Fifteen Eighty Four

In a world afflicted by an absence of trust in authority and institutions of virtually all kinds, democracy is almost everywhere in retreat and the unfreedom of authoritarianism is on the rise. At the same time, humanity is falling farther behind in its endeavors to achieve ambitious global goals for human development through sustainable economic, environmental, and social development on which all the nations of the world agreed in the United Nations. These two shortfalls from progress toward full human flourishing in a sustainable society on a sustainable planet are not unrelated. In fact, democracy and sustainable development are intricately and inseparably related. They are unavoidably linked. Democracy is not possible without sustainable development, and sustainable development is not possible without democracy.

This is so locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. This is so in every dimension of cooperative human endeavor. It is through the human development that results from sustainable development that we as individuals can become more capable of governing ourselves through true self-rule in a democracy. And it is through the institution and the practice of democracy that we as humanity can find the will to pursue and accomplish the economic, environmental, and social goals of sustainable development. Free and open democracies support the creativity and innovation that are needed for problem-solving in a world too full of the problems posed by the multiplicity of obstacles to sustainable development. And the freedom and openness that thrive in democracies feed the optimism that is indispensable to summoning the will to solve these problems and overcome these obstacles.

Democracy has both moral legitimacy and practical utility. Democracy is the only form of government with moral legitimacy. Because every human being is equal in human dignity and therefore equal in their claim to justice, every human being should have an equal say in making decisions that affect them. Democracy is morally justified, irrespective of how it works. But, in addition, as a matter of practical utility, democracy has worked, it has often worked well, and if we embrace democracy fully in conception and in practice, it can work much better now and in the future. When it is practiced within the right enabling framework, democracy is the form of government that works best for the benefit of all. The benefit of democracy for all will be maximized when it becomes fully accessible by becoming fully participatory for all. The key to democratic renewal and democratic success is full participation.

The path to global sustainable development is therefore participatory democratic global governance – the only truly effective path to confronting pandemics, military conflicts, climate change, biodiversity loss, potential overall ecological collapse, and all else that increasingly threatens human civilization. We live in a world of accelerating and ceaseless change, a world in which, every day, change threatens more and more to overwhelm us, including especially the unnatural changes we humans have made and are stubbornly still making to the natural world. It is a world in which we are realizing, slowly and belatedly, that the human world and the natural world are one and the same and – like democracy and sustainable development – are inseparably linked.

Some of the tools we have made, and the ways we have made them, are eroding the very foundations of human civilization and endangering the very future of our planet. We live within a “technosphere” of our making that in turn exists within a biosphere we are unmaking, and our limited vision and our lack of mutual trust are preventing us from seeing how we might live and prosper in some other – in some sustainable – way. We need new ways of seeing and acting that are grounded in and proceed from this current reality and that will shape and reshape the ways we try to live together and work together with the oneness of humanity and humanity’s oneness with nature constantly in mind. We must figure out together how we can have both human prosperity and a healthy planet, and then, together, we must make it happen.

The many threats we face can only be met by making something new. We must have both participatory democracy and planetary sustainability. The only way to attain them both is to pursue them both at the same time. This can be done by summoning and employing the best of both the individual wisdom and collective wisdom of humanity through a cooperative combination of right representation and the random selection of sortition. It can be done by starting with linking and scaling the thousands of innovative local and regional sustainability networks that are experimenting with new forms of democratic participation worldwide and by building from there to establish new and reformed structures that will vastly enhance democratic participation, create living democracy, and inspire cooperative, affirmative, and effective human actions for sustainable development at every level of global governance.

We must create and re-create public trust. This can only be done through the creation of more democratic participation. Without much more extensive democratic participation than exists now throughout the world, and at every level of governance, there will not be sufficient popular support for the something new that is needed. Without much broader and deeper popular support, the necessary new ways of shaping how we live within the world cannot be created. If decisions about how best to do this essential shaping are not made in a way that is fully democratic, then the best decisions will not be made, the best results will not be achieved, and one of two eventualities will follow. Either decisions will not be made at all, as seems likely on our current course, leaving civilization confronting the prospect of chaos and collapse on a hotter and more precarious planet; or, not too many years from now, decisions will be made, but not democratically, and those decisions will be imposed by undemocratic powers from above, leaving people everywhere in the clutches of coercion, trapped in a dark new world, and shorn of what semblance of control they may currently have over their lives and their futures.

