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 emocracy is both a way of making collective
decisions and a form of participation in society. The way
we participate affects the decisions we make and our role
in the decision process affects our membership of society.
If a society can draw upon the expertise and knowledge
of
all its citizens, then it is more likely to be able to
make adaptive decisions in a changing environment. If the
decision
making process involves the citizens of a society then
they will see themselves as part of that society and take
on
a responsibility for their actions within it.
Those of us
who value democracy do so for a number of reasons, but perhaps
the
commonest are that: (a) the people who are affected by a decision
have a say in it, and (b) it allows us to change governments
without a war or revolution. The first is important because
participation in decisions means that people feel they own
them,
and thus will take some responsibility for their implementation.
Having a voice in decision processes is one of the biggest
factors
in their appearing fair. The second is concerned with correcting
mistakes. If one lot make a hash of it, then we vote them out
and give someone else a turn. In the last two decades we have
had trouble on both these fronts and these problems pose a
serious
risk to the survival of our society.
We have problems with the legitimacy of the political system.
People are contemptuous of politicians and are totally uninterested
in the political process itself. People cannot be bothered
to take part, believing that even if they do it will make
no difference and the type of participation offered them does
not attract support. This is related to the second problem:
the strength of a pluralist democracy is that there should
always be more than one set of ideas on offer, more than one
model of society, more than one set of policy prescriptions,
more than one approach to problems. Thus if one set of ideas
fails to solve problems there is always the chance that another
set will be more successful. At present there is no realistic
alternative to the market-based ideas of both this and the
previous government. Thus people are deterred from political
participation by the perceptions that there is no point voting
for anyone because they are all the same.
It is hardly necessary to make a case for the failings of
the market ideology. Writing off a sizeable proportion of
your adult population is hardly a mark of success. Shoe-horning
young and disabled people into mind-numbing McJobs is not
a particularly noble goal. Allowing huge disparities in income,
prospects and quality of life does not promote a healthy or
cooperative society. Emphasizing individual aspiration, taking
selfishness as the most basic motive of human action, and
rewarding greed, lack of scruple and disdain for others will
not produce social cohesion, coordination and increased contribution
to the common weal. And capitalism's record on the environment
is a matter of shame. Yet our society must survive, we cannot
live apart from it.
That society has to survive within its physical environment,
and on current evidence we aren't doing all that well. A recent
Channel 4 documentary tried to explore the reasons for the
abandonment of Viking settlements in Greenland: a little ice
age was seen to be a primary cause yet the Inuit people, who
had been there less time than the Vikings, survived quite
well. The Inuit developed techniques for living in that terrain
which were not adopted by the Vikings and importantly, the
fact that Inuit culture was not Christian, may have been a
major factor in the lack of communication between the two
peoples. The church, a social institution, and its powerful
ideology which proscribed the ideas and practices of non-Christians,
may have prevented people from learning to cope with changed
climatic conditions. This is beginning to sound rather familiar.
A society needs to make the right decisions in order to survive.
Climate is changing in our own day, yet the dominant set of
ideas is quite incapable of coping with this and is preventing
us from adapting our practices to the new conditions. An ideology
and its attendant power structure are causing maladaptive
decisions to be made.
To rush headlong upon one's doom is not, by and large, considered
to be intelligent behaviour. To understand what an intelligent
society would look like, we need to understand the nature
of human intelligence. Is not the very essence of human intelligence
the ability to adapt and survive? Intelligence is not about
IQ scores, the number of A-levels you have, or how many certificates
are gathering dust in some cupboard. It is about being able
to reflect upon one's actions, review one's decisions and
change them if necessary. This means that we have to have
criteria for evaluating those decisions, those outcomes, and
for deciding upon new courses of action. But what makes the
human being as a decision system so highly adaptable, is the
ability to review not just the decision processes, but the
decision criteria themselves. We can change our minds about
the values we hold.
Markets render us collectively stupid because there is no
place in them where decisions can be reviewed and evaluated.
Any decision system, de facto or otherwise, which relies upon
individual action will depend heavily upon the characteristics
of the actors within it. Human beings are notoriously short
term creatures. It is easier to go to the out of town store
than the local high street; you know that selective education
is divisive but your immediate concern is the welfare of your
own child. Thus where the collective decision is simply an
aggregate of individual decisions, it will produce results
which no one wants. You vote for a particular candidate, not
because you support her, but to give the other side a bloody
nose. Unfortunately a lot of other people decide to do the
same and you end up with an MP who is detested by the majority.
Human societies can develop ways of counteracting this, of
ensuring that most people do what they, and society, need
in the long run, because human societies have cultural rules
and norms to which people adhere, and institutions which structure
the range of possible actions. Democracy is one such mechanism
but we need to think further about the characteristics that
such a decision system must have. It must be able to deliver
practicable decisions, and within a limited timespan: producing
a perfectly researched decision is no use if the situation
to which a response was needed has already changed. It must
be able to change decisions in response to events, it must
be able to review collective decisions and ask whether they
are acceptable. It must have a wide range of expertise on
which to draw, it must have a realistic and sufficiently complex
model of its own environment. And above all, any decision
system that wants to survive must have a sophisticated value
structure. Decision systems based on crude value structures
do not produce intelligent behaviour. They produce the sort
of behaviour which humans look at and think "how stupid,
couldn't it see that allocating children to schools on the
basis of the school's reputation would lead to sink schools
and increased school journeys?" Of course it couldn't
- the system had not been told to give weight to children
being educated locally.
We need a highly developed structure of values, anchored
in more than one primary value (the values which are accepted
as good, in and of themselves) because only such systems produce
adaptive behaviour. We need a value for what happens at the
collective level, a value for society in and of itself, as
well as a value for people. And we need a model of society
which fits the bill. Experience has taught us that experts
are just as fallible as the rest of us, and often have a rather
narrow idea of the public interest to boot. Essentially such
people are making decisions upon too limited a set of criteria.
Hence we end up thinking: why didn't they spot things that
we could have told them would go wrong? The point is that
the people on the ground bring a whole lot of values and knowledge
to bear upon their decisions and evaluations which those outside
the situation do not perceive.
Economists essentially see society as a self correcting homeostatic
mechanism such as those which maintain body heat or blood
sugar levels in the human body. The human body is probably
our most appropriate analogy, since it, too, is immensely
complex and has a variety of decision making mechanisms in
addition to the conscious ones. But human society is not characterised
by the negative feedback of homeostasis, but by positive feedback.
You send your child to the "best" school which:
(a) increases the average ability of the intake and hence
exam results, and (b) creates the impression that it is a
good school because everyone wants to go there. This results
in yet more people trying to send their children there.
These are non-linear processes characterised not by steady
states, but by attractors (states around which the current
status of the system will recur) and also by runaway processes
that can come out of the blue. These kind of processes cause
clumping of different bits of the system around divergent
states: with respect to education we are increasingly seeing
a divergence between two steady states coexisting side by
side, the world of the successful selective school and that
of the poor relation comprehensive. Society is also a probabilistic
rather than a deterministic system. It is an increase in the
probability of certain actions for which we try, not a totally
determined outcome. Many political and social theorists haven't
even made it into this century let alone the next.
Intelligent decision making in our society needs mechanisms
which produce adaptive decisions and which is capable of further
change. We need decision making systems which make full use
of the detailed knowledge (and hence values) of those actually
in the relevant situation. We need structures capable of rapid
response, we need opportunities to review outcomes, procedures
and even decision criteria themselves. There is no ready made
blueprint, but we need a sensible model of our situation in
order to address that lack. The ideas outlined above are offered
as part of the toolkit that will enable us to do so.
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