Jade Goodey for prime minister?

To make my first point on democracy, consider the fate of the Godfather of philosophers and Glass Bead Gamers, Socrates.

Socrates was tried in Athens in 399 BC- Athens- the epicentre of ancient Greece and home of democracy. Socrates came to the attention of the elders of ancient Greece because he was strange- he looked strange (squat and snub-nosed), and had the irritating habit of walking barefoot through the streets of Athens, stopping complete strangers, and asking them questions: What did they consider beautiful? Could they define art? What was bravery? And so on. This method of Socratic dialectic is still at the root of much modern philosophical thought and logic. Socrates was a hugely virtuous, creative and intelligent thinker. He lived simply- eschewing wealth and position- and sought only knowledge, wisdom and truth, inspiring a whole generation of Greek thinkers, notably Plato, and an entire tradition of Western Philosophy.

Socrates once visited the famous Oracle at Delphi, renowned for her wisdom. He asked her, ‘who is the wisest man in Athens?’, and not recognising him, she replied ‘Socrates’. Now Socrates knew this was not true, as he recognised fully his own failings. He therefore concluded that true intelligence comes from recognising your own ignorance.

The elders of Athens grew suspicious of Socrates and put him on trial. Athens was the greatest city in the world, and had high social conventions- one in 3 members of the populace were slaves, women were prevented from political or public life, social roles were highly structured. Socrates made enemies through questioning some of these conventions, not maliciously, but merely enquiring whether the BELIEFS Athenians had come to accept were routed in TRUTH or CONVENTION? Three powerful citizens petitioned for him to be tried on the basis that he had disrespected the city’s Gods, and was corrupting the young.

Enter Athenian democracy: The court of the Heliasts was a large wooden building with benches for the jury and platforms for defence and prosecution. A jury of between 200 and 2,500 people would decide on verdicts by a show of hands. This was a mirror of Athenian custom as a whole- 2 or 3 times a month, all male citizens were invited to gather to vote on important questions by a show of hands. However, in an echo of our own times, there were flaws- not everyone could be bothered to turn out, so decisions were often made by a skewed subset.

Some 500 citizens were in the jury on the day of Socrates trial, however they were not experts in any sense: They included an unusual number of the old and war wounded, who were motivated by the payment for going, rather than any sense of justice. Socrates answered his charges honestly and eloquently. Why would he try and corrupt the citizens of Athens, he asked? Since a corrupt Athens would only do harm to him- an Athenian citizen. When the initial guilty vote didn’t carry the requisite margin, the court read out an attack on Socrates penned by one of his condemners- equivalent to reading out an article from the News of the World and presenting it as objective evidence. The second vote him guilty and Socrates was sentenced to death. He drank his famous cup of Hemlock, despite having the option at any time to admit his ‘crimes’ and go free. He chose truth over popularity, conviction over the easy road.

Herein lies the first flaw of democracy- allowing ‘the people’ to choose their government, or decide the guilt/innocence of their peers relies on ‘the people’ being open-minded and wise. Otherwise they will make judgments based on ignorance, or no judgements at all. Consider the huge drop in people voting at general elections, despite the fact that we are hugely fortunate to have the freedom to vote at all. ‘Voter apathy’ is often blamed on political parties- they have become so bland and superficial that voters can’t tell the difference/don’t care. But some of the blame has to lie with the electorate themselves- if they were interested enough in political issues, they would care enough to vote, but they don’t. Similarly, the tabloid press may be salacious in their editorial content, but no one forces the populace to go out and buy 3 million copies of The Sun every day. The tabloids are a reflection of their readership- of what people want to believe. As uncomfortable as this may be, we largely get the media we deserve, and we get the democracy we deserve. New Labour’s shift to bland, conviction-less psycho-babble was a calculated move to stay in power for as long as possible- for it reflected the growing state of the electorate. Unforgivable though their shallowness in enhancing this has been, we the people have nevertheless allowed our dumbed-down apathy to accommodate such a government, and thus have to take a major share of the blame.

What are the implications for society if this continues? Do we really wish to allow an increasingly flaccid western society to make key decisions such as who rules, and who is guilty or innocent? Put yourself in Socrates position- would you really want be tried by your peers? The table opposite shows the top UK search terms on Google in the first quarter of this year- a sad indictment of what is really important to people’s every day lives. When the News Of the World ran their famous campaign outing paedophiles, several people were wrongly attacked due to mistaken identity, and a paediatrician(!) was beaten up on the South coast. Such incidents of mob justice show the danger of granting un-fettered democracy to a shallow and ignorant populace- a triumph of popularity over truth, echoing Socrates time.

Jade Goodey for prime minister? Shilpa Shetty for Chancellor? Pass me the Hemlock

The Information age- are we better off?

The ‘information age’ has empowered us hugely, or has it?

