Notes on:
Sylviane Agacinski, Parity of the Sexes.
153
Hubertine Auclert wrote in 1880 on not being permitted to vote: “I leave to the men who enjoy the power to govern the privilege of paying the taxes they vote for and distribute as they please…. I have no rights, thus I have no burden. I do not vote, I do not pay.” Later, in 1884, Auclert was the first to suggest that among those who govern there should be “as many women as men.”
154-5
Since it is not a full-fledged “failure of democracy” not to have parity between women and men—the classical conception of democracy by itself says nothing about requiring that women be represented proportionately in governance, the principle of parity must be seen as something new in political philosophy.
[Parity is not inherent in the concept of democracy, writes Agacinski, certainly not pure democracy where every one votes on everything.]
An aside on democracy: a modest first step toward moral hygiene
In passing and on a slightly different subject, I mention that we are accustomed to dismissing pure democracy rather quickly as unworkable in any but a very small state or organization: the small Greek city-state with a highly circumscribed franchise, adult males of a certain class, for example. Presumably this is because the practical infrastructure requisite for such a system has seemed inconceivable. But if this has been viewed as the central obstacle, it is quite thinkable that there should be a technological solution in the offing. What really is to stop everyone from voting one’s every velleity even within an electorate of hundreds of millions? That no one has the time, interest, or expertise on every issue? Neither do representatives on this scale. Everyone simply votes on what matters to them. And that may be the tiniest subset of everything. The votes could be tallied in principle at the speed of light and the outcomes put into effect with at least the same human efficiency (or lack thereof) of representational systems. Would we miss out on the filtering wisdom of delegates and leaders? I have never detected any—not that I have any great respect for the wisdom of the masses, but in this one regard representative democracies have indeed worked: the stupidity of the elected has always genuinely reflected the stupidity general in the population. We forget that wisdom or even mild portions of critical intelligence or moral insight have never been cardinal requirements of political office. And to truly remain representative they cannot be. Wealth, connections, and overall likeableness have never failed to win the day. The only intelligence prized has been that necessary to their acquisition. I mustn’t exaggerate the predicament. The fact is great wisdom is simply not needed for a civilization to survive a respectable period of time. If history has taught us anything, it is that. The ordinary person lives an ordinary span at a very ordinary level of happiness. Should we expect more of our self-imposed institutions? Leaders who aspire beyond this have never been in demand except when conditions have become desperate and thus become ripe for delusions of grandeur. (E.g., Russia in 1917, Germany in the 1930s, the United States in 20??) When that happens whole nations can be rallied to sacrifice now for the sake of magnificent future worlds that only their descendants may dream of seeing. In other words, only historical emergencies precipitate much call for serious rethinking. (Needless to say, it never rises above a call: the lack of practice during milder times insures the response under duress is always botched.) During the long periods leading up to crises inertia necessarily works to constrain strenuous thought to only the point where it threatens to exceed the requirements of entertainment. Beyond their basic human needs, people want to be entertained, not made into better people. (The few of you reading this far, I guess, would not agree with this. But you are simply not representative—and there is no reason to believe you will ever be—of the run of humankind.) Grant them these two demands, their bread and roses, and nothing will ever change except that the two demands will incrementally increase in sophistication over time. Government’s role is reduced to management of fermenting satiety, or dissolve into tyranny or anarchy. The bread will need to be whole-grain, the roses organic…
To get back to the question, exactly what still stands in the way of the purest form of democracy? Less than is commonly assumed.
Why prefer pure over representative forms of what we have often heard described since Churchill as the worst form of government but for the alternatives?
I know of one good moral reason: When the time comes for aiming blame we will have fewer distractions from the correct target.
If we can ever learn to blame properly, there will have been true moral progress in the species over the last several thousand years.
Representative democracy was instituted, we fear, for more sinister reasons than just because the pure form was impractical. It must have come about through pressure from two directions. From the wish on the part of the many to share in power and from the wish of the few to secure their holdings. The latter, seeking safety in numbers, but not too many numbers, chose strategically to dilute previously autocratic power among a manageable few. While the former sought to make the latter accountable to them in lieu of being, if they could not always be, one of their number. Representation served perfectly to diffuse blame which is what defines the political state—and keep at bay the moral state. Elected representatives could claim they only represented the will of the people. The people could claim they were betrayed by their delegates. And nobody could ever be held unambiguously responsible. No head would ever really roll. At worst, the politician may retire in comfortable disgrace. And the people, because there are always too many of them, could by sheer dint of their all powerful will make black seem white and white seem black, and, in the end, forget their transgressions: for it becomes sacrilege to gainsay “the will of the people.”
