Call things by their name

By Mark Blair

JAKARTA (JP): Few words are used as sloppily as democracy is. What is it? Does it come in degrees and types? What does it include and exclude?

People control might serve as a rough, working definition. Democracy has a quality: people control. There are quantitative distinctions to that quality, but if people do not clearly control their government and other instruments of representation, that's not democracy.

Moreover, democratic systems should tend to transparency in this control. They should err on the side of clarity. Instruments must be seen to be democratic, and it is the task of the bureaucrats not the voters to demonstrate this.

An elemental aspect of democracy is the directness of people's control of their instruments. To stand in a paddock and vote by show of hands (as the Swiss sometimes do) is direct. This degree of directness stands on one side of a spectrum. A little further across stand less direct forms; larger, more cumbersome and more susceptible to manipulation.

We might not argue that these less direct forms are undemocratic but we would be naive not to acknowledge that they are less democratic, marred by somewhat autonomous and self- serving elements.

Dictatorships aren't democratic -- but most dictatorships require their citizens to vote. So, voting does not a democracy make. Forms and facades can exist where actual democracy does not. Some authoritarian force, which has no intention of allowing outbreaks of actual democracy, can pretense democracy, perhaps to curry international diplomatic acceptance (read "aid and loans").

Structures such as this -- Stalinism/Maoism, fascism, theocracy -- should be correctly termed. These structures are not on the direct/indirect spectrum. They are qualitatively different, masquerades.

Another form that is commonly mislabeled as democracy is one whereby the principle of people-control is somehow qualified. This qualification might be the rights of a monarch, the obtrusions of religious belief, or some "interim" need to "guide" democracy (left or right wing). No matter, if the principle of people-control is not clearly central, it's not democracy, and should not be so called.

It is here that we should note an intriguing tangent to the above: what if people democratically chose a nondemocratic social practice? Do they somehow vitiate their own belief by needing to choose not to choose? Once you had voted democracy out, could you later vote it back in? What do you offer to those who still want democracy? This is not so silly a notion as it may at first seem. There are significant numbers of people who want someone to do their choosing for them.

The reasons why people might choose nondemocratic social practices introduces another more metaphysical -- and unsettling -- perspective. So far, we have mainly considered systems -- but what of people? Democracy requires both democratic instruments and a democratic culture.

Certain attitudes -- call these "empiricism", "secularism", "logic" or whatever --- are prerequisites of democracy. A definition is appropriate here: Determinism is the doctrine that all human choices and actions are the result of preceding events and states of affairs; i.e., that freedom of choice is illusory. Having accepted this position as at least generally valid, acculturation to nonobjective and/or nonindividualist social practice may simply preclude democracy.

Predestination examples the nonobjective culture. If people believe that a deity controls the universe, democracy simply has no place. In respect of nonindividualist culture, it is just too easy for a ruthless power group to gain and maintain control of the acculturational process, making "unity" and "acceptance" the status quo. Nothing too democratic there.

Moreover, if nationalism and other chauvinisms are also acculturation -- i.e., constructs, not intellectually defensible realities -- we need doubt if democracy yet exists.

Let's be more sparing, accurate and honest in the use of the "D" word; or, rather, speak of "democratizing." Determinism is ever present, and there exists plenty of regimes in which it is mixed with either or both indirectness and nondemocratic "qualifications." Refuse to live The Big Lie. Call things by their name.