Future of Democracy

[The_Rorschach]

There are five criteria that mark a democratic process: voting equality, effective participation, enlightened understanding, control of the agenda, and inclusion of all adult members in collective decisions. These five criteria make the democratic process fully consistent with the logic of political, if not individual, equality. It is intrinsically important that this be made clear when discussing it in a classroom environment, in order to illustrate exactly how unwieldy such a form of government is to implement. However, when it comes to instruction, I believe Democracy should be viewed in a historical context, as it has no place in the world's future. If one studies their history, they will be unable to help but notice that even from its very conception in the early 1900s, democracy found itself almost at once on the defensive. The Great War exposed the myth of guaranteed peace for what it was and shattered the aged structures of false security and imposed order by unleashing dogs of war whipped into frenzy by the angry proponents of revolution. Not revolution for democracy, but against it. Bolshevism in Russia, Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, militarism in Japan uniformly despised, denounced and destroyed individual rights and the processes of self-government, and they did so with the full support of their citizens. In America, there was the Great Depression, which, if nothing else, debased the myth that democracy would guarantee prosperity.

Not yet thirty years into the century and democracy seemed a pitiful concept, rendered spiritless, paralyzed and ineffectual. Universal contempt for Democracy resonated amongst the educated elite and the average citizen alike, parliamentary discussion was viewed with disdain, seen as both bourgeois civility and outright cowardice. In 1940, a book was published by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a bestseller which proclaimed totalitarianism The Wave of the Future. Within she wrote of a "new, and perhaps even ultimately good, conception of humanity trying to come to birth." Hitlerism and Stalinism were merely "scum on the wave of the future . . . The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it." By 1941, the number of democracies could be numbered in less than a few moments, and though now "For the first time in all history," as President Clinton declared in his second inaugural address, "more people on this planet live under democracy than dictatorship," but that will not remain true if the political, economic, and moral failures of democracy perpetrate themselves into the 21st century, as it did in the twentieth. Unless democracy is able to construct a humane, prosperous, and peaceful world, it will invite the rise of alternative creeds apt to be based, like fascism and communism, on flight from freedom and surrender to authority. Already, I find myself already embracing such ideals myself, how much longer will it be until others discover what is lacking within society as it stands now?

"The problem of the twentieth century," W.E.B. Du Bois observed in 1900, "is the problem of the color line." That line exists a hundred years later. One might attempt to give credit to democracy for having abolished slavery, but in truth, the slaves were freed by the industrial revolution which made slave labor obsolete, not by the laws implemented by then President Lincoln. It was not the democratic process which would give western countries influential hegemony, nor that ultimately lead to their triumph in World War II. Rather, it was the rise of technology. Technology was responsible for the birth of the printing press, the compass, the steam engine, the corporation, and the other innovations that laid the foundation for capitalism, hence western dominance, and in time fostered increased rationalism, individualism, and democracy. Initial advances were erratic, intermittent and slow. Within a short span of time it became institutionalized. "The greatest invention of the nineteenth century," observed Alfred North Whitehead, "was the invention of the method of invention." Yet, while initially technology was used a proponent of democracy, it is becoming its adversary, though few realize it as yet. The computerized world we live in today poses problems which cannot be denied or overcome, whereas the Age of Industry created an influx of occupational opportunities, the Age of Information threatens to destroy more jobs than it creates, leaving an almost omnipotent elite in control. One needs look no further than the Patriot Act than to see a new age coming, like the tide. An age of totalitarianism perhaps.

Self-government, individual rights and equality before the law are European inventions, as are the egalitarian myth we created and venerate to this day. In current headlines we see a rise in Asian independence, nations who refuse to bargain, barter or compromise on issues such as nuclear proliferation, trade tariffs and peaceful discourse. Nations which spy, sabotage, and undermine western democracies wherever possible. The Asian tradition, we are told, values the group more than the individual, order more than argument, authority more than liberty, solidarity more than freedom, and it that manner of things which will ultimately, perhaps, prevail over the well intended European political ideologies. How then, should we view democracy? I would say a post mortem examination is appropriate.