Korea given a different form of government by an arbitrary line of latitute has become one of the dozen or so richest and most advanced. If North Korea had been merely bad, I might have seriously attempted a defence of its system, but as things are it is impossible to do so with a straight face. That situation makes some degree of self-examination inevitable: exactly how stupid does an argument have to be for me to reject it as I have the “North Korea is actually really well governed” line. And what does that say about me?

(This interesting point from Nathan Bashaw seems relevant).

Part of the question is how easy it is to dodge the problem. And here I can really do it. For one thing, we don’t really know who has the power in North Korea — for all we can tell, Kim may be an empty figurehead entirely under the control of military and party officials. In any case, the problem in North Korea is not who is in charge, it is that it is attached to a collectivist economic system. Kim is legitimate not because he is the annointed heir of Kim Il-Sung, but because he is the carrier of the flame of communism.

That gives us another data point: North Korea does not in fact convince me that hereditary government is a bad idea. Despite the problem that everywhere else in the world has dumped NK-style collectivism, with the possible exception of Cuba, which… is ruled by the brother of the previous leader. Hmmm.

I don’t think I can really draw conclusions about attachment to ideology here. But the question’s still open: I’m going to keep an eye on the process of my adapting judgement to ideology and vice versa. I’m well placed to do that, because I am not in a social group united by my ideology — other than a few other bloggers. Also the fact that I’ve recently abandoned ideological positions I held for most of my adult life gives me an extra reserve of cynicism to draw on.

I already started with yesterday’s post, where I deliberately went through the motions of drawing ideological conclusions from the undercover policing scandal.

Aretae has also been writing along these lines recently. One of his most important points is that there is no basis for anyone to be certain or even nearly certain about these difficult ideological issues. When he puts forward ideas, it’s all 60% this and 70% that.

That’s very sound. But is that the way anyone really sees things? The reason I’m able to take this detached approach to my royalist ideology is that I genuinely do have doubts. Again, that’s probably because it’s fairly new to me, and it’s out beyond the lunatic fringe in the public debate.

For a comparison, take the issue of climate change. I am persuaded by the evidence, and have written here, that there is considerable room for doubt of the pronouncements of the climate science experts. I claim that the evidence tends to support the position that dangerous climate change is not happening and will not happen.

That’s fine. But what I haven’t said in so many words is that I have a deep inner certainty that anthropogenic global warming is all rubbish. That certainty cannot be justified by a reasoned analysis of the evidence: in no way do I have sufficient knowledge or understanding of the science to achieve such confidence in any conclusion. Where does this certainty come from?

If it is simply overconfidence, that’s almost the least bad possibility. At least in that case, the direction of my conclusion is based on reason. What’s more worrying is the possibility that the inner certainty is totally independent of my reason, and the reasoned conclusions I have drawn are only rationalisations of my faith.

If that’s the case, where did the faith come from? I would have to have made some kind of intuitive, rather than rational, judgement on one side of a very complex issue. What is the source of that intuition? I don’t know, though I could take a few guesses. Is that intuition to be trusted? In general, absolutely not. There are too many cases of people reaching opposite certainty on the basis of intuition, and there is no basis for judging one person’s intuition against another.

Now maybe my intuition, unlike yours, is reliable. It does have a fairly decent track record. Also, I’m not in the habit of being certain: of all the other things I have written about on this blog, I don’t think there are any that I have the same inner certainty about that I have about AGW.

Weak leaders and bad leaders

Chris Dillow brings up the well-known puzzle that inconsistency is far more damaging to leaders than it ought to be: politicians are so terrified of being seen to change their positions that it is almost impossible to make a reasoned change.

Their fear is not unjustified; it is forced on them by the voters, who prize “strong” character in a candidate above good decision-making.

The puzzle is why this should be, when the quality of government so obviously suffers as a result.

I imagine it is a holdover from days of stable leadership. As I discussed last year: in the days of monarchies, the worst thing that could happen was that the King would be weak and the state would come to be dominated by competing factions seeking to control him. A strong but stupid or immoral monarch would do less damage. It is very explicit in histories written before the present era, that weak king equals bad king, and strong king equals good king.

