In this fraught election time, a few books I’ve been reading recently have brought to mind some aspects of the problem of what makes a government legitimate. I have the intuition, drawn from experience, classical learning, and my Catholic faith, that there is such a thing as a legitimate government—that is, a state power that ought to be obeyed and even loved with patriotic love, rulers that are in the right when they demand allegiance and service from their citizens. But at the same time, I have worries about most particular governments—it’s hard for me to see, at times, why they are legitimate, why they ought to be obeyed and loved.
I think many people have this worry. Some people think that their government is illegitimate when they disagree with its principles, goals, or methods, or when it is based on a false view of the human person or a false view of our relation to God. Many Catholic political thinkers—integralists, post-liberals, Catholic Worker anarchists, etc.—raise problems like these about the legitimacy of our democratic liberal government. Although I too have objections like these to most of the viable candidates for public office in our current election, I actually think that democratic liberalism is, in some respects, based on a truer vision of the human person than some aspects of those other views. But in any case, these are not the problems I want to raise here.
All I want to do here is call attention to some experiences, of which I was recently reminded by two books (Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Roberto Kalasso’s Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India), that trouble my thoughts about the very possibility of a legitimate government. I do not propose to offer a solution to these problems here. Rather, I think it’s helpful—especially in these times where we have such profound political disagreement in global society, in the United States, and in the Catholic Church—to reflect on ways that the world shows up that don’t fit neatly into a political, philosophical, or theological worldview. It is helpful to just sit with these experiences and not always try to solve them. Perhaps by attending to these weird experiences, we can find a way through the theater of the absurd that our political life has become.
The White Whale
On the recommendation of a friend, I recently started re-reading Herman Melville’s great novel Moby Dick. I haven’t read this book since I was a kid. My friend told me that he thought it was “a great middle-aged man’s book.” I’m not quite middle-aged, but I’ll be getting there soon enough, so I figured it would be a good idea to re-read this great American novel. I didn’t realize the last time I read it just how funny a book it is!
The other day, I reached the famous speech by Captain Ahab, when he announces that, on the ship he is captaining, they won’t just be hunting for whales as on an ordinary whaling expedition. Rather, they’ll be searching for Moby Dick, the white sperm whale that bit off Ahab’s leg on a previous expedition. Ahab has sworn vengeance against Moby Dick. Starbuck, the first mate, sees his all-consuming desire for revenge against an irrational animal as mad, even blasphemous. Ahab’s famous response articulates a key part of my problem about legitimacy:
Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, men, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shove near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. The inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. (Chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck”)
To live reflectively in modernity—maybe just to live reflectively in this world at any time—is to live constantly with the worry that the world we see is a mask pulled over some horror. Even at the beginning of modernity, philosophers like Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant theorized on the basis of this fear. Fiction writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard built whole genres around it. Films like The Matrix and The Truman Show have worked this fear into the contemporary consciousness. “All visible objects are but pasteboard masks.” Some might dismiss this worry as Gnosticism—but that doesn’t make the sense that it might be true go away! The political world, the social world, even, oftentimes, the Church in its visible form feel uncanny, like they’re hiding something, like some conspiracy theory must, in the end, be true.
With such a fear tickling the back of our minds, no authority or power’s claim to legitimacy seems entirely plausible. There’s constantly that worry that any claimed authority is actually a mask over some horror—or, Ahab says, over nothing. Every government seems built, somewhere in its history, on monstrous injustices or on dubious interpretations of texts. Every claim to legitimacy feels like a more or less masked bid for raw power—the kind of power that can bite off your leg! Every authority—like the white whale—seems to be implicated in evil.
What’s the answer? You could refuse to believe that the world is uncanny and take unthinking refuge in some particular ideology or worldview. But even embracing the truth of the Catholic faith—which you should do—without facing up to the uncanniness of the world is a dereliction of your duty as a human being. Your job is to face up to the truth, the whole truth. That means staring the white whale in its horrific face.
You could fight back like Ahab, meet cruelty with cruelty—you could see even your own face as an “unreasoning mask” over your own lust for power, your own nothingness. But that is, as we know from the novel, an exercise in futility. Or, with the great poet Robinson Jeffers, who also saw this masklike quality in human politics, you could try not to “Be Angry At the Sun” like Ahab, and instead embrace resignation and the authority of truth alone, denying the ultimate legitimacy of all human rulers:
That public men publish falsehoods Is nothing new. That America must accept Like the historical republics corruption and empire Has been known for years. Be angry at the sun for setting If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn, They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors. This republic, Europe, Asia. Observe them gesticulating, Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth Hunts in no pack.
The Horse Sacrifice
My first worry about legitimacy is based on suspicion, not as a theory about government’s duplicity, like we find in Marx or Foucault, but as a visceral experience of the political world as a mask over nothingness or over evil. Under my Ahab-like gaze, every ruler’s claim to have some legitimate power or authority over me seems suspicious, like something worth shunning or fighting.
