The "Impossibility" of Democracy
The cooperation of the people is likely to be necessary for any required changes in our techniques for addressing the problems that Joy and others have presented. Cooperation that is willingly embraced through non-coercive means is more reliable and more easily sustained. For those reasons, it appears that democracy in one form or another may be necessary. In addition, the potential reach and malleability of the Internet and other new communication technologies further suggest that it may be possible to devise applications, services and institutions within the evolving world communication network that would support and strengthen these democratic approaches. Communication, certainly, is key to any effective democratic system. Projects along these, while reminiscent of Wells' world brain visions, would need to be more aligned with the preconditions that support conceptual and technological innovation if they are to be used and useful.
Democracy, as nearly everybody knows, is highly flawed in practice: the wrong people can become elected for the wrong reasons and do the wrong things once in office. Candidates can be favored for their tousled hair, their dimpled smile, their lineage, the slogan du jour. Once in power, elected officials may acquiesce to special interests (Greider, 1993) or be undermined through media-induced scandal (Castells, 1998). Running for office (in the U.S.) is so costly that only the very rich have any chance of getting elected. (The New York state Senate race will probably cost over one hundred million dollars.) The role of the media, lobbyists, rich patrons, professional public relations campaigns, and dirty tricks, further frustrate any attempt to understand or to participate meaningfully in the "democratic process."
The task of collective self-rule – democracy – has been called an impossible task. Indeed, its impossibility can even be "proved," in much the same way that engineers had "proved" that bee flight is impossible. The task of democracy – if it's done remotely well (so the story goes) – is so exacting, so all-encompassing, yet so frustrating and ultimately unpredictable, that it's been called an "impossible" enterprise. Walter Lippman (1925) in particular, was skeptical of the idea of an "omnicompetent" citizen who possesses sufficient knowledge to participate effectively in the political process. Lippman notes that even though civic affairs was his professional avocation, he was unable to monitor the relevant data, initiatives, and ideas that he believed would minimally be necessary for him to sustain competence in this area. To be minimally competent in the area that this paper addresses, for example, a person should be well-acquainted with democratic theory, world systems, communication technology, political economy, public policy, environmentalism and the state of the world, and many other topics. Each of these areas is characterized by shifting opinions, initiatives and discourses, in addition to an overabundance of empirical, verifiable data (whose interpretations are then disputed). (Interestingly, as Wells points out, our elected leaders themselves are far from omnicompetent. Their chief skills, campaigning and political maneuvering, are, in large part, responsible for their success, while their competency in other matters may be under developed.)
A similar criticism can, of course, be directed towards any elite body, however humanely and well-disposed they are towards governing the rest of the citizenry. But does Lippman's critique render democracy "impossible" or merely the idea of "omnicompetence" and its purported indispensability. I would claim the latter. Reality is unfathomly complex and we are each incapable of "knowing" even one aspect in its totality. But, impossible or not, democracy or some approximation of democracy, is not optional. Decisions have to be made. We have no choice but to cultivate systems of governance that can help us constructively engage with our collective concerns. Lippman's critique is valuable, but not to support the conclusions for which it was originally marshaled. Lippman demonstrates the fallibility of basing a system of governance on the idea of omnicompetency. Indeed, any system of governance should assume the impossibility of omnicompetence and the inescapable reality of imperfect competence, while not allowing ourselves to be defeated by it. This means, in software parlance, turning a "bug" into a "feature." It may be, in fact, the impossibility of omnicompetence that makes democracy the only viable choice for a system of governance.
Dumbing Down the Citizen
In the early 1970's Harry Braverman's "Labor and Monopoly Capital" (1974) demonstrated how the process of "dumbing-down" workers, primarily through severely reducing their on-the-job responsibility, flexibility, and autonomy (often called "de-skilling") increases management control and, hence, profits to the advantage of capital. Since we will be soon discussing the idea of civic intelligence we may hypothesize briefly about whether these ideas may also have some applicability outside the workplace. Is it possible that the citizenry is being "dumbed-down" in similar ways? And, if so, can we "run the processes in reverse" to undo the damage?
The key to Braverman's analysis is the decomposition of broad workplace responsibilities by management into discrete constituent parts, which are then used to force workers to perform within circumscribed ranges. This process, often in the name of "efficiency," dramatically lessens the scope and directionality of worker power. How could this process be replicated in realms outside of the workplace? The first responsibility to be jettisoned (as "outside" their primary work responsibility) in the civic sphere under such a redefinition would be the consideration of issues relating to general social implications. Thus workers and labor unions should focus exclusively on jobs and job security (and not, for instance, the social consequences of the jobs); artists should explore and express their individual feelings' scientists and researchers should pursue what is fundable within a narrow, specialized niche – computer science, physics, and other "technical" disciplines would expel implications of their subject matters from the curriculum; while measuring success purely in terms of monetary return on investment. Citizens of course would spend much of their non-working life shopping, buying items that will maximize their individual comfort and status while keeping the economic machine running at maximum capacity.
This general process removes the "politics" of labor, leisure, and learning; indeed it naturally results in the "de-skilling" of the citizen. Economists are the pioneers in this process by adapting and advocating the use of an economic calculus as the sole determinant for all of our decisions. This is the ultimate dumbing down; it reduces human aspirations and agency to that of an greedy and unthinking automaton. The media "de-skills" the citizenry in several ways as well, according to a variety of scholars. Castells (1997), for example, shows how the media's fixation with political scandal encourages cynicism and political disengagement on the part of the citizenry. The media often promotes "the spectacle" (Garber, Matlock, and Walkowitz, 1993) at the expense of the intellectually taxing. The ill effects of money on the media, politics, and elections also further increase the distance between citizens and public affairs (Schuler, 2001). Furthermore, Robert Putnam shows convincingly that, at least in the US, the virtually overnight spread of commercial broadcast television was a primary culprit in the steady degradation of American civic life over the last several decades (1996). One can only wonder what effects this new electronic "opiate of the masses" will have as it continues its spread on cultures outside the U.S.