It seems that the danger of weak leaders is so deeply ingrained that it survives in the popular mind to this day — even though the demise of monarchy has made it irrelevant. (It may even be innate, but that is speculation). With democracy, you get all the disadvantages of a weak king whether the individual politicians are weak or strong, so there is no good reason to prefer a strong personality over one that is open to reasoned argument.

On Pageantry

Watching the festivities today, I heard from several directions, that Pageantry is something very British, and something that Britain can be especially proud of.

I can only assume that the people saying these things have been in very few foreign countries. On the whole, pageantry is something Britain does exceptionally little of.

In the USA, every high school has a marching band, and public celebrations on the scale of a Royal Wedding are fixtures in the calendar, taking months of preparation every year. The New Year Tournament of Roses typically draws a live attendance of a million; the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade gets an annual TV audience not much smaller than the population of England. Attempts in Britain to hold comparable events are tiny, amateurish, and attract only bemusement from spectators.

So let’s hear no more of the “British love of pageantry”. Are their conclusions to draw instead from the relative lack of public celebration in Britain?

One point is that parades such as Mardi Gras and Saint Patrick’s day are Roman Catholic in origin, and were suppressed in Britain by the Reformation. The untrustworthiness of the weather here is perhaps of some significance also; we were very lucky today with weather, since there is now a thunderstorm here in Luton.

The most conventional observation would be that the Britain’s Royal events are elitist, while American festivals are inclusive. Or, to put it another way, what’s the point of having a Royal Family if you have to organise your own parades? That would be almost as stupid as having a Royal Family and electing a government.

Authority and Anarchy

Aretae has a problem with authority.

I’ve never been able to understand authority as anything other than thugs with bigger sticks

Well, sure. That goes without saying. But thugs with bigger sticks are a fact of life, unless you set out yourself to be the biggest thug of all. Which, despite his having “chosen reason over authority”, does not seem to have been Aretae’s plan (I’m not sure exactly how to go about it, but I doubt it would leave much time for cookery).

This is a step back from our previous discussion, because it’s not about formalism versus democracy, or monarchy versus neocameralism, it’s about law versus anarchy.

The metaphor I would prefer, though, is not a “step back”, but a step down. Morality, or “Right Conduct”, like system architectures, has layers*.

The base layer is absolute imperatives. These pretty much have to be supernatural, or else non-existent. Aretae believes that nobody can give him an order that he absolutely must obey. I agree. At that layer, I am an anarchist:

There is no God but Man
Man has the right to live by his own law
blah blah blah…
Man has the right to kill those who would thwart those rights.

Having deified my own reason and my own appetites above all alleged authority, I can now follow them to get what I want.

The technology risk/governance types in a large organisation come up with rules about what a programmer on the coalface is allowed to do to the company’s precious systems. They frequently come up with rules for application code, and rules for configuration. If they’re not careful, or not expert, they end up with definitions that either classify java bytecode as configuration for the jvm, or else classify users’ spreadsheets as application code. Code and configuration really aren’t different things, they’re just different layers. They smell the same.

If Aretae starts to construct rules of thumb for how to act by his own reason for his own appetites, those rules will smell a lot like morality. They may not actually be ultimate imperatives that he has to obey, but then java bytecode isn’t actually machine instructions that are executed by a CPU.

So when I argue for authority, I do so not on the basis of ultimate morality, but on the basis of what works better for me. I don’t shy away from the words, however, because of the remarkable resemblance between what I reason to be the most utilitarian form of government, and what was once believed to have been imposed by supernatural forces. It is too close to be coincidental — I think for most people, they would be better off accepting the old morality and getting on with their cooking.

Further, the “no authority” attitude is not antithetical to formalism. The real opponents of formalism are those who do believe that some forms of government have an ultimate moral legitimacy that others lack. Aretae and I believe that all governments are ultimately “thugs with bigger sticks”, and the argument is not about which has more moral authority, but about which works better for us. That argument of course remains unresolved, but that’s because TSID, not because of different fundamental assumptions.

* Also like onions. And ogres. Both of which smell.

Political Formula

I wrote the other day that you cannot just create a state of any particular design. Why even discuss designs of states, then?

What I am hoping to take part in is the building of a political formula that will eventually produce a better form of government. To borrow the metaphor used by biologists to explain the role of genes in development, it’s not a blueprint, it’s a recipe.

