democracy EVENT HORIZON
we can no longer define democracy but we can detect its decay ______________________________________________________________________________
HORIZON des ÉVÉNEMENTS de la démocratie
on ne peut plus définir la démocratie/on sait remarquer sa décomposition
we can no longer define democracy but we can detect its decay ______________________________________________________________________________
HORIZON des ÉVÉNEMENTS de la démocratie
on ne peut plus définir la démocratie/on sait remarquer sa décomposition
Four threads of Democracy
a commentary by David W. Watts for delivery at the banquet of the Information Access & Privacy Conference 18 June 2014
I doubt if we shall improve upon Abraham Lincoln’s description of democracy as “government of the people, by the people and for the people” any more than we will better Jesus of Nazareth’s injunction to “Love one another” as the basis of a viable community.
Unfortunately there has been so much mindless repetition of both phrases, not to mention inadvertent and deliberate abuse, that many people have reached the point of a legal friend of mine who lamented that “Democracy is a failed state and Christianity is a failed religion.”
So we must begin anew, in different terms because we live in different times. In a technological age we focus on operational standards such as MRIs in hospitals, computers in classrooms and fixed elections and information access for accountability in politics.
These are not enough. Dictatorships abound sanctioned through the ballot box. Information is dumped and spun to confuse rather than to inform. When the Watergate Scandal began to get legs, the Nixon Administration launched “Operation Candor” whose stated objective was to make Oval Office conversations available to the public. Its actual objective was information overload to distract from the relevant conversations the Administration was not releasing.
This would have succeeded had it not been for the persistence of a lower court judge and a few lawyers. Their demands for the relevant evidence was upheld in Supreme Court and led to the fall of the Nixon Administration. So prima face information access without precision or focus is not enough. Any seasoned bureaucrat or politician knows this. Information excess can be used as effectively as legislated exceptions to disclosure to avoid accountability.
I have chosen to focus on four qualities I see underlying good governance of any kind. Without them, our so-called democracy, no matter how often it claims to poll the people or consult through elections or focus groups, is no more than forms. Each of the qualities rests on a foundation of the one that follows it. The four are Thought, Translation, Trust and Truth.
Thought is much more than the snap judgments that come from having our buttons pushed. Political spinmeisters can be very good at preventing us from thinking with techniques that draw on neurological knowledge of how the limbic brain trumps the cortex. If we stimulate the limbic system, we don’t have to think at all; reflex will determine. Practice with e-devices has made us quicker in reaction time but not more reflective or in-formed in our thinking.
Thought is more than cog-nition, a word we also use for mechanical cogs. It integrates body awareness—proprioceptive, systemic and cellular—and participation in the larger body of humanity: impacts of our actions on others and theirs on us. Emotional Intelligence is a wake-up to what we leave out of a narrow focus that is becoming calculating and psychopathic.
If you want to know what this larger sense of thought was, before we divided it into intellect, emotion and other components, we have to go back to Elizabethan English. In Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, the Queen, in her palace with events closing in, asks Enobarbus who is one of Mark Antony’s supporters, “What shall we do?” Enobarbus—a true servant and not a cypher—replies, “Think and die!”
That is the kind of thought that takes it all in, reflects consciously and gives meaning. It can serve us not only to face death but to make life worth living and to have a viable democracy.
A second quality I see as a thread of democracy, translation, is also larger than the meaning that first springs to mind. Think of translation not only between languages but mediums such as from water to land to air, or from words to mathematical symbols as in calculus. The capacity is inter-change flexibly underlies thought. We need it in order to learn to think.
A child first learning her mother tongue knows this. She knows that the word she is presented to re-present an object is not the same as the object. Her mother is more than the word Mama. The child has a rich source to draw on: her mother’s smell, her mother’s touch, her mother’s face and smile. Each of these is more than the word that eventually stands for them all. It is the capacity that knows that, that associates and identifies without equating, that makes young children such perceptive and fantastic learners.
Unfortunately, for most of us except the creatively artistic and differently abled we dismiss as dis-abled—and there’s considerable overlap here—words, definitions, formulas take over.
One of the great benefits of learning another language when our brains are flexible is that it keeps the flexibility alive. Because words are not fully interchangeable from one tongue to another, we remain more alert to nuance, shades of meaning, sound and colour than when a Table is always a Table and nothing more or less.
This capacity to translate also enables us to re-late socially: to put ourselves in another situation: to try to imagine what it would be like to be something else and later to try to put ourselves in another’s shoes. Such a sense of “socializing”—of being able to connect, not simply to behave—is needed to live in any society. It is necessary for us to be able to think, and it, too is a thread of democracy.
