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Volume I
The Theory
Introduction
A) Background, Objective, Intended Audience and Standards.
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE. Ever since Hiroshima, the atom bomb has haunted our imagination with images of the Apocalypse, inflamed political discussions and dominated thinking about global political relations. The impact of this event on a young man then just finishing high school was quite different. To him, the revelation of that event was the abysmal discrepancy between our technical proficiency and our evident impotence to solve even the most simple-looking problems of inter-human relationships. That young man - you guessed it - was me.
I felt that the solution must lie in applying the same faculties to which owe our technical successes, specifically our power of reason and generalisation (with its formalisation in logic and mathematics), in short science. Both by my interest in physics and other natural sciences and by the verdict of my school's professional counsellor I seemed preordained to become an engineer. But the fascination with the above discrepancy prevailed over my career prospects, and I decided to study social science. Then as now, economic problems dominated political discussions. So I enrolled at what now is called the Erasmus University at Rotterdam.
Social science at that time seemed to me a bottomless morass of verbal sludge too amorphous to provide any firm ground for a critical appraisal. Mathematics and measurements are the tools which all natural sciences use to present, criticise and defend their theories. Quantitative economics, especially decision-making (‘besliskunde’), was the obvious choice for me, and I was privileged to have many prominent professors such as Theil and Nobel-prize winner Tinbergen. No more wishy-washy words, but logic and hard facts!
Alas, when applied to social problems, ‘hard’ facts had the remarkable habit of assuming diverse shapes despite their hardness; logic gave different answers to the same questions depending on who asked or answered them. Chaos backed by objectivity! Part of the intellectual community reacted by blaming science as a whole and retreated into metaphysics and mysticism. The rest produced more of the same: ever more sophisticated theories and mathematical models and an ever-increasing bulk of figures. Only recently did social scientists come to realize and acknowledge that we could not expect from social science anything even remotely approaching the control and predictive power we achieved in physics.
Remarkably few were prodded by this state of affairs into an investigation of the foundations on which social science was supposed to rest. Professionals of that discipline will not be surprised that I turned to philosophy. Yet even the most prosaic branch of epistemology - methodology -
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produced only contradictory theories: Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Kuhn and an ever-increasing plethora of other contradictory views. The concepts which they use are often more than half a century old and many are poorly defined in terms of reality and the current knowledge about it.
Similar chaos exists in social philosophy. The seed of this book was a totally unexpected experience, in 1970. I had become a member of the board of the Rotterdam chapter of a new party specifically founded to improve the working of our democracy: D66. I soon found that within its ranks no consensus existed on any explicit and unequivocal concept of democracy. I searched for one in the best-known works about democracy, but in vain. All build on and refer to concepts developed more than a century ago when democracy was designed mainly to protect the individual against the usurpation of power by tyrants, oligarchies or capitalists and to ensure peaceful coexistence of ‘free’ citizens: Churchill's ‘least bad’ form of government.
In the simple world of Pericles, Locke and Rousseau, that might have been adequate. That world is gone forever. Today the well-being and even life of individuals depends not only on being protected against violence from others, but also on their cooperation in the common venture that a modern society is. The state must ensure not only coexistence, but also cooperation. Neither a purely defensive nor a procedural definition of democracy, such as universal suffrage and a parliament, will do.
Western democracies were nonetheless able to develop and flourish because of the exceptionally favourable circumstances in which they came about: plenty of land and natural resources and a technical development generating new wealth at a rate which was fast enough to outstrip the growth of population, yet slow enough to enable society to adapt. For western democracies those days are gone for ever; for the rest of the world they never did nor will exist.
The chaos resulting from the lack of a common view on democracy is documented every day in our newspapers, especially after democracy's victory over totalitarian attacks. Bereft of the centripetal force of external enemies, its full weakness was exposed in our inability to deal with environmental problems or with political and humanitarian crises such as in Yugoslavia. The most dramatic illustration is our impotence to help former communist countries and other dictatorships in their transition to democracy. One cannot simply transplant institutions. A lesson from today's knowledge of life is that what works in one time and place can bring disaster in another. We should have provided an understanding of the basic principles of democracy (which is not equivalent to capitalism), what makes them work and a transition plan and assistance. The Gettysburg Address plus the constitution of the US and a few dollars does not suffice. In the absence of a generally accepted, paradox-free and operational definition of democracy, social philosophy has been dominated by fashion, in the first half of this century by the socialist Utopia and today by the sanctification of the market economy.
