The first step towards democracy is public discussion
However, public discussion, by itself, is not a form of government
Amartya Sen won a Nobel Prize in Economics, partly for his work on the interplay of democracy and human happiness. He proved that full human flourishing was only possible in a free society. And he’s also famous for making the assertion that democracy has historic roots in many human societies, that is, democracy is not just an idea from the West. But is he correct about that? He offers some examples:
What is the central point of democracy? …A good clue can be found in the analysis of the foremost political philosopher of our time, John Rawls. Democracy, Rawls has taught us, has to be seen not just in terms of ballots and votes–important as they are–but primarily in terms of “public reasoning,” including the opportunity for public discussion as well as interactive participation and reasoned encounter.
…While public reasoning flourished in many ways in ancient Greece, it did that also in several other ancient civilizations–sometimes spectacularly so. For example, some of the earliest open general meetings aimed specifically at settling disputes between different points of view took place in India in the so-called Buddhist councils, where adherents of different points of view got together to argue out their differences. The first of these large councils was held in Rajagriha shortly after Gautama Buddha’s death twenty-five hundred years ago. The grandest of these councils– the third–occurred under the patronage of Emperor Ashoka in the third century B.C.E. in Pataliputra, then the capital of India and what is now called Patna. Ashoka also tried to codify and propagate what must have been among the earliest formulations of rules for public discussion–a kind of ancient version of the nineteenth-century “Robert’s Rules of Order.” He demanded, for example, “restraint in regard to speech, so that there should be no extollment of one’s own sect or disparagement of other sects on inappropriate occasions, and it should be moderate even in appropriate occasions.” Even when engaged in arguing, “other sects should be duly honoured in every way on all occasions.”
…Indeed, the importance of public discussion is a recurrent theme in the history of many countries in the non-Western world. To choose another historical example, in Japan in A.D. 604, the Buddhist Prince Shotoku, who was regent to his mother, Empress Suiko, produced the so-called constitution of seventeen articles. The constitution insisted, much in the spirit of the Magna Carta to be signed six centuries later in A.D. 1215: “Decisions on important matters should not be made by one person alone. They should be discussed with many.”
To take another example from a much later period, when in the 1590s the great Moghal Emperor Akbar was making his pronouncements in India on the need for tolerance, and was busy arranging organized dialogues between holders of different faiths (including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsees, Jains, Jews, and even–it must be noted–atheists), the Inquisitions were still flourishing in Europe. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome, in Campo dei Fiori, for heresy in 1600, even as Akbar was lecturing on tolerance and holding interfaith dialogues in Agra.
But wait, let’s back up, let’s pull apart some words. Here in the West, all political theory starts with the moment when the democratic people of Athens got together and democratically decided that Socrates was teaching ideas that made them uncomfortable so they democratically decided to murder him. I wrote about that previously. Socrates had a student named Plato and Plato watched this whole scene go down, at which point Plato decided it was difficult to reconcile democracy to liberalism.
In the above passages, Amartya Sen is clearly talking about liberalism, not democracy. It is absolutely true that the benefits of liberalism have been discovered over and over again, by many princes in many countries and across the centuries. Trying to rule using terror and brutality provokes constant revolt and therefore instability, and when the people face a problem they blame the ruler, since the ruler has concentrated all decision making and therefore must take the blame for every bad outcome. By contrast, offering people a maximum of personal freedom makes it easier to govern, as in such societies people are less likely to revolt, and when they face problems they are more likely to cooperate with each other and with authorities to find a solution.
In the West, during the 1700s, during the early part of the Enlightenment, philosophers and historians such as Voltaire wrote extensively about the benefits of liberal rule. Voltaire admired some of the ancient Roman emperors, who had emphasized the pursuit of justice and fairness. He also admired some princes who governed during his own life, such as Frederick The Great of Prussia, a man of great tolerance who, in 1740, introduced the policy of accepting the Jews in Prussia, a policy that later expanded to all of a unified Germany. The policy survived from 1740 till 1933.
But democracy is different from liberalism. In the West we spent 2,200 years arguing over the difficulty of reconciling liberalism to democracy and that entire debate fails to make sense if democracy and liberalism are the same thing. The great problem has always been that democracy can be brutal, as was clear when Athens murdered Socrates.
