I have an embarrassingly unformed thought that I sense is connected to what you're concerned with, but making the connection explicit is, at the moment, beyond my intellectual power, I'm afraid. I can only hope their relevance is real, if oblique, and discernible, if only weakly.
To an alarming degree and with alarming rapidity, increasingly concentrated and popularly unaccountable forces — economic, financial, technological, bureaucratic — are, it seems to me, coming to determine even the minutest of details of everyday life. Where ordinary life isn't thusly infiltrated, it's at least shaped by being subject to arbitrary exercises of power, distantly authorized and insulated from democratic contestation — by what the neorepublicans call domination. I fret about this, because I fear that it's eroding our ability to govern ourselves, not to mention our taste for doing so and our aspirations to do so.
In connection with this, you rightly put pressure on the idea, not often accepted so much as trotted out, that bureaucratic administrative agencies and other creatures of the executive branch are in principle democratic. As you observe, those creatures might be run by appointees of (appointees of . . . ) democratically elected representatives, but it's difficult in detail to believe in their popular accountability.
And yet, as you also observe, these creatures seem necessary for a complex society such as ours. What are we to think about, what are we to do about, these institutions that appear democratic in name only? I ask this, and worry about this, as one who for the most part approves of our current administration's efforts to enforce anti-trust law and prevent unduly geographically and politically distant, anti-competitive concentrations of economic power.
My inchoate thought is this: perhaps those of us who are worried about the erosion of self-government are looking for democratic accountability in the wrong place.
Let me admit that the question of what-causes-what is always fraught; often, mutual reinforcement reigns, and it becomes a question of intervening in the causal circle at the right place and time and with the right touch. So what I'm suggesting is to be taken with more than a grain of salt. But what I'm wondering is whether the self-government that matters to the ordinary person *in the order of ends* is not to be found at the scale of national electoral politics. The latter, if anything, should orient its exercises of power toward strengthening self-government at the more regional and local scale. (This is one of the reasons I'm generally happy about the current administration's bustling anti-monopoly activity.) Once there's been something of a devolution and distribution of power, the machinations of a merely nominally democratic administrative apparatus wouldn't matter so much — unless, of course, they begin undermining smaller-scale self-government once again.
You can tell, I'm sure, that I'm coming up against the limits of my competence here. I'm hoping there's something here you can latch onto and make into a better idea.
"How can we humanize the contemporary? Or at least make our peace with our worlds?"
I am haunted by these same questions - they are perhaps the telos of my own writing. In Hegelian terms: to be at home in the other. Also (and not unrelatedly), After Virtue is my favourite work of moral philosophy. Thanks for the excellent post.
You're on to some crucial things here, David.
I have an embarrassingly unformed thought that I sense is connected to what you're concerned with, but making the connection explicit is, at the moment, beyond my intellectual power, I'm afraid. I can only hope their relevance is real, if oblique, and discernible, if only weakly.
To an alarming degree and with alarming rapidity, increasingly concentrated and popularly unaccountable forces — economic, financial, technological, bureaucratic — are, it seems to me, coming to determine even the minutest of details of everyday life. Where ordinary life isn't thusly infiltrated, it's at least shaped by being subject to arbitrary exercises of power, distantly authorized and insulated from democratic contestation — by what the neorepublicans call domination. I fret about this, because I fear that it's eroding our ability to govern ourselves, not to mention our taste for doing so and our aspirations to do so.
In connection with this, you rightly put pressure on the idea, not often accepted so much as trotted out, that bureaucratic administrative agencies and other creatures of the executive branch are in principle democratic. As you observe, those creatures might be run by appointees of (appointees of . . . ) democratically elected representatives, but it's difficult in detail to believe in their popular accountability.
And yet, as you also observe, these creatures seem necessary for a complex society such as ours. What are we to think about, what are we to do about, these institutions that appear democratic in name only? I ask this, and worry about this, as one who for the most part approves of our current administration's efforts to enforce anti-trust law and prevent unduly geographically and politically distant, anti-competitive concentrations of economic power.
My inchoate thought is this: perhaps those of us who are worried about the erosion of self-government are looking for democratic accountability in the wrong place.
Let me admit that the question of what-causes-what is always fraught; often, mutual reinforcement reigns, and it becomes a question of intervening in the causal circle at the right place and time and with the right touch. So what I'm suggesting is to be taken with more than a grain of salt. But what I'm wondering is whether the self-government that matters to the ordinary person *in the order of ends* is not to be found at the scale of national electoral politics. The latter, if anything, should orient its exercises of power toward strengthening self-government at the more regional and local scale. (This is one of the reasons I'm generally happy about the current administration's bustling anti-monopoly activity.) Once there's been something of a devolution and distribution of power, the machinations of a merely nominally democratic administrative apparatus wouldn't matter so much — unless, of course, they begin undermining smaller-scale self-government once again.
You can tell, I'm sure, that I'm coming up against the limits of my competence here. I'm hoping there's something here you can latch onto and make into a better idea.
"How can we humanize the contemporary? Or at least make our peace with our worlds?"
I am haunted by these same questions - they are perhaps the telos of my own writing. In Hegelian terms: to be at home in the other. Also (and not unrelatedly), After Virtue is my favourite work of moral philosophy. Thanks for the excellent post.
Agree.