The Square, the Tower and the Cloud: the Problem of the Elite Rule
Technological progress is destroying the elites. On the other hand the elites tend to rely on a couple of wrong assumptions about the nature of man. The message of this text is that unless liberal democracies find a way to establish, nurture and empower a deserving elite and unless this elite understands human nature its crisis will go unresolved.
Wrong assumptions
Liberal democracy is based on a couple of wrong assumptions. First, that all men are equal. Since the French enlightenment any observation of society has been materialistic, objective, scientific and so has been the equality. An older idea of equality was based on the transcendent — people were equal, because they were all made in the image of God. Equality was about the equality of the souls. Now it is about the equality of the bodies and equality of the brains. Which objectively are not equal.
Second, we like to trust Rousseau that people are generally good. That they are only spoiled by society. Even less idealistic treatments of human nature such as Haidt’s moral foundations theory is exploring the foundation of morality, of goodness. The other half, study of the evil, receives much less attention.
The third assumption that has been debunked in the last decades is the people are born a blank slate. Even if someone is not born good, so it was believed, he or she can be educated and raised into a good person. Recent work in biology, evolutionally psychology, genetics, and even literature is telling a story that our instincts of good and evil are to a large extent heritable. Moreover, social evolution has selected institutions and memes that work and enable survival and progress of human communities. The totality of this is called civilization.
Civilization was about finding narratives, stories, and memes that strengthens the inherited instincts of good and suppresses the instincts for bad — for the success of its society. It was about creating institutions that would formalize the narrative. One such institution that has been quite successful in the last 200 years is liberal democracy.
It’s about creating trust
Success could have many different criteria. A successful society would put the first man on the moon. Or make people happy. Enable longer and healthier lives. But initially the success of a society was determined by how many children it could feed and raise to adulthood. Population and territory of successful tribes grew, of unsuccessful shrunk.
Society requites both collaboration and leadership. Democracy seemed to have found a way to manage both. Peaceful collaboration and absence of violence lowers transaction costs. Peace is created by trust. Democracy is not a system for selecting politicians or policies, it is a system for creating trust. Trust into those that are allowed to take away our property in taxes and our freedom using the rule of law. He who has a monopoly on violence needs to be trusted; or he will need violence to rule.
Second, democracy solves the issue of leadership. Ideally leadership should be in the hands of the smartest, most informed, of the elites. Because people are not equal in their talents. Ideally the elites would work for the benefit of all not for the benefit of themselves. If good people select the elites by voting they would select a good elite. So we hope.
All political systems so far have been trying to solve the contradiction between the two elements: free will of the people and the power that the leaders have over them. We are in trouble now because the liberal-democratic model of solving this has expired. It expired because of technological change that destroyed some safety mechanisms that democratic systems had to prevent mob rule.
Safety mechanisms
Liberal democracy rests on the assumption that people are good and equal. Therefore, if you give each person one vote, good person will vote good. In fact, people are not only good, they are also evil. And there are not only smart people, there are also stupid ones.
The architects of democratic orders in late 18th and 19th century were aware of this and created a number of safety mechanisms so that democracies would not slide into mob rule of the majority. Some of these mechanisms were designed — like electoral college, rights of the political minority, constitutional principles that cannot be overturned by a majority, independence of branches of governments, checks and balances, etc. The crisis of liberal democracy is in that rules can be changed. And rules are being changed in countries like Hungary, Poland, Turkey.
But there was another mechanism that had not been designed but emerged as a result of technological change. It is this mechanism that is more important, that was more resilient, that was keeping the ambitions to dismantle the designed safety mechanisms at bay. It is this mechanisms that is being destroyed by technological progress and is putting liberal democracies in danger. What is it?
The square and the tower
The thesis of this text is that a society cannot function without an influential element that is not egalitarian but elitist or aristocratic. For the sake of simplicity lets borrow the metaphor from Niall Ferguson and divide the society into the square and the tower. The square is where the ordinary people gather, the tower represents the power over them. The square is the communication system of a society, the tower is the political system of a society. The thesis is that you cannot have a society in which both are egalitarian.
