Ranting to /dev/null

Sovereignty

This post is a reflection on something I've been thinking about for a while now, and is a theme that is related to a number of things I've posted in the past few months ([1], [2], [3], [4], etc.), and that theme is sovereignty.

In short, I think we are facing what can be described as a crisis of sovereignty to the point that it may no longer exist in any way that matters.

This is going to be really long. Read on at your discretion.

sovereignty. n.
1 obsolete : supreme excellence or an example of it
2 a : supreme power especially over a body politic; b : freedom from external control : AUTONOMY; c : controlling influence
3 : one that is sovereign, especially : an autonomous state

Wikipedia says that sovereignty is "the exclusive right to exercise supreme political (e.g. legislative, judicial, and/or executive) authority over a geographic region, group of people, or oneself." That's more the definition I'm looking for, but even that betrays the problem I'm going to be discussing.

A "sovereign" would be one who is possessed of "sovereignty". We don't really have sovereigns anymore. For most of history, sovereignty rested in a particular person, that being the king. There were many and various justifications set forth for why a given king was sovereign over a given people and/or territory, including divine right, inheritance, treaty, oaths of fealty, but they basically all boil down to whether or not the king is able to exert his will over the person or territory in question. This really comes down to a question of power: can the king enforce his will?

For most of human history, this has been the way sovereignty worked. A king - frequently considered to be a god, especially in the ancient world - was sovereign, and wielded ultimate power over his people and lands. Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Homeric Greece, classical Sparta, the Roman Empire, various Indian kingdoms, China, Japan, the Mongols, you name it: sovereignty resided in a particular person. When Louis XIV said "I am the state," he was echoing this ancient notion that the king, and the king alone, is sovereign.

There are historic examples that break with this tradition, choosing what I will refer to as "abstracted sovereignty", sovereignty that does not reside in a particular person but is seemingly distributed into what amounts to a legal fiction, be that "the people" or the state. The Greeks - at least while Athens was ascendant - didn't tend to have kings, and sovereignty seemed to rest with the polis as such, not any particular person in it. The Roman Republic is another such example. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any non-Western examples of abstracted sovereignty.

Let's start by saying that sovereignty is important, abstracted or absolute. Someone has to be in charge, otherwise there's anarchy. Fortunately for human civilization, the maxim that it's good to be the king is pretty self-evident, and just as nature abhors a vacuum, society abhors the absence of controlling authority. But regardless of the justification set forth for sovereignty and the nature that sovereignty takes, sovereignty is a necessary condition for human society to coalesce beyond hunter-gatherer and subsistence farming stages.

The easiest way of doing this is some form of absolute sovereignty, rule by kings. Pretty unambiguous. If you want to ask who's in charge, you've got someone to point to. And how do we know he's in charge? Because he'll kick your sorry little butt if you don't pay your respects, or he'll have someone do it for you. Power is thus concrete and understandable. Everyone knows exactly how they relate to power and knows exactly the ways in which power applies to them.

But absolute sovereignty has its dangers as well. If the king truly is sovereign, any time you need a ruling on something you have to ask him or one of his agents. Not only is this a huge pain in the neck, but it also lends itself quite readily to arbitrariness. Arbitrary application of power is almost as harmful as no application of power. Even Hammurabi knew this, giving us one of the the oldest forms of written law we've still got.

Writing down the laws is the first step in abstracting sovereignty, for all of a sudden you've got something other than the king to consult on questions of law, which are in essence questions of power. Law is, at root, the codification of the will of the sovereign. The reason this is only the first step is that the sovereign always has the ability to change the law as he/it sees fit, and if you've got absolute sovereignty in the form of one of the ancient god-kings, well, even basalt can be erased if you've got enough expendable labor.

Fast forward a bit. The American republic is perhaps the best example of abstracted sovereignty that there is. Here, the "people" are sovereign. This is a fairly strange idea. If you were to go to Washington, DC and try to find the sovereign, you couldn't do it. The obvious place to look would be the White House, but the President can't make laws, so he's out. Congress can make laws, but they can't really enforce their will on anyone, certainly not to the degree that the President can. If anything, the courts are as close as most people will ever get to seeing a sovereign power, because they still have the power to order you to show up at a certain place at a certain time, and they can get you in a lot of trouble if you decide not to listen. Neither the President nor Congress can do that: the Courts are the final arbiters of power over the population. But the federal government is not where sovereignty resides: that remains, as a matter of law, with the people. The government answers to the people, not the other way around.

In many ways, this is an improvement over the ancient god-kings. The system is very, very resistant to the arbitrary application of power. It doesn't undergo periodic crises of identity as a sovereign dies and needs to be replaced. It's very adaptable, as the people running things are replaceable and quite frequently replaced. It's also quite scalable: one person and his household could never run a country the size of ours the way ancient kings ran their countries, but we can always hire more bureaucrats as needed.

But abstracted sovereignty has its dangers as well, and this is what I really want to talk about here. By saying that sovereignty resides in the people, we've essentially said that each of us is a little bit sovereign. As a practical matter, this is problematic, because that doesn't really create any kind of structure where people know where they fit. If everyone is just as sovereign as everyone else, who do you listen to? Should you, in fact, listen to anyone? All you need do is head down to your local high school or juvenile court and you'll find a lot of people who don't think they need to listen to anyone, because no one can tell them what to do, right? As I've said before, the fact that there are people out there who really do have the authority to give you orders that you have to follow is not something with which modern American culture seems to be familiar. And it seems to be falling apart at the seams as a result.

There is also a real theological, pastoral danger here. We say that God is sovereign, but as most people don't have any idea what it means for a person to be sovereign, and the dangerous beauty to be found there, most people haven't a clue what it means for God to be sovereign. And just as people don't know how to fit into a human pattern of sovereignty, how to relate to human sovereigns, they thus have no idea how to relate to God. The reason that the intimacy of the Holy Spirit is so dangerous and wonderful is not primarily that God is not only nearer than thought or breath, but that he is the sovereign ruler of the universe. Just as obedience to kings is a beautiful thing because things are working the way they are supposed to work, obedience to God is the highest expression of human purpose. God demands utter obedience, and the fact that obedience to God means glorifying and enjoying him is suddenly a radical, surprising truth. But how can we see the glory and joy in this if we consider ourselves to be little sovereigns?

This is where I want to get eschatological, but I'll leave the application of Revelation 13 as an exercise for the reader. If enough people are interested, I'll do a post or something. Suffice it to say that we know that the siren song of the great Beasts sings of power and authority apart from the Lamb, but make no mistake: the Lamb will rule the nations with a rod of iron, sovereignty at its most concrete.

So while abstracted sovereignty certainly has its uses, and has served to mitigate or eliminate many of the excesses, dangers, and inefficiencies of absolute sovereignty, it is not without its own breed of dangers, and I fear those dangers are coming to bloom. As it says on my site, government, especially in its current, abstracted form, is indeed a shared myth, and the myth is one of sovereignty. When people stop believing in the myth, and how can one really believe, in ways that really matter, in ways that hit you in your gut, in a sovereign that you can't see and with which you can't interact, when the myth dies, government dies.

The message - one of them anyway - of God's covenant with man is that mankind needs a king, and that king needs to be God. In Adam, we are told that God will save himself a people. In Abraham, we are told that people will be a family. In Moses, we are told that family will be a nation. In David, we learn that that nation will be a kingdom. From the kings that follow, we learn that no human king will do. But now our Great King has appeared.

Even so, come Lord Jesus.

Posted by ryan at March 16, 2007 10:31 PM | TrackBack