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Notes -
Legitimacy & Israel
What is it that makes a state legitimate? It's amazing to me how many people simply take any existing state as legitimate, without asking whether it ought to be seen as legitimate or not. States commit horrific acts of violence and coercion daily, so this is an important question. How can we know whether such a state is actually justified in committing such blatantly awful acts?
There are, I think, at first appearance two popular theories of this: might makes right, and democratic moralism. The former theory is amoral, and the latter is moralistic. In practice, however, I think these are in fact merely two faces of the same coin.
On the one hand, the might-makes-right people say that the state is self-justifying. It exists, it has might, therefore obey it, end of discussion. This is unsatisfying in that it essentially dodges the topic of discussion. As such it is not really a valid answer to the question of legitimacy; rather it implicitly denies that there is any question to be had at all. Might makes right might be a good starting point for a science of state, which investigates how, in human history, states have emerged and become mighty, but it is inappropriate for the normative question that is the question of legitimacy (what type of state should there be?).
Now on the other hand the democratists say that the state is justified when it is popular. But why should that be? If you assume, empirically, that people have different levels of moral aptitude, then popularity immediately appears to be a formula to craft a wicked state. The only deeper justification is that popularity probably correlates with mightiness. But this is just a thin veneer over the first position.
So said Thrasymachus:
In the Gorgias, Socrates makes the link to democracy explicit, and Callicles agrees:
But Callicles then points out the absurdity of democracy:
I agree, rather, with Socrates (and Plato?) that the aristocratic rule by virtue is more just than the democracy. And likewise the most legitimate state is the state of Reason (or what was called philosophy). I believe in modern times, Francis Galton and Friedrich Nietzsche have shown us the way to establish a legitimate state.
Galton:
Now this brings me to Israel. Israel is a recent example of state foundation, by which I mean the art of creating a new state. It was founded in 1948 by a population made up largely of recent immigrants; for well over a thousand years Jews had been but a small minority in the region; for nearly two thousand there was no Jewish state.
Now, what kind of state is Israel? Obviously, it is Jewish. But it is also democratic. And it seems to premise its existence on the dwelling of the Jewish immigrants in the region. What inferences can we make here regarding probable hypotheses in the science of state? For one, we can guess that Israel and states like it depend on the influx of people into its vicinity for its sustenance. In other words Israel is predicated on the mass immigration of aliyah; the Jewish population grew from about 25,000 in the 1880s to about 630,000 by 1948, mostly through immigration. It is merely, then, the armed and coercive organisation of that population.
What sort of just foundation is that? Consider this: when one man declares himself sovereign, he is a laughing stock, like an ape. When a few men do it, they are criminals; yet when many men do it, I am supposed to profess that they are just?
I would prefer to keep my reason and see all such founders, not only Israel's, as laughing-stocks and criminals. Thus, I see Israel as the farce of state foundation. For before Israel we knew the way to the just state; yet it was the Torah and its aliyah which led to the foundation of Israel, a state not unlike all previous states, and all of its rivals in the region. There is nothing new or elevated about Israel. What is the higher purpose?
And if Israel is farce, who then is the tragedy? One does not have to look far; it is Israel's greatest ally, or should I say its uncle, old Samuel. For the United States was founded on philosophy, it was founded on higher ideals. But its ideals were flawed, because its philosophers were flawed, and so were its people. It started as an oligarchy, that saw itself as an aristocracy, and it never knew true justice. As Plato would predict, it degenerated to a democracy, and lost most of what apprehension of virtue it had, and now many say it is on the road to tyranny.
Imagine what could be done with North America if it were not already settled! That is the tragedy. And the farce is all the effort put in to crowding out the Muslims in Palestine, for nothing higher at all. The situation is so dire that people dream of settling Mars, a desert with no water and no breathable air, because at least it is not yet scourged by a state. Galton had the same dream:
Some will say all of this is silly because it is impossible. But we know true aliyah is not impossible; Galton showed us that much. If Israel were impossible, it would not be because of the Jews. It would be because of the gentiles. So too, if true Israel is impossible, it is because the true gentiles block the true aliyah of the true Jews. (Sozusagen). Ask yourself, are you a Jew or a Gentile? Is it just for the gentiles to stop the Jews? And how should Jews feel, if they are stopped?
