The Charm of Democracy

We were invited to reflect on Western democracy as a foray into new thinking about political excellence. When contemplating the question of “what do I think about Western democracy?”, Gandhi’s famous quip about Western civilization springs to mind: “I think it would be a very good idea”.  Democracy always looks best in comparison to what it is not. Churchill – who described Gandhi as a half naked fakir imposter – asserted that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” This otherwise astute observation sheds no light on what democracy actually is. Common sense offers a litany of democracy’s descriptive indicators that are taken as absolutely self-evident: free elections, multiple political parties, civil liberties, independent judiciaries, etc. But regardless of the question of how much these features really grant people control over their own society, these only vaguely describe an amorphous entity that we call democracy. They do not define it. In fact, democracy has no essence to define. It is only an ideal. Therefore, any serious discussion of political excellence must refrain from creating a fetish of Western democracy and stare some basic facts in the eyes: that 2% of the world’s population owns 50% of the world’s wealth, that the poorest half of the world owns 1% of the world’s wealth (Financial Times 2006: 8), and that Westerns democracies sustain this gross imbalance through its economic leverage, its technological advantage, its military capacity, and the globalization of its standards. Of course, the West is not the only culprit and everything it does is not inherently bad, but the global playing field (the global “system” to use a reductionist term) remains skewed in its favor for reasons unconcerned with democracy’s mighty ideals.

With that point in mind, this brief essay starts from the position that to effect political change we must not think of our society as a democracy but rather as a technocracy, i.e. a society that is governed (though not ruled) through the work of countless specialized experts working in countless policy domains. Those experts sit at the intersections of the countless policy process that make up the fabric of social life today. They include a range of professionals such as lawyers, accountants, financial planners, education specialists, health professionals, and consultants on everything from soil science to urban planning to civil society. Political movements must find a way to engage them directly. This essay moves in three steps toward that end. It first explains the emergence of policy as a form of governance in order to show its totalizing scope. It then caricatures the international life-style of the policymaking elite to show how they, as a class, are shielded from the global inequalities that they are paid to ostensibly rectify. This critique is necessary to show how certain norms encase them in their social roles and hinder them from acting on more progressive political principles. The essay ends not with a master plan on how to achieve political excellence – that oxymoron that would have the author pretending to be a philosopher-king. It rather ends with an idea of how we might better conceptualize the relationship between the academic and the activist; the thinker and the doer; the critic and the practitioner. This reconsideration might help us break through the familiar impasse in which the policymaker chastises the intellectual for never offering any “practical” advice while the intellectual scoffs at the policymaker for pursuing policies void of substantial knowledge.

The Ubiquity of Policy

That policy impinges on all aspects of self and society is well suggested by the fact that from cradle to grave most every aspect of our lives are negotiated through some kind of policy: health policy, education policy, investment policy, immigration policy, security policy, foreign policy, etc (Shore and Wright 1997: 4). As such, any political movement must somehow grapple with policy’s nuanced and multifaceted presence in the social fabric. We can begin to appreciate policy’s work through a bit of semantic history. The English word “policy” is derived from the French medieval word “police”. This older term did not refer narrowly to sanctions against social deviance (as does law), but rather it meant, more broadly, “to organize and regulate the internal order of” society (Wedel et al 2005: 35). In his “theory of police”, Foucault illustrates the total attempt at regulation through the example of Delamare’s Compendium. Delamare, the eighteenth-century French administrator, argued that police work is administrative work monitoring eleven elements pertaining to daily life: religion, morals, health, supplies, roads, town buildings, public safety, the liberal arts, trade factories, manservants and labor, and the poor (Foucault 1988:80). 

Though it might seem to foreshadow an Orwellian world of fear, terror and totalitarianism, the police’s objective is “everything pertaining to men’s happiness” (ibid, original emphasis) by regulating everything that forms relations between them. Indeed, Delamare covered all aspects of social living: the moral quality of life (religion), the preservation of life (health, supplies), the conveniences of life (trade, factories, workers, the poor, and public order), and the pleasures of life (theatre, literature, entertainment). In this context, the object of the police encompasses the indispensable, the useful, and the superfluous. The point here is that policy is historically and logically a comprehensive tool in the creation of social order and thus social inequality. While today’s police exert negative power by barring illegal acts, on the opposite side of the coin, today’s policymaker exerts positive power by inducing people to behave in productive and orderly ways. Intentionally or not, each still plays an administrative and normative role.