The moral advantage of pure democracy is that it would lay bare the pettiness of countless petty tyrants: indeed, it would make them countable. In so doing, the mirror of hypocrisy would be cleaner, a modest first step in improving our moral appearance, if not our reality.
The nature of representation.
Back to Agacinski: is it really necessary to supplement the concept of representative democracy with a new idea of parity?
We have, for example, the notion of geographical representation. We insist that a certain state or province or district have its own representative; one from another distant state, province or district will not do. Why not? Why do we suppose it necessary for a representative to have some physical (in this case, spatial) relationship with his or her constituents? We must be supposing that a physical connection and not an arbitrarily assigned one will assure some affinity of interests and values, without which the idea of representation devolves to something algebraic: let x=a and y=b for present purposes and let certain rules and procedures apply and such and such a conclusion can be worked out. We might just as easily have started with x=b and y=a… But one entity cannot be assumed to represent another when the domain of discourse includes human beings. The entities are not interchangeable. Pursued strictly, this logic entails representation is never possible since physical approximation or intimacy can never be total… But, of course, we settle for quite a bit less rigor and then the question arises what kinds and degrees of difference between the representatives and the represented are tolerable. We take it, among other things, that both should reside, at least some of the time, in the same vicinity. The experience of living in the same clime and terrains will erode any universal or abstract sameness we may share with others living in quite different ones. We are thus shaped and formed into a natural kind, a distinguishable political animal requiring representation.
If this is true with something so external, contingent, unstable, and imposed on us as geography, how much more so in the case of the kinds of bodies we inhabit? If physical proximity between voter and delegate is one acceptable criterion of when native representation is required, why not similarity of body?
There are two widely acknowledged biological envelopes, whose real and potential differences from each other on the most fundamental matters, to say nothing of a host of pettier but no less contentious ones, are surely greater than those between dwellers on opposite coasts. The envelopes, for one, in all but the rarest and dubious cases, persist a lifetime. And while nothing stops and many things encourage affinities across envelope boundaries, these remain fixed, powerful, determinants of very clearly distinguishable perspectives. In fact, it is hard to imagine cross boundary agreement without nuances of systematic difference. A man and a woman never agree on the same thing in quite the same way and for quite the same reasons. Failure to probe beyond superficial agreement is to court serious misunderstanding. There has been now for a century or so a concerted effort to deny or marginalize these differences, the patent and subtle alike, in the interest of forwarding the cause of a universal set of human or generic values.
But universalism, as a reaction to irrational discrimination and oppression, more than threatens to, it becomes itself a source of the very injustices that inspired it when it willfully or mindlessly blinds itself to differences that do in fact have moral import.
Sex is different. It is unlike race or religion or ethnicity or social, cultural or familial affiliation or any other difference that can be detected between people. It is permanent, intimate as nothing else, and it colors value. We go further: it is the source of all value. And because we are a dioecious species, we enter the world already partisan. The moral task of the rest of our adult lives should be the attempt to find “universal” grounds of agreement with others. But the first step in doing this requires knowing the distance we must traverse…
The political implications for any conception of representative democracy are plain.
Parity comes in two forms: it may come about through having “an equal number of elected men and women, or by putting forward an equal number of candidates, men and women.” Agacinski believes parity of candidacy the more workable path.
It is the general principle of mixity that counts, more than the exactness of the numbers. We shouldn’t quibble over a few seats. In general, there is always something rigid about the purely quantitative, which adapts poorly to human relations.
[We must disagree on this point. Parity of the elected makes for a clearer institution: if the proportion is fixed, this removes one important cause for potentially endless debate on how close to parity the actual numbers may approach before becoming acceptable. To some they may already be. These may have room to say that the distance from ideal parity to where we are now is the result of parity not really being of grave importance to women. And moreover, admitting sexual difference, may never be: One of the differences between women and men is that the women simply are not interested, ceteris paribus, in being as political as men, or that they are equipped with a built-in deference in the public sphere.
Parity should ultimately be seen as a pre-political moral challenge to both women and men: for men the task is to cede unjust power; for women to take on responsibility for a power they have been allowed (or required) to shirk for too long. It is not meant to be easy for either. It should go against the grain both of inertia and inclination for all concerned.
