Essay On Politics And Ethics.
Democracy is not just confined to the political domain, but it pervades all spheres of society:. Ours is an age of democracy. Democracy as a form of government, characterised by elections and the installation of a "representative" government, is becoming a global phenomenon. The fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and domestic and global changes in Latin Africa. Africa, and West Asia (the Middle East), have brought democracy to pleases and shores where it was undreamt of a few decades ago, giving people a taste of freedom.
The globalisation of democracy as a form of more legitimate representative government has not been accompanied by genuine efforts to tackle the problems of democracy. such as the lack of
equilibrium between equality and liberty, the dictatorship of the "falling from grace". In this context, democracy as a political process cannot absolve itself of the responsibility of enhancing what Mr. Amart) a Sen calls the "functioning and capability- of individuals.
The collapse of socialist economies has not vanished the problem of economic deprivation, and advocates of democracy have to support programmes of well-being which contribute to "human capital formation- rather than create perpetual dependency.
Democracy is not, strictly speaking, confined to the political dominate but it ought to pervade all spheres of society. A society consists of several institutions -- family. school, firm. university, the press, etc. It ma) very well be that while a society's polity may be governed by the formal procedure of democracy, its institutions may function in a very non-democratic manner, as these violently trample upon the dignity of its individual members.
Consider. for instance. Taylorism as an institution of supervision and management in the workplace. This institutions is based upon a taken-for-granted division between conception and execution and has created a caste system in the modern workplace between the workers and the managers. But the new technologies. which structure the workplace today. require a different kind of work organisation where workers and the managers have to be partners of innovation and competitive performance.
Similar is the predicament in the case of an institution like family. As women and children are taking their rights with pleasure and dignity, there is the challenge of giving an alternative institutional design to family which will fulfill the needs of a democratic personal order. The question here is not only democratising intimate relations, but also relaxing that the infrastructure of person a life is the foundation of a democratic social order. the challenge now is to realise that intimacy is democrac).
But democratisation of intimate relations requires a different striving, other than the one with which democracy has so far been familiar, namely the one of distribution of power. But the challenge before democracy. when we go out of the political system and enter the life world, is to participate in a new enfranchisement where the conflict is not only between different social groups but also between different kinds of desire -- conflict between want an individual perceives as a more desirable desire and a less desirable desire in one's life.
But a resolution of the conflict of desire cannot be solved in the ballot box. but in the reflective self of a person. It requires a distinction between attention and distraction in one's life.
In fact. as Robert Bellash and his colleagues argue in their provocative book. The Good Society, that only as a moral quest demoeracy can revitalise itself today. since it has taken itself to blind alley in the subsystems of money and power. As a moral quest. democracy is a mode of paying attention to the needs of others and the aspiration of the self.
The limits of politics as seizure of power. and the need for a moral revitalisation of the actors and institutions, is nowhere more prominent that in the case of the professional order of contemporary societies. The rise of complex system, as a consequence of revolution in science and technologies, have made professionals with expert knowledge. important in the functioning and governing of society. But the increasing significance of professionals in contemporary societies is not being accompanied by an institutional effort to arouse the moral consciousness in them, not to use their knowledge for enhancing power over those who do not know and make themselves servants of the "common good".
The distortion that professionalism introduces in the work of democratic polity, where policy elites are outside ':the effective control by the demos-, cannot be solved by power politics alone, and it requires a moral revitalisation of the self and the public sphere.
In our age of democracy, nations are heralding democracy at the very moment in which changes in the international order are compromising the possibility of an independent democratic nation state. Many of the problems that individuals within a polity are faced with. today. be it ecological disaster. terrorism, pollution or continued pauperisation defy solution at the nation-sate level, since those problems neither arise their nor are they confined t it. But the solution that democracy offers to day to the problems of global contingencies to the citizens, is. to say the least, outmoded and ineffective.
The challenges for transformation at the current euphoric moment of democratic transition is to move from democracy in the national state to democracy in the transnational sphere. But such a move requires a reflective moral self which is aware of the limits of nationalism, and the need for a transnational consciousness as the actor of politics and the protagonist of democracy.
