Democracy
I had a rather difficult colleague at Berkeley who could be quite annoying. Everything we did in our program, Peace and Conflict Studies, he would criticize on the grounds that it wasn’t “democratic.” Finally, one day I stopped him: “OK, what is democracy?” He looked a bit stunned, and after a while said weakly, “One man, one vote.”
He was causing us all that trouble for an idea he had never thought through. And he was not alone. In fact, the last world war that destroyed millions of lives went out under the banner, ‘making the world safe for democracy’ and made the world safe for nothing of the kind. If you’re going to kill for something, you better be clear what it is. (And if you really are, it won’t be worth killing for it! But that’s another story).
Let’s begin at the beginning. The word ‘democracy’ is from ancient Greek. It’s a typical compound of two other words, dēmos, literally ‘community,’ and kratos, ‘power, authority, rule.’ So, the rule of a region by its people 𑁋 the people as a whole. The head of any democratic regime worth the name is an administrator, not a ruler. This was the idea that inspired the Athenians two thousand years ago; and it resonates with many of us today. Here and there, it came alive, in the Mondragón cooperatives of the Basque region of northern Spain and many early populations that flourished before the invention of the nation-state.
When you reach ‘democracy’ in our world, however, it has been watered down to a rather empty label, drained of its concrete meaning, and an ideological trigger like ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ in that case can do much more harm than good. It can also be quite unstable: as one of democracy’s worst enemies, the Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, gleefully observed, “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction.”
Which is exactly what happened here. And it’s not hard to see why. When Thomas Jefferson adopted the Athenian ideal for the new nation of the United States he envisioned it as a kind of pyramid founded on an educated populace granting powers upwards through a series of representatives to the president. The pyramid was not for everyone, of course: slaves, women, and others were not able to participate. We have over the centuries greatly enlarged the franchise 𑁋 and lost sight of the fundamental premise. We do not, frankly, have an educated public that can reliably weigh, for example, the import of legislation even on their own interests.
The problem is that democracy was founded in a period of brilliant discovery. It was a political system that would express the sacred value, we might say, the core of divinity in the human being. In our language, it enabled the reservoir of pure consciousness within us that we express 𑁋 when conditions let us. The first of those conditions, of course, is to know it’s there. That’s where our current educational system, overshadowed as it is by the dis-educational system of the mass media, has let us down. The underlying assumption behind the thousands of commercial messages dinned into our consciousness every day is that we are physical beings that can be gratified 𑁋 not by relationships; not by serving others 𑁋 but by consuming.
There’s another way to look at this. The Athenian discovery of democracy was a big step in the discovery of the inherently sacred nature of the human person. One big step. Now the time has come to make another, arising from the same discovery: that the only real way to build a world faithful to that core is nonviolence. With that, as Gandhi saw, ‘democracy’ becomes real. The joke, Herr Goebbels, will be on you.