To be plain, since the above is metaphor (which I think has value in itself): I am not talking about actual Jews or gentiles. Zionism showed that a scattered people can migrate and found a state within a few decades; Galton showed what kind of state would be worth founding. By «true Israel» I mean a state founded on reason and on Galton's eugenics rather than on scripture. By «true aliyah» I mean the migration of the people who want such a state to a place where they can found it. By «true Jews» I mean those founders, and by «true gentiles» the existing states and peoples who would stop them. So the question I am asking is: would it be just for existing states to block the founding of a better one, and would its founders be wronged if they were blocked?
Let me explicitly deny, if not that there is any question to be had at all, then at least that you have properly asked any valid question. You sound like a textbook deontologist: for you, the wording "what type of state should there be?" is self-explaining and self-justifying, because should is an atomic element in your conception of the world. A large number of your interlocutors, including me, are not deontologists†. For us, the assertion that something should be in some way is on its own a pointer into nothing, an error of language that makes an actually meaningless phrase sound meaningful in the vein of the trope of the "sound of one hand clapping".
There are values, simple numeric assignments or at least ordinal comparisons that say that one hypothetical world is better than another, and a general preference that those values should be reducible to a simple set of generating principles if possible (less death, more freedom, more variety, more beauty). If one of us non-deontologists says that something should be, this is to mean that we expect that it being so will lead to a world that is better according to that notion, and it also implies that the improvement is along a generating principle we think we share with the listener. We understand nothing else. So if you want to ask whether Israel "should be" considered legitimate, or what the notion of legitimacy should be, you need to not only unpack what you want being "considered legitimate" to entail (add its flag to the drop-down when programming Javascript slop with country selectors? Buy products made there? Refuse to aid concrete efforts aimed at the entity's dissolution?), but also what shared values you think we may want to further by setting up and applying that notion.
† I'm not going to work with the textbook taxonomy that considers e.g. "virtue ethics" its own thing; to me those are just deontologists with a particular class of rules. To begin with, all ethical systems are interdefinable anyway, so I'll just define deontologists as those who use "should" as the most basic predicate of their ethical vocabulary and define everything else in terms of it.
I'm not a deontologist. I'm closer to a Platonist, if you couldn't tell from me quoting the Plato books.
Imagine there are two animals in your house. One is a dog, the other is a rat. Prior to anything else, you decide the dog is legitimate (as your pet) and the rat is illegitimate. We are discussing why you should decide one way or another with another animal, such as a stray cat. I deny that if the animal reaches a certain large size, or if there is a nest of animals, that the first calculation step should not occur and cannot be talked about. Indeed I think it is good to discuss it nonetheless.
This sounds like it assumes democratism?
Well I think you are wrong here, although I'm not exactly a virtue ethicist either -- to me your textbook is itself flawed and you ought to read the classics directly. I'd prefer not to have this conversation filtered through such a glass, darkly, and I'm mildly perturbed that this sort of exposition is needed. Is it really that you and the others have not understood what I wrote in the slightest, that the concept of judging a state is completely confusing to you all? And not just that the word Israel is a mind killer (why should it be, why should anyone have emotional attachment to it? I had better arguments with people about their God directly, which should be a bigger mindkiller.)
I think my religion helps me understand, I recently made a top level post about it. So another metaphor: Imagine you are a pneumatic and the Son of Man sits you up high on a bench, and before you is the entire state of X, and he asks you to determine whether they were a legitimate state or whether they are going to receive divine punishment. You want to do this well, because your God might intervene and get mad at you if you make a stupid decision. Might makes right theory is like responding, « but I don't believe in this God », « but this will never happen », or, indeed, « but I did have breakfast ». The point is specifically the hypothetical moral judgement step. .
Could you please explain what that entails here, beyond, again, the "textbook"/folk understanding that you believe that everything in the real world is an imperfect reflection of some "perfect" (whatever that means - is it just a matter of having a simple definition?) abstract entity or concept?
Do I? I don't think I need to blegg the rat or the dog. I will give any animals that happen to be in my house whatever degree of care, engagement and quarter I decide in the moment is appropriate to optimise for my preferences. If I feed the dog, it's not because I have decided that it is "legitimate (as my pet)", but because I thought I want the dog to stay in my house and not starve as it doing so brings me joy. I could do the same thing for the rat.
Huh? To be clear, I'm only talking about shared values between the speaker and the listener, that is, you and me.