To talk sensibly about a subject, in my case the practice of social decision-making, it helps to see it at work. That experience I gained as an officer of a multinational, as a member of the committee on income policy of the Social and Economic council (SER) of my country, a member of the board of the Rotterdam Chapter of my political party and as a founder and manager of the local chapter of a trade-union which I also served as member of its social and economic
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advisory committee. This gave me first-hand knowledge in various fields of social decision-making and of the application of social science and philosophy.
THE OBJECTIVE OF THIS BOOK. We tend to take democracy for granted, we think we have paid our dues if we do the job we are paid for, vote once every four years and pay the salary of our representatives and government. A ridiculous view if we consider the enormity of the venture that a modern democracy is.
In nature there are few, if any, free lunches. If we want democracy, then we must pay the minimum price at which we can get it in terms of effort and sacrifice. An adequate definition of democracy will tell us what that price is. Reluctance to face that price may be the main reason why we do not yet have such a definition. First, it will be shown that some pet subjects of certain groups do not pertain to democratic decision-making. Secondly, democracy requires from those who have some pretence of being at the centre of our culture - let us call them intellectuals - tasks which are not performed today. Examples will be found at the end of this volume and in the second volume in the chapters about the social dimension of knowledge. Some of those tasks have no market value: doing the job for free is the price which has to be paid for democracy, and paying it is the virtue of the democratic intellectual.
Providing a solid foundation for democracy is a venture which surpasses the creative power of any single person. Only a concerted and durable effort of capable individuals holds a promise of success. The objective of this book is modest: to promote this cooperation by impressing its necessity upon the reader, convincing him that it can be done and suggesting some ground rules and fundamental principles which can serve as a starting point until replaced by better ones.
THE TARGET AUDIENCE consists of those intellectuals who cherish democracy and are willing to devote some time and effort to shore it up. They must be prepared and able to take the point of view of the user of their work and apply the consequent standards.
THE STANDARDS OF THIS BOOK: RELEVANCY FOR DECISION-MAKING. They will be unfamiliar to academics accustomed to display in their works the full command of their discipline, to place their findings in the context of all major works, to refer to other theories mainly by referring to their author and to disperse the definitions, axioms and elements etc. of their own theory over the whole book. They assume that if they write ‘the instrumentalism of James’, the reader knows what is intended, and worse, that they have adequately defined what they refer to. In fact no work of a philosopher and no school of social philosophy is so unambiguous and self-contained that such a reference can do. They often view practical problems just as an occasion for displaying everything their discipline has to say about the subject, preferably in terms of ‘X said this and Y said that’.
The emphasis is on disagreements between philosophers. The user is left both with the impossible job of deciding about the scope and reliability of the conflicting statements of professionals and with the opportunity to choose whichever best serves his personal objective. A politician usually can find an academic authority to support with impunity just about any statement that serves his objectives.
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No wonder that the experience of the application of academic social science and philosophy so often is negative. The target audience should include not only colleagues of the same discipline, but also the intended users of their work, the people who need its findings for decision-making. Much of social science and its underlying philosophy is producer-oriented. That deficiency also affects the academic community itself because the findings of one discipline often provide axioms for theories of other disciplines. My user-oriented - and therefore integrative - approach to fundamental issues turned out to be unfamiliar to much of the academic community, forcing me to extend this introduction far beyond my original intention. Professors to whom I submitted the manuscript of this book usually started their comments by calling it ambitious. Given the title and many fields on which it touches, that may be understandable, but also wrong. A few pages hence, in ‘The structure of this book’, par. ‘Life and Information’, I have explained that the choice of subjects was dictated by absolute necessity because they form an ‘organic’ whole which must be treated as a whole. My objective is modest: to provide a starting point and clear the ground for the necessary group projects which, as also explained in ‘The structure of this book’, must be based on a common objective and on accepted, explicit procedures and rules governing the argumentation. Consensus on these is achieved by limiting my audience to those who accept my objective (democracy) and the rules of argumentation which are deduced from this objective. It also requires a shared ‘cosmology’, but that will follow from the application of the objective and the rules.
