Is democracy doomed?
I hate posing the question. I’m a big fan. I attribute the vast outpouring of human creativity in the Western World during the last seven hundred years to human freedom. Humanity needed the chance to strut its stuff. Genius, like any growth, requires encouragement. Shakespeare would never have written his plays without an audience.
Democracy encourages every person to think for themselves: “every man a king,” as an old political slogan put it. Democracy assumes the many are wiser than the one. The Renaissance and Reformation did not sprout democracy immediately, but they spawned the spiritual commotion that led to self-government. The vast accomplishments of modernity in every sphere of action and thought may be traced to the individual’s empowerment. Often we’ve been too smart for our own good (vide, holocaust, climate, WMDs), but on balance we the people have been a wow. To return to a government of enforced compliance is no happy prospect.
The signs are not good. America, democracy’s Petrie dish and most conspicuous triumph, is sliding into rancor and disfunction. Young people, viewing their parents’ achievement, remain unconvinced of democracy’s superiority. Why not dictatorship? Can it be any worse? Such questions, anathema to their forbears, are natural enough, given the evidence.
The answer is yes in thunder, things can be a lot worse, but until one’s burnt one will never understand the force of fire. Nobody who lived under Hitler muses, “Maybe he wasn’t so bad…”
It may be we must try dictatorship to see how we like it. We won’t – we’ll hate it – but it could take generations to undo the harm. Humanity may not survive the experiment.
What went wrong? For a quarter millennium or so, democracy seemed such a swell idea, endlessly ingenious, inexorable in its advance.
The complexity and density of humanity outran our ability to cope. No human, however brainy, can comprehend even a fraction of how today’s world works. Our systems, science, voluminous laws have paradoxically reduced us to victims of our own success. We are rats in a maze, no longer in charge. Who’s in charge? The system. The system must be obeyed. You rebel from its tyranny at your peril. (Last month our dishwasher broke. The system meant me to buy a new one. I forged my own path for a few days. Bad idea.)
Contemporary humanity is free – to obey. Imagine the modern city if all those millions improvised their own way to work. We must stand in line, swipe our cards, heed the rules. We are intensely cared for, supervised, but we are not in charge.
Objecting to our helplessness we rebel where we can. We demonstrate our independence by savaging one another. Government becomes a harum-scarum battle to win for the sake of winning. Hot hate proves we are not rats in a maze!
(I resist by shaping my own syllables and what I take to be my own opinion. A.I. may obviate even that revolt from conformity.)
These trends, if true, escape our detection, like most of the processes that master us. We ascribe our dismay to factors we can detect. We blame the President – or our neighbors; we kick the cat (or dog). If only gender-challenged kids would use the right bathrooms, everything would be swell! The scapegoat’s rarely the culprit, merely available.
These trends, if true, must run their inexorable course. The tide rushes toward the cataract, it may not matter what we say or do. But we will not go meekly. We will resist with all our might. That too is who we are.