6 ms·

Athenian Democracy in the Political Imagination

49 points by diodorus 6y ago

sep_field 6y ago
Athens -- a city built by slaves with riches obtained by military conquest, for the exclusive benefit of men. A poor model to emulate; we can do better. Nevertheless, I think Sortition is a very interesting approach we should consider implementing.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >a city built by slaves with riches obtained by military conquest, for the exclusive benefit of men. That applies to every major capital city in Europe with a colonial past, from London and Amsterdam to Paris and Vienna.
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    Actually, that applies to pretty much everywhere in the world. Of course no-one is suggesting to emulate Athenian society as it was, it's quite odd to suggest otherwise as the comment you're replying to does. Athenian democracy was momentous and a big step forward at a time when the standard was a despotic ruler.
    - watwut 6y ago
      It depends a lot on who you was. The people who enjoyed that democracy were only minority of the population - the rest was not free nor had a say.
  - ginko 6y ago
    >and Vienna What Austrian colonies would those be?
    - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      The Austro-Hungarian Empire encompassed several other peoples who chafed under Austro-Hungarian rule, namely Serbs, Slovaks, Rusyns, and Transylvanian Romanians. You ought to have heard about this, because it was the spark that ignited World War I, after all. In the 19th and early 20th centuries there was grumbling from the peripheries about its riches going to a foreign people in the center, just as one heard from the colonies that other European powers set up overseas.
      - ginko 6y ago
        > The Austro-Hungarian Empire encompassed several other peoples who chafed under Austro-Hungarian rule, namely Serbs, Slovaks, Rusyns, and Transylvanian Romanians. None of these were colonies though. And Serbia wasn't part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire.
        Mediterraneo10 6y ago
        > None of these were colonies though. Some scholars of colonialism have considered them such, especially considering policies by which the Austro-Hungarian Empire gave land in its eastern and southern marches to magnates from Central Europe. > And Serbia wasn't part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. Serbs were not limited to Ottoman-occupied Serbia or to the nascent independent Serbian state, they also lived (as they continue to today) in Bosnia & Herzegovina, and in Vojvodina. As I said, it was Serbian grievances against Austro-Hungarian rule that sparked World War I when Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo – this is basic schoolbook stuff.
        ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        Oh, silly me, they weren't? Then what do you call the occupation of your country under a foreign power? It's not like the Austrians asked the occupied regions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Romania: "Hey, are you guys OK with us ruling you? Because if not, we're totally cool about it and we'll just leave you be, no strings attached." In case you missed history class, WW1 started because, among other things, due to Serbian revolts against Austrian rule.
- a_imho 6y ago
  Sortition is a very interesting approach we should consider implementing This One Trick The Elites Hate, You Would Not Believe it. Seriously, I do not see any solution besides sortition that has a chance to enable power structures which actually serve the common people.
  - tragomaskhalos 6y ago
    Given the idea of public offices allocated by lot to people who, virtually by definition, would have absolutely no idea what the job entailed, one imagines a "Yes, Minister" style class of civil servants with whom the real power actually resided. I wonder if there is any evidence of that, or if the appointees genuinely winged it / learned on the job. I'm pretty sure I'd want a Sir Humphrey holding the hand of the guy in charge of the water supply, for example.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      I wonder if the gap between "knowledge required for the job" and "knowledge the average citizen has" wasn't rather small then. Note the "citizen" part - they tended to be more of an elite than citizens today, which are almost everybody.
      - tragomaskhalos 6y ago
        That's an excellent point actually; in the modern world we are so used to high levels of complexity in every field that we forget that this is a recent and not entirely welcome phenomenon - to cherry pick one minor example, people of my age will in their youth have been able to fix a wide variety problems with their car (or have a friend who could do so), today not so much. The systems, in both their technical and organisational natures, would have been far simpler in Athens.
    - sep_field 6y ago
      Currently public offices are allocated by vote to people who have absolutely no idea what the job entails, yet are seeking power. So picking people randomly by lot does seem superior to me vs. picking people who want power. Maybe we could make it even better by, instead of picking people at random, picking them by pools of capability. So for instance the person in charge of the water supply could be chosen by sortition of plumbers.
- PartiallyTyped 6y ago
