Democratic ideas 1 - political animals

okay welcome to the discussion of democratic ideas um some of this was foreshadowed in the discussion I had uh or I mean realistically over the last two lectures but um we'll go over some things that that we talked about before this textbook has chapters written I think by different people so sometimes they may repeat themselves there's nothing wrong with repetition I mean that's part of learning is we repeat ideas over and over again so we understand them in different contexts and we see the different debates that surround them so so that's fine um so for

this week we really want to define democracy freedom and citizenship I will have a so that would be the sympathetic reading my critical reading of this would be that um there's a tacit liberalism in this textbook chapter that starts very much like we've talked about it in the the um yeah the fukuyama's end of history is that this liberal belief is that Democratic liberalism is the ideal goal of all social relationships and therefore it's teleological it it is logically progressing towards that ideal and so in this chapter we start out and if we problematize some

of those assumptions it's very clear why the the striving for that democratic ideal doesn't work but but it's inexplicable to the the textbook chapter author why that happened so I I think having a sympathetic and critical Approach at the same time is is a better explanatory framework as well so we're going to place those ideas in historical contexts and examine challenges to contemporary democracies I think we should challenge it all the way through and then it's not such a surprise at the end when we've got challenges to democracy um I would like to show a

a clip that's been circulating um from the dictator but I might put it in as a separate kind of short video only because I know I will get a copyright strike which is also messed up that like my these non-public um four academic discussion videos are likely to get a copyright strike but on social media you could share it a thousand times and you would unlikely to encounter this intro anyways um and so we're speculated about democracy's future Maybe um in the context of mass demonstrations we don't have an explanatory framework for that here so

I'm not willing to to go that far but yes we can absolutely talk about mistrusting government and citizen demands that that makes sense to me so those are all things we'll do um so when we're talking about Democratic ideas you know we can so democracy is a critical Concept in in modern politics like the the title of this this um textbook a critical concept can be either that it's important or that we should think critically about it so again same thing as I've talked about um every kind of step of the way so far it's

about this idea of the people and about rule which isn't really unpacked in the text because rule is just assumed to be a kind of outcome of hierarchical leadership but we know that leadership and as I've been saying there isn't a good unpacking of leadership that leadership doesn't always produce effective rule right so it's it's another it comes back to this problem over and over again and so the roots of modern democracy rest in Enlightenment and the rise of capitalism I don't know that's the case like we talked about last week and we'll talk about

or in the last lecture in the next lecture um there are lots of ways that we can conceptualize Democratic forms of political organization that exist outside of the Enlightenment framework um so we'll talk about that as we go um and so today liberal democracy is in profound crisis maybe I I blame the liberalism more than the Democracy um again you can tell that I've got some biases around that that that's fine we all have our biases it's as long as you can acknowledge those biases and then and talk through them um so the rise of

authoritarianism sure um capitalism the state uh maybe uh Reckoning authorities absolute but I don't think that's new I mean you can't talk about the enlightenment without the the emergence of the concept of of race right so that's kind of it kovid I think we're all covid fatigued out so I I generally not talking about that as much as I might have in the past um climate change for sure and that's going to be a thing that we come back to at the end uh of of this term um and citizen mistrusting disengagement I think those

are oxymorons and then because it comes from who the people are um and so um yeah theory is how we organize make sense of and bring meaning to our lives sure there's Stories We Tell ourselves um democratic theory is marked by waves of crises yes we don't really get into that in this section there is uh we we call them waves of democracy um but we don't really deal with them here that would probably be in second year comparative politics is where you you go into those types of questions um currently is a new kind

of Crisis whose resolution is unknown I mean sure I don't know what crisis means if crisis is supposed to be temporally defined right so like oh my gosh something happened there's a flood that's a crisis sure I get that but when this is systemic I don't know if it's a crisis or it's kind of you know it's not a feature it's not a bug it's a feature um and so we have to to think about that and understand how the current crisis so I'm guessing it's the the current crisis we could trace back to maybe

911 back to then 2001 and go from there um maybe um shapes politics use Trace historical development democratic theory again we have to unpack all these Concepts we can't use them critically so as I mentioned there's a bunch of tropes so this is stuff I've added on a bunch of tropes in this chapter the first is Crisis as if everything was okay prior to that moment I I don't have a resolution to this do you want to think about history as a linear process that doesn't involve transformation or change that would be a kind of

tacit liberal teleological understanding because liberals have no endogenous theory of violence which is I'll come back to that again what that means is that violence always happens from illiberal spaces and liberalism is always trying to resolve violence rather than create violence so one of the reasons that 911 is so significant in thinking about this is that we could argue that 9 11 triggers liberal violence in which case we don't have a good framework for understanding this Reckoning with race is really just the majority has to reflect on what being a majority actually means and so