Democracy means a majority should be allowed to rule, and that idea is somewhat unique to the West, and perhaps the early Middle East, during the Bronze Age, in places like Sumeria, where perhaps some rough democracy was tried in the early days. In most places, pure democracy too easily tips over into civil war, for too often the majority will take advantage of its power and the minority is forced to fight to defend itself. That the majority needs to restrain itself (that the system needs to be liberal) is an idea that has often been understood, at least as an aspirational ideal, in the West, but not elsewhere, and for that reason the idea of majority rule has been seen as too explosive in traditional societies. Indeed, in those traditional societies that are not ruled by monarchies, the elders of the tribe typically seek to rule by broad consensus, which is to say, they seek to base all important decisions on super-majorities rather than slim majorities. This style of governance has a different set of strengths and weaknesses: it is less explosive than the idea of simple majority rule, but it makes decision making difficult and therefore such a society is slow moving and inflexible, for which reason such societies are sometimes destroyed by better organized societies who invade.
Even in the West, we often get populists who insist “they people must be listened to” and by that they mean the majority. Such unscrupulous populists understand that the claim is explosive, by they hope to manipulate the explosion for their own benefit. But at least in the West, we’ve always had people who push back against populists, and point out how much evil can be unleashed by an angry majority that shows no respect for the rights of those who are currently out of power.
Liberalism encourages free discussion. By contrast, democracy sometimes leads to censorship, if the majority is outraged by some idea that is promoted by a minority. Liberalism and democracy are two different things, therefore discussion and action are two different things. For this reason, many societies and organizations fail to convert their ideas into governance. A classic on this topic, regarding organizations that citizens can form, is Jo Freeman’s essay “The Tyranny Of Structurelessness:”
During the years in which the women's liberation movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main -- if not sole -- organizational form of the movement. The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the over-structured society in which most of us found ourselves, and the inevitable control this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this overstructuredness.
The idea of "structurelessness," however, has moved from a healthy counter to those tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right. The idea is as little examined as the term is much used, but it has become an intrinsic and unquestioned part of women's liberation ideology. For the early development of the movement this did not much matter. It early defined its main goal, and its main method, as consciousness-raising, and the "structureless" rap group was an excellent means to this end. The looseness and informality of it encouraged participation in discussion, and its often supportive atmosphere elicited personal insight. If nothing more concrete than personal insight ever resulted from these groups, that did not much matter, because their purpose did not really extend beyond this.
The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific. At this point they usually foundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their tasks. Women had thoroughly accepted the idea of "structurelessness" without realizing the limitations of its uses. People would try to use the "structureless" group and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything but oppressive.
It’s a problem faced by both organizations and also governments. To get anything done, there needs to be limits and rules and a hierarchy, and that is especially true regarding money: assuming a citizen’s organization raises money so it can take real action in the world, that money will need to be kept in a bank account, and only a few trusted individuals can be allowed access to that bank account. And though Jo Freeman was talking about left-wing women’s groups, the general problem of organization extends to all kinds of groups. Indeed, small churches often go through a cycle where at first the whole church consists of just a few highly devoted individuals and therefore it seems that everyone can be trusted to handle the money — but this does not scale. Once the church has 100 people, or a 1,000 people, it will need to have elected officers who are granted positions of authority and trust, and among the positions of trust the most important (aside from spiritual responsibilities) is the careful handling of the money. (Personal note: my mom was elected treasurer of her Unity church for 6 years, 2 terms of 3 years each, so I know exactly how this works. The church enforces terms limits of 2 terms, so 6 years is the maximum anyone is allowed to serve in a particular role on the Board.)
I suspect that both Amartya Sen and Jo Freeman would agree that open and free discussions are vital to the human experience. Such discussion helps to build trust among disparate groups, and thus it helps increase the overall level of cooperation that can happen in a society. It’s also a profound experience for each individual, who can better work out who they are, and how they exist in relation to everyone else, by freely discussing how they see things while also learning how others see things.
However powerful these discussions are, they are not a form of government. To get anything done in the real world requires organization, money, resources, control of the resources, and a hierarchy that determines who has the authority to make decisions about the use of those resources.
But free and open discussions are the starting point of the process that can eventually lead to a system of governance.