We the Persons: Why the New Scotland must be a Republic

Image © Debs

It’s an institution that seems always to have been there. You don’t like it much, but you’re not offended by it. You know it’s quite expensive, and you’re not keen on such disparity of wealth, but that just seems a fact of life. It just... is. It was put in place a long time ago, and has persisted – through historical wobbles and much bloodshed, but with a certain continuity of character – to the present day.

You know your place.

I am writing of the institution of monarchy. And it is wrong. Those who support it are wrong, and most of the standard, lazy perceptions of it I have outlined above are wrong. It is desperately, unreconstructedly morally bereft. We should be offended by it. The costs of it run way beyond the financial aspect. It is a relatively new bad idea. It is, but it never had to be, and it doesn’t have to be ever again. Moreover, the disparity of ‘station’ that it embodies and symbolises is an affront not only to what it means to be human, but also to what it means to be a person.

What does it really represent? Hatred, inequality, discrimination, racism, sectarianism, elitism, substratism.

‘It’s like wolves,’ said the artist friend-of-a-friend, who I met during an up-until-then pleasant evening out. ‘There’s always a leader.’ What, I asked, could he possibly mean by that? The queen is the leader of our wolf pack? We can reason; we can choose; we can communicate at high levels of abstraction; we have art, music, literature, science, mathematics; we are capable of setting up equitable systems of governance... . But you compare us to a wolf pack... as a way of justifying the institution of monarchy? (I was less eloquent than this.) Was he really appealing to a deeply-misunderstood form of group or natural selection to explain the social phenomenon of monarchy?

By this point, although I had never seen it, I had decided that his art must be dire. A man with such a tenuous grasp of natural and moral philosophy must be a hack. The words of John Lydon rang in my head: ‘Like a terrible artist, you’re using no shadow.’ But where was my use of shadow? Why couldn’t I find the grey areas?

Trying to reason with a royalist is like trying to reason with a unidirectional tennis ball serving machine. They don’t listen, they have no alternative angles, and they keep firing fuzzy projectiles at you faster than you can ready yourself to return them.

Vulpine splatterer balls aside, how can we find a simple way to explain why monarchic systems are immoral? It looks like we’ll have to strip it back to the board, and paint by ethical numbers:

1. Are monarchs super-beings?
   If yes, in what do their superpowers consist? If no, then in what does their ‘right to rule’ consist?
   
2. If monarchs were in fact super-beings, would this justify the lavishing upon them of great wealth and privilege not afforded to ‘ordinary’ beings?
   
3. Conversely, if monarchs are in fact ‘ordinary’ beings, is there a way conferring great wealth and privilege upon them and not upon others that does not constitute discrimination against those others?
   
4. If a monarch is in fact an ordinary being, is it like the leader of a wolf pack?
   If yes, how did ‘nature’ select it to be the leader of the pack? If no, how can we justify giving so many of the scarce resources of the majority to an individual who is not even a pack leader?
   
5. What does a ‘divine’ right to rule consist in? And if it is only a figure of speech – if there is no direct linkage to God – is there something else that that a divine right to rule can consist in?
   
6. Can blood be magical?
   If it can, where does it come from, and how does it attain its supernatural properties? If it cannot, how can ‘royal blood’ be considered in any way special?
   
7. If a monarch is not a super-being, is not the leader of a wolf pack, does not have any ‘divine right’, and does not possess magical blood, are there still reasons why – democratically chosen by no-one – he/she should be allowed a role in the governance of a democratic country?
   If yes, what are those reasons. If no, why then do we allow this?
   
8. If a monarch cannot be allowed such a role, are there ways in which he/she can still be a symbolic ‘figurehead’?
   If yes, what is represented by this symbol? If no, why should we allow even this.
   

So, you see, even if the queen were an X-Men character,¹ we would still be unable to find moral ways to elevate her above all others. If she were a Professor Xavier, we might consider her wise and compassionate, but most would still accept that she could be granted additional powers only by being democratically elected to govern. If she were a Magneto, we might well elevate her out of fear of her powers, but there would be no way of framing this as a morally-acceptable situation. She is, in fact, neither, and there exists no morally-acceptable way to set her and her family above all others.

In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the Scottish philosopher David Hume said

If there be any suspicion that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion. It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future.²

Continued support for institutions of monarchy is based upon this mistaken resemblance of the past to the future. The continuity of monarchy is an illusion. It is an experience become useless, and worse than useless. If there is a future worth living in, it will be populated by citizen-persons who will have opportunities to elevate themselves, but who will not connive to set themselves above others by instilling fear, and who will not expect riches and obeisance to be lavished upon them because of supernaturalistic, essentialist notions of ‘divine right’, or ‘birthright’, or ‘royal blood’.

