On today’s show, Mitch Jeserich is in conversation with British philosopher A. C. Grayling about the limits of the democratic system. He highlights what he calls the ‘dilemma of democracy’: the power belongs to the people but, at the same time, the power needs to be stable to be efficient. A. C. Grayling is Professor of Philosophy and Master of the New College of the Humanities, London, and author of the book Democracy and Its Crisis.
Democracy and Its Crisis
One response to “Democracy and Its Crisis”
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Professor Grayling’s commentary on the background of democrary and its modern evolution. I was struck by a remark he made about China in its present evolution as a model governance competitor. I’m a bit uncomfortable with that take.
I think it is helpful to see China’s present permutation in the Post Mao period, as Grayling does, as a command economy operating on quasi-war powers terms, i.e., in a dizzy state of high mobilization. I think the war-powers experience of the USA and the subsequent regimentation and mobilization we have undergone from the time of the build up of the USA economy as a command-economy producer of war goods for USAmerica’s allies. I see the postwar period now, with some distance, as a transition to a reality of global nation-states no longer able to impliment, or seem to impliment a unique destiny apart form the growing global community of concern. I think the present political unrest in the US is associated with this quantitative change as a state. The period under a command economy accelerated the loss of local control over former community life, and at a pace too rapid for ordinary growth by attrition.
Unlike the ex-USSR, China has been more sensitive to relaxing authoritarian principles of governance in response to rising pressures of public opinion for an open view of integration into the global community. China is institutionally hampered by its traditional family centered distribution of power, but I see in China at present an almost giddy rise of enthusiasm about opportunity that gives vent to an amazing cultural expression of industriousness. I’m not saying the human rights abuses are excusable, now or in the past, but China has a long way to go to take the form of a modern state able to operate within a conensus to concent manner and it is moving, away from, not in the direction of a “heart of darkness” like what is seen in the imperial challenges of the ex-USSR.
I just don’t see that Grayling has perceived that the move from a world of separate cultures able to remain self-enclosed and self-defining is quantitatively different from a world of global dimensions faced with issues of planetary environmental survival and distribution of opportunity and reward that cannot tolerate a world-level violent struggle.