Autocrats and Democrats
I recently watched “The Internecine Project,” a movie I remember enjoying from the seventies and which I hadn’t seen in years. I was struck by the dialogue towards the end of the movie. It was between the character played by James Coburn, a behind-the-scenes mister fixer manipulating and eliminating people to further certain ends and his lady friend. I noted down the exchange, because it resonates with the anti-politics of these times.
Woman: EDC and Farnsworth can run the government any way they want because good old professor Elliot is right in there next to the President. I hope they are paying you a lot of money.
James Coburn: Yes they are. You know that there are a Hell of a lot of things in this world that need to be done and to do them the right man has to be in the right place at the right time.
Woman: are you the right man?
James Coburn: Yes.
Woman: You know it’s usual in a civilized society to wait until you’re elected to a post, not smash your way through whether you are wanted or not.
James Coburn: That’s why the whole world is falling around all about us because we are waiting for the right man to be elected.
Woman: That’s called democracy, don’t you remember?
James Coburn: Yes, the whole world is governed by a whole bunch of democratically elected amateurs. There’s no time for that any more.
Woman: a little fascism can go a long way.
James Coburn: You don’t seem to understand that there are things that I believe in, I believe in very deeply. I’m not about to wait around for a bunch of half-assed politicians to screw things up when I know I can do a Hell of a lot better job and that’s not vanity or conceit or a damned thing, that’s pure honest conviction.
Woman: The end justifies the means. There’s a lot of us poor, downtrodden peasants who don’t happen to agree with you.
James Coburn: That’s why you are peasants.
Woman: This particular peasant doesn’t intend to stay down.
James Coburn: Oh well, you are stuck in time. That kind of argument went out with the Cold War and flower children.
Woman: well there’s something else. You know I’ve been digging up a lot of stuff and the more I kept digging the more I kept finding out that you were involved. I’m going to write about it.
James Coburn: well write it.
Woman: I damned well will.
So many people, of different persuasions, not only think themselves to be right in the myriad causes they pursue, they are possessed with a conviction and an urgency that makes them impatient with the normal processes of politics and the give-and-take of human interaction and exchange. They are more than willing to impose their ends and override the alternate and contrary views of others. The pernicious doctrine of the end justifying the means has reared its ugly head again. This degeneration in politics is almost inevitable once the political narrative comes to be dominated by crisis, catastrophe, and necessity. As the James Coburn character puts it, “You don’t seem to understand that there are things that I believe in, I believe in very deeply. I’m not about to wait around for a bunch of half-assed politicians to screw things up when I know I can do a Hell of a lot better job and that’s not vanity or conceit or a damned thing, that’s pure honest conviction.” It is striking how many times activists can be heard justifying their extremism in action by the claim that there are things that they passionately believe in. So long as they remain activists engaged in a process of civil resistance they are something of a nuisance. But you only need to translate that same mentality into public office and political power to see its totalitarian implications. Time and again these people override the opinions and preferences expressed by real flesh and blood individuals in there here and now by reference to some abstract and non-existent ‘humanity’ of the future. Like all vanguards, they claim to know, represent and speak and act for the objective interests of others, in contradistinction to the subjective choices of those others. They are autocrats or foot-soldiers in the advancement of autocracy and the retreat of democracy.
I argue for something that is very different. I am a democrat. Democracy is not populism but is premised on the individuals composing the demos becoming capable of ruling themselves through the nous instead of being led by the nose by the manipulations of others. This article in Aeon caught my eye in this respect.
Democracy requires patience, it requires the recognition that one is fallible and that others with whom you disagree may well have a point, and it requires the cultivation of the moral and intellectual virtues. I emphasise the cultivation of the virtues as qualities for successful living, character construction, and happiness as flourishing well. The article argues that, so long as an activity is generally conducive to developing character traits and intellectual traits that will enhance and not impede the flourishing of both an agent and those with whom they interact, it is objectively pursuit-worthy. My own view goes further to argue for the inherent goodness of things in an objectively valuable and meaningful world. Without that conception, we will always tend to try to find objectivity in the phenomenology of human exchange and interaction. It’s not that that view is wrong but that it still begs the question of the good. I shall leave that question of objectivity aside here and instead focus on fostering the inner motive force for right action. Without that, the business of politics will be all the messier, leaving problems mounting, encouraging impatience on the part of those who think that they have the solutions. We see this in so many areas. I have argued this point for years now: whilst liberalism is fine with the view of the good as no more than subjective preference – individuals choosing the good as they see fit – the character of those choices and hence of the individual choosers matters a great deal for a collective form of governance which generates social consequences. It is for this reason that I have criticised the notion of ‘liberal democracy’ as inherently unstable, an oxymoron even.