To reach a point of translating ourselves into different situations in reality and imagination, we must trust our capacity to do so. There must be enough situations in our experience where we’ve tried and succeeded or, if the result has not been overwhelming success, it has at least not been a crippling failure that keeps us from trying again. The toddler who trusts he can fall and rise again learns to walk; the teenager, given a chance, learns to take her own decisions.
Science rests on belief that the universe, if not benevolent, is at least benign and orderly. It will not strike back at us for exploring, or punish us for asking questions. In a story foundational to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the patriarch Abraham repeatedly presses his point in negotiation with the gods or God and is commended, not rebuked, for doing so.
Translate this to the realm of governance and politics, and several things follow. Electors will not be intimidated from going to the polls and when they get there—if they are not re-routed by robo-calls—will not have to cast their votes in a setting dominated by scrutineers of one party. If they are students, retired or recipients of other benefits, they will not be belittled or differentiated from other citizens by the label “taxpayer.” They will not be censured for asking questions, face to face, or in a letter to an MP or editor or on social media.
Senior and other citizens will not be penalized for voting for the wrong party or have requests for assistance and information delayed or discriminated against because they are in a riding represented by the Opposition. Elected representatives of whatever party will be free to vote or abstain from voting according to conscience on matters of conviction. MPs of any party will be able to ask questions that are more than obsequious plants or talking points.
Some of the challenges to trust cited here are matters of privacy. If the list is getting longer, it is not because we are creating new rights as much as eroding or undermining old ones. The secret ballot in Canada is 140 years old, just 7 years younger than Confederation, and we have more ways of accessing the information of how people voted today than we did then.
Canadians have preferred to trust our leaders. That is changing with good reason. Not only are there more technical moles and termites permeating more of our lives, but we are coming to doubt that those we entrust with our governance are actually there for us. An increasingly aggressive winner-takes-all political culture favours those most clever at working the system as opposed to the traditional sense of our leaders being there to make the system work. This lack of trust points to a final foundational democratic thread, a quality also in short supply.
The issue of Truth in government, or with any type of power, is problematic. The moment we claim to have it, we move into the realm of naïve idealism or dogmatism of religious creeds. The first we see in the Declaration of Independence that begins “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” It follows with the evident un-truth that “all men are created equal” then lists two of Canada’s foundations—the recognition of the uniqueness of Quebec society, and the preservation of aboriginal lands—as “intolerable acts” that are grounds for revolution.
The other abuse of “truth” is in dogmatic fervour that degenerates into tyranny of Inquisitions and charade of “show trials” that invariably end in distortion. If, on the other hand, we abdicate the pursuit of Truth, we have anarchy, chaos and unchecked self-interest. Clearly there has to be some middle way, and there is.
Truth must be proactive, not in beating a rival contender to the punch, but in providing sufficient in time and detail to stand scrutiny.
Truth must be seen to trust the people to whom its disclosure is directed. Many years ago in writing an article, I requested information on rates charged to the public by a major railway. The Communications officer who took my call intoned, “You must realize this is highly technical and complex information that could be misunderstood by a majority of lay people.” (Translation: either the public is not smart enough to get it, or too smart for us to get this by.)
Truth must be sufficient to allow its hearers to arrive at an informed position, not simply exculpatory (enough to get off) or the opposite “gotcha” of media. It must comprehensive enough in the scientific sense to give testable grounds for a provisional hypothesis. The body of evidence must have “integrity” in the sense that it hangs together.” It does not have to be a last word. The verdict of “not proven” in Scottish Common Law is a reasonable conclusion.
In short, Truth is an attitude and an approach as much as an outcome and without the attitude the outcome is not possible
I turn to one of the most famous trials in the Western tradition: that of Jesus of Nazareth before Pontius Pilate. My reference here is independent of theological aspects and focused on the facts of the process: a treason trial in a subject state under Roman law.
In fairness, it must be admitted at the outset that the records are not without bias. They are intended to be exculpatory of the Roman authority that pronounced the sentence and inculpatory or incriminating of the Jewish authorities who are seen as the accusers. Yet there is a line here, in the last of four parallel accounts, that points to the issue of attitude.
Having extracted what can be seen as a confession to the charge of treason, “So you are a king then?, Pilate dismisses the prisoner’s further statement of his being an other-worldly kingdom and that he has come “to bear witness to the truth,” retorting, “What is truth?”
