The Doubter's Companion (15 page)

DIRECT DEMOCRACY
   An appealing idea which has been unworkable for more than two thousand years. This makes it a favourite with political groups whose basic instincts are anti-democratic.

Twenty-five hundred years ago in the Athenian
agora
and
ekklesia
every citizen could speak and vote on every question. This didn't include women or slaves, but compared to any other civilization of that or later times right up to the modern era, this was the most open and participating of societies. And Athenian democracy did work. It worked better than its competitors and inspired what has come to be known as Western civilization. However, there were only 40,000 voters, 5,000 to 6,000 of whom took part regularly.

The Athenian model could still work—in smaller towns, for example, or in specific areas such as school boards—if people were willing to commit the equivalent time and energy. This kind of
PARTICIPATION
would mean making politics as important in their lives as family and careers and far more important than private pleasures.

Those who promote direct democracy talk a lot about small towns, but are not really interested in them. What they are fascinated by is the mythological theme of the small town. They like the big picture, where the undercurrent of discontent includes millions of people. They like big themes—race, language, freedom, security, debt, efficiency, individualism. These emotion-laden abstractions are almost impervious to sensible public discussion. They can be activated through the exploitation of pain. History, after all, inflicts emotional wounds on us all. The proponents of direct democracy scratch away at these in order to increase the sense that a personal wrong has been done. If these wounds can be made to bleed profusely enough, the sensible, practical nature of the population will be destabilized.

Over the last half-century the direct democracy argument has come from an increasingly strange right wing which somehow manages to combine a romanticized version of local nationalism with practical support for
NEO-CONSERVATIVE
economic policies. In other words, their language evokes a small, naturally unified group, while their policies assume that the ugliest sort of competition will hold sway and therefore be free to sweep away that group's interests. The contradictions are so flagrant that cause and effect are lost in the confusion.

The new Right claims the citizen is being excluded from public affairs. They are right. However, instead of coming to terms with the real causes of this exclusion, they exploit it through false populism. They condemn the slow mechanisms of public debate in large complex societies. This process of serious deliberation can't help but be awkward and filled with doubt, lost time and errors. Yet, this inefficiency can transform itself into an expression of the public interest.

The false populists will seize upon any moment of failure as if it were a breakdown of representative democracy. They seek to hijack it through more direct mechanisms which, because they eliminate consideration and indirection, are fundamentally judgemental and authoritarian. What they seek are more easily controllable structures.

The
REFERENDUM
has always been one of their favourite tools. The complexities of the real world, long-term practical evolutions and working relationships are transformed abruptly into an abstract clarity involving a yes or a no. Technology has since added dozens of new techniques. The old Heroic rallies have grown, with the development of electronic communications, into advertising or propaganda; that is, a one-way illusion of debate. Electronic town hall meetings have been created to simulate direct democracy through televised debates with “representative” audiences who ask “populist” questions. New technology makes direct votes on endless subjects possible. We are at the beginning of a sustained push by authoritarian movements in favour of these systems. As with referenda, they make real debate almost impossible, but facilitate large emotional swings of the sort that demagogues are best at creating.

The old-fashioned demagogues have been given a new lease on life by their marriage to technology. What they share with this communications technology is a devotion to the linear. Questions are asked, then answered. Problems are posed, then solved. And when they are not answered or solved, the conclusion is that the system has failed.

Direct democracy seems to push the citizen forward by emphasizing the importance of casting a ballot. Of course the vote is essential to the democratic process, but it is not the purpose. Consideration, reflection, doubt and debate were the primary purpose of the Athenian
agora
and
ekklesia
, as of representative assemblies over the last few centuries. These four processes are the body of the democratic sentence. The vote is merely the punctuation. The body of the sentence, if properly expressed, makes it almost inevitable that sometimes there will be an uncertain question mark, a careful period or sometimes a determined exclamation. Without the body, these signals are clear and even exciting, but meaningless. Direct democracy is all punctuation, but denies functioning language. See:
DOUBT, ELECTORS OF BRISTOL
and
IMAGE.

DIVORCE
   The deconstruction of
SEX
and
PROPERTY.

Since the unification of these two
non sequiturs
through marriage deforms reality, separating them again several years later can't help but be as unpleasant as any other part of the
DECONSTRUCTIONIST
movement. The mysteriously recurrent idea that divorce will convert contractual enemies into natural friends belongs to the fantasy genre of fiction. See:
ORGASM.

DOUBT
   The only human activity capable of controlling the use of power in a positive way. Doubt is central to understanding.

The
ELITE
s of organized societies define leadership as knowing what to do. The citizenry are not so certain. Their response is to doubt, consider and deliberate. That is, to question, contemplate and weigh carefully.

Most human activities are divided into three stages. The act of doubting is the second and is the only one which requires the conscious application of our intelligence.

The first stage consists of the reality by which we are faced. This is always a confusing mixture of situations out of our control, attitudes clouded by received wisdom and a variety of cure-all solutions. The third stage is what we call decision-making. In a rational society this is supposed to be the result of having a solution produced by the correct answer. Decision-making is, in fact, an overrated business, rarely more than mechanistic. It, in turn, is followed by a minor, passive business—the management of the decision taken.

Given our obsessions with
LEADERSHIP
and right
ANSWERS
and our fear of doubt, we have been slipping into treating this managerial stage as if it were of primary importance.

