The Democracy Debate: Darling or Devil?
15 Feb 2010 4 Comments
in Democracy
PREFACE
Does it ring any bells? It would, I guess, for the most of us!
We talk so much about democracy. We believe in it. We stand by it. We invoke its principles when arguing about “rights”, “freedom”, “governance”, “leadership”, “justice” and what not. For a lot of us it’s almost a religion, a belief! But just like religion, the idea of democracy almost always goes unquestioned. We never rattle the ageless granny’s feet and ask what’s so charming about her, why she clicks, or why some people say bad, bad things about her, why yet some treat her as a worthless concubine, good only for one thing. She’s just our dear granny who’s always been around and we are so used to her charms and illnesses that, subconsciously, we’ve accepted them as a part of her. There seems to be nothing much left to question.
As philosopher Daniel Dennett would say, most of us just believe in belief rather than believe first hand.
For a change, unlike religion that I ‘ve royally ranted about in the past, I fully stand by Democracy. It’s a first hand belief. But ‘m still going to put it on the dissection table under the knife of rational strutiny! I admit, I might prove as much of an expert on democracy as would Paris Hilton on flying space shuttles. But after much introspection, I am going to give it a go.
What we usually don’t question is what we usually take for granted. And what we usually take for granted is what we usually don’t look outside of. Some lucky ones do get the chance though, sometimes unwillingly or even undeservingly. As did one of my dear friends recently ( willingly and deservingly though!) whose usually jet-setting between the Middle Eastern arab countries. Mesmerized by the wealth brought upon itself by the blessing of the unending abyss in its oil wells, my friend came back pretty impressed by the monarchy of Saudi Arabia (he hates the gulf’s airlines though as they reek of labour class gentry!) and made a case against democracy that it is inefficient and hypocritical. He would rather have us dispensed with it.
There was a point. Look at countries like China, South Korea, Mexico, the gulf countries. They started the race with us, each of us with our bowls in our outstretched hand, yet they are much more prosperous now, or much safer, or much more organised and much more livable, or a mix of these qualities, at least by the looks of them. There’s something common in all of them. Neither of them are proper democracies and never were.
India, although, champions the democratic principles in a much more religious way. What are we missing? Before I delve into democracy, I want to set the stage and the props.
SYSTEMS THINKING
I believe that society is a complex arena and a lot of us fall victim to our simplistic thinking. It’s always good vs bad, moral vs immoral, right vs wrong, black vs white. As we are becoming ever more cognizant of the inherent uncertainties of nature, and the intrinsic irrationality that suffuses from human free will, we are starting to realize that digital thinking is not what we need. We need a much more weighted approach which is introspective as well as empirical.
To give you an example of what I just said, I am going to tell you about a little local-train journey that I remember. With me was friend of mine who had just joined a prestigious bank after earning a prestigious masters degree from a prestigious B school and I was leaving her back to her 5 star hotel accommodation that her company had provided. We were discussing about her recent trip to China, the hitherto autocratic communist superpower, and I was curiously listening to her fresh insights & observations and the things that people talk about when they come back from their first trip abroad. Winding down the labyrinth of our talks, we came down to the point of what was wrong with our country. What were we missing on? I said people have to become more sensitized to the democratic process. It’s because we take our freedom as our birthright, as if it should be served to us on a golden platter everyday by god himself, and ignore our responsibilities like a huffing dog on the street while we are licking the ‘free’dom off our fingers. I asked her how many of us thought twice before buying a packet of biscuits on a local station, demanding a plastic bag to carry the stuff to our friends and in less than a minute, nonchalantly throwing the bag off to the tracks. I qusetioned why we couldn’t take the responsibility of keeping our own cities clean. Her answer, which was delivered in a serious and concerned tone, blew me away; she said if we did that, the economy would crumble. A million sweepers would become jobless!
Aaaaah.. the B schools! So basically, the statement translates to:
We should have crime, else police will become jobless.
We should have disease and suffering, else doctors and the entire drug industry will become jobless.
We should have stupidity & immorality, else the motivational speakers and the new age spiritual gurus will become jobless.
Yeah! We should have all of them together, else god will become jobless!!
It was an obviously bogus answer. You would be wondering what my reply was. Well, I was dumbstruck! I knew it was a flawed argument but it didn’t strike me immediately, why exactly. On my way back I mulled hard over the question. I was cursing my wits that I couldnt reply to her immediately. None of the BMC workers who clean our gutters live beyond fifty, yet argumentatively, he would anyway die of hunger if I didn’t pee on the road! It was a stupid dilemma and I knew for sure I was missing something.
But after an hour of hard thinking, I realised the fallacy. Filth, crime, disease, stupidity and immorality are not just temporary fluctuations in a system waiting to settle down to stability. They are a part of nature. They are in its design, as are lightning and hurricanes, and we can never completely get rid of them. We can, at best, just handle them. And handling is a process, which can be made ever more efficient. And in carrying out a process we need people! So nobody is becoming jobless. Efficiency is a two-pronged drug, it protects and it cures. I felt elated to imagine the sweeper on railway stations in a protective suit and equipment, his job being to keep a not-so-dirty station sparkling clean instead of just keeping a filthy station out of a state that wouldn’t need bio-terrorists to make a massacre, and not becoming a social and economic burden to the nation by harbouring terminal illnesses.
I realized that democracy too wasnt immune to such natural problems, actually the very same ones stated above, and it needed much more than just simplistic thinking that my friend and I, for a while, fell victim to. I realized we, the people outside of academia and scholarly circle, don’t reflect enough. We think we do but we don’t. I myself just reflect enough to realize that I don’t reflect enough.
Though ideologically democracy espouses the principles of freedom more than any other means of governance, it has also been its biggest impediment. Democracy has been criticised by many intellectuals over the ages. From Plato to Milton Friedman. Criticisms have been varied, the most important among them being irrationality of voters, inefficiency, political instability, short terms, mob rule, and popular rule only as a façade to mask the rule of the élite.
While I am not going to reinvent the wheel arguing about the boring pros and cons of democracy, I want to give this debate a new geometry. I want to go deeper into the whys behind the whys of intricate gears and levers of democracy. So I will attempt to show this whole complexity from a new angle from where things appear much clearer to me..
THE LENS OF FREEDOM
Like I said earlier too, I have realized that the greatest impediment of democracy is the same principle that forms the bedrock of its whole philosophy; freedom. As shown in the cartoon above, we are awful with handling freedom. And that’s exactly the point of my debate; the evolution of freedom.
The concept of freedom is a very tricky one and relatively new to the human race. We have always been slaves. Slave to nature, slave to religion, slave to the society, slave to the king or the queen, slave to our so-called leaders, and most of all slave to the manifold of our own knotty psychology and consciousness. If anybody has noticed, free will isn’t really that free. And, as a species, since we have spent so much of our evolutionary time being some or the other kind of slave, I contend that we are simply not psychology evolved to handle freedom. We find it difficult to steer ourselves through a maze of choices. Now, I am not saying that freedom is synonymous with choices but just to make a point, everybody has faced a dilemma with choice so its easier to relate to the topic this way.
What really is freedom by the way? I have never come across an absolute answer to this question. If you look in the dictionary for the word ‘freedom’ , you’ll find twenty different definitions and they all seem to be floating in a dimension of their own, only very seldom crossing each other at a common point. My only conclusion is that there is no absolute answer. And if there was to be one, it would be; There’s nothing like absolute freedom.
We have always been evolving towards greater freedom. We are more free than we ever were. The world now is full of choices, some of which were always there in a hypothetical space to which we didn’t ve’ access, and others which we have invented for ourselves. E.g. Women now call themselves liberated, in the sense that now they can decide their lives for themselves, earn their own living and spend it as they want, decide for themselves what they wear, their career, their boyfriend (or girlfriend, lately!), their spouse, how they raise their children etc. They have an equal say in everything, at least according to the law. That’s a radically different picture compared to the world that was 50 years back. Still we don’t feel free, not very often do we? That’s because freedom is not a close ended straight road to which we could all just say; See you at the last stop. Freedom is not something which will one day see itself reaching to some kind of a logical conclusion, when there’s no more freedom to be achieved and all the dilemmas are sorted out. I surmise that we will keep redefining freedom and rediscovering its meaning and form to no end. When I say we dont feel free I mean we still feel the viscosity, the friction of the path of freedom on which we’ll forever keep walking.
Absolute freedom, an apparition which has been talked about for centuries by poets and philosophers alike, is in my opinion a paradoxical concept by its own definition, especially considered in relevance to our topic of debate. Consider this simple reasoning; Suppose the humanity has attained total, absolute freedom. That means I have the freedom to kill you and you have the freedom to live! So who among the two of us would you think is free?
If you’re not convinced, I can go deeper on a metaphysical, philosophical level. Absolute freedom means ability to make a choice and act on it completely detached from the input, control, or otherwise influence of persons or society. That means if one claims to have attained absolute freedom, he claims to have detached his self from ‘causality’ i.e. he is no more influenced by causation nor is he the agent of causation to anyone else harbouring the power & privilege of absolute freedom. In such a case a sense of self would be lost since consciousness expresses itself as a memory of an ordered array of events, with causes & effects providing for the ‘order’ element as cause always precedes the effect and events can then be recorded by the mind on a timeline. Impotent causes and uncaused action will simply add up to an incoherent memory and the loss of awareness of the any direction of time, hence of self. To get a clearer picture of this, imagine a movie tape and imagine the information on that tape to be the whole of your life. Now suppose, any element of causation is removed from this movie, and the movie now is made of randomly jumbled 1-second frames as the linking element between the frames, causation, is now lost. Imagine playing this movie and watching it. Do you think it would make any sense? Earlier, the movie was a story, now its a mesh of crap. That’s what our consciousness would become if causality was totally eliminated from the world, and that’s exactly what absolute freedom entails for itself to manifest. Hence for somebody having absolute freedom, the freedom would really be absolute but it wont be his. The whole concept of he and his would thaw into nothingness, so the freedom which we call absolute couldn’t be ascribed to a living, conscious entity anymore. It just means since his actions would be uncaused, they would be random, indeterminate and hence meaningless. Absolute freedom not only does not exist, it cannot exist.
You must be wondering why I am drilling so deep into this ‘absolute freedom’ territory. Well, I am hunting for black gold which would come gushing out. My point here is that since absolute freedom does not exist. we have to question, keeping aside for a second our inescapable dependence on nature, what keeps us from reaching it. What keeps the check? Is it ingrained in the design of nature? Yes, I say; Its our Karma; Our reaction to causality ( from the fundamental level of which we are inescapable by the very design of nature), and the agent of further causation, resulting in an endless cycle. People take their democratic freedoms too much for granted and shoo away their responsibilities. It is utterly frustrating to read some rosy sounding philo-phony-sophers in the spiritual columns of newspapers saying that man’s ultimate goal is to attain absolute freedom. Agreed with the endless harp on freedom but what about its limitations? We don’t learn enough about them. Neither through school, nor through our leaders and gurus.
Purely from a system’s perspective, any system which is not absolute and operate under some laws, has to have its checks and balances. With all the parameters set properly within a body of laws, the system tends to be naturally stable as one parameter keeps a check on the other and vice-versa, like the classic example of crabs in a jar pulling the escapists down. Laws can be flexible but only to an extent. I see democracy as a fenced playground. Frolic as much as you will, but you’re not allowed to break the fence. You break the fence and a pack of howling wolves could barge in and devour you, as well as everyone else, alive. You could increase the playground area, but you would have to augment the fencing proportionately. So, like Spiderman said, “with great power comes great responsibility”. I would morph it to; with greater freedom comes greater responsibility since freedom is nothing but power to act to your own will. We can have as much freedom as we want, provided we are ready to handle the baggage of responsibilities that tends to balance our newfound freedom by tying us down in some way or the other.
THE HIROSHIMA
A radioactive uranium atom takes a hard stance on absolute freedom. It fissions into smaller atoms indeterministically, spontaneously, uncaused by any external agent, accompanied by a huge amount of energy ( for a single atom). Tinker with this freedom just a teeny-weeny bit in a considerable mass (technically called the critical mass) of uranium, and what you get are a thousand splendid suns. Right over your head! You get a Hiroshima!
In a democracy, freedom does not just mean being free to do what you want. It also means making yourself free and willing to take the full advantage and use to the fullest the rights and opportunities guaranteed by the government and the constitution. This second aspect of freedom requires us to break free of the shackles of ignorance, fear, misinformation, gullibility, herd mentality, groupism & narrative fallacies. I’ve borrowed the last term from Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan. Taleb shows how, in an attempt to make the world around us more and more predictable by consuming ever more information, we end up messing things so badly by trying to build a definite narrative around the information. What about the information that’s hidden, unseen or unknown? And there’s always a lot of it. Always! We have to ask ourselves how that changes the narrative, the story.
Since, as discussed earlier, all the cripples stated above are natural and given. We will always have irrational voters with impressionable minds, especially in the wake of factors like poverty and religious sentiments. There’s no dearth of incompetent leaders either. What do we do then? Before attempting to answer that, I must say that while thinking along these lines I ve been mighty impressed by Taleb’s ideas and philosophy. He propones the philosophy of empirical skepticism. Being a trader and playing dodgeball in a highly unpredictable world of free markets, he has made himself a lifelong investigator of randomness (though I am not trying to make any comparison between social and economic randomness). He says; If you cannot avoid it, expect it. The question here is, who should be at the expecting end? The public or the political parties?
Irrational, misinformed, ill-informed and, especially, hungary voters jeopardize the democratic process. But a lot more dangerous can be the poisonous tree that sprouts from that little, apparently inconsequential (the “what difference does one vote make” mentality), malignant seed that such voters plant in the ballot box. Just like other natural occurences, there always are people who harbour a grotesque idea or a philosophy and don’t ever excuse themselves to think outside their little box. Till such people are contained within the masses, they’re harmless like the little radioactive uranium atoms I mentioned above. But when we make them leaders, accumulate around them a critical mass of followers and artificially trigger the would-have-been-spontaneous decay with the chant of ”hail Hitler”, the chain reaction starts and BOOM! What you get is a Hiroshima! It’s just that instead of radioactivity, it’s the political, economic, intellectual and moral shit that persists for years from one such explosion. Half-baked notions of democracy in the minds of people further allow these so-called leaders to take the idea of freedom too seriously and too far, who get seduced by the goal of absolute freedom, but only for themselves ( And I have shown pretty well above that absolute freedom can never be personalized. Little Uranium atoms have absolute freedom but its impersonal and its expression; inconsequential). They hijack democracy to express their “democratic right” to propone and live their freakish whims, supported by a mass of hypnotized followers. Radical notions are infectious. With a mass following and a little wits, these leaders soon become dictators.
Coming back to the question I posed above; who should be at the expecting end? Democracy is a form of governance that puts the least tax on exercise of free will but from it results a torrent of irrationality and stupidity on one hand and blatant rape of power on the other. Anyone who’s read Orwell would understand it better. Within the sphere of their roles, leaders definitely are important but within a system, I dont like to see them as more than our elected representatives. To distinguish them from the public would be to call them rulers instead of leaders. So I would say it should be the public. More interesting would now be to ask; Who should be at the end of public expectation? (Remember that we are talking of expectation in the sense of expecting what cannot be avoided, not expecting what we desire) The answer, unfortunately, is usually taken to be ’the leader’ or ‘the ruling party’. So should we expect since indolence and corruption of our leaders cannot be avoided, we should expect it and see what can be done? No, just forget about the leader for a while. Since I just eliminated the leader, I would say it has to be the public itself. The public has to be aware of its own debilitations and expect that it would be irrational, irresponsible and corrupt and then see what can be done. The leader is nothing but our own extension. As the public, so its leaders. I like to think that once this happens, the leader part would largely get taken care of by itself.
SO, WHAT CAN BE DONE?
I would very frankly say that I dont know. Since it’s a utopian fantasy to have a society of perfectly moral and responsible citizens, its difficult to say what’s the way out. But as they say; “You may be disappointed if you fail, but you’re doomed if you don’t try”. The step before the first step as a society would be to start thinking holistically. When we say a problem cannot be done away with, we only mean it cannot be done away with completely.
Coming to the first step, I think it has to start with education, but not just formal education. Education has to be our cultural artifact, a lifelong process. The first objective of such education has to be to sensitize, not to teach. Teaching, to most people, is resonant with rote learning, a task, like learning the commandments of religion that are forever debatable and conveniently forgotten. Education on the other hand is something that one absorbs, mulls about and get effected by.
I have often pondered over the dichotomy between the use of the word ‘our’ and ‘your’ in school textbooks. The latter is seldom used while being taught about civics or economics in school. ‘Our’ country, ‘our’ economy, ‘our’ environment, ‘our’ responsibilities! The word ‘our’, in my opinion, has been overused on the pretext of humility and to convey the thought that the sayer is not any different from the listener and not exempt from the same responsibilities.
While all of the above ‘ours’ are definitely our’s, the word ‘our’ paints a different impression of its meaning when being taught. The word ‘our’ becomes a sea of masses where ‘my‘ becomes an implicit, undermined and diminutive entity. Think of the phrase ‘my responsibility’. Where does that ‘my’ stand in a billion ‘ours’? I can hardly even see it. An ‘our’ devoid of ‘my’ is a sum of a huge number of zeroes, a zero itself. ‘Your’ on the other hand singles out a person. It has a singular existence. It points very bluntly to you. That’s an example of the linguistics of the script of sensitization.
I like to think of democracy as a complex machine, a robot maybe, with its remote control in our hands. Knowing that we are not psychologically evolved to handle freedom, to intuitively process information and expecting we would make mistakes, what should be our mitigation plan? Well, we werent evolved to operate robots or other complex machines either! But we are damn good at using them. We are very careful with our expensive, fully automatic washing machines. We don’t run them like arcade games. Why? Because we realize their worth, they come with a user manual and we get a demo. We have to not just create a user manual of democracy but create a real good demo too to sensitize people, to make them realize not the worth but the pricelessness of ‘freedom’. We also have to take care that this demo be interactive.
Movies and TV campaigns are doing wonderfully at this but they are not interactive. I think this is a job that can be done to a magnificent level by schools! Today we are in a dire need of good role models, especially the children. Since academia is the one social institution that mulls the most over matters of sociology, morality & ethics, I think the rebuilding should start from there. I grew up disillusioned with my teachers as most of them were payed robots imparting knowledge, not education. Teaching, not educating. Teachers would ve’ to fill up the vacancies for role models before anyone else!
Marching on, given all the sensitizing, we should still expect there’ll be people who still wont learn. Those who’ll still spit on the roads, fling the plastic bag out of the moving taxi, vote for the wrong guy and not give a damn about any of it. Or worse, those who will take democracy into their own hands like the Senas in Mumbai who can turn a vibrant cosmopolitan city into such a wretched, deplorable mess and trample on the freedom of freedom itself. What do we do now? We hedge our bets on those who do learn and let those who dont learn be the scapegoats, who tread the path of radicalism and make of themselves living examples of what not to be. Thats my personal philosophy; Its more important to know what not to do or what not to be. The rest is all experimentation, exploration and luck!
Ultimately, for any of this to happen, the law has to be made almighty and its implementation much, much stricter. With people willing to be sensitized and learn, I hope we will see it happening in the future. There are examples to be hopeful; The women’s rights movement, legal stance on homosexuality, the pink chaddi campaign!
I have to admit though, that change in a country like India will be gradual. One mistake our founding fathers made was to declare the country a democracy while keeping the economy under the autocratic government control. Economic liberalization has come very late to us. Journalist Fareed Zakaria, in his book The Future Of Freedom has argued that democracy works best in states that are constitutionally liberalized. He says democracy leavens better from liberalizing autocracies than regimes which mix election and authoritarianism. That explains China better I guess. Of course, we cannot expect 500 million hungry and hurt Indians to listen to reason. Sensitization does not work on someone hardened up to hunger and hatred.
I think that from the government side, this would be the most important step. The economy has to be in concordance with democratic principles; Free markets governed by strict rule of law. Many governments have long feared free-markets for their assumed potential to create a dog-eat-dog world and subjugation of the poor and the under-privileged. I am no expert on the subject of free markets (who is, by the way?) but I support the contention of Steve Forbes, the CEO of Forbes Inc. that free markets are governed by the Invisible Hand of demand & supply which bring millions of human beings around the world together into a network of mutual cooperation as parts of the supply chain without any need of a central planner as brilliantly illustrated in the essay I, Pencil: My Family Tree by the educator and the thinker Leonard Read. Ultimately, it’s based on trust & freedom. Isn’t that what democracy is about? Forbes says if the government restricts itself to, and take very seriously, the task of playing a watchdog, making sure that everybody plays fair, watch out for financial bubbles like those in the 2007-08 crash ( the first hand responsibility of which Forbes puts on the US government for excessive printing of currency and fostering an environment where greed was natural to run wild), not indulge in too much of artificial tinkering within the economy, any disparities created within the economy eventually soothes out and the system is self-equilibrating. My point here is that the dose of socialism, which probably was needed during the poverty ridden conditions of the time of independence, has gone on too long and has only bred corruption, within the government itself, more than anything else. Let the citizens be the owners of the enterprise of nation building, let them be the primary stakeholders, let them share the risk, let them capitalize on that or let them fail and learn. Let the real democracy have its day in the sun!
THE VISION
Letting bygones be bygones, the only way is to look forward. The legendary Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli had argued on a cyclical theory of government where monarchies always decay into aristocracies, that then decay into democracies, which decay into anarchy, then tyranny, then monarchy. Left to its own devices, I guess this is probably how it would be, the gleaming example being Pakistan as it keeps vacillating between dictatorship and something resembling democracy. But today I would rather see democracy as in a process of evolution. Both human and societal.
Evolution is irreversible and is self-optimizing. Thanks to the information revolution, it’s not the same playing field anymore. We have as much information at our disposal as we want. Citizens can now take informed decisions, only they are not used to it. Globalization has further changed the scene. It has become the normalizing factor which maintains the equilibria of common denominators of the most popular ideas of humanity. Technology has already drastically altered the ideas of freedom of speech and the expression of ideas themselves. What more could prove that fact more than that you’re reading this blog. It’s still a mayhem but citizens, the common man, today has more power than he ever did. That fact cannot be contested.
The vision of democracy that I like to have is that of a not-so-near future. And a rather cheeky one, if I may opine. I would divine that two to three hundred years hence, the forms of governance that have existed till now would become fossilized. The world would become one giant, global organism with states and economies just being the organs. Technology is bound to play a huge role and not just in digitizing the voting process ( that is not even more than a decade away in advanced countries!) but in governance itself. The cripples of psychological evolution of freedom within human mind shall be done away with by the hyper-advanced networks of artificial intelligence that would exist then. Those who want to jump the gun and shout we’ll become slaves of technology and that history repeats itself, I would want to assure them that humans would have done much thinking after having watched the movie I-Robot! Well, I am no soothsayer but I’d like to believe it would be a symbiotic relation between man and technology. I am skeptical of how different both these terms will remain!
There are two other major things I still am skeptical about in this audacious future of mine. One is the evolution of justice. Second is whether I’ll be remembered as a great thinker of the past or forgotten as a drunk, delusioned blogwriter. But well, you are not forgotten as anything. You’re just forgotten. The second one really bothers me!
