Power to the people? - Anxieties about democracy -

Power to the people?

- Anxieties about democracy -

MARY BEARD

TLS/June 29, 2016

One of the most curious sub-plots on Referendum day was what quickly, and predictably, became known on social media as “pen-gate”. Groups of Brexit campaigners started to hand out pens in polling stations to replace the government-issued pencils with which voters are usually asked to make their cross. Their worry was that, somewhere along the electoral line, a pencil cross in the “Leave” box could easily be erased by those working on behalf of “the establishment”, and replaced with a vote for “Remain”. Police were apparently called to one polling station to investigate the potentially disruptive distribution of alternative voting instruments.

There is a tiny glimpse here of the edgy anxieties of Western democracy. It seems inconceivable to most of us that “our” leaders should stoop to the tactics of the world’s worst pseudo-democratic dictators who would go to almost any lengths, the less ingenious the better, to claim a popular mandate (and, for what it is worth, in my view it is inconceivable). Yet, at the same time, it is hard entirely to banish the suspicion that our own complacency could actually be blinding us to what those in power might be doing to get their way. There is also a very long pedigree to these anxieties about how far you can trust what the voters are supposed to have written on their ballot papers. Electoral fraud of that kind is as old as democracy itself, and was an issue even in the famous ancient Athenian institution of “ostracism” – usually taken to be a canny system of keeping the elite in check, and a far more radical deployment of popular power than any modern referendum.

Modern historians have found in ostracism one of the most appealing inventions of fifth-century BC politics. It involved the Athenian citizens getting together and deciding which politician they wanted to get rid of from their city, into honourable exile, for ten years. Each man wrote the name of his chosen victim on a little piece of broken pottery (an ostrakon, hence “ostracism”), chucked it into a voting urn – and, with a few safeguards such as a quorum of 6,000, whoever got the most votes was sent away. It is not surprising that ostracism has become such a modern favourite. “Just imagine”, so the argument goes, “being able to get rid of some loud mouth politician you didn’t like, simply by voting him out . . . ”. Boris Johnson has been a particularly enthusiastic supporter, seemingly unaware of his own vulnerability: “That was people power”, he once said; it only needed enough citizens to show up and vote, and “kerpow, you were spending the next ten years twiddling your thumbs in Bulgaria . . . . Imagine the exhilaration of catapulting someone off like that”.

The system was not, in fact, quite so straightforward – nor was it quite so clear who was behind the catapulting. one of the most curious archaeological finds of the last century was a cache of 190 ostraka, with the name of Themistokles (who was ostracized in 472 BC) scratched on each one, in just fourteen different hands. It does not take much imagination to see what must have been going on: an ancient plot not so very far from what the pen-gate Brexiters suspected. Some of Themistokles’ powerful enemies presumably prepared a huge pile of ready-inscribed ostraka (the 190 are only the left-overs) and handed them out to the mostly illiterate voters, maybe even disguising whose name was actually on the ostraka. You can get away with a lot if the electorate can’t read: it was more popular manipulation than popular power.

A different version of manipulation put an end to the whole system. Despite its modern fame, ostracism only lasted about seventy years and fewer than fifteen people were ever sent into exile this way. The last was an unlucky character, who is supposed to have been the victim of a stitch-up in 416 BC – when two rival establishment figures, Nikias and Alkibiades, both major candidates for exile, decided to do a deal and get their own supporters to turn their votes against a third party, by the name of Hyperbolos. It was he who was sent away, while the intended targets escaped scot-free. No one could have failed to spot what had gone on. And the glaring exposure of establishment control and of their self-interested trade-off destroyed any myth of people power. Ostracism was never used again.

It’s hard not to catch an echo here of some of the grubby politics, and the elite back-stabbing, that lie behind our own recent exercise in supposedly popular control. But how far was this typical of the Athenian political system as a whole? Fifth-century Athens was ostensibly committed to direct democratic power, from top to bottom: all decisions of state – on everything from going to war to the administration of temple estates – were taken in mass meetings, by every citizen who was entitled to vote and bothered to turn out. Did it really deliver direct people power, and to what effect?

That is not as easy to decide as we might imagine, and the whole issue is clouded by the almost universal hostility to democracy of surviving ancient commentators and the almost universal admiration of modern historians. Plato was not the only writer to see the Athenian electorate as an undisciplined, uneducated and fickle mob, swayed by unscrupulous demagogues; and he was not quite as wrong as one might hope. on one notorious occasion, the people assembled on one day and voted to put to death the entire male population of the town of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, as punishment for their revolt against Athenian imperial control. on the next day, they decided to have a second vote – the ancient equivalent of a second referendum – and opted instead for leniency. A desperate race ensued, as the ship taking news of the change of heart rowed furiously to catch up with the first one already dispatched. It just made it, and the victims were spared.

