My friend Jason Adams posted this quote on his Facebook wall today, an extract from the book Hatred of Democracy by Jacques Ranciere. It is an argument on why to reject elections, and instead embrace sortition, or selection by drawing names out of a hat.
"The drawing of lots, so they say, was fitting for ancient times in those small towns with little economic development. How could our modern societies, made of so many delicately interlocking cogs, be governed by individuals chosen by drawing lots, individuals who know nothing of the science of such fragile equilibria? We have found more fitting principles and means for democracy: representation of the sovereign people by elected members; and a symbiosis between the elite, elected representatives of the people, and the elites educated in our schools about the mechanisms by which our societies function. But differences in time and scale are not the heart of the matter. If the drawing of lots appears to our ‘democracies’ to be contrary to every serious principle for selecting governors, this is because we have at once forgotten what democracy meant and what type of ‘nature’ it aimed at countering... We habitually oppose the justice of representation and the competence of governors to arbitrary justice and the mortal risks of incompetence. But the drawing of lots has never favoured the incompetent over the competent. If it has become unthinkable for us today, this is because we are used to regarding as wholly natural an idea that certainly was neither natural for Plato, nor any more natural for French and American constitutionalists two centuries ago: that the first title that calls forward those who merit occupying power is the fact of desiring to exercise it."
I was very taken with this extract. It brought to mind something I read by Immanuel Wallerstein when I was engaged in research for my not completed PhD thesis. From memory Wallerstein was talking about filling positions of functionaries, rather than elections of office bearers. His argument was that human talents are distributed along a bell curve and the vast majority of people are average. That means that the relevant skills, talents and so on will be clustered around the average value, and that consequently:
1)the people available or applying for a certain position are not especially different from one another and
2) it is virtually impossible to distinguish among the competencies and so other, hidden, (and thus inequitable) criteria must enter the process.
Truly outstanding individuals (in the senses of both competency and incompetency) are found on the ends of the bell curve and thus are rare and not to be expected. In Wallerstein's view positions could be filled as well by selecting names out of a barrel as any other method. As sortition is also more equitable and cost effective, the case against it can only rest on ideology. And this is exactly what Ranciere argues above.
To my way of thinking sortition is the most democratic, most equitable and most effective way of filling all government, administrative and occupational positions. There is nothing to prevent limiting the eligible population from which the names are drawn in particular cases. For example, the position of a surgeon or an engineer to build a bridge would draw names from people who had the relevant skills.
Further pre-sorting of the eligible population could also ensure more equitable outcomes. The low representation of women and people of colour in many occupations could be rectified by limiting the number of white men in the eligible population to a number equal to the number of women or people of colour. This would ensure a statistically equal chance of selection to each group. In situations such as filling a parliament or similar such body the population could be sorted into category barrels and a specified number of names drawn from each barrel.
If we are serious about the development of a more democratic, more equitable world, the use of sortition as a selection / election mechanism seems essential.
1)the people available or applying for a certain position are not especially different from one another and
2) it is virtually impossible to distinguish among the competencies and so other, hidden, (and thus inequitable) criteria must enter the process.
Truly outstanding individuals (in the senses of both competency and incompetency) are found on the ends of the bell curve and thus are rare and not to be expected. In Wallerstein's view positions could be filled as well by selecting names out of a barrel as any other method. As sortition is also more equitable and cost effective, the case against it can only rest on ideology. And this is exactly what Ranciere argues above.
To my way of thinking sortition is the most democratic, most equitable and most effective way of filling all government, administrative and occupational positions. There is nothing to prevent limiting the eligible population from which the names are drawn in particular cases. For example, the position of a surgeon or an engineer to build a bridge would draw names from people who had the relevant skills.
Further pre-sorting of the eligible population could also ensure more equitable outcomes. The low representation of women and people of colour in many occupations could be rectified by limiting the number of white men in the eligible population to a number equal to the number of women or people of colour. This would ensure a statistically equal chance of selection to each group. In situations such as filling a parliament or similar such body the population could be sorted into category barrels and a specified number of names drawn from each barrel.
If we are serious about the development of a more democratic, more equitable world, the use of sortition as a selection / election mechanism seems essential.
Just a very short comment for now: Agreed. The modern representative democracy is the perfect form of bourgois rule. Candidates for open positions on any level are either already 'shaped'to represent the ruling doctrine or will be shaped by persuasion, pressure, even coercion to do the bidding of the ruling class once elected. The few exemptions are irrelevant for the goals of democratic intsitutions, but they serve as welcome 'proof' how democratic and free our society is.
ReplyDeleteMartin Gutzat
Yes, fully so. The process of standing for elections preselects people with "leadership ambitions", which in my book is a bad thing. It implies egotism, an inherently elitist and individualist view of the world, a sense of being somehow special. It also tends to reduce the election of people to roles as a form of popularity contest. A much broader cross section of people would be obtained by drawing lots. And given how unimpressive most elected 'leaders' are, the people selected could not be much worse.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your argument that elections are bad because they promote the virtues of "leadership", a kind of egotism and individualism.
DeleteI think Marx's comments in /Jewish Question/ happily back up your argument. In /Jewish Question/ Marx is anxious to understand and transcend the political-economic antinomy we see developed in bourgeois democracy. We see society schizophrenically divided into pure, virtuous democratic citizens, with public legal rights and responsibilities; and then citizens with private lives with prejudices, manipulative persuasive abilities and so on.
Marx observes that this is the ancient antinomy between form and content. Liberals take the division of a person into concrete and abstract elements to be the best thing that has ever happened since the enlightenment. The abstract processes of bourgeois law should rule over the dirty, "judaical" content.
However this charge for elevating the abstract over the concrete is obviously a charade. It is not real freedom, real democracy. Real, concrete citizens, with affective attachments and real creative potential are hollowed out and reduced to numbers. There is a second dimension to this alienation. Bourgeois democracy is a political process that generates abstract universal logic only. The particularity of human existence is subjugated to the totalitarianism of the liberal democratic state.
And this completely explains why representatives elected by popular vote is seen as the only logical choice for determining the will of the capitalist state. It is a very clumsy attempt to try and short-circuit the alienation of concrete human content into hollow abstract legal right. Marx again observes that elected officials have an ancient song and dance about having a "mandate", which is actually a complete fairy tale. It is impossible to generate /anything/ determinate from an election.
So not only do elections foster the wrong virtues within collective identities, but they are also logically and methodologically poor political tools.
Those are very interesting arguments. The implication of course is that electoralism will not be used in different social structures. I (like you) am of course most interested in the kind of practices that could operate in a socialist or communist social formation. I can see something like a base assembly, a workers council, being based on an open meeting in permanent session form of arrangement in which anyone is able to attend and participate. If delegates are required for a council beyond that, say a a city wide body or a regional federation, they would then be selected by lot, with precise mandates / instructions, and subject to recall. Staughton Lynd discusses some of these matters with reference to the Chiapas communes and I intend to write about his ideas when I have the time!
DeleteThose are some exciting ideas actually.
DeleteMaybe we are quite close to working a lot of important things out...