Doubt is thus the space between reality and the application of an idea. It ought to be given over to the weighing of experience, intuition, creativity, ethics, common sense, reason and, of course, knowledge, in balanced consideration of what is to be done. The longer this stage lasts the more we take advantage of our intelligence.

Perhaps this is why élites move so quickly to limit doubt and consideration. Those who gain power almost automatically seek to leap from reality to solution, from abstraction to application, from ideology to methodology. This is as true of contemporary rational society as it was of those dominated by religion or monarchies. Deliberation is mocked as weakness. Consideration is rushed through, if possible eliminated. The effect is to reduce the intelligence of the citizenry to received wisdom, unconscious or secretive procedures and mechanistic actions.

Healthy democracies embrace doubt as a leisurely pleasure, and so prosper. Sick democracies are obsessed by answers and management and so lose their reason for existence. But, above all, doubt is the only activity which actively makes use of the human particularity. See:
ERROR
and
HUMANISM.

DUAL USE
   Rhetoric for the 1990s invented by the armament's technocracy to replace
TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS.

Both phrases are designed to persuade non-specialists that arms production is an inherent part of the civil economy, which it isn't. Although the purpose of both is identical, each is based upon a different geometric model.

TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS
should be seen as an equilateral triangle in which concentrated, purposeful military spending spreads out like a waterfall, to provide financing and innovation across the broad base of the civil economy. Dualuse economics, on the other hand, turns the equilateral triangle on its side, first one way, then the other. The result is that the purposeful spending of the civil economy flows like a powerful river into the military and the purposeful spending of the military like a river into the civil.

In more sex-oriented conversations the term dual use can be replaced by a second key new rhetorical phrase—“crossfertilization.”

“Dual use,” as John Polanyi, the Nobel chemist puts it, “is no use at all.”
⁵
It is bad economics and bad strategy. If the direction of civil production is limited by military needs it is stymied. If the nature of armaments is limited by “market requirements,” then the basic purpose of arms and armies—to protect and to win—is weakened.

However, the purpose of dual use is, as a close adviser to the American secretary of defense puts it, to “…move decisively towards a fully integrated industrial base to meet future U.S. economic and national and security requirements.”
⁶
This is to include the total integration of civil and military R and D in order to produce “generic, dual-use technologies that have the potential to support both commercial and military requirements.” Military controls and standards are to be removed from arms production and replaced by the tension of the market-place. If the economic ideas being put forward here bear no relationship to reality, the strategic concepts are even more farfetched. The intent is “…to promote an arms acquisition culture that is compatible with the demands of the commercial market-place.” Wouldn't they be more useful if they were compatible with the demands of the battlefield?

In late 1993, early 1994, the term “dual use” abruptly appeared on the lips of every armaments expert in Germany, France, England, Russia and the United States.
⁷
All declared that this was the solution to both the economic crisis and tighter military budgets. The simple fact of who is using it makes this anonymous little phrase one of the most important economic concepts of the decade. It doesn't seem to matter that this is exactly the same policy that has provoked inflation, government debt, economic stagnation and unfocused over-arming for the last three decades under the name of
TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS.

E

ECONOMETRICS
   A seductive combination of facts and faith, it is not so much a sub-category of economics as a schismatic sect.

Economics sprouted from the same intellectual roots as
WEATHER FORECASTING
—rarely accurate but devoid of memory, thus cheerful about being wrong. When economists begin to confuse the well-being of humans with the proving of theories (for example, the market-place is always right or private enterprise is evil), they may actually have become a destructive force resembling maddened weathermen, who call upon the population to fight their way through a hurricane in order to reach the eye of calm at the centre.

This manic phenomenon can be identified by the rise of untempered
OPTIMISM
and pessimism and is characterized by the repetition of religious formulae. Thus “the debt must be repaid” or “the recession is over” will be chanted in the way priests once repeated “the devil must be defeated” or “Christ is risen,” by which they meant “You also will rise from the dead.”

There are many intelligent economists who, when faced by the real social needs of real people in real societies, attempt to be both practical and imaginative. The importance of imagination is that while the people and their needs are real, economics is created with illusions, which for the purposes of daily life must be treated as real. This is why large theories are so dangerous. They mistake conventional illusions for reality and so treat the people and their societies as abstractions.

Unfortunately the practical and imaginative economists have been increasingly frustrated by the rise of econometrics, the premise of which is that society can be reduced to the elements of accountancy. And since numbers are the face of god, it follows that all will be well.

This has been the dominant school since the 1970s—so dominant that even sensible economists find they must conform to the conventions of numerology if they wish to be heard. And yet they know that in the real world numbers are what numbers do. They are not real and are rarely useful. Economics based on econometrics resembles King Canute, sitting on his throne out on the bared beach and ordering the ocean not to rise. This is one of the explanations for the arbitrary division of the 1973
DEPRESSION
into a series of recessions, each of which has been ordered to end.

ECONOMICS
   The romance of truth through measurement.

An understanding of the value of economics can best be established by using its own methods. Draw up a list of the large economic problems to have struck the West over the last quarter-century. Determine the dominant strand of advice offered in each case by the community of economists. Calculate how many times this advice was followed. (More often than not it was.) Finally, add up the number of times this advice solved the problem.

The answer seems to be zero. Consistent failure based on expert methodology suggests that the central assumptions must have been faulty, rather in the way sophisticated calculations based upon the assumption that the world was flat tended to come out wrong. However, streams of economists are on record protesting that they weren't listened to enough. That the recommended interest rate or money supply or tariff policy was not followed to its absolute conclusion.