Political formulae were brought up by Mencius Moldbug in his post Democracy as an Adaptive Fiction. “A political formula is a belief that makes the ruled accept their rulers”. But Moldbug understates just how adaptive the fiction is. He says, “An adaptive fiction is a misperception of reality that, unlike most such misperceptions, manages to outcompete the truth”. But it is more than that. A democratic state survives because of the adaptive fiction that democracy is a desirable form of government. But if that fiction were to collapse, so would the state — and it would be messy. In the short run, the false belief that democracy is the best form of government is adaptive not just for the government, but for the believers themselves.

And vice versa. While the political formula of democracy lasts, no undemocratic form of government will work very well. One might be imposed by force, but the force will cause at least as much damage as our democracy does today.

Therefore what I am pushing is not a program of monarchism or any other formalism, but rather the political formula that will support it and make it work well. The formula comes first, and the government later.

The key element of the political formula is that governing is a task, and, other things being equal, those doing that task will do it better if they are not interfered with. I then go further and claim that this is a vital principle that it is worth making sacrifices to maintain — that even if the current ruler is blatantly making a mess of things, in all but the most extreme circumstances it is better in the long run to let it happen and hope for better weather than to act to sort things out and set a precedent that in the long run will lead all the way back to democracy.

There are a handful of minor ideas that go with it, like belief in the value of the virtues of personal loyalty, family loyalty and patriotism. They are not essential, but they help.

We could throw in the divine right of kings, but I’d rather not. I don’t actually believe it’s true, and the problem with a false premiss of that sort is that, even if its first order effects are beneficial, the most able reasoners will reason from it to ever more lunatic conclusions. While our democracy actually works moderately well, many of its worst effects are due to the absurd theorems derived correctly from its political formula.

It is argued by some — Bruce Charlton, for instance — that it is not possible to create respect for authority in a culture which is secular and largely atheist. They could be right. Atheism and Democracy came in as partners and reinforced each other, and now I am trying to keep the atheism and lose the democracy.

I have reasons for thinking it possible. As the old order died, there were those who tried to retain it who had a very cynical view of the religious angle. I found a lovely quote recently:

he allowed, indeed, of the necessity and legality of Resistance in some extraordinary cases … [he] was of opinion that this ought to be kept from the knowledge of the people, who are naturally too apt to resist. That the Revolution was not to be boasted of and made a precedent, but we ought to throw a mantle over it, and rather call it Vacancy or Abdication.

That is Bishop Hooper (I think this one), described in “Tudor England” by Barry Coward. “Resistance” here means opposing the rightful ruler, and “the Revolution” is the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. Consistent with my formula, Hooper believed the revolution was a good move but a bad precedent. Note that, though a bishop, he is reasoning on entirely secular grounds.

He and the other Tories of the time hoped to restore the form of monarchic government with new personnel. They lost, but I don’t believe their loss was inevitable. They had majority support in the country, but lacked the intellectual elite (again, I recommend The Kit-Cat Club by Ophelia Field). However, as usual, Left and Right in this debate had differing visions of what the results of “progress” would be, and those on the Right were proved much more correct by history. That is why I do not believe I am attempting to reassemble an exploded bomb back to the moment before explosion. If the Whigs had known then what we know now, most of them would not have been Whigs.

Aretae's A-G

Aretae lists 7 points of disagreement, but in the main for me, I don’t disagree with them, they’re mostly “yes, but…”

Autonomy. Among the top values people seek, indeed. But the state is very rarely the biggest limiter of autonomy. Where it is, something has gone very wrong. On the other hand, I have little patience with those who happen to exercise their autonomy in attempting to overthrow the state, and then get all indignant when the state runs them over with a tank.

Bad government, and the purpose of the state. States don’t need purposes, they happen without one. The nearest thing to a purpose any state has for me is the purpose of preventing a worse state arising.

Chaos. This is one where we agree. Instability succumbs to stability, but too much stability fails in the long run. The question is which is more stable: a broad-based state to which every change is a threat, or a narrow-based state which is more independent of the society it rules, but less limited in what interventions it can make.

Design. Again, agreed. But the exercise of central power is not the same as the existence of central power. Central power is exercised to excess today because each element of the large ruling coalition can exercise only a tiny fraction or the central power, and gains power within the coalition by exercising that fraction. The holders of central power collectively do not benefit from its exercise, but that collective interest is not expressed by constituent individual interests.

