People often remember a well-known quotation for the wrong reasons. A good example is Hamlet’s phrase: “More honour’d in the breach than the observance”. The modern interpretation, invariably by people who have little knowledge of Shakespeare and no understanding of the context in which the phrase is uttered, takes ‘honour’d’ merely to mean ‘obeyed’ or ‘observed’, and it is used as a rather pretentious way to describe a rule or ritual that is usually ignored. However, the original context makes it clear that Hamlet actually did consider it honourable not to follow a custom.It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.Winston Churchill.
Churchill’s views on democracy have been similarly misrepresented. His best-known quote on the subject is frequently taken to be a backhanded compliment towards democracy, but it can also be seen as a cynical admission that democracy isn’t quite as good an idea as its proponents claim it to be. It has limitations, one of which was also pinpointed by Churchill:
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.Given that Churchill was a man who chose his words carefully, we can be sure that they mean what he intended them to mean, so it’s probably worth looking at ‘all the others that have been tried’. I’ll start by going back 10,000 years or so to the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution, and the advantages accruing to human social groups who abandoned hunter-gathering for food production based on arable farming. The key advantage of such systems is that not everyone needs to be involved in food production, thus freeing some members of a social group to specialize in a range of other activities that will ultimately be beneficial to the development of that group, such as pottery, carpentry and, later, metallurgy.
This would have worked well in villages and small towns, although it would also have involved someone taking charge and making the decisions about who did what. With the rise of city-states in the Middle East, the Indus valley and China, this division of labour would have eventually given rise to a problem: irrigation agriculture means that a relatively small proportion of a population is required to produce food, so it would have become possible for some men to enter essentially useless occupations such as that of a priest, philosopher or soldier.
Another by-product of this move to cities supported by systematically organized agriculture was writing. The motive behind the development of all writing, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Babylonian cuneiform to Chinese characters, is the need to keep records, although it quickly became apparent to those in charge that this new invention could usefully be employed for self-aggrandisement. And writing also had another use: it separated those who could read and write, an educated elite, from those who could do neither of these things and were thus dependent on the elite for instructions. It should be noted that this state of affairs persisted in Europe until the Reformation: the Bible used by the Roman Catholic church was in Latin, which only the priest understood.
However, the crucial function of writing has been the ability to pass information on to succeeding generations. We can see how difficult this process can be if we examine a culture without writing, such as that of the Australian Aborigines, who did develop an elaborate system for passing on their knowledge. Unfortunately, this was lore relating only to survival in the hostile environment that they found themselves in. There was no room in such a system for knowledge that might transcend the situation of its progenitor, like Euclid’s geometry or the philosophy of Confucius.
Writing also gives us a record of who did what and when it happened. Of course, the further back we go the sketchier that picture becomes, but the paradigm for governance in the earliest civilizations seems to have been a more or less despotic monarchy backed up by military might. In fact, the very raison d’être of the early empires seems to have been warfare and conquest, and the most rapacious of these, the Roman Empire, in retrospect can be seen as little more than a gigantic extortion racket enforced by a huge standing army. This is why, in the end, it collapsed, bankrupt. However, echoes of this tradition continued well into the twentieth century, and we may yet find that the tradition is not extinct.
While writing propels the intellectual heart of a culture, it is through technology that a culture is usually judged to have advanced. From machines used to raise water to irrigate fields to the earliest uses of the wheel and the forging of weapons of war, the men whose job it was to make these objects would have, from practical experience, developed ways to improve the end-product. And, where there was a need, to make new products. It is my hunch that such innovations were far more frequent under ‘liberal’ regimes where practical men were left to get on with their jobs and saw a personal benefit in turning out better, more efficient products. However, despite the degree of personal freedom that this scenario implies, such a regime cannot be regarded as democratic in any modern sense. The concept and the word ‘democracy’ derive from Attic Greek, and they commemorate political arrangements in Athens in the fifth century BC, but these arrangements were not genuinely democratic, specifically because they excluded women, and fifth-century Athens, like other city-states of the time, was a slave-owning society.
At the same time, in China, a different political system was being developed. Its architect was Confucius. The Confucian system is a hierarchical system, with the emperor at the top of the pyramid and women at the bottom, but although this form of social organization bears a striking resemblance to mediæval feudalism in Europe, it is as ludicrous to suggest a connection here as it is to conclude that any modern ‘democracy’ has been influenced by Athens in the fifth century BC.
While feudalism can be regarded as the pinnacle of organization for a society that is based ultimately on agriculture, for those at the bottom of the pile, conditions were little different from outright slavery. Nominally, a serf could rely on the lord of the manor for protection, but it was a one-sided arrangement in which the serf had no say. And underpinning the entire system was religion: in Europe in the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic church had almost as much authority as the state, with separate courts in many countries to try ecclesiastical malefactors and its own system of taxation. The practice of giving one-tenth of one’s income to the church is still encouraged in the modern era by fundamentalist Protestant sects, which promote the giving of tithes as a religious duty.
For most of the period during which agriculture was the foundation of a society, there was a competing form of social organization, one that was constantly in conflict with settled agriculturalists. Nomads, especially the horsemen of Central Asia, didn’t have cities, towns and villages to protect, and they were frequently belligerent towards neighbouring civilizations. However, nomadism is ultimately a dead end: after his grandfather Genghis Khan had conquered much of China and Central Asia, Kubilai Khan completed the conquest of the former and settled down as emperor of a new dynasty. Descendants of another Mongol, Tamerlane, founded the Mughal Empire in northern India, while the Israelites forsook their wanderings to settle down in Canaan, although in this case they constructed an elaborate myth to explain how and to justify why they had done so given that 'the promised land' was only ’flowing with milk and honey' because someone else was already farming there.
