Defining "democracy"

Americans are taught in elementary school that the word "democracy" comes from ancient Greek and meant "rule by the people" (demos, "the people" + kratia, "power, rule").  The Greeks are said to have created democracy around the 6th Century B.C., the implication being that 300,000 years (give or take) of possible human self-management prior to the Greeks was negligible, that there was no democracy until there was the word "democracy."

One bit of information that is sometimes missing from school textbooks- but that students often pick up on their own- is that for the ancient Greeks, "the people" referred to wealthy, slave-owning men of sharply defined ethnicity, as it did for their successors the Romans and our predecessors the Founding Fathers.  

The period of the Greek and Roman empires (called the classical age, from Latin classis, class, as in, upper class) was followed by a thousand year period called the Dark Age, which happened because when the Roman empire collapsed, the peoples whose cultures it had destroyed had no cultures to fall back on (a similar potential exists in today's industrial world).  Textbooks suggest that Dark Age people didn't know anything; they just made things up and believed them no matter how stupid or crazy they were (imagine that!).  There was no democracy.  People were ruled by monarchs- kings and queens- who were members of the "aristocracy," from ancient Greek meaning "rule by the best people" (aristos, best + kratia, ).  Aristocratic power tended to derive from agricultural possession and wealth. There were also religious leaders such as the Pope, who represented rule by God.  Many monarchs tried to cover both ends by claiming that, in addition to being the best people because they owned the most, they had been appointed by God.  

In the 14th Century, towards the end of the Dark Age, the Black Plague killed an estimated 25 million people throughout Eurasia and North Africa- about a third of the population- leading to a major shift in human ambition.  Many people were dissatisfied with monarchy and/or religious rule after these failed to protect against the plague.  The institutions had also notably failed, over centuries, to turn human life into an interesting and gratifying experience.  This became important in the late 18th Century to a group called the Romantics, who imagined that life used to offer more than a desperate quest not to be a slave.  In contrast to the Enlightenment (see below), which valued rationality (from Latin reri, to count, as in counting money), Romantics believed our ancient life was primarily emotional.  My vintage textbook describes Romanticism as "a reaction against the order and restraint of classicism," which is ironic because "Romanticism" derives from "Rome." 

The Dark Age concluded with an explosion of light and darkness called the Industrial Revolution, in which humanity believed, perhaps rightly for some, that it could not survive without continually evolving machines.  People from every background, sensing that humans could fight back against obstinate nature, developed science (from Latin, scire: to know) into a well-funded, politically supported organized collection of data on every aspect of everything. Among the most prominent of the scientific achievements were a variety of machines that could do human work using steam and electricity.  

The machines increased human power so much that the human role started to change from doing work to tending machines that do work.  The owners of the machines- who were often not members of the aristocracy and so could not rule- became rich, sometimes gaining near absolute power over the workers who tended the machines.  These owners started to feel like their abilities to move earth and dominate people qualified them to be among "the best," with attendant perks.  It was the machine owners who resurrected the ancient Greek idea of "democracy," which they found afforded them the quickest route to power.

There were people who did not want the machines and their owners to take over society and culture.  In the early 19th Century, a group of English textile workers called "Luddites" (after a mythical character named Ned Lud) believed that machines were in competition for their jobs, so in response they destroyed machines.  Their movement lasted four years, until they were all either killed or imprisoned.  In current usage a "Luddite" is a person who opposes industrialization generally.  If you call someone a "Luddite," the implication is that this person is living on another planet. 

At the same time that industrialization was forcing a transition from serfdom to urban "wage slavery" or actual slavery, the philosophers of the age started thinking about classical Greece and Rome, how the ancient aristocracies were able to lord it over everyone not just with the sword and the wage, but with intellectual output.  Suddenly everything about the classical world was cool: rectangular buildings surrounded by columns; state endorsed theater that probed the human soul; democracy, where rich men could run things on behalf of women, wage-slaves and slaves.  The PR department for this movement came up with the term "Renaissance," meaning "rebirth."  Thus Shakespeare, a Renaissance playwright, was patronized by the royal court even though his plays laid out the mental pathologies of kings and queens, an elevation and acceptance of theater not seen since classical times.  At least for playgoers, there was a rebirth.  For everyone else, life was the same slog.

Another PR coup was the term "Enlightenment," the idea that all the stupidity of the human race through the Dark Age had been replaced by a great understanding of things.  For instance, we finally understood the self-evident goodness of allowing people to make as much money as possible doing whatever it takes to make it.

Not many people talk any more about the Enlightenment or the Renaissance as ongoing processes, but we continue to refer to democracy and expect it to be practiced in America, with or without clarification of its meaning.  

We should look at the concept of "democracy," however, and determine what it does and does not mean, because it's at the core of our state religion, which holds that our government takes its orders from every single one of us, not just from people economically or socially close to the government, or part of it.

[Digression alert!]

There will be plenty of disagreement about the definition of "democracy." For instance, in my view the current promotion of "Critical Race Theory" (CRT)- the latest mulit-million dollar panacea for racism- in American public schools is an example of democracy not in action, especially for veteran teachers like me who have taught all races from all places for a long time and have developed their own CRT that posits a universality of the human soul, without the additional bit, prominent in CRT, instructing children that anyone who is "white" is an oppressor. I call CRT undemocratic because it was put in place by a handful of academics having a gas in their ideological playground in collaboration with garden variety education hucksters who can spot a quick buck, not by some sort of "majority" of citizens. On the other hand, proponents of CRT see it as an expression of democracy in that it empowers oppressed peoples. What motive they might have for adding on a doctrine of white original sin is unclear. One might surmise that while some of the academic authors of CRT may recognize the counter-productive nature of telling teachers to "challenge whiteness" (as the Los Angeles Unified School District does), they go along with it because it's the kind of "in your face" approach that excites young people; it sells

[End of digression]

I vote "No" to using the word "democracy" as a national shibboleth, given its referent's increasingly exposed reliance on smoke and mirrors, and its habitual entanglement with politics. Politicized democracy should at least not decide questions concerning education and child care, such as determining which ethnicities are moral and which are immoral.

Beyond education, and whatever its motives, politicized democracy is useless simply because it requires that one side be right and the other wrong. It will reshape any issue into that format, to the detriment of solutions.

Even in classical times, democracy was suspect. Socrates and Plato criticized it for serving special interests, as we do today.

In the minds of most people, democracy requires that every adult affected by an issue have the ability to vote on that issue, but voting is glossed over in most practical decision making (e.g., don't expect to vote on CRT). It might be impractical to expect a one-to-one ratio between every key decision our national, state and local governments make and a vote- we would be voting night and day in a real democracy- but it would clarify our political conversations if we stopped describing official decision-making as "democratic" when it does not entail voting or any sort of measure of "majority" and "minority" views, especially as we face future foundational challenges in education and beyond.  We're about to reinvent human society from the inside out, incorporating Artificial Intelligence and bioengineering to create humankind 2.0.  Almost none of the decisions involved will be made by voting, so the process should not be termed democratic.  

Since many of our important rulings are made by experts, we might label ourselves a technocracy- a society run by technocrats (i.e., members of a technically skilled elite, Webster), though there is a negative connotation to "technocrat," suggesting a bureaucratic coldness.  That could change with some decent technocrats.

All that matters in the end is whether the human race will be able to figure itself out before self-destructing.  We won't be able to without meaningful language, in which words essential to our society, like "democracy," are clearly defined.