Prem Chandavarkar on Tue, 10 Jan 2006 18:18:19 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Frank Rieger: We lost the War--Welcome to the World of Tomorrow |
> Democracy is already over > > By its very nature the western democracies have become a playground for > lobbyists, industry interests and conspiracies that have absolutely no > interest in real democracy. Was it ever there? If we believe that democracy is some system that allows majority public opinion to prevail over special interests, then we never had such a system. See the book by John Allen Paolos "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper". Paolos gives the example of gun control in America (and I stress the point that gun control can be treated here as a hypothetical example - I have quoted this argument elsewhere and got sidetracked into debating the rights and wrongs of gun control, which is totally besides the point being made here). He mentions that many opinion polls show that 80% of the American public favours some form of gun control. But despite such an overwhelming majority opinion no politician will touch it. He points out that it is not a question of a majority opinion compared to a minority opinion that determines how decisions get taken in democratic politics. Rather it is how that majority and minority respectively break down within themselves. Of the 20% that oppose gun control (NRA members, etc.), 75% of them are so fanatical about it that they will make a voting decision solely on this basis. This decision is easy to make because the issue to them is black or white. 75% of 20% comprises 15% of the electorate. Of the 80% who favour gun control, they support it amongst a wide range of other ethical issues. Morever, there are many shades of grey here, as they are not unified on the level of control they desire. Only 5% of this group will make a voting decision on this issue alone (perhaps because they have been victims of a gun related crime). 5% of 80% comprises 4% of the electorate. So you have 15% of the electorate on one side, and 4% on the other. The 11% differential is enough to swing any election and all the politicians know it. Therefore, democracy is not about majorities and minorities. It is determined by how the debate coalesces around single cause issues. It is tempting to believe that resistance can be constructed through articulating our own single cause issues. But could we pick one?? Groups with political ideals as found here on Nettime tend to revolve around complex and nuanced ethical attitudes, together with a propensity to continuously debate and share. This will prevent any crystallisation into a single-cause issue. But more important - single cause issues are inextricably embedded into power politics for they involve constructing generalised representations. People get lumped into homogeneous categories such as 'Islamic terrorist' or 'American imperialist'. What gets glossed over is the fact that categories such as 'Islamic' and 'American' actually cover groups whose complexity and heterogeneity is far too great to collapse into a single label. Ethics can perhaps be discussed at an abstract level, but it comes most alive when the scale of relationships allows people to be named and differentiated? How do we build on such foundations through hierarchies of scale that eventually construct a political system? What potential for this is provided by recent technologies of communication - the emergence of netizens? To end on a (somewhat) optimistic note - while the democratic system we have today is deeply flawed, it is still a vast improvement over the feudal and colonial systems that preceded it. In the late 17th century people would have categorically stated that such a thing as democracy could never exist. But it did come about, and the roots lay in writings of individuals such as Locke and Rousseau. And their writings also must have had roots in some anonymous conversation somewhere. Everything (including major global change) has its roots in obscure anonymity. We may not see the change in our lifetime, but we must keep plugging away (and perhaps take some comfort in the fact that the rate of change has speeded up since the 17th century). PC # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net