Copyright © Humanist Perspectives
Democratic practices reach back to the millennia of our nomadic ancestors, but in our Western civilization, democracy first became a form of political governance in Athens and other city-states of fifth-century Greece. Though its practice lasted barely two centuries(1) before it was crushed under the boots of a Macedonian army, the dream of democracy lived on. Its struggle against the reality of oppression and tyranny finally triumphed in eighteenth-century enlightenment when the American Declaration of Independence (1776) affirmed it
to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed… with inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed…
These principles, along with their succinct summation in the rallying call of the French Revolution — Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité! — have become the universal standard of liberal democracy in our time. What they demand is that a nation shall be ruled by, in Daniel Webster’s phrase, “the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.”
In the 21st century, most countries in the world consider themselves democracies, but few, if any, satisfy Webster’s lofty definition. Old World countries like England and France, straddled with stultifying legacies of colonialism and class-consciousness, practise a democracy often difficult to distinguish from oligarchy where the populace is largely reduced to rubber-stamping the policies of an elite. In New World democracies, like those of many African nations struggling with extreme poverty and neocolonialism, government is often a more or less concealed form of autocracy. The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea is a brutal one-party dictatorship; Russians currently enjoy a form of government the Kremlin describes as “managed democracy”, a one-man rule that includes censorship of the media, persecution of dissidents, and a war of ethnic cleansing in Chechnya; and in the USA, democracy has become a two-party plutocracy determined to maintain the illusion of freedom and social justice to mask a very different reality in which wealth rules.
In the face of this situation, an extra-terrestrial visitor would surely be challenged to understand what we mean by liberty. She might be even more perplexed to hear the loud, universal proclamations and protestations of the equality of people and yet to find herself on a planet where 50% of the total global wealth is in the hands of a single nation that constitutes less than 5% of the world’s population, and where half the inhabitants(2) live on less than $2 a day whereas the average income of people in the Developed World is closer to $60 or $70 a day, and for some rare species of homo mercatorius known as CEOs it is more than $400,000 a day or $50,000 an hour(3).
Our untutored extra-terrestrial might also have a problem appreciating our sense of fraternity when confronted with the fact that on this earth a billion people go hungry every day, and that 11 million children under the age of five die every year from preventable disease and starvation; that’s about twenty every minute, or twelve hundred during my talk. She could easily misapprehend democracy and conclude that for most of our species happiness means the pursuit of poverty and starvation.
She might be equally puzzled by our system of justice. In Canada, we have advanced a long way towards making every citizen equal before the law, but, as is demonstrated by the many cases of innocent people who spend decades in prison before receiving justice, we have a long way to go yet. The fact of the matter is that money buys justice. You can walk away from many a crime if you can afford a team of shyster lawyers who will bend the law so that justice is not done. By the same token, innocent people are often condemned because they cannot afford the legal defence to protect them from shyster police officers willing to falsify evidence to advance their careers. Or if a jury of their peers finds them innocent, they incur legal costs it takes a lifetime to pay off. The case of Evelyn Martens demonstrates the woeful inadequacy of our legal system.
The problem starts at ground level. To someone earning a minimum wage, a $100 fine for a traffic violation constitutes ten hours of work; someone earning $600 an hour can work off the same fine in ten minutes, and a top CEO in the United States with an income equivalent to $50,000 an hour can earn his fine in a fraction of a second. In Finland, a country more advanced in democratic procedures, such fines are determined in proportion to the offender’s income, and our $600-an-hour individual would have to pay $6,000 for the same offence for which the minimum-wage earner pays $100. That is what equality before the law means. Until we eliminate the now astronomical gap between top earners and the majority of working people by making income correspond more fairly to the contribution an individual makes to society, we shall not have equal justice for all.
In a society governed by and for the people, such issues can be addressed, but we have no such government either in Canada or anywhere in Western society. For a demonstration of the growing distance separating people from their government, we need go no further than the recent war against Iraq. According to polls, the attack on Iraq had the support of only 37%(4) of the American people, and yet an overwhelming majority of their elected representatives both in Congress and in the Senate empowered their President, in great haste and with little real dissent(5), to unleash war on Iraq with a pretext so transparently false that it resulted in global derision of the White House. Polls in England and Spain indicated that 80% of the population in both countries was opposed to joining the US invasion, but their elected leaders took their countries to war anyway.
