Albert Camus
Here’s a really good broadcast by Clive James on how liberal democracy works the transcript is here (and, while I don’t know how long this will be available under the BBC’s ‘Listen Again’ terms of use, if you subscribe to the podcast, you should be able to get all of the series).
It’s worth listening to all the way through, and particularly to consider Karl Popper’s notion of “changing the government at the peoples’ whim” - he says it like it’s a good thing, and when you think about it, it is less of a bad thing than all of the other options on offer.
James also quotes Albert Camus on Democracy:
“…the form of society devised and maintained by those who know that they don’t know everything.”
He goes on:
“Camus was right: the whole democratic system depends on the realisation that we don’t know everything. The people know enough to know when the government needs to be changed in order to preserve democracy, but a fully developed democracy contains within it all kinds of areas where specialised knowledge really counts and popular opinion – especially when it is whipped up by the press – is largely irrelevant.
We don’t have popular elections to a medical board. We ought to have government oversight of a medical board through the people’s representatives, but a popular election in every field would be government by plebiscite and would produce more injustice than it avoided. Within a properly constituted democracy there is room for all kinds of alternatives as long as they are enlightened.
Theatre for example, is always an enlightened despotism. And a poetry professorship falls within that realm of alternatives. The professor shouldn’t be elected by the whole of the people or even, as in Oxford, by a bunch of graduates. The professor should be appointed by a panel of properly qualified literary figures who are fully aware that good poets are often frail people, and people who are not frail are seldom good poets.
It’s an essential part of democracy that it can shape and employ the idea of authority, so that authority can stave off the effects of populism run rampant. As for authority running rampant, well, in a democracy it can’t or at any rate shouldn’t: a consideration which makes democracy superior to any system where power is concentrated perpetually in a few – or sometimes only two – hands.”
Via Freemania
