Democracy: The Word
If all that was meant by the word “democracy” were “rule by the people” or “people power”, there’d be no earthly reason to discuss it. We’ve always have had the power to rule ourselves and always will - at least until some strange robot apocalypse, an invasion of space aliens, or a long-awaited extinction event finally bequeathes our planet to grasshoppers and the scorpions.
It might be we’ve simply never realized our power, and still haven’t. In that case the mighty task of leadership would be the raising of consciousness and the creation of environments for nurturing certain necessary skills. That would be daunting enough. But it certainly would underestimate the challenges.
It’s still seems an immense luxury (I won’t call it a ‘privilege”) to debate or contemplate how far human society has advanced viable practices of formal democracy - and how far we have to go. Who but useless idlers and malcontents want to catalog the authentic remaining obstructions, snares, and pitfalls for democracy as a set of meaningful practices? And is it more effete or more subversive to anticipate likely sources of potential ambush or treachery - and whether there exists any ultimate and invincible nemesis to the democracy project in Western Civilization? There’s just so much we don’t know about democracy and what it means, but could we at least be starting, once again, to raise legitimate questions and worries?
Perhaps it’s merely foolishness to consider possibilities that seem far beyond any individual or collective ken? For instance: will it ever be possible to know if human perversity (our tendency for orneriness and contrarianism) is a primary characteristic or simply is, at a certain limit, irreducible?
And then there’s the expression, “Man is Wolf to Man”. Aside from being a crude slur against wild canines, could it also be unfair to our own species? There’s no conclusive evidence either way, and consequent predispositions for wariness or trust seem widely distributed with a broad range of possible combinations. And that makes sense because survival may be more dependent on either trust or wariness depending on the circumstances.
Futile or not, the case for trust must be made. Unfortunately, survival could take many forms, some much less ideal than others. Furthermore, species survival could, under certain circumstances, impel the sacrifice of many individuals. Certain modes of survival would clearly be preferable to others. And though some individual humans would opt for survival under any circumstance, most of those would still poignantly regret the forced choice of a future where trust is even more a liability than it is now. But if trust and mutuality were to objectively become lethal luxuries, would something in “human nature” work to compel some survivors to strive for change?
Presently the case for even paranoiac wariness remains quite strong. We simply do not know the extent of our capacity for predation against each other. We know even less about how altering our cultural environments might mitigate our rapaciousness. The same goes for fostering “the better angels of our nature” - if we even agree on what those are.
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Is there any way for us to overcome ourselves?
Is it even possible?
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Conspiracy theorists have ample precedent to fear technologically contrived solutions. What’s that crop duster spraying us with? Is it good old fashioned DDT, LSD, or an aerosol version of Zoloft? If they can put fluoride in the water supply, why not some newfangled happy juice? And even if “the gubmint” isn’t spiking the air and water with special pharmaceuticals or biological agents, how can we know they won’t start tomorrow? The “deep state” has a vested interest in developing and using capacities to alter the moods of large groups of people. Sometimes they might want us more pliant and, other times, more bloodthirsty. What if “we” could selectively induce some groups to be paralyzed with fear or overcome with joyful elation? How much would it be worth to “help” people soldier on through discomfort, doubt, or boredom so their time “on the clock” would be spent more productively? Are “they” (still) experimenting even now on military recruits, convicts - or us?
Is freely given trust among humans merely the most intimate of follies? Is it the most exquisite luxury when secretly shared among the blessed select? Or is it an aspirational pinnacle of human achievement, hard earned but easily toppled?
Is collective trust even possible? Is it the same as “God”? Is it “the future”; that very “long run” in which all of us are eventually dead? Isn’t it ultimately a question about ourselves and our unknowable “nature” where perhaps “we” are only some uncertain Nietzschean rope, a questioning series of living links, twisting and changing over the abyss gaping between our ever more beastly angles of imposture?
Closer to angle calculating billiard players than to angelic agents of divine design, we are condemned to try to govern ourselves even if our constant collisions, combinations, and divergences are more quantumly inexplicable than they are geometrically determinable. And for that reason we devise institutions that, by dispensing with the need for trust, make it (perhaps) more likely.
Elections and ostracisms. Checks and balances. Divisions of power. Ambitions countering ambitions. Democracy like concoctions that survive longer than a generation or two were planned for by by cold eyed designers who kept their idealism firmly in check. It’s a truism that the framers of the American Constitution did not trust themselves anymore than they did “the people”. James Madison was more than merely aware that the most enduring source of faction was the divisions between the rich and the poor. He knew that any system with a chance to survive must recognize and attempt to balance such divisions. He also know who had more power (at least in the short run) just as he knew which side of the available bread slice his butter was slathered on.
Today, implements of surveillance are forming a bigger bulge in the toolkit of the checks that balance our society. But since this panoptic capacity is not equally distributed, it is inevitably a force for domination and control generating salutary (for the elite) contributions to the straightening waves of paranoia and division.
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In our brief history of civilization we may well have actually achieved major advancements in democracy and justice which are, by more decent definitions, attempts to minimize human tendencies for mutual predation. But who can convincingly claim the incremental and contingent nature of these advances has altered our fundamental natures in any significant way? Do conservatives who tend to emphasize the depths of our own depravity do so out of genuine secular despair - or is it to justify (sanctify?) the predation and dominance currently practiced? Do “progressives” who tend to direct our earthly desires towards our more attractive facets do so to encourage us to assiduously strive for more “progress” - or is it to divert attention from the malevolent and true obstacles to justice?
It’s interesting to think about “predation” as a stark description of what is more euphemistically referred to as the “consumption” of one life form (or its products) by another. Putting aside protests from vegetarians, this requires a recognition that predation is essential for the survival all all higher life forms lacking recourse to photosynthesis. Reassuring or not, many forms of predation involve a degree of mutuality - if only at the level of natural selection. The domestication of crops and “livestock” is generally an induced process of genetic engineering that ultimately makes “the prey” as dependent on the predator as the other way around. One might not wish to contemplate conditions in even the most hygienic and humane slaughter houses when considering how the the checks and balances involved in “the rule of law” may actually be a set of mechanisms for breeding most of us to be dependent on the well placed few.
It’s sad to become fixedly aware that neither “mutuality” nor “cooperation” exclude “dominance”, “control”, or “exploitation”. It’s not inspiring to imagine that the best we might hope for in terms of a “commonwealth of mutuality” is some balanced form of exploitation where most forms of predatory dominance are (in the main) prevented. But this is the baseline for constitutional democracy as we know it - even if it is not the preferred beacon for guiding us toward some future form of self governance. Pathetic or not, this is the actual kind of “trust” some of us may be most actually inclined to invest any faith in.
We, of course, value (and hopefully don’t merely imagine) other forms of mutuality and trust. These (whether “real” or “imagined”) may reside more deeply in us than do speech and the types of thinking intertwined with language. Some of the most intriguing theories about the origins of human language posit that it emerged from music and song. And music, the synchronous merging of voices and percussions (of flesh on flesh, or flesh on instrument, or handheld object on object) is probably inseparable from dance. Does it seem impossible that music and dance predate drugs and alcohol as social lubricants and bonding mechanisms?
Music and dance (along with concomitant employment of intoxicants) are essential components of cult. And “cult” may be the best descriptor for the earliest forms of what we now rely upon as “culture” and practice as “religion”. In this (very speculative) sense “cult” predates language and myth. And the word “cult” with its association with “myth” puts us in touch with a very generative form of irrationality associated with humans - especially in terms of our use of language.
What if language, as an extension of music and dance (with its links to mating and social “rituals” in “lower” species) was selected for on the basis of its relative efficiency in coordinating human activity?
After all, everyday speech burns magnitudes less energy than song and dance. Using language to string together any lengthy series of complex thoughts in any near coherent expository way also requires a considerable expenditure of energy and was probably never a socially viable activity until the invention of writing (if then.) If language does serve as a “scaffold” for thought (and especially complex arrangements of thoughts), it’s intriguing (to me, anyway) to consider the multiple meanings associated with the word “scaffold” as they sometimes apply to critics of established authority.
On top of mating rutuals and ceremonies of social abandon, language provides humans with other mechanisms for getting under each others’ skins. A linguistic “ear worm” in the form of an injunction, a warning, or an enticement from almost anybody can resound in a person’s mind for hours, days, or a lifetime. In conjunction with rhythm and melody, a linguistic “meme” can permeate an entire culture for generations. And who knows the extent to which the mutations and evolutionary pressures that provided humanity with the capacity for extended abstract thought were not inextricably entwined with abilities connected to music, language, drama, and graphic art?
