The western world, it seems, seems duty-bound to “show less developed societies the way” and foist the grand scheme of democracy upon them. The problem is that usually, it doesn’t work – peoples given the new right to vote for whoever they wish generally vote despotic rulers into office who prompty take the rights away again. Why is that? Why is democracy such a hard sell?
It may be difficult for us Westerners to appreciate, but the idea that all adults have a say in running the country is not universally revered. In fact, regarding people as having rights just because they are people is not the way many countries do things. And I’m not talking evil leaders here; I mean the people themselves don’t see their compatriots as deserving rights. It certainly wasn’t the Western way of doing things until the Enlightenment. In feudal times, your responsibilities were directed straight upwards to your boss, and so on, up through the hierarchies and ending in the king. You had no expectancies or responsibilities to people on the same level as yourself. In such a society, why should anyone give other people on the same level any automatic privileges? It only is a detriment to yourself to do so.
If you have such a society, there is no way democracy will take root. A prerequisite for democracy is the IDEA that people have human rights. And how does such an idea take hold?
It will take hold, I believe, if there are enough people susceptible to the idea .One enlightened soul in a Dark Age society will achieve nothing, but if there is enough reason in the population at large, the idea will take hold and spread, causing a gradual shift to Enlightenment-style values.
So the whole problem of democracy-seeding comes down to determining if a population is ready for the idea that humans can have rights. And how is this done?
Here’s my suggestion. I propose that people will be ready to make the shift from subservience to Enlightenment when their dependencies to other people change. Cynically speaking, if other people have no value to you as a person, you won’t care about their rights. If, on the other hand, the well-being of other people is directly connected to your own, you’ll be acting in your own self-interest if you supported the other people’s rights.
Imagine a society, society A, where every citizen is placed in a strict top-down hierarchy. The ultra-feudal society. In society A, there are no lateral dependencies, and a citizen will be prone to consider other people as meaningless to his own existence. Drawing a diagram of Society A would look something like an upside-down family tree, with the king at the top, and branching out from there.
Now imagine society B, where the dependencies between people is completely decentralised. Everyone is connected to other people, but there are no “bosses” as such, and no chains of command. In this society, every citizen is highly dependent on lots of other people in a variety of ways. The diagram of society B would look more like the internet connection diagrams, but even more interconnected and web-like. (The linked diagram clearly has heirarchical structures).
Based on my hypothesis above, society A would have no interest in an Enlightenment, and society B would be incredibly eager to embrace the idea. Let us imagine an Enlightenment Index (EI) which assigns a number value to a society, which measures the extent of non-heirarchical connections within the society. Society A would be given an EI of 0, and society B gets an EI of 100. There will be some sort of EI “magic number” where enlightenment ideals will suddenly take hold of a country, driving forward a revolution, and ultimately, democracy.
How to measure the EI of a given society in practice? Luckily, the sociological science of social network analysis combined with the mathematical ideas of graph theory already provides all the tools for this sort of numerical analysis – they just need to be combined. As a very simplistic idea, one could count the number of truly independent job providers in a society, i.e. “the bosses who work for no-one but themselves”. The more of those a society has, the less heirarchical it must be. Similar analyses could be made on service providers, market saturation etc. etc. I’m just trying to show that this is not a completely pie-in-the-sky idea.
So let’s imagine that we’ve calculated EI for all the nations of the world. (Mapped with colors onto Google Earth for coolness, of course). The non-democracies with the highest scores will take the least amount of prodding and de-heirarchization by the Exporters Of Democracy to send them over the revolutionary edge.
And, in my book, that beats four years of stupid war any day of the week.
[...] How to export democracy properly [...]
I get it, of course I do, since we just discussed it – HOWEVER I’ve come to think of a drawback to the theory:
The theory balances on the idea, that people are generally selfish. A person will only respect the rights of others if these others have a positive impact on the person. If this is not the case, the person doesn’t care – basically, it’s a theory with a pretty dim view on human behaviour. Everything a person does is a calculation on where to gain the most.
I’m not saying I disagree – but is that really it? Are we that cynical?
This is, of course, a difficult question to answer, but I’ll admit to thinking that, yes, at a societal level, we tend to select groups of people to whom we allow rights – and de-select others. And I do believe that a large part of that reason, however unconscious it is, is whether or not the group of people gives us any advantage to ourselves. It’s a pretty deep-seated “herd animal” mentality coded into us by evolution. Basically, groups don’t exist from an evolutionary perspective – only individuals fighting for survival. If that individual survival is made easier by grouping together with others, great. Otherwise, get lost. No living thing does anything “for the group”.
Now, of course a lot of what makes us human is the ability to NOT be controlled by selfish survivalist impulses. We can circumvent these animal-like traits and be compassionate despite what our DNS tells us. But the whole point of my post was to try to answer the question: “How does the idea of individual value take hold?” If a population at large has no concept of human rights, there are no reasons to value them. Individuals who can see the altruism of human rights before their society is ready to accept it will never get through with the idea. It’s the old story about a person being smart and people being stupid.
150 years ago, our Western societies were incredibly racist compared with today. That doesn’t mean that no-one regarded black people as humans – but that the “forget about skin color”-meme was not ready to spread in the society for simple group dynamic reasons as outlined above. Today, we totally outcast the mentally ill, which may change in the future. Hell, we might even give apes the same rights as humans one day – and that’s a meme that today’s society is in no way ready to accept.
Hooray for long comments! It’s my blog and I’ll talk if I want to, talk if I want to.. (etc)