At least that’s what he appears to do. Remember, this is a Roman prefect or procurator with a ruthless record of law enforcement, not Plato setting out Socrates to his students. Pilate may have been a slave who had been freed and rose through the system. Like many who work their way up from the bottom, he got there by following the law to the letter.
Unlike aristocratic appointees with wealth and power enough to voice independent thought and opinion, Pilate was a meat and potatoes magistrate. In fact, he was very much the type of appointee the current government in Ottawa would like to have in its highest court.
So when Pilate says “What is truth?” he is probably saying it dismissively: “Truth—what’s that? Something for academics to play with. In this court we stick to the facts.” That’s what he seems to be saying, if the emphasis is on the third word: “What is truth?”
But there is another way we can hear or read those words: “What is truth?” This is not outright dismissal; it contains an element of doubt and uncertainty. It’s the attitude a judge in our adversarial system must take to a case.. S/he cannot presume to know the truth or infer it from their own reading into the evidence. They must listen to the two versions laid out by plaintiff and respondent, or prosecution and defense, and choose between them. The decision may not be all-or-nothing for one side or the other. But it is still a choice based on presentations. Of the scenarios laid out before me, what is plausible, and in what degree?
There is a third way we can take this question, and it puts the emphasis on the first word: “What is Truth?” This is the first step on the road to learning. A “learned judge” does not start out that way: she becomes that by asking the right questions. An educated populace or electorate likewise. Clichés and catechisms about Democracy are not enough. We must start afresh: look, listen and learn. The journey may take us where it seems that “no one has gone before” and that is no reason to either give up on it, or to become reckless.
There is a destination: as George Rawson said, “I am persuaded that there is more light and truth to break forth…” We may not know what or how but we know that. And from what we now know about quantum as well as metaphysics, the observer is not neutral and objective but a participant in the events observed. Thoughts affect outcomes. What we believe affects what manifests. Do we want a society of Order, or one of Chaos where the only thing that matters is who’s first out of the starting gate, and the winner takes all?
So how do we ask the question?
“What is truth?” with a sneer of dismissal?
“What is truth?” with uncertainty and willingness to study and compare alternatives?
“What is Truth?” starting out on a journey, believing in a destination even if we don’t know exactly how and where the journey will lead us?
Without Truth, there can be no Peace, Order and Good Governance: the intent of our Constitution.
Without Trust in the people’s ability to hear, to Translate, Think, and decide the Truth, under wise leadership, to be sure, but knowing that it is they that must ultimately decide, like a jury, there can be no Democracy.
The defense rests.
a commentary by David W. Watts for delivery at the banquet of the Information Access & Privacy Conference 18 June 2014
I doubt if we shall improve upon Abraham Lincoln’s description of democracy as “government of the people, by the people and for the people” any more than we will better Jesus of Nazareth’s injunction to “Love one another” as the basis of a viable community.
Unfortunately there has been so much mindless repetition of both phrases, not to mention inadvertent and deliberate abuse, that many people have reached the point of a legal friend of mine who lamented that “Democracy is a failed state and Christianity is a failed religion.”
So we must begin anew, in different terms because we live in different times. In a technological age we focus on operational standards such as MRIs in hospitals, computers in classrooms and fixed elections and information access for accountability in politics.
These are not enough. Dictatorships abound sanctioned through the ballot box. Information is dumped and spun to confuse rather than to inform. When the Watergate Scandal began to get legs, the Nixon Administration launched “Operation Candor” whose stated objective was to make Oval Office conversations available to the public. Its actual objective was information overload to distract from the relevant conversations the Administration was not releasing.
This would have succeeded had it not been for the persistence of a lower court judge and a few lawyers. Their demands for the relevant evidence was upheld in Supreme Court and led to the fall of the Nixon Administration. So prima face information access without precision or focus is not enough. Any seasoned bureaucrat or politician knows this. Information excess can be used as effectively as legislated exceptions to disclosure to avoid accountability.
I have chosen to focus on four qualities I see underlying good governance of any kind. Without them, our so-called democracy, no matter how often it claims to poll the people or consult through elections or focus groups, is no more than forms. Each of the qualities rests on a foundation of the one that follows it. The four are Thought, Translation, Trust and Truth.
Thought is much more than the snap judgments that come from having our buttons pushed. Political spinmeisters can be very good at preventing us from thinking with techniques that draw on neurological knowledge of how the limbic brain trumps the cortex. If we stimulate the limbic system, we don’t have to think at all; reflex will determine. Practice with e-devices has made us quicker in reaction time but not more reflective or in-formed in our thinking.
