This blog post is a modified version of a talk I gave at a recent China-US colloquium.
The greatest threat to America comes not from another nation, but from inadequacies in its own system of governance. The United States is hamstrung by a political system that is not up to the trials of the twenty-first century. Foreseeable challenges include: (1) managing national aspirations in a global setting; (2) creating new jobs for people displaced by improvements in agriculture and technology; (3) reversing environmental degradation; (4) managing paradigm-shattering advances in artificial intelligence that are forcing human beings to reconceive selfhood.
In the spirit of trial-and-error, why couldn’t the U.S., in collaboration with other superpowers such as China, conduct experiments designed to discover forms of decision-making that are better suited to dealing with looming technological, environmental, and political challenges?
Each nation would draw on its own traditions and borrow from the other’s. The political philosophies of Confucius, Mo Zi, Lao Tzu, and Huang Zongxi complement and enrich the political philosophies of Hume, Locke, and Jefferson.
For example, Confucius taught that a harmonious relationship is one in which both partners take care to protect each other’s dignity. To affirm dignity is to confirm belonging and grant a voice in decision-making while disallowing exclusion, paternalism, and coercion.
Dignity is a universal desire, not something liberals favor and conservatives oppose, or vice versa. So, too, every faith and every political system supports equal dignity in principle, if not in practice. This suggests that instead of choosing between libertarian and egalitarian models of governance, we should seek a dignitarian synthesis that incorporates both Jeffersonian and Confucian principles.
Though he didn’t call it dignitarian governance, Confucius was one of its earliest advocates. Confucianism argues that rulers should be chosen on the basis of merit, not entitlement, and that the governing class is not above the law but rather honor-bound to serve not their own but the people’s interests.
Interpreted in today’s language, good governance means honoring legitimate rank, but abjuring rankism—abuse of the power inherent in rank. Dignitarian governance—be it academic, corporate, or civic—rests on precisely that distinction. Rankism, not rank, is the source of indignity, so by barring rankism, dignity is secured.
Though many subspecies of rankism—corruption, cronyism, favoritism, predatory lending, insider trading—are unlawful, these laws are nowhere consistently enforced.
Western democracies, which emphasize individual liberty, cannot ignore the fact that many of today’s issues are too complex to be settled at the ballot box. “One person-one vote” style democracy may have been up to the tasks of governance in an agrarian age, perhaps even in an industrial age, but it is no match for the intricacies and perils of hi-tech, knowledge-based societies.
It can be argued that humankind has come this far only because science was in its infancy and we lacked the means to destroy life on Earth. But now avoiding irreversible damage to the planet and to each other is too important to leave to autocrats, ideologues, or amateurs. Society pays a steep price when its leaders learn on the job, much as it does for on-the-job training in business, education, and medicine.
But there’s the rub. Wherever accountability is weak, rulers may be tempted to use the power of their office not to serve others but to strengthen their own hold on power, if not to enrich themselves. Put the other way round, any model of governance that would substitute expertise for popular elections must have a solution to the age-old conundrum of holding accountable those to whom authority is entrusted. Be the “experts” Confucian sages, Platonic philosopher kings, or highly trained professionals, the burden of proof is on those who would dismiss the warning implicit in William Buckley, Jr.’s remark: “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”
Dignitarian governance offers an alternative to traditional democracy by providing accountability through layers of governing bodies comprised of a fine-tuned mix of professionals and representatives chosen by those who have a stake in the decisions of those bodies.
Take academic institutions as an example. In the university, dignitarian governance means that students, staff, faculty, alumni, administrators, and trustees all have a voice and a share of the votes. Votes on policies affecting distinct aspects of academic life are apportioned according to the responsibility that constituencies bear for those aspects. Thus, the faculty holds a majority of votes on educational policy, students hold the majority on issues of student life, and administrators hold a majority, but not a monopoly, on budgetary issues. Trustees, in consultation with the other constituencies, periodically choose new leadership for the institution, and hold fiduciary responsibility, but they delegate day-to-day internal governance to faculty, students, and staff.
Many of the issues facing our globalized hi-tech world call for technical solutions, not political compromises. It would be naïve to suggest that effective mechanisms of accountability already exist, but it’s not too soon to begin designing and testing alternatives to find ones that work. Much experimentation will be needed to learn how to apportion votes among stakeholders so as to optimize the overall quality of decision-making while ensuring accountability.
We could begin in education and healthcare, and then apply what we learn in those areas to management and business. As we gain confidence in the capacity of dignitarian models to bring more knowledge to bear on decision-making while strengthening accountability, we can introduce dignitarian principles into civic affairs, first in municipal government and then at the state, regional, national, and the global level.
Democratic governance developed through a process of trial and error, and so will dignitarian governance. But we must begin because the only way to create and maintain the global harmony that will protect us from self-destruction is to create forms of self-governance that ensure dignity for everyone.
Both China and America have traditions and institutions that hold vital lessons for modernizing decision-making. While it is admittedly a stretch to imagine either nation undertaking fundamental governmental reforms in the near term, it’s not so hard to imagine them collaborating on the design and testing of new governance models for apolitical institutions. As for our global future, what could be more auspicious than China and America working in partnership to invent governance tailored to manage the challenges of the twenty-first century?