Jill asked me in a comment to describe my ideal state. I obliged:
You know, I don’t think anyone has asked me that directly.
I don’t know what the ideal state is, but it probably isn’t a state. I can’t really decide for other people under what rulership they should be living–deciding for other people is why the modern state is so terrible. You could probably at least partially agree with that.
But if I could decide for me and my domain (i.e., my household), I’d probably choose to live under a contractual/covenantal feudal religious rule…no, not a theocracy, which nowadays means religious rule combined with a lot of other things I don’t care for. Think of pre-exile Israel, where families were the rule of law, and some things cascaded down from the priestly class. In the modern sense of the “church age,” the priestly class would be whichever church we’d happen to be a member of. Something like that. Churches would have to be a lot different than they are now to accommodate this, so I wouldn’t think something like this could be airdropped in the middle of America or anywhere else to make it work. Someone. somewhere with a lot of guns and resources will have a problem with this, so I wouldn’t expect this kind of “state” to last very long or be peaceful.
I don’t care about answering “what ifs” in depth because they aren’t arguments, nor things to even think about comprehensively. One can give “what ifs” for every stupid idea for organizing a society; if they were seriously entertained, we’d be paralyzed by doubt.
The government other people choose is of no concern to me. The can do whatever they prefer, but most of what people may choose involve a lot of guns and forcing people to do things, so I supposed in a moral sense I’d advise against that. People tend to make every excuse they can for government behavior when the behavior benefits them personally, so this ethical consideration is going to pass right by them.
To stick some further meat on this: there are degrees to what I prefer here, though I try to stick to what I know what God has in mind. I’d be okay, in a practical and moral sense, with some kind of functioning monarchy, since that is closer to what I described above than lots of other systems one could come up with. A tribal-based system seems to work the best because our tribal hindbrains are always running its protocols. Modern systems (democracy) exacerbate the worst parts of those mental subroutines. God didn’t need to institute the tribal structure since it was built in to our hardware. He did, however, take advantage of it for His own purposes, imperfect however it is, and I don’t see any markers that He thinks other systems would be any better.
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To be precise, I asked you what a legitimate state is. I’m inclined toward thinking that it’s whatever state you were born under, obviously w/ some caveats, as you might have been born just after Cromwell had chopped off Jamie’s head. Still, it would be all you experienced of governance. See, I don’t believe legitimate and ideal are the same thing at all.
I kinda noticed I wasn’t too clear in my answer; I kinda mashed the ideal vs legitimate answer together.
Legitimate = whichever government has full consent of those governed. Currently, no government I know of enjoys legitimacy since they are nation-states, and nation-states are too large for rulers to accurately know they have full consent. This is my definition, obviously…other people probably have different ones. This is what I was getting at when I said I didn’t want to decide an “ideal” state, since it could be different for everyone.
Ideal = what I had described up above, in the post comment, as my personal ideal.
I’m open to criticism on this, as usual.
I’m impressed with the clear and succinct statement, Jay.
Thanks! Once in a while something good comes out of me.
The concept of a ‘legitimate state’ infers some ‘law above law’ by which to judge the legitimacy of the lawgiver (the state) itself.
In a game of ouroboros, we could apply the internal law *of* the state *to* the state: namely, does the state conform to its *own* laws which it enforces? By doing so, we could establish legitimacy without relying on the existance of some hotly contested external standard of legitimacy.
What, then, if the state is discovered to fail this basic smell test, i.e. it violates the very laws it enforces against its subjects? What if, for example, the state punishes stealing, and yet is in the habit of confiscating the wealth of its subject using force, threat of force, or fraud? Has it not undermined the legitimacy of its own existance?
Or does the state possess special provenance to conduct its affairs according to a different standard than the one which it enforces? If so, then we are back to pleading a law above law which lends legitimacy to a state that violates the very laws it enforces. What is our basis for this belief?
if it is deemed wrong for the individual to steal or murder, then it stands to reason that the individuals composing a government should also be ruled by the same societal constraints.
What if we were simply to say that a legitimate state is granted authority by its citizens to defend the life, liberty, and property of the individual, and is, itself restrained by this very same principle in its function and its conduct? Would this not be the most consistent, parsimonious definition of ‘legitimacy’?
I would say the state *could* be legitimate in this way, if non-state actors could, for instance, legally use the same manner of force as state actors. That might seem odd–why bother having a state if anyone could become a state actor? I guess the answer lies along the lines of division of labor, since not everyone can spend the resources to be a state actor, even though they would have the permission to do so.