(I) Truth and Political Legitimacy.

‘Legitimacy refers to the rightfulness of a power holder or system of rule. Two broad criteria for moral justifiability can be distinguished: 1) political power should derive from a rightful source of authority, and 2) it should satisfy the rightful ends or purposes of government.’ (Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. p.551)

If we look at the diagram in the previous entry: ‘Ostensible Enlightenment’ we see that truth – in the absolute sense, is not realistically achievable. We would need to account for all possible perceptions of reality in terms of a single conceptual scheme to be able to claim truth. Rather conceptual schemes are variously valid of reality.

Thus, the bride-to-be is wrong. The meteor shower is not a good omen. The astrophysicist is right – not absolutely right, as he would be the first to acknowledge, but his understanding can be reconciled with cause and effect, the conservation of energy, the universal law of gravitation and so on, and these same terms of analysis be employed to explain a great many other phenomena.

The bride-to-be may have sound emotional reasons for wanting to believe the universe would care for her happiness and conspire to send her a sign, just as there are sound emotional reasons for wanting to believe there’s a God in the heavens looking out for us. She’s wrong because her understanding is not compatible with the explanation of other phenomena – but sadly, she will invest so deeply in this illusion, not only will she rush headlong into marriage, but with this in the back of her mind, remain far too long in a marriage gone bad.

Similarly, by employing the conceptual scheme of the artefact-artificer relationship to reconcile perceptions of existence – primitive man inferred the existence of a Creator God, and employed this as an objective authority for law to enable the marriage of hunter-gatherer tribes. No doubt there were other factors encouraging socialization, such as the sudden ability to make things – against the impossibility of making everything one might want, but this again indicates the centralization of artefact-artificer relationship.

It’s clear both from pre-historic finds and historical records that there is no decisive notion of how society should be structured. If society were formed on the basis of an idea of society, we should expect to see very formal and quite uniform social structure, but throughout history and across the world we see a wide variety of social forms with only one thing in common: a central and common concept of God. Rather than the founding idea therefore, society is an undefined conceptual scheme derived from reconciling perceptions of reality – overall of great benefit to man, but which therefore remains an unsettled question, an engagement as opposed to a marriage.

Just as God acted an evolutionary shortcut, enabling man to overcome the limits inherent to tribalism, science, if applied similarly will boost human evolution, and just in time – for we have reached the limits of validity of the concept of God to perform this social function, as we reach beyond the legitimacy of the social structures built on this foundation.

In Britain, the source of authority from which power is derived is God. It’s less than explicit, but nonetheless the case that the Queen rules by Divine Right, is Head of Church and State, and her permission is required to form a Parliament. It’s never been the case that the British people have voted for a government the Queen has found impossible to accept, and thus democracy is widely considered to be the source of authority from which power is derived. But even if that were so, Parliamentary arrangements serve to undermine democratic principles to such a degree, as a source of authority it can only be considered a pretence.

The two main political parties – almost indistinguishable yet ostensibly in opposition, monopolize the middle ground with faux debate, clearly lying and allowing each other’s lies to go unnoticed, passing the same old political footballs back and forth between them, conspiring not to address any real questions. In order to maintain this charade, the representatives people vote for are not free to voice their opinions or vote as they choose. The party list system allows that representatives can be deselected at the behest of the executive. In theory it’s not impossible to continue as an independent, but in practice, it’s almost impossible. Come election time, media coverage focuses on the two main parties, presenting the party candidate as the only credible choice.

In the 2001 general election for example, 59% of those eligible to vote did so. The Labour Party, led by Tony Blair won 41% of the vote, and thus with a mandate based on the consent of less than 25% of the electorate, Blair held office until May 2007. After he stepped down, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown took up the post of Prime Minister – and it’s a matter of no great concern in political circles, nor in the media that over a year later he’s neither sought nor won a democratic mandate. Nonetheless, Prime Minister Brown attended the July 2008 G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, making a speech advocating economic sanctions against Zimbabwe on the grounds that their elections were not free and fair.

No doubt President Mugabe is a despot – and Zimbabwe’s Presidential elections were a sham, but it’s impossible to consider advocating starving the people of another state into opposition of the prevailing regime the rightful ends of a legitimate government, less yet one led by a Prime Minister with no democratic mandate. Of course, this is not Gordon Brown’s fault. He’s on script – acting perfectly rationally in terms of fundamentally irrational political and economic arrangements. In Part Two we will show that legitimate ends and purposes are rendered impossible by these arrangements