Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  Thus, as democracy has progressed, it has begun to organize greater am­ounts of money in the public sphere and otherwise regulating ex­changes on the market. Money, of course, isn’t a concrete “thing” “the state” can “take” and then “spend”. That would just be a childish way of seeing things. No, money is a measure of people’s coordinated efforts to extract resources from the environment as well as their degree of coord­ination of agency with one another.

  The point, then, is that democratic governance has come to dom­inate both greater material or natural resources, and it has begun to coordinate more human actions: longer stretches of time of people’s lives (in terms of time, effort and attention), in more minute details, playing parts in more abstract patterns of information, for more abstract shared goals. This means many more decisions must be made, much greater amounts of infor­mation organized. Hence, there is a move towards bureaucratization and digitiz­ation—anything that can cost-eff­ect­­­ively monitor and control larger quant­ities of more varied (and specialized) human agen­cy.

  A third long-term trend is that democracy has evolved more checks and balances against arbitrary uses of power; hence there has been an increased account­ability of decision-making .

  This one is difficult to spot in recent decades, as democratic develop­ment has stagnated and come to a halt. But if we look over the centuries of modern history, the pattern is obvious. There are more laws restricting the use of power, the power of office is decoupled from the office-holder—legally, if not socially—and there are greater demands for transparency and motivation of decisions made. Moreover, there are more institutions—state-run as well as in the media and civil sphere—which actively seek to uncover failures of governments, elected officials, the bureaucracy, the courts and the legal system at large. There is even an increasing number of critical soc­ial scientists who spend years laying bare problems in just one sub-section of governance, be it concentration of power in informal net­works of elites, shady conflicts of interest, or structural malfunctions that elude cas­ual obser­vers.

  These many forms of checks and balances increase the inter-subjective verification of legitimacy, or indeed, the inter-subjective falsification of claims to power. This does not mean that democracy functions by the same premises as does modern science, which also ideally works by inter-sub­jective verification/falsification—far from—but it suggests a vague, ten­tative approximation of the scientific ideals.

  This, in turn, entails that the self-organization of society gradually beg­ins to rest upon a deeper and more intricate web of verifications and fals­ifications. And even these verifications and falsifications are themselves subjected to increased scrutiny as more voices join the fray.

  We may sometimes nostalgically look back at the times of Athenian democracy, of English coffee houses (17th and 18th centuries), of French salons (18th and 19th centuries), of worker socialist collectives (19th and early 20th centuries), or even the youthful energy of 1968. “Ah, those were the days”, we say, “when people cared , when everyone engaged in the pol­itical, in the public, in the civil sphere. Back then, folks were citizens, not merely idle con­sumers”. But we often forget that these expressions of poli­t­ical en­fran­ch­ise­ment only reached small cliques of the overall population: Athen­ian demo­cracy exclu­d­ed all women, slaves and non-Athenians; English coffee hous­es cate­red to urban well-to-do citizens; French salons were meeting places for the upper bourgeoisie and the radical­ized parts of the nobility; more compre­hensive worker colle­c­tives showed up during key moments and events rather than being a permanent state of affairs; and even in 1968 (with the hopeful, radical students) we must remem­ber that university and coll­ege admissions were consider­ably small­er than to­day. It is true that there have been beautiful and inspiring nex­uses in his­torical space-time, and it is true that such beauties have waxed and waned—but this should not blind us to the obvious macro-historical pro­cess: that checks and balan­ces have increased over time as democracy has grown into its current var­iety of forms.

  This leads us to a fourth long-term directionality; namely that demo­cra­tic participation has thickened and deepened . Even if the younger gene­ration of today appears to have a lower level of interest in public life (at least conventional politics), and even if many democratic institutions and practices have become sub­jected to diff­er­ent degrees of market logic (where voters are viewed as “customers” or “cli­ents”), largely due to the impact of the so scorned cul­tural and political currents of “neoliberalism” and “new public manage­ment” in recent dec­ades—it still remains true that today’s citizens have more venues of participation than in the past.

  Not only do larger groups of people have greater access to media and more time and resources to inform themselves. People also have more concrete channels of participation: in advisory boards and citizens’ coun­cils, feed­back channels for public institutions such as schools and hos­pitals, direct links by email to elected officials and a higher number of represent­atives. And then there’s a dramatic increase in the number of interest groups and civil society agents who defend the interests of many groups—from the ethnic minorities to the sports’ clubs to the animal rights activ­ists to the people suffering from sclerosis and, increasingly, metamodern groups (yay!) who seek to enhance the quality of public dialogue, and so on.

  Seen as a totality—and if we put the partly negative trend of neoliberal watering-down of public enfran­chisement of recent decades into a greater historical context—there can be little doubt that public enfranchisement has increased dramatically. This does not have to mean that more citizens spend their time doing things public and political; it simply means that there are many venues and that many and diverse interests crop up and organize.

