Dilettante Politics: Reconsidering the Executive
History has no claim on the present or the future. Yet, lack of historical knowledge and understanding makes us prisoners of history. There is no part of society more imprisoned in the past than politics and government. Some of our most elemental political and government concepts remain based on myths and archaic science.
In the Western tradition, the Greeks and Romans defined types of government. While Plato and Aristotle initially provided definition, it was another Greek, Polybius, most responsible for bringing these ideas forward into the modern era. Polybius lived in the second century B.C., when having defeated Carthage, the Romans turned their conquering ways toward Greece. Polybius and a group of fellow Greek nobles were taken as Roman hostages, a common practice to insure the allegiance of conquered peoples. He lived for twenty years in Rome, writing his Histories, a book about Rome and the first two Punic Wars with Carthage. He wrote a number of other works, but The Histories is the only one that survived.
Polybius defined the three types of classical government, which the Greeks thought repeatedly cycled. Democracy begets aristocracy, begetting kings, once again bringing about democracy. Polybius thought it best to combine the three types into one government. The Roman Republic represented this mixed system best. He writes,
“Now, it is undoubtedly the case that most of those who profess to give
us authoritative instruction on this subject distinguish three kinds of
constitutions, which they designate kingship, aristocracy, democracy... it is plain that we must regard as the best constitution that which partakes of all these three elements.”
Histories became one of the works of the classical world that resurfaced a thousand years later, helping bring about the Renaissance. His idea on government “separation of powers” directly influenced Enlightenment thinkers Montesquieu and Locke. Influenced by all three, the design of the American Constitution led to the construct of what most grade school student once knew as the the three branches of government.
Importantly, there were modern adjustments and supplements. The Congress became one branch, combining an “aristocracy” in the form of the Senate with the House, a representative form of democracy, opposed to what Polybius understood as the direct democratic participation of the assembled citizenry in the Roman Republic.
The greatest change was the addition of the court system as a separate branch. In the Roman Republic, courts evolved over time, being first the business of the consuls, the executive branch, and the Senate. However, in many cases, all final verdicts were in the hands of the full assembly of the Roman citizenry. In Rome, the people were the Supreme Court. The American judicial system derived more from the English monarchical court system. It is not surprising the US judiciary, most demonstrably at the federal level, has reverted to a monarchical institution.
The third branch is that of the executive. In the Roman Republic, the executive was elected for one year, an office held simultaneously by two people due to the Republic's tremendous hostility to anything resembling the sole rule of a king. In the US, the presidency has grown both ever more powerful and incompetent. An incompetence largely derived from institutional incapacity as opposed to personal ineptitude, but there's plenty of that too.
Two and half thousand years later, our government design remains greatly influenced by ancient thought, while increasingly failing at its most basic tasks. Looking more closely at Polybius, we find flawed ancient science still directly designed into the very structure of our institutions. Most detrimental is Polybius' thinking on the initial development of politics. He writes,
“For what we see happen in the case of animals that are without the faculty of reason, such as bulls, goats, and cocks, among whom there can be no dispute that the strongest take the lead, – that we must regard as in the truest sense the teaching of nature. Originally then it is probable that the condition of life among men was this, – herding together like animals and following the strongest and bravest as leaders. The limit of this authority would be physical strength, and the name we should give it would be despotism. But as soon as the idea of family ties and social relation has arisen amongst such agglomerations of men, then is born also the idea of kingship, and then for the first time mankind conceives the notion of goodness and justice and their reverse. ”
Starting with the last sentence, Polybius has this completely backward. Family ties, social relations, and some ideas of goodness and justice were all in place before larger communities emerged based on hierarchical order. Our best understanding today is stringent hierarchical order was neither the original social order of homo sapiens, nor, and just as importantly, is it a correct view on the organization of the rest of surrounding life. Yet, centralized hierarchical order remains a fundamental concept locked into our politics and indeed our constitution.
Current biological understanding upends Polybius' thinking on the fundamental order of the natural world. He stated there, “can be no dispute that the strongest take the lead, – that we must regard as the truest sense the teaching of nature.” This is neither indisputable nor the truest sense of natural order. From his study of baboons, the seminal evolutionary biologist Robert Sapolsky has a wonderful anecdote in looking at the supposed natural dominance of violence imposed physical hierarchy. He writes if any baboon troop had to rely on the current dominate male to find food, the troop would starve. For food sources, the baboons are reliant on older females, whose long experience gives them the knowledge of things like the times and places of fruiting trees. So, looking at life's “hierarchy,” a nebulous idea in most cases, if you can't eat, you can't reproduce. Food and water must come before reproduction, thus for baboon group survival, the older female is more important than the latest, fleeting, physically dominant male.
