Sundry reflections provoked by reading Barbara Kingsolver’s  essays entitled “Small Wonder”, and elsewhere.

As an aside, I like to wandering in dictionaries and often get lost there.  In this matter of privilege I thought to question my understanding of the word and so looked in the Chambers Dictionary.  Privilege comes from Latin roots meaning "private" and "a law".  Aside from it is common meaning I take it to mean something that has been put in place, according to and for reasons relating to, individual character and made a “right” under law, implying a personal requirement of obligation or responsibility. 

Kingsolver’s reflection that half of US voters opposed Al Gore but that almost half voted for him brought me to reflect on what I see as a significant difference between US and Australian democracy.  And now I'm coming to my point.  I see democracy as privilege: that is, a right only because it has been earned and the responsibility it implies will continue to be met. In Australia we have compulsory voting: in the usual way people, and dare I say it, Americans in particular, think of democracy that is a paradox.

In fact only about 50% of Americans voted in the 2000 presidential election.  About 25% for Bush and just less than that for Gore. 50% did not vote!  Is that an exercising of their democratic right or failing in their democratic responsibility? It irks me that a man elected by 25% of the population claims the democratic right to impose democracy on other people; and it irks me just as much that our Prime Minister, voted for by around 42 percent of the population acts as though he has an absolute mandate. Personally I am glad that Australia has compulsory voting, notwithstanding the paradox.  Many Australians, I know, would prefer the US system. They complain about having to vote once every three years and politicians encourage them to feel that way.  The intricacies of our preferential voting system, however, allow us a Prime Minister whose party won 42 percent of the vote but was at least indirectly preferred by more than 50% of the voters. 

Historically democracy has always been a privilege. We trace its roots to ancient Greece and usually ignore the fact that Greek democracy could not exist without a slave class. The “right” to vote has always been a privilege accorded within certain prescribed requirements. Always those who already have the “right” hold the power to decide who, if anyone, might also be granted the privilege. These it seems are the inherent paradoxes of democracy as a “right”. Australian and American democracies are no less riddled with contradictions. How long did it take women to get the “right” to vote? In Australia it was the early twentieth century and our indigenous people were only granted that right in 1967. No doubt most indigenous people have suffered similar indignities. Not to mention the indignities of women in Switzerland some of whom were granted the “right” to vote as late as 1971.

What am I getting at?  I see democracy as privilege earned by my willingness to participate in the political system which, however imperfect, guarantees some measure of social cohesion, mutual obligation and acceptance of a sense of responsibility. Compulsory voting whilst it contradicts the notion of willing participation holds people in a relationship to the privilege, also known as a "right", that their forebears earned for them, sometimes at the cost of their own lives.

Freedom is another one of those words or ideas cherished by Americans and Australians alike. And it is also interesting etymologically. Its origins are obscure but the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology suggests two possible and somewhat contradictory connections.  One is to old German and Celtic words which suggest being “dear” or related to a head of house as opposed to slaves who are in bondage. A Latin connection on the other hand relates to children who are presumably free of responsibility. Neither of which seem to bear close connection to the way freedom is often spoken of rhetorically by our leaders.

It seems that democracy and freedom are strangely paradoxical bed-mates. Freedom from constraint and the bindings which create social cohesion seems only to lead to chaos. Freedom which excludes some, as in the Germanic/Celtic notion of dearness to a head of house, from the rights or privileges accorded to others can hardly be considered democratic. And yet Australian and American democracies have arisen on the usual pattern of excluding under classes such as slaves, women, indigenous people, the economically poor, and so on. That we have found ways to give the appearance that these anomalies have been addressed, whilst finding more subtle ways to mark and reshuffle the card deck, may not be obvious to many but must be evident to the scrutiny of one who is willing to see it. That usually only those who are wealthy enough can be elected and that they then control the electoral process and the economic focus of society, speaks for itself.

Bruce Cockburn in his song “Call it Democracy” speaks of politicians;

“Passing themselves off as leaders,

Kiss the ladies and shake hands with the fellows,

And its open for business

Like a cheap bordello.”

It’s a cynical view but its hard not to agree with Kingsolver’s daughter that its all a $uck-up based on what we can $ell you.

