Rethinking ‘Democracy’
There are a good many sacred cows in the Modernist world.
One of them is ‘democracy’.
It’s rather a fine myth, as myths go.
As ever, even the brightest of us fall for its disarming allure.
The only myth greater than it is possibly the notion that it is (yet another!) European gift to the world.
Europe, as it happens, links itself, quite gratuitously, to the achievements of Ancient Greece.
Then it suggests that the Greeks invented it, and thereby, by extension, it becomes one of its Co-Legators.
But facts , being stubborn things, deny such a facile attribution.
As I have argued before, Greek Civilisation was a part of a great Pan-Mediterranean Civilisation that included several others, itself fertilised by a host of ideas emanating from Egypt, India, and China.
North Europe, the least cultivated region of the sub-continent, first received exposure to Med. Civ. , indirectly, in ‘twice-removed’ fashion, via Roman conquests.
Then , of course, the Crusades had the former stalwarts brought , finally, into direct contact with the region.
In consequence, the so-called ‘Renaissance ‘ was the Great School where North Europe learnt of exotica like high culture.
A bit later, the generalization of European Conquests globally, netted them the bounteous troves of the wisdom, science and technology of the East which helped bring about their own , vaunted , ‘Enlightenment’.
At any rate, the Greeks no more ‘invented’ democracy than they discovered the theorem attributed to Pythagoras.
‘That much is simply part of the smug folklore that was constructed to project the later European Empire as great, wise, and beneficent.
Democratic’ institutions existed in both ancient Civilisations , like India , and tribal formations, long before Greece
At any rate, EuroModernism did not, by any stretch, enter the world bearing the olive branches of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’: but rather , swept in by sword , cannon , and civil war.
.If one reduces ‘democracy’ to a mere voting rule, then it was , within Northern Europe, localized entirely within the ruling class, as say, within the landed elites – not exactly the most progressivist of the extant societal orders - of Pre-Reform England.
Later, it was actually fought for by forces set against the latter, as with the commercial ‘middle classes’ who ably used the working-class Chartist Movement to secure their own ‘voting rights’ in 1832.
And It was only in 1867, after long, long, struggles, that Workers , in England, earned that nominal privilege.
Of course, it took Women until the 20th Century to wrest that same ‘right’.
If we date the onset of the Modernist Impulse as somewhere in the late 16th century, even limited democracy took two centuries to be accepted , largely by dint of the struggles of an ‘internal opposition’,
Of course, History is written by conquerors: and it is written such that we assume that Modernism simply dawned one fine day, smiling benignly, and brimming over with a cornucopia of such gifts, scattering them to all and sundry - like manna from heaven,
On the other side of the Atlantic, 1776 gave White Gentry Patriarchs that same privilege, but keeping it safely away from all else (minorities, women, and the sans-cullotte).
Never mind the Franchise, the property-less couldn’t even count on the services of a fire brigade in the land of the free.
Women resisted , and gained the franchise in the 20th century: and , with Afro-Americans, it took the second half of the Twentieth century, almost two and a half centuries after all those fanciful ‘Universal Declarations’ , to be recognized as even having the franchise: though ,to this day, there is a certain undeniable fragility to it.
The domestic struggles for the franchise were aided also by fortuitous international factors,
Women got the right to vote in the US, in context of the Russian Revolution , and WW1 , which shook the confidence of ALL ruling orders.
Afro-Ams were assisted by the heat of the Cold War, where the US was forced to compete with the USSR, in appearing to be benign and ‘’human-rights ‘ oriented’ in the eyes of the world.
And so it goes.
One must pause.
Recall, we are talking about a Voting Rule only, no more , no less,
In Modernist democracies, the ‘people’ elect delegates to an Assembly only: they elect , in effect, the would-be governors (in most cases, these ‘representatives’ are then swiftly bought out by ‘special interests’).
Voting places people in office: it does not, necessarily, put them in power.
Stated another way, the governing class – a functionary political class - need not be the ruling class: in fact, the greater the distance between the two , the more effective is the propaganda about democracy.
So , we need to understand the nature of power.
Power can derive from a monopoly of force, but that can , en generale, only be temporary.
As Napoleon had it , one can do anything with bayonets - except sit on them
More securely, it stems from effective ownership or control over the means of social production and reproduction.
