John Keane - The Life and Death of Democracy

Also by John Keane

VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRACY

GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY?

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DEMOCRACY?

VCLAV HAVEL: A POLITICAL TRAGEDY IN SIX ACTS

CIVIL SOCIETY: OLD IMAGES, NEW VISIONS

TOM PAINE: A POLITICAL LIFE

THE MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY

REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE

DEMOCRACY AND CIVIL SOCIETY

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2009
A CBS COMPANY

Copyright John Keane 2009

This book is copyright under the Berne convention.
No reproduction without permission.
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The right of John Keane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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Excerpt from Burnt Norton in Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot 1936 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1964 by T.S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Excerpt from Little Gidding in Four Quartets 1942 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Excerpts from T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, reproduced by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd/ T. S. Eliot Estate.

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ISBN: 978-1-84737-760-9

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For Alice and George

CONTENTS

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, Four Quartets (1936)

History is often said to be a catalogue of human sorrows, an unending story of bootlicking, a slaughterhouse of crimes. It is not always so. The mould of cruel servitude can be shattered, as happened 2600 years ago, when Greeks living on the south-eastern fringes of Europe laid claim to an invention that now ranks in historical importance with the wheel, the printing press, the steam engine and the cloning of stem cells. Born of resistance to tyranny, their claimed invention at first caused no great stir. Few spotted its novelty. Some condemned it for bringing chaos into the world. Nobody predicted its universal appeal. It seemed simply to be part of the great cycle of human affairs yet one more example of power struggles among foes. The invention was soon to be seen differently. It was to magnetise millions and to arouse passions on a world scale, understandably so, since it required human beings to picture themselves afresh, to live as they had never before lived. The invention was a potent form of wishful thinking that is still with us today: the Greeks called it dmokratia.

Wishful thinking the longing to bend the present world into a different and better future is often mocked, but the plain fact is that it is a regular feature of the human condition. Whenever we refer to the world around us in language, we habitually allude to things that are absent. We conjecture, we say things that miss the mark, or that express yearnings for things to be other than they are. We live by our illusions. The language through which we speak is an unending series of short little dreams, in the course of which we sometimes fashion new ways of saying things, using words that are remarkably apposite, and strangely inspiring to others. The feminine noun dmokratia was one of those tiny terms that sprang from a little dream, with grand effect. It was to rouse many millions of people in all four corners of the world and give them a hand in getting a grip on their world by changing it in ways so profound that they remain undervalued, or misunderstood. In contrast to things whose names immortalise their inventors newtons, Hoovers, Rubiks Cubes for example democracy has no known wordsmith. The roots of the family of terms that make up the language of democracy, and exactly where and when the word was first used, remain a mystery. Democracy carefully guards her secrets. Through the fog of the past only random clues appear, in the guise of wild-looking, ungroomed figures bearing suggestive names like Demonax of Mantinea, the bearded, robed, sandal-shod lawmaker who was summoned (around 550 BCE ) by the women of the Oracle of Delphi to grant the people of Cyrene, a Greek-speaking farming town on the Libyan coast, the right to resist the tyranny of the limping, stuttering King Battus III, and the right to gather in their own assembly, to govern themselves, under their own laws.

forward within most Greek plays, poems and philosophical tracts, that fifth century Athens wins the prize for creating both the idea and the practice of democracy, seemed plausible to contemporaries. It continues until this day to be repeated by most observers. But it is false.

The Life and Death of Democracy, the first attempt to write a life and times of democracy for well over a century, shows that the little word democracy is much older than classical Greek commentators made out. Its roots are in fact traceable to the Linear B script of the Mycenaean period, seven to ten centuries earlier, to the late Bronze Age civilisation (c. 15001200 BCE ) that was centred on Mycenae and other urban settlements of the Peloponnese. It is unclear exactly how and when the Mycenaeans learned to use the two-syllable word dmos, to refer to a group of powerless people who once held land in common, or three-syllable words like damokoi, meaning an official who acts on behalf of the dmos. What is also unclear is whether these words, and the family of terms we use today when speaking about democracy, have origins further east, for instance in the ancient Sumerian references to the dumu, the inhabitants or sons or children of a geographic place. But these uncertainties are tempered by another remarkable discovery by contemporary archaeologists: it turns out that the democratic practice of self-governing assemblies is also not a Greek innovation. The lamp of assembly-based democracy was first lit in the East, in lands that geographically correspond to contemporary Syria, Iraq and Iran. The custom of popular self-government was later transported eastwards, towards the Indian subcontinent, where sometime after 1500 BCE , in the early Vedic period, republics governed by assemblies became common. The custom also travelled westwards, first to Phoenician cities like Byblos and Sidon, then to Athens, where during the fifth century BCE it was claimed as something unique to the West, as a sign of its superiority over the barbarism of the East.

Like gunpowder, print and other imports from afar, the arrival of popular assemblies and (later) the strange-sounding word