Democracy Is Inevitable

From What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy

IF DEMOCRACY IS THE NATURAL STATE OF ALL MAMMALS, INCLUDing humans, it must be something purely temporary that has prevented it for so much of the “civilized” period of the past few millennia (even though it has continued to exist throughout this time among tribal people). The force that slowed its inevitable emergence was a dysfunctional story in our culture, which led to thousands of years of the sanctioning of slavery, the oppression of women and minorities, and the deaths of hundreds of millions. It was the story that our essential nature is sinful.

The Fundamental Issue of Sin and Punishment

Thomas Hobbes and others have assumed that we’d need a time machine to know how bad life really was 20,000 or 50,000 years ago. But there are still humans living essentially the same way that your ancestors and mine did, and if we look at their lives we find, by and large, that Hobbes was mistaken.

I remember vividly the first time I experienced this. I was sitting around a campfire with half a dozen or so men who were members of a southwestern Native American tribe. We’d just done a sweat, and after some of the heavy talk and ritual associated with that sacred ceremony the conversation gradually turned to “guy talk”: telling stories, making each other laugh, and poking fun.

They were making jokes mostly about another tribe, which lived about 600 miles away. Not cutting or hurting comments but jokes that pointed out—with a humor born of respect—the historic and cultural differences between the two tribes. Because I’d never interacted with the other tribe, I made a comment typical of modern American culture: a put-down joke, with the man sitting opposite me around the fire as its butt. It was the kind of remark you’ll hear within five minutes of turning on any sitcom on American television.

The group fell silent, and everybody looked down or into the fire. I realized I’d had breached some protocol. And I didn’t know how to make it right or how they’d punish me for my sin.

After a long and, for me, uncomfortable silence, the oldest man in the circle roused himself, as if he knew that his age gave him the obligation to speak first.

“I remember a time when I was young,” he said, “and, well, I won’t say, ‘stupid,’ but let’s say, ‘not so wise.’ Not that I’m all that wise now,” he added with a small laugh,

but I’ve learned a few things over the years. Anyhow, I remember when I was young and I was sitting with some friends, and I said something hurtful about one of the men who was there with us. I remember how badly I felt, immediately knowing that I had put a pain on his heart. I remember how confused I felt, not sure what I should do to restore balance to the circle. And I remember one of the men telling a story of a time when he’d hurt somebody’s feelings, and how he’d made it right by acknowledging that, and retracting the comment, and asking the rest of the group to help him bring back balance and harmony.

The man spoke for several minutes, and my version of it is from memory so probably not exact, but it captures the essence of his comments. He was teaching me—without ever once mentioning my name—how to remedy what I had done.

Then the man next to him cleared his throat and said, “I too remember a time I said something impulsive that hurt my friend.” And he went on to tell the story of what he did to make it right. His story was followed by one from the man I’d made the joke about, and this continued all the way around the circle until it got to me.

By then I knew how each person felt and had learned how I could make it right with each individual or rebalance the situation in the group. It took a few minutes, but I did it, and the oldest man gently interrupted me by hand-rolling tobacco into a corn shuck, lighting it, and passing it around the circle. It was as if something heavy had been lifted from the group. We were soon again laughing and telling tall tales.

What’s important in this story is that nobody had called me a sinner. Nobody implied that I was doing what was normal or natural. Everybody accepted that I’d made a mistake, I hadn’t known better, and each man had done his best to politely tell me how I could restore harmony.

This is one aspect of how a society can live without police and prisons.

This is how humans, for the most part, lived for the past 40,000 years and longer.

This is beyond the imagining of Thomas Hobbes and the people of his day who were struggling in a largely anti-democratic kingdom with the issue of whether those who rule over others—restraining sinful impulses and punishing those who err—should be appointed by gods or men (but never women).

When society agrees with the story that people are fundamentally flawed and evil, it creates repositories for those evil people or puts them to death. It assigns to some of its members the job of human trash collector who performs therapy, provides drugs, or restrains them. If they acted badly enough, they’re put into a prison, where it’s assumed that others of equal evil and lacking restraint of their human nature will bully, beat, and even rape the newcomer.

On the other hand, when a society agrees with the democracy-grounded story that people are fundamentally good, born in balance with the world and one another, something quite different happens when a person acts badly. It becomes the responsibility of the entire community to bring that person back into balance. The bad behavior is seen either as an indication that the person has not yet learned something or matured or that the person is suffering from a form of spiritual sickness. The solemn responsibility and work of every person in the community becomes that of teaching or healing the individual. Usually, once harmony is restored, a small ceremony is performed to acknowledge the return of the person and the community to its natural state.

Some would argue that this way of life may work well for small tribes where everybody knows everybody else but isn’t viable in a city-state society where it’s possible for predators and sociopaths to prey on innocent people if unrestrained by the force of law and threat or reality of imprisonment. There’s considerable truth to this argument: Hobbes was writing from the midst of the British Empire in the seventeenth century, the belly of the beast of one of history’s mightiest and most bloodthirsty anti-democratic cultures to rule the earth.

And yet we do have this simple metric today: generally, the more democratic a nation is, the fewer people it will have in prison.