I see no place – in the future of the long now – for kings, queens, princes, or princesses. New diversity is to be welcomed, and such outdated concepts represent the opposite of diversity. In leaving behind these baseless, discriminatory forms of ‘us and them’, we find that there are only persons. It would be best for our new, democratic nation-state of Scotland if there were only persons – citizens – from day one.

1. James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2004), sec. Siding with the X–Men.

2. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Reprinted from the Posthumous edition of 1777 (Oxford: University College, 1902).

Scotland: An Abstracted State of Potential Grace (repost)

A wide-eyed Merida.
Image ©Alice the Photo Ninja

I used to be political; now I’m just politic.

Following on from my recent article Neuro with Everything, where I raised the vexatious issue of so-called neuropolitics, I will now take a deeper refractory look at our psychological blocks against things constitutional. Why are we uncomfortable about the mechanics of nationhood? Because we don’t really know what ‘nations’ are. Why is this relevant? Because, in Scotland, we are in a process of building a new one. Now, pass me that torque wrench.

Nations (yawn), how un-futuristic. Not so fast, there. While futurists tend to look forward to a time when all humankind will live in harmony, perhaps even under the auspices of a benevolent form of world government, some of us ponder what is the most expedient way to get there. Nations can be desperately un-futuristic, especially when they are cobbled together from the zombie vestiges of dead empires. Alternatively, they can be dynamic, paradigm-shifting agents in this world of exploding complexity.

Nations don’t exist. Countries don’t exist. Landmasses do exist, at least in the ordinary physical sense. People exist, living on landmasses. No, that’s not right. Roving biomasses exist on landmasses. Better. Some of these roving biological entities (us) are self-aware. These self-aware entities tend to group together with others whom they feel are like them – they are social entities. This can cause problems. These entities tend to argue with, fight with, and sometimes kill others whom they feel are dissimilar to them. Nations form. ‘In-groups’ delineate their territories using convenient geological boundaries, and then call these nation/territory constructs ‘countries’.

The term statist is often used as an insult, these days, against people who think that nation states can be effective vehicles for delivering on the needs and aspirations of individuals. You might expect such an attitude from capitalists (even the modern anarcho-capitalist variety) and ‘libertarians’, but why do many technoprogressive leftists also take this stance? I think it is because they assume that all nations, both existing and emerging, have been and will be built using the same failed templates that past nations used.

People are ‘agents’ within nations; neurons can be thought of as ‘agents’ within persons. Yet, perhaps because nations are seen as ‘not natural’ and ‘manufactured’ whereas persons are seen as wholly natural, we tend to dismiss the fact that they are both types of abstraction.[i] There are many ways in which neurons in their communicative context of human brains are different from humans in their communicative context of nations; I am not claiming that they produce the same types of abstraction, only that both can be seen as abstraction-generating agents of sorts.

Nations may behave unpredictably, but they each seem to have a unique ‘character’. They can be calm or aggressive, colourful or dour, outgoing or reclusive. They may form intimate relationships with other nations. Sometimes those relationships become strained, or abusively one-sided.

Scotland has a ‘character’. It is often identified as female. Some persons tend to think of her as traditional, wise, and cautious, but others see the growing scintilla in her eye. She craves.

We represent ourselves in myriad different ways. We change ourselves. We think. We act. Those of us who spend time pondering the future of the human race should not pretend that we can leap from here to utopia in a single bound. The Singularity might happen, but, then again, it might not. We need to interrogate our world, and engage with it. We cannot sit around waiting for some kind of ‘hard takeoff’.[ii]

The elevation of morality is important to me. I want to live in a morally-elevated world. On this trajectory, I choose the expedient of personal agency; I also find that I must choose the expedient of the fair, diverse, creative, forward-looking, independent nation state that I think we have an opportunity to create here. This may be unfashionable in futurist circles, but what should a futurist care for fashion?

Empires – and bloated nations that act like empires – shrink persons. They reduce us to mere ‘subjects’ with little more agency than synaptically-weak neurons in a conflicted brain. But consensual nations, chosen freely and fairly, can connect us together in fascinatingly teleodynamic ways. They can bring us together and help us to reach out. They can give us a clear voice in the growing din. Under the right circumstances, they can grant us citizenship within a well-adjusted, constantly-questioning, fully-functioning, enlightened ‘national consciousness’.

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[i]     D. Parfit. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

[ii]    Inspired by a talk, in 2013, by James Hughes Ph.D., of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Note: This article originally appeared on one of my other blogs, extravolution.com