Clearly, across the world, the mechanisms of democratic procedure are not working. Not even the UN was able to prevent the US/UK invasion of Iraq which was supported by a tiny “coalition force” from other nations. This support came not from people but from governments coerced or bought to provide a fig leaf to conceal the obscenity of the war. The true reasons for invading Iraq exposes the cancer that is destroying democracy — greed, the greed of those in power. War was forced on Iraq to secure diminishing oil supplies to countries whose wealth is dependent on cheap energy, and to sustain the ideal of a free-market economy — an industry that thrives on products with built-in, instant obsolescence, i.e. the armament industry. War is the ultimate apotheosis of consumerism that makes every capitalist’s dream come true: the redistribution of money from the pockets of the people, who pay for the war (sometimes also with their lives), into the bank accounts of those who (at a safe distance from any military action) manufacture and deal in products intended to self-destruct and kill as many people as possible in the process. Some of this blood money is legal, much of it is illegal. Today some five trillion US dollars are deposited in unregulated, offshore accounts — moneys extracted from the pockets of ordinary people to disappear in the numbered accounts of crooks. The Cayman Islands, for instance, with 35,000 inhabitants, plays host to “forty-seven of the world’s largest banks”, to say nothing of the numerous trust companies and brokerage houses that maintain offices there(6). War is big business.
Canada’s refusal to join in this war certainly reflects our moral sensibilities and does suggest that our democratic structures are not yet completely corroded, but we can afford this luxury only because the military-industrial complex is not as powerful here as it is in the USA. Otherwise, if reason and morality determined our conduct, would we not adopt a different approach to today’s environmental challenges, which are spreading disease and death around the globe? Yet, it has taken our government eight years to consider the first tentative steps to implement the terms of the Kyoto Protocol (1997) to reduce Greenhouse Gases. We may look good next to the USA, the world’s biggest polluter, which has refused even to sign the Kyoto Protocol, but eight years of procrastination have contributed to the rapid deterioration of our environment, and we have yet to see how effectively and in what time frame we will manage to meet the Kyoto emission limits. If ours were a government of and for the people, we would long have been practising saner environmental policies because the first victims of our disastrous pollution of the planet are ordinary people.
The current Sponsorship Scandal is another symptom of the failure of our democracy. Upwards of $250 million disappeared in the pockets of the friends of Liberal MPs, and/or in the Liberal Party’s coffers, in a scenario that might have been devised by the Godfather for the Corleone family. Cloak-and-dagger plots, including unmarked envelopes stuffed with thousands in cash left on tables in an Italian restaurant. Even worse is the pathetic performance of the actors in this piece of political pornography. The Gomery Inquiry, created to ferret out the truth, has triggered an epidemic of amnesia and mendacity among those responsible as they play the old game of passing the buck. Even the man who was responsible for the nation’s finances when this horrendous embezzlement took place claims to know nothing about the misappropriation of hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money. To add insult to injury, the then Prime Minister treated the inquiry with an arrogance that might have led our extra-terrestrial visitor to speculate if homo sapiens has golf balls where his brains should be.
The list of grievances against our democratic government reaches from the step-by-step privatization of essential public services such as energy, transport, and communication to trade agreements that serve only the international business corporations, moving manufacturing operations abroad and depressing wages and working-conditions at home to trade agreements that allow foreign corporations to dictate domestic government policies. Canada also has the dubious distinction of leading the industrialized world in shrinking the scale of funding for public services from 16.8% of GDP in 1992-93 to 11.5% in 2002–03(7). Add to all this the alarming growth of secret surveillance and other infringements of our civil liberties as part of a so-called war against terrorism, and the American poet e.e.cummings’ summary of our democratic rights and freedoms spring to mind: “You pays your money and / you doesn’t take your choice. Ain’t freedom grand.”
So — what is ailing our democracies? Is there a form of government that might better serve the interests of the community as a whole instead of the vested interests of the privileged? A benevolent dictatorship perhaps? It is indeed possible to imagine a Mahatma Gandhi governing a country so that the greatest number of its citizens could enjoy the greatest happiness. But the practices by which our leaders come to political office today will never bring to power a man or woman of such exceptional integrity, humility, and sagacity. And if they did, would not they too be corrupted by the very measures required to invest them with absolute power, and would not, after investiture, the flattery of sycophants likely turn them into tyrants?
