Re: Pearls and truffles and swine, was Re: rooting for the Americans

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sun Jan 19 2003 - 02:29:48 MST


On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 07:11:12PM -0800, Michael M. Butler wrote:
>
> The tyranny of the majority is alive and well, and armed to the teeth.
>
> I'm a big fan of representative government in preference to, say,
> living under a Bokassa or an Amin or a Pol Pot, but I stopped being
> a big fan of pure-d "democracy", applied willy-nilly... about 25
> or 30 years ago.
>
> Without a bunch of norms of fair play, or checks and balances, or
> both--in other words, without some sort of "governor", in the
> steam-engine-flyball-valve-sense--democracy winds down/up as "Let's
> you and me kill Fred and take his stuff" pretty durned fast.

I.e, you want liberal democracy rather than majority democracy. There is
plenty of political philosophy on this issue; very few people think that
majority democracy is anything good (other than being better than the
truly awful systems). When democracy becomes really constructive is when
it is built on a constitution and political culture that respects the
rights of people (rights to life, freedom, expression, property etc),
especially the rights of the minority.

The problem with building liberal democracies is that it is not just
about writing a nice constitution (although that helps; I envy you
americans your constitutionalism!) but to get institutions to actually
respect the rights set down therein. It is about the same problem as
Hernando de Soto described about bootstrapping a market economy: if the
culture and institutions are not right, it won't work outside small
sectors. You need to set up the culture and institutions that act as
checks and balances, and this can't be done onvernight and must be done
while building the rest of the constitutional system. Messy.

The worst thing about this IMHO is that it is almost a conservative
position: good democracies are enormously path dependent and one should
be careful about not destroying key components. But fortunately a strong
civil society seems to be a good buffer to handle even seriously
out-of-line institutions.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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