That the American electoral system is fundamentally bound to economic imperatives that preclude a truly democratic outcome is self-evident. It may be as difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle but a poor man can forget about being president of the USA unless he has some very rich friends. Australia is different only in degree. Here, because we do not have the overlay of a presidential executive government, the party must be rich but the individual can be relatively not so. Nonetheless in either system a person/party that does not pander to the dominant economic world-view will not find funding sufficient to mount a credible challenge. What hope, for example, does Ralph Nader really have? All he gets is blamed for leeching the Democratic vote. And much the same smear is levelled at Australian Greens. A poor return for having the courage to offer a real alternative not just a variation on the theme.

Two party politics which structurally excludes representation of minorities is not democratic. Both Australia and the USA suffer from it; it’s a sort of political “old boys club” in which opposition and government are an institutionalised game in which only the two teams have legitimacy. The European and New Zealand proportional systems, which Australia has a touch of in its senate and some state upper houses, are much better. They structurally enable and sometimes even include minorities and lead to a modification of the “majority rules” mentality which is just a civilised version of “mob rule”.

Is true democracy the majority rules or a sort of consensus in which all parties must find a way to accommodate difference? I lean to the latter view. In any case the majority that rules America, if voting is any guide, wants no part of government, it does not vote. Less than 50 percent of eligible voters have voted in all US presidential elections (when all added together) since World War II.

Australia has a system that allows a second preference so that even a party that has not won 50% of the vote can claim majority by dint of being the second preference of voters who chose some-one else as their first. Thus the appearance of plurality disguises a duopoly. I once had an argument with a pollster who rang just prior to an election and asked which candidate I preferred for Prime Minister, A. or B. I said that I preferred C, a minor party leader. The pollster said I could not choose C, it had to be A or B. I retorted that I did not prefer either A or B and asked why the question did no include C or even D. I was told this was unrealistic because neither C nor D had any chance of becoming Prime Minister. So much for freedom of choice and democracy, Maybe I just preferred to choose who I would like even if it was not “realistically” likely to happen, but the pollster could not get his head around that.

That our media which play so large a role in the “democratic process” are also fundamentally tied to economic imperatives is also a structural impediment to democracy.  I recall an interview in which two journalists, an American and Egyptian, who had swapped places and countries for a month were asked to reflect on the experience. The Egyptian woman when asked about the freedom of being in US commercial TV as opposed to government run Egyptian TV gave a surprising response. She said she thought she was freer in Egypt because the government was genuinely concerned by what journalists said but that in the USA she knew nothing would reach the air-waves that the sponsors would not find acceptable.

I am aware that some Americans listen to National Public Radio, but know that many other Americans do not make that choice to listen and be informed about All Things Considered – the name of a wonderful NPR current affairs program. The agonising question for me is always why so many people appear to passively accept this situation. On the one hand I can (arrogantly?) consider them ignorant. Or, on the other cynically see them as at best passively accepting what they deep down don’t like, or, at worst passively agreeing to what I see as appalling? Kingsolver remarks that many people think she’s crazy to go so far as she does abou what they see as “matters of principle”. Things that I (and maybe she) see as matters of life and death; not just personally but collectively.

The world seems to be full of good people, few are overtly prejudiced, aggressive or even overly greedy, so why is it that the general trend is towards increasing violence, war, environmental degradation, poverty and excessive wealth?  I would say it’s precisely because the sorts of good people whom we all know, think we are crazy for trying to turn our good intentions into good behaviour, or standing on “matters of principle”. There is of course that old saying, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. I think we are a long way down that road and it’s paved with all the unexpressed goodness of people who may never do anything very bad but who likewise let their goodness remain a potential. Psychologically speaking I suspect that that is precisely the problem. So long as people do not see that good intentions not acted on create a dangerous psychological vacuum, and something always rushes in to fill a vacuum, we will have this situation getting worse and worse. When we do not act upon our principles, or good intentions, we are allowing them to remain as ideas never expressed as actual behaviour. In this way we hope to avoid the possible conflicts or criticism which acting on our beliefs sometimes brings, or in extreme situations, risks to not only our own lives, but to those we love. Many people like to believe they would put their lives on the line to save those they love from danger but they won’t put their image on the line to create a better world for their children or grandchildren.

Marie Louise von Franz, a student of C G Jung’s who died in the late 1990s put it this way.

