Keith Hudson wrote:
>
> I'm beginning to think that FW List and other similar unmoderated
> discussion groups on the Net are about the only democratic activities left
> in modern developed society. Any subscriber, whether thoughtful individuals
> who express themselves carefully and try to back up their arguments with
> facts, or vindictive personalities who can only attack others in nasty
> ways, are all allowed their say in truly democratic fashion.
>
> This is to be compared with the "democracy" of the mass electorate in
> Elections in developed countries.
[snip]
It seems to me that the word democracy should be reserved
for situations where persons (the demos) govern
themselves (do ocracy).
In _The Human Condition_, Hannah Arendt wrote that, properly
speaking, the classical Greek polis was an anarchy (no government),
because there was no special group of persons who
governed the rest of the people.
I think what we have in The United States would more accurately
be called something like: a representativocracy, i.e.,
government of and by a group of elected representatives.
Elections strike me as having the interesting
property of being "fair", "legitimate", etc., only
insofar as no individual's action determines the
outcome (as they say in elementary calculus:
the limit of 1 divided by x, as x grows larger, is ZERO).
It seems to me that the very fact of coordinating the
lives of large numbers of persons makes it difficult if
not impossible for individuals to straightforwardly
shape their lives (as opposed to "making it in the
system", "working the system", etc., which forms of
individuality can exist in any form of political
organization...).
This is obvious, but that does not
make it unimportant -- and it seems to me there
may be opportunities to increase real democracy
(persons governing themselves as an intrinsic aspect
of their daily life activities)at the "micro" level,
in the workplace, the schoolroom, etc. via carefully
deconstructing hierarchical relations between
employees and their managers, students and their
teachers, etc. and reconstructing these in more
dialogical (peer-with-peer) ways, even if the
overall life of > 6 billion concurrently living
persons must be done thru alienated
mechanisms such as representative "democracy".
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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