Democratic by nature

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/08/2024 (431 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If all that mattered is economic growth, then Shaikh Hasina would still be in power. She has ruled Bangladesh for 15 years, during which the country’s per capita income more than tripled. Yet she has been overthrown by the very same students who stood to benefit most from her remarkable economic achievements.

Sheikh Hasina fed their anger by reserving a large proportion of the government jobs (30 per cent) for young people from families whose older members had fought in the Independence War (from Pakistan) of 50 years ago.

Yet 400 people, almost all of them students, laid down their lives in the protests against her increasingly arbitrary rule, and it’s not really worth dying for a slightly better chance at a cushy but not very well-paying job. They also talked about democracy, by which they really meant equality, or at least equality of opportunity.

That’s also what motivated the two-thirds of Venezuelans who cast their votes against tyranny last week. They may yet succeed in forcing the ruler, Nicolás Maduro, to give up and go into exile too, because fairness is a basic human value.

Only a third of the world’s people live in countries that can be called democratic, but practically every autocratic regime in the world also claims to be democratic. In principle (although not yet in practice) it is the default human political system.

We are talking about the nature of ‘human nature’ here, and the key point is that it has a history. It changes over time in response to changing circumstances, but there is a detectable theme running through it for at least many tens of thousands of years.

Human beings belong to the primate family, most of whose members live in smallish groups (rarely more than a hundred). They have strongly graded hierarchies like those in our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees. There is a boss who rules by force and by fear but also by making alliances, and there is constant turmoil as other would-be bosses rise and fall.

By and large that is the primate condition. It was presumably once the human condition too — but all the ancestral human groups we know about lived in absolute equality.

We know this because the last genuine hunter-gatherer bands survived long enough to be studied by the first anthropologists. They were all dedicated to equality, even to the extent that they automatically co-operated to bring down any individual who tried to set himself above the others.

How did that come to pass?

Early human beings were still living in quite small groups, but they were already intelligent enough to realize that the monkey-king model served nobody’s interests except the king’s. They also had language, so they could conspire together.

The revolution may have happened once and spread, or it may have happened a thousand times in different bands, but the human default mode became egalitarian. It must have remained that way for at least thousands of generations, because equality and fairness have become universal human aspirations.

Unfortunately, when we went into the first mass societies 5,000 years ago we had to revert for a long time to our other, older heritage of brutal hierarchy. Early mass societies could not be egalitarian: there was no way for large numbers of people to meet and talk and decide together.

That situation prevailed until we developed mass communications a few centuries ago. That technology made it possible for us to decide things together again as equals, and as soon as we got it (just printing, at first), our long submerged but never forgotten ‘democratic’ values re-emerged as well.

That’s what the American and French revolutions were about. That’s what the Bangladeshi and hopefully the Venezuelan revolutions are about now. These are not random events. They are part of a long but promising process of reclaiming our real values.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.