In looking at the value of Sapolsky's older female baboon, her social value lies in the information or knowledge she possesses. From our beginnings, human culture contained a great deal more information than a baboon troop. Today, our newest technologies daily unleash tsunamis of information. Nothing better demonstrates the antiquated organizational capacity of the institutional executive. This should not be surprising, as Polybius was correct, the first executive was founded by exerting physical power. Over the centuries, as society itself became more and more reliant on information, the executive, be it pharaoh, emperor, or king, sought not to best facilitate the decimation of knowledge, but control it, first and foremost for their own benefit.
Bureaucracy evolved as the organizational tool of the executive to control information and its use. As society became ever more information complex, larger and larger bureaucracies evolved. All bureaucracy is undemocratic. In its truest nature, bureaucracy is a political eunuch. Its ability to act is at the discretion of the executive, though over time, all bureaucracy gains the understanding their only autonomous power is to not act.
The creation of ever massive bureaucracy, whether government or corporate does not allow the executive, him or herself, to in anyway master the information complexity of ever increasing specialization. Information processing through specialization lies at the foundation of contemporary society. It is simply impossible for any person or any one institution to effectively utilize or even understand the complexities of contemporary society.
This has led to a destructive executive dilettantism. Maybe best exemplified by the notion that complex ideas, issues, and processes can be understood with a half-page memo. This has led to an appalling incompetence in the political sphere, revealing a complete incapacity of our present politics to in anyway constructively engage today's challenges. By no means is this a problem confined to the executive suite or even a specific institution, it is an acute malady across the whole of society, accompanied by the false belief we can effectively communicate complexity with a single phrase or picture.
No doubt institutions can operate in certain fashions led by dilettante executives. In the form of established process and bureaucracies, complexity is built into the organization itself. However, critical problems assert themselves when these processes need to change. When reorganization must take place, dilettantism insures failure. And in so many respects, the challenges the world presently face desperately cries for reorganization.
In modern governance, legislatures also create bureaucracies. Centralization of power classically associated with the executive has also developed with modern legislatures. In the United States, Polybius would recognize nothing democratic or even representative of a Congress with only 535 members for 355 million people. Dilettantism infests the entire Congressional process. Members don't even read the bills they vote on.
The most detrimental aspect of organizational dilettantism presents itself in the process of feedback — the results of any action returning to the instigator. In our present systems, feedback is so generalized to be almost worthless. In the case of politics, elections represent feedback, with markets, it's profits.
Biologist Sapolsky in his book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst provides an important critique of inherent market dilettantism writing,
“We tend to think of market interactions as being the epitome of complexity finding a literal common currency for array of human needs and desires in the form of this abstraction called money. But at their core, market interactions represent an impoverishment of human reciprocity."
Far and away the greatest example of the total failure of feedback in the industrial era is the complete inability to value industry's impact on the greater ecological systems they are part. This is a failure not only of information processing capacity, but the inability of centralized power to in anyway react to the signals of destruction coming back. Continued profits say all is well. Information dilettantism is a plague not only of the executive and its institutions, but across the whole of society.
Instead of Polybius' separation of powers, we must look to a merging of powers. That is how organizationally, the processes of deliberating, deciding and acting are not separated but conjoined in a distributed network construct. Sapolsky notes on the functioning of the brain,
“Every region of the brain is getting projections from and sending projections to a zillion other places, it is rare that an individual brain region is the "center for" anything. Instead its all networks where, far more often, a particular region plays a "key role in," "helps mediate,” or "influences" a behavior. The function of a particular brain region is embedded in the context of its connections."
Looking at social organization, a healthy politics understands the key to social order lies in the design of the system. How power is held, distributed, and enacted resides in the system's design. What are the roles and processes of the individual in interacting with each other? How are institutions designed more distributedly? How are they shaped internally? How do they interact with each other?
At the founding of the American Republic, its creators referred to what they were doing as an experiment in self-government. Politically, Americans have loss this experimental spirit. In fact, just the opposite mindset pervades the body politic. As centralized power became entrenched, people concluded established order and processes were the only possibilities.
In his wonderful book, Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland, democratic historian Lawrence Goodwyn acutely and succinctly defines democratic experience. He writes,
“All inherently dynamic democratic organizational forms are intrinsically experimental. As Solidarnosc itself would experience, contingency is necessarily built into the structure of popular democracy. There is nothing remotely “scientific” about democratic forms. Such building blocks as have been fashioned possess value because they have been experimentally tested over time, not because they harmonize with some enclosed political theory.”
Today, democratic dynamism is lost. Entrapped in antiquated notions of politics, people endlessly repeat empty rituals, insisting if they just get the right person in charge things will work. History shows this is a losing game. Polybius would be the first to understand.