History suggests that dictatorship, whatever form it takes, whether monarchy, theocracy, single-party or single-person rule, does not serve the public good. The benefits dictators sometimes provide are always offset by the cruelty with which they govern to gratify their own vanity and greed. The same goes for oligarchy, however constituted, for it is merely dictatorship by an elite. The unbridled power of any individual or any assembly of individuals can lead only to corruption, injustice, and oppression. It was against the abuses of power by absolute rulers, and the class of administrators and enforcers on whom they depended, that ordinary people eventually rose up in revolt to demand a share in political power and of the fruits of their labour.
That leaves only anarchism as an alternative to democracy. Anarchism is often confused with anarchy, a state of chaos and senseless destruction. But ‘anarchism’, in Greek an archos, means no government, and signifies a political philosophy that puts its faith in the innate goodness and intelligence of human beings, and therefore calls for the absolute freedom of every individual, allowing for no restrictions other than those self-imposed. Inasmuch as it empowers everyone to freely determine his or her own life, anarchism can be seen as the ultimate form of democracy. However, quite apart from the legitimate concerns it raises about how an unstructured society that might work well around Walden Pond would cope with the extremely complex organizational demands of the overpopulated urban world of our time, anarchism forces us to confront a crucial question about human nature.
Are human beings by nature good or evil? The topic is beyond the scope of this paper, so let us simply agree that good is what is creative, and evil what is destructive, and that goodness entails such virtues as truthfulness, compassion, kindness, and loyalty, without which no society can survive, and that evil is characterized by dishonesty, egotism, brutality, cowardice, and greed, vices that will destroy a community. The question then transforms itself into one about nature and nurture — are we born with moral virtues and vices or do we learn them? Both the Communist and the Capitalist manifestations of democracy base themselves on the assumption that human beings are by nature good. Communism assumes that certain historical processes of dialectical materialism have alienated people from their innate goodness, and it can be recovered only by the creation of a community of equals sharing the fruits of the earth and their labour. Capitalism assumes that in the free interplay of economic forces, the individual comes to wed enlightenment to selfishness and create a social order that is fair and free for all to share the world according to their individual strengths and efforts.
History seems to have refuted both these doctrines. If Soviet Russia was the final test of the validity of the communist doctrine, the assumption that natural human goodness is released in a Soviet democracy produced a tyrannical state that murdered more than 35 million of its own people and established a class of commissars that enjoyed the luxuries the people who created it had no access to. If the USA is the final test of the validity of the capitalist doctrine, the assumption that human intelligence in a free-market environment will engender human goodness to usher in the millennium has instead created a country where “80% of the nation’s property [is] now securely in the hands of 10% of the population” and the “13,000 richest families [are] possessed of a net worth equivalent to the assets of the country’s 20 million poorest families” and the “top ten CEOs [are] earning an average of $154 million a year.”(8) Because both communism and capitalism claim to represent absolute truth, they are both possessed of a missionary fervour that turned them into imperialist powers. As such they both created a world of enslavement and exploitation, poverty, and death. The real Mafia looks like a charitable institution when compared to these so-called democracies committed to freedom and equality.
Behind the façade of the goodness derived from enlightened self-interest, there lurks a notion that brings capitalism closer to fascism than to communism or liberal democracy. The road that leads to the capitalist paradise involves a perpetual state of competition that is supposed to separate the chaff from the wheat. Those who succeed in the struggle, i.e. those who come to wealth and power, prove by their very success that they are superior to those who fail, i.e. the poor. A millionaire acquaintance of mine expressed it perfectly when he said in response to my protest that his wealth was acquired on the backs of a lot of hard-working people: “The poor are poor because they’re lazy and stupid.” This attitude has its roots in the puritanical Protestantism of the early nineteenth century when the industrial revolution created both colossal wealth for some and equally colossal suffering for the many who created that wealth. To assuage their consciences, and consistent with their belief that God providentially managed the affairs of the world, these evangelicals argued that the free market was created by God to reward good Christians and to punish the bad ones.(9) In other words, wealth and poverty are God’s way of signifying in advance whom he has chosen to join the ranks of the angels or of the devils respectively. No one has captured the true state of this society of enlightened self-interest more accurately than Charles Dickens, and any one of his novels demonstrates the preposterous fallacy of linking morality with wealth. “Free markets don’t promote public virtue; they promote private interest,” as writes Gordon Bigelow(10). “The wages of sin are often, and notoriously, a private jet and a wicked stock-option package. The wages of hard moral choice are often $5.15 an hour.”