Throughout this period, information continued to be disseminated by writing, a slow and laborious process where large amounts of information were involved. And it remained the case that few people could read what was being written, partly because the amount of written material available was small. This changed in 1439 with the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. It is true that woodblock printing had been developed in China a thousand years earlier, but Gutenberg’s crucial innovation was the use of movable cast-metal type, which offered improved flexibility and the capability to turn out more printed material more quickly.
Printing turned out to be only the first event in a period of upheaval and change in Europe that took more than three centuries to unfold. The prime mover of these changes was Martin Luther, whose challenge to the authority of the Roman Catholic church triggered the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty-Years War. Encouraging people to read the Bible for themselves in their own language rather than relying on the official interpretation provided by a priest may have seemed intellectually liberating, but during Luther’s lifetime, William Tyndale was burned at the stake for heresy, his ‘crime’ being to translate the Bible into English. Religion is essentially anti-democratic, because there is no room for individualism.
Of course, the previous statement begs a crucial question: what is democracy? In technical terms, democracy is rule by the demos, the people, but as I’ve already pointed out, the original demos excluded women and slaves. The interesting point here is that every country likes to pretend that its system of governance is democratic. Why else would the former East Germany style itself ‘the German Democratic Republic’, or North Korea pretend to be ‘the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’, when by any conceivable definition neither would qualify as a democracy?
The usual criteria for defining a democracy aren’t much more enlightening:
- The ‘rule of law’: whatever laws a polity has chosen to enact, they apply to everybody.
- An independent judiciary: judges must have no political allegiances.
- A free press: it is of crucial importance that the news media is free to criticize the actions of political leaders.
- A non-violent mechanism for removing political leaders, such as regular elections in which everyone over a specified age has a say in the outcome.
Also, the ‘rule of law’ is a widely misunderstood concept. That no one is above the law, that the law applies to all, regardless of status, is the popularly understood definition of the concept. However, for it to be genuine, the rule of law requires much more than this. What, for example, is the role of the police in a society that aspires to be democratic? When Sir Robert Peel, as British home secretary, established the Metropolitan Police in 1829, he would have been aware that the move was deeply unpopular with large sections of London’s population, which is why the roles and duties of individual policemen were defined so closely in a policing model that came to be known as ‘policing by consent’.
The phrase ‘regular elections’ also comes with an important caveat. In the UK, for example, it’s possible for a political party to gain a huge majority in the House of Commons despite securing less than 40 percent of the votes cast in an election. This is the inevitable result of the so-called first-past-the-post system, which is egregiously anti-democratic. The USA has a similarly anti-democratic system in its electoral college, which has the bizarre effect of making the opinion of a rural voter worth twice that of a city-dweller. This is why, despite securing 3 million fewer votes in the last presidential election than his rival, Donald Trump came out on top.
The fact that Trump is a career criminal who belongs in prison isn’t relevant to the democracy debate, except that he appears to believe that US laws don’t apply to him. In addition, he has violated #2 by recommending a blatantly unsuitable candidate for the US Supreme Court, and #3 with his endless tirades against the mainstream news media as ‘fake news’. I predict that should he be convicted in the current impeachment saga—and he should be, on the evidence that I’ve seen—he will not go quietly, thus also violating #4. In other words, Trump is a demagogue, not a democrat.
He won’t be convicted though, because for this to happen two-thirds of the Senate has to vote in favour, and thanks to another anti-democratic feature of the US electoral system—that every state returns two senators, regardless of population—the Republican Party will always have enough senators to block any move to convict.
At this point, it should be obvious that democracy is a chimera. While some countries are not democratic by any conceivable yardstick—Russia and China are obvious examples—neither India nor Pakistan qualify according to the criteria that I outlined above, despite the former enjoying the label ‘the world’s largest democracy’. Try being a Muslim in a country run by Hindu nationalists! Or a Christian in Pakistan, where blasphemy is a capital offence. It’s the baleful anti-democratic influence of religion again.
However, it’s the attitude of ordinary citizens that ultimately determines a country’s ‘tendency’. The result of the Brexit referendum three years ago was a victory for xenophobia and intolerance, both of which are antithetical to democracy. There is no reason to believe that the ‘blood and soil’ nationalism that inspired the Leave vote and the election of Donald Trump will disappear anytime soon.
further reading
Democratic Deficit
Send in the Clowns
I think the word originates with Aristotle, but then it disappeared from political vocabulary until the 18th century. It was never used by the 17th century Puritan radicals, or by the 18th century rabble-rousing troublemaker John Wilkes (nor did he ever use the word "dictatorship", which had also vanished from use). Rousseau revived the word in his "Social Contract", but he used it to mean what we would call "direct democracy" (all the villagers meeting under a tree to make decisions), and pointed out that this was only feasible in very small states. The British system he called "Elective oligarchy". John Stuart Mill preferred the term "Representative government", thinking "Democracy" to be too imprecise in meaning. In the 19th century, "Democracy" was often a term of abuse rather than praise: Queen Victoria is said to have dubbed Gladstone "The mad democrat"!
ReplyDeleteThank you for such a detailed comment. I don’t pretend to be an expert on this subject, I’ve merely expressed my opinion, so your words should help to stimulate a debate.
Delete