West­ern Europe, and lands cul­tur­al­ly derived from it, have made some rel­a­tive­ly suc­cess­ful approx­i­ma­tions of democ­ra­cy and civ­il soci­ety, and com­bined them with notice­able pros­per­i­ty. Peo­ple both inside and out­side this favoured zone won­der why, and they have often sought the answer in two par­tic­u­lar areas: reli­gious tra­di­tions, and the dra­mat­ic intel­lec­tu­al era called “the Enlight­en­ment”. As some­one who has writ­ten about the uni­ver­sal aspects of democ­ra­cy, I’ve often felt some annoy­ance at what I con­sid­er parochial views of his­to­ry, and dubi­ous ideas of causal­i­ty. I feel great sym­pa­thy for peo­ple out­side the favoured zone, who are hope­ful that they can have a demo­c­ra­t­ic future, but are dis­com­fit­ed by the “sec­ond-banana” sta­tus that it seems to imply for their cul­tur­al her­itage. This is espe­cial­ly true in the Islam­ic world, where past cul­tur­al glo­ries and present embar­rass­ments com­bine to make the search for demo­c­ra­t­ic reform a touchy sub­ject. I think that an exces­sive­ly car­toon­ish view of the Enlight­en­ment, and of the rela­tion­ship between reli­gion and democ­ra­cy, is part of the problem.

I recent­ly read two arti­cles by Tas­saduq Hus­sain Jil­lani, a supreme court jus­tice in Pak­istan. Though Pak­istan has mil­len­nia of cul­tur­al achieve­ment — it was one of the ear­li­est cen­ters of urban civ­i­liza­tion — and it has a well edu­cat­ed pop­u­la­tion, it lan­guish­es under a crude mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship. It has expe­ri­enced much strife from con­flict­ing reli­gious fac­tions. While its econ­o­my is a sham­bles, the mil­i­tary thugs who run the place take pride in their pos­ses­sion of nuclear weapons. Read more »

“Civ­i­liza­tion is the process in which one grad­u­al­ly increas­es the num­ber of peo­ple includ­ed in the term ‘we’ or ‘us’ and at the same time decreas­es those labeled ‘you’ or ‘them’ until that cat­e­go­ry has no one left in it.” — Howard Win­ters, an Amer­i­can archael­o­gist who stud­ied ancient set­tle­ment and trade pat­terns [quot­ed by Anne-Marie Cantwell in Howard Dal­ton Win­ters: In Memo­ri­am]

“Voice or no voice, the peo­ple can always be brought to the bid­ding of the lead­ers. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the paci­fists for lack of patri­o­tism and expos­ing the coun­try to dan­ger. It works the same in any coun­try.” — Her­mann Wil­helm Göring, sec­ond in com­mand to Adolf Hitler.

What most telling­ly dis­tin­guish­es demo­c­ra­t­ic from non-demo­c­ra­t­ic thought is its respect for human beings. By this, I don’t mean respect for some neb­u­lous abstrac­tion called “human­i­ty” or “the peo­ple”, which is all too eas­i­ly trans­formed into a mys­ti­cal col­lec­tivism. It’s a respect for real-life indi­vid­ual human beings, who live, fall in love, have chil­dren, and strug­gle to find secu­ri­ty and hap­pi­ness. In demo­c­ra­t­ic thought, the well­be­ing of indi­vid­ual human beings is the pur­pose and mea­sure of polit­i­cal choic­es. Well­be­ing, to the demo­c­rat, is defined first in terms of what mat­ters most to con­scious beings — lib­er­ty, self-respect, dig­ni­ty, con­trol over their own lives. The phys­i­cal neces­si­ties of life, such as food and shel­ter, are mean­ing­less to human beings except with­in the con­text of those val­ues. We are not cat­tle. Read more »