A Response to People who Make too Many Assumptions
A few weeks ago, I received a notification from Academia.edu letting me know that I had been cited by an article. Sometimes I let these things go for a while, but I was procrastinating another piece of work, so I looked at it.
This turned out to be a good thing.
I try to express myself clearly, but obviously something has been lost in translation, so I would like to set the record straight on a few points, so that people understand what my point of view actually is.
The link to the paper concerned is here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:26431/
If you don’t want to read a long argument between academics, you should probably bail now.
Here are the corrections I would like to make.
Quote from the above piece: “Fuller’s vivid polemic identifies real issues, but her enthusiasm for Athenian practice occasionally skates over its difficulties, or makes unsupported claims for its achievements, suggesting that Greek science and philosophy is a product of Athenian democracy (p.22)”
For the record: I’ve never even thought anything like this, and have always been very careful to discourage people from connecting democracy to any particular results. The fact that people persist in trying to associate democracy (a decision-making process) with their particular conceptions of all goodness and light is a particular irritant to me, one that I am continuously pleading with people to stop doing, so this accusation is particularly unjust and (for obvious reasons) doesn’t find support in what I wrote.
Here is what I said (very different from what this author claims I said):
‘When we look at the classical marble statuary of Greek civilization in museums, we often get an impression of solemn formality but when they were created, these statues were often painted, brightly coloured masterpieces not of grave reverence, but of passion, wisdom and power. After all, the ancient Athenians lived in the dynamic atmosphere of one of the most powerful and developed cities on earth. Feats of engineering, chariot racing and risqué theatre productions – Athens had something for everyone. The philosophers who lived, studied and congregated in this city of ideas were already hypothesizing that the world was round, that the sun was a ball of fire, and that all matter was constructed from building blocks too small to see that they christened ‘atoms’ – all far-sighted theories that would not be conclusively proved for millennia. But what really distinguished Athens from other important cities of the time was that its citizens aspired to the good life.’
As you may notice, far from claiming that democracy caused anything at all in Athens, I don’t even mention the word democracy in this passage. Because the point of this passage was to try to get the layperson to imagine ancient Athens as an actually existing society with actual people in it. Not rigid, formal or primitive people, as ancient civilizations are often portrayed in popular entertainment, but as just everyday people, who might like to go to a fun play, or speculate on how life works or have a meal with friends. They obviously wouldn’t have felt the same reverence for their society (which to them was obviously just normal society) as we are supposed to at least pretend to feel today.
I’m a blunt person. Had I wanted to say, ‘Democracy and only democracy caused specific innovations’ I would have. But I’m not even limiting my description of Athens just to the strictly democratic period. I’m just trying to explain what ancient Athens generally was like.
And, since I am not claiming that there is a specific causation between democracy and science and philosophy, I obviously didn’t feel the need to ‘substantiate’ this non-claim. Like most people, I am not in the habit of substantiating claims I wasn’t making in the first place.
My view – and it has always been my view, expressed strenuously, is that there are no guarantees with any kind of government and that you could have the smartest, most nice absolute dictator in the world who would be a joy to live under. It’s possible.
This should be obvious, just as it should be obvious that no system of government has a monopoly on science, philosophy or whatever.
Clearly the pyramids – another feat of engineering – were not built in a democracy, and the Persians, who were not a democracy, also managed to bridge the Hellespont. Europeans kept philosophizing and innovating right through the Middle Ages. If I had wanted to describe these societies to the average layperson today, I’d also be trying to get them in the frame of mind to see the pyramids not as a pile of old rocks, but as something connected with that society and the living people in it.
There is probably some co-relation or vague, indirect causation between democracy and development, in that it generally helps scientists to live in ‘a free society’ where their ideas aren’t constantly policed, and to live in a society where more members are educated and able to fulfil their potential, but this passage doesn’t even deal with such considerations at all. It’s about something else entirely – trying to get people to imagine Athens as a real, often informal place where things are happening, and not some fictional realm where people are just declaiming.