Single words may sometimes have incantatory powers, but this very idea includes the likelihood that that the potency of any word (or phrase) is a function of its association with other “experiences”. These “experiences” may or may not have been “artistically” contrived by other humans, but the degree of skill and and the level of resources devoted to creating such “experiences” must tend to increase their potency. The most successfully evocative artifacts and galvanizing experiences often inspire many derivative (and some enhanced) creative expressions which can eventually pervade, if not “create”, a culture or a “nation” through their ability to provide a shared set of references that resonate both with survival needs and with ambitions to transcend the vicissitudes of subsistence. The reflections of the stars can sometimes be seen in dank muddy puddles.
It’s practically a given that all ancient (and modern) cultures were (and are) at least partially defined by a framework of mythology involving song, dance, icons, and stories which infuse certain words and images with special potency. Among the most exalted aspects of “European centered civilization” are legacies of the ancient Hebrews and the Classical Greeks. The stories and symbols of the Hebrews remain so potent that framing them as “mythology” can still generate withering cultural reactions in certain parts of the “West” which may well now appear to be ‘backwaters” though they might just as well be considered as potential primordial soups for unthinkable generative organic “reactions”.
The best of the living Hebraic legacy is a moral framework for challenging unjust or unwise authority. In addition to epic literary and dramatic exemplars, Classical Greece still gives us models for rational inquiry and discourse we continue to use, adapt, and build upon. It also gives us the concept of democracy as it applies to complex and diverse polities. We are still struggling to adapt, use, and build democracy too. (Or, at least, we may be . . .)
* * * *
“Democracy” like any other word is only evocative and meaningful in the context of a larger web of words and concepts. The same goes for democracy as a set of practices. The word most associated with “democracy” is “freedom”. This would be appropriate if the connection between the two were clearer.
It’s certainly viable to claim democracy will work to protect individual freedom from encroachments by other citizens or domestic institutions. As evidenced by the Peloponnesian Wars; however, it’s not so clear that democracy offers the best protection for collective freedom - as in the self determination of nation (or city) states.
It may well be that democracy is more dependent on freedom than the other way around. Any society that depends on mind “control” or any surreptitious influence over the processes that seem to afford us “self” determination cannot be considered democratic. Meaningful democratic participation must be “freely” voluntary. And “surreptitious influence” manifestly includes the propaganda (now called “public relations”) which effectively plays upon the evocative power of words and images as they relate to national mythologies.
Deplorable though it may be, American politics is (and probably always has been - if the 1787 convention is excluded) primarily a competition between (more or less) skillful manipulators of mythical words and symbols. Ideally, this would not be surreptitious (and perhaps is not now) because the bulk of the citizenry would (and maybe already does?) possess the critical skills to prevent the manipulation of symbols from becoming a manipulation of people. Under such conditions, the manipulation of symbols might enhance rather than debase democracy just as it might invigorate rather than enervate the essential mythological underpinnings of nationhood.
It bears repeating that democracy cannot operate unless an overwhelming bulk of the citizenry freely submit themselves to operating within a complex network of reciprocities, obligations, rules, traditions, and institutions. When vibrant and vigorous, this network, varyingly characterized as “the rule of law” and “civil society” organically throbs, tenses, and develops to protect individuals and minorities against overbearing majorities, while also protecting individuals and majorities against usurping minorities.
The purpose, and only justification, for this cumbersome set of entanglements is its effectiveness in curbing human proclivities for intra-species predation. Liberalism, the Western philosophy of freedom, has been fractured since at least the turn of the previous century by contradictions first documented by Sophocles. On one side is the responsibility to protect individuals from strangulation in (sometimes lacerating) legal/cultural thickets. On the other is the obligation to prevent the entire briar patch from being torched, dynamited, uprooted or herbicided by cunning foxes who frequently present themselves as liberal brethren. But democracy requires this bramble for without it “freedom” is only a license for the mutual idiocies of human parasitism and predation.
To an unknown extent humanity will continue to create the environments in which we will thrive, stagnate, or become extinct. To an unknown extent our ability to enable each other to endure and support the challenges of formal democracy will help determine whether we have a future worth surviving for. Comforting or not, this may well be the true meaning of “People Power”.
1If there’s ANYthing sensible, but not commonplace, in (especially) this exploration of language, it’s probably derived from the viewing of many YouTube videos featuring Noam Chomsky. (Everything stupid is, of course, my own responsibility.)
2An inadvertent typo that seems more appropriate uncorrected.
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