Equality by lot

In a recent article in The Catholic Herald Niall Gooch discusses some objections to sortition from the book Against sortition?. As he describes sortition, “[t]he idea is that involving “normal people” in such deliberation helps to spread power more widely and obtain broader perspectives”.

The contributors to the book set out various reservations about this idea, and various objections. Many of them have procedural concerns – for example, they believe that existing approaches don’t gain a wide enough spectrum of opinion, or that they are easily captured by special interests, or that they don’t really add anything new to a conventional elected legislature.

Others highlight the problems of accountability raised by citizens’ assemblies, or the way in which they dilute the legitimacy of existing bodies. But a few contributors are clearly trying to articulate something like the more fundamental problem identified by John Paul II, which we might sum up with this question: “Does involving lots more people in political decision making actually get you closer to the truth?”

Gooch refers his readers to, Evangelium Vitae, The Gospel of Life, a 1995 essay by Pope John Paul II. In it John Paul II writes:

Democracy cannot be idolized to the point of making it a substitute for morality or a panacea for immorality. Fundamentally, democracy is a “system” and as such is a means and not an end. Its “moral” value is not automatic, but depends on conformity to the moral law to which it, like every other form of human behaviour, must be subject: in other words, its morality depends on the morality of the ends which it pursues and of the means which it employs. If today we see an almost universal consensus with regard to the value of democracy, this is to be considered a positive “sign of the times”, as the Church’s Magisterium has frequently noted. But the value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes. Of course, values such as the dignity of every human person, respect for inviolable and inalienable human rights, and the adoption of the “common good” as the end and criterion regulating political life are certainly fundamental and not to be ignored.

The basis of these values cannot be provisional and changeable “majority” opinions, but only the acknowledgment of an objective moral law which, as the “natural law” written in the human heart, is the obligatory point of reference for civil law itself. If, as a result of a tragic obscuring of the collective conscience, an attitude of scepticism were to succeed in bringing into question even the fundamental principles of the moral law, the democratic system itself would be shaken in its foundations, and would be reduced to a mere mechanism for regulating different and opposing interests on a purely empirical basis.

The church is indeed in a much better position than the academics to proudly assert that it promotes a specific message, The Truth, whose validity, being God-given, cannot be doubted no matter how unpopular it is. The acedemics are uneasy about openly asserting such a position since they do not have an authority from which they can derive unassailable validity justifying overruling popular sentiment. They therefore tie themselves in knots talking about “ideal speech situations”, “original positions” or other intellectual edifices which serve as rather poor replacements for divine authority.

At the same time the academics further complicate their position by tying such assertions of access to The Truth to the notion of democracy rather than keeping the two separate, as John Paul II largely does^[1]. This is of course done because the academics accept that democracy is the only basis for legitimate power. Wanting to assert the legitimacy of imposing their ideas on society, they see tying their ideas to the legitimizing power of “democracy” as the way for justifying such an imposition.

Two additional points worth mentioning:

1. In the past and/or the present, both the Chruch and the academics have thoroughly delegitimized themselves by embracing on a regular basis various repulsive positions. For the Church this may (or may not) now be considered ancient history (apart from the occasional pedophilia scandal, and maybe other issues about which I am uninformed) and the Catholic believers may be ready to accept the moral authority of the Church. For the academics, the embrace of repulsive positions is an ongoing process, making any claims by academics to having access to The Truth ring hollow to large swaths of the population.

2. While acknowledging that “crimes have been committed in the name of ‘truth'”, John Paul II decries “ethical relativism” as the being at the root of the loss of the moral Truth which the Church teaches. It is obvious that democratic approval for a certain idea does not make it Truthful. But of course, nothing else does either – neither theological santcion nor academic one, nor any other mechanism. It is right (and inevitable) that every member of society form their own assessment of what is right and what is wrong. If a person or a group of people wish to assert that a certain idea is Truthful or Good, it is best to do so by explicitly asserting this idea and presenting its derivation from the assumptions from which it is derived. If the assumptions and derivation are compelling, i.e., they match “the ‘natural law’ written in the human heart”, then one can hope that one’s ideas would become accepted and policy would follow. (Indeed, it is this connection between accepted ideas and policy, not an asserted connection between accepted ideas and The Truth, that is what democracy is about.) Any attempt to impose ideas authoritatively should be resisted.

[1] But note the following comments in the essay:

Even in participatory systems of government, the regulation of interests often occurs to the advantage of the most powerful, since they are the ones most capable of maneuvering not only the levers of power but also of shaping the formation of consensus. In such a situation, democracy easily becomes an empty word.

It is therefore urgently necessary, for the future of society and the development of a sound democracy, to rediscover those essential and innate human and moral values which flow from the very truth of the human being and express and safeguard the dignity of the person: values which no individual, no majority and no State can ever create, modify or destroy, but must only acknowledge, respect and promote.

[ My emphases. ]

Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Religion, Sortition |