I can fully understand opposing certain ideas, but if you’re against democracy because it doesn’t work, why go to a system of governance that has previously shown not to work?
The obvious question here is, why do you think monarchy has been “shown not to work”? Is it because monarchies have had a tendency to turn into democracies? Or perhaps because historical monarchies didn’t have the same level of technology that modern liberal democracies enjoy?
That question is kinda obvious. Thanks for pointing it out.
From what I remember from my History classes, monarchies worked pretty okay with an enlightened autocrat who made benefiting the state and the populace as his or her prime goal. But the problem there was that they didn’t stay in power and they had no real way of making absolutely sure their children had the same values. All it takes to mess things up is one oldest son (or daughter if you do away with the Salic law) who cares more about their own lives than those of the population.
So I don’t think technology level plays a decisive factor. It probably will improve things for the monarchy, since famines are a good way to start a revolution, but giving absolute power to people without a good fail-safe when you’ve got a bad ruler seems like a good way to rot a system from the inside.
I was in a Chinese university around Geoge W. Bush’s second election and afterwards, which didn’t make it easy to convince Chinese students that Democracy was a particularly good system for picking competent leaders (Chinese leaders are often graduates from prestigious universities like Tsinghua (where I was), which is more like MIT than like Yale, and they are generally very serious and competent, though not particularly telegenic). On the other hand, the Chinese system gets you people like Mao.
I don’t think Mao could exactly be said to be a product of the Chinese system, seeing as unless you construe the “Chinese system” to include revolutions, it necessarily postdates him.
I’m not necessarily saying that democracy is the best thing ever. I just have issues jumping from “democracies aren’t really as good as you’re supposed to believe” to “and therefore a monarchy is better.”
I feel I should point out the Chinese system was not what got Mao into power. Instituting the Chinese system is what got him into power. And this system saw massive reform since then.
Bullets 5 and 6 of this MoreRight article point out some reactionary ideas to assuage your concerns. Like Mr. Anissimov notes, it is necessary not only to consider the harm such a failure mode might cause, but also to compare it to failure modes that are likely to arise in demotist systems. Reactionary thought also includes the idea that good systems of government align their incentives such that the well-being of their ruler coincides with that of their people, so a perfectly selfish son should not be nearly as much of a concern as an stupid or evil one.
Picture an alternative Earth Prime where monarchies dominated the political landscape and democracies were seen as inconsequential political curiosities. In this Earth Prime, can you not imagine that textbooks and teachers might instead point out equally plausible-sounding problems with democracy, such as the fact that politicians face selection pressures to cut off their time horizons around the time of their next election? Can you not imagine pointing to small democracies in their world with failures analogous to failures of democracies in our world, and declaring “Q.E.D.”? How sure are you that what you are taught is a complete and unbiased analysis of political history, carried out by sufficiently smart and rational people that massive errors of interpretation are unlikely, and transmitted to you with high fidelity?
How sure are you that what you are taught is a complete and unbiased analysis of political history, carried out by sufficiently smart and rational people that massive errors of interpretation are unlikely, and transmitted to you with high fidelity?
I don’t think you have to be (certainly I am not,) not to put much credence in Reaction. From the premise that political history is conventionally taught in a biased and flawed manner, it does not follow that Reaction is unbiased or correct.
The tendency to see society as being in a constant state of decline, descending from some golden age, is positively ancient, and seems to be capable of arising even in cases where there is no real golden age to look back on, unless society really started going downhill with the invention of writing. There is no shortage of compelling biases to motivate individuals to adopt a Reactionary viewpoint, so for someone attempting to judge how likely the narrative is to be correct, they need to look, not for whether there are arguments for Reaction at all, but whether those arguments are significantly stronger than they would have predicted given a knowledge of how well people tend to support other ideologies outside the mainstream.
I don’t think you have to be (certainly I am not,) not to put much credence in Reaction. From the premise that political history is conventionally taught in a biased and flawed manner, it does not follow that Reaction is unbiased or correct.