Parity of the elected as principle would set a clear number that figures not the exact division of the sexes at any one time or place but the ideal point around which these actual proportions hover: 50/50. (E.g. the US Senate should have exactly 50 female senators at all times as a matter of law or, put another way, every state should have one female and one male senator.) Parity of the elected may motivate parity of candidacy (and perhaps other methods of achieving parity as well) as a matter of course.
It is not clear that parity of candidacy would be sufficient to achieve true shared power. It seems, by itself, it would offer defenders of the status quo a convenient way out: allow equal numbers of women to run but maintain or manipulate the system to insure men still usually win. (This strategy works quite well with regard to socio-economic class.) Since the underlying value expressed in parity is and ought to be moral, there should be as little political wiggle room as possible.
Agacinski, in the interest of accommodating what she must perceive as political reality, appears to take a softer stand. Perhaps she is right about this, but we fear she is not.]
156
It may be tempting to wish to include parity within equality, in order to water down the idea’s originality and make it easier to swallow. But it would be less rigorous and, consequently, more difficult to defend. It is better, then, to accept the democratic invention it is.
[As we argued above, we don’t thing the idea of parity is unobtainable from the idea of representative democracy.]
Parity really constitutes a political interpretation of sexual difference. This difference ceases to be a pretext for segregation and becomes the justification for sharing. Parity posits that the interest in things public and the responsibilities attached devolve to men and women equally. This sharing constitutes a realization of sexual difference that does not hierarchize, according to traditional schema, nor neutralize, according to a universalist conception. If it is possible to escape the hierarchical programming of difference, it really would be by inventing original solutions not by denying a priori that this difference takes on political meaning.
[She hits the nail on the head.]
158
Democracy, and this is its strength, has within its means the ability to transform itself: parity, as a new idea of democracy, must thus become the object of a decision that is, itself, democratic.
159-60
Agacinski takes on two objections to parity: that an assumed principle of the indivisibility of the people will be violated, and that there shall no longer be a national representation, that there will cease to be a will of the people. The first would create “sections” of people, divide the class of men from the class of women. The second would make a unified expression of nationality impossible, replacing it with the will of women and the will of men but no “will of the people” as such.
But there is no requirement that men vote for men or that women vote for women. It is highly unlikely that any woman could ever represent the will of all women or a man the will of all men. (Indeed, if Weininger is right about the essential hybrid sexuality of all people and the subsequent cross-gender sharing of value in some degree, strict political self-segregation would be impossible.) Parity would insure that values and sensibilities endemic to each sex and which cut across politics would have their chance to be exercised.
[In an important sense, it is not “the will of the people,” whether broken down into “the will of women” and “the will of men,” or not, it is the will of the two value-making, Weiningerian principles that matter: the will of the feminine and the will of the masculine.]
161
Just as there was once a fear that allowing women to vote would break up families so now the fear is that a plurality of sexual types in power would destroy a unity—one, Agacinski suggests, exaggerated for the occasion. What disappears is “the identification of the entire family with the patriarch and the eclipsing of the woman by the masculine identity of the couple.”
163
Some have mistakenly supposed that the mixity of the legislative body, by requiring national representation—and thus the Assembly—to be half men and half women would mean that each of the ‘halves’ would respectively represent the male citizens and the female citizens, thus dividing the nation that must remain one and indivisible.
But the principle of representative democracy “does not imply that deputies must ‘represent’ each citizen belonging to his or her own gender.”
166
Political representation, it seems to me, is a matter of figuration and not copying, because it is not a question of exactly reproducing the thing but, rather, of inventing a figure that expresses it and can replace it. This is very similar to the way Montesquieu conceived of political representation.
[It is a more accurate and meaningful figuration that parity seeks to achieve.]
167
It is the role of representatives to translate the will of their constituents into a “will of the people” as best they can.
It is in this sense that political representation gives form or figure to the national will. The fact that the national will does not exist outside the persons and organs of representation is troubling, and yet obvious: Where then might we find this will? … If we walked with a mirror all over France, would we be able to see an image of France in it?
168
The fiction created by representation is supposed to be truer to the will of an abstraction, such as a nation, than any slavish copy of it in a way similar to how a painting may portray a deeper likeness or capture more of the essence of a subject than a photograph.
169
A similar “theatrical vision of representation” is found in Hobbes.
170
The greatest dangers in politics do not necessarily come from that which divides but often from the violence of forced unification.
We must resist the “nostalgia for the one” that stifles a clear view of the reality of division and plurality.
171
…the progress of democracy toward parity would constitute a just break with the forced, masculine unification of the political community.
No comments for “Parity”»
No comments yet.
Leave a comment