Hey all,
Marco asks of Democracy,
"So the majority decides what's good?"
RICK:
In a pure democracy, the majority does decide what is good... that is,
the majority will determine what causes will benefit from societies
resources, what behavior will be criminalized, what rights the citizens will
be entitled to, what is socially "acceptable" and what is not, etc. If
these are things we think of as the "good" then yes, the majority does make
these sort of decisions in a pure democracy.
The United States is NOT a pure democracy... it's not even close.
Democracy as we Americans have it is primarily the vision of James Madison.
200 years ago when the colonial states sought to discard or repair the
obvious failure of the "Articles of Confederation" Madison undertook a year
long study of the history of democracies. He studied the Greeks, the
Romans, the Swiss Confederation of Independent Cantons, and the United
Provinces of the Netherlands among others. His study taught him one thing
above and beyond all else, pure democracy doesn't work.
Madison was savvy enough to anticipate the exact concern Marco expresses
when he asks "So the majority decides what's good?" The question had been
anciently considered by Aristotle who felt that next to Monarchy, Democracy
was the lowest form of government. Aristotle felt that the only thing that
was almost as dumb as having one man run everything was to have everyone run
everything (Aristotle, by the way, believed in an Aristocracy, so much so,
he named it after himself--- he felt that government should be run by the
smartest citizens, which... when you think about it, isn't such a bad idea).
Madison wrote his reply to these concerns in a paper called "the Virginia
Plan" which was submitted to the first Constitutional convention by Virginia
Governor Edmund Randolph. The answer was a Representative democracy. The
idea was that the will of the people should be ultimate, but without the
guiding vision of leaders, the people's will could be easily confused and
mislead. They felt that the people should elect representatives whom they
trusted to run the state for them.
And being no fool, Madison's plan provided for a judiciary of appointed
officials, a supreme court insulated from political winds by lifetime job
security, to rule over the laws in equity, and protect the rights of the
people from the swaying will of the majority. The supreme court is the
fountain from which many of our most treasured rights (the right to a
lawyer, the right to Miranda warnings, the right to desegregated schools,
etc) originated. Furthermore, they are the guardians of the Bill of Rights,
protecting our most fundamental liberties (free speech, separation of church
and state, the right to bear arms) for better or worse.
The point here is that the majority will does not always prevail in our
system. Often it does (as it often should), after all, simply because the
majority does back a certain idea or proposition doesn't automatically make
it bad (there is something to be said for the "Marketplace of Ideas" and I'd
like to believe that some of the ideas that appeal to the majority do so
because they are genuinely GOOD ideas). But sometimes, the little guy does
prevail... When the Supreme Court desegregated schools in the famous "Brown
vs.. Board of Education" decision, you can bet your house that the vast
majority of Americans hated the idea (including Northerners). And when the
court released the rapist and murderer Carmen Miranda because nobody had
ever informed him he had the right to a lawyer, you can be sure the majority
would have loved to see the guy lynched. But the court let him go, so the
rest of us could be sure that if we were arrested, we would know that we had
"the right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions... the right to
lawyer...", etc. The ideal is that the majority will prevails until it goes
too far, and the system kicks in to protect the rights and interests of
minorities... it doesn't always work. But it does sometimes.... that's the
real dream (right Marco?).
So where does the MoQ come in???
Robert M. Pirsig has identified several of our rights and freedoms as
INTELLECTUAL Patterns of Value. He names the freedoms of speech and the
press, assembly and travel, democracy, trial by jury and habeas corpus. He
puts these rights under the umbrella which covers the highest of static
patterns, second only DQ itself. They are not merely social patterns. They
are not even "high Quality" social patterns. They're not even "the highest
Quality" social patterns. They are Intellectual. In the MoQ, these rights
are as real, as objective, and as moral as science, math, and truth. They
are high Quality Intellectual patterns.
I have heard several members of this forum object to Pirsig's
identification of these Natural Rights as Intellectual patterns. Some have
accused him of mistaking high Q-social patterns with the Intellectual. But
I disagree. Freedoms of speech and the press are necessary for DQ, without
this freedom to communicate ideas the Intellect would be stifled (if you
doubt this, go ask Galileo how valuable science is without the freedom to
communicate discoveries and theories) and DQ would hit a brick wall at the
end of its static moral chain. Since the MoQ asserts that a lower level
resists the control of the level directly superior, it would make no sense
to call these rights "Social". Freedom of speech frees the Intellect that
controls society.
Notice how the Nazi's burned books... it wasn't because they had found a
weaker social system or a social system of inferior Quality... on the
contrary, they had found a STRONGER social system. One prized social order
and strict sociological controls. And one of their first steps was to burn
the books, that is... cut off the freedom of speech, and throw Intellect and
the rights it guarantees off the top of the chain. They aren't the only
ones either. Book burning, control of the media and censorship are often
the most powerful tools of the totalitarian... now you know why, because the
assertion of these controls signals the severance of the Intellectual from
its rightful place.
Enough for now,
It's all Good,
Rick
------- End of forwarded message -------
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:27 BST