So , effective power lies, for the most part, in the hands of an unelected class of landed, financial , and corporate wealth.
They are the organ-grinders: the governing class , is a political elite that is elected, but are just the frontstage player-performers in the game of politics.
The ruling class is more continuously stable than any such governing class which comes and goes as elections dictate.
And no set of governors can, for long, defy their special interests.
Now we begin to get closer to an understanding of Modernist ‘democracy’: it is no more than a legitimating device (now if that sounds ‘Marxist”, in origins, beware: it is actually a rather prosaic Weberian argument).
One might also recall Adam Smith’s bland statement that ‘governments’ are constituted to ‘defend the rich from the poor’.
Yes, Adam Smith: our ever-glorified ‘Free Marketeer’.
So , ‘democracy’ provides the comforting illusion that the ‘people’ are in charge of their own socio-economic destinies - regardless of how often that myth is punctured , again and again, by overt political realities.
So we need to try and see through the charades, or become stupefied by them: as an acute thinker once wrote, ‘ if appearance and reality coincided, there’d be no need for science’!
The crash of 2008 , and the gratuitous bail-out of the very folks, that helped manufacture that crisis is just one more drab and dreary lesson that is likely to go ignored as to the reality of the power of the real rulers.
It gives lapidary proof of Santayana’s dictum that democracy is the ‘ paradise that unscrupulous financiers dream of’.
Let me make this clear by pushing the argument forward.
Had the 2008 crash posed an irreversible threat to the ruling class , even such ‘democracy’ ,as exists, would have been suspended (even beyond the de facto suspensions one observes today),
As it well might, in any such future crash.
And as it is , a passive ‘democracy’ was used to deck the perpetrators , wantonly, with oodles of our tax monies.
(II)
Power, to be stable, needs legitimacy.
And ‘democracy ‘ is a useful tool of legitimation: indeed, few of us stop to think beyond having voted.
That mechanical act effectively terminates the exercise of the ‘power of the people’.
After that, the real powers that be take over: and run the show.
De facto Dictatorship, within ‘formal’ democracy, one would think, never had it so good!
We elect ‘representatives’: and these are then ‘commandeered’ by the power elites.
Yep , and so we do , routinely, get the ‘best government money can buy’!
But this is not to entirely discount the concept.
From the point of view of the sans-cullotte , democracy offers the meager possibility that , perhaps, some charismatic demagogue, riding the crest of a strong ‘, populist movement’ , may author policies that at least, indirectly, benefit them.
Yes, trickle-down benefits are possible, and even critically important , but to imagine that rulers simply hand over control, let alone ownership, to the ‘mob’ (as they see it) is laughable.
If this sounds cynical, remind yourself that even elite US educational institutions – such as Stanford – have, recently, sponsored studies that establish the fact that we live under an oligarchy.
So you don’t need a Piketty to announce, with the air of nouvelle ‘discovery’ , in the 21st century, that the rich are getting richer, so to speak, ‘behind our backs’.
They have done so, systematically, since the system began.
What else would you expect under Capital-ism?
It is not, even nominally!, labour-ism, middleclass-ism, minority-ism, or women-ism, surely!
In fact, even more sobrietously, there is an Iron law of Oligarchy that obtains in all societies , that are ‘class-divided’ between labor-owners and property-owners.
Barring the rare instances of revolt, that is the status quo that prevails, en generale.
Now, Churchill offered a rather classic defense of ‘democracy’: it is the worst way to run a government, said he, until you consider the alternative’.
As with much that he said, off the cuff, he was dead wrong.
Actually, democracy is, by far, the safer tool for Modernist societies than dictatorships, because the latter are rarely stable - given the everpresent danger of revolt.
In effect, democracy is , so to speak, the perfect sop for the masses.
Actually, the truth is even more bitter.
There is a saying that whether the melon falls on the knife, or vice versa, it is the melon that gets chopped.
So, the everyday peace of Modernist democracies (which are law and order entities) may be far preferable to the iron fist of Modernist dictatorships: but in either case , in the final analysis, it is the sheep that get sheared.
So this is the great tragedy of Modernist politics: that generations of the property-less pin their faith, again and again, over time, to achieve societal justice at the polls – and go home unrequited(even in everyday political rhetoric, note that they offer you ‘peace and prosperity’ but not justice).