I'll put it directly - fostering the inner motive force is crucial to any collective project in politics – whether we refer to socialism or climate change or any movement, issue, or cause that is concerned with issues of general significance. Many of the would-be autocrats overriding democracy today see themselves as educators, trying to inform the empty heads of the members of the demos in expectation of right action. There is a crude Enlightenment rationalism at work here, one that plays right into the hands of behaviourism. Against this, I argue that learning, defined as a change in behaviour, proceeds through the formation of the inner motives. Karl Marx never wrote a truer word than when he argued that ‘the educator must also be educated.’ Marx here was arguing against the elitist and manipulative tendencies of the old determinist materialism which saw human beings as the passive products of their environment. If human beings are indeed the products of circumstances, then corrupt circumstances demanding transformation would issue only in human agents too corrupted to be able to initiate and sustain the transformation required. Marx thus noted how ‘would-be universal reformers’ would break their materialist premises by reverting to an idealism that transcended these corrupt circumstances, raising themselves above corrupt society and corrupt people and seeking to force transformation from above and from the outside. This is the vanguardist model of political change and it is the very antithesis of Marx’s actively democratic model. Marx argued for the reality-changing politics of praxis, with human agency at its heart.
I would argue that Marx is fundamentally correct as far as he goes, but go further in terms of virtue ethics, character construction, and personal moral effort. But I am encouraged by the evidence of other leftists moving in this direction in recent decades. Whilst calling for constructive models of the future society, Jurgen Habermas underlined the importance of something that is key when it comes to allying social transformation with personal transformation: ‘I know that all learning depends on the formation of inner motives’ (Habermas 1981: 28). Precisely. We need to emphasise the true definition of education as drawing out each person’s inherent potentials, something that is very different to an endless proselytising with a view for forcing action in favour of externally given and already determined ends. There is zero process and agency in this externally driven education and hence no social and democratic content. It is a recipe for autocracy, a morally empty bureaucratic society in which external imperatives take the place of inner motives. Without the formation of inner motives, and without the forms of the common life enabling effective response and action on the part of individuals, then ‘education’ and more ‘education’ will not suffice. (Habermas 1981: 28). Because such education is not true learning as a change in behaviour at all – it is behaviourism, a manipulation of individuals informed by some ethically empty neurononsense. The informing of heads will not work as the educators think unless it goes with the formation of character and also social formation with respect to the structures and relations setting the context of human actions. These are the things I try to bring to environmentalism as a politics of practices constituting public community. Without that, the language of necessity translates very easily into a coercive authoritarianism. Jurgen Habermas argues that bureaucratisation represented the highest form of societal rationality and ‘the most effective subsumption of acting subjects under the objective force of an apparatus operating autonomously above their heads’ (Habermas 1989: 307). We can observe precisely this happening in a number of areas in modern society, with activists/campaigners so convinced by the righteousness of their cause (and their knowledge) as to be completely blinded to the pitfalls of their approach. And it’s not just those mobilising around a cause who express these tendencies. There are now nudge units employed throughout government. I have direct experience of ‘nudge,’ having been confronted with the systematic bullying of the nudgers in the employment service. I challenged my local Employment Service on this back in 2010, to absolutely no avail. I noted its failures and its dehumanising intentions and effects. And here we are now, with nudging now extended across whole areas of government. Governments have learned along with activists that fear works. If it is not exactly persuasive, it has a compulsion that people in the mass find hard to resist, not least when put under constant pressure. I can see why governments, bereft of solutions, employ such tactics, ensuring that a fundamentally iniquitous society remains untransformed. As to why activists/campaigners demanding ‘system change’ engage in such behaviourism requires a serious answer. It’s not a mystery. This is an inevitable result of relying on an ethically neutral naturalism instead of developing a genuine ethics. Model your politics on an indifferent Nature and seek to motivate actions by reference to crisis, fear, and necessity, then you inevitably end up attempting to ‘nudge’ individuals. Because you have no means whatsoever by which to connect with, motivate, inspire, and obligate real individuals. ‘We’ve tried democracy and it has failed’ is a common response on the part of environmental campaigners, justifying their direct action/civil resistance. The problem is that environmentalism has not tried democracy and has been politically clueless since its incipience. It doesn’t take politics and ethics seriously and thinks these things are secondary and passive consequences of correct (scientific) knowledge. Inevitably, such an approach has proven to be utterly deficient when it comes to the motivational economy. It’s not democracy and politics that has failed, it is the environmentalists who have failed politically. Their war of attrition against the public can end only one way – in overspill and appropriation, with necessity taken over by those with the resources to ‘act.’ Whoever that may be, it won’t be green hippies demanding a return to nature. The political cluelessness of environmentalism would be harmless enough in normal times, but we are now seeing how governments are able to manipulate the ecology of fear to entrench and extend iniquitous power.
