Howard Burton - Democratic Lessons: What the Greeks Can Teach Us: A Conversation With Josiah Ober

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Ideas Roadshow conversations present a wealth of candid insights from some of the worlds leading experts, generated through a focused yet informal setting. They are explicitly designed to give non-specialists a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldnt otherwise be encountered through standard lectures and textbooks.

Over 100 Ideas Roadshow conversations have been held since our debut in 2012, covering a wide array of topics across the arts and sciences.

See www.ideas-on-film.com/ideasroadshow for a full listing.

Copyright 2014, 2020 Open Agenda Publishing. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77170-079-5

Edited with an introduction by Howard Burton.

All Ideas Roadshow Conversations use Canadian spelling.

Contents

A Note on the Text

Introduction

The Conversation

I. Cutting Ones Wisdom Teeth

II. Digging Deeper

III. Battling Iron Laws

IV. Feet to the Fire?

V. Why Athens?

VI. Dissent

VII. Enter Aristotle

VIII. Increasing Eudaimonia

IX. Dignity

X. Keeping It Real

Continuing the Conversation

A Note on the Text

The contents of this book are based upon a filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Josiah Ober in Stanford, California, on October 1, 2014.

Josiah Ober is Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Professor in Honor of Constantine Mitsotakis Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University.

Howard Burton is the creator and host of Ideas Roadshow and was Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Introduction

Back to the Future

How can we make our democracy work better?

Can we give citizens a stronger voice in public affairs? Can we make people more invested in the decisions that are taken? Can we find a way to make better decisions to start with?

Age-old questions, to be sure. And for many, any serious investigation of democracy starts far back in time, in the world of Classical Athens, where the whole idea of democracy was first invented and put into practice.

Of course, we realize now, those early democratic pioneers made many blatant errors in the way they went about doing things. Women, for example, were excluded from participating in all decision-making. So too were slaves, who made up a shockingly large portion of their society.

There was clearly lots wrong with the way things were done some 2500 years ago. But what, its worth asking, was done particularly right? Can those ancient Greeks help us with our political struggles today?

Josh Ober thinks so.

The Mitsotakis Professor in the School of Humanities and Science at Stanford University, he is an active presence in both the Political Science and Classics Departments and has, by his own admission, always had some taste for ancient meets modern, thinking about how antiquity may shed some light on something that we care about today.

But the key spark to his groundbreaking 1989 book, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People, happened almost by accident.

I was reading for my dissertation on military changes after the Peloponnesian War, and I came across a couple of passages of the orator Demosthenes that I just didnt understand. He seemed to be contradicting himself in a single speech: making comments that were blatantly elitisttalking about his opponent being this lower-class guy who didnt really deserve the attention of the Athenian citizensbut at the same time saying that his opponent was this guy who pandered to the elite and didnt care about the ordinary people.

I thought to myself, How do you get away with that? How do you get away with being both, Im more elite than my opponent, and also, Im more of a regular guy than my opponent? Theres got to be something going on here.

What was going on, he later came to appreciate, was that a close reading of public rhetoric could provide deep insights on aspects of the prevailing political and societal structure that had hitherto gone largely unrecognized.

The basic argument was that political communication in Athens was not a one-way street from elite speaker to mass audience, which was the way it had often been portrayed.

The speakers had to be intensely attuned to their audience. They had to claim that, Im worthy of listening to because , and then quickly come up with a sufficiently good reason. And theyd also have to say, My interests are aligned with the interests of our country, of our community, of you the ordinary people, because ... and then theyd have to fill that in very quickly as well, before adding, And heres my proposal.

If you dont do that right in Athens if you either seem to be somebody who might be perfectly well-intentioned but doesnt know anything more than the ordinary guy, people will think, Why are we listening to you? We need to listen to somebody who knows something.

But if the speaker says, Oh yeah, Im an expert. Shut up, you lowly rabble and listen to your superiors, the masses will naturally have a feeling that this guys interests arent terribly well aligned with theirs.

In either case theyre going to shout that guy down. The Athenian speakers in the law courts, as well as in these legislative assemblies, had to align what they say with the interests of the people and prove their alignment through what they said, through discourse. They also had to demonstrate their elite credentials:Heres why I really know something thats worth all of us taking into account.

Well, all very interesting, you might think. But how is this relevant to contemporary society? A good questionand one that, intriguingly, Josh has given considerable thought to over the years.

The question then is, how do you get something like that in the modern world? How do you create, instead of the talking heads speaking down to all of us in one-way communication, a way in which the people, the citizenry, can talk back to those in leadership positions and test themnot just once every four years in an election, but every time they open their mouths?

Social media and other technological tools, he suggests, may play a pivotal role here. So, too, might more innovative social-science techniques to coherently promote public understanding such as deliberative polling, an invention of his Stanford colleague James Fishkin.

But Joshs key insight is that the ancient Athenians didnt just happen to stumble upon the idea of democracythey somehow managed to make it work in practice for the better part of 200 years, all the while facing many of the same divisive societal pressures that we are currently grappling with.

After all, the Athenians, too, had enormously wealthy individuals who were constantly striving to buy their way into a disproportional share of political power, just as our high-profile political activists and well-funded lobby groups.

The Athenians, too, had a cadre of self-proclaimed elites who were convinced that they ought to be perpetually guiding the mindless rabble.

And yet, despite these constant pressures, Athenian democracy survived and prospered. Which swiftly prompts us to ask, What, exactly, were they doing right? And how can we learn from them?

For me, from the very beginning the key question was how to explain why democracy was such a success. The old question scholars used to ask was, Why doesnt it last forever? My question was, Why does it last for more than twenty minutes?

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