It’s not unlike that Peanuts gag where Lucy holds the ball down and invites Charlie Brown to come running and kick it, only to whisk it away at the last minute: time after time.
Only, it’s not funny.
Ask yourself who is responsible for the sad denouement: Lucy , for tricking Charlie unabashedly , or Charlie - for believing Lucy over and over?
So it is necessary to understand the limited value - if value, nonetheless - of Modernist , top-down, democracies , from the point of view of the under-classes.
Democracy from below, is quite another matter, obviously ( but where is that permissible?)
The far superior ‘alternatives’ remain tribal, i.e., consensual societies where 51% cannot trump 49%, as a matter of course.
Indeed , instructively, many European tribal Democracies , like Denmark or Iceland, fare far better than, say, the UK or the US, for being far more genuinely considerate of the larger interest..
It follows from their homogeneous , tribal, constitution.
The fatal flaw lies in the make-up of (Euro)Modernist ‘civil society’: once you sanction unbridled greed, and set up an adversarial society where each sees the other as rival and competitor, and society itself as but a means to advancement of personal self-interest, you have created the potholed Hobbesian world where ‘Hell is other people’.
So not merely ‘democracy’, any means of governance fails in such a disastrous mine-field of malintentions.
Where empathy is dead , and amorality is alive , you get the familiar, anthropic prospect of a Modernist wasteland, debauched of all co-respecting content.
Now, the Convivial Society is still possible, for having viably pre-existed our deformed Modernist ‘states of being’.
Its eternal locus is the template of the anthropic family, which is more or less intact , in truncated form, even under severe Modernist duress.
How we get back on that felicitous track is the prime question for our troubled times.
In effect, our tribal essence is ours to reclaim anytime we wish.
It is , no less than our anthropic birthright, sadly expunged by Four Centuries of EuroModernist depredations.
Perhaps we might start rethinking all issues considered settled for us , by others, in 1776 and 1789, and soon: lest we continue the precipitous slide into what promises to be an indefeasibly radioactive future.
[© R.Kanth 2014, Harvard University]
There are a good many sacred cows in the Modernist world.
One of them is ‘democracy’.
It’s rather a fine myth, as myths go.
As ever, even the brightest of us fall for its disarming allure.
The only myth greater than it is possibly the notion that it is (yet another!) European gift to the world.
Europe, as it happens, links itself, quite gratuitously, to the achievements of Ancient Greece.
Then it suggests that the Greeks invented it, and thereby, by extension, it becomes one of its Co-Legators.
But facts , being stubborn things, deny such a facile attribution.
As I have argued before, Greek Civilisation was a part of a great Pan-Mediterranean Civilisation that included several others, itself fertilised by a host of ideas emanating from Egypt, India, and China.
North Europe, the least cultivated region of the sub-continent, first received exposure to Med. Civ. , indirectly, in ‘twice-removed’ fashion, via Roman conquests.
Then , of course, the Crusades had the former stalwarts brought , finally, into direct contact with the region.
In consequence, the so-called ‘Renaissance ‘ was the Great School where North Europe learnt of exotica like high culture.
A bit later, the generalization of European Conquests globally, netted them the bounteous troves of the wisdom, science and technology of the East which helped bring about their own , vaunted , ‘Enlightenment’.
At any rate, the Greeks no more ‘invented’ democracy than they discovered the theorem attributed to Pythagoras.
‘That much is simply part of the smug folklore that was constructed to project the later European Empire as great, wise, and beneficent.
Democratic’ institutions existed in both ancient Civilisations , like India , and tribal formations, long before Greece
At any rate, EuroModernism did not, by any stretch, enter the world bearing the olive branches of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’: but rather , swept in by sword , cannon , and civil war.
.If one reduces ‘democracy’ to a mere voting rule, then it was , within Northern Europe, localized entirely within the ruling class, as say, within the landed elites – not exactly the most progressivist of the extant societal orders - of Pre-Reform England.
Later, it was actually fought for by forces set against the latter, as with the commercial ‘middle classes’ who ably used the working-class Chartist Movement to secure their own ‘voting rights’ in 1832.
And It was only in 1867, after long, long, struggles, that Workers , in England, earned that nominal privilege.