Without the religious window-dressing, this is political Darwinism in its crudest form. If fascism can be assumed to have a political philosophy at all, it is based on the view that social life is like nature a struggle in which the fittest survive and triumph, and the fittest are those who combine brute force with cunning and a lack of moral scruples. An elite of hoodlums provides the leadership in a fascist state. The general population is regarded as weak, lazy, and obtuse rabble that must be kept in their place with the right dose of bread and circuses. On this basis things may be done to benefit the people, but they are done by force and fiat in a society that is by definition unfree, unequal, and unjust.
Our commitment to democracy hinges on our answer to the question about the moral nature of human beings. Concern about this has a long history, going at least as far back as Plato whose Republic calls for government by an oligarchy of “Guardians”, men of integrity and expertise, who are to lead the masses in the ways of the common good. Similar views were argued in more recent history by political thinkers like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville. Here is what Walter Lippmann said in 1927:
The individual man… does not know how to direct public affairs. He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen. I cannot imagine how he could know, and there is not the least reason for thinking, as mystical democrats have thought, that the compounding of individual ignorances in masses of people can produce a continuous directing force in public affairs … The public must be put in its place … so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd.”(11)
This attitude does not support true democracy. At best, it calls for a government by an elite for the people, and sooner or later that turns into government by, of and for an elite. History provides much disturbing evidence of crowds behaving like a “bewildered herd” trampling our individual rights, but there is even more evidence of human beings behaving spontaneously with kindness, solidarity, consideration, respect, and yes, love, which humans bestow upon each other daily all across the globe. I am prepared to make the case that most acts of inhumanity are the result of misinformation, demagoguery, manipulation, and, above all, ignorance bred by the very institutions professing to do away with it, whereas our acts of compassion and mutual help come more naturally to us. We witness this in the outpouring of emotional support and financial aid whenever an individual or nations are visited by misfortune and disaster. Such acts of genuine human fellowship and sacrifice go largely unreported in the media unless they provide the kind of sensation that attended the recent tsunami disaster. Murder and mayhem make better copy in the media, but it is the small acts of decency and compassion that provide the binding material holding human society together. Without it we would have perished millennia ago.
There is ample evidence that both creative and destructive forces are innate to us, and that nurture plays a large role in determining what role they will play in our lives. Still, as I have argued in an earlier article on “The Origin of Violence”(12), the continued existence of human society is proof positive that the forces of cooperation are stronger than those of aggression. That is why Western civilization has actually advanced, and we enjoy more freedom and justice today than preceding generations did in the Middle Ages. The advances we have made are due to the struggle for and the implementation of democratic government. This struggle must continue if we want to preserve and expand the liberties and equalities we have achieved. History is not a linear story of progress and the achievements of civilization are constantly at risk.
As humanists we believe in our capacity to govern ourselves, and we can therefore come to no other conclusion than that democracy offers the only viable road into a future when humanity might eventually realize the freedom, justice, and equality, for which people everywhere yearn. At the end of the twentieth century, Francis Fukuyama declared democracy the very peak of government and argued its achievement had put an end to history(13). While he may be right about democracy as the ultimate form of government, he is wrong about history. Everything that exists is historical, i.e. it changes constantly, democracy included, and things either change for the better or the worse. At the present time, democracy is showing alarming symptoms of terminal cancer, especially when we look south of the border. “Maybe it’s still worth the trouble to wonder when the American democracy lost its footing in Hollywood or Washington,” writes Lewis Lapham in his July 2005 editorial in Harper’s, “but the historical fact is no more open to dispute than the extinction of the Carolina parakeet.”
Not surprisingly, political apathy and cynicism are spreading across Western democracies. One hears it everywhere: politicians are corrupt; to get our vote they make us promises they have no intention of keeping; they’re all liars and hypocrites; politics is a dirty business; it makes no difference whom we elect. In a poll conducted by the CBC less than a month ago, 29% had no confidence in their leaders at all, and 72% did not believe politicians would keep their promises. Such deep distrust is alarming. Benjamin Franklin, before signing the Constitution of the United States in 1787, warned that the democratic form of government it called for “is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”(14) It may be that the cycle of our civilization has run full circle and the demise of democracy is upon us, but to act on that belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. To dismiss politics and politicians as corrupt and hypocritical without the determination to address the problem is nihilistic, and nihilism, by definition, leads nowhere.
We must not allow ourselves to be manipulated into misanthropy by those who profit from a world of mindless consumers. To the Athenian Greeks who first articulated and practised democracy, demos meant not just ‘people’, but ‘poor people’. Democracy was intended to be a form of government that protected the ordinary man from the despotic caprice of the rich and powerful. Our democracy no longer provides that protection. Instead, ordinary people are herded into shopping malls to become slaves to a system of usury that deprives them of their dignity and their joy of life. We are not without fault in surrendering to our most primitive desires for material possession and instant gratification, but if we want a society whose citizens act out their best reason and their most fraternal emotions, we must stop manipulating people to indulge in a permanent buying spree and providing them with credit cards that lure them into the trap. If people are to make intelligent choices, they must be provided with truthful information and adequate, uncensored context. Among other things, this calls for the break-up of the media monopolies that now control the flow of information and entertainment. Our media, especially television, instead of spinning cocoons of mendacity and deceit, and pandering to our basest appetites as they do now, must confront us with the truth about the world in which we live, even if these truths are not comforting, and must encourage and empower us to think critically at all times.
There is much that needs confronting: the rapidly deteriorating environment, overpopulation, catastrophic climate change, declining energy supplies, food and water shortages, the crisis in health care, the threat of epidemics and economic collapse. Our politicians lie to us about the state of the world we live in, and the press and the media conspire with them in their own disingenuous ways to grease the hand that feeds them. If we want the world to draw back from the edge of disaster and the inevitable barbarism that will follow, we must take back the power to make the necessary decisions in the interests of the community, indeed of the planet as a whole. Otherwise these decisions will be made for us by calamitous events that will eventually spin out of control.
Humanists believe in the capacity of ordinary people to create a just and free society. Because we know that only human beings can solve the problems of living in a world that can sustain levels of comfort and dignity, it is time we insert ourselves more specifically into the political process, not in support of any particular political party, but to give the ultimate decency and common sense of ordinary people a chance. What we need is an articulate political platform, a manifesto even, designed to help democracy mutate so it can survive in the new environment of multinational corporate power and media manipulation that threaten to render it extinct.
Democracy has come to us in two giant historical steps: constitutional monarchy which placed restrictions on the absolute power of rulers through a parliamentary body, at first representing members of the church and of the aristocracy, and then representative democracy which enfranchised all people, men and women, to elect a body of representatives responsible for the affairs of the nation. The time has come to take the next step: participatory democracy, i.e. the establishment of a form of government that reflects the general make-up of the society it governs, involves all citizens as directly as possible in the decision-making process, and remains accountable to the electorate at all times. It is nothing less than the final democratization of democracy.
Canada’s current representative democracy does not govern by the will of the majority. For a political party to have a majority of seats in the House of Commons, it needs the support of only a minority of the electorate. Since only the votes of the winning candidate in each riding count, those voting for the others might as well stay home. Most elected MPs represent only a minority of eligible voters in their riding. In 2000, to take the most recent example of a “majority” government, the Liberals elected 172 members, i.e. slightly more than 57% of the seats. In actual fact, the Liberals received less than 41% of the popular vote, and if you factor in that only 64% of eligible voters cast a ballot, the Liberals represented a mere 26% of the electorate. In the same election, the PCs garnered 12 seats with a little over 12% of the vote. Which means that the Liberals with less than 5 times the number of votes won 15 times the number of seats. The same calculations apply to the other parties. Clearly, our electoral system produces a parliament that does not represent the will of the people as expressed by the ballots they cast. If we want true democracy, we must move on to proportionate representation.
For those not familiar with the system, let me just say quickly that it calls for each voter to cast two ballots, one directly for a candidate and the other for a party; all parties publish a list of candidates in the order they will be chosen to complete the percentage of seats to which the popular vote entitles the party. In 2000, a truly democratic parliament would have given the Liberals 123 instead of 172 seats, the PCs 37 instead of 12, the NDP 26 instead of 13, the Canadian Alliance 77 instead of 66, and the Bloc Québecois 32 instead of 38. This would have been a very different parliament from the one we had, a minority government that would have been more representative of the will of the people. Minority governments require coalitions and compromises and thereby serve a pluralist community better. We need look no further than our own current Liberal/NDP coalition to appreciate the benefits. Over night it produced large sums of money for education, health care, and the social net, while drastically cutting the tax giveaways to large corporations.
Proportionate representation will also address one of the most serious problems affecting democracy today — the growing apathy, if not outright cynicism of the electorate towards politics, politicians and the political process itself. Fewer and fewer people, specially among the young, bother to exercise their right to vote because they feel it won’t make any difference, it won’t curb corruption in government or bring to power people of integrity or of truly public spirit. The proportion of the electorate voting has come perilously close to 50%, and if that process continues oligarchy or dictatorship will be the inevitable consequence. Proportionate representation will go some way towards assuring the electorate that every vote counts.
Opponents of proportionate representation argue that it will always produce a minority government, and they point to the political mayhem in Israel as an example of what will happen to us. Given the pluralist nature of our society, it is likely (but by no means certain) that proportionate representation will most often produce minority governments. But the more parties join forces in government the more people have direct input in the way they are governed. Ideally, we should all be MPs, as was the case in Pericles’ Athens, but Athens had between twenty and thirty thousand eligible voters, and we have almost as many millions. This imposes limitations on us. A minimum level of popular support must be demonstrated before a party can be represented; otherwise we could indeed end up like Israel where a tiny lunatic fringe of fanatical religionists seems able to dictate national policy. In countries that have opted for proportionate representation, a threshold of 5% of the popular vote has worked well. We already have that requirement for political parties to receive government funding.
Proportionate representation makes (almost) every vote count, a powerful incentive for people to exercise their vote, but it is not enough to establish participatory democracy. It is not enough for us to go to the polls every four or five years to elect a bunch of politicians who promise us a better future, only to renege on their promises once they’re in power. We need to make additional changes to democratic procedures, for instance to curtail the power of political parties. Political parties are dependent on the wealthy sector of society to raise the large amounts of money they require to finance their operations and campaigns. In return, their benefactors expect them to legislate for their benefit, i.e. the benefit of large corporations and wealthy individuals. Their interests are most often diametrically opposed to those of the people at large. To put governance into the hands of the people and establish a truly participatory democracy, I offer ten suggestions:
“Hold your four-wheelers!” I hear my extraterrestrial friend shout. (She is a little confused about what we call horses). “Do you seriously expect the federal and provincial governments of your country, or of any country on your dysfunctional planet, to adopt any, let alone all, of these suggested reforms? If you do, you’re an even bigger fool than the rest of your fellow-humans.”
“You may be right,” I tell her, “but unless we take serious steps on the road to a government of, by, and for the people, this civilization will come to an end. More and more people are realizing that catastrophic conditions are developing all around us, and that time is running out. Some disasters have already become inevitable. If we are to avoid the worst we must make important decisions at once, decisions that run counter to the consumerism that we are being sold as a panacea when it is, in fact, the source of our undoing. The democratization of democracy is, of course, only one, but a major step on the road to recovery. We must examine and change our own values; we must learn that Bigger is not Better, but that Smaller is Smarter; we must revise our educational systems to develop critical and independent minds; we must reintroduce honesty and openness in the media, the press, and in government; we must take drastic steps to save our environment and all the creatures who are part of it. Our planet can no longer sustain the pampered, selfish dolce vita many now claim as their birthright. Sacrifices will have to be made, and voices of reason, still too far and few between, must grow louder and guide us.
All this can come to pass only if we democratize our democracy and make it truly participatory. The humanist movement belongs in the vanguard of this battle, a battle we cannot afford to lose, for, to quote Martin Luther King: “If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridor of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”(16)