"The personal shadow is the personal shortcomings of things which every human being could be conscious of… for instance, such things as greed for money or jealousy, inferiorities which everybody has but prefers not to know about.  If one is jealous or if one is suddenly possessed by wanting money or so on, one could know about that if one is honest with oneself.  But the collective shadow… has always been personified and felt as something which is not to do directly, with the human being.  I mean, if somebody is possessed by the devil he is much worse…he is not human…when Germany went to the devil in Nazism, people fell into it through their

personal shadow.  For instance, they didn't want to lose their job because they were clinging to money.  That was their personal shadow. But then they joined in the Nazi movement for that reason and did much worse things than they would have done normally, under normal social conditions…the collective shadow comes up in those terrible mass psychoses."

 I don’t think we are in the grip of a mass psychosis of quite the proportions that occurred in Nazi Germany but we have had consistent outbreaks of such conditions throughout the twentieth century. In America and Australia I think we suffer more from a kind of mass repressive-neurotic condition. Barbara Kingsolver and Clarissa Pinkola Estes (one of my favourite American Jungians and author of “Women Who Run with the Wovles”) both work with migrant workers and refugees and issue that’s big in Australia too. The issue of migration has always touched a sore point in Australia and has been very much to the fore post 11 September 2001. Fear of the “aliens” who might lessen the size of the pie we are sharing around, none too fairly anyway, is a potent political weapon. And especially so when combined with fear of the terrorist that might lurk amongst them. Never mind that the terrorists more likely fly in business class with all the right (if forged in some cases) papers. We see ourselves as fair minded and democratic and tolerant and are blind to our uncharitable attitude to those who come to us in fear and desperation.  Easier to go invade their country and impose our vision of democracy on them all than to allow a few, who have made desperate efforts, to come here and share what we already have. Maybe this more subtle condition that we suffer from is more dangerous because it’s all the harder to see. It’s like a lurking cancer as opposed to the raging fever of mass psychosis that possessed Nazi Germany.

When the fever breaks out from its lingering low grade states which take the form of militias and gun rights lobbies and fanatical sects in the USA, and our less overt equivalents, it gets scary because we can see that something is up. But what do we do? Address the root of the problem or suppress the symptom? Always the latter. Who gets below the surface of the Oklahoma bombing, or Waco, or of our One Nation movement and asks where this fever is really coming from? Oh, individuals of course always ask these questions, but our governments and media rarely give them any deeper attention. As Kingsolver remarked in her essay about the one eyed monster it’s only the horror of it that creates an adrenalin rush and keeps viewers hooked; addicted to the rush and the accompanying outrage. We suffer from a national adrenalin/fear addiction. What actually happens is that the symptoms of the fever are identified, mitigated and then re-validated and reincorporated into mainstream thinking. So the sick body politic is forced into pseudo recovery and the Branch Davidians, or the militias and the National Riflemen’s Association or our Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party fall back into the shadows and the two party system adjusts its rhetoric to recapture once dissatisfied voters.

It occurred to me recently that there is a bodily parallel to all this too.  A sick society will be sick at all levels including the bodies of its citizens. I am amazed at how much obesity and high blood pressure have become normalised in our cultures. These things that have been in the past indications of ignorance or neglect of one’s wellbeing are now seen as problems on the one hand but as somehow acceptable conditions that society must adapt to. The attitude that bigger seats for obese people and that high blood pressure is just part of ageing and  inevitable is how we mitigate and revalidate the sick body of the individual and make it socially acceptable. How far will we go?

In the world around us we turn a blind eye to or even support state sanctioned terror on our doorsteps in order to keep a peaceful neighbourhood as Australia did for 25 years in East Timor or as almost everyone seems to have done over Tibet. Then we want to be seen as heroes when we finally decide that too much is enough and we are ready to act, usually in our own economic interest for which some humanitarian disguise has been conjured up. We need the oil (Iraq and the USA) or natural gas (East Timor and Australia). Its like not getting involved when the man next door beats his wife but calling the police when it disturbs your kid’s birthday party, then feeling all righteous and like a good citizen when the woman finds safety in a women’s refuge.

We are all so afraid of AIDS and SARS and chicken flu, or of terrorism and WMDs that we fail to see that the worst enemy is right there in our own hearts and souls destroying our humanity in the small every day ways that we fail to be true to ourselves because we fear to be different, un-American or un-Australian in some way.  I see it all around me and struggle constantly to “be true”:  it’s a hard road to hoe, especially in the post-modern world where to suggest that there are essential values that would serve us better than the sort of post modern moral and ethical relativism which surrounds us is so un-cool.

Copyright Rodney Ravenswood 2006

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