Of course, it took Women until the 20th Century to wrest that same ‘right’.
If we date the onset of the Modernist Impulse as somewhere in the late 16th century, even limited democracy took two centuries to be accepted , largely by dint of the struggles of an ‘internal opposition’,
Of course, History is written by conquerors: and it is written such that we assume that Modernism simply dawned one fine day, smiling benignly, and brimming over with a cornucopia of such gifts, scattering them to all and sundry - like manna from heaven,
On the other side of the Atlantic, 1776 gave White Gentry Patriarchs that same privilege, but keeping it safely away from all else (minorities, women, and the sans-cullotte).
Never mind the Franchise, the property-less couldn’t even count on the services of a fire brigade in the land of the free.
Women resisted , and gained the franchise in the 20th century: and , with Afro-Americans, it took the second half of the Twentieth century, almost two and a half centuries after all those fanciful ‘Universal Declarations’ , to be recognized as even having the franchise: though ,to this day, there is a certain undeniable fragility to it.
The domestic struggles for the franchise were aided also by fortuitous international factors,
Women got the right to vote in the US, in context of the Russian Revolution , and WW1 , which shook the confidence of ALL ruling orders.
Afro-Ams were assisted by the heat of the Cold War, where the US was forced to compete with the USSR, in appearing to be benign and ‘’human-rights ‘ oriented’ in the eyes of the world.
And so it goes.
One must pause.
Recall, we are talking about a Voting Rule only, no more , no less,
In Modernist democracies, the ‘people’ elect delegates to an Assembly only: they elect , in effect, the would-be governors (in most cases, these ‘representatives’ are then swiftly bought out by ‘special interests’).
Voting places people in office: it does not, necessarily, put them in power.
Stated another way, the governing class – a functionary political class - need not be the ruling class: in fact, the greater the distance between the two , the more effective is the propaganda about democracy.
So , we need to understand the nature of power.
Power can derive from a monopoly of force, but that can , en generale, only be temporary.
As Napoleon had it , one can do anything with bayonets - except sit on them
More securely, it stems from effective ownership or control over the means of social production and reproduction.
So , effective power lies, for the most part, in the hands of an unelected class of landed, financial , and corporate wealth.
They are the organ-grinders: the governing class , is a political elite that is elected, but are just the frontstage player-performers in the game of politics.
The ruling class is more continuously stable than any such governing class which comes and goes as elections dictate.
And no set of governors can, for long, defy their special interests.
Now we begin to get closer to an understanding of Modernist ‘democracy’: it is no more than a legitimating device (now if that sounds ‘Marxist”, in origins, beware: it is actually a rather prosaic Weberian argument).
One might also recall Adam Smith’s bland statement that ‘governments’ are constituted to ‘defend the rich from the poor’.
Yes, Adam Smith: our ever-glorified ‘Free Marketeer’.
So , ‘democracy’ provides the comforting illusion that the ‘people’ are in charge of their own socio-economic destinies - regardless of how often that myth is punctured , again and again, by overt political realities.
So we need to try and see through the charades, or become stupefied by them: as an acute thinker once wrote, ‘ if appearance and reality coincided, there’d be no need for science’!
The crash of 2008 , and the gratuitous bail-out of the very folks, that helped manufacture that crisis is just one more drab and dreary lesson that is likely to go ignored as to the reality of the power of the real rulers.
It gives lapidary proof of Santayana’s dictum that democracy is the ‘ paradise that unscrupulous financiers dream of’.
Let me make this clear by pushing the argument forward.
Had the 2008 crash posed an irreversible threat to the ruling class , even such ‘democracy’ ,as exists, would have been suspended (even beyond the de facto suspensions one observes today),
As it well might, in any such future crash.
And as it is , a passive ‘democracy’ was used to deck the perpetrators , wantonly, with oodles of our tax monies.
(II)
Power, to be stable, needs legitimacy.
And ‘democracy ‘ is a useful tool of legitimation: indeed, few of us stop to think beyond having voted.
That mechanical act effectively terminates the exercise of the ‘power of the people’.
After that, the real powers that be take over: and run the show.
De facto Dictatorship, within ‘formal’ democracy, one would think, never had it so good!