Thought is more than cog-nition, a word we also use for mechanical cogs. It integrates body awareness—proprioceptive, systemic and cellular—and participation in the larger body of humanity: impacts of our actions on others and theirs on us. Emotional Intelligence is a wake-up to what we leave out of a narrow focus that is becoming calculating and psychopathic.
If you want to know what this larger sense of thought was, before we divided it into intellect, emotion and other components, we have to go back to Elizabethan English. In Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, the Queen, in her palace with events closing in, asks Enobarbus who is one of Mark Antony’s supporters, “What shall we do?” Enobarbus—a true servant and not a cypher—replies, “Think and die!”
That is the kind of thought that takes it all in, reflects consciously and gives meaning. It can serve us not only to face death but to make life worth living and to have a viable democracy.
A second quality I see as a thread of democracy, translation, is also larger than the meaning that first springs to mind. Think of translation not only between languages but mediums such as from water to land to air, or from words to mathematical symbols as in calculus. The capacity is inter-change flexibly underlies thought. We need it in order to learn to think.
A child first learning her mother tongue knows this. She knows that the word she is presented to re-present an object is not the same as the object. Her mother is more than the word Mama. The child has a rich source to draw on: her mother’s smell, her mother’s touch, her mother’s face and smile. Each of these is more than the word that eventually stands for them all. It is the capacity that knows that, that associates and identifies without equating, that makes young children such perceptive and fantastic learners.
Unfortunately, for most of us except the creatively artistic and differently abled we dismiss as dis-abled—and there’s considerable overlap here—words, definitions, formulas take over.
One of the great benefits of learning another language when our brains are flexible is that it keeps the flexibility alive. Because words are not fully interchangeable from one tongue to another, we remain more alert to nuance, shades of meaning, sound and colour than when a Table is always a Table and nothing more or less.
This capacity to translate also enables us to re-late socially: to put ourselves in another situation: to try to imagine what it would be like to be something else and later to try to put ourselves in another’s shoes. Such a sense of “socializing”—of being able to connect, not simply to behave—is needed to live in any society. It is necessary for us to be able to think, and it, too is a thread of democracy.
To reach a point of translating ourselves into different situations in reality and imagination, we must trust our capacity to do so. There must be enough situations in our experience where we’ve tried and succeeded or, if the result has not been overwhelming success, it has at least not been a crippling failure that keeps us from trying again. The toddler who trusts he can fall and rise again learns to walk; the teenager, given a chance, learns to take her own decisions.
Science rests on belief that the universe, if not benevolent, is at least benign and orderly. It will not strike back at us for exploring, or punish us for asking questions. In a story foundational to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the patriarch Abraham repeatedly presses his point in negotiation with the gods or God and is commended, not rebuked, for doing so.
Translate this to the realm of governance and politics, and several things follow. Electors will not be intimidated from going to the polls and when they get there—if they are not re-routed by robo-calls—will not have to cast their votes in a setting dominated by scrutineers of one party. If they are students, retired or recipients of other benefits, they will not be belittled or differentiated from other citizens by the label “taxpayer.” They will not be censured for asking questions, face to face, or in a letter to an MP or editor or on social media.
Senior and other citizens will not be penalized for voting for the wrong party or have requests for assistance and information delayed or discriminated against because they are in a riding represented by the Opposition. Elected representatives of whatever party will be free to vote or abstain from voting according to conscience on matters of conviction. MPs of any party will be able to ask questions that are more than obsequious plants or talking points.
Some of the challenges to trust cited here are matters of privacy. If the list is getting longer, it is not because we are creating new rights as much as eroding or undermining old ones. The secret ballot in Canada is 140 years old, just 7 years younger than Confederation, and we have more ways of accessing the information of how people voted today than we did then.
Canadians have preferred to trust our leaders. That is changing with good reason. Not only are there more technical moles and termites permeating more of our lives, but we are coming to doubt that those we entrust with our governance are actually there for us. An increasingly aggressive winner-takes-all political culture favours those most clever at working the system as opposed to the traditional sense of our leaders being there to make the system work. This lack of trust points to a final foundational democratic thread, a quality also in short supply.
The issue of Truth in government, or with any type of power, is problematic. The moment we claim to have it, we move into the realm of naïve idealism or dogmatism of religious creeds. The first we see in the Declaration of Independence that begins “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” It follows with the evident un-truth that “all men are created equal” then lists two of Canada’s foundations—the recognition of the uniqueness of Quebec society, and the preservation of aboriginal lands—as “intolerable acts” that are grounds for revolution.
