The threat to democracy

The other day a colleague asked me to present a proposal for him at a meeting because I supposedly was an “expert at democracy”. I demurred in the face of this description, but afterwards thought that I should have pointed out to him that the notion of an “expert in democracy” is a contradiction in terms, because the authority implied by such a description is unattainable as far as “democracy” is concerned. Why should this be the case? Can’t “democracy” as a form of government be known thoroughly, and mastered pragmatically or in practice? I don’t think so, at least not in a conclusive manner.

A clue to the reasons why this is the case is afforded by Jacques Derrida’s puzzling remark, that “democracy is always still to come”, which appears to suggest that it is an elusive ideal. Once one starts thinking about it, however, it makes perfect sense, provided one understands what it is that democracy attempts to achieve in political terms, under ever-changing historical circumstances, and moreover, as instantiated by finite, fallible human beings (instead of algorithmically governed machines). In Multitude (2005), Hardt and Negri describe democracy as the “government of the people by the people”, and also point out that it is a system of governance that works “from the bottom up”. Even if one does not complicate the matter by considering what is implied by Rousseau’s description of the “people” as sovereign (analogous, one would assume, to the erstwhile “sovereignty” of the king in a monarchy), with its connotations of supremacy and absolutism, on closer inspection these descriptions already suggest that democracy is anything but a simple affair.

Compare democracy with a monarchy, for instance, where the latter is a system of one ruler governing a populace — the people — with or without the assistance of advisors of various stripes. Here it is not difficult to conceive of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, given their clearly defined difference. But in the case of “democracy” the ruler is also the ruled, which is, to say the least, paradoxical. The way in which modern states have attempted to overcome this difficulty, namely through the principle of one person, one vote, within a system of multi-party democracy, amounts to a division being introduced into “the people”. The effect, one would assume, is that a certain number of people — the “majority” — would then rule “the people”. But again, it is not that simple, because “the majority” is not synonymous with “the people” (but at best only part of the people), and our definition says that democracy is the “rule of the people by the people”.

To aggravate matters, given the large number of citizens in contemporary democracies, there is no “direct” democracy here, but democracy by representation, in some or other parliamentary or congressional form. Why should this be a problem? Simply because it makes of the supposed nature of democracy as the “rule of the people by the people” even more of an ever-receding ideal. It is for this reason that Hardt and Negri talk of a “crisis of representation” in Multitude. Not only does majority rule create the opportunity for the interests of minorities to be minimised or ignored, but even in systems such as the South African, where a proportional representational system attempts to address this problem to a certain degree, neither the majority, nor minorities have any guarantee that their putative “representatives” in national or in provincial parliament really represent their interests at any given time, instead of largely pursuing their own personal and class interests instead. (It is more likely that the representatives of minority parties would attempt to represent their constituents’ interests, simply because they are in opposition to the governing party, and have to be seen to do so, lest they disqualify themselves as alternative to the government from the outset.) The large number of service delivery protests in South Africa is symptomatic of citizens’ dissatisfaction concerning the question of adequate representation of their interests by their so-called representatives, and several commentators have of late questioned whether the latter can truly be regarded as articulating or representing the “will of the people”, instead of simply imposing their own “will” on the people. This makes a mockery of the idea of democracy, of course, as the preceding discussion shows, and marks the first threat to democracy — one that constantly haunts it, although it is more pronounced at historical times when political and economic forces combine to undermine the representativity of the representation of the people by their so-called representatives.

The second threat to democracy concerns the economic and political forces referred to above — forces that are at present converging on democracy with a vengeance. One of the symptoms of this consists in the alarming dwindling of economic and political support for the humanities at universities, apparently because of the naively erroneous notion, that the only thing that matters today, is the economic bottom line, and therefore it is sufficient to support mainly, if not only, the natural sciences and technological disciplines, which supposedly feed directly into the economy. Needless to say, people who believe this, reveal their ignorance of history — modern natural science developed after the rediscovery of Plato’s mathematically oriented philosophy (after the Aristotelian late middle ages), which encouraged a mathematical interpretation of nature. Galileo’s famous saying, that if you want to know Mother Nature, you have to understand her language, which is mathematics, reflects his debt to Plato. This belief is itself embedded in Plato’s encompassing philosophy of forms, and it should therefore be clear that philosophy played an important part — and still does — in the generation of ideas that are valuable beyond the confines of philosophy itself.

The point is that if humanities and social sciences such as philosophy, literature, music, sociology, psychology, economics (ironically) and the like were to be neglected any more than they already are, all the sources of critical and creative thinking, which play an indispensable historical role in the promotion of civilised, and not merely technological development, would be smothered. Technology cannot think for itself; humans create it, think about it, and about its effects on society.

But why is the neglect of the humanities a threat to democracy? This, too, should be obvious. The humanities and the social sciences — because they are guided by what Habermas calls the hermeneutic-communicational interest of mutual understanding, and the critical interest of emancipation, respectively — are indispensable in providing the conceptual, critical means to understand and criticise political and economic tendencies that are in the process (as they are at present) of undermining the very foundation that made democracy possible in the first place. It is remarkable how fascism can so easily grow on democratic soil: the threat to democracy is simultaneously symptomatic of the resuscitation of a form of fascism, or at least authoritarianism.

Even more remarkable is the fact that it is economics, and not primarily politics, that comprises the source of this freedom-limiting development at present. In her recent book on the theme that I have addressed here (the link between the dual threat to the humanities and to democracy), Not for Profit, American philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes some pretty disturbing observations in this regard. According to Nussbaum, people who prioritise economic development over anything else:

“Will do more than ignore the arts. They will fear them. For a cultivated and developed sympathy is a particularly dangerous enemy of obtuseness, and moral obtuseness is necessary to carry out programs of economic development that ignore inequality. It is easier to treat people as objects to be manipulated if you have never learned any other way to see them. […] Art is the great enemy of that obtuseness, and artists (unless thoroughly browbeaten and corrupted) are not the reliable servants of any ideology, even a basically good one — they always ask the imagination to move beyond its usual confines, to see the world in new ways.”

The last part of her statement is crucial to my argument here — if democracy is to be rescued and strengthened, imagination (which flourishes in the humanities, or what she here calls the arts) has to be given the space for open, free and creative thinking, for these sciences to be expanded, instead of diminished. And one of the most important themes to be addressed there is the question with which I started this post, namely, how to put into practice the puzzling imperative, implicit in the idea of democracy as the “rule of the people by the people”, to ensure the optimal participation of the people in this rule, instead of simply yielding to custom by accepting that the present representational system is the best possible way to do this.

An excellent review of Nussbaum’s book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy needs the Humanities, by liberal arts professor Troy Jollimore is available here.