The questions as to whether and to what extent citizen "de-skilling" has been orchestrated, and by whom, will not be discussed in depth in this paper (although the transformation of the US from a country of citizens to a country of consumers is certainly an appropriate and provocative topic to contemplate in this regard). It is sufficient to say that civic de-skilling is likely to dampen civic intelligence by influencing the content of, and the conditions under which, issues are placed on the public agenda, and by trivializing and polarizing discussion and deliberation on important public matters. Certainly each de-skilling step introduces changes in both institutionalization, the prescribed processes through which actions are advanced and validated, and in conceptualization of what everyday life entails; each step helps erect ordinary and the extraordinary barriers to civic intelligence.
Who — or What — Will Govern?
If the dire scenarios that Bill Joy describes (or, even, the less dramatic but no less worrisome, environmental catastrophes that atmospheric and other scientists warn us about) have even a minuscule chance of occurring, an urgent need to consider ways to avert them arises. Since "solutions" to these problems are likely to be protracted and multi-pronged, and involve large segments of the citizenry, a correspondingly urgent need to analyze the preconditions underlying the development and successful implementation of these "solutions" also arises. What "environments" – social and technological – would be hospitable to the satisfactory resolving of these problems? If we could imagine humankind finding better responses to our myriad problems old and new, what circumstances and resources need to be in place and what steps could be taken that would support these new responses? These preconditions and steps we can call "civic intelligence" or perhaps a "world brain."
What choices face us in the design of this "civic intelligence?" What attributes could it have? One hypothetical expression of "civic intelligence" would be a massively complex computer system which would make intelligent decisions on society's behalf. This option would be a twenty-first century manifestation of Leibniz's dream, a terrifying cybernetic Frankenstein-on-a-chip from the same cupboard of nightmares that Joy opened in his Wired article. The limitations of this approach are manifold but are worth briefly mentioning; the impossibility of accurately, adequately, and comprehensively representing infinitely complex situations with discrete computer logic comes to mind, as do the problems surrounding the implementation of the decisions. Would police or other armed organizations receive their instructions from such an "intelligent" system? The problem of the biases and assumptions of the system's creators becoming embodied – forever? – in such a system is also a sobering and disturbing thought. Imagine an International Monetary Fund (IMF) "expert system" free to impose economic "restructuring" on hapless regions according to the arcane theorems of economists!
Other approaches which rely more heavily on intelligence of the non-artificial variety include having a small elite group making the decisions, nobody making decisions (let the "free market" reign, for example), or a system in which citizens play a strong role. Political scientist, Robert Dahl (1989), suggests that these three systems, dictatorship, anarchy, and democracy as well as "polyarchy," a hybrid of the others, constitute the entire list of possibilities.
Wells suggested that scientists (at least in his day) would sometimes yearn for a society that would apply their (eminently reasonable) principles and clamor for their leadership and Lippman believed that an elite group should govern because of the impossibility of omnicompetence. What Lippman didn't acknowledge was that omnicompetence is impossible for small groups as well as for individuals. America's "best and brightest," for example, engineered America's tragic war with Vietnam. Regardless of the role of an elite, the non-elite citizenry will necessarily also have a strong role to play. If an elite group, for example, devises solutions or sets of solutions they'd then have the thankless and potentially impossible job of "convincing" (through rational appeal, propaganda or force) the rest of us to accept their jeremiads and prescriptions. A democratic approach on the other hand, would be to enlist the aid of the citizenry at the onset as part of the overall project. The population or at least a large majority may need to "buy in" and adopt – without coercion or deception – ideas and actions which would be unacceptable without suitable participation in the process (Pateman, 1970) which developed those ideas and actions. A more radically democratic view (and the one that might ultimately be seen as the obvious choice) is that the often neglected, sometimes "dumbed-down" citizenry might provide the intelligence, creativity, energy, and leadership that is needed to recognize, formulate, and reconcile the problems that we are faced with.
As we have seen governance shouldn't be entrusted to an omnicompetent elite or an infallible computer system, both are impossible to achieve. Nor should governance blind luck through the fantasy that the status quo and/or the "free market" will miraculously solve current problems and avert future ones through benign and unanticipated side-effects. A democratic system of governance, then, is the only viable alternative and civic intelligence that is strongly democratic – in spite of the problems previously discussed – shows the greatest promise for an effective and equitable system of governance. This approach increases distribution of creativity and attention while, at the same time, reducing concentration of power away from those people with vested interests in maximizing their gain – often short-term – over the gain – often long-term – of the larger population. There is mounting evidence that this democratization is occurring. As Bill McKibben (2000) points out, the vast majority of Seattle's anti-WTO protesters were demonstrating on behalf of somebody else, an impossibility according to homo economicis. Keck and Sikkink (1998) report out that "advocacy networks" "often involved individuals advocating policy changes that cannot be easily linked to a rationalist understanding of their 'interests.'" An effective and equitable system of governance would help promote the creativity of the civic sector which is, as Castells (1997) and others remind us, responsible for launching the major social movements of the last century, including the environmental movement, civil rights movement, and the women's' movement.
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