Harari is a historian but as evidenced by his writing (Harari, 2015) he is quite concerned with the future. Harari attempts to foresee, at least in broad outline, where humanity might be going and to encourage some thought about what options may be open to us. Harari's recent books have been very large international bestsellers, so for such an influential thinker to be so unimaginative and pessimistic about the ability of democracy to grapple with the challenges of the future is both worrying and telling.
In a lecture given at the Cambridge Forum, economist Yanis Varoufakis quotes Wolfgang Schaeuble, the President of the Bundestag, during his tenure as Minister of Finance for Greece, as saying: "Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy" (Varoufakis, 2018). This was both statement of the operating principle of the European Union and a threatening warning against attempts to undermine that principle. The European Central Bank is a kind of authoritarian state that presides a-democratically over its member countries (Streeck, 2016). This structure was able to arise in part from the decoupling of the economic sphere from the political sphere, with the net effect being a de-powering of the political sphere (Varoufakis, 2018).
Economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck notes the shift in the German government's scope, a change from 'government' to 'governance' and a curtailment in the budgetary authority of the Bundestag. The terminology is not an invention of Streeck's, instead it comes straight from a quote of Chancellor Angela Merkel (Streeck, 2016). Streeck sees newly fashionable elitist theories as claiming "...democracy to be irrational, incapable of dealing with complex problems, too slow to respond to changing conditions in a global economy and too vulnerable to popular pressures for economically inefficient intervention in free markets." (Streeck, 2016, p. 141) Capitalism growing beyond the bounds of democracy is not seen as a sign of a system dangerously out of control, or as a need for democracy to be reasserted in a larger framework, but rather as an indicator of democracy's impotence, of the need for more non-democratic authority.
The allure of non-democratic sources of authority to deal with global threats is not new to this century, in fact it may seem a repeat of the previous century. Whereas overpopulation and nuclear war provided the previous existential threats, we now face climate change and the prospect of runaway artificial intelligence. It is clear that the old system is not up to the task of dealing with the future, but it does not follow that democracy is to be abandoned.
Democracy is not a luxury
The moment we conceive of democracy as a luxury is the moment when we begin to lose any trace of it still remaining. Democracy is unsexy: it involves compromise, takes time, and requires that people actually listen. It requires extraordinary effort and yet makes no guarantee that we will get the outcome that we want.
In order to function, democracy must be rigorously cultivated and habitually practised. In times of good fortune we are disinclined to engage in the process, apt to let our rights and responsibilities slide; we weaken democracy in the times we ought to be strengthening it. It is not for such times that democracy endures, but to see us through difficulty and turbulence. Indeed it was economic crises that saw a shift in the liberal position toward democracy from scepticism to eventual embrace, as its regulating effect proved capable of taming some of capitalism’s self-destructive tendencies (Varoufakis, 2018).
Democracy is the critical linchpin in a modern society. It is not a case of first establishing law and order, or peace and stability, or economic security and justice that then attention can be paid to the flourishing of democracy. Democracy must underpin all aspects of society or else every institution and nexus of power is subject to corruption, is prone to prejudice, and will act to further entrench the existing power structures at the expense of the powerless. Democracy is not a luxury, it is foundational.
Totalitarianism is not a solution
While totalitarianism can often seem appealing in its ability to strong-armedly handle complex issues, the twentieth century proved that modern issues are often too complex for central authority to comprehend, let alone solve. However that is changing. Many technologies of the twenty-first century tend to reward centralisation. Networks, 'big data' databases and the algorithms that work on them all benefit immensely from a larger base. While in the past it may have sometimes been demonstrably true that totalitarianism was worse at dealing with the issues of the time, it should not be expected that this will hold in this century. Advances in machine-learning algorithms and the accumulation of vast amounts of data mean that quite small central authorities may become quite well positioned to solve large-scale problems. Totalitarian authority must be opposed on principle. Such organisation is unlikely to relinquish control once it has seized it, and consequently will have a vested interest in keeping other systems dependent upon it, perhaps by balancing the world perpetually on the brink of catastrophe that only it is able to keep at bay.
We should not expect totalitarian authority to manifest in the twenty-first century identically to how it did in the previous one. The mid to late twentieth century has already given us a preview of how a-democratic authority can rebrand and reconfigure itself to be more palatable and unassuming to the general public. In the economic realm, authority rests with scientific theories and models, models which never explicitly acknowledge the values of the capitalist frame in which they are embedded and so deny them and present themselves as objective. We could all become enslaved to a totalitarian system of control while lacking any clear dictator or the more overt displays of a-democratic rule by force that formed a steady part of the media diet of the twentieth century.
Democracy is good... why?
Democracy isn't just in decline or out of vogue owing to capitalism nor to the looming existential threats and the siren song of totalitarianism to handle these threats (threats themselves brought about by capitalism), its decline is also due to the decline of the liberal subject and the ascent of new models of thinking about humans that have been slowly supplanting it.
In liberal humanism, the liberal subject is held to have some innate essence (Harari, 2015) and we can trust this essence to make decisions, as it is the source of meaning. Such thinking is enabling to democracy as if we believe in the validity of individual meaning and if we grant that everyone else is an individual, a democratic solution is compatible. But the computational worldview that has come to dominate all of the sciences has done away with the liberal subject. Humans are held to be no more than a collection of processes, really just algorithms, so that the assignation of special value to human judgement seems untenable. Advances in neuroscience and biology lend credence to this philosophy, suggesting that all 'we' have at best is an illusion of control.