  We should absolutely not implement sortition without some form of filtering to ensure the pool contains only qualified individuals, but that pushes the goalpost to selecting a benevolent committee which brings us back to the current situation. From the Central Limit Theorem, we would end up with mostly candidates from the middle of the pool. The fact that 'average' people are in possibly important positions a) enables malicious actors to manipulate them much easier than having more qualified (or smarter people) and b) puts potentially unqualified people in important positions. I do not suggest that the current state of affairs is better either, but considering, for example that a very large portion of people in the US are Qanons, putting them in any important position is definitely not a good idea.
  - krapp 6y ago
    QAnons are already in positions of power throughout the American government. You can't have a democracy and not have a significant cultural and political movement be represented, even if it is crackpot lunacy and a Trojan horse for white supremacy. That's on the US and its poisonous political culture for letting QAnon get big enough to matter. Now it matters and America and the Republican party are stuck with the ramifications of QAnon having become popular enough to win elections.
  - ozim 6y ago
    Well I imagine that it could work without ensuring anything. If sortition would be used to get people to serve in parliament. Then it works as usual because parliament consist mostly of people who don't need to be qualified at all. They vote for prime minister and then that prime minister assembles government with ministers that are qualified specialists. In the end parliament votes if they trust that selection of prime minister and done. In the end I just came to conclusion that whole voting for parliament members is useless because I can imagine it would not be much worse than random selection from pool of interested people. You also remove issue with people who are handing out places on voting cards because a lot of people just vote on the first person on the list of political party. I can imagine political parties are not going to change status qua :)
MurJake8 6y ago
Well so much about democracy in Ancient Greece. If you are wondering, nowdays my home country is a bankrupt puppet servile state militarily attached to US and economically to the "democratic" EU. The current US ambassador to Greece goes around spreading nonsense about Russia being evil and dangerous to democracy. Eh, it was the Russians who helped Greece win its independence from the Turks. And our first governor had served as a foreign minister to Russia. If you want to know how much the US appreciates us, just read this: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Greece.pdf https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Greece.pdf "...Encourage Greece’s active participation in strengthening regional and global security to protect the American homeland and its interests..."(!!!) Yeah, we are cannon fodder in a possible future war between NATO and bad bad Russia.
throw0101a 6y ago
A good weblog post by a classical studies and history student, "Athenian Democracy Wasn’t Really That Great": * https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/01/30/athenian-democracy-wasnt-really-that-great/ https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/01/30/athenian-democr... As he notes, Athens was't even really the first democracy.
- nottorp 6y ago
  Looks to me like at least 90% of the downsides he's mentioning are shared by every state of the time. And some are plain wrong. For example he complains that Athenian trials by jury weren't as fair as modern American trials by jury, while conveniently forgetting to mention that few other states even had trials by jury.
  - DaedPsyker 6y ago
    I have to agree, it's a very strange reasoning. They are comparing the system to today which is a ridiculous comparison, it was 2500 years ago! The system was still better than its rival Sparta and far better than the 30 tyrants Sparta installed in Athens after the war. The author seems to confuse the aspirational ideal with Athens as its stand in embodiment with actual desire to implement the details of the Athenian state. No one wants to remake Athens as it was, its a figurehead for nebulaus concepts.
eevilspock 6y ago
Civilization has been trying to get democracy right for well over 2,000 years, and we still haven't arrived at a genuinely fair and just social order. Capitalism has had 400 to 500 years (arguably even longer), and in that time it oppressed, colonized, enslaved and engaged in genocide of hundreds of millions of people, thoroughly warped democracy (e.g. bribes and huge amounts of money spent to ensure the election of capitalist-friendly politicians), thoroughly warped geopolitical evolution (e.g. the propping up of dictators to ensure the flow of oil and other resources needed to keep the capitalist machine humming), and is thoroughly wreaking havoc on the environment as it demands we consume as much as it can produce, again to keep the machine humming. Yet we've only experimented with socialism for 100 years (and that's being generous with the definition of socialism) and it is dismissed out of hand as a failed idea and that its supporters are crackpots.
- woolcap 6y ago
  I assume it's an argument of how you define 'socialism', but in my mind, the body count and accompanying oppression, enslavement, genocide and theft committed by regimes with socialist roots doesn't exactly inspire much confidence in what it has to offer.
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  cough Melian Dialogue cough the massacre of all the adult males of Melos cough the death camps on Sicily

49 points by diodorus 6y ago

Athens -- a city built by slaves with riches obtained by military conquest, for the exclusive benefit of men. A poor model to emulate; we can do better. Nevertheless, I think Sortition is a very interesting approach we should consider implementing.