If you think it all arcane, virtue ethics as ‘traditional’ and therefore outmoded, then think again.
The Marxist William Morris emphasised the development of the subjective conditions of social transformation as the most important condition of all since, in its absence, socialism would be but 'the mill-wheel without the motive power.' (Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist 2 434-53).
I'll put it more bluntly – you can stuff your autocrats and psychocrats now appropriating crisis and necessity to their own ends, ‘would be universal reformers’ manipulating and coercing human behaviour from above and from the outside. I reject vanguards of all kinds for they way that they gut democracy and override agency, destroying the consanguinity of personal and collective effort. I argue for a genuine ethics (and politics) within the field of practical reason to yet another variant of behaviourism backed by all manner of neurononsense.
Habermas, J. 1981. 'The Dialectics of Rationalisation: An Interview with Jurgen Habermas’, Axel Honneth et al, Telos 49 (Fall) 1981
Habermas, J. 1981. 'New Social Movements', Telos, 49
Habermas, J. 1981. 'Modernity versus Postmodernity', New German Critique, Number 22
The lessons are plain: do not support bad process because it promises to deliver conclusions with which you agree. It may well do, for a short while, in specific instances. But sooner or later that bad process will come to consume the ends you pursue.
I am in full agreement with Pope France on this. ‘We are witnessing a retreat from democracy.’ Francis reminded people that “democracy requires participation and involvement on the part of all; consequently, it demands hard work and patience. It is complex, whereas authoritarianism is peremptory and populism’s easy answers appear attractive.” He noted that “in some societies, concerned for security and dulled by consumerism, weariness and malcontent can lead to a sort of skepticism about democracy.” He emphasized that “universal participation is something essential; not simply to attain shared goals but also because it corresponds to what we are: social beings, at once unique and interdependent.” Don't become so consumed by ends (and crises) that you neglect the quality of means and processes. There are far too many would-be universal autocrats and too few democrats.
You can read the article here.
Pope Francis made his speech at a meeting with government authorities, civic leaders and the diplomatic corps at the presidential palace in Athens, Greece (December 4, 2021). “Here democracy was born,” he said, before expressing his concern that “today, and not only in Europe, we are witnessing a retreat from democracy” and emphasized the pressing need for “a change of direction.”
Pope Francis uttered these key words: “democracy requires participation and involvement on the part of all; consequently, it demands hard work and patience. It is complex, whereas authoritarianism is peremptory and populism’s easy answers appear attractive.”
These words bear repetition and underlining, guarding against tendencies to impatience on the part of people gripped by a crisis-mentality. Fear is the enemy of democratic processes, necessity is the tyrant’s alibi. I remember the Gaia theorist James Lovelock justifying the suspension of democracy over a decade ago. I have no truck with such thinking. Such thinking is political cowardice, it is misanthropic, it is deficient in all the things we need to resolve problems, it is plain wrong. The problem with suspending democracy or liberty or anything else that makes for humane living on account of abnormal times is that such suspension soon becomes normalized: having acquired power, governments are loathe to give it up. And they rarely resolve the problems justifying the accumulation of power in the first place. One lesson we ought to have learned from history by now is that all concentrations of power are baneful.
Pope France noted that “in some societies, concerned for security and dulled by consumerism, weariness and malcontent can lead to a sort of skepticism about democracy.”
