In a number of columns over the past two years, I have ended with a statement worrying that our democracy might be failing.
Like many Americans, I have seen such things as our current political polarization, monopolistic capitalism, racism and even our lack of energy (personal and environmentally clean) as threats to democracy. And they are.
Recently I have been reading a path-breaking book by historian Yuval Noah Harari entitled Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harper, 2015), acquired at our local bookstore, Bolin Books. Harari’s history of our species emphasizes the importance of what we believe the creation of what he calls “our imagined order.”
The way Harari sees it, homo sapiens (that would be us) was able to overcome the other human species (Neanderthal and a few others) over a 220,000 year period of what historians like to call prehistory. Sapiens were able to do this because their larger brain gave them the ability to think in new abstract ways.
Other humans and higher animals could use their language to say “careful, a lion.”
Only homo sapiens, says Harari, could say and believe that “the lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.” Believing in what Harari calls “fictions” or abstractions like this allowed homo sapiens to form larger groups who shared belief in an idea that went beyond an awareness of things in their local band or physical environment.
It is this “cognitive revolution” that allows us to create and believe in abstract ideas like religious belief systems and the many “isms” that are a feature of our modern history–nationalism, socialism, capitalism, liberalism, conservatism, absolutism. You get the idea.
Democracy, of course, is one of those “isms.” It is a belief system. There is nothing in our biological or genetic makeup that causes us to see voting or elections as necessary to our survival as a species. Our DNA doesn’t care, Harari tells us, whether we are ruled by an absolute monarch, a fascist dictator, or a duly elected president.
The only reason we have democratic governments is because over a period of time, a few million people came to believe that a democratic republic was the best way, to quote the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
All of these aspirations are intangible, part of Harari’s “imagined order.” They are not the real, dangerous lions that our ancestors had to avoid. These are ideas, honored by millions over recent centuries, but ideas that must be made tangible by the actions of people.
If we no longer believe in democracy, we will no long take the actions necessary to ensure its survival. If we make voting more difficult, as Republicans have done in many states by redistricting campaigns and by reducing the number of voting locations in Democratic controlled cities, we weaken democracy.
If we vote for candidates who wish to restrict individual rights, divide people into saviors and enemies to be distained or even destroyed, deny people the ability to read certain books, or to see certain physicians, we weaken democracy.
And worse, if we support and vote for candidates like Donald Trump and his political groupies, who clearly wished to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, place desire for power ahead of democratic norms and rules, we show ourselves and others that we no longer believe in the abstraction of “government for the people, of the people, and by the people.”
Classic western political philosophy, going back to the ancient Greeks, recognizes three kinds of government, rule by one person (monarchy or dictatorship), rule by a small group (oligarchy), or rule by the many (democracy).
All of these require some level of belief and acceptance by those governed, but the first two require far less because once democracy has been abandoned, people only have to submit in order to survive the person or small group to who now have power.
You have to really believe in democracy to make it work. Do we?