The concept of legitimacy is an important one. especially these days. To some extent, it’s a measure of our faith in our government, or whatever else provides direction and control in our lives, a measure of the extent to which we as a whole assent to the exercise of power, to which we feel any authority to be right and proper.
Some form of legitimacy is a requirement for any government to function without constant resort to force or coercion, but it applies also to the running of our organizations and institutions, and even to the governance of our individual lives: is, for instance, reason or emotion the one authorized to be chief executive of our actions in this area or that of our lives?
In the sphere of mundane motives and their enabling agendas, legitimacy is assumed by tradition or won by charisma or calculated by some process like voting, but it is still ultimately a common trust in some system of convictions, practices and values to positively and appropriately structure our lives.
There is, however, yet another zone of legitimacy: the encounter. The encounter space is the overlap of the transcendent and mundane realms, a place where we meet others in the active participating presence of freshness itself. When we choose to encounter, that is, when we choose to make common cause with the livingness of an other addressed as you, we assent to the legitimacies operative in that space, just as we would obey the laws of another country that we visit.
If we can encounter it, it has a claim on existence as good as our own. This first legitimacy, that it is right and proper for something to exist, is the basis of a second: that it is right and proper for what exists to have an identity, to be itself. A necessary corollary: what has identity stands as an other to everything else.
This means that in the encounter space, all things have the same essential dignity of existence as well the same right to be what they are as we do. None are privileged in the encounter space; there’s occasion for all to exhibit humility.
The basis of these legitimacies is transcendent freshness itself. What’s legitimate in the transcendent doesn’t directly apply to the mundane realm but, since we can and often do choose to have dual citizenship, we usually take both into account.
So when I choose to encounter a definite other directly as in face to face conversation, I am governed by rules of social etiquette, as well as by the obligation to make common cause with the livingness of that other.
When such an encounter has implications for non-present others who are fellow members of common kin groups, neighborhoods, organizations, institutions or traditions (KNOITs), I am governed or influenced by the rules, tacit or formal, which structure these particular social arrangements, as well as by the obligation to adopt a stance of solidarity with regard to the livingness of these definite but indirectly encountered others.
When such an encounter has implications for not present other who don’t share membership in our KNOITS, that is the general public including strangers and aliens, then I am, in part, governed by the broadest governing principles, such as those articulated in the Declaration of Independence, which are compatible with a pluralistic society that allows all to exist and any to be different. And I’m governed also by the transcendent requirement to exhibit hospitality, exploration and friendship with regard to the livingness of any others and othernesses generally, even if indirectly encountered and indefinite.
Governing principles in the mundane realm are based on concepts of the common good as understood by those who live in the mundane, but these principles are often contested, and the meanings of the words ‘common’ and ‘good’ can expand or shrink, modify or petrify as times change, so there’s no intrinsic limit to the authority that governors may sometimes have or the governed assent to.
Sometimes the existence of certain individuals or groups or things is deemed right and proper, and their right to be themselves is considered lawful. At other times, that right is withdrawn, and they have been coerced and exterminated by governments which have been given authority to treat them as enemies.
Even in a democratic pluralistic government, parties and factions can disagree on the different proposals offered by one another. Beyond policy differences, partisans can find their some of their fellows incomprehensible, unlikable and even essentially immoral, and seek to withdraw from interaction with them, or resist their influence, or try to change how they think, what they do, or what they value. The temptation to delegitimate the existence or the identity of the other is ever present.
Acrimony makes encountering a challenge, and, if hostility is comprehensive, bilateral and principled, may make encountering impossible.
But encounters can occur in all kinds of even unlikely situations, and whenever they do, the existence and the otherness of all participants, each of whom is other to the other, is a governing principle legitimated by freshness itself.
Freshness makes the rules for encounters. To participate in the transcendent, we assent to them. As dual citizens, however, they have influence and do limit what we can give assent to when invited to confer any legitimacy on anything.