Where’s History Going Now?
I think it is almost deliberate, I hope so, as it makes it easier somehow, to understand the deep oddity that lies in the heart of democracy. That oddity, is, put simply, its lack of history; or better, a lack of history to call its own. Britain obviously only became a fully ‘working’ democracy (I mean one with universal suffrage and all that) after the First World War (i,e. a century or more after it became a nation state). Democracy then became naturalized because it was able aposteri to grab hold of the history which had allowed it to happen. The progress, the narrative, was then taken to be somehow inexorable, and democracy, somewhat illicitly, gained itself over 300 hundred years of history. It became accepted,
Now this is all very sweet (and itself perfectly natural, as what nations, or even what humans, are not performing pretty much the same task every day of their lives?) however in this case, there are two clear senses in which democracy has less right than other myths to such a history.
Firstly, and politically, if not philosophically the most troubling, one must ask what right Democracy, which claims to be the universal goal for history, has to make this mythological move? I mean, other myths can afford to be somewhat fluffy in their annexation of their own pasts, and their expectation that everyone else either will (or at least ought) to agree with them. (This is the stuff of colonialism). Where perhaps we are unique is the expectation that this ‘revelation’ is what the uninitiated were really aspiring to anyway (after all we know we always were), and so that all we have to do (like some Christian missionary) is to bring out that still small voice of conscience. People who therefore fail to ‘convert’ are somehow suspect and ‘not quite human’ (lo, the poor savages…). This ‘hope’ by itself might be dark enough, and thus far is little more than an extension of nineteenth century missionary activity. And yet what is a little different is the consequences we are likely to draw when (as is probably no real surprise), other peoples fail to quite adopt (or even worse, think Cuba, - wildly adapt) our own local political solution, that is democracy, to their own local purposes. This failure is of course by and large inevitable, and yet we have no real paradigm, beyond the worst kind of realpolitik for grasping it. We therefore condemn, ignore or forget, or even pretend, as the occasion suits us, or perhaps even randomly, which given the high historical destiny of democracy is somewhat strange… Of course the real problem here is that not only is there no ‘standard’ as to what a democracy should look alike, but even more problematically, the lack of the standard actually prevents any nice neat spectrum (from oppressed to free), which would fit in with the nice neat history we tell ourselves that it deserves. Democracy shatters into particularity and partiality (one can so very easily be just a little bit free) and it becomes almost impossible to have any very clear opinion about what to do about it. Or, far better, it becomes impossible to have an opinion beyond the high ‘ideal’ of what perfect democracy looks like (an ideal whose essence no doubt actively lies in its lack of meaning). The only other plausible spectrum which one could measure a democracy by, is the dark spectrum of oppression. This ‘spectrum’, is no doubt the best which the ‘high’ ideal can breed, and yet at the same time the ideal itself creates this spectrum, it also occludes its power to actively change anything (as the only solution allowed is the ideal democracy itself, which was caught up in the inception of the oppression in the first place).
To add to the complexity here, there is of course another element in modernity which is absolutely confused with democracy. I mean here, the Western lifestyle. But on this point the empirical evidence is very plain, no doubt much to the perplexity of the West, peoples can easily desire over consumption (greed, or better ‘high status’ certainly translates rather well across cultures), but have little or angled desires for democracy itself. This result is of course likely (horribly enough) to be exaggerated in a world which is (and knows it is) riven by pollution, and short of resources. Where is the impetus for a society to spend the time reforming their political systems, when a large and so influential group of them can be so very wealthy, and when there is a ‘hard time’ premium on using up resources. That is, the lesson, so very clear in the modern world, is that if your country gets polluting quick enough, and becomes therefore part of the ‘problem’, it can oblige other countries whether by military means or mere economic bribery, to somehow pay for the consequences for that pollution (what else is carbon trading?). Surely natural justice would demand not only that the polluter should pay directly, but even more that, as it was the rich polluting countries that caused the problem, and the poorer that actually suffer for it first, why can the poor not sue the rich? Hence democracy’s claim to be simply universalizable, must surely be profoundly questioned if that universalizability is only achieved at the cost of a drive to Westernization, which does not necessarily lead to democracy anyway…
The second reason for the problematic status of democracy’s claim to universalizability, takes one straight back home. The myth we pedal to ourselves about democracy is so very far from what it has ever been (or really could be). I mean, not only is it so very recent, but also the ‘high point’ of the democracy (as recounted by the history at least), was surely, in Britain in 1950’s, when more people actively voted (and worried about straight democratic and political issues) than any time before or since. Since then one could (if one was daft) argue that democracy has declined. Far better I suspect to argue that it has splintered. That is, democracy in action has been less like a finished state (akin to the final state of communism) and far more like a laboratory within which different sides of its various aspects can be explored; for example what it is to launch political (rather than military) campaigns; or what it is to participate within a government, in some form; or even how one can strata lives according to an algebra of age and responsibility; and have been initially developed. That these aspects have now received a life of their own is certainly not terribly surprising given that the law and free market, or even hospitals, initially started as an aspect within something else. Indeed to say something nice about democracy here, it deserves credit for manufacturing within itself a great variety of different and very fertile ‘sub-growths’). And yet of course it is just these sub-growths that the ‘theory’ of democracy (which is ultimately founded on a re-reading of history), would actively seek to suppress. How can they be given a life apart, when democracy is itself the goal?
Indeed it is surely this last problem which is the great challenge of our time. I mean it seems (and one does not merely need to be a Marxian thinker to say this, although it helps) to be the case that the ‘high point’ of democracy was associated with a whole set of assumptions about the kind of world in which the democrats lived. I mean here, both the classic Marxist assumptions about the technological world; but also the far more nuanced (and very problematic) assumptions about who had the rights to do what. It is then just these assumptions which it seems we have spectacularly undermined. Not only have we now no clear set of technologies, but also it is not even clear what type of technology (phone, computer, playing systems) is likely to produce the next ‘major’ revolution. Also, in a world worried about environmental collapse, it is far less clear, where the division between humans, and the world in which they live, lies (if we do not worry about the right of mud-worms or bees, in the end we might become extinct ourselves). The classic assumptions therefore that allowed democracies of the immediate past to flourish, are simply no longer relevant.
This last point however matters, in that it makes the entire problem so very much more urgent. I mean here that there is a real danger in simply ‘wanting to be done’ with democracy, and wanting it for environmental reasons, - because that was tried in Germany in 1936… The game is rather different, and must surely involve thinking democracy not as a God given right, which has been sanctioned by a certain historical process, but rather as a curious set of ways of understanding the world, which it (democracy) uniquely developed , and which might when taken away from their initial setting, productively resonate across the world. It is then these ‘sub-growths’, these other thoughts that could have only occurred within a democracy, which no doubt will form its lasting ‘legacy’.
