My Tutor at Cambridge, a deeply civilised man, didn’t believe in democracy. He greatly admired the Master of the college for his wisdom and insight, and thought that the country would be better off under that kind of paternalist rule than with its current form of government. The fellows of the college, he once told me, had been debating the momentous issue of how best to light the Hall for 15 years, which sounded like something from a David Lodge novel. In his view, he added, they would do well to cease their squabbling and put the matter entirely in the hands of the Master. His ideal form of sovereignty, in short, was a benevolent dictatorship, a phrase which for most of us is as self-contradictory as “business ethics”.
The trouble with this view is that it sees democracy in purely instrumental terms. It judges political systems primarily in terms of whether they secure the best results, however “best” happens to be defined. This surely can’t be right, since even fascist regimes have come up with some impressive achievements from time to time. You can’t look only at the consequences of a form of politics, rather than at its internal operations. What my Tutor seemed not to grasp was that democracy isn’t just a way of getting things done, a way which for Winston Churchill was the least worst and for my Tutor the very worst, but what Aristotle would call a virtuous activity. This means among other things that it’s valuable in itself, not just for where it might get you. Aristotle isn’t altogether opposed to my Tutor’s viewpoint: he thinks that if there’s an individual who is clearly superior to everyone else, then it’s right that he should rule over them all; but he also believes that this is rare or non-existent.
There’s also a sense in which Aristotle thinks, like my Tutor, that political arrangements should be judged instrumentally. But this means judged in terms of how far they help to secure the good life; and for Aristotle the good life is a virtuous one, which like ballet or laughter or gift-giving is an end in itself. You might say that the goal of the political state is human friendship, but friendship itself doesn’t have a goal. Human beings naturally have affection for each other and therefore desire to have a life together, Aristotle writes in the Politics, even when they have no need to seek each other’s help. This is strikingly at odds with the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke, for which government is basically a matter of individual self-interest. The state exists to prevent us from strangling each other or stealing each other’s property. Its function is thus largely negative. There’s an element of this in Aristotle’s view, but to his mind the state has a more positive role in creating the conditions in which individuals may flourish; and one form of that flourishing is their participating in the running of the state, which is to say democracy.
This view can lead Aristotle to some pretty authoritarian conclusions, but in anachronistic terms it also puts him on the political Left. (There are those, needless to say, for whom the political Left and authoritarianism are synonymous.) By and large, the Left has looked favourably on political society as the matrix of all individual flourishing, whereas the Right tends to interpret this as meaning that a totalitarian state should take you over. The key distinction between state and society is elided. It sounds authoritarian to some liberal ears to claim that society takes priority over the individual, but for the Left this is a statement of fact rather than a political imperative. Only by belonging to a language and form of life, does one become a person. The self is relational to its roots. There couldn’t be just one individual, any more than there could be just one letter or number. Society is constitutive of individuals, not simply a neutral space in which they move or a potential obstacle to their freedom. The liberal or conservative might retort that it’s the same the other way round — that society itself is simply a collection of individuals. But this isn’t quite true. Society is a set of relations between individuals, some of them formal and some informal, not an assemblage of isolated units.
So democracy, or self-government, is an exercise of our powers and capabilities which is inherently valuable, as well as conducive to ends beyond itself. As far as its results go, Aristotle isn’t worried that under democracy the people will make all the wrong decisions, since though each of them will be a worse judge than the experts, they will collectively speaking be better, or at least no worse. One might also point out that human beings can abuse their freedom, but they aren’t fully human without it. Collective self-determination, i.e. democracy, may result in thwarting some people’s freedom, but to be self-determining is to be free, at least in one sense of the term. To be free is not just not to be governed by someone else, but to have learnt how to govern oneself alongside others.
Still, there are problems with this vision. For one thing, it seems to suggest that politics and morality are fundamentally incompatible. Politics may be based on the will of the people, but it’s hard to view ethics in the same way. Is murder wrong just because most of us think it is? An alarming number of medieval citizens believed in burning witches, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. What if the moral consensus of the future contradicts the orthodoxy of today? Most people in Britain once held that homosexuality was sinful, but most of them don’t hold that now. It’s disturbing, however, to suppose that we just make up our fundamental principles as we go along. It seems to suggest that humanity rests on nothing but itself. Democracy means that we are the ultimate authority, rather than that there exists a sovereignty beyond us to which we should conform. Human beings determine their own history, but according to no ground plan independent of themselves. Democracy, in a word, is secretly atheistic. God has been replaced by the Plebs, and humanity assigned an importance which may lead to hubris.
There’s also a strained relationship between democracy and the market. If men and women are self-determining in the political sphere, they wouldn’t seem to have much of this capacity in the economic one. On the contrary, their own free actions merge together in the marketplace to constitute alien forces capable of commanding the course of their lives. To be truly sovereign over oneself, you need an environment which is relatively stable and predictable. You can’t play a decent game of croquet if, as in Alice in Wonderland, the equipment keeps shifting capriciously around. A degree of predictability is a condition of freedom, whereas sheer randomness amounts to the death of it. The economic life of capitalism is like a surreal game of croquet in which things stroll off the pitch or morph into something else just when you want them to keep still. As far as keeping still yourself goes, you have to run very fast simply to do that, as the Queen remarks to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s tale. Socialism is among other things a response to the fact that a capitalist economy is inherently out of control, not out of control only at times of crisis. And in the world of Trump, politics has become almost as volatile and erratic as the stock exchange.
There used to be a time when the proletariat was seen as the potential downfall of this system. That it was destined to be the gravedigger of capitalism was a kind of irony, since it was itself a product of it. Today, the potential undoing of the system is still the system itself. Advanced capitalist economies have reached a degree of opaqueness, complexity and global reach which undermine some of their own moral foundations. Classical liberalism, with its faith in individual freedom, has evolved into an anonymous corporate world in which the individual is largely dispensable, and the nation-state along with it. A traditional respect for God, family, community and country gives way to rootlessness, faithlessness, the disruption of communities, the provisional nature of all values and a planet on which any place is more or less interchangeable with any other. Nor can you have proper self-determination when the self seems little more than a fiction, a fleeting nexus of impulse and desire without continuity or foundation. Neoliberalism rounds savagely on its more classical forebear, ripping up civil rights and redefining freedom of expression as the freedom to profit from hate speech. In reaction to all this, parts of the global capitalist system enter a kind of time-warp, turning back to the days when men were men, the nation stood tall, home and kinship were precious, God was in his heaven and the manufacture of automobiles was in Detroit.
Neoliberalism unmasks the embarrassing truth that capitalism and democracy aren’t at root compatible, even if we still have the privilege to choose which particular bunch of old Etonians should represent us at Westminster. This incompatibility wasn’t so evident in the age of classical liberalism, when the individual’s freedom to acquire property seemed to go naturally with his or her freedom to dissent, divorce, launch a campaign or rise in the social hierarchy. We don’t, however, speak of Walmart or the oil companies in terms of the individual’s right to private property. In practice, that whole discourse is almost obsolete; but neoliberalism has nothing but the language of wealth and acquisition with which to fill the ideological gap left behind. John Stuart Mill knew that liberal democracy was constantly under threat from “sinister interests”. Today, it has been effectively taken over by them.
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Author: Terry Eagleton
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