What’s not true is that democracies suck and everything always just goes wrong with them. There were fun and exciting times in Athens. It was not, by the standards of the time, a hellscape.
So, in closing on this point: I am extremely irritated that I am being unjustly accused of making ‘unsubstantiated claims’ by someone who has invented a claim I never made – all the more so as I have gone out of my way to discourage people from making these kinds of precise linear associations at every turn. I’m all the more irritated as it would be so easy for me to play into that. People want to believe that ‘democracy’ will automatically fix everything in their lives. Continually telling them it won’t has been like repeatedly stabbing myself in the hand because it is the right thing to do. You have no idea how many people I have deflated at talks on exactly this point.
‘Fuller skates over difficulties’ (from the quote above)
Given the hundreds if not thousands of hours I have devoted exclusively to dealing head-on with ‘difficulties’, I almost swallowed my tongue on this one.
I have spent more time than anyone I’ve ever heard of objection-handling, and I genuinely enjoy it and view it as an important part of my job. I debate people all the time.
I also do it in writing, even when I don’t have to.
I spent the entirety of my thesis trying to poke holes in various aspects of democracy, and spend from page 290-371 of my book Beasts and Gods on ‘objection-handling’ to an idea that I explain from page 277-289.
That means I spent 12 pages (of my own book) explaining my idea and 81 pages dealing with other people’s objections to this idea.
Those are hardly the actions of someone trying to ‘skate over difficulties’. The vast majority of people spend the entirety of their book either purely complaining or explaining their precious idea and three to four pages at the end making sweeping statements like ‘people should be more civil to each other’ or something equally vague.
I recently read an article by one well-known author in the field claiming ‘accountability is an overused word’ since they designed a system that had no political accountability. I’d file that under ‘things I would never get away with and don’t want to, either’. But I mention this to point out the general standard and to show that I am acting well above expectations.
Here are the ‘difficulties’ I dealt with in Beasts and Gods – my first ‘directed at the layperson’ book on this topic.
- Media/‘demagoguery’ (something I offer numerous suggestions to mitigate)
I also note that I foresaw deep-State manipulation of social media in this book years before anyone else ever talked about it.
Was that a difficult thing to foresee? Of course not, it was a completely obvious development. However, it is not fair to accuse someone of ‘skating over difficulties’ that they literally raised before anyone else was prepared to take them seriously. Thus, I think ‘Fuller even foresaw deep State social media manipulation – too bad no one paid attention to her!’ would be more appropriate than ‘skates over difficulties’.
- Tyranny of the Majority/Trial of Socrates/place of the individual and individual rights
(an obvious one – could hardly be left off the list…which I remind the reader is something I didn’t do).
- Potential for Oligarchic Takeover (Thirty Tyrants)
Again, this is still an issue no one else takes seriously, so again literally raising an objection myself that no one else has seen. Sitting around pointing big flashing signs at difficulties no one else wants to acknowledge is the opposite of skating over them.
- Economic Issues
This section was entitled ‘A Fragile Balance: The Economy, the Rule of Law and Democracy’
If I were ‘skating over difficulties’ would I be calling this (something most other people don’t even see as an issue) ‘a fragile balance’? What part of ‘fragile balance’ makes it sound like this isn’t difficult? Again, feel like I’m doing the lifting on both sides here.
- Tyranny of the Majority vis-a-vis groups (as opposed to the individual), with suggestions for minority voting protection in modern times (eg cumulative voting).
Taking the time to search through the literature on this topic to find a potential solution is hardly ‘skating over difficulties’. It’s an explicit acknowledgment that the issue is important and should be dealt with.
However, perhaps that isn’t enough objection handling!
So, I wrote another book called In Defence of Democracy which is pretty much completely devoted to objection-handling to democracy. There was a hard word-limit on this book, but I packed in what I could (I note this book came out a few months after the article I am complaining about was published, however, I use it to show that I’m not avoiding dealing with ‘difficulties’ and have shown myself more than happy to keep right on going).