James Garfield, US president in the late 19th century once said “Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.”

The information age has surrounded us with a convergence of technology and information the like of which the world has never seen. More people have access to more knowledge and information than at any time in human history- surely therefore, ‘popular education’ in the truest sense (not just people going to school, but people having free access to culture and learning) should, in parallel, be at its apogee. And if popular education is at its most advanced, then freedom and justice should be prevalent all over of the world, right?

Of course this is not the case. But why? Particularly when you consider how freely accessible knowledge is. Consider the following:

• The average newspaper contains more information in a week than a 17th century person would have consumed in a lifetime
• The majority of American children now go online before they can functionally read
• The number of people who learned English in China last year outnumbered those who speak English as a first language in the rest of the world put together
• People are creating and sharing information on an unprecedented scale. A University of Berkeley study reported that in 2002 humankind created 5 exabytes of stored data (print, film, computer data)- the equivalent of 500,000 libraries of congress EVERY YEAR. there are 50 million blogs on the internet, and the that number is doubling every 6 months; Wikipedia, the web-based encyclopedia compiled by users has over 2 million articles.
• Google, where much of the world’s knowledge is indexed and made accessible has more computer servers than there were computers in the world in 1970

But is all this knowledge actually enriching us? My fear is that this huge advance is not being accompanied by actual cultural development, for several reasons: 1) There are political and cultural groups who fear this democracy of information- the Chinese government are a prime example- all of the major internet search engines having famously had to censor their results- a search on ‘Tiananmen square’ on Google China will not pull any references to the 1989 massacre Conversely there are plenty of groups seeking to utilise the information highway to destroy freedom and justice- cults, fundamentalist groups, terrorist, etc.
2) A large population of the world does not have access to the information superhighway- poverty still disenfranchises through preventing popular education in all senses.

However one can reasonably expect humanity to continue to triumph, or improve its record on these 2 issues: Just as Soviet Russia crumbled, China will have to embrace some form of democracy- (in the 2nd decade of this century their youth working demographic will shift against them- leaving them probably not enough young people to sustain their current economic growth- huge social/cultural change will be needed); fundamentalism and extremism ultimately destroy themselves; and global poverty is at an all time low thanks, in principal, to the rise of China and India as economic powers.

However my concern is not so much with those who are being PREVENTED from accessing the information age, as the decline of those who ARE. A sage once said that the danger with the technology revolution was not that computers would become more human, but that humans would become more like computers.

And ultimately, the reality of the information age is that it’s a product of computer mechanisation on a huge scale- with relatively few humans involved- as opposed to a collective human development. Google may have made the world’s knowledge universally accessible, but that doesn’t mean that people are consuming it. Look around you, and you see a society perpetually plugged in and switched on- play stations, mobile phones, Blackberries, laptops, ipods. But are the people at the end of these devices more knowledgeable, more culturally informed? Or are they merely outsourcing their entertainment to ‘the network’? Has the information age enriched us, or have we have become flesh-based hard disk drives?

Consider this parable: When at boarding school I remember hearing the poem of the Ancient Mariner on the radio. It transfixed me and desperately sought it to read it. Now this was in 1986, so if I wanted to read this poem for myself, I had to go find it in the school library. The problem was it wasn’t there-the volume of the Oxford Companion of 18th century verse had mysteriously disappeared (like so much else at my school). So, I had to wait 5 days for the weekly minibus trip to the nearest town, when I was able to borrow it from the public library. The anticipation of that trip, of actually getting the poem was so great that when finally in my hands, I devoured it over and over again, and can still recite much of it to this day. The point being, the THRILL of this discovery was in the CHASE. Nowadays, I need only tap ‘Ancient Mariner’ into Google and up it pops- no challenge at all. But the problem with this is that, knowing that so much information is at our fingertips, I think we don’t seek it out, safe in the comfort that it’s available if we want it. The comfort of the availability of information can, if we’re not careful, turn us from thrilled seekers to passive receivers.

And when you look behind some of the startling figures above, the realities are somewhat different: a relatively small percentage of the Wikipedia community actually edit and contribute- the majority passively view. Similarly, Technorati estimate that of 100 people engaged in a blog, on average 1 will create original posts; 9 will supply comments whilst 90 will passively view.

My point is that the huge democracy of information is actually being utilised and originated by a comparatively small bunch of people. The majority are either passively receiving, or using the advancements to make their lives EASIER not RICHER. Glass Bead Gamers will not be content with using the information age as a comfort-blanket of ANSWERS; they will utilise its power to ask vital QUESTIONS. And the more people who utilise it in this way, the more popular education, freedom and justice will truly advance.

So, we must rejoice in our new democracy, but not forget to vote! Lest we become idle and immobilised on the sea of human knowledge- like the Ancient Mariner:

Day after day, day after day
We stuck, nor rythme nor motion
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean