Democracy - ok, ok

I thought that I would write about democracy...  a play with many parts.

The story of democracy is largely about power.  It is not just about who has the power or even how to select those who will have power....  it is about finding and cultivating the power of humanity - better described these days as society.  

To explain why democracy is so difficult to describe, it is necessary to begin with a short lesson in sociology.  Sociology is the 'study of society' which emerged in the 18th - 19th Centuries as the scientific counter part to more traditional ways of thinking about ourselves and our communities.  And just as science eventually stumbled on the atom, the supposed building block of all matter, sociologists discovered the individual.  Scholars and poets (for example, John Donne "no man is an island" (Meditation XVII0)) had for centuries seen men and women as part of and inseparable from society, but not necessarily as separate from this society.  However, as the modern era unfolded and with the help of the science of sociology, men and eventually women, extracted from society and given an existence independent of the social.  The problem as some sociologist have explained became understood as the duality of the individual and the social (the collective or aggregate).  The question is how to reconcile the individual with the social in order to offer one all encompassing theory of human society.  The technique, as described by one sociologist, was to privilege either the individual or the social.  So, on the one hand you could begin with ideas about society and then try to explain the individual and on the other hand, you could begin with ideas about individuals and then offer a theory as to how society evolved - see Ian Craib Modern Social Theory for an excellent discussion of the problem and how various theorists have attempted to resolve it...  What this all means is that several centuries into this modern era, the individual is not only considered as having an existence apart from society, society is increasingly seen as an aggregation of individuals.  The organic sense of humanity, the idea that no one can or should 'be an island' has been forgotten.  

The modern story of democracy began with a genuine and revolutionary desire to promote the idea of the individual...  the struggle for rights, equality and so on are all part of this story.  The problem is that while it was possible to abstract the individual from society in theory, it was not possible in practice.   Individuals were welcome to equality, until it was time to eat, sleep, procreate and so on...  the idea of equality promoted in the struggle for democracy also had to be abstracted from ideas of 'sameness', 'equal treatment' and, to a certain extent, even 'fairness'.  Life was not fair.  Woman bore children and died; men worked hard and the crops still failed and so on.  Add to this the scientific division and alienation of labour as compelled by 'capitalism' and the idea of the equal individual lost much of its economic justification. And then of course in the late 19th Century the Corporation emerged as an 'individual' in its own right and, since recent case in the US Supreme Court, is the archetypal individual and citizen in the post modern state - see discussion of Corporate Personhood in Wikipedia as a place to start exploring this bizarre turn of events. 

So democracy is about power and is a story about about the individual - but what does that mean?  Well my discussion will wander around a bit.  The next part of the story is about Auckland's super city and Malawi's green revolution.  And, to use what seems to be the metaphor of the month, it is all about the "perfect storm"...