But Jeffers’ response of aloof resignation is inadequate. We’re not just free beings at war with the world, asserting our own rights. We’re not just beings who can seek nothing but the truth without passion or desire. The whole reason the problem of legitimacy is a problem is that not only are we free and self-directing (and so we must have a good reason to submit ourselves to a ruler, and so we need to know that that ruler is ruling us legitimately), but we also deeply feel ourselves to be subordinate to something higher than ourselves, to be enrapt in a mystery greater than ourselves. We long to give ourselves to what is higher than ourselves, better that ourselves. We long to make sacrifices to what is truly, beautifully authoritative.
As I’ve mentioned before, one of my favorite writers is Roberto Calasso. Unlike any other writer I’ve ever read, Calasso had a sense for the importance of myth in human life and human history. Recently, I read his book Ka, which retells various Indian myths, analyzing them, linking them to features of modern psychology and government, all in that inimitable, phantasmagorical style that Calasso has.
The Indian traditions on which Calasso draws certainly had a sense for the mask-like quality of the world. The epigraph of the book, from the Yogavāsistha, reads, “The world is like the impression left by the telling of a story.” But those Indian traditions also had the experience of seeing something higher than the mask. What is behind the world is not mere malevolence or nothingness—though for all that it is no less uncanny.
Calasso spends a long section of the book discussing the aśvamedha, the “sacrifice of the horse.” This is a long ritual that is meant to establish one as a legitimate authority:
To be sovereign of the whole earth, one need do no more than think of oneself as sovereign of the whole earth, one need do no more than celebrate the rite of him who is sovereign of the whole earth: the sacrifice of the horse. What is real in effect (actual sovereignty over the whole earth) is secondary and derivative with respect to what is of the mind, and to the rite that is its consequence. (p.129)
The sacrifice of the horse is a long sacrifice. There is first a long period of collecting and making the implements necessary for the sacrifice. Then, there is a preparatory ritual, in which the horse is consecrated, and other animals are sacrificed. After the initial rituals, the horse is allowed to wander through the wild for a whole year, followed by hundreds of warriors and attendants, and whatever lands it enters will belong to the new sovereign. While that is happening, the king and the priests must sit and tell the same stories over and over again, repeating the cycle of stories every ten days, for the entire year. The ritual that makes one a legitimate ruler does so by offering one to the divine and by incorporating one into the true story of the world. At the end of this time, the horse and many other animals are sacrificed, in violent and gruesome ways; there are disturbing sexual elements of the ritual too. All of this consecrates the king as a legitimate ruler so long as it is done exactly as the seers have seen it must be done.
I’m of course not advocating that we do the horse sacrifice nowadays. But the idea that legitimacy is secured by performing an elaborate ritual sacrifice is one worth reflecting on. You could probably construe aspects of the American electoral process as ritual sacrifice—the vast expenditure of money, the campaign rallies, the political theater of debates, etc.—but, let’s be honest, they are pretty boring compared to the horse sacrifice. They lack something of the numinousness, the overt uncanniness of a ritual based on a seer’s vision of the transcendent.
The problem for legitimacy that Moby Dick raised for me was the worry that all claims to legitimate power are just masks drawn over an evil lust for power or over meaninglessness. This problem is compounded by Ka’s account of the horse sacrifice. To be legitimate, state power must be derived from above. “There is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God” (Romans 13:1). But even if we have good reasons and deep faith that the transcendent is good, any way in which that divine authority is bestowed upon human rulers will always be strange, uncanny, seemingly arbitrary. Why should sacrificing a horse—or being crowned by the pope—make one have legitimate rule over others? There’s the constant worry that there is complicity between the meaningless horror that Ahab saw and the religious turn toward the divine, seen in the grotesque elements of sacrifice. There’s a gap between the ritual and the ruling authority that results from it, between the goodness of God and the way that goodness is said to enter the world. These gaps add to our sense of uncanniness. This gap, which is there in every political and religious thought and action, is captured well in T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the Shadow. For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response falls the Shadow. Life is very long Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent falls the Shadow. For Thine is the Kingdom
The feeling I get whenever an election comes up is a feeling of being caught in a conflict at the very heart of reality. These books and these poems have helped me articulate that feeling anew. I long for a numinous source of authority, and I fear and suspect any actual appeal to that authority. I also want a more mundane, normal, boring, peaceful sort of government (and, for that reason, I have often defended liberal democracy as the best option we have right now)—but that doesn’t remove the sense of uncanniness found in even the most boring state, nor does it remove my longing for a higher, more liturgical, more sacrificial, more divine source for the state. Being caught in this place is not comfortable, and it doesn’t guide me to any clear political decisions (as to, say, whether to vote or for whom to vote, or as to which concrete political views to adopt). But I think it's worthwhile staying here a while and pondering, not evading, the actual human condition, situated as we are between the white whale and the horse sacrifice.