In this book I dealt with many claims brought by well-publicized and widely cited authors such as Ilya Somin, Jonathan Rauch and Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, to the effect that people are too stupid, ignorant and irrational for democracy.
I also dealt with a lot of claims surrounding Trump and Brexit, referendums in California, as well as libertarian (Jason Brennan) and authoritarian (Daniel A. Bell) critiques of democracy.
I then dealt with a whole bunch of issues the editors and readers decided they wanted dealt with, including things like: ‘They had slavery in Athens, obviously democracy causes slavery!’ and ‘everything was better before social media!’
More than two-thirds of this book was objection-handling to democracy (as the title ‘In Defence of Democracy’ may well suggest).
And, if that is not enough, feel free to refer to my thesis, which goes into even more issues like the counter-majoritarian difficulty, another difficulty I am apparently the only person who cares about. When you are the only person concerned about an issue, you aren’t the one skating over it.
Moreover, I also give a lot of talks and those talks often consist of an hour or more of the audience grilling me. Indeed, I go out of my way to try to limit my own contribution, just so the audience (or other panellists depending on set-up) has more time to publicly dispute everything I am saying. Which is no problem, because when I am alone with my friends and relatives, the grilling is even more intense since no one kicks them out of the room. This has, and I am not joking, sometimes gone on for days.
At the point where someone spends a frankly unreasonable amount of their time objection-handling, at the point where they assiduously follow-up every criticism and misportrayal (as I am doing right now), I don’t think they can be characterised as avoidant. If you want to disagree with my views, theories or whatever, fine.
But I genuinely have not avoided dealing with objections or ‘difficulties’, and, in fact, have gone far, far above and beyond what is normally expected in this field, having held myself to a completely different, much higher, standard than most people do.
So, get me another book deal and I’ll happily do even more.
Moving on - another quote from the article that has attracted my ire:
‘she, like Hennig and Van Reybrouck, is more interested in the practices of direct democracy and its possibilities, than in the details of the Athenian tradition. The risk is that considering Athenian practice outside the careful contextualisation that Cartledge and Mitchell provide makes it impossible to evaluate the historical success of Athenian political procedures’.
Actually, I was quite interested in the details, which is why I spent almost two years in the university library reading all English and German language information (and some French) in all of the academic journals and specialist literature I could find. I also ordered in a few books that weren’t in our library, just to make sure I was getting as complete a picture as I could. Then, having finished the Fachliteratur available to me, I also got into reading a lot of the plays of the time, fiction written by historians of the period, etc. just because I got so into the general context.
I then continued to supplement this by getting in contact with no less than three well-respected historians of this period and asking their input on various points, just to be absolutely sure I didn’t totally screw anything up. Plus my supervisor spoke Greek as well (or read it), so I could always check up with him if I couldn’t puzzle out something particular.
In light of all that, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that I’m the person who reviewed both Mitchell’s (Irish Times) and Cartledge’s (Los Angeles Review of Books) books, so you can probably bet that I read them and am thus aware of the context. Although by that point, I don’t think there was much in either book I didn’t already know. Maybe one or two factoids. Obviously, the academic contributions of these authors were among the bazillion that I read, so these books were kind of like a simplified version for me, and actually I only forced myself to re-read the content, because I like to be thorough in reviews. However, it was a lot like watching a film you’ve already watched.
So, yes, my book Beasts and Gods, is not primarily about ancient history (half the book, after all, examines the modern governmental system in some detail). If you want a book that is primarily about history, then read a book devoted to that.
However, it’s still unfair to assume that this book represents the sum totality of my knowledge and ‘all that is not in this book, the author does not know’. There aren’t any details in there about the sun coming up in the morning or grass being green. I know these things, but publishers don’t like books to be a million words long. You have to leave out some things that you know in the interests of the reader being able to physically lift the book.
Unlike Hennig and van Reybrouck, I got a PhD for an alternative more technical and boring version of this work. I’m really not in the same category of knowledge as they are, and, as such, it is unfair to place me with them.