To be sure, the Compendium assumed a highly centralized state, which is not the situation we see today. The state has been delegating its historical responsibilities to the private and non-governmental sectors, but it is “policy” which gives the whole matrix of governance its cohesion, rationality, and sense of direction. Policy becomes the venue through which ideal citizens are postulated and the conditions created through which it becomes advantageous for us to internalize those ideals. It codifies, normalizes, and naturalizes the dominant rhetoric of social order. “Order” is the object of our analysis whether or not the political system is formally democratic, autocratic, totalitarian, or whatever. It follows that policymakers are strategic players in both reproducing that order and in changing it. We would do well to ask who these people are, or rather, how they are framed.

Sequestered in Status?

If policymakers play pivotal roles in implicitly or explicitly regulating society, then they are potentially “dangerous” people to the status quo. A tremendous amount of ideological work must take place for them to believe (or to find too taxing to refute) that their function in society is wholly benevolent, humanitarian, and valued and that their own punishing work hours and travel schedule are well worth it. To create space for policymakers to push beyond the prescribed limits of their professional roles, we must expose how the cultural milieu in which they thrive anaesthetizes the global inequalities that they manage and the personal sacrifices they make for their jobs. 

Airports provide excellent, condensed examples of this anaesthetization. Indeed, policymakers in international organizations, international businesses, and humanitarian organizations are quite familiar with them. First of all, airline advertisements routinely show the standard passenger as a business-class traveler endowed with a sense of kindness, status, and well-deserved fun. The archetypical airline passenger is the self-confident (but non-threatening), handsome (but not vain), white male (with dark hair) between 30-40 years old. He is often accompanied by an attractive (but not shallow), sharp (but fun-loving) woman, who appears young and unjaded (but never naïve). The couple is both world-wise and open-minded with their best years ahead of them.

They live a life of leisure while solving global problems. Airport lounges tuned to BBC World, CNN, or Euronews give them the latest briefs on the global state of democracy, security, and capitalism. Updates are readily available on brewing crises, changes in the stock market, fluctuations in exchange rates, election results from who knows where, and the unpredictable mudslide wrecking the tenements in a “Southern” country (it’s always safe to blame nature for human catastrophe). The broadcasts from global hotspots “out there” sever the crisis’s connections to bourgeois life “back here”. They render us innocent of the flare up and benevolent in our effort to cool it down. These crises need help. They need investment, emissions standards, development, civil society, democracy, small business, etc. They do not need a grand modernist visionary (who might transmutate into a Stalin or Hitler) but rather a technocrat with specialized knowledge tailored to solving particular policy problems.

Their airport consumer experience offers a social status, which the policymaker likely does not enjoy in real life. The luxury stores are awash in duty-free goods so desirable (and now affordable) for their beauty, elegance, charm, and the inner confidence they promise: perfumes, exquisite chocolates, imported cigars, and liquors and liqueurs from around the world. (Beer is less available. Too accessible. Too dangerous.)  Chocolates are wrapped in gold foil and ribbons of soft warm colors. Perfume advertisements display women saturated not just in wealth and style, but also in what everybody else lacks: lots of free time. Airport bookstores offer a range of pop-psychology self-help books, apropos of these neoliberal times when we must believe that our failures unequivocally result from our personal weaknesses. To cope with mediocrity, they (and we) can live vicariously through the biographies of political and business leaders and the histories of great events. A full range of men’s magazines are offered from Cigar Aficionado (offering the distinction the petit bourgeoisie so desire) to automotive and sports magazines (assuring male readers that they are still regular guys in the republic). Travel magazines give the reader escape routes into luxury villas in the Maldives, Aruba, Tahiti, etc. Its articles tell the reader everything one must know about port, whiskey, shellfish, and other consumer knowledge that the traveler must command to convince that s/he belongs in the right social class. In an airport, the world is available to be enjoyed, consumed, experienced, and, most of all, known.