  Lastly, a fifth long-term trend has to do with the growth of democratic culture and values . Yes, Sweden was indeed a democracy even in the 1920s and the 1950s if we consider its institutions. But in the 1920s, a hus­band could still legally rape his wife, it was considered inappropriate to speak too openly against religion, people talked to one another different­ly depending on social status and title, and so forth. Up until the early 1960s, you could beat children, not only at home but also in schools. In short, culture was considerably more authoritarian, less toler­ant, less multi-per­spectival, less egalitarian and overall less dem­o­cratic than today. If you go back to the late 1800s the issue becomes even clearer, with a ma­jority of the constituency being against not only women’s suffrage, but also against racial equality, equality of different social classes (or “estates”) and free speech.

  Earlier in this book we discussed that values evolve in recognizable patterns as societies develop, and in Book One I mentioned the re­search of the huge World Values Survey (WVS) which indicates that the Nordic countries have the “most progressive” values in the world. As Chris­tian Welzel, the boss of WVS, notes, it is clear these values play well together with the development and maintenance of democratic inst­itu­tions. When “pro­gressive” values decrease—for reasons of eco­n­omic tur­moil or other­wise—it often leads to direct attacks on demo­cratic institu­tions, as has recently been the case in Turkey, Russia and the Philippines.

  What I am getting at here is that democracy in itself is not only a mat­ter of institutional frameworks, but also of cultural develop­ment where the values, sentiments and behaviors of people can be more or less in line with democratic ideals and their collective democratic func­tion­ality.

  The recent rise of co-development ideals in the most progressive coun­tries bears witness to this tendency. Co-develop­ment is the process of improving the quality of de­bate, dialogue and delib­eration throughout all of society and across the political spectrum. It works from the supposition that we can’t possibly be right about “everything” and hen­ce always need to learn from one another, friend or foe; if nothing else just to see where they’re coming from. This, of course, is a deep
er demo­cratic ideal and an early sign of a further deep­ening of democracy.

  All changes of institutional and constitutional frameworks must ultim­ately rest upon the values and cultural realities of real people. It is within this cultural realm that challenges to the existing equilibrium stage of gov­ern­ance (“liberal democracy”) can grow.

  Thus, I have suggested five dimensions of what a deeper democracy may entail:

  increased dispersion of leadership;

  increased volume, complexity and efficiency of information processing;

  increased accountability and balancing of powers, putting greater demands upon the verifiability of decision-making;

  a deepening and thickening of de jure and de facto participation and popular support in pro­cesses of decision-making and opinion formation; and

  the growth of democratic, egalitarian and multi-perspectival culture and values.

  If you like, you can call these five dimensions a way of increasing the collective intelligence of a given society; a means to “deepen” democratic participation.

  In this regard, a deeper democracy is one that lets solutions of higher orders of complexity emerge and gain legi­timacy, thereby allowing for more com­plex forms of society to exist and thrive .

  If more real problems are solved, if public support of and consent to decisions are better, if the decision processes run more smoothly, if there are fewer unwanted and unexpected consequences of decisions made—and so on—then we can say that democracy has been developed, that it has been deepened.

  These five dimensions give us a kind of “true north” of democratic development, a map that can guide us towards a more democratic demo­cracy. Today’s democratic institut­ions are better than their historical pre­decessors not because they in-and-of-themselves are a God-given “corr­ect” form of governance, but simply because they fulfill these five criteria more adequately as compared to earlier forms of gover­nance.

  False Defenders of Democracy

  When we “defend democracy”, this can mean two very different things: We can either defend the progression and development of these democra­tic ideals and their manifestation in society (which is good)—or we may be defending the current, increasingly outdated institutional form of mod­ern “liberal demo­cracy” from the metamodern currents of renewal and refine­ment. In the latter case, we may think of ourselves as heroic defend­ers of democracy, raging against the dying of the light, but we are in fact waging a war against the core values of democratic develop­ment bec­ause we mistake the current forms of govern­ance for a sacred entity—for instance, by being overly defensive about “the constitution”. The latter is as enlightened as holding sharia laws to be the only true and God-given way of organizing society. It makes us medieval.

  Because democracy in its current form is seldom regarded with a sober and secular gaze, and often as a kind of sacred value-in-itself, the majority of the population may in effect be on the anti-democratic side of the develop­mental tide—much like when most folks in the past were against women’s suffrage and gay rights. Habits, outdated norms and investments in the status quo all work to uphold social inertia, an immunity to change. In this case, we end up fighting off necessary developments of govern­ance and thus of our collect­ive intelligence. The majority posi­tion, then, is that of the false defen­ders of demo­cracy .

  The majority is wrong. Always were. Then again, what else should we expect? The point with democracy isn’t that the majority is always right. The point is that there is a process of free and sufficiently systematized truth-seek­ing and dialogue going on for small groups to be able to pro­ve the rest of us wrong, again and again, so that values, opinions and laws can evolve and adapt. That’s how demo­cracy works—you can’t “vote” about the truth; the idea is that the truth offers a powerful attractor point so that, in the long run, more truth than falsehood will win out, and that this, on average, will have better con­seq­uen­ces.