And, unlike Cartledge and Mitchell, my point with Beasts and Gods was to explain the issues with the modern system, including the international legal system. So, perhaps it would be as fair to say that ‘Cartledge just doesn’t have an interest in the finer points of commercial treaty-making and thus doesn’t carefully contextualize his analysis of ancient history with that.’
I mean, we’re not all trying to write the same book here. That would be pointless. And it is not my intention either for the layperson to just read my book – I’ve gone out of my way to bring the work of classicists into the mainstream directly, primarily by reviewing their books and also by recommending such books to other people all the time. Whenever I do that, I’m directly encouraging people to consider everything I say or write in the context of those books.
And I do that because I’m pretty sure reading more than one book is the only way anyone is going to get the whole context on anything.
I ask you to remember that men are viewed as having potential, while women are often judged on precisely what they have demonstrated. Thus, if a man writes something, it is presumed that he could write more things (even on other subject areas he frequently knows nothing about). Whereas, if a woman writes something, that is presumed to be the end and complete extent of her capabilities. It is presumed you know nothing at all that was not in that piece of writing.
This insane double-standard, which I deeply resent, constrains everything I do.
I feel like I would be able to be a much better writer without it. I talk very, very fast and I write in a very condensed style, and I do both those things, because I need to get everything out all at once, because I will always be judged by what I said or wrote just right then with the presumption that I am ignorant and disinterested of all other things in this world, regardless of evidence to the contrary or the fact that, at this point, common sense should really be telling you otherwise.
Fuller argues that decisions made by a larger proportion of the electorate will be more acceptable to all than those taken by a tiny number of representatives. The divided response to both the 1975 and 2016 UK referendums on EU membership suggests that this may not be the case. The slender overall majority in 2016 barely masked greater regional divisions, and knowledge of these different results within the overall has threatened the cohesion of the political entity that is the United Kingdom. Fuller acknowledges that a member of the defeated minority ‘might not be happy’ (p.85) with a decision, but would accept it as that of the majority.
Here is the sentence I wrote:
‘While the individual citizen might not be happy with any particular decision of the Assembly, he at least knew that it was a genuine decision that the majority of his peers backed’ (rather than being statistically skewed via election as the page makes clear).
So, what I said was: way back in Athens people knew that a decision was the will of the majority, because they could literally see people putting up their hands with their very own eyeballs.
Rather than a purely electoral system where you don’t know why someone cast a vote for a party and thus end up with a situation later where you don’t know if any particular measure really enjoys the support of the people (in fact, this happens all the time and occasionally governments are forced to back down over measures they take that turn out to be unpopular with a large percentage of people including their own voters).
That it was a decision is very different than accepting the decision was the right one, which you are under no obligation to do. It also does not imply that the population would immediately cease to be ‘divided’ on an issue after a vote.
That’s why I didn’t use the word ‘accept’ in this passage, I used the word ‘know’. The entire section of the book is concerned with the accuracy of methods of measuring public opinion, not with getting people to be happy about the outcomes. Again, these two things aren’t completely unrelated, but they are different.
For example, no one knows if people support Covid-vaccine mandates, but if there was a nationwide vote on it, we would know where people stand.
Let’s say such a vote turned out in favour of vaccine mandates (that is coercing or forcing people to get a coronavirus vaccine) and let’s say such a measure was cleared by the courts (I’m personally not sure if either of these events would happen, but we will accept it for the sake of argument here).
Well, now you do have a clear mandate for action and we now know where everyone stands.
Will anti-vaxxers accept this, in the sense of accepting it is the right decision?
I’d be pretty surprised if they did.
Would we now be clear on the fact that they are in a minority and that this is a decision made by the majority of people and not just ‘the government’?
Yes.
Regarding Brexit (the example brought by this author in the quote above) as some kind of negative example of people not accepting a referendum outcome, let me say the following.
a) This was not a referendum won by a landslide, but the alleged ‘slenderness’ of the results has been massively overplayed. The Remain side lost by 1.3 million votes despite outspending the Leave side. That’s pretty conclusive.
b) The ‘regional differences’, such as the North of Ireland being somewhat more Remain (55% Remain) go a bit deeper than the Brexit vote. This may well undermine the cohesiveness of the UK, but I’m not sure when we agreed that was a goal. One could also have written, ‘The continued occupation of the North of Ireland by British forces threatens the cohesion of the political entity that is Ireland’. Finally getting our political entity ‘cohesive’ again is going to end your political entity’s ‘cohesiveness’. Perhaps this is an outstanding issue you should deal with. ‘I’ve stockpiled so many issues I can’t afford to have a referendum for fear of blowing them up’ is not a long-term solution.
c) Because there was a pronounced tilt towards Leave in the referendum, the Conservatives wisely did the classic ‘co-opt a smaller party’s popular policy plank’ trick and preceded to win two national elections resoundingly, plus very good showings locally and an undeniable win for the Brexit Party at the final EU elections. Those are repeated votes on the same policy, despite an enormous media campaign to the opposite effect. That is some rock-solid public opinion. That some (minority) sectors of the population screamed and shouted and threw their toys out of the pram and inflated every minor indication in their favour while excluding anyone who said differently turned out not to mean very much. They created an impression of flip-flopping division. But the numbers belie this impression.
It was interesting to watch a powerful minority try to overturn a majority vote, and I’m pretty certain that had that vote been undertaken by any mechanism except a referendum which allowed people to clearly see that it was a vote backed by the majority of their peers they would have succeeded.
So – this did exactly what I said it would – it introduced clarity into the situation. There was a vote and we all know how it went. Then things shook out from there.
And now, the coup de grace, and what got me to write this response in the first place:
“Two further books, David Van Reybrouck’s Against Elections and Brett Hennig’s The End of Politicians: time for a real democracy, both discuss the Athenian practice of sortition as an alternative to elections, a perspective that Fuller endorses”
Oh my.
I most certainly do not endorse Hennig’s and Van Reybrouck’s perspective.
I have been arguing with the sortitionists (yes, to the point where I invented a term for them) for years, including explicitly with these specific sortitionists.
I reviewed Van Reybrouck’s book for LA Review of Books (this was my idea to tack it on to a review I was doing of Brennan’s Against Democracy).
I did not review Hennig’s book, as I felt the quality wasn’t there.
Had the author of this article sought to understand my stance rather than assuming it, I think they would have come across this review and understood my objections to Van Reybrouck’s suggestions, which I made very explicit.
If that weren’t enough, I included over 40 pages of criticism of sortitionist suggestions in In Defence of Democracy (which I realize came out slightly later then this article).
I’ve written several more articles that make my point of view crystal-clear, eg. this one on Unherd, as well as radio appearance, podcasts, etc. My serious disagreement with sortitionists on this point has gone back years, and I have been one of the most vocal people on this topic.
So, how this claim that just says I endorse something which I have NEVER endorsed, came about, I truly don’t know. Sortition has a place in a democracy, but it is a very different place and done in a very different way than these authors advocate.
I understand that sortitionists do look through history in order to bolster their ideas (to hold lotteries) and having found that they stop and don’t think things to themselves like: ‘I wonder if an official back then was like an official now?’ etc.
But that is not what I did.
I started with an investigation of international legal institutions and the modern development of the system of what we call democracy, which is a legal system. In order to gain a better understanding of that, I looked at other systems (not just Athenian democracy, either) in order to get a good comparison of different institutions, their specific functions, the logic behind why they functioned the way they did (why did the Athenians have such large juries? Super expensive!), and the consequences of those institutions (what did it achieve in concrete terms?).
I didn’t set out to ‘make the world a better place’ and try to find some gimmick to do it.
But we do have a specific problem in our society – that would be the hegemonic society that controls those international institutions I was referring to earlier – and that is the growing power of oligarchs. Oligarchs who have begun to do exactly what I predicted they would do – attack the idea of democracy. As they must, of course, to retain their position.
If we keep going the way we are, we will either end up in a feudal society, where your position is largely determined by birth (we get closer to this every year), a very conservative, possibly fascist, backlash, or some kind of socialist revolution.
I’m trying to avoid that happening. The institutions of democracy help to defuse this tension, because they spread power out among more people. This is why it is interesting and so relevant to our present predicament.
Whereas, the non-systemic suggestions advocated by Van Reybrouck and Hennig don’t do this. Sortition, as they propose to practice it, consolidates power and facilitates oligarchy, which is why it has been embraced by oligarchs.
They, amusingly and predictably, don’t even wonder why they’re getting such a smooth ride, which, trust me on this, is the first thing anyone with my background would ask themselves.
Like most people from a legal background, I don’t do thought experiments – I try to solve problems. Those can be complicated like this one, but, again, like so many people in law, I often look to tradition when I have a problem to solve, because chances were someone somewhere also tried to solve that problem before and you might be able to learn something from them. At least it gives you a starting point, since basic principles rarely change, and gives you an idea of what may otherwise have been unexpected consequences.
Sortitionists, on the other hand, conflate so many things: legislative and judicial functions, past officials and present officials, large-scale lotteries and small-scale lotteries. I’m pretty sure they don’t even understand what modern juries do or why we use them.
I think there has been a push to lump me in with Van Reybrouck and Hennig, despite the fact that this doesn’t fit my background or content, which is far, far more technical and detail-oriented. To claim that I endorse their perspective is just insulting and point-blank false.
Moving on (because while we are complaining, we might as well keep going): ‘While Fuller’s evocation of an idealised Athens draws on the cultural authority of classical Greece’
a) Regarding: ‘cultural authority’
Here, I have to say we run across something quite weird. Perhaps my writing ‘draws’ on this ‘cultural authority’, but it definitely does not do so intentionally. I’m from rural Canada and a large percentage of my family are immigrants. Ancient Greece has no ‘cultural authority’ with us whatsoever, and in fact, since we are being open here, I initially thought of looking at ancient history at all as something incredibly lame that only a complete dork who was useless into the bargain would do.
I know that’s kind of rude, but those were my views at the time.
I was literally afraid of being accused of slacking off for entering the classics library.
As this should make obvious, democracy (or maybe some form of people power not called democracy but truly delivering people power) could have originated in India, Mozambique or on Mars for all I care. This would not make a difference to me or change the ‘authority’ of it one bit. I cast around for comparative societies quite a bit before finally starting on all of this classics stuff by taking an etymological approach. It certainly wasn’t the first thing I thought of and I was pretty up on the cultures of Iceland, Bhutan and Saudi Arabia by the time Greece occurred to anyone.
So again, maybe other people feel ancient Greece has cultural authority, but it’s kind of alien to me. I only discovered that British people were super into classics at a much later date. I suppose it seems ‘foundational’ to their society and I appreciate that, and clearly a lot of major thinkers were influenced by the classics, but I think for a lot of them, also in the sense that it just provides a good comparison – it’s distant enough that you can look back on it with some level of clarity.
Unlike so many others, I grew up in a society where the foundations were felt to be beaver trapping, railroad-building, French people mapping waterways in canoes and generally just not being American. ‘Something or other happened in ancient Rome or Greece’ is not something that of itself will pull any weight in that atmosphere. I mean, our religion all comes from the Middle or Far East, but we don’t really think about that, either.
b) Regarding ‘an idealised Athens’
I’m genuinely always baffled about what part of being constantly at war, being taken over ruthlessly by oligarchs and pulling people off the speaker’s podium sounds ‘ideal’ to people.
I think, that unlike a lot of other people in this area, but like a lot of people in general, I’m neither aiming nor have any expectation of ideal. Life in general is not ideal, so why would it have been ideal back then? Why would it be ideal in the future? It’s not going to be. Get over it.
