From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Mon Aug 05 2002 - 02:26:02 MDT
On Sun, Aug 04, 2002 at 12:23:05PM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
> > To paraphrase Winston Churchill, democracy is a bloody awful form of
> > government -- it's just not as bad as the alternatives. I'd rather look
> > for a better alternative than accept that this is the best we're getting,
> > thanks.
>
> It sounds like we mostly agree on a number of steps that can
> be taken to improve any extant democracy. But here it sounds
> like you want to discard the concept in a search for a better
> system. I claim that you'll never find a better system (until
> human beings are replaced by something else, or conditions
> change drastically in some other way from what we're used to).
Sort of.
Most of our conceptual and philosophical frameworks have progressed
since the 18th century, so why hasn't our theory of government?
Right now we seem to have a collective cultural blind spot about
the merits of different forms of government that's as enormous as the
widespread opinion in the early 17th century. Back then all right-thinking
people agreed that monarchy was the only possible way to run a country --
and that all the alternatives would lead to civil war, disaster, famine,
and the withdrawl of divine blessings. (Only a few barking mad religious
visionaries dissented from that view, although it's the beliefs of
those Levellers that has set the agenda for the forms adopted by today's
liberal democracies.) Similarly, today everyone pays lip service to the
idea of democracy as a Good Thing, overlooking the numerous problems
that a democratic system can succumb to and the ways in which a democracy
can become a majoritarian tyranny. Democracies are less prone to tyranny
than dictatorships or monarchies, but they're not immune to the disease,
and they may well be less stable than tyranny or monarchy over long periods
of time.
This doesn't mean that I want to replace democracy unconditionally
-- just that I want to keep an open mind about the possibility of
better forms of government being possible (for purposes of reconciling
individual freedoms with collective necessity while maximizing individual
freedom). I'd stipulate that democracy *doesn't* always work to maximize
personal freedom, or even optimize it, and it would be great if somebody
could come up with a wholly new philosophy of government that would fix
the drawbacks.
What a better theory of governance would look like I do not know:
as the man said, I'll know it when I smell it. (I expect it to look
superficially familiar and vaguely resemble a democratic system, but
with subtle second-order side effects that make it behave differently in
those situations where democracy fails to work properly -- but I might
well be wrong.)
I'll also stipulate that "until human beings are replaced by something
else, or conditions change drastically in some other way from what
we're used to" both describe situations that the singularity-watchers
among us deem to be imminent. :)
-- Charlie
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