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>a city built by slaves with riches obtained by military conquest, for the exclusive benefit of men. That applies to every major capital city in Europe with a colonial past, from London and Amsterdam to Paris and Vienna.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  Actually, that applies to pretty much everywhere in the world. Of course no-one is suggesting to emulate Athenian society as it was, it's quite odd to suggest otherwise as the comment you're replying to does. Athenian democracy was momentous and a big step forward at a time when the standard was a despotic ruler.
  - watwut 6y ago
    It depends a lot on who you was. The people who enjoyed that democracy were only minority of the population - the rest was not free nor had a say.
- ginko 6y ago
  >and Vienna What Austrian colonies would those be?
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    The Austro-Hungarian Empire encompassed several other peoples who chafed under Austro-Hungarian rule, namely Serbs, Slovaks, Rusyns, and Transylvanian Romanians. You ought to have heard about this, because it was the spark that ignited World War I, after all. In the 19th and early 20th centuries there was grumbling from the peripheries about its riches going to a foreign people in the center, just as one heard from the colonies that other European powers set up overseas.
    - ginko 6y ago
      > The Austro-Hungarian Empire encompassed several other peoples who chafed under Austro-Hungarian rule, namely Serbs, Slovaks, Rusyns, and Transylvanian Romanians. None of these were colonies though. And Serbia wasn't part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire.
      - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
        > None of these were colonies though. Some scholars of colonialism have considered them such, especially considering policies by which the Austro-Hungarian Empire gave land in its eastern and southern marches to magnates from Central Europe. > And Serbia wasn't part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. Serbs were not limited to Ottoman-occupied Serbia or to the nascent independent Serbian state, they also lived (as they continue to today) in Bosnia & Herzegovina, and in Vojvodina. As I said, it was Serbian grievances against Austro-Hungarian rule that sparked World War I when Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo – this is basic schoolbook stuff.
      - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        Oh, silly me, they weren't? Then what do you call the occupation of your country under a foreign power? It's not like the Austrians asked the occupied regions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Romania: "Hey, are you guys OK with us ruling you? Because if not, we're totally cool about it and we'll just leave you be, no strings attached." In case you missed history class, WW1 started because, among other things, due to Serbian revolts against Austrian rule.
a_imho 6y ago
Sortition is a very interesting approach we should consider implementing This One Trick The Elites Hate, You Would Not Believe it. Seriously, I do not see any solution besides sortition that has a chance to enable power structures which actually serve the common people.
- tragomaskhalos 6y ago
  Given the idea of public offices allocated by lot to people who, virtually by definition, would have absolutely no idea what the job entailed, one imagines a "Yes, Minister" style class of civil servants with whom the real power actually resided. I wonder if there is any evidence of that, or if the appointees genuinely winged it / learned on the job. I'm pretty sure I'd want a Sir Humphrey holding the hand of the guy in charge of the water supply, for example.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    I wonder if the gap between "knowledge required for the job" and "knowledge the average citizen has" wasn't rather small then. Note the "citizen" part - they tended to be more of an elite than citizens today, which are almost everybody.
    - tragomaskhalos 6y ago
      That's an excellent point actually; in the modern world we are so used to high levels of complexity in every field that we forget that this is a recent and not entirely welcome phenomenon - to cherry pick one minor example, people of my age will in their youth have been able to fix a wide variety problems with their car (or have a friend who could do so), today not so much. The systems, in both their technical and organisational natures, would have been far simpler in Athens.
  - sep_field 6y ago
    Currently public offices are allocated by vote to people who have absolutely no idea what the job entails, yet are seeking power. So picking people randomly by lot does seem superior to me vs. picking people who want power. Maybe we could make it even better by, instead of picking people at random, picking them by pools of capability. So for instance the person in charge of the water supply could be chosen by sortition of plumbers.
PartiallyTyped 6y ago
We should absolutely not implement sortition without some form of filtering to ensure the pool contains only qualified individuals, but that pushes the goalpost to selecting a benevolent committee which brings us back to the current situation. From the Central Limit Theorem, we would end up with mostly candidates from the middle of the pool. The fact that 'average' people are in possibly important positions a) enables malicious actors to manipulate them much easier than having more qualified (or smarter people) and b) puts potentially unqualified people in important positions. I do not suggest that the current state of affairs is better either, but considering, for example that a very large portion of people in the US are Qanons, putting them in any important position is definitely not a good idea.
- krapp 6y ago
  QAnons are already in positions of power throughout the American government. You can't have a democracy and not have a significant cultural and political movement be represented, even if it is crackpot lunacy and a Trojan horse for white supremacy. That's on the US and its poisonous political culture for letting QAnon get big enough to matter. Now it matters and America and the Republican party are stuck with the ramifications of QAnon having become popular enough to win elections.
- ozim 6y ago
  Well I imagine that it could work without ensuring anything. If sortition would be used to get people to serve in parliament. Then it works as usual because parliament consist mostly of people who don't need to be qualified at all. They vote for prime minister and then that prime minister assembles government with ministers that are qualified specialists. In the end parliament votes if they trust that selection of prime minister and done. In the end I just came to conclusion that whole voting for parliament members is useless because I can imagine it would not be much worse than random selection from pool of interested people. You also remove issue with people who are handing out places on voting cards because a lot of people just vote on the first person on the list of political party. I can imagine political parties are not going to change status qua :)