Ethics. Ideas of what is ethical are very malleable over a timescale of generations. I suspect that the currently mainstream ethical positions of western societies are incompatible with good government, and I am trying to change them, more than trying to change government directly.

Font of power. The most difficult for me. What enables a narrow coalition to retain power? One answer is the Ethics. For most of history, loyalty to superiors and acceptance of one’s desginated place were high virtues. Today, possession of any unearned privilege is unethical. If a move back towards the older ideas could be achieved, would that enable an under-strength coalition to rule peacefully? Or am I idealising a mythical old morality that never really existed?

Game theory. We go full circle. Yes, a narrow based coalition will be more acquisitive, but is that a bigger problem than that of Design above: that the goodies that a broad-based coalition distributes will be distributed on the basis of BDUF? I resent what the state spends for my alleged benefit far more than what its members steal for themselves.

Practical Matters

Clarifications from Aretae and Whyiamnot show, I think, that we are all seeking the same things. The “rules” that Aretae wishes to preserve are not political rules but the rules of private property and economic freedom that actually benefit non-politicians, while Why emphasises that he supports voting not as a right, but as a practical method for ensuring better government, and argues that the vote should be taken away from state dependents (and he says he is not a reactionary!)

But perhaps I am not a reactionary. The aim of this theoretical discussion is not to form a movement that will overthrow David Cameron and install an absolute monarchy, either of Stuarts or of Battenburgs. Our tangled old democracy has its benefits (not least that the random shocks of technological change, which I mentioned recently, are less likely to tear it apart).

Its resistance to shocks, however, is also a resistance to improvement. Why wishes to restrict the franchise, but I can find no example of that ever happening: though there is usually opposition to any given extension of the franchise, once it is won, it is won for ever*. There are many other ratchets operating. Even what we are left with today would be worth preserving, if it could be preserved — but our societies contain an ever higher proportion of people with no expectation of working, ever more entrenched tax-eating agglomerations with diminishing value to anyone, ever more expensive government.

It can’t be turned round. Thatcher got rid of the miners and the steelworkers, but only because new, stronger public-sector bodies were taking their place. The teachers and the social workers and the environmental consultants and the privatisation IPO advisers didn’t need the miners, so they let them go, but the total payroll never went down.

What we have is not too bad, but it cannot stop getting worse, — Why clearly scores a point when he turns my “realistically oppose progressivism” demand back on reactionaries — the question my theoretical pieces are addressing is what we do next.

When is “next”? I haven’t the foggiest. Democracy has lasted a hundred years in Britain, somewhat less across Western Europe, and rather more in the United States. As the quality of government has gone down, the quality of life has gone up, improvements in technology and private organisation disguising the increasing damage done by the state.

I don’t rule out a total collapse in the near future, from hyperinflation, terrorism, or some black swan, but it’s not what I expect. My guess (and it really is no more than that) is that democracy can struggle on another 50-100 years, with decreasing growth rates and more bumps along the road. China could either collapse or join the club, eventually becoming an old democracy of sorts, probably a bit more corrupt and nastier than what we have now.

But it’s not going to get better, and someday it’s going to have to be renewed. Most likely it will go back round the cycle of a young democracy, waves of Jacobin terror and fascism, until some new establishment can bring things under control behind the facade of a re-established limited** democracy.

But I think a wrong turn was taken in 17th century England and 18th century France, and I expect a similar choice will be presented again in the 21st century. Someone will force order onto the chaos of a disintegrated state, and will then either consolidate personal power or hand it over to some revived or newly-designed constituent assembly. I am hoping for the former.

My blogging is not keeping pace with Aretae or Devin Finbarr, and there are recent points from both to be responded to, with luck later today.

* In comments at his place, Why suggests the Test and Corporation acts as reductions in the franchise. I believe they were restrictions on holding office rather than on voting.

** That analogy to our recent monarchy discussions may be a better terminology than my “old versus new democracy“. Old democracy is limited democracy, New democracy is absolute democracy. The only point of confusion is that the limitation is probably not explicit or legalistic, but only practical. An absolute democracy can have a constitution tightly circumscribing its powers, and a limited democracy can have theoretically complete power but work through a practically unreformable civil service or military with independent views.