Hi John,
Yup - humans is just ornery folksOriginally Posted by John T. Fishel
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Some really good points, John. One of the problems I have with a lot of the assumptions about "building a democracy" is that function follows form, so that if "we" impose a social structure on a group "they" will become like "us". Pretty naive stuff, but it is often unchallenged.
Personally, I think it is much better to look at the desirable set of social relations that we wish to encourage. Do we want leaders held accountable for their actions and, if so, how and by what mechanism(s)? Do we even want "leaders" in the Western sense of the term, i.e. people who hold an office which, by virtue of holding that office, have the social right to act in certain situations? Maybe the culture we are looking at has different criteria for becoming a leader, and different checks on their powers.
One of the problems I've seen with imposed democracies is that they tend to break the cultural controls on leaders without having the time to bring in the types of cultural controls that we have developed over centuries, and this has some pretty serious implications.
Let me just play out one example and try and tie it more closely into Colin's project.....
How would / should we go about advising a military that is based in a culture with a clan based "aristocracy"? Well, leadership is generally determined by blood rather than office, but there are almost always narratives that define what a "good" leader is. Perhaps more importantly, most such societies have three forms of class mobility: one (usually) "religious", and two based on para-kinship systems (marriage into a clan and adoption into a clan).
These forms of class mobility, in turn, act as controls upon the power of leaders. Often, the "religious" form acts as the conscience of the leader and, in some cases, has the power to destroy their legitimacy. As an example, think about the effects of excommunication in, say, the 12-13th centuries which voided all oaths of fealty.
The two para-kinship forms function somewhat differently. Adoption allows for people from outside the class who are really good at doing something that is a characteristic of the "leadership class" to be brought into that class. So, for example, if you happen to have someone who was born as a peasant who shows an true talent for leading in a military setting, you can adopt them and retain the characteristic of military leadership for that class. Usually, this is justified as a case of (the) God(s) testing us but, functionally, what it does is to provide a way for talented people to get into the social roles they should be in: a Human Resource Management system that works.
Marriage into clans may act either as a surrogate for adoption, i.e. by bringing in a talented person, or it can act as a way of establishing linkages between clans, thereby providing kinship based mechanisms for dealing with inter-clan conflict that otherwise might spin out of control.
Okay, so what type of a military system would this type of social system produce?
Well, for one thing, "officers" would be drawn almost exclusively from the leadership class, and there would probably be a class-based ceiling on promotion for people outside of that class that could only be circumvented by marriage or adoption. You might see commissions being bought, or the establishment of a tradition of service from the great families. You would probably see a fairly flattened promotion scale as well with a lot of long term NCOs etc. (think "family retainer" style, although that's just one variant).
The simplest way to modify such a system would be to construct some mechanism that would ritually "count" (in the very broad sense) as a third type of para-kinship connection, probably based around a particular military unit or institution. So, for example, establishing a military academy for promising people primarily from the non-leadership class for those who have been recognized as having leadership talent. A good case in poit is the Brit derived traditions that make a man a "gentleman", which is a social class, by fiat upon commissioning.
Since these cultures also tend to be historically bound in time (unlike the US and Canada which are more future oriented), you could also see the establishment of a parallel NCO academy with preferred access for the children of current / past NCO's and an emphasis on individual skills development.
I haven't really talked about the "religious" form of class mobility yet, but that actually does play into it in three ways. First, in this type of a culture, you are going to find a long term relationship between families and units. That could be a regimental system, or it could be broader than that (In Thailand, for example, it is based more around armies than regiments). Regardless of the system, some type of military unit organization becomes a para-kinship system and network in its own right, and that system has obligations to its members that go beyond the purely "military" ones. That needs to be systematized and upheld.
The second "religious" function lies in having a class that stands outside of the clans / great families which has the power (usually influence, but sometimes outright fiat power), to force them to non-kinetic forms of conflict resolution. In "our" systems, this is the control of the military by the civilian government (Parliament and Congress both have a quasi-religious status; cf Durkheim and Mary Douglas on this). That type of quasi-religious status probably doesn't exist in a clan society where the great families / clans will control both the government and the military, so some other quasi-religious institution is necessary: it might be a Church, it might be the Ancestors, it might be the Ummah, it might be freely available Sorcery. Regardless of its form, however, there has to be something that can act as a check on the leaders of the great families / clans.
The third "religious" function is what we might call "philosophical" or "ideological", and its effect is to construct, maintain and promulgate an ontology, an epistemology and a metaphysics that supports the clan system (again, this gets back to Durkheim's notion that "religion" is society worshiping an idealized form of itself). This ties in with my earlier point that in order to "tweak" a military organization, one has to construct ritually acceptable substitutes that will "count", e.g. the creation of military academies. I would also suspect that the concept of a "calling" or "vocation" would probably be emphasized.
So, what would this mean in terms of advising on a re-organization? Well, for one thing, you couldn't use the "cookie-cutter Captain" approach so beloved of the US military; that's based on a bureaucratic office ontology that is totally at odds with the much more individualistic "calling / vocation" ontology. Second, whatever HRM system you put in place would have to be both more individualistic and more unit focused aimed at long ties rather than placements.
Third, you are likely to see a really heavy class based distinction on service choice. Given current technologies, I would expect that air forces would be the highest status, especially since they are the most costly. There is a danger that the higher status services will suck up too much of whatever limited capital is available, and that has some serious implications for other forces. I can think of several ways around this problem, but I just haven't thought them though enough yet to put them down. Maybe later.
So, back to "democracy".....
If we define the ostensive function of a democracy as providing the greatest good for the greatest number regardless of the actual form of governance structures, then this type of advising should help a culture move towards that. Obviously, this is a really general set of comments and any particular situation would have to be shaped to fit the realities on the ground.
Cheers,
Marc
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