Mark Kingwell is professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and author, most recently, of The Ethics of Architecture.
My American friends are inclined to laugh when I mention that Canadian politicians sometimes receive death threats. The source of amusement seems to be rooted in a general-south-of-the-border attitude that Canada cannot really be serious. Alas, the sad fact is that Canadian politicians do indeed receive death threats, as do journalists and judges. I have received them for things I published in this newspaper, which is weirdly reassuring given the spectacular nullity with which philosophers are usually greeted by the modern world.
That world is one in which, for obvious reasons whose names are Twitter and Facebook, offers more and more opportunity for febrile, venomous disdain of public figures. Anyone with a keyboard and too much time on their hands is now judge, jury and potential executioner. This is not my own idea of democracy, but some people obviously love it.
Among the ones who don’t must be the targets of all that hostility. Just taking the top echelon, recent weeks have shown a marked preference for politicians to exit the stage forthwith. Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, Donald Trump (not a sitting politician but the presumptive front-runner for presidential nominee even though more than half of Republicans oppose his candidacy), Justin Trudeau (a “divisive” pop-up Prime Minister apparently responsible for everything from erosion of truckers’ constitutional rights to passport chaos, airport hell and turbine treachery), and the hapless leaders of Pakistan have all been targeted, sometimes by their own supporters, for removal. The Sri Lankan president’s palace was stormed, and the prime minister’s house set on fire. I don’t know about you, but if someone set my house on fire, I’d figure there was discontent somewhere.
Of course some of this vivid disapproval is just par for the course in democratic politics. We all get to say “Throw the bums out,” if not “Shoot the bums,” as often as we like. What may be new is a spreading sense of not wanting anyone to take the bums’ place. Mr. Johnson is too slippery. Mr. Biden is too old. Mr. Trump is too crazy. Mr. Trudeau is too glib. The Sri Lankan leaders are too corrupt. Okay.
But who will replace them? Do people really think there are occluded stars waiting in the Tory, Democratic, Republican, Liberal, Conservative or other ranks? There isn’t just a leadership vacuum or a shallow talent pool in politics. There is a decisive break between electorates and the very idea of representation.
Politics has always been a mug’s game, especially in democracies, where virtue-signalling, avoidance rituals, staged apologies and displays of feigned outrage are the daily stock-in-trade. Sane and well-balanced people don’t go into politics, except as occasional object lessons in bad judgment. Politics is corrosive of the soul and the mind, especially at a time when, as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, we are enduring what might be the stupidest decade of political history in the West. And it’s not just a phase, but rather a definite trend in eroding social trust, faith in institutions and shared narratives. None of these traditional buttresses of democracy retain the robustness of former times, and the contempt for elected leaders is a key part of the downward anti-democratic spiral.
This sad condition might lead us to an ancient Greek insight, namely that anyone seeking political office is thereby disqualified from it. Or it might, to cite another ancient Greek, generate the idea of a philosopher-king, the only possible just ruler because possessed of genuine virtue and not just the wild desires of the tyrant. The latter often mistake themselves for the former. Hence Vladimir Putin, when it’s late at night: He must imagine that the invasion of Ukraine is meet and right, not vicious and cruel.
But even people who have not read Plato, which must surely include some who believe they can make a difference in politics, must suspect that an against-the-grain reading of Republic is called for. That is, Plato’s masterpiece book is not really a call for philosophers to rule and so create a utopia; it is, instead, a warning to those inclined to the love of wisdom that they should stay out of politics. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and not even the finest soul is proof against points one and two.
Which leaves us precisely where? Well, let’s bite the bullet and say that the best ought not (and will not) lead, and that the self-promoted leaders are far from the best. We could naturally plod along in this suboptimal manner, electing a string of clay-footed mere humans as leaders, hoping vainly that they will turn out to be reliable visionaries, and then, when they inevitably disappoint us, disporting ourselves with deranged personal attacks, threatening tweets, sanctimonious op-eds and incoherent protests about “freedom.”
This is good fun, up to a point, and shows that the true role of democratic leaders is not to offer a way forward but to act as lightning-rods for human discontent, of which there is an endless supply. There is likewise an endless supply of human imperfection combined with overweening ambition, of course, and that’s why this dynamic is so basic to democracies, even if made worse by recent forces of techno-capitalism.
What if there were a more radical alternative? What if we had politics without leaders, democracies without the pathologies of elections? Before you dismiss the idea, post a nasty ad hominem comment, or send me a sarcastic e-mail, consider the possible benefits as well as the deep costs of the shadow-play we call democracy.
The latter are obvious but apparently intractable. In the sort of power vacuum characteristic of figurehead-only administration, unelected bodies – the Prime Minister’s Office in Ottawa, the United States Supreme Court in Washington – quickly acquire undue and unwarranted power and influence. Political power is always distributed unevenly and sometimes irrationally, of course, but here it is pooled in places where no ordinary citizen has any influence whatsoever, even of the nominal or spectral kind exercised in the act of voting. Decentralizing power from individuals altogether could have the benefit of lessening these forms of disproportionate and illegitimate backroom power by uncoupling the acted-out connection to elected representatives, itself already dubious.
But let’s go farther. What if the business of administration were depersonalized entirely, so that the very fact of representation was, for example, a matter of drawing lots or randomly assigning responsibilities? Even a permanent professional civil service could be run on a rotating basis, the way academic administration falls in short cycles to various professors rather than entrenched elite, who tend to shadow their own pensions the way incumbents shadow their re-election. Mostly people would not want these jobs, as most academics do not enjoy administration, but they would perform them conscientiously as a matter of shared good citizenship.
Would there be a lack of good principles and direction in such an apparently random arrangement? Not necessarily. The excision of toxic electoral politics and undue focus on careerist leaders might be the salvation of genuine democracy because it would strengthen the very idea of rule by the people – an idea currently both watered down and made poisonous. If we all had a strong personal stake in the business of shared business, rather than off-loading the work of running a country to punching-bag mediocrities and stultified bureaucracies, we could close the gap between government and governed – something many people call for but hardly ever act upon. Temporary but shared government work could then, like jury duty, form part of a compulsory national-service scheme, something long overdue in any large land-mass nation with a diverse population.
Leaderless government would then be something like a combination of various empty-chair metaphors. There are several relevant similarities: the empty chair at Seder as a sign of hospitality for an unexpected guest; the empty chair of a two-player, one-person debate where the live person engages an imagined opponent; or the empty chair reserved for an absent philosopher at all committee meetings, creating the presence of implicit reflection in the room. The more radical option still would be to remove all chairs from the room where political decisions are made, thus shortening meetings and preventing physical dominance from the head of the table. (Again, some of my academic colleagues do just this, recognizing that the underlying purpose of most meetings is to generate future meetings.)
There will be a transition period to leaderless government, of course; we can’t just eliminate them overnight. But here technology is friend not foe. Justin Trudeau is already cancelling appearances for fear of protests. Other leaders have gone to ground in the face of hostile electorates. Let’s replace them with avatars or deep-fake video feeds and then gradually phase them out. By the time we realize they’re gone for good, we’ll be running things ourselves, like real democratic citizens.
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