that's more about like the kind of cognizance of this this logical progression of this these white Western Enlightenment ideals have to do when they realize that they're white and Western um in the past they thought that because of structures of Supremacy and hierarchical dominance they thought that this was it's just naturally good but now we have to think about well or is it naturally good for everybody and has everybody's experiences of it been naturally good um again because you know I don't believe in the concept of nature um okay so uh and then the people

who is who are we assuming to speak for here and by the end of the chapter we get this really kind of condescension elitist technocratic view of of well this is how things should go why aren't you big like we said you should and so rule is a very specific form of thinking about politics the rule of the many is perceived of as being Democratic I don't know what kind of rule that is though because it sounds very unruly um because how we traditionally understand rule is is kind of in its consistency or in at

least in like even in on credit occurred or totalitarian system we would we'd say that it's like the imposition on a bunch of bodies which is going to be a problem for that rule of the few oligarchy we'll talk about that a bit aristocracy I would add in here a technocracy so those technical Elites that know better on how to deal with certain things are supposed so this is the classic like the crypto Bros right like they know better than you and if you bring up basic questions they're like no no no that's not right

you don't know what you're talking about you research should learn more and understand more I have a chapter written on cryptocurrency or an article written on cryptocurrency if you want it come at me bro um and then um the rule of one um is is monarchy right and so weirdly enough we still equate like the modern Sovereign Nation State as being you know vocal right as as stemming from this and so we still think through especially in the Canadian context we still think through the monarchy when we deal with issues and so that monarchical thinking

has all sorts of consequences for groups that have been traditionally considered not part of the the demos or the people that are there and so starting with um ancient Greek democracy then is a very specific way to understand these issues um you know developed in the 5th Century act Athens again we've talked about this but no harm in restating it citizens actively participated in all aspects of the the life okay citizens did right but they do go into this in this chapter the citizens are 40 000 people in a population of 300 000. this this

sounds like um you know the the type of stuff that we were dealing with with Qatar and um uh the World Cup where you have a massive population of people without status who are the workers who build the stadiums right so they're people well if we're using this literal framework under democracy no they aren't the people they're Medics they're Outsiders whatever we want to call it and so the idea then of of of why this is heralded why ancient Greek democracy is held up is those forty thousand people get to actively participate in governance right

so that's why it's Democratic it would be very interesting to see the active participation of of 40 000 people in governance because governance tends to be so technocratic and Elite now that very few have access to it and so this is one of the questions that immediately comes from this is is do we think that democracy the easiest way to do The Logical extension is can we think of a fully active Chinese Democracy for example um and so I wonder if the Western Enlightenment experience makes it so I think many of us would say that

that doesn't make sense right having two plus billion people actively engaged in their own governance would seem to at least in the way that we've conceptualized things be likely to produce negative outcomes if for example the Americans can't seem to figure out their democratic system to work very efficiently or effectively now the Counterpoint to this is India which is an example of democracy that does have that scale it's a representative democracy though it's not this type of democracy the ancient Greek democracy is active engagement of the citizens in the political and decision-making structures right it's

not just voting it's more than them so um again at least they bring up here the idea that the citizenship was limited to to women um and all these foreign residents and slaves are excluded um this raises fundamental questions then because the public realm is is barely like 15 percent of what would then be the private realm right so if we are thinking about and this goes back to the fucodian discussion but if we're thinking about how politics actually happens then we can think about the ways in which there's a lot of politics taking place

between women and these foreign residents and slaves that isn't captured in this framing of ancient Greek democracy and and more to the point I mean the easiest point and this is a constant and Perpetual debate is the extent to which Commerce takes place public or private because if we are talking about the polis as being direct democracy of 40 000 people those 40 000 people are resting on systems of social reproduction that include massive amounts of resources and those resources then to the extent that they are considered private are not something that is the the

the government regulates and so we can see here if we take this to The Logical extension we see here we end up with the problems of of the anthropocene of our political systems not responding to the environmental damage created by these systems because those systems are considered private the government doesn't regulate them those decisions aren't ones that are taken there and so this idea then of this this ancient Greek democracy is establishing a public-private separation that might in its conception produce problems right systemic problems when put in at scale and so this experience experiment with

democracy really ends with the polyphonesian wars and so it becomes kind of a nostalgic way to think about democracy that this ancient Greek participation um and so this crisis of the policy is why we have the Plato and Aristotle stuff we talked about before one of the interesting side notes of that is that this this also reinforced the idea of a kind of a trained and disciplined military and so when we're thinking about those things we have to think about the ways in which this kind of reinforces the what we end up with in the