If you tell me something like "one should ensure that raw metal is always processed into wires of 2mm diameter", because you are actually a paperclip maximiser and have concluded that preparing metal in such a way makes it easier to proceed to make paperclips, then this statement is completely meaningless to me, because I am not a paperclip maximiser.
Unfortunately, you can't convince me to read hundreds of pages of ancient texts (that I, based on my limited interaction with written philosophy of any degree of antiquity, strongly suspect to be incoherent and intellectually unsatisfactory) before I engage with your post. Such a requirement is so heavyweight that it should be taken to go against that "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion" rule we have.
I would like to think I'm not so naive, nor do I intend to pretend to be, that I don't have any idea about how you engage in "judging a state". It's just that the bases of our moral systems are fundamentally sufficiently distinct that I don't think there's a productive discussion to be had. I mean, what sort of thing do you actually want to see? Someone coming at you and proclaiming their own notion of state legitimacy, backed by nothing than emotional assertions and well-written words? Would you adjust your own understanding, if their paean to legitimacy based on the height of the tallest building the state managed to construct (for example) were sufficiently beautiful?
I don't think I showed any signs of being mind-killed to you mentioning Israel. It seems wholly orthogonal to the question at hand; we may just as well be talking about the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany contra the Reichsbürger movement that asserts that the German Empire was never properly dissolved, or the legitimacy of Sealand, or of the Cherokee Nation.
I'm not sure I understand what you are saying here. I'm not religious, and if I against all odds wound up being captured by a deity who at smite-point forces me to to guess His definition of some concept, I would hope that at least some contextual hints will be available to me regarding the nature and preferences of Them.
We can, of course, play this sort of game as a hypothetical scenario - if you do in fact sketch out which deity you are imagining running this trial, I can speculate about a wrath-minimising answer. Perhaps a Mesoamerican deity would want me to say that a state can establish legitimacy by creating and maintaining a pipeline of human sacrifice, with the proper attendant rites. If we want to package this notion as something that is parseable in the Western philosophical tradition, we could even say something like of course the highest symbol of the state's authority over men is its power over life and death, and the very circumstance that the exercise of this authority is recognised as ritual rather than banditry and thereby accepted by the subject population without complaint proves that it is legitimate.
Taking a step back, is it so hard for you to write out what it is that you specifically want this notion of "legitimacy" for? If you just were willing to unpack it - say, by saying something like "I hold that it is morally imperative (1) for any legitimate state to not invade the territory held by another legitimate state and (2) for people who are subject of a legitimate state to accept violence upon themselves that is sanctioned by the legitimate state" - then we could have a productive discussion about different notions even without having the same ethical language. Or, perhaps, as a related question: if the Son of Man, or the Platonic ideal of Plato himself, descended on an exquisitely shapely cloud and told you that in fact no country past, present or future on this planet is legitimate, what would you do differently going forward?
Yes, there are several ways to look at this. First, mathematical. I believe the world is deeply mathematically patterned and that observations obey mathematical laws. These laws are close to apprehending the form itself. But as a gnostic Christian I also believe that these laws are created by a Demiurge which modeled them on a higher realm, so in another way truer forms exist above.
Obviously it takes too long for you to do before reading my post, however I don't think I'm violating that rule by suggesting it, surely a good thing it is to find something to read off of this site from this site, something more substantive than forum responses can be. For a modern summary on Plato I recommend Strauss, the City and Man, middle part. I also recommend Ch 2 from his Persecution and the Art of Writing before reading him or the ancients. This totals less than 150 pages of modern English.
When I say Plato I mostly mean him and his descendants. The other ancient philosophy is mostly bad, as is everything modern that isn't in dialogue with him, imo. He is the philosopher.
Values I think are not that complex, and surely you are not a paperclip maximizer. Some of what you think is a value of yours may not be determined by your nature, it may be open to questioning by yourself.
That is what I mean by legitimate. Most proximal, it's something that you feel.
I think it would be interesting to discuss what makes you think that, and if it is really so.
What is it you think normally gets posted here?
No because the idea itself has ugly implications. It would be interesting to discuss how this criteria might correlate with good things, like national intelligence, but how it might also be subject to random chance, which makes it an inferior criterion to something purer.
No, the deity is hidden to you. You have to guess what he thinks. That's the point of philosophy. I believe we can converge on a pretty good answer.
I don't think they would say this, but I suppose I would ignore mundane politics even harder, because there is something new in this revelation for me. What would you do?
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