Democracy Schmemocracy

I was listening to an On Point (www.onpointradio.org/) about civic engagement where the host, Tom Ashrbook, was interviewing Robert Putnam, author of the book Bowling Alone (www.bowlingalone.com/). They were not talking about the content of that book, but invariably it came up b/c it is what Putnam is best known for. In the book he talked about how Americans are becoming less and less engaged in civic life - and that was what did it. 

At least that is the extreme, albeit prevalent, post-modernist conclusion. A constructed solipsism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism). Which, it further occurred to me, is a natural political conclusion given our inability to get past seeing democracy as THE answer to that which ails ya. It doesn't really matter what political stripe with which you identify, if you're talking to anyone about the necessary solutions to our political woes (read either domestic or international or global) the answer is *cue fanfare music* DEMOCRACY!

Now I'm not slighting democracy here, in no small part b/c I don't have anything to offer by way of better alternative. But I think it would be helpful if we understood what deomcracy is, and what it is not. The Merriam Webster dictionary, which I happen to have access to, defines democracy thusly,

In Wilberian ( www.kenwilber.com) terms, what that says to me is that democracy is primarily a lower-right affair - it is the political structure of a certain groups of ppl. But what democracy doesn't necessarily have anything to do with is the INTERIORITY of ppl. So, as Ken has said many, many times, you can hold free elections and if the people are at roughly a red/egoic place of development, then they are likely to elect a red military dictator (a la Palestinian elections of Hammas). Extrapolating this to where I started, if you are in an extreme post-modernist stage of development, democracy is going to produce a political structure that is relativistic and unwilling to make any judgments that might infringe upon your uniquely subjective sphere. Orange/individualistic stage = roughly what most Western gov'ts look like (with an increasing helping of green).

So democracy is neither the answer to many of the world's "under-developed" countries/nations current state, nor North Americans' reengagement in civic life (or at least it isn't THE answer - there may not be a panacea). This is primarily b/c democracy is not much more than a lower-right tool that reproduces the lower-left stage of its operators - it has very little to do with the subjects' interiority. What ppl often mistake democracy for is the civil society that accompanied its flourishing in the west (orange western enlightenment). And while democracy might be a necessary precursor to such an interior development, it has been fairly well proven not to be a sufficient precursor to bring about such transformation from prior stages of development.

So what DO we need? My thoughts: a politics that cognizes, engages, and begins to integrate interiorities. The first step, something that operates from an inter-subjective space.

And that brings us to about here.

Cheers,

sp