This book must be readable for readers who are mainly interested in its core and its possible applications. But it must also enable the academic community to evaluate its arguments in the light of their discipline. To that end, the work is divided into two volumes. The first presents the findings and conclusions. The second contains the confrontation of my propositions with relevant classical problems and works in the fields concerned, as well as some CAPITA SELECTA pointing out conclusions which could be drawn from it in fields not directly related to social science and decision-making.
Its objective and user-orientation also dictate its style, its level of sophistication, its metaphors, the kind of examples and the form of argumentation (for instance foregoing reliance on references to other authors as justification). When attempting to define a phenomenon such as information, I start by investigating the simplest form (a bacteria) in which the phenomenon can be found, a process which seems rational. I search for and use the most simple, down to earth explanations and arguments I can find. The user-oriented criterion of this book is that any simplification or imprecision is justified as long as a more complex or precise analysis would not induce us to revise the conclusion. This criterion may be quite strange to many academics. A professor and director of the department of philosophy of a Dutch university accused me of oversimplification but did not cite a single example, hopefully because there is none.
The requirements of its presentation explain why sometimes I had to use metaphors and illustrations which intrude on areas in which I have no professional accreditation. But the arguments or conclusions in this book never rely on metaphors and illustrations for their justification; they cannot therefore be invalidated by shortcomings in metaphors or illustrations.
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The above considerations also explain the use of words like evolution, functionality and holism and those of my references to biology to which professional philosophers might take exception. In the relevant sections I explicitly explain the use and content of potentially controversial terms and concepts, as well as how and why they differ from their objectionable connotations (for instance with social Darwinism, classical utilitarianism, mystical holism, parts of sociobiology etc.) which, in conjunction with superficial reading or a less-than-benevolent attitude, might prompt readers to throw my proposals into the bin in which they have discarded the above abuses. Yet if a word or concept is totally adequate in its etymology and in its evocative or explanatory power, then coining a new one just because of past abuses would entail an unwarranted sacrifice of readability. But I welcome any suggestion for alternatives.
These problem-oriented criteria made this book possible. It allowed me to take account only of that literature which would sway the decision for or against one of its fundamental assertions, thus reducing the set of crucial publications to a manageable size. Some apparently relevant classics, like Schopenhauer's, were deliberately excluded because their impact on my subjects can be deduced by the reader from my argumentation. (In the case of Schopenhauer, the philosopher intent on ‘updating’ him would focus on the notion of his a priori versus my a posteriori teleology, and on the function of the will in the process of life.)
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B) The Structure of This Book.
THE ELEMENTS OF SOCIAL DECISION-MAKING. All actions of living systems, even bacteria, are triggered by decisions which are directed by information obtained about its surroundings. If we talk about the concerted action of a group, then such an action presumes some form of coordination in decision-making. An evident prerequisite is effective communication: the participants must refer to the same entity when using a specific word. A major part of this book is devoted to achieving this for some basic and ubiquitous concepts.
Any social decision, and therefore any successful group action, always involves four elements. Defining any of these elements in a concrete situation is taking a decision on the definition of that specific element; this ‘subsidiary’ decision again involves all four elements, but at a lower level. In each of these elements one category of human thinking, one abstract concept, dominates.
| 1) | An expression of where we want to go, a common objective. In this book that is a democratic society (PART ONE) |
| 2) | A shared ‘cosmology’, a conception of what we are, namely a living being, involving-knowledge about life and the predominant role of information (PART TWO) |
| 3) | Fact-finding for deciding on the best means to achieve our objective. That is the domain of (the philosophy of) science (PART THREE) |
| 4) | Deciding on everybody's share of input and output. That clearly is the domain of (the philosophy of) normative justice (PART FOUR). |
In addition, there must a process for achieving commonality on these subjects. In a democracy, this must, to the extent possible, be argumentation (PART FIVE).