The other abuse of “truth” is in dogmatic fervour that degenerates into tyranny of Inquisitions and charade of “show trials” that invariably end in distortion. If, on the other hand, we abdicate the pursuit of Truth, we have anarchy, chaos and unchecked self-interest. Clearly there has to be some middle way, and there is.
Truth must be proactive, not in beating a rival contender to the punch, but in providing sufficient in time and detail to stand scrutiny.
Truth must be seen to trust the people to whom its disclosure is directed. Many years ago in writing an article, I requested information on rates charged to the public by a major railway. The Communications officer who took my call intoned, “You must realize this is highly technical and complex information that could be misunderstood by a majority of lay people.” (Translation: either the public is not smart enough to get it, or too smart for us to get this by.)
Truth must be sufficient to allow its hearers to arrive at an informed position, not simply exculpatory (enough to get off) or the opposite “gotcha” of media. It must comprehensive enough in the scientific sense to give testable grounds for a provisional hypothesis. The body of evidence must have “integrity” in the sense that it hangs together.” It does not have to be a last word. The verdict of “not proven” in Scottish Common Law is a reasonable conclusion.
In short, Truth is an attitude and an approach as much as an outcome and without the attitude the outcome is not possible
I turn to one of the most famous trials in the Western tradition: that of Jesus of Nazareth before Pontius Pilate. My reference here is independent of theological aspects and focused on the facts of the process: a treason trial in a subject state under Roman law.
In fairness, it must be admitted at the outset that the records are not without bias. They are intended to be exculpatory of the Roman authority that pronounced the sentence and inculpatory or incriminating of the Jewish authorities who are seen as the accusers. Yet there is a line here, in the last of four parallel accounts, that points to the issue of attitude.
Having extracted what can be seen as a confession to the charge of treason, “So you are a king then?, Pilate dismisses the prisoner’s further statement of his being an other-worldly kingdom and that he has come “to bear witness to the truth,” retorting, “What is truth?”
At least that’s what he appears to do. Remember, this is a Roman prefect or procurator with a ruthless record of law enforcement, not Plato setting out Socrates to his students. Pilate may have been a slave who had been freed and rose through the system. Like many who work their way up from the bottom, he got there by following the law to the letter.
Unlike aristocratic appointees with wealth and power enough to voice independent thought and opinion, Pilate was a meat and potatoes magistrate. In fact, he was very much the type of appointee the current government in Ottawa would like to have in its highest court.
So when Pilate says “What is truth?” he is probably saying it dismissively: “Truth—what’s that? Something for academics to play with. In this court we stick to the facts.” That’s what he seems to be saying, if the emphasis is on the third word: “What is truth?”
But there is another way we can hear or read those words: “What is truth?” This is not outright dismissal; it contains an element of doubt and uncertainty. It’s the attitude a judge in our adversarial system must take to a case.. S/he cannot presume to know the truth or infer it from their own reading into the evidence. They must listen to the two versions laid out by plaintiff and respondent, or prosecution and defense, and choose between them. The decision may not be all-or-nothing for one side or the other. But it is still a choice based on presentations. Of the scenarios laid out before me, what is plausible, and in what degree?
There is a third way we can take this question, and it puts the emphasis on the first word: “What is Truth?” This is the first step on the road to learning. A “learned judge” does not start out that way: she becomes that by asking the right questions. An educated populace or electorate likewise. Clichés and catechisms about Democracy are not enough. We must start afresh: look, listen and learn. The journey may take us where it seems that “no one has gone before” and that is no reason to either give up on it, or to become reckless.
There is a destination: as George Rawson said, “I am persuaded that there is more light and truth to break forth…” We may not know what or how but we know that. And from what we now know about quantum as well as metaphysics, the observer is not neutral and objective but a participant in the events observed. Thoughts affect outcomes. What we believe affects what manifests. Do we want a society of Order, or one of Chaos where the only thing that matters is who’s first out of the starting gate, and the winner takes all?
So how do we ask the question?
“What is truth?” with a sneer of dismissal?
“What is truth?” with uncertainty and willingness to study and compare alternatives?
“What is Truth?” starting out on a journey, believing in a destination even if we don’t know exactly how and where the journey will lead us?
Without Truth, there can be no Peace, Order and Good Governance: the intent of our Constitution.
Without Trust in the people’s ability to hear, to Translate, Think, and decide the Truth, under wise leadership, to be sure, but knowing that it is they that must ultimately decide, like a jury, there can be no Democracy.
The defense rests.