Before democracies took over, in the middle ages, the square was egalitarian. The public communication was almost nonexistent, but equally so for all. Each person could talk to a neighbor or family member and that was about it. No media, no newspapers, not distribution of ideas through schools. The tower, on the other hand, was hierarchical, aristocratic, and elitist. One was born into power. Got better education that the rest. In an ideal case he was raised into awareness of moral and material responsibility over its subjects.
Then a communication revolution happened. Inexpensive paper and print changed the communication on the square. Another elite started to emerge in the square. It developed ideas, science, technology and challenged the elites of the tower. Through a series of revolutions in England, America, France, and elsewhere democracies have been established. In a democracy the tower is egalitarian. Each man has one vote. Everybody votes. Anyone could be elected. In principle. In principle we could have mob rule. But in addition to the constitutional safety mechanisms there was something more powerful to prevent it — the aristocratic restructuring of the square.
People in the square were still able to talk to each other, talk to their friends, neighbors and co-workers. But an elite has been formed that could talk to the masses. Selected few, educated and intelligent, would have access to write for newspapers or publish books. Very few would be given seconds and minutes on network television. Media space was far from egalitarian. People were free to vote for anyone they liked but their minds were shaped by an elite that had access to the media. The aristocracy of the square. This has been saving democracy from itself. Until recently.
Recently the square got a powerful new tool. The internet. Not only has one person one vote, one person has one Facebook account. Elites in the square — journalists and authors — are being challenged by just about anyone in the internet. This is the root cause of the crisis of liberal democracy — that nowhere in society there is a pocket of elitism that would be tilting the scale a little bit in favor of smart vs. stupid and good vs. evil. Moreover, the narratives that nurtured the traditional understanding of good have been pushed from the center of society into private sphere. In the West it is not religion any more that would nudge the society towards the good. We write our own rules of good and evil and we can vote on them. We can have mob rule on morality itself.
This is important. If the elite is too detached from the rest it forgets the traditions and institutions that social evolution selected in the past — like marriage, family, belonging to kin or nation etc. If the elite is too close there is a danger of mob rule and succumbing to the lowest instincts of the people — the very instincts that these evolutionally institutions are preventing.
Both cannot be egalitarian
Clearly, democracy as a mechanism for establishing trust does not work any more. Increasingly low election turnouts are a symptom of that. Low trust in institutions another. The intellectuals are not in a position to tell people what they should wish for, what policies and what politicians. Neither is religion. The populists would say, thank you very much, we know better. They might even believe in Roseau’s fallacy that people are good. There is good and evil in each of us and we need some help to bring the good forward.
The solution to the problem, in the context of what was said, is to find room for benevolent elitism somewhere; either in the square, or in the tower, or both.
One could desire for a less egalitarian square — for the control who and what can say on the internet. Some argue that freedom of the press was coined in times where only the intellectual elite would have access to mass media and that freedom of speech is essentially freedom for the elites. These ideas are implemented with various pretexts, such as defending copyright (with the recently adopted directive in the European Parliament); with tackling fake news by pressuring social media companies to sanitize their sites; or by curbing hate speech with the aim of silencing some voices. All these solutions are better or worse disguised forms of censorship which is unacceptable in democratic society.
The other solution is to make the tower less egalitarian. It is happening in countries like Russia, Turkey, China. Some are successful with the keeping the tower away from the will of the people. This too — not having democratic elections — goes against the core dogma of liberal democracy.
If the square and the tower are off limits due to the dogmas of liberal democracy, what else?
Enters the cloud
Well, we could add a third element to the tower and the square. A cloud. Something that is above it all, far away, distant from the people. Old societies had this — it was the religious substrate, the transcendent that had the final judgement over the affairs on the square and on the tower. It nudged both towards the good. In the West we have decided to ditch that, some say we do not need the Bible, we want to write our own rules.
Some of those rules are maintained by distant international organizations far from the will of the people such as the European Union, the United Nations, the European Court of Human rights, the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, etc. They can be an authority, a guardian of the man-made rules that could prevent mob rule. The difference between “can be” and “will be” is in the selection of the rules they would protect and in the mechanisms that would populate these institutions with an elite which is benevolent. But distance from the people also means distance from the good moral instincts, not just from the bad ones.
It would appear there is no silver bullet but to strive for the good in the square, in the tower, and in the cloud.
Wherever one can.