I think most of us just kind of take for granted that people are constantly backstabbing each other and trying to cheat.
It’s like how no one writes in books that people had to go take a piss in the middle of a conversation or they brushed their teeth every night or whatever. We just assume these things are happening and that the normal order of human existence didn’t stop. Most things, most of the time, are a bit of a drag, frankly.
As mentioned above, I feel like I’ve gone into a lot of not-so-great aspects not just of life in ancient Athens, but of democracy in general. I continuously make clear to people they aren’t always going to get their way and sometimes later it will turn out that a decision could have been better, and sometimes some real asshole will win.
Why would those kind of things just stop? Why would anyone expect them to?
I’ve been absolutely explicit about the fact that most people who rose to prominence in Athens were rather well-off people and that you really had to fight to get somewhere. Unlike deliberative democrats, I’m clear on the fact that people lied and double-crossed and if they did things like brag about over-paying their taxes it’s because they did so precisely to build up clout in order to hedge against threats or get away with other things.
‘Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they like and the weak suffer what they must’ as the Athenians are said to have said to the Melians is not the attitude of a people suffering from too much idealism. Just as I, realpolitik trained as I am, who says, ‘they were right on that too – true back then and true today’ am not suffering from an abundance of idealism either.
However, and this is where the Athenians and I get onto one wavelength in a major way: that doesn’t mean things aren’t worth doing. I’m not aiming for ‘ideal’, but if you think hard enough and you try hard enough and you’re willing to put enough on the line, you can still achieve things you never thought were possible.
That’s not ideal.
That’s real.
It happens.
Things don’t have to be ideal to still be really good.
They don’t have to be ideal to be valued.
They don’t have to be ideal to be much better than the alternatives.
And you don’t need to idealise people to learn from them. I’ve learned from plenty of people I seriously dislike.
There are a lot of positive points about democracy that are worth bringing attention to, and these people who struggled so much to implement this idea, but for which we would live under the yoke of our oppressors (as the vast majority of people have done throughout the vast majority of human existence) deserve to have someone take their side. They deserve more than snidish armchair generals convinced they would have done everything better, despite never having attempted to do anything at all, much less succeeded in it. And people today deserve to have someone take their side, too.
I wrote my books, because arguments against democracy are ubiquitous. That’s why the second one is called In Defence of Democracy (and I wanted the first one to be called The Democracy Delusion).
So, the idea that I, being nearly the only person who argues for democracy, is somehow unbalanced, because I spend a mere 2/3 of my time (the clear majority) continuing to deal with anti-democrats, is I think really unfair. I already have to tie one hand behind my back and spend a huge amount of word count dealing with others objections every time I write – an expectation not placed on those others, thus making this extremely asymmetric.
So, I don’t apologise for making the case for democracy, or rather, to be more basic, for humanity.
My book is not entitled,
‘Democracy: A Complete Picture of Every Last Detail You Never Wanted to Know with not only a Focus on the Downsides, but Actually an Exaggeration of them Accompanied with every Slander we could Repeat and a Sigh About How Naïve Anyone Would Be To Like This and Why It Just Couldn’t Work Today without Asking Ourselves if That’s Really True’.
Afterward: ‘Brexit. What a Mistake. Truck Drivers Are Making £70k a Year Now. When Will Those Ignoramuses Finally Regret It?’
There are plenty of books like that out there, if the reader wants to read them. This isn’t some cover-up. It’s just an actual different perspective, that is sorely needed.
Democracy is a worthy idea. Self-determination is a worthy idea. The crooked timber of humanity may never make anything entirely straight, but neither is it hopeless.
A thousand people make the opposite case. One person makes this one.
Guess which one of them is being accused of being one-sided (despite demonstrably not being so as shown above)?
“Suggesting that ‘digital democracy’ offers a ‘way forward’, as Fuller does at one point (p. 277), may be naïve in a context where persuasion and corruption through the circulation of fake news and manipulation of social media appears to have had a decisive effect on the public mood”
The author later contextualizes this, so we’re almost all good here. Not quite though, and I’d like to take the opportunity to go into this ‘naïve’ thing.
‘Naïve’ is another favourite word (a friend of mine calls it a ‘control word’) and it is irritating, when as demonstrated above, I brought this very issue – this exact, specific issue – up before it was trendy. That’s literally the opposite of naïve.
I’d also probably have more understanding for accusations of my naivety if I didn’t spend an enormous amount of time voluntarily testing digital platforms and – at my own cost – trying to find problems and weaknesses with them. I am not an advocate of social media and social media is not digital democracy any more than shopping on Amazon is digital democracy. I’ve been very, very clear about this. But considering I may know more about digital democracy as practiced today than any other living person, I find accusations of naivety a bit much, especially when they come from people who I’m fairly certain haven’t done the work on this that I have.
I specifically deal over an entire long chapter in Beasts and Gods with the exact issue of public dialogue manipulation (in the multiple ways that occurs, including military action/psyops utilizing the internet) and how we can mitigate that by ensuring a space for discussion that is not subject to such manipulation.
And, whatever else that makes me, it isn’t naïve. When you see a problem and deal with it, you are not naïve about that problem.
You’re just constructive and not wallowing in defeatism.
Because what’s really naïve is thinking problems are going to get better on their own or that you can afford to ignore or gloss over them.
Conclusions:
I feel like I have done all I can to be incredibly clear in my writing, which is far, far less vague than most writing on topics like this, but I really can’t be responsible for people just making stuff up about what I have said and then claiming that I am somehow at fault for not substantiating those fictitious claims that were never made, or (even weirder), at fault for not having the views I am supposed to have on certain topics, like eg. Brexit.
It does frustrate me, because I honestly feel like there is not much more I could do in terms of objection handling or foreseeing issues or making my stance clear, yet people try to press me into the ‘normal’ mould, because it is there, without really engaging with what I have actually said. This kind of thing, this interpretation of convenience, happens all the time – and not just to me.
Indeed, I note another misquote in this article:
‘Britain has had enough of experts,’ said Michael Gove in an interview just prior to the EU referendum in June 2016.
This is interpreted by the author as ‘Gove’s rejection of the role of expertise’.
But what Gove said was: ‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and consistently getting it wrong.’
I have no personal affinity for Michael Gove, however, I believe we should at least aim for accuracy, and what he said is the opposite of what the author is claiming. Unaccountable people (experts with organisations with acronyms – no one knows who they are and they often appear and disappear overnight) consistently getting it wrong is not expertise. When you’re wrong a lot, you stop being an expert, or at least one anyone listens to. People start ‘having enough’ of you and your predictions that have proven so unhelpful.
If there had been organizations with acronyms in ancient Athens consistently getting things wrong, I’m sure we’d be hearing about it as a sign of demagoguery, not defending them.
I get that people can make mistakes, and that nothing is perfect and complete. I also get that it is hard to interpret other people’s work or really know what is going on in their mind. It is very hard when you are writing something and you think that two writers agree, but you’re not really sure. I’ve tried also to go out of my way to make sure that people know that my ideas of applying Athenian democratic principles to modern institutions are my ideas alone, while still giving credit to historians for the research they have done. I try to be very clear on these things, but it isn’t always easy.
So, to err is to be human.
But I think there is a tendency here to make assumptions that are too far-reaching and to press things into a narrative that doesn’t fit.
Moreover, my biggest reason for writing this was to correct several erroneous quotations from my work, things I (like my unlikely bedfellow Michael Gove here) never said, including claims that I have endorsed things that I oppose.
Had I let that go, I would be opening myself up to further misquotations and false understandings of my work. If people want to think I am wrong or disagree – fine – and as a reviewer I of course understand that it’s the job of writers to critique work and not just gush about how great it is, but this should be done from the basis of at least understanding what I said in the first place.