MurJake8 6y ago

Well so much about democracy in Ancient Greece. If you are wondering, nowdays my home country is a bankrupt puppet servile state militarily attached to US and economically to the "democratic" EU. The current US ambassador to Greece goes around spreading nonsense about Russia being evil and dangerous to democracy. Eh, it was the Russians who helped Greece win its independence from the Turks. And our first governor had served as a foreign minister to Russia. If you want to know how much the US appreciates us, just read this: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Greece.pdf https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Greece.pdf "...Encourage Greece’s active participation in strengthening regional and global security to protect the American homeland and its interests..."(!!!) Yeah, we are cannon fodder in a possible future war between NATO and bad bad Russia.

throw0101a 6y ago

A good weblog post by a classical studies and history student, "Athenian Democracy Wasn’t Really That Great": * https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/01/30/athenian-democracy-wasnt-really-that-great/ https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/01/30/athenian-democr... As he notes, Athens was't even really the first democracy.

nottorp 6y ago
Looks to me like at least 90% of the downsides he's mentioning are shared by every state of the time. And some are plain wrong. For example he complains that Athenian trials by jury weren't as fair as modern American trials by jury, while conveniently forgetting to mention that few other states even had trials by jury.
- DaedPsyker 6y ago
  I have to agree, it's a very strange reasoning. They are comparing the system to today which is a ridiculous comparison, it was 2500 years ago! The system was still better than its rival Sparta and far better than the 30 tyrants Sparta installed in Athens after the war. The author seems to confuse the aspirational ideal with Athens as its stand in embodiment with actual desire to implement the details of the Athenian state. No one wants to remake Athens as it was, its a figurehead for nebulaus concepts.

eevilspock 6y ago

Civilization has been trying to get democracy right for well over 2,000 years, and we still haven't arrived at a genuinely fair and just social order. Capitalism has had 400 to 500 years (arguably even longer), and in that time it oppressed, colonized, enslaved and engaged in genocide of hundreds of millions of people, thoroughly warped democracy (e.g. bribes and huge amounts of money spent to ensure the election of capitalist-friendly politicians), thoroughly warped geopolitical evolution (e.g. the propping up of dictators to ensure the flow of oil and other resources needed to keep the capitalist machine humming), and is thoroughly wreaking havoc on the environment as it demands we consume as much as it can produce, again to keep the machine humming. Yet we've only experimented with socialism for 100 years (and that's being generous with the definition of socialism) and it is dismissed out of hand as a failed idea and that its supporters are crackpots.

woolcap 6y ago
I assume it's an argument of how you define 'socialism', but in my mind, the body count and accompanying oppression, enslavement, genocide and theft committed by regimes with socialist roots doesn't exactly inspire much confidence in what it has to offer.
Mauricebranagh 6y ago
cough Melian Dialogue cough the massacre of all the adult males of Melos cough the death camps on Sicily