Democracy:
The Least Bad
Form of
Government
By Ian Morris
“No-one pretends
that democracy is perfect or allwise,” Winston Churchill observed
in 1947. “Indeed, it has been
said that democracy is the worst
form of Government except all
those other forms that have been
tried from time to time.” And most people tend to agree with Churchill’s sentiment that nothing
beats the wisdom of the crowd. In 2007, EU polls found that around the world, regardless of
country, continent, age, gender or religion, about 80 percent of respondents believed democracy
was the best way to run a society.
And yet, very few people felt this way until very recently. Throughout most of recorded history,
democracy has consistently equated to mob rule. Even in November 1787, a mere two months after
playing a leading role in drafting the U.S. Constitution, James Madison took it for granted that
“democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.”
To me, this raises one of the biggest but least asked questions in global politics: Should we assume
that we are cleverer than our predecessors and that we have finally figured out the best way of
organizing communities, regardless of their circumstances? Or should we assume that because
democracy has a history, it — like everything else in history — will someday pass away?
The Technological Challenge to Democracy
I have been thinking about this question a lot since this spring, when I attended a dinner hosted by
Stanford University’s cybersecurity committee on how cybersocial networks might affect
democracy. (Serving on committees is generally the worst part of an academic’s life, but some can
be rather rewarding by exposing their members to a range of new ideas.) My fellow diners were
mostly members of Stanford’s political and computer science departments, and much of the
conversation centered on the details of designing better voting machines or networking citizens for
online town hall meetings. But some of the talk rose above the minutiae and into grander, more
abstract speculation on what supercomputers and our growing ability to crunch large data sets
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might mean for the voice of the people.
The past decade has seen huge advances in algorithms for aggregating and identifying preferences.
We have all become familiar with one of the more obvious consequences of this trend: Personalized
ads, tailored to our individual browsing histories, pop up unbidden on our computer screens on a
regular basis. But research has moved beyond studying its effects on decisions about consumption
and on to decisions about justice and politics. When tested against the 68,000 individual votes that
have been cast in the U.S. Supreme Court since 1953, a computer model known as {Marshall}+
correctly predicted the outcomes of 71 percent of cases. Meanwhile, an algorithm designed at
University of Warwick predicted the outcome of the 2015 British election with 91 percent accuracy
by analyzing political tweets.
Admittedly, there is still a long way to go. {Marshall}+ is good, but it cannot compete with Jacob
Berlove, a 30-year-old resident of Queens, N.Y., who has no formal legal or statistical training but is
able to predict the Supreme Court’s votes with 80 percent accuracy. And while the Twitteranalyzing algorithm got many things right about the British vote, it was utterly wrong on the one
thing that really mattered: the relative tallies of the Labor and Conservative parties.
But as technologists like to say, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Algorithms are still in their infancy, and I
would guess that by the time self-driving cars become a common sight on our roads (2020,
according to Google; 2025, according to most auto manufacturers), our computers will have a better
idea of what we want our politicians to do than we do ourselves. And should that come to pass, we
might expect two additional predictions to play out as well.
The first seems uncontroversial: Even fewer people will bother to vote. In the United States’ 2012
presidential election, only 58 percent of citizens took the time to exercise their right to vote. In the
2014 midterm elections, that figure dropped to 36 percent. Other Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development countries aren’t much better: On average, only seven of every 10
voters participate in member states’ elections. In Switzerland’s 2011 legislative elections, only four
of every 10 voters participated. How much further should we expect participation to fall when
technocrats confirm citizens’ suspicions that their votes don’t really matter?
The second prediction is even more ominous: When our computers know best what we want from
politicians, it won’t be a big leap to assume that they will also know better than the politicians what
needs to be done. And in those circumstances, flesh-and-blