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drethelin comments on Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity - Less Wrong
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"You know, given human nature, if you lived in a country in which there was Monarchy, pretty soon someone would try to sound deep by inventing reasons that hereditary rule was a good thing. But if you lived in a universe in which Kingship wasn't the high-status mode of governance, and asked them if they wanted it, with all its attendant consequences, they would say no. It would never occur to them to invent all the clever rationalizations that someone resigned to monarchy would devise."
Why wait until we live under a monarchy to start practicing for Ideological Turing Test tournaments? Let's start now: According to the CIA World Factbook, the forms of government of the three countries with the greatest GDP per capita (PPP) are a hereditary constitutional monarchy, an emirate, and a constitutional monarchy. Wait a minute...that was a little too easy.
It would be a better argument if it didn't rely on people not knowing what a constitutional monarchy is.
Good point. While the CIA is technically correct in referring to Luxembourg as a constitutional monarchy, it also has a large democratic component, making the description somewhat misleading.
Those who historically lived under monarchies relied more on the Divine Right of Kings, I believe.
Really? It was my understanding that the Divine Right of Kings was a recent (17th century) invention. Care to share you evidence?
Check out the relevant Wikipedia page, for starters. The Divine Right of Kings as a notion went back to medieval times, when rulers would only rule with the blessing of the Pope, though the theory so named was not spelled out until later.
Note that the Divine Right of Kings was refuted in 1689 by John Locke, and I've heard it said that he was kicking a dead horse.
I'm not very impressed with the Wikipedia article on the subject. It seems to conflate several different theories of civil authority that were historically used in opposition to each other. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, The Divine Right of Kings asserts that:
If I'm not mistaken, The Mandate from Heaven and medieval divine right theories were generally thought to limit a kings power (by making it subject to revocation by religious authority), whereas The Divine Right of Kings (the Post-Reformation concept; note the capitalization) seeks to expand monarchical power. In any case, it would be wise not to update very strongly on my vague impressions from my university days (which are somewhat hazy and long before I started using spaced repetition software).
Well, Egyptian Pharaohs ruled by divine right, if nothing else. I was referring to the general idea that the monarch rules by divine permission.
However, as noted below, the theology and so on became more explicit around that time, according to Wikipedia.
This was my understanding as well; the Divine Right of Kings is a 'recent' thing and was for European kingdoms specifically.
The oldest example I can think of that is sort-of-related is the Mandate of Heaven, and it seems to me like various forms of divine ancestry were the most common things to rely on to assert monarchic authority.
The Mandate of Heaven was double-edged though, unlike the divine right of kings.. The peasantry was considered a force of nature, and a rebellion was thus a sign that heaven revoked the ruler's mandate.
The on-topic point I attempted to make was that both were appropriate arguments of the form that would definitely pass an ideological turing test for "people who are rationalizing that their monarchy is the best thing ever".
IIRC, the Mandate of Heaven did help quite a bit in getting imperial rulers to not be total assholes, though.
patrissimo advises me that others have noticed Liechtenstein's (relative) awesomeness.
This seems both true and false. Plenty of apologia for monarchical governments exist, some of them quite famous. But there do seem to be some few latter-day monarchists glaring from beyond the edges of the Overton window. I've talked to a couple of them, and they've been quite clever in inventing rationalizations.
I imagine the same was true for republicanism when it was the low-status option.
Universal Counterargument Alert!
The point is that the modified quote can be modified to talk about almost anything, so it's not actually a useful statement to make as to whether or not something is good or bad.
I think it's better treated as a statement about human psychology than about any particular system. If most people support the system they're embedded in for biased reasons, then their opinions about it are suspect and so's the appeal to popularity that comes with their aggregate; however, none of that means they're necessarily wrong.
Of course you're technically correct. There are, and have been, terrible arguments for monarchy advanced in the past. But today, democracy is the high-status mode of governance, and so the terrible arguments generated by motivated cognition, such as this OP, are in favor of democracy, not monarchy.
Worrying about bad arguments for monarchy now is like someone worrying about bad arguments for evolution in a creationist school board meeting. Yes it could potentially be a problem, but this over-concern is hardly our biggest problem right now and is very likely itself generated by motivated cognition.