Humanity set out on the democratic path – the path of human equality and human self-rule – twenty-five hundred years ago on a hill on the outskirts of ancient Athens called the Pnyx where the Athenians first practiced something that can be identified as democracy. There were many shortcomings in that first democracy, to be sure. Most Athenians – including women, slaves, and immigrants – were excluded from that democracy because they were not permitted to be citizens. The only citizens were free men aged 18 or older. Yet, this minority of citizens practiced a combination of direct democracy and participatory democracy that offers insights for us today in how we might structure and foster sustainable collective action through democratic global governance. Knowing how the ancient Athenians set out on the democratic path from the Pnyx can teach us much about how today we must rediscover and follow it. Above all, the ancient Athenian democratic experiment teaches us that real democracy – real self-rule – requires full participation by all citizens. It requires that democracy be, as the 20^th century American philosopher John Dewey expressed it, a way of life.

In making democracy a way of life, we must keep our current democratic and international institutions, but we must also reform them. The mountains of political money and the misshapen political structures that prevent right representation of the people who elect democratic representatives must be eliminated. A right representation that is based much more on merit will provide us with more of the best of individual wisdom. But that will not be enough. In addition to right representation, there must also be new forms of democratic expression that provide us with the best of collective wisdom. In this way, individual wisdom and collective wisdom can be combined into deciding and taking democratic human action that will truly solve problems and produce the best and the most sustainable results for everyone everywhere.

Through the addition of the random selection of sortition, such as that practiced by the ancient Athenians, to our current representative means of democratic governance, we can reimagine our current forms of cooperation at every level of governance to make them more truly democratic, and we can enlist collective wisdom for the common good. The Athenians used a machine called a kleroterion to select members of jury courts and administrative boards randomly from among citizen volunteers. In our scientific age, through modern scientific means of random sampling, we can create a new form of democratic participation in which every variation of the voice of humanity can have an equal chance to be heard and every individual person can have an equal opportunity to share in decision-making. The new structures of democratic governance that are established in this way can be added to existing institutions of governance and made a part of new institutions of governance – from the local up to and including the global. They can supplement and complement what already exists, making it vastly more democratic and making it also vastly more effective.

Through random selection from among large numbers of volunteers worldwide, we must create “circles for nature” and “circles for the future” to advise all institutions at every level of governance globally on how best they can protect the interests of the planet and those of future human generations in their democratic decision making. In addition, through random selection from among volunteers using scientific sampling to produce a representative sample of human diversity, we must also create for every institution at every level – including the United Nations and all other international institutions and arrangements – new “circles of participation.” These “circles of participation” would make decisions jointly with traditional institutional bodies of elected and appointed representatives at local, national, and global levels of governance. For international institutions, there could be increasing millions of volunteers in the pools of people who volunteer for random selection to serve by scientific sampling.

In creating fully participatory democratic global governance, these “circles of participation” would comprise an interlinked network of global participation within our existing international institutions that would be a central part of a new system of democratic global governance. There would be multiple levels of multidimensional, multiconnected “circles of participation,” ascending and descending through interaction at different tiers of governance, linking, overlapping, and jointly acting in different sectors and on different subjects of governance, in an ongoing expression of human imagination and democratic will. These global participatory circles would become rings of human action in which everyone throughout the world would have an equal opportunity to participate. This enormously increased extent of democratic participation worldwide would help dispel the distrust that now immobilizes the world and would enable the human actions for sustainable development that are urgently needed. It would give new life to human institutions at every level of governance by enlivening them with fully democratic participation. It would return us to the path from the Pnyx. In a long life of public service, I have had the privilege of serving at every level of governance in significant legislative, administrative, and judicial roles of responsibility. These proposals for participatory global democracy may seem impractical politically, but they need not be. They may seem far away from realization, but they need not be. How all this could be accomplished and structured, as well as much more about how it would work for full human flourishing in a sustainable world, is explained in detail in my new book, Democracy for a Sustainable World: The Path from the Pnyx, from Cambridge University Press.