the liberal era of the idea of the state as the night Watchmen as as the basic like we need a state to enforce the rule of order but we don't need it to tax us and we don't need it to intervene in the private Realm of the economy and it should be a bare minimum thing and so I don't know if this was actually like this this Nostalgia for a period that worked for a bit and then failed why we still have a Nostalgia for it and why it's still idealized I think to me is

dangerously presentism right so it's very much how we think about things today and how we think about things in the current moment um and so I do think there is an underlying critical challenge here which is if there's politics taking place with these these all of these other 260 yeah 260 000 people who aren't included are are we idealizing a very tiny Elite rule as Democratic rather than fully actually participatory politics right um and so one of the underlying assumptions here of course is is that we have to go into the public in order to

achieve the ideal of democratic participation but when we say Democratic participation we really mean Elite participation in these systems and this is why I fundamentally reject the concept of political animal um we can talk about why it's the case the sociality of it I'll talk about in a second but that it produces a kind of single uniform way of being doesn't make a ton of sense to me so I I get it right the idea Design This is the sympathetic reading good citizen is someone who's actively engaged in the day-to-day government the public affairs of

the state because they want those ideal um uh that that love of government to result in the production of public goods that we can all benefit from that are non-exclusive right so that everyone should benefit it's just we don't know if those citizens are actually producing public goods or they're producing Goods for the elites right in which they do it and so when a small group defines what is good we're not sure that that's something we should aspire to we know that small groups will want to always say that well if it's good for us

it's good for everybody probably right but without any feedback mechanisms for that 260 000 uh we're going to have problems determining if it's actually good for everyone so this goes back to to basic concepts here I took them from here but the political animal problem is is basically um as outlined by Aristotle is you know all animals kind of produce reproduce and have social lives the distinction for Aristotle is the reshaping of the environment that's what makes man as a political animal different from other animals which immediately raises the kind of environmental character of democratic

politics it also raises fundamental questions about those that we don't consider full citizens what is their status and how do we treat them and so there's a couple different problems that emerge here because if we are talking about the existence of women slaves and medics in this Greek system we have to have questions and these are questions that we haven't even started to resolve that come from this so to what extent are animals property if their property well one back to the Lockheed tradition how have we mixed our labor with them I guess it's the

care and maintenance of them but if there are property are they free to dispose of as we wish and how we wish and which ones that we can consider valid to consume and not consume and the ways in which we should end their lives in order to consume them raises all sorts of messed up questions when we start from this this boundary between the citizen and the non-citizen is the boundary between the political animal and the non-political animal right and then the the second question is to what extent are they subjects and subjects here is

a kind of the the analytical construction based on the sovereignty of the nation-state about who is subject to the rule of that rule now if it's a democratic rule with this forty thousand I I guess it's it still doesn't answer the question of the people um if it's uh arist aristocratic rule then you could understand that those in positions of power want to govern those who don't have positions of power right those are the subjects of governance um but we also have this question about non-human subjects we know that there are internal life worlds back

to the idea of social lives of animals to what extent should they be respected so we've seen it now we've seen it emerge uh particularly around cetaceans but like dolphins and whales where states are now granting subject Hood in order to protect them as distinct from property because we know that we can cause them harm through our action and we need to protect them in order to protect um you know tour we can be crass about it protect tourism for dolphin shows or whatever um and so this idea of them being subjects is that we've

always had this capacity there's no reason that those citizens couldn't expanded the enfranchisement to the 300 000 of people who were living there but we don't want to do that today right so we don't like the idea of just granting citizenship to people who are participating in the community we want to make sure that someone citizenship is always in question that is medic they can't do the full things we can do because then they'll have be incentivized to example pick our crops for us and so we have this problem of of subject Hood relating back

to political animals and then the final question of this is aren't we animals as well um and does this distinction between us as mammals and as being parts of mammals does the separation of us from the Animal World allow us to then ruthlessly exploit that other world as if we're not part of it which is the fundamental problem of environmentalism right so we can just think about it in these ways um to what extent are we engaged in relations with our companion species right so Donna haraway has written extensively about this in biology the ways

in which we have imprinted on each other and you know dogs sense of love and human sense of love under MRI machines is remarkably similar um and the question then becomes what does it mean to to keep animals in places where they might not otherwise be um is it for their good is it for ours and how do we understand that good and then how do we tell people who we don't think are doing well in the treatment of their their property pets um that is good you know this is you know this is basic

law in Ontario you can't be refused um rental housing based on the existence of pets and yet people perpetually say oh no pets no pets no pets and so people want to govern your private lives in a commercial transaction which doesn't seem fair but the boundary of Commerce rights and subject code is all bound up in this notion of political animals all right I'm going to stop there um for this video before it goes too long and then we'll we'll jump back into the the Aristotle discussion of the next one