  The true north of democratic development can and will lead us bey­ond the institutional forms of modern society. We are, of course, still struggling with the taboo of asking such questions, about what might lie beyond liberal democracy (with a capitalist market), because the two major alter­natives of the 20th cen­tu­ry—communism and fascism—turned out to be such terrible mis­takes.

  However, this compass could actually help us steer clear of new treats of total­itar­ianism that may show up in new, seductive, postindustrial, digital-age guises. With a good compass, and with a critical sensitivity towards the directionality of historical development (seeing the stages of development and how these constitute historical attractor points), we may be nearing a point in history in which we are compelled not to take any form of gover­n­ance for grant­ed—and in which we must begin to dream dangerous dreams of future forms of governance.

  The Four Democratic Forms

  Fundamentally, then, governance is just another word for the self-organ­ization of society (shaping the development of people’s psychologies, who in turn consciously participate in the organization of society). To develop democracy as we know it is a way to tackle this issue of self-orga­nization.

  In this view, then, “liberal democracy” with its parliamentary party pol­itics is only a train station on a longer developmental railroad that has stop­ped at several earlier forms of governance. True, we have stayed here for a hun­dred years or so, which is a long time. But we stayed at mon­archic and varieties of feudal rule for much longer. And then we mov­ed on.

  It’s normal for the train to stop for a while. The system needs to sta­bilize and the costs of getting to the next station are high. But the train does move on, sooner or later. As I said, there is no reason to suppose that democratic governance will—or should —look the same during the enti­rety of the 21st century as it did in the 20th .

  Let us, before we go ahead to describe what Democratization Politics may look like on a state level, do an inventory of a few key concepts that may serve as building blocks as we begin to construct metamodern forms of governance. First out are the four forms of democracy and their inter­relations: direct, representative, participatory, and deliberative democracy. These four forms of democracy are most famously discussed by David Held, but they have been treated by many other prominent political scien­tists as well. I’ll touch briefly upon them and try to cut to their core ess­ence.

  Direct demo­cracy is when people—“the whole popula­tion”—vote direc­tly on decisions for laws, regulations, taxes and public pro­jects. In extension, all non-autocratic governance rests upon a found­ation of direct democracy. In theory, a population, “demos”, must be able to oust any representatives, revoke or reverse any decisions made, change any laws, rewrite any const­itution. The idea of democracy is simply that the power belongs to the people, the people being whoever is governed by a mono­polized use of force. Thus, any “in-direct” democracy must, in the last inst­ance, reference a direct democratic rule, lest it loses any and all demo­cratic leg­iti­macy.

  Representative democracy is when people elect representatives who make decisions for them (within certain designated areas of common con­cern) in “free and fair” elections. In this system, people who want to get elec­ted generally organize into lists of names on the ballot with others who they tend to agree with, and these lists are the political parties. These parties often gain a life of their own. It is, goes without saying, the main system of most democracies in the world today.

  Participatory democracy is when people—i.e. the constituents them­selves—get to participate directly in decision-making, carrying out decis­ions made, fulfill advisory functions and so forth. The idea here is to in­crease the pathways into the exercise of power, in effect broadening how many people get to really partake in governance and have a real relati­onship to the common, to the political.

  Deliberative democracy is democratic decision-making based upon “deliberation”, i.e. carefully facilitated discussio
ns between the stake­hold­ers. People are invited to panels or councils and the discussion goes on in organ­ized and curated manners until some kind of common ground can be reached. The common ground is thus taken to be the decision. The idea here is that people often need to learn from one another and listen to many arguments and perspectives before they make an informed decision, and that there are often non-obvious alternatives that are not only watered-down compromises but actually synthesize different posi­tions so that a “better” position or “higher ground” is reached.

  The most prominent scholar to advocate deliberative democracy is, aga­in—and of course—Habermas, a.k.a. the patron saint of the EU and social philosopher of communication. But the topic is increasingly popu­lar academically and otherwise, and has been growing as an ideal in the early 21th century. We can see a staggering growth of “facilitation tech­niques” such as Art of Hosting, Deep Democracy and Otto Scharmer’s The­ory U as well as organizational forms which build upon deliberative ideals, such as Sociocracy, Holacracy and Frédéric La­loux’s phenomenally pop­ular “Teal Organizations”. These are really all over the place, from NGOs to tech startups to international meetings that gather philanthro­pists and acti­vists.

  Anyway, so we have these four forms of democracy, and I would like to specify the relationship between them, as this has not been quite properly done to my knowledge.

  Let’s start with the completely wrong way of thinking about this (and, regrettably, the by far most common one). The completely wrong way is to view each of the four democratic ideal types as “a system” which can “be instituted” at a certain time in history and from there on “functions” according to the logic of that same system.

  So you will hear people coming from this perspective—when reacting to the men­tioning of democratic development—saying things like: “I don’t think that is a good idea, as it would lead to mob rule” or “Today’s society is already too democratic; we shouldn’t make it more so.”