We elect ‘representatives’: and these are then ‘commandeered’ by the power elites.
Yep , and so we do , routinely, get the ‘best government money can buy’!
But this is not to entirely discount the concept.
From the point of view of the sans-cullotte , democracy offers the meager possibility that , perhaps, some charismatic demagogue, riding the crest of a strong ‘, populist movement’ , may author policies that at least, indirectly, benefit them.
Yes, trickle-down benefits are possible, and even critically important , but to imagine that rulers simply hand over control, let alone ownership, to the ‘mob’ (as they see it) is laughable.
If this sounds cynical, remind yourself that even elite US educational institutions – such as Stanford – have, recently, sponsored studies that establish the fact that we live under an oligarchy.
So you don’t need a Piketty to announce, with the air of nouvelle ‘discovery’ , in the 21st century, that the rich are getting richer, so to speak, ‘behind our backs’.
They have done so, systematically, since the system began.
What else would you expect under Capital-ism?
It is not, even nominally!, labour-ism, middleclass-ism, minority-ism, or women-ism, surely!
In fact, even more sobrietously, there is an Iron law of Oligarchy that obtains in all societies , that are ‘class-divided’ between labor-owners and property-owners.
Barring the rare instances of revolt, that is the status quo that prevails, en generale.
Now, Churchill offered a rather classic defense of ‘democracy’: it is the worst way to run a government, said he, until you consider the alternative’.
As with much that he said, off the cuff, he was dead wrong.
Actually, democracy is, by far, the safer tool for Modernist societies than dictatorships, because the latter are rarely stable - given the everpresent danger of revolt.
In effect, democracy is , so to speak, the perfect sop for the masses.
Actually, the truth is even more bitter.
There is a saying that whether the melon falls on the knife, or vice versa, it is the melon that gets chopped.
So, the everyday peace of Modernist democracies (which are law and order entities) may be far preferable to the iron fist of Modernist dictatorships: but in either case , in the final analysis, it is the sheep that get sheared.
So this is the great tragedy of Modernist politics: that generations of the property-less pin their faith, again and again, over time, to achieve societal justice at the polls – and go home unrequited(even in everyday political rhetoric, note that they offer you ‘peace and prosperity’ but not justice).
It’s not unlike that Peanuts gag where Lucy holds the ball down and invites Charlie Brown to come running and kick it, only to whisk it away at the last minute: time after time.
Only, it’s not funny.
Ask yourself who is responsible for the sad denouement: Lucy , for tricking Charlie unabashedly , or Charlie - for believing Lucy over and over?
So it is necessary to understand the limited value - if value, nonetheless - of Modernist , top-down, democracies , from the point of view of the under-classes.
Democracy from below, is quite another matter, obviously ( but where is that permissible?)
The far superior ‘alternatives’ remain tribal, i.e., consensual societies where 51% cannot trump 49%, as a matter of course.
Indeed , instructively, many European tribal Democracies , like Denmark or Iceland, fare far better than, say, the UK or the US, for being far more genuinely considerate of the larger interest..
It follows from their homogeneous , tribal, constitution.
The fatal flaw lies in the make-up of (Euro)Modernist ‘civil society’: once you sanction unbridled greed, and set up an adversarial society where each sees the other as rival and competitor, and society itself as but a means to advancement of personal self-interest, you have created the potholed Hobbesian world where ‘Hell is other people’.
So not merely ‘democracy’, any means of governance fails in such a disastrous mine-field of malintentions.
Where empathy is dead , and amorality is alive , you get the familiar, anthropic prospect of a Modernist wasteland, debauched of all co-respecting content.
Now, the Convivial Society is still possible, for having viably pre-existed our deformed Modernist ‘states of being’.
Its eternal locus is the template of the anthropic family, which is more or less intact , in truncated form, even under severe Modernist duress.
How we get back on that felicitous track is the prime question for our troubled times.
In effect, our tribal essence is ours to reclaim anytime we wish.
It is , no less than our anthropic birthright, sadly expunged by Four Centuries of EuroModernist depredations.
Perhaps we might start rethinking all issues considered settled for us , by others, in 1776 and 1789, and soon: lest we continue the precipitous slide into what promises to be an indefeasibly radioactive future.
[© R.Kanth 2014, Harvard University]