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1) A COMMON OBJECTIVE: A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY AND ITS NORMS. The coherence of actions that distinguishes a society from a loose assembly of individuals is to a large extent achieved by the norms which rule that society. The authority to establish and enforce norms therefore is at the core of the organisation of a society. A democrat wants to live in a society, otherwise he would not bother with its form of organisation. But he also wants to reserve for himself the authority to decide what he considers right and wrong, he rejects any a priori authority of certain individuals to impose their own norms on others. The only solution is to endow all members of society with equal authority: in social decision-making all opinions and interests will have to be given equal weight, with one exception: all opinions and interests, all decisions, which conflict with the objective of forming a democratic society will have to be rejected as undemocratic. Everything proposed in this book presupposes the acceptance of the common objective of forming:
| - | a thriving society |
| - | a society which respects the authority of each individual over himself (his autonomy) and the consequent subjective equality in decision-making. |
2) LIFE AND INFORMATION: AN UP TO DATE COSMOLOGY. Most philosophy and all social sciences deal with human beings. They are in the end founded, usually implicitly, on some concept of what a human being is and of his place amongst the other manifestations of our universe. That concept of man is a determining factor of any theory about how men must organise the relations between humanity and the rest of the living world on which man depends for his continuing existence. The adequacy of this picture of himself will determine the effectiveness of the application of social theories. The demands on that effectiveness increase proportionally to our ability to act on each other and on our environment, an ability which has grown almost explosively thanks to a technology based on science, especially physics, chemistry and biology. (Purely for reasons of ‘readability’, ‘human being’ will often be referred to by the much shorter and commonly used ‘man’. I hope that some day sexism will have become so obsolete that no women will take exception nor even notice it.)
The revolutions of Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Quantum theory influenced the way we perceived the world around us but had little impact on the view of ourselves. They did not require a re-calibration of the philosophical concepts we use to deal with the ‘human phenomenon’. The latest scientific revolution does. I refer to the findings of molecular biology which exposed the working of life and the role which information plays in it. A major contribution of these findings to philosophy is that they justify functionality as a criterion for the evaluation of elements of living beings. This provides a passage between the barren grounds of positivism/relativism and the dangers of totalitarian ideologies or orthodox utilitarianism.
One phenomenon has today overshadowed all others: information. Yet I could find no definition of information which is both generally accepted and has discriminatory and operational power. Such a definition can be deduced from the above knowledge about life. The conclusions about information, especially its functional nature, enable us to solve a number of classic paradoxes. Some examples will be shown in this book, but many other problems of philosophy can be similarly exposed as misconception of the information process. These conclusions also provide justifiable criteria for the evaluation of knowledge and contribute an important element to the ethics of science in a democracy, for instance the status of objectivity.
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The most important insight provided by that knowledge is a structural property of all living systems: an adequate representation of a such a system requires that all parts be considered together in their historical and environmental context. ‘Holistic’ seems the best word to express this (mathematical) property. The much neglected consequence is that the analytical method used by physicists when dealing with inert systems (dividing it into parts or aspects, analysing each of them separately and then putting all of them together again) is inadequate when dealing with a living system, particularly its most complex one: a human society. Because of this holistic property, adequate models of living systems often evidence circularity, recursiveness, and so does the argumentation about it: the conclusion of one argument serves as a premise in another one.
This book illustrates this holism and circularity. For instance, my rules for establishing facts follow from a specific view about life and information plus the choice for democracy as defined by me. That assumes acceptance of the fact that this view of life is correct and that the audience has chosen for democracy. Justifying that assumption requires rules for establishing facts, which is the problem we try to solve. An academic may be satisfied with the conclusion that such systems are undecidable. A decision maker cannot leave it at that, he must take a decision. Such systems are decidable by an act of will, namely to accept certain premisses without proof. If those premisses are - by their very nature - subjective and beyond any more objective proof, accepting them is justifiable as long as we limit the validity of our conclusions to those who accept these premisses. The craft of the democratic decision maker is to find those premises which insure the adherence of his target audience and which limit the subjective premises to the inevitable minimum.
