Scratchpad

Positioning

cosmopolitanism, democracy, plurality, stoicism, virtue —

6 Apr 2010

Have we lost a recognition of the position from which we apply values with the turn to democracy? Question prompted by Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.

In other words, in the past, it was taken as given that those in power (emperors, patricians, etc) needed certain virtues in order to rule, while those who were ruled needed others. A just judge was impartial, and his impartiality was his fairness. This was a mixed blessing—it was easy for those who maintained total impartiality to others to become frigid or cruel, impartiality slipping into disinterest or isolation from others. To combat it, we cue up notions of shared humanity, fellow feeling, camaraderie with all as humans and brothers. But it is, by definition, abstract and not particular. The leader must universalize to be fair, but in doing so he creates a barrier between himself and those he rules, and he creates a different set of rules for himself and for others. This is understood as a paradoxical answer to a paradoxical question. To erase the paradox is not possible. The question was in maintaining the proper balance between two competing needs—identifying with others, but not so much as to cloud our judgment. Refusing to connect with the particular, but not so much that we lose the ability to connect altogether.

But with democracy, we are all judges, and we are all leaders, and we are all equally citizens (that's the story anyway...the reality would involve a much longer set of musings). As such, we are expected to maintain a judicious distance from one another. We are to see all as equal, and yet as the personal sovereign we stand apart. That is what we do if we are good leaders and citizens anyway. Those who do not exercise this self-control and objective distance are, one must assume, crappy at their jobs. They are not as good at being citizens as we.

It is a holdover. An atavism. As mini-sovereigns, we exercise our duty with care and understand that those around us will not have the same needs, beliefs, or responsibilities. We accept the plurality which we rule over and live amidst, and this is a requirement of the job. But now those around us are not merely our subjects (as subjects, we forgive them their different virtues, for those virtues are appropriate to subjects and they do their jobs well). But we judge them harshly as fellow rulers, for they've got it all wrong. When our fellow citizens are beneath us, we forgive them. When they are equal to us, we despise their failings and judge their values as inappropriate. In other words, they may rule as they wish, but only so long as it is as we.

We believe in the ideal type of democracy and equality so deeply that we no longer see the possibility of these different positions. There's no distinction between them anymore, so the bourgeois (psuedo-leader) adherents to notions like cosmopolitanism assume that it simply makes sense for everyone to be a cosmopolitan, and that that will mean the same thing, and serve the same purpose, for everyone. It is a virtue for all. The virtue. But what does it mean to be a cosmopolitan as a leader, and what does it mean to be one as a citizen? What does it mean to be both at the same time? Is it self-defeating and antithetical to plurality when separated from corresponding conceptions of hierarchy, which temper its inherent tendency to be universalizing?

Or is it, instead (or in addition to), that the Stoics were quiescent? One could act against Nature, or against another man, but the harm done was not important, indeed, could be imagined away. Today, however, our dignity is brittle and fragile, and any affront presents a terrible danger which compels immediate action. Those who do not agree thus pose a much greater threat than in the past, so, again, there is little to temper the demand that all must concur on this point.

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