Since the early nineteenth century, modern judgements have generally been very different. For many Western political pundits, the Athenian system not only represents a shining example of how the people could really take charge of a city (right down to the use of random selection by lot for most political offices); it has also been a useful stick with which to beat our own representative versions of democracy, which have always marginalized the ordinary citizen.

As the stories of ostracism hint, it was not in practice quite so egalitarian as that rosy modern image suggests. The ordinary Athenian citizens never got a foothold in the few powerful elected offices that remained even when most were chosen by lot (and the old aristocrats were very snooty about any of the nouveaux riches who managed to secure election). Political initiative always remained firmly with the elite. And the level of popular participation in decision-making was not always high. By the end of the fifth century, low turn-outs had led to the introduction of payment just for showing up at the voting assemblies. That said, the crucially important principle remained: each individual decision of the democratic state required the sanction of the citizen body as a whole.

The Athenians had some concerns about how this principle operated that may be relevant to us, and our own awkward experiments with referenda. First, they worried about lying politicians. How, they asked, could the people make a responsible decision if they were not told the truth? That is one theme hinted at in Aristophanes’ comedy Clouds, where the dangers of clever but deceptive rhetoric are highlighted in a spoof contest between the comic personifications of “Superior Argument” and “Inferior Argument”. It is partly a wry comment on the anxieties about decision-making at Athens that “Inferior Argument”, with all its lies, bribes and blandishments, wins. It is not hard to guess what Aristophanes would have made of some of the less than half-truths told about the EU over recent months. Neither side has been entirely innocent, but the £350 million figure, the threats of invasions of Turkish criminals and the mythical EU cabbage directive and the ban on children blowing up balloons belong firmly in the repertoire of “Inferior Argument”.

The Athenians were also concerned with political education. You did not need to go to the rabidly undemocratic lengths of Plato, who would have restricted governance to an elite cadre of philosophers, to realize that “the people” (rich or poor, privileged or unprivileged) could only exercise their political power properly if they had been trained to do so. Many Athenian democrats would have argued that people must learn to do politics, they must learn to be citizens; it is not something that comes naturally. Much of the Athenian political system was about that process of learning. Below the level of the city institutions themselves, there was a whole series of local government committees and talking shops, where the Athenians practised the art of politics. The use of random selection for political office had an important role to play too.

We now tend to treat the Athenian use of lot as if it was simply a way of ensuring that every citizen had an equal chance of serving as one of the 500 annual members of the city Council (the boule) or as one of many other administrative officials. And it was in part that; indeed some modern idealists have even thought it might be one way for us to solve the democratic deficit in the British House of Lords. But lot had another equally important, structural part to play in the Athenian system. For it also ensured that practical political experience was spread widely across the citizen body. Leaving aside all other offices, at a rough estimate something like 70 per cent of the citizens would have served on the Council once during their lifetime, with all the responsibilities that involved of preparing business for the full assembly, dealing with day-to-day crises as they arose, receiving and interrogating representatives from other cities and countries, and so on. There was no equivalent of a civil service in classical Athens. Serving on the Council was a practical course in political administration and argument.

Even so, Aristophanes was still doubtful about the Athenians’ ability to tell the “Inferior Argument” from the “Superior”. one can only imagine how he would have satirized our own recent venture in committing a major, irrevocable constitutional decision to a citizen body that is used to exercising its vote every few years, and in relatively small numbers, to elect representatives who are often proposing policies that are barely distinguishable.

I am not suggesting that there is a direct lesson here that we can simply apply across the millennia. Ancient Athens is far too different from us for that: its citizen body was, for a start, no larger than the size of some modern university student unions, and was completely “woman-free”. But Athens can help us to look harder at ourselves. Handing us a referendum once every twenty years or so, largely depriving us of accurate information in a fog of slogans and rhetoric, and allowing us all, on both sides, to vent our various discontents and prejudices in a yes/no vote is not a way to reach a responsible decision. Nor is it a way to re-empower a disempowered electorate. That, as Athenian democrats would have seen, needs something much more radical, and it has to happen not twice in a lifetime but in the day-to-day practice of political life.