We hear precisely this in the language used by environmental campaigners, now in the streets engaged in a war of attrition against the public, deliberately disrupting the lives of ‘ordinary’ people, causing harm and suffering in an attempt to bully governments into compliance. It’s a never-ending war. Campaigning is not politics and knows no limits and no compromise. Whatever ground may be conceded, it can never be enough. Campaigners will simply move to the next demand and then the next, scaling upwards. In the meantime, ‘ordinary’ folk will be on the receiving end. Such campaigning to coerce government policy is a flagrant attempt to circumvent democratic process. When challenged on this, activists claim that they have tried democracy and that democracy has failed. This is self-serving drivel. They may have engaged in politics but have failed so lamentably at it that sufficient numbers have not been persuaded. Tough. Do better. Learn the value of engagement, participation, and consent. Respect citizens as autonomous moral agents and stop treating people as empty heads to be educated/indoctrinated.
Pope Francis proceeded to emphasize that “universal participation is something essential; not simply to attain shared goals but also because it corresponds to what we are: social beings, at once unique and interdependent.”
Participation is key.
He drew attention to the fact that today, “we are also witnessing a skepticism about democracy provoked by the distance of institutions, by fear of a loss of identity, by bureaucracy.”
That alien politics has been growing for decades now, the remoteness of governors from the governed breeding a scepticism on the part of citizens and a pessimism about politics. Campaigners feed on this but rather than resolve the problem of alien politics they embrace the simple resolution of authoritarianism all too easily.
Democracy “is complex, whereas authoritarianism is peremptory and populism’s easy answers appear attractive.”
“The remedy is not to be found in an obsessive quest for popularity, in a thirst for visibility, in a flurry of unrealistic promises or in adherence to forms of ideological colonization but in good politics.”
God bless Pope Francis. In face of activists and environmentalists denigrating and dismissing politics as ‘useless’ and worse, I’ve been arguing for years that the solution to bad politics is not no politics but good politics. Unfortunately, far too many environmentalists have gone down the line of ideological claims of being ‘beyond politics.’ They have fallen for the totalitarian temptation, with the pathetic offering of the device of citizens’ assemblies barely masking the attempt to put people and politics on ice. Fill the heads of a selected number of citizens with the correct knowledge supplied by selected experts and we get the right result and right action! The sad – or horrifying – part here is that I’m not caricaturing the argument. I don’t know what to make of so many campaigners who cite citizens’ assemblies as an argument when challenged on democracy. I get the impression that many come from science backgrounds and have paid scant attention to politics and ethics, thinking them secondary and ephemeral compared to ‘real’ knowledge. This is so facile and simplistic that it is no wonder environmentalism has got itself into such a mess politically. The truth is that natural science yields knowledge of the easy stuff, the stuff of the physical universe; the hard stuff is the messy stuff which is human beings and the human world. Environmentalists want an argument that you can only say ‘yes’ to – they don’t want the yes/no of politics and ethics, with moral agency at its core, they want an unarguable, unquestionable truth beyond negotiation and compromise.
This anti-politics started decades ago as the claim to be ‘beyond left and right.’ This involved claims not merely to be independent and forward thinking but most of all to be right. The dangers of this thinking are now becoming more and more apparent. Whereas politics is all about negotiation in exchange, truth is non-negotiable; there can be no compromise
Pope Francis was repeating arguments that he made in his encyclical “Fratelli Tutti”:
Politics is, and ought to be in practice, a good thing, as the supreme responsibility of citizens and as the art of the common good. So that the good can be truly shared, particular attention, I would even say priority, should be given to the weaker strata of society. This is the direction to take.
I agree entirely. Pope Francis proceeded to argue that “a change of direction is needed, even as fears and theories, amplified by virtual communication, are daily spread to create division.”
“Let us help one another, instead, to pass from partisanship to participation; from committing ourselves to supporting our party alone to engaging ourselves actively for the promotion of all.”
Crucially, Pope Francis argues that political and social leaders should move from partisanship to participation on such issues as “the climate, the pandemic, the common market and, above all, the widespread forms of poverty.” Quite so. The problem at the moment is that we have an exercise of power without responsibility, not merely in governments alienated from the governed but in campaign groups ratcheting up claims on the public from outside public office. The campaigning voice feeds off division, exploiting it and even creating it in the first place to radicalize people through a sense of grievance.
“These are challenges that call for concrete and active cooperation. The international community needs this, in order to open up paths of peace through a multilateralism that will not end up being stifled by excessive nationalistic demands. Politics needs this, in order to put common needs ahead of private interests.”
