What form of politics best supports transforming humanity?
For multiple reasons our civilization is increasingly unstable, making it increasingly likely that Humanity will go through (is already going through?) some form of transition. Our only chance of avoiding the transition being a collapse is fundamentally to change all elements of society: economics, finance, education, power structures, societal norms etc. To simplify things, I’m going to say that such changes need to be driven by the idea of increasing individual and collective flourishing. Your intuitive understanding of what that might mean is fine for this article. Such fundamental change would constitute a transformation.
Politics, and more generally, governance, clearly plays a central role in transformational change. Governance includes establishing underlying values, responsibilities, policies, activities, accountability etc. Its scope can range from small groups and communities to organizations, nations and the globe.
To answer the question: “What form of politics best supports transforming humanity?”, we first need to ask - which bits of humanity? In this context, it helps to split humanity up by forms of governance.
The Economist’s 2022 Democracy Index provides very helpful rankings and categorizations. The categories are:
Interesting findings are:
Norway (top score: 9.81) and Afghanistan (bottom score: 0.32) require very different considerations. Who’s going into Afghanistan to demand the installation of democracy? We tried that before, with disastrous results. But there’s also a question about Norway. Has it reached the pinnacle of good governance, apart from a few minor tweaks to get it to 10/10?
For simplicity, I’m going to analyse each of three categories based on these rankings, bearing in mind that 1) governance systems have to align with the ‘conditions’ of the country (values, worldviews, capacities, education, available resources etc.) and 2) governance systems have to be determined by the governed, not imposed from the outside.
Also I’m going to assume that the over-arching goal is that we want to increase flourishing.
[Side note: Democracy rankings such as the Economist’s are based on the political systems as they exist. They don’t necessarily reflect the cultural conditions (e.g. average worldviews) of the people themselves. I suspect that in the Full and Flawed Democracies there is a reasonable correlation between them. However, in Authoritarian regimes that may not be the case. For example, in Iran it seems possible that the cultural conditions could support a rapid transition through the stages from Authoritarian to Full Democracy if the people could somehow overthrow the rulers.]
1. Hybrid Regime and Authoritarian
These need to evolve into some form of democracy. To the extent this can be influenced from the outside, we should help create the suitable conditions from which democracy could emerge (e.g. through aid, education, trade deals and the like). But we have to recognise, this has to be an evolutionary process.
It would also help a lot if there were more examples of full democracies creating more flourishing for their citizens. The most prominent democracy (the USA) is almost an embarrassment to the cause.
2. Flawed Democracy and lower end of Full Democracy
There is much that can be done to enhance democracy by improving citizen participation in the governance, although I’ve not figured out how much this might effect the rankings in the Economist’s Index.
The current vanilla form of democracy is Representative Democracy where elected officials make decisions on behalf of the people. The only involvement by the citizens it to cast votes to elect representatives. But there are many over-lapping refinements to this, under the heading of Participatory Democracy, which allow greater involvement by citizens. These include:
Deliberative Democracy: authentic public deliberation is required for decisions to be seen as legitimate. (Details )
Direct Democracy: the public?decides on policy?without using?elected representatives?as proxies. (Details )
Liquid Democracy: the public has the right to vote directly on all policy issues, with the option to delegate their votes to someone who will vote on their behalf. (Details )
Digital Democracy: using digital technologies to enhance and facilitate citizen engagement in all democratic processes, including policy formulation and decision-making. (Details )
But democracy isn’t the only way to improve citizen participation. There is also:
Sortition: random, but representative, citizens are selected to be the decision makers. (Details )
All of the above are being used somewhere, in some parts of the governance process.
3. Close-to-perfect democracies
So, what do you do if you’re almost perfect?
You aspire to transform!
To explain what that means, I’ll be calling on one of the main leaders of the Metamodern movement, political philosopher, historian and author Hanzi Freinacht. Almost exclusively, I’ll be referencing his ideas in this Medium post about Protopian governance .
A little contextualisation might help.
Metamodernism, originally an art movement, is now also the name given to what its proponents see as the next stage in the evolution of worldviews. Over-simplifying, we can say that worldviews have evolved from Pre-Modern to Modern to Postmodern and now there is an emerging Metamodern. Again, over-simplifying, it aims to embody the positive elements of Modernism and Postmodernism, whilst freeing us from their dysfunctional elements. I see Metamodernism as an essential input to understanding the contours of the transformed humanity we need to cultivate.
So, Protopian governance is what would support a metamodern culture. But as with all things metamodern, there are nuanced convolutions.
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It’s not a thing, it’s a set of directions
Hanzi does not state precisely what Protopian governance is, arguing that what might emerge would be different in different places and times. Instead, he specifies three principles or features - or in complex systems terminology attractor points - that need to underly Protopian governance. These can be used as guides so that when a new initiative or adjustment to governance is proposed, we can ask “is this in line with the principles?”
But before going into those principles, we need to establish when and where it makes sense to work towards Protopian governance. As Hanzi says, it isn’t something to be “implemented in Afghanistan next Tuesday”.
Just as liberal democracy was an evolution out of feudalism rather then a fix for problems within it, so Protopian governance is an evolution beyond democracy rather than a fix for its dysfunctions. Indeed, the argument is that we need to fix a whole list of governance problems within democracy before Protopian governance can even start to emerge: to be “cultivated?by agents sensitive to the limitations inherent to any reform and the risks involved” as Hanzi puts it.
Finally, here are the three Design Principles:
Design Principle 1: Don’t ask how to make governance “more democratic”; ask how to increase collective intelligence
(This is largely about the decision-making processes.)
Democracy is great because it tends to result in more flourishing than non-democracy. But the correlation doesn’t go on forever. More and more democracy with more and more citizen participation may not lead to more and more flourishing. It may lead instead to gridlock and lack of decisiveness, for example.
A more general capacity that we need to focus on is collective intelligence: the capacity of a group to solve shared problems. Now, it may well be that this new focus leads us to employ some of the democracy-enhancing ideas I mentioned above, but the driver is increasing collective intelligence rather than simply being “more democratic”. The example Hanzi gives is moving complex decisions into the realm of participatory and deliberative democracies, which involve stakeholders and citizen councils selected by sortition.
Design Principle 2: Create Meshwork Governance and Ignore the Principle of Subsidiarity
(This is largely about the level at which decisions are made, and who the stakeholders are.)
It seems obvious that the most appropriate people to make a decision are those most effected by it. That’s the principle of subsidiarity: make the decision at the lowest possible level.
But life is messy and rarely as clear-cut as would be needed for that to be a good idea.
For example, the residents of a street may want to pedestrianize it to stop it being used as a rat-run. If you’re devolving decision-making using the principle of subsidiarity, who really is most effected by the decision? The residents or the rat-runners? And what about the wider interest in reducing car usage in the whole town or village?
Many governance issues are complex and intertwined, so it makes much more sense to reflect this by having multiple units of governance which exchange influence over one another: a "meshwork governance" system.
An example Hanzi gives at a national level is that Denmark and Sweden could exchange 1% of their power over one another, so that Denmark's perspective is present in more Swedish decisions, and vice versa.
The meshwork would allow for more coordination and cooperation between different units of governance, and would lead to better decisions that take into account the interests of all stakeholders.
Design Principle 3. Allow for Deep Feedback Cycles — Limit Fast and Shallow Ones!
This principle addresses the problem that our current governance systems are too focused on short-term feedback cycles. The consequences of this are:
Of course, we have to check that what we are doing is effective, but doing that using short, reactive feedback cycles and shallow metric-based assessments leads to poor long term results.
Instead, we need to use longer-term feedback cycles, based on carefully considered information, and then make slower and more profound changes based on that information.
The key point is this: short feedback cycles can only address specific policies and the effectiveness of their implementation. Long, deep feedback cycles, on the other hand can (and should) address the very governance processes themselves.
This will allow us to create a more stable yet flexible society that is better able to adapt to change: to keep us on the path of increasing flourishing.
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Hanzi’s summary of the vision of Protopian governance based on these three principles is this:
A large set of different units of governance that are tailored to maximize the collective intelligence with which different topics are managed, which are laterally connected into a meshwork of mutual influence, and which continuously evolve by periodically updating their constitutional forms and the stated purposes they serve.
My final quote from Hanzi is this:
There is, of course, more to the idea of Protopian governance — but this would be the bare basics. And that’s enough to reshape the world.
This topic is the subject of the Humanity’s Transition - Oxford Discussions Meetup group, which I organize.
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