Democracy is hard work; autocracy is easy
What the founding fathers of the U.S. grasped, which was painfully evident before them, was that liberal democratic societies are actually remarkably difficult to construct. There is no single lever one can pull to make a free society. A good constitution will not secure accountable government if the people do not respect the principles laid out in such a document. A democratic parliament will not automatically secure a free society if that parliament uses its police force to quash dissent. A society that aspires to a free frame of mind is a jigsaw made of many interlinked pieces, all of which must fall into place. However, unlike a real jigsaw, society in constantly in flux, and the jigsaw is constantly being altered, requiring that it be cared for and delicately rearranged as the moods and ideas of society change. Liberty needs work.
The enemies of freedom often say that democracy is a weak system. It is prone to fashions and the passions of the crowd. Its mechanisms, in seeking consensus and the involvement of the people, are capricious and prone to error. They are absolutely right. Freedom is like a delicate Fabergé egg. It is a thing of complexity and in many ways flimsy, easily smashed, like one of those eggs, by thoughtless violence and the blunt instrument of power. Democracy and its associated liberties are things to be nurtured, cared for, constantly discussed and improved. The systems of checks and balances within a liberal democracy, the independence of courts and judges, the protection of individual freedoms of speech, of press, of assembly, of religion and the right to petition and criticize governments. All these things are easily eroded even in the most enthusiastic free societies. Not least, the most difficult part of free governance is to inculcate a culture in which that very freedom is not misused by the power hungry to destroy freedom itself. Freedom requires nurturing the very opposition you may despise.
I don’t think it is chauvinistic or arrogant to declare the ideas of liberal democracy to be universal. There surely cannot be a single human on the planet who cannot approve of a society where people can express their ideas freely, where people can sleep soundly without the worry of being arbitrarily arrested in the middle of the night and transported to a camp far away from their loved ones, or where, when one does transgress laws, one is treated fairly and humanely. We might surely argue about the specifics – it certainly would be arrogant and ironically autocratic to declare that there exists one vision of democracy, but the general values that liberal commercial democracies seek to achieve contain within them nothing that is European or American. They are the values of people who wish to be free of the wanton caprice of the dictator. Pericles understood this more than two thousand years ago.
Autocracy is easy to achieve. When one looks back across several thousand years of human history one is struck by the sheer variety and color of dictatorships. Everything from the conformist military society of Sparta, through to the communist experiment of the Soviet Union and the agrarian paradise of Pol Pot’s Cambodia has been attempted, with many varieties of central control in between. Millions of humans have lost their lives in the service of attempting to fabricate these planned utopias. It is not surprising. It is easy to wield the dead weight of power over the febrile flesh and blood of humans, to terrify them into submission, and to murder them when they do not conform. To put it crassly, dictatorship is for dullards. It requires no nuance, subtlety, sympathy as Adam Smith would have had it, or hard work to build the delicate self-corrected structures of democracy. Not least, it strips leaders of the need to show the magnanimity to step down from power, even when they may feel they are at their zenith. In many ways, democracy is uncomfortable, even unnatural. It requires humans to draw upon the fund of behaviors and attributes that are not easy to mobilize, let alone assemble into the structures of government and society. As Germaine de Staël, firebrand eighteenth century French advocate for liberty observed: ‘Examine the adversaries of freedom in every country, you will find among them a few deserters from the camp of men of talent, but in general, you will see that the enemies of freedom are the enemies of knowledge and intelligence. They are proud of their deficiency in this respect; and one must agree that such a negative triumph can be easily achieved.’
Ukraine is not seeking to be European or American any more than France seeks to be Estonian, or Lithuania seeks to be Romanian. What these nations share is a general interest in fashioning societies where the people can hold their rulers accountable, where individuals have a field of play to pursue their own ideas of the good life, and where their rulers respect and cherish the highly complex and fragile edifice of liberal democracy: where society is forever working to improve that structure through free and open public discourse. The Ukrainian impulse is as old as Pericles.
Historical experiences shape and mold our views of people and politics. Ukraine, in particular, has a rich and complex history. Its current borders and the borders before them have changed hands, shifted, rotated and transmogrified in many ways, like many borders in Europe or across the world for that matter. But that should not distract from the aspirations of the modern Ukrainian people and what they want today. We become too beholden to the idea that freedom and democracy belongs to certain nations or particular historical national boundaries.
To finish with a hope. I happen to believe that the Russian people agree with this outlook. Russia is no stranger to the extraordinary outpouring of art, science and literature that can be achieved when minds are left free. Its contributions to science and culture are second to none. Lurking in all of us is a Pericles, the spirit of animals that seek free reign to our aspirations. The way in which we express those freedoms will vary from place to place, but there isn’t a single human who cannot wish to escape tyranny and build freer societies. This task is never complete. It is a struggle that every human who has lived, who exists today, and who will eventually come into being, takes part in. The struggle of Ukraine is as old as history, and that is the struggle of free human minds.
Charles Cockell is Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His book ‘Interplanetary Liberty: Building Free Societies in the Cosmos’ published by Oxford University Press in June 2022, explores idea of liberty beyond Earth.
This Op-Ed reflects the author’s views and not necessarily those of the Kyiv Post.
