Democracy today, caught between institutional leviathans and technological monopolies

A few days ago, in Sassuolo’s beautiful square, I attended a lecture by Simona Forti on the contemporary far right. It was a friendly, rigorous lecture, ‘anti-extremist’ even in its tone and interpretative approaches. Over the course of an hour, Forti discussed both Plato and Thiel without ever confusing the levels within the great cauldron of pop exhibitionism – a tendency to which, by contrast, a growing number of intellectuals, accustomed to treating festivals as circus tents, are succumbing. While describing the ideologies in which evolutionism blends with accelerationism, and sketching portraits of the prince’s advisers who spread them between Washington and Moscow, Forti warned that we cannot counter all this with a rhetorical defence of democracy, inherited by inertia from more peaceful times. If the Bannons and Dugins are poking their fingers into the wound to tear it open and bleed us dry, it is no good pretending our skin is unblemished. It is hard to object to such a reasonable argument. Here I would like to add just a few side notes, which I also owe to my reading of Arendt, of whom Forti is a keen scholar.

The first fallacy to avoid, it seems to me, is that of acting within a ‘polis’. It is a misguided metaphor, one that deceives and disappoints. Not only because we are usually dealing with enormous leviathans, but because even in local assemblies we find ourselves discussing proposals that almost always go over the heads of individual communities. Thus, the political creativity described by Arendt – linked to the model of ‘elementary republics’ and, in its free action, opposed to mere economic and organisational necessities – is easily stifled. Bureaucratic and institutional gigantism either depresses or fanatises. As Constant had already observed, anyone in a modern state—founded on representation and ‘bourgeois’ life—who believes they can appeal to ancient virtues will either fail or pave the way for a tyrannical mobilisation in which citizen-subjects have only obligations and no real capacity to participate in power. This divide between community and society deserves to be examined with clear-eyed judgement; and the temptation to abolish it with a stroke of the pen must be rejected. Instead, we must manage the daily frustration that stems from it – the frustration that populist movements promise to redress. For that promise of redress, as we know, translates into the deception of ideology, which simultaneously mystifies both politics and culture. This is why we must protect the critical spaces where one can do without even the minimum of demagogy indispensable to any politics, and where, consequently, more truthful analyses can be produced because they are ‘without purpose’. In their attempt to balance the books and dispel the shadows, sincere democrats often underestimate this aspect. At a very dark moment in European history, Nicola Chiaromonte pointed out that it is not a question of ‘imposing Socrates on Caligula’; rather, ‘Socrates’ existence becomes (…) a source of moral authority whose power is not measured by whether Caligulas and Attilas recognise it’.

This does not mean turning our backs on politics; it means turning our backs on the unreality that renders politics totalitarian, and which makes us unaccustomed to accepting the inevitable divisions between the various planes of our existence (theoretical and practical, knowledge and action). “In collective action, forces are combined, but ideas clash and cancel each other out,” said Alain, adding that “only the individual thinks; every assembly is stupid”There is no aristocratic air about this statement: merely a clear-sighted division of spheres that concerns us all, and the absence of which breeds practical violence by stifling thought. Yet there is one issue that deserves to be discussed ‘in the assembly’, yet is instead kept from it: that of scientific and technological development, determined by procedures that cannot be translated into everyday language. Decisions of epoch-making significance are taken in esoteric forums. Is the scientific revolution, which gave birth to democratic modernity, now holding its funeral? I cannot answer that: I can only listen (after Forti, Pievani spoke in the square in Sassuolo) and observe the repercussions of these changes in my own life as a guinea pig. Certainly, there is a great deal of frustration to contend with, between institutional leviathans and technological monopolies. In both, to quote Simone Weil, there is nothing to love; and in the defence of the rule of law against tyrannies, this impossibility of love may prove fatal to us. For the rule of law rests on an awareness that must be continually sustained by passion. It is as if to say that the private freedom of modern people must be constantly stimulated by the active freedom of the ancients. We do not know how. Yet the problem remains: what happens to the democratic faculties of those who, rather than being ready for Thermopylae or Marathon, refuse to ‘die for Danzig’ (or for Kyiv)? And how can one ask for such a sacrifice in the name of formless societies, which no one can take in at a glance?