Repudiating and Appreciating Democracy

Following is a short essay describing the debate on democracy that went on between two people in the 20th century – political commentator Walter Lippman (arguing against) and pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (arguing for).

If we look around and consider the broad sweep of history upto the present day, there is no shortage of complaints we can furnish to poignantly illustrate the poor public record of our most evolved form of governing the populace – democracy; how it is falling short of the Panglossian ideals it nurtured in popular imagination; how it has time and again failed to repair the flaws of monolithic thinking. But, if we also accept the premise that any solution to a problem brings its own set of unique problems, it becomes easy to notice that one can keep turning the wheels of political machinery and still reliably fail to come up with a satisfactory mode of government. 

If we recognize that we bear a duty to point out when the emperor has no clothes, we are similarly duty-bound to honestly address the third rail of a democratic government. The steady decay of belief in democracy is a global problem par excellence. A good place to start would be to assess its munificence – giving equal power to every citizen to cast a vote. A democracy functions by relying heavily on public opinion. So, is the average citizen of a society the right person to be making the decisions about who should be making the decisions for a society? Public opinion sounds great in theory but in practice, it may be a misbegotten enterprise. 

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Most of us are born and live our whole life in some local community, immersed in its workings, enjoying our perquisites and criticizing the downsides. When the election rolls around we vote for the person who shows the maximum interest in our community. This is the good thing about democracy: As citizens, we are capable of collectively making decisions confined to our immediate surrounding. The fly in the ointment: We are expected to have political thoughts on a global scale. As a member of a modern society, we are supposed to have opinions on enormously complex systems that underpin a global civilization – fields with thousands of years of work done, fields people dedicate their entire lives to and don’t even come close to understanding fully.

The world is “too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” The simpler model – as Walter Lippmann calls it – is known as pseudo-environments. To construct one such pseudo-environment we scan our surroundings, and in a hamfisted attempt to obtain a smattering of our immediate milieu we create a collection of stereotypes – of people, culture, medicine, corporations, government, etc. When the adults among us work 40 hours a week, have families and lives to maintain, and precious little spare time to prevent burnout, it is humanly impossible to properly educate oneself about the world.

So, when we are prompted to give an intelligent opinion of local- or global-scale affairs, we pull out a few from our rucksack of stereotypes to battle with stereotypes of other people. This is the public opinion – the crystallized version of everyone’s pseudo-takes on a world based on stereotypes. Such are the treacherous, often poorly understood, currents running a democratic society. Interested in forming a political stance? Your job is to form an emotional response (based on moral intuitions of the pseudo-environments you’ve created) to events that you don’t experience, have never seen, had no idea a minute ago that it even happened, and that happened so far away that you couldn’t possibly understand it’s proper context. 

And how do we come across these events? Media: The best tools the average citizen has to create pseudo-environments; tools created by people with their own set of stereotypes (not to mention their profit motive driven by consumer decisions). Media itself is delivered through the vehicle of language, a sophisticated and perfect tool it is not!

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Paraphrasing Lippmann, “For 10rs, you may not even get a decent cup of tea, but for 10rs or less (think newspapers) people expect reality/representations of truth to fall into their laps.”

Internet has put to shame the complaint of lack of information necessary to conduct full-blooded political discourse. But it has also simultaneously thrown gunpowder into the dumpster fire of fanaticism, a feature thought to be the ignorance of the populations in the past. The belief that more information would lead to smarter decisions stands nullified because the truth is, people are not seeking truth when they seek information. They seek to reinforce existing stereotypes from new information filtered through their existing stereotypes. Developing our understanding of politics is just us choosing between which of the handful of existing authorities and thought leaders we’re going to entrust our worldview to.

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Time to look at the obverse of a democratic society.

Buried by the sands of time are the monarchy government by the one and the aristocracy government by the few. But what if democracy government by the many is not just a form of government? What if society is an organism and government is merely something produced by that organism?

Democracy is present in corporations, families, religious institutions, groups of friends. Perhaps democracy is more than just a form of government. It is an ethical ideal, a code to live by. It is a tool for social unification that we all have an ethical obligation to maintain. 
Society is an organism, and the individual and society are ‘organically’ connected to each other. Within a true democracy the individuals are always able to contribute to and own part of the society, because they’re participating in it. The society is always able to contribute to and own part of the individuals because they are always engaged in the issues of that society. Democracy is thus gestalt theory in the flesh: the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

It is the most stable form of government because it’s the best at safeguarding against potential authoritarian systems taking control of the organism.
Every brand of authoritarianism that ever rears its ugly head tries to use some birthright, some aspect of “nature” or “the natural order of things” as a totem to justify its power. Some prior, unquestioned principle is always at work – the divine right of kings, being a ruler because you’re part of the right bloodline, ruling over others because they’re the wrong race, ruling over others simply because people that came before you were high ranking in the social structure of their time.

Government is not a social contract you give your silent approval to ipso facto of being born in a society, automatically enrolling yourself in some subscription to that society. This is yet another example of the blithe usage of  “the natural order of things” or “human nature” as a means of pretending rulers know a lot more about the way societies work than they actually do. The world is no where near that simple!

Democracy, as a social unification tool, is the bulwark against this scourge of prior status. Every person has the ability to contribute something to society. Each and every person is unique and thus brings a unique perspective to the problems society is facing. If we want as many good ideas as we can possibly get as a society why would we ever limit ourselves to a panel of oligarchs or a single dictator? 

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True democracy shouldn’t just be a form of government defined by just a bunch of people voting for what they want. It should allow every citizen within it to realize their full potential, which in turn helps society immensely as well. Yes, certain people are going to go down the rabbit holes of information and become enraged political zealots, but that shouldn’t discourage us vis-à-vis democracy. It should cause us to renew our commitment to education and teaching the citizens the skills to be able to not fall into those traps of simplified thinking.

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To me,

Democracy today looks very much like “meet the new boss – same as the old boss” gig. More accurately, it’s the boss plus a cabal of people we happen to have elected. In wanting to outsource our collective troubles onto a few key decision makers we often miss the fact that we use the force of majority as a means for extorting agreement from the rest. And meantime, two things happen: the rest, having not voted similarly as the majority, merely identify themselves as a pain in the butt, and the majority confuses being popular with being correct, frolicking over the anemic sense of purpose democracy is left with. Painfully, I see the rest, left behind in their humble cottages, is always on its backfoot, dissembling, having to argue that it is not a bigot whenever they complain against the majority. Their concerns just get steamrolled over because the majority wangled an agreement through the numbers game.

The blinkered model of democracy is built around being as numerous as possible, to reach or exceed the critical mass of 51%. Once reached, it becomes the judge, jury and the executioner of itself and the rest. Coupled with social media’s mobilizing effects of outrage stirred up to pathological heights, who’s to tell what crisis may befall the minority?

As a member of the modern society, if we can try to be all of a piece, why use just the one lodestar of an emperor or the majority of a democracy to guide our lives and future? Resplendent the night sky is with several constellations, similar to how resplendent the world is full of diverse communities, burnishing against each other to make things better for everyone. To navigate our way through the complex makings of the world, we need everyone’s help. Democracy, if we are earnest, can be the mainspring to shape governments into a conduit of our collective will.

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References and further reading
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