Developed when physics was king of science and this property was unknown, the organisation of today's academic institutions is not geared to deal with it. In my country most of the academic establishment adamantly refuses to acknowledge that property. One of the professors to whom this book was submitted discarded it by remarking that I had the tendency to ‘relate everything with everything else’. That is tantamount to reproaching Einstein that he ‘relativated’ too much. The persistent failure to take account of that fundamental property is evidence of the necessity of a book like this one.
3) TRUTH: WHAT ARE THE BEST MEANS TO ACHIEVE OUR OBJECTIVE? Answering that question requires the establishment of the relevant facts which involves a decision about their truth. The concept of information developed in the previous part is essential to that subject.
4) JUSTICE. Seeing the problem of justice in the context of our objective and of the current cosmology enables us to formulate a ‘pure’ contract theory of justice. It is the only theory which is both rational and democratic because it reconciles the logically inevitable subjectivity of any choice (for a moral or a norm) with the justification for imposing its consequences on dissidents. It thus solves the problem of Rawls' version of contract theory: the justification for enforcing compliance.
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5) ARGUMENTATION. Interests conflict and the views about facts often diverge. We will run into differences of opinion as soon as we apply the theory to actual decision-making even if we have achieved agreement on the above elements. In a democracy these differences should be settled as far as possible by argumentation instead of violence. The conditions for an argumentation to merit the qualification of democratic are the subject of PART FIVE.
The main condition is that the participants are of good faith, meaning that they are willing to submit their arguments to some general rules and criteria to which they subscribe, and that they apply them to their own arguments and decision-making. A long experience of argumentation has taught me that any discussion with people who refuse that condition is a pointless exercise in frustration. Fortunately our definition of democracy provides the justification for ignoring the opinions of those whose argumentation or behaviour is evidence of lack of such good faith.
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C) Conclusion: (Part Six) Democracy Must Be Earned.
The lack of consensus on all of the above elements of social decision-making is evident. It is just as evident that decisions are in fact being taken by society, though not necessarily by achieving consensus. Commonality of behaviour may be imposed by the current dictator, oligarchy, majority or by social control. Inertia and tradition may inhibit the emergence or acceptance of deviating behaviour, thereby extrapolating to the future that behaviour which has proven its viability in the past.
In times of rapid change, past success is not an adequate basis for future action. Imposing on people a decision which they consider illegitimate undermines the efficiency of any cooperative venture: a reluctant participant is an ineffective one. Such ineffectiveness will increase dissent and thus the necessity of repression, which in turn will reduce effectiveness etc, a major cause of disintegration of dictatorial systems. Anyway, for most of us the loss of freedom is by itself sufficient cause for rejecting the repression implicit in imposing decisions which are perceived to be illegitimate.
The second World War impressed on all free people the blessings of democracy and conditioned them to readily accept as legitimate most decisions taken by their governments. In the sixties that legitimacy began to be questioned, giving raise to student unrest and, in my country, to a new party specifically founded to improve the working of our democracy: D66. To little avail: today all social research and opinion polls point to a continuing loss of legitimacy of politics.
Most good things come at a price. A modern society is extremely complex. The idea that we have paid our dues to democracy when electing and paying for a government and parliament is preposterous. This book identifies a number of other tasks which have to be fulfilled by citizens who have the ability to do so, without any expectation of reward other than the satisfaction of contributing to the viability of their democratic society. The main fields in which improvement is both necessary and possible are:
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| - | the establishment of facts for social-decision making |
| - | the containment of the bureaucracy which is inevitable in multi-levelled decision-making and which cannot be properly addressed without taking into account the above-mentioned ‘holistic’ property of a human society. |
They form the concluding chapter of Volume One: the social responsibility of science.
YOUR CONTRIBUTION IS WELCOME. In accordance with the content of the book, nothing in it is definitive, except the objective of a society as defined by the democratic principle and the acceptance of the rules of democratic argumentation. Your criticisms and other contributions to the subjects of this book are welcome provided they are specific (see web-site <democratic-principle.nl>, on which you also will find a summary of this book). The author also intends to start discussion-groups mentioned in PART SIX about more specific subjects such as economy, conflict prevention, etc. (see web-site <project-democracy.nl>).
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