Of course not; even if you reject the current conventional narrative, it still takes a lot of evidence to pinpoint Reaction as a plausible alternative (nevermind a substantially correct one). But Mathias was basically saying that the models and case studies of monarchy he studied in his history classes provided him with such a high prior probability that monarchy “doesn’t work” that he couldn’t imagine why anybody could possibly be a monarchist in this day and age. I was arguing that the evidence he received therein might not have been quite as strong as he felt it to be.
Or perhaps because historical monarchies didn’t have the same level of technology that modern liberal democracies enjoy?
At the given time, they were replaced by democracies with the same technology level they had.
The argument could be constructed that for different levels of technology, different form of government is optimal. Which sound plausible. For a very low technology level, living in a tribe was the best way of life. For higher level, it was a theocracy or monarchy. For yet higher level, it was a democracy (and this is why the old monarchies are gone). And for even higher level (today in the first world), it is monarchy again.
It’s a bit suspicious that the monarchy is the optimal form of government twice, but not impossible. (Although it is better to have opinions because most evidence points towards them, not merely because they are not completely impossible.)
Or perhaps because historical monarchies didn’t have the same level of technology that modern liberal democracies enjoy?
At the given time, they were replaced by democracies with the same technology level they had.
That response is nonsense, an unfair reading. Jaime already offered your hypothesis immediately preceding:
Is it because monarchies have had a tendency to turn into democracies?
He explicitly says that means something completely different.
I imagine that he means, quite correctly, that many comparisons between democracies and monarchies fail to compare examples at the same technology level.
As to the other point, I doubt Jaime thinks that monarchies turning into democracies is a very good argument in favor of democracies, just that it is a common implicit argument. I doubt that there are many people who think that monarchy is a good form of government at two technological levels, separated by democracy. Generally people who condemn democracy think that it was a mistake, perhaps historically contingent, or perhaps a natural tendency of technology, but one to be fought. Some reactionaries hold that this is a good time to pursue non-democracies, but usually because democracy is finally self-destructing, not because technological pressures have reversed course.
But monarchies turning into democracies is evidence against the stability of monarchies, and some reactionaries do implicitly make the argument that technology favors monarchy in two different periods.
The obvious question here is, why do you think monarchy has been “shown not to work”? Is it because monarchies have had a tendency to turn into democracies? Or perhaps because historical monarchies didn’t have the same level of technology that modern liberal democracies enjoy?
That question is kinda obvious. Thanks for pointing it out.
From what I remember from my History classes, monarchies worked pretty okay with an enlightened autocrat who made benefiting the state and the populace as his or her prime goal. But the problem there was that they didn’t stay in power and they had no real way of making absolutely sure their children had the same values. All it takes to mess things up is one oldest son (or daughter if you do away with the Salic law) who cares more about their own lives than those of the population.
So I don’t think technology level plays a decisive factor. It probably will improve things for the monarchy, since famines are a good way to start a revolution, but giving absolute power to people without a good fail-safe when you’ve got a bad ruler seems like a good way to rot a system from the inside.
I was in a Chinese university around Geoge W. Bush’s second election and afterwards, which didn’t make it easy to convince Chinese students that Democracy was a particularly good system for picking competent leaders (Chinese leaders are often graduates from prestigious universities like Tsinghua (where I was), which is more like MIT than like Yale, and they are generally very serious and competent, though not particularly telegenic). On the other hand, the Chinese system gets you people like Mao.
I don’t think Mao could exactly be said to be a product of the Chinese system, seeing as unless you construe the “Chinese system” to include revolutions, it necessarily postdates him.
I totally agree, and in addition, Mao is the kind of leader that could get elected in a democracy.
However, a democracy may be getting rid of someone like Mao than China was (provided the democracy stats).