It is a sign of the sea change that is underway that whereas I used to argue this very thing against right wing forces in politics, I now have to argue it against supposedly leftist or progressive campaigning forces. Of course, all wings claim to have the common needs of people and the common good of all as their goal. Not so. They may use this claim as a justification, but the sheer absence of cooperation and participation at the heart of such politics reveals that claim to be ideological. All press the objective claims of ‘humanity’ in the abstract; they just draw the line at actual individuals in the here and now. At the heart of all such claims is the claim to know better than the people they claim to represent.
Democracy builds upon the common moral reason of human beings. There is no respect for that commonality in a politics of partisanship. Such a politics divides the public up in terms of rightness and wrongness.
Pope Francis acknowledges that “this might seem a utopia, a hopeless journey over a turbulent sea, a long and unachievable odyssey. Yet, as the great Homeric epic tells us, traveling over stormy seas is often our only choice. And it will achieve its goal if it is driven by the desire to come to home port, by the effort to move forward together.”
Pope Francis’ speech takes the intellectual and moral compass that I have taken in my work on ‘rational freedom.’ He emphasises the Greek origins of a democratic politics and ethics. Making reference to Socrates, Homer, Aristotle and Hippocrates, he makes a point of saying that the Gospels were written in Greek. “Without Athens and without Greece, Europe and the world would not be what they are. They would be less wise, less happy.”
This is an argument for Athens and Jerusalem as twin poles: lose one and you will lose the other. Science and ethics go together in any politics worthy of the name. Arising in ancient Greece, politics concerns a creative human self-actualization leading to a public happiness, each and all flourishing well together.
Francis said that from Athens “our gaze is directed not only to what is on high, but also toward others.” He recalled that “here, according to the celebrated words of Socrates, people began to view themselves as citizens not only of a single city or a single country but of the entire world. Citizens. Here man first became conscious of being ‘a political animal’ and, as members of the community, began to see others not subjects but as fellow citizens, with whom to work together in organizing the polis.”
But something else is required for true fulfilment – a sense of transcendence.
“From Mount Olympus to the Acropolis to Mount Athos, Greece invites men and women of every age to direct their journey of life toward the heights. Toward God, for we need transcendence in order to be truly human.” The problem is that in the West today “there is a forgetfulness of our need for heaven, trapped as we are between the frenzy of a thousand earthly concerns and the insatiable greed of a depersonalizing consumerism.”
Without transcendence, individuals worship the self and the body. Why wouldn’t they? What else is there? Nature? As environmentalists say repeatedly, we are nature. Without the sense of belonging to and participating in something greater than we are, we curve in on ourselves. The ego becomes a prison in short order.
Pope Francis went on to speak on the age-old dream of political peace inspired by what I call ‘rational freedom,’ a dream I would say is founded on the axis of Athens and Jerusalem. Although refers to the European Union, I would argue that we are still in search of the appropriate institutional framework, and on a global basis. I don’t think either the EU or the UN cut it. Indeed, Pope Francis himself noted that “the European community, prey to forms of nationalistic self-interest, rather than being an engine of solidarity, appears at times blocked and uncoordinated.” It’s all about cracking the logic of collective action so that legitimate self- and sectional interests can be satisfied in such a way as to ensure the collective interest. My point is that whatever the frustrations at cracking that problem and whatever the temptation to take short cuts, the authoritarian route is a dead-end that puts the true resolution of the problem back decades or more. Pope Francis ended by calling for “a global, communitarian vision,” urging that “attention be paid to those in greatest need.”
Pope Francis ended by referring to suffering, in the forms of the migration crisis and the Covid pandemic. He described the pandemic as “a great calamity” that “has made us rediscover our own weakness and our need for others.” “Sufferings bring us together,” he said. “Realizing that we are all part of the same frail humanity will help us to build a more integrated and peaceful future. Let us turn what seems only a tragic calamity into a bold opportunity!” He saw encouragement in the fact that “there has been a remarkable growth in solidarity.” This is absolutely key to any politics worthy of support. Partisanship and proselytising is fine for would-be universal autocrats but are the death of democracy and human dignity and decency.
He concluded his speech with these words:
From this city, from this cradle of civilization, may there ever continue to resound a message that lifts our gaze both on high and towards others; that democracy may be the response to the siren songs of authoritarianism; and that individualism and indifference may be overcome by concern for others, for the poor and for Creation. For these are essential foundations for the renewed humanity which our time, and our Europe, has need.
[In Greek:] May God bless Greece!