In my article “When Democracies are loved and hated” of 20 November, I showed how fifth century Athens, much like the United States of America today, presumed that democracy is the best of all possible formulas to run a society, anywhere, anytime. But the reality often showed, then as now, that some societies are ill prepared for such a big leap. Why?
Democracy: a near-run thing
Even if, for a while, we forget the imperialism, the libidos dominandi, that has tainted democratic regimes, from classical Athens, through the French Republic, down to present day America, we still must ask ourselves one important question: why have people, for the best part of history, rarely liked the idea of letting themselves be ruled by their own kind? Why have whole societies inevitably fallen back on entrenched oligarchic or monarchic systems, even when events pointed to a new beginning? Why did Cromwell’s parliament, which was probably the most evolved of representative regimes since the Italian Republics, gradually get cold feet after the execution of Charles I? History has repeatedly thrown up those quintessential embodiments of the democratic paradox: the lonely tyrants, from Cromwell’s predecessors Pisistratus, Pericles, Caesar, Lorenzo de Medici down to his successors Robespierre and Napoleon, silently pondering if they should push society across the chasm into the uncharted waters of democracy and then desisting. Why did they hold back?
We, who take democracy for granted, find it hard to accept one important fact about human nature. Arthur Koestler describes it methodically in his articulate essay Janus: A Summing Up. He says that human societies, since the evolution of modern humans, have been doing a tightrope-act between an integrative and a self-assertive instinct found in all of us (in fact he shows that this dichotomy is found everywhere in nature). In simple words, humans want to be individuals but cannot help wanting to form part of a group. The history of human civilisation is thus the history of this visceral tension between individualism and tribalism or, as Freudians would say, between the ego and the superego.
In his brilliant book The Honey and the Hemlock, Eli Sagan comes very close to Koestler’s paradigm by delving into the survival of democratic regimes using a psychoanalytic perspective. His main contention is that democratic societies are near-run things surviving on a delicate suppression of an innate human fear of the underlying paradox of democracy: ruling and being ruled. Contrary to traditional societies of rulers and subjects, stable democracies are run by citizens, by people who have learnt to accept the chore of ruling and the inevitability of being ruled in turn.
But Sagan’s preoccupation remains: for how long can people suppress this inherent paranoid position? When democracy gives us the right to express our individuality, do we inevitably get dizzy and fall back into the safe arms of the group? Does the group (or tribe, party, church, nation) ally our instinctive mistrust of other individuals by substituting one common identity for many different, conflicting ones? What does it take to conquer this paranoid position?
How the Athenians did it
The Athenians did not wake up one day and decide to cure themselves of this basic natural mistrust of each other. It took 100 years of bloody plebeian revolt, the throwing up of demagogues and tyrants against oligarchic counter-revolution until all parties came to a compromise to share power equally between themselves.
It took two geniuses like Solon and Cleisthenes to hammer out the necessary laws and institutions to safeguard the system and make it effective. They accepted the breakdown of old kinship ties and removal of religious censure as prerequisites to freely participate in the new democracy. They promoted freedom of speech. Everyone was required to participate in the execution of justice and jury courts were made accessible to all and jurors paid for their services.
Athenians thus went about breaking all the ties that held them down in groups, freeing themselves to float about as individuals. It was, however, a system that needed constant vigilance because Sagan’s paranoia was never far away from their minds. If individuals are to work together as individuals, none of them must be allowed to rise above the others. To this end Athenians re-distributed political power over as large a percentage of the population as was practically possible (approximately one third) but also for the minimum time required for each one to do a good job. Generals and most officers were syndicated after their term of office and many were censured, some ostracised and not a few executed for various abuses. Themistocles, the architect and hero of the Athenian victory in the Persian wars, was himself ostracised for embezzlement. Aristides the Just was ostracised because people were simply tired of his fame for justness!!
And the Italians
The Italians also dabbled with democracy for 200 years during the central Middle Ages, which brought out the best and worst in them. Their city republics or comuni were constructed on immensely complicated systems of checks and counter checks, with constitutions being reworked and retouched, executive bodies reformed and recast. The history of the comuni, like that of fifth century Athens, is replete with internecine warfare (Blacks against Whites, popolo grosso against popolo minuto) with oligarchic coups and popular counter-coups coming and going in endless succession. Even the non-aristocratic guilds, which promoted the democratic ideal in the first place, found it hard to rule together without being endemically jealous of each other. In times of chaos, they even went to the extreme of calling in arbiters from elsewhere to act as supreme police chiefs.
Needless to say, their continual mutual mistrust found leverage at the hands of massive international interests. Revolutions were concocted, assassinations planned and when these failed, fierce and horrible punishment was exacted. When the plot to eliminate Lorenzo de Medici failed, hundreds of people lost their heads in Piazza Signoria while their houses and palaces were demolished. Many decent people must have thought, and probably rightly, that democracy was just a romantic dream.
Conclusion
We all know that democracy is not a romantic dream. But we should also appreciate that for it to work, it must be built up patiently, not over a decade or two, but over a much wider timespan. History teaches that the democratic ideal seems to go against much of human nature because it tries to keep a balance between two divergent instincts in each of us: the urge to be individuals and the need to identify with others. So we must never forget to keep asking ourselves if certain societies are ill-equipped to practise democracy. Why, for example, do many Islamic peoples still find it hard to digest?
It is obvious to me that organised fundamentalist religion often finds itself diametrically opposed to the individualistic urge which must be stimulated for a healthy democracy. In Catholic Europe, the ideas of freedom of thought, of democracy itself, were still anathema in the 1920s. In fact, many Protestant countries that had cut their clerical shackles long before, had a head start in democratisation over Roman Catholic ones like Italy and Spain. Modern Turkey reached an uneasy democratic Consti-tution only due to the iron will of its founder Kemal Ataturk, who spent his whole life secularising the old Islamic culture.
Democracy expects its citizens to be politically and socially active, legally literate, intellectually critical, informed on the widest possible spectrum of issues. To have these qualities, society has to be open to education, gender liberation, scientific endeavour, ethical and moral debate. It is thus hardly surprising that the ancient Greeks, the Italians of the Comuni, the Republican French, showed such drive in all these fields. And it is equally obvious why most oligarchic or authoritarian and nearly all theocratic regimes have failed miserably to promote them. The reason should by now be only too evident.