I’m not necessarily saying that democracy is the best thing ever. I just have issues jumping from “democracies aren’t really as good as you’re supposed to believe” to “and therefore a monarchy is better.”
I feel I should point out the Chinese system was not what got Mao into power. Instituting the Chinese system is what got him into power. And this system saw massive reform since then.
Bullets 5 and 6 of this MoreRight article point out some reactionary ideas to assuage your concerns. Like Mr. Anissimov notes, it is necessary not only to consider the harm such a failure mode might cause, but also to compare it to failure modes that are likely to arise in demotist systems. Reactionary thought also includes the idea that good systems of government align their incentives such that the well-being of their ruler coincides with that of their people, so a perfectly selfish son should not be nearly as much of a concern as an stupid or evil one.
Picture an alternative Earth Prime where monarchies dominated the political landscape and democracies were seen as inconsequential political curiosities. In this Earth Prime, can you not imagine that textbooks and teachers might instead point out equally plausible-sounding problems with democracy, such as the fact that politicians face selection pressures to cut off their time horizons around the time of their next election? Can you not imagine pointing to small democracies in their world with failures analogous to failures of democracies in our world, and declaring “Q.E.D.”? How sure are you that what you are taught is a complete and unbiased analysis of political history, carried out by sufficiently smart and rational people that massive errors of interpretation are unlikely, and transmitted to you with high fidelity?
I don’t think you have to be (certainly I am not,) not to put much credence in Reaction. From the premise that political history is conventionally taught in a biased and flawed manner, it does not follow that Reaction is unbiased or correct.
The tendency to see society as being in a constant state of decline, descending from some golden age, is positively ancient, and seems to be capable of arising even in cases where there is no real golden age to look back on, unless society really started going downhill with the invention of writing. There is no shortage of compelling biases to motivate individuals to adopt a Reactionary viewpoint, so for someone attempting to judge how likely the narrative is to be correct, they need to look, not for whether there are arguments for Reaction at all, but whether those arguments are significantly stronger than they would have predicted given a knowledge of how well people tend to support other ideologies outside the mainstream.
Of course not; even if you reject the current conventional narrative, it still takes a lot of evidence to pinpoint Reaction as a plausible alternative (nevermind a substantially correct one). But Mathias was basically saying that the models and case studies of monarchy he studied in his history classes provided him with such a high prior probability that monarchy “doesn’t work” that he couldn’t imagine why anybody could possibly be a monarchist in this day and age. I was arguing that the evidence he received therein might not have been quite as strong as he felt it to be.
At the given time, they were replaced by democracies with the same technology level they had.
The argument could be constructed that for different levels of technology, different form of government is optimal. Which sound plausible. For a very low technology level, living in a tribe was the best way of life. For higher level, it was a theocracy or monarchy. For yet higher level, it was a democracy (and this is why the old monarchies are gone). And for even higher level (today in the first world), it is monarchy again.
It’s a bit suspicious that the monarchy is the optimal form of government twice, but not impossible. (Although it is better to have opinions because most evidence points towards them, not merely because they are not completely impossible.)
That response is nonsense, an unfair reading. Jaime already offered your hypothesis immediately preceding:
He explicitly says that means something completely different.
I imagine that he means, quite correctly, that many comparisons between democracies and monarchies fail to compare examples at the same technology level.
As to the other point, I doubt Jaime thinks that monarchies turning into democracies is a very good argument in favor of democracies, just that it is a common implicit argument. I doubt that there are many people who think that monarchy is a good form of government at two technological levels, separated by democracy. Generally people who condemn democracy think that it was a mistake, perhaps historically contingent, or perhaps a natural tendency of technology, but one to be fought. Some reactionaries hold that this is a good time to pursue non-democracies, but usually because democracy is finally self-destructing, not because technological pressures have reversed course.
But monarchies turning into democracies is evidence against the stability of monarchies, and some reactionaries do implicitly make the argument that technology favors monarchy in two different periods.