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The Elephant and the Lion: an Enquiry Into the Roots of Democracy

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The Elephant and the Lion: an Enquiry Into the Roots of Democracy The Elephant and the Lion: An enquiry into the roots of democracy This is a draft ready to be published. 1. Coincidences Since 2006 I spend some time with my friend John Clarke at the Wild Coast in South Africa. This is the area of the amaPondo people, which has a long tradition of resistance against those who want to change their ways: from King Faku on, accommodating between the Boers, the English and the Zulu conquerors; King Sigcau, who was imprisoned by Cecil Rhodes but freed again by a High Court, which put the law above the imperial prerogatives which Rhodes usurped; the Chiefs who revolted against the apartheid regime and were hanged; an heir of king Sigcau, Mpondombini Justice Sigcau (+ 2013) who successfully won the case in the South African Constitutional Court against president Zuma who tried to depose him for embodying the resistance of the amaPondo against economic development through mining and the building of a toll road. Those stories of conflict have been reported in John Clarke’s books: the Promise of Justice1. However there is a paradox here. The paradox is that the kingdom of the amaPondo is fundamentally democratic in nature, and it is this democracy, which has made it so resilient in the face of change. The title of this article (The Elephant and the Lion) finds its origin in the way the Swazis name separately both the queen and king in power, retaining even in the concept of royalty itself an inherent tension or conflict. After all, both animals in a quite different way can be labeled as kings of the bush. However, as animals they avoid confronting each other, they co-habit. In a similar fashion in this culture, king and queen are envisaged as equal sources of power and as such bound to have a conflict-ridden perspective. Hence the particular quality of my definition of democracy: A democratic social system is a conflict-ridden system, which integrates the dynamic of conflict without resorting to threat or violence. Just to be clear, by violence I mean resolving conflict by getting rid of one of the parties of the conflict through exclusion: gagging, exile or execution. 1 http://www.amazon.com/Promise-Justice-Book-One-Story- ebook/dp/B00EHMT9D6 http://www.amazon.com/The-Promise-Justice-Book-Story- ebook/dp/B00GS5TR78 1 At first glance, a democratic kingdom reads as an oxymoron, quite differently from the classical definition: democracy as a form of governing the people by the people for the people. The problem with this definition is the definite article “the”. If we read: governing people by people for people, we get immediately confronted with the plural, hence plurality and diversity of the word “people”. Nationalistic populism always has hidden behind that definite article “the”. Once plurality is assumed, conflicts in purposes, worldviews, values ensue. This is why I redefined democracy in the way I did. The existence of the oxymoron begs for an inquiry into the roots of what democracy might be. Coincidentally, the fact that I was preparing my participation to a series of conferences about democracy and the publication of the books of John has been the trigger for this article. The conferences have been held in a community of about twenty persons from 6 to 84 years, which since 1984 (coincidentally) are forming a ‘micro-democracy’. They have no problem to recognize the definition I gave to their experience. As a cyberneticist (kubernetes=governor in Greek) in theory and in practice, I was bound to ask systemic questions: questions about the meaning of democracy and the implications of the institutions through which it is embodied in practice. Apparently, nowadays, more and more questions are being asked about those institutions. Democracy appears to be more than universal suffrage: the failure of “democratic structures” in many ex-colonies, the failure of nation-building experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, the questions about the Arab ‘democratic’ revolutions and their development, in my opinion are telltale signs that some rethinking is necessary. Even the European Union and the so-called ‘democratic deficit’ come to mind together with a resurgence of nationalistic populist tendencies. As the number of voters diminishes, where voting is not obligatory, and the requirements for governance by the public opinion increases, while the governors try to reduce the public space through de-regulation and privatization, paradoxically increasing exponentially the number of laws and regulations, inevitably we have to start to see the very notion of democracy as a paradox. Given this insight, it would seem that democracy is not so much ‘acquired’ as a process that is signaled through a continuous struggle against a tendency towards totalitarianism and strong leadership - the good hegemon, as Hobbes already assumed in his Leviathan. This article does not provide solutions. As the title indicates, it is an enquiry into the roots of the notion of democracy itself. The best that the author can do is to reframe some questions about democratic structures and processes. This reframing may help not to ‘revolutionize’ the existing processes and structures, which as human artifacts are bound to stay imperfect. Hopefully these questions may help to “Make Work Systems 2 better”2, the title I chose for my book published in 1994. Already at that time I gave some enquiring directions, mainly in the chapter treating the domain of value systems. In fact this article can be seen as the result of my experience and my thinking since then. It seems to me that there are two perspectives, which can be taken about democracy: a focus upon the political institutions embodying democracy, the representative parliamentary system and the various public agencies making them work. I shall comment somewhat on this institutional perspective in this article. However, as a consequence of my definition of democratic social structures, my emphasis shall be more on the social mechanisms, and the democratic attitudes of the actors, which in any social system enable maintaining the conflict inherent to any coexistence of differences without violence. This is the reason for the subtitle of this article: ‘an inquiry into the roots of democracy’. This is also the reason why referring to this perspective upon democracies, I use as illustrations kingdoms, private companies, even extended families. Democracy will only be effective, if in all kinds of social systems democratic mechanisms and attitudes are accepted. Relegating democracy to only the formal political realm is in my opinion one of the reason of the continued failure to export the notion of democracy to other cultures. In a first part of the paper, I question the concept of participative democracy from the perspective of the practitioner, using insights from systems thinking and practice. In this way, I enlarge the concept of democracy beyond the narrow meaning it has in the political sciences. In a second part I question the abuse of ‘sums’ in political lore and show how ‘relations’ can replace them. In effect, this is a review of the concept of subsidiarity. This part of the paper confronts the problems of the scale of democratic social systems and questions its reduction to nation-states. In a third part, based on the previous ones, I ask questions about the meaning of collective identities, of constitutions, of masses and crowds, real or virtual, in relation to the basic human need to belong to a social system. 2. Participating in what? 2.1 Participating in action: action democracy One of the most perverse legacies of the Greek and Latin cultures regarding participation comes from the fact that although we trace notions of democracy to them, in point of fact they were slave societies – 2 Hoebeke,L Making Work Systems Better Wiley 1994 3 a split of the social between the citizen (thinker) and the doer (slave). This splitting between thinking and doing and the assumed superiority of thinking above doing still permeates our own culture, reflected ubiquitously in its structures, rewards and appreciation systems. Mostly we are unaware of it. This has resulted in a rather strange way of organizing society: decisions and policies are discussed and taken, which have to be implemented by an executive body. The basic assumption behind this way of thinking is that certain human beings have to forget their capability of thinking for themselves and instead do exactly what is asked of them. This is the definition of a functionary: a person embodying completely a function allocated by his superior - the one who created the function in the first place. At heart, this is as inhuman as slavery, where we find its origins. However, it is important to note that in practice it is the person who acts who is the person taking the decision. He/she takes the decision based on his/her personal interpretation; a subjective understanding of what is required from him/her. The satirical soap ‘Yes, Minister’ is a good illustration how the person who acts (the public servant), is the one who controls the events in spite of the one who is thinking (the decision-or policy-maker). This is the reason why, in Montesquieu’s proposal the separation of equal powers for a representative democratic structure, in practice the executive power becomes the most powerful. My experience of working with groups, which are involved in a concrete joint activity is indeed that when in the group thinkers and doers start to work separately, the doers are achieving something on their own accord in spite of the best wishes and quality of the thinking process of the thinkers. One might say that tinkers (thinking in action), appear to be more effective in joint action than thinkers (thinking to delegate actions).
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