Democracy

When one sweeps their mind clean of many of the concepts that have been instilled in one's pattern of thought over the years by a globalized society possessing a set of fundamental assumptions, taking great care to address, to the greatest degree humanly possible, the bare facts of experience in their raw essence, it becomes startling to observe the degree to which the idea of Democracy is worshipped today.

It is asserted as though it is some sort of universal moral/political law, naturally existing as such, and so it is very rarely itself dissected and justified. "But that is anti-democratic", or the like, can be heard prematurely killing numerous debates. 'Real' universal happenings, such as the laws identified by physics, are those forces embedded in nature which just are, and which cannot themselves be questioned. The force of gravity and the force which binds atoms together, known as the 'strong force', for instance, are all universal happenings, meaning they apply, for all practical purposes, anywhere and everywhere and cannot be questioned. They are by their nature necessary and immutable.

However, there are no equivalents in the realms of morality or politics - because all such notions are completely subjective and man made. No universal moral or political laws 'exist', and therefore no theories in those realms should be taken for granted. Today, one is usually dismissed immediately for questioning the suitability of democracy. I think this is wrong. Democracy is taken as a given, when in fact it has no objective basis what so ever. Furthermore, its subjective basis seems, to this writer, to be misguided.

Democratic theory has been parroted in the -modern- western world since the Enlightenment period. That period of European thought was all about discovering the universal traits that exist in the universe (in the human being, the physical universe etc). The thing identified as existing, universally, in all people, was their faculty of reason. The concept of 'reason' is a slippery one, but it has something to do with grasping effects and their causes, or alternatively, grasping the laws of logic which are apparently infallible throughout the Universe.

People were encouraged to break from the traditional sources of authority such as the church and monarchy, and to work reality out for themselves. Apparently the *potential* ability of all people to grasp effects and their causes vindicated the notion that they should lead society themselves, all of them, 'equally'. No one person's vote would be worth more than another's.

This might sound nice at first, but it ignores two points. Firstly, the fact that one person is often more developed in their faculties than another, and secondly that many people do not care about the dynamic and holistic issues that they find themselves voting for or against once every four years. So what? Well this results in nothing less than one intelligent and well researched vote being cancelled out and ruled obsolete by one ignorant vote.

Alarm bells should be raised considering that our popular current affairs shows on television are clogged with light weight segments like 'the worst neighbors in the country', while our most popular newspapers often struggle to raise themselves above the depth level of a tabloid magazine.

Moreover, in our modern time of highly specialized labor can we really expect that all people have the time and breadth needed to devote themselves to political and social issues?

In contrast to Ancient Athens, the era and place that originally spawned state democracy, the average voter in our modern democracy is engaged with some form of narrowly specialized job all day and this era of paid employment is typically preceded by time spent in narrow fields of education in preparation for our narrow fields of employment.

Consider the citizen, male as he was, in Ancient Greece who spent much less time at work for himself and whose education was not nearly as specific and individualistic as in modern times. It was concerned, not with entry into some specific field of employment, but with developing the whole (man) in all his virtue.

This reflects the preoccupation held by Ancient Greeks with life beyond the individual. For the Greek citizen "was essentially social...Religion, art, games, and discussion of things - all these were needs of life that could be fully satisfied only through the polis (city-state)...Moreover, he wanted to play his own part in running the affairs of his community"1.

I do not think it is a coincidence that a political theory like democracy sprang up in Ancient Greece. As well as experiencing a culture that revolved around civic pride, the voters were exclusively the men of the polis: many of them kept slaves and their wives managed all the domestic affairs, leaving each of them with time and energy to devote themselves to the society.

The reality of modern life is much different to the utopian idea that everyone is equal in their reasoning abilities. Similarly, the reality of our culture is at logger heads with the democratic premise that all modern 'citizens' care about the realm of life beyond entertainment and the individual.

Besides the further fact that not all people are equal in their abilities but that paradoxically all votes are considered equal, democracy is slightly absurd because there exist no cultural obligations related to logic/argument, politics, and society.

By David.

1 Kitto, H.D.F. (1951) 'The Greeks', Penguin Books, Middlesex, pp. 141