While the old liberal subject is at this point beyond resuscitation, there has been a fatal lack of imagination in our modern conceptions of what constitutes the human. An understanding of the parallelism between our own biological processes (processes that give rise to our deepest feelings) and computational algorithms has gone hand in hand with an unstated but persistent clinging to dualism. The result has been a dissolution of the subject as we dis-identify ourselves with the biological processes that constitute us. For democracy to flourish, the subject will need to return to public consciousness, but the project of working out what form it will take in contemporary understanding remains a difficult one.
True democracy recognises a shared humanity and cuts across societal inequalities. It values everyone’s point of view1. In valuing each individual’s unique experience, democracy provides a way for us to learn and benefit from that experience. Each individual is a complex, real-time, data-acquiring, knowledge-computing, environment-shaping, continuously-learning agent. When we devalue the views of some, we deny ourselves potential pathways to better solutions. Worse, we serve to shape the world into the mould in which we have chosen to see it. Hierarchical systems of control serve to further stratify society, amplifying and accelerating inequality. When we choose to see the world through the lens of difference we become cold and cruel, not just to our fellow humans but against ourselves as well.
I admit that appealing to the value of democracy may seem like a failed prospect in the present time. With little shared values aside from the implicitly accepted ones of capital, it is difficult in our society to present any moral or ethical argument without some sort of appeal to its potential benefits to capitalism. But it is precisely this thinking that I would like to see overthrown. We need to elevate democracy to the domain of shared values, and while I am unable here to articulate a metaphysical argument for why, no one has presented such an argument for capitalist values, and yet we accept those without question.
How do we do better? ...Our future will be what we imagine it to be
It is not enough to resist or decry calls for a-democratic solutions to new problems, we need to imagine how we can expand, strengthen and empower democracy so that it has the scope and capability to deal with them. If we fail to secure a democratic future into this century it will be a failure of imagination, a resignation; the result of lack of creativity and of will. We can't bring about a worthwhile future simply by remixing the past, we need to critically understand where we are and assess how we can use technology to update systems that we value. We need to set aside technological determinism and the lazy precognition that sees only the most obvious uses of new technology as the only ones possible and keep what is worth holding onto well in mind, democracy ought to be one of those values.
We aren't relegated to contemplating ways to keep democracy from further declining, technology offers plenty of opportunities to realise democracy much more fully than has ever been possible in human history. We can't think just in terms of 'how do we save democracy?', we have to think 'how can we catalyse democracy into a higher energy phase?'
While a lot of the discussion around automation focuses on a loss of jobs and how to deal with displaced workers, automation also holds the power to invert traditional power pyramids. That we are often unable to see how speaks to how deeply we have allowed ourselves to become blinded and numbed by the status quo. For while automation does threaten to eliminate workers in diverse industries, it more easily holds the potential to eliminate traditional managerial hierarchies. Take the trucking industry, which is currently under massive threat from automation. Driverless technologies could (and may) make truck-drivers obsolete within a decade. But replacing human drivers means retrofitting fleets with driverless capability. If each truck and truck driver is considered as a node in a company network, each node must effectively be brought in to central authority and revised before being redeployed in the network. What does not seem to occur to us is to explode the central node within the network! Why are the truckers even working for a central authority that has the ability to eliminate their jobs? Because the central authority has control of the logistics and is in a privileged position to direct and coordinate the activities of all the various truck-drivers. But these are all tasks best completed by algorithms, not humans, and indeed the humans who are 'in control' are typically simply the ones with ownership of the machines that make the actual decisions. If control becomes completely decentralised and available to all, there is nothing to stop independent truckers from using that data to serve customers, acting directly between consumer and producer. In the driverless future it is speculated that driverless vehicles will have access to a vast network of information about all the other vehicles and other logistics, enabling them to continuously capitalise on the inefficiencies as they are detected. Implicit in this is the idea that the network is owned, that access to it is restricted. But why not blow open the doors? If driverless technologies become so superior, then truck drivers could equip their own trucks and then operate their driverless truck as an independent business. Hooked into the same network as everyone else and using equivalent driverless-tech, the independent truck driver would be able to compete with a corporation operating fleets of vehicles.
If this example sounds unconvincing I maintain that it is because it is undermined by the auspices of capitalism. A truck represents an investment that an average individual seems unlikely to be able to afford, so we must obtain capital from someone who has accumulated it. But the driver can just as easily get the requisite capital from a loan, and the investors should prefer thousands of distributed, decentralised investments in the form of independent truck drivers to a few oligarchic entities which lack the locality to stay in touch with the needs of the areas in which they operate.
But it is also important to keep in mind that we need to envision how we can make technology yield to democracy, and understand that it should not be democracy that needs to find a way to exist within capitalism but that it is capitalism that should be on notice, operating only within the limited domain within which democracy permits it, if it is permitted to persist at all.
Footnotes
1 One might think Dataists - so-called by Harari (Harari, 2015), named 'digital Maoists' by Lanier (Lanier, 2011) - who value the flow of information over all else, would see the value in democracy. But unfortunately they are too narrow minded to appreciate the increased complexity afforded by multiple perspectives and instead seek to assimilate diverse data to a singular point of view.↩
References
Harari, Y. N. (2015) Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Harvill Secker.
Lanier, J. (2011) You Are Not A Gadget. London: Penguin Books.
Streeck, W. (2016) How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso.
TED (2017) Nationalism vs. globalism: the new political divide | Yuval Noah Harari. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szt7f5NmE9E (Accessed: 30 August 2018)
Varoufakis, Y. (2018) Is Capitalism Devouring Democracy? [Lecture]. Cambridge Forum. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGeevtdp1WQ&t=215s (Accessed: 29 August 2018)
VICE (2018) The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3M8Ka9vUA (Accessed: 28 August 2018)
