The weight of (recent) history, cont.

The BBC has nailed down something I've vaguely wondered since reading in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 that the dead outnumbered the living 30-to-1.  Now, the ratio is more like 12-to-1!  Some 83.2 billion have lived since the beginning of the species, and about 7 billion of them (us) are alive now.

Next question: how many people have lived/died in the last 100 years? 10 billion, according to the BBC. 200? 500?  A disproportionate slice of human history, viewed in terms of hours lived by human beings, has happened quite recently. And as I've suggested before, it's quite right that kids read less of the classics and spend more of their educational time soaking up what's been written and discovered in recent times than they would have done 50 or 100 years ago -- since the percentage of literate people and those who have added to the permanent store of human knowledge or preserved human expression in the past 150 or 100 or 50  years must be many times that of the percentage of people who have lived within those time frames.

Sofie's Choice, Tehran edition

We generally think of free speech as a guarantee of self-expression and the flow of information -- the right of all to input and output. Iran's theocratic geniuses have found a way to split this atom. Tehran Bureau reports:

Government officials are asking residents in north and northwest Tehran to choose: either keep their much prized — but illegal — satellite dishes, or continue chanting, “Allah o Akbar!” or “God is Great,” the revolutionary slogan piercing the capital every night, but not both...

In north and northwest Tehran some residents have been ordered to choose between keeping their satellite dishes or taking part in the “Allah o Akbar” chant that takes place every night from city rooftops and windows.

The message is simple: “We’ll let you watch your CNN, your BBC, and your favorite entertainment shows, as long as you do not join the 10 p.m. chorus!”

Sofie's choice: you can learn the truth, and stay silent, or you can speak the truth, and stay ignorant. You can pray or play, but not both. I am reminded, somehow, of Mousavi's rather fantastic vision of the founding of Khomeini's earthly paradise:

If the large volume of cheating and vote rigging, which has set fire to the hays of people’s anger, is expressed as the evidence of fairness, the republican nature of the state will be killed and in practice, the ideology that Islam and Republicanism are incompatible will be proven. This outcome will make two groups happy: One, those who since the beginning of revolution stood against Imam and called the Islamic state a dictatorship of the elite who want to take people to heaven by force; and the other, those who in defending the human rights, consider religion and Islam against republicanism. Imam’s fantastic art was to neutralize these dichotomies. I had come to focus on Imam’s approach to neutralize the burgeoning magic of these.

Mousavi claims for "Imam's fantastic art" a balance that ever existed and never will. You can't rule as God's mouthpiece and respect the people's right to information and dissent. That is a miracle beyond God's power to deliver.

Islam and republicanism may be compatible. Theocracy and republicanism, never.

The MSM 'defeats' Mousavi

One quick-drying bit of reporter-speak keeps getting my goat as the drama in Iran unfolds:

BBC 6/20: Defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi repeated calls for the election to be annulled on the grounds it was rigged.

Reuters 6/20: Defeated presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi said on Saturday he was "ready for martyrdom"

Xinhua 6/20 : Iran's former Prime Minister, defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi renewed his call on Saturday for cancellation of last week's disputed presidential election.

AHN 6/20: The planned rally was confirmed by the wife of defeated candidate Mousavi, Zahra Rahnavard, through her page on Facebook

Wash Post 6/18: Many people around the world have replaced their online photos with the words "Where Is My Vote?" against a green backdrop, the color of defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi's campaign.

Defeated how? By whom? In what sense? Why grant the electoral fraud that validation? Why linguistically codify a result that's still a wee bit contested?

In his "Think Again" blog, Stanley Fish relayed some of his responses to 10 questions posed by a BBC interviewer for a series titled "Why Democracy"? As usual, Professor Fish was interesting and inconsistent.

Beginning with his definition of democracy, Fish says:

I tend to resist romantic definitions that feature phrases like “noble ideal” and opt instead for something more analytic: democracy is a form of government that is not attached to any pre-given political or ideological ends, but allows ends to be chosen by the majority vote of free citizens.

Shortly afterward, riffing on democracy's potential for undermining itself, Fish notes:

It is always possible that those who gain control of the legislative process will pass laws that erode or even repeal the rights – of property, free expression and free movement – that distinguish democracies from theocracies and monarchies.

And with regard to terrorism:

The danger is not so much that terrorists will defeat democracies by force as it is that, in resisting terrorists, democracies will forgo the procedural safeguards (against warrantless detention, censorship and secret surveillance) that make a democracy what it is.

Laudable warnings -- but how do they square with Fish's limited definition of democracy? Technically, democracy is defined by the vote. But it cannot survive long without a legal and constitutional architecture that distributes rather than concentrates power. Otherwise, the vote will be undermined, as in Russia today.

Fish's limited definition of democracy precludes his engaging the deepest questions regarding democracy’s potential for continuing to improve the human condition. For example, he writes off the question, "can democracy solve climate change?" as a "category mistake":

Solving the problems of climate change, if it can be done, will be a matter of advances in technology and alterations in personal and corporate behavior in response to state directives and regulations. No political system is either naturally suited to the task or barred by definition from performing it. Politics and technology are independent variables.

If Fish thinks that "alterations in personal and corporate behavior in response to state directives and regulations" happen in a vacuum, he should take a look at environmental regulation in China today -- where the central government mandates, and the nation's factories ignore with the collusion of local governments. Or look at the sewage pits that the Soviet Union and eastern Europe were revealed to be after communism collapsed.

Far from being 'independent variables," politics and technology are interdependent. That's not to say that authoritarian and even totalitarian societies make zero technological progress. But over time, they've been outperformed by freer societies -- by democracies in the period that democracy has existed. Fish may dislike Frances Fukuyama's 'teleological' argument (In The End of History and the Last Man) that human society as a whole is moving inexorably toward democracy. But Fukuyama's argument is evolutionary -- that sheer competitive pressure in the economic sphere drives countries toward democracy, because only democracy creates the conditions of free inquiry and a rule of law protecting economic rewards for those who innovate in the practical sphere. Authoritarian societies can ride piggyback in today's global economy and make economic progress for a while. But over time, they will either regress or democratize.

The question of whether democracy can cope with climate change, far from being a category mistake, cuts to the heart of democracy's (and humanity's) ability to adapt and thrive. Because democracy is founded on persuasion and a contest of wills, there's something counterintuitive about its often-proven ability to effectively cope with problems that demand a mobilization of will and resources. When fascism was on the rise, and again in the cold war, many 'tough-minded' observers felt that democracy could not compete effectively with societies marching under a totalitarian banner. They were wrong.

My own feeling is that democracy alone can cope with the toughest challenges facing humanity -- but only if democracies do not destroy their own workings in the ways outlined by Professor Fish, e.g. -- by voting away the people's empowerment through the erosion of civil liberties -- and also by allowing the destruction of checks and balances on the distribution of power.