Images of golf are ubiquitous in the air travel experience. Golf provides a vehicle into the recreational world of an upper class that has reached downward to capture the workhorses of the new global political-economy: policymakers. To update the sport, golf also has been cleansed of overt signs of racial exclusion as it is no longer quarantined in posh whites-only country clubs. In fact, Tiger Woods is the definitive golfer, and, as the Economist argued (2001), he is not black but rather post-racial, a mix of “other” backgrounds from Thai to Chinese to Native American. He is an interesting and unique hybrid in an age when we are all obliged to be interesting and unique. Furthermore, golf, unlike football, is not a game of direct head to head competition. Contestants do not try to beat each other (literally and figuratively) by physically outdoing the opponent, but rather simply outperform each other and gracefully step aside while one’s golfing partner gives it a go. The violence of victory is discrete, invisible, and indirect because golfers share too much mutual interest. The game’s outcome should never upset the ordered social relations between the players: hence lunch and drink after the eighteenth hole. Football matches, in contrast, can be followed by such divisive acts as class-fueled hooligan attacks or bravado displays of nationalism. It is unwise to tempt fate in an airport, let alone an airplane, with football screenings.

Despite its anaesthetic qualities, the airline experience cannot fully conceal the broader social inequalities that sustain policymakers’ privileged positions. One clue is found in liquor. A portrait of Queen Victoria adorns one of the leading gins on the market, Bombay Sapphire, harking the consumer back to the glorious days of colonialism. Singapore Airlines and Thai Airlines take advantage of the same discourse showing white male travelers relaxed and laid back in business class seats with passive and alluring “Oriental” flight attendants responding to their immediate needs. However, the airport corridors provide the most immediate and ugliest suggestion of an enduring post-colonial system of inequality: the shoe shine stall. Here, the hurried traveler, whose success and self-confidence are conveyed through exquisite footwear, sits on a throne two levels above the rest. The passers-by reach only up to his knees (I’ve never seen a woman on this throne) while the (immigrant?) shoe shiner hovers busily around his feet caressing and buffing his symbol of status and power. To be fair, the throne’s occupant often squirms with guilt in such a spectacle of class and racial inequality. The shoe-shiner is therefore wise to show himself at ease. This makes it easier for the customer to (pretend to) believe that the transaction is a friendly one between equals.

Overall, however, the policymaker’s travel experience anaesthetizes all of this pain through a forest of symbols of comfort, luxury, and happiness. It is worth demystifying this air of innocence and pleasure so that policymakers can act upon what they know full well: that the system in which they work also produces the disparities, calamities, and catastrophes, which they are paid to try to fix.

The Policymaker as Specific Intellectual: A Template for Political Change

Surely policymakers do not internalize this role as it is presented to them. Moreover, the discrepancies between the role and the actual individual are strategically valuable for implementing political change. Policymakers sit in the critical intersections of power circuits insofar as power relations are mediated through policy processes. They are positioned to push for change, to suggest reform, and to rework conventional policy assumptions in more egalitarian ways. The political task is to convert the policymaker into what Foucault (1980: 126-133) has called the “specific intellectual”. This character is not the grand thinker of the nineteenth-century who brings forth the masterplan for a new world order. Unlike this “universal intellectual” who represents the old stereotypical academic, philosopher, or reclusive writer, the specific intellectual commands specialized knowledge of social regulation, which qualify him/her to work in pivotal power positions in the first place. Of course, we should not superficially present the policymaker-cum-specific intellectual as the mythical “change agent” celebrated in entrepreneurial rhetoric. But, today’s academic, philosopher, writer, etc. must engage these individuals in dialogue in order to create opportunities for them to recognize, articulate, and act upon the discrepancies between the anaesthetized images encasing their professional lives and the real world of oppression, violence, starvation, and structural conflict. The social critic must not be so righteous to assume that such a technocrat lacks any such consciousness, while the technocrat must not be so unimaginative to believe that the critic has no “practical advice.”

References

Economist. (2001). “Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright”. June 14th.

Financial Times. (2006). “Half the World’s Assets Held by 2% of Population”. P.8. December 6th.

Foucault M.. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Colin Gordon, ed. New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault M.. (1988).  Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984. Kritzman, Lawrence, ed. London: Routledge.

Shore C., and Wright S.. (1997) “Policy: A New Field of Anthropology”. In Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power. Pp. 3-39. London and New York: Routledge.

Wedel J., Shore C., Feldman G., and Lathrop S.. (2005). “Toward an Anthropology of Policy.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences (600)1: 30-51.