Democracy Is Resilient, Always
Rising from the Human Spirit

Most scientists who have examined the relationship between democracy and biology have concluded that democracy is so resilient an idea, so biologically ingrained an imperative, that it will continue to grow and prosper around the world even if the Texas oil barons and the New York corporations do succeed in turning America back into a Dickensian world consistent with the vision of dictators, pseudo-conservatives, and those who don’t understand democracy.

Professor Rudolph Rummel made the following points in an e-mail discussion we had in November 2003:

■ Freedom is a basic human right recognized by the United Nations and international treaties and is the heart of social justice.

■ Freedom—free speech and the economic and social free market—is an engine of economic and human development and scientific and technological advancement.

■ Freedom ameliorates the problem of mass poverty.

■ Free people do not suffer from and never have had famines and, by theory, should not. Freedom is therefore a solution to hunger and famine.

■ Free people have the least internal violence, turmoil, and political instability.

■ Free people have virtually no government genocide and mass murder and for good theoretical reasons. Freedom is therefore a solution to genocide and mass murder, the only practical means of making sure that “Never again!”

■ Free people do not make war on one another, and the greater the freedom within two nations, the less violence between them. While they may declare war on autocratic regimes that threaten them, people in a democracy never vote to attack other democracies.

■ Freedom is a method of nonviolence—the most peaceful nations are those whose people are free.

As Per Ahlmark, former deputy prime minister of Sweden, said in his remarks to the European Parliament on April 8, 1999: “In a democracy it is impossible, or at least extremely difficult, to get enough support from the people to initiate a military confrontation with another democracy. Such people know each other too well. They trust each other too much. For democratic governments it is usually too easy and natural to talk and negotiate with one another—it would look and feel ridiculous or totally irresponsible to start shooting at a nation which is governed in the same way as your own country.”¹

On his website Dr. Rummel has a “Peace Clock” that shows that in 1900 only 8 percent of the world’s people lived in nations that were democratic.² By 1950 the number had increased to 31 percent, and, Dr. Rummel says, “Now is the dawning of a new world,” as by the year 2000 fully 58.2 percent of the world’s people lived in democratic nations.

Rummel also coined the word democide in his book Death by Government to describe the deliberate murder (or allowing the deaths) of a state’s own citizens.³ Rummel points out that the world was shocked when the Chinese Communists slaughtered people in Tiananmen Square but should not have been shocked: the Chinese state had killed more than 35 million of its own citizens prior to that time and continues to kill them to this day.

As awful as that number is, the Soviets hold the world record, having killed an estimated 54 million to 61 million human beings, according to Rummel. Although we all know about the wars incited by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, what most people miss is that in the twentieth century up to four times as many people died at the hands of their own governments as in all the wars combined. The cause? According to Rummel and many other experts on the topic, it’s a lack of democracy.

In his book Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025, former US ambassador to Hungary Mark Palmer says that there are only 45 dictators left in the world and that with thoughtful and nonviolent effort we may be able to end all of their reigns before the year 2025.⁴ The worldwide trend, Palmer says, is solidly toward peace. In a November 2003 interview, he told me, “If you could foresee a world which was 100 percent democratic, there would be no war.” There would be competition, Palmer notes, but not war, and the result would be an increased standard of living among people all across the planet.

And the trend is good. Palmer is vice chairman of the board of directors of Freedom House, which produces an annual report on democracy around the world.⁵ “In 2002, the last year that we covered,” he told me, “we saw roughly 26 countries moving in the right direction [toward democracy] and only about 11 doing some reversal.”

We may be standing on the edge of a new era of peace because democracies have a built-in mechanism (the will of the people) to prevent aggressive wars. So long as our democratic institutions can resist being taken over by a new version of warlords, aristocrats, and kings in the form of multinational corporations (particularly those in the defense industry), we could see the prospect of the biblical “thousand years of peace”—following the brutality of the past century—in our or our children’s lifetime.

Reinventing Democracy

Democracy doesn’t just appear, fully formed. In every part of the world, over and over, it has to be refigured out, developed, put together piece by piece. This is why it can appear so different in different parts of the world yet always share the same set of basic values.

Democratic indigenous cultures almost always have their own laws, appropriate to their time and place, to ensure stability and peace. The Australian Aborigines, for example, have carried for as long as 80,000 years the belief that if they engage in intensive (single-crop, tilled-soil) agriculture, the gods will punish them with terrible famines.

So how do people find their way from a violent warlord, theocrat, or feudal culture into a peaceful and stable democratic culture?

■ The people have learned that they must live in a sustainable fashion in balance and harmony with their environment.

■ They’ve agreed that they’re no longer willing to live in a violent society characterized by extremes of wealth and power.

■ They’ve agreed that power must be locally held and locally exercised.

Eventually, enough people re-remember the basic tenets of democratic life and figure out how to apply them to their own particular time and place. When enough people wake up to the possibility of living in a democracy, the nondemocratic culture dissolves and a newly formed and unique democracy emerges, as we see in examples from New Caledonia to the Iroquois to the American Revolution, to the dramatic shift around the world toward democracy in the past century. Today, all across the world, people are creating fledgling democracies with the hope that they can successfully transit them into multigenerational, long-term democratic nations.

From What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return to Democracy by Thom Hartmann,
© 2004, published by Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.