The Strength and Folly of Democracy

Canberra.
After yesterday's CCI Symposium, I've made the trip down to frosty Canberra for this year's ANZCA conference. We start this morning with the first conference keynote, by John Durham Peters, who begins by considering democracy as a political category - for a very long time, it has been seen as an impossible and preposterous, so for it to be seen as a sine qua non is remarkable.

There are various obstacles to democracy, of course: chiefly, scale and human nature. For the ancient Greeks, democracy had to be small - even Athens was seen as too large, and democracy was thought to be able to be workable only if all participants were able to get to know one another personally. For Plato, the ideal number of citizens for a functioning democracy was precisely 5040, in fact. At the same time, small size was also seen as making democracy unsustainable. So, democracy was seen as most workable where citizens could meet one another in political assemblies.

The second major obstacle perceived by early philosophers of democracy was human nature. A democratically constituted jury convicted Socrates - how could this happen, unless democracy lacked a conscience? Democracy was seen as fallible; people were seen as gullible and susceptible to demagogues and political seducers. In the US, Madison saw factionalism as the mortal disease of democracy, and that this was rooted in underlying human nature rather than in specific cultural contexts; his structural answer to this was the representative system which was able to handle scale and could filter and subdue popular passion to a manageable level. Others, like Dewey, saw a more educational answer - that people needed to be educated to democracy.

In the 19th century, a much deeper democratic culture came into being, and similar but new obstacles to democracy were pointed out - not scale, but exclusion, limiting what counted as 'the people' along class, race, and gender lines; not human nature as such, but egotism (the retreat from public participation into private pleasures, allowing for the emergence of benevolent despots). There were concerns about the loss of eccentricity for John Stuart Mill, for example, leading to a reduction in the diversity of opinions.

For the classical world, the medium of democracy was essentially speech; for modernity, it has been print, and newspapers assumed a key role in democratic thought - the printing press was inherently linked with democratic enlightenment. Overall, democracy means information; mass media have the power to homogenise by providing a uniform source of information. Today, old media are declining somewhat, but newspapers and especially the broadcast media still remain key structural elements of democracy.

In 1888, Dewey suggested that uniquely, democracy has a claim to a normative or ethical ideal; and that any true democracy would have to get down to the level of economics as well, addressing the distribution of access to the resources for material production. But what are the subtle dangers to democracy today?

First, documentation: how do our brainwaves behave in a Twitter age - if everything is documented and citizens can be journalists, if democracy depends on transparency and on public records, how can this be reconciled with the need in democracy for first drafts, for exploring possible options? Is the lack of mercy and solidarity, the constant hunt for politicians' gaffes, the Twitter-speed news cycle, undermining democracy? Knowledge is not simply the accumulation of information, but the sorting of the important from the irrelevant, and a newscycle in overdrive doesn't allow for this - democracy needs a tolerance for the rough draft..

Second, scandal culture: scandal has become one of the dominant features of news culture today; much of modern journalism is about the exposure of scandal and corruption. Scandal is one of the major ways that people are involved in political discourse, but it is a profoundly conservative genre: it is about the reinforcement of extant social morals. For a scandal to exist, explicit social or moral rules need to be violated - and indignation and outrage about scandal is not always a progressive gesture: while outrage is deeply connected with a struggle for social justice, indignation also hijacks all emotions and through the attendant posture of uncompromising righteousness and unerring superiority undermines constructive political participation. How we deal with our (fallen) celebrities also points to this Schadenfreude, which is dangerous for a democratic culture that relies on a knowledge of human fallibility and an ability to tolerate alternative positions.

Third, otherness and inclusion - today mainly in the context of immigration fears: how do borders and democracy, nation states and democracy fit together; should democracy rest upon diversity and international cooperation? Habermas's public sphere is a nationally homogenous one and based upon the exclusion of others; how can these others operate in a public sphere? (Habermas himself notes in his later work how the public sphere can be discriminatory of certain groups in society.)

Finally, can we believe democracy? It is impractical, idealistic, unacquainted with the failings of human nature; but its impossibility is the great thing about it, is its normative force. It is a form of government whose particular strength lies in its ability to cope with the inevitable failure of our best-laid plans. It reminds us of our great folly and teaches us to check ourselves; it needs not our faith but our tenderness, and is something to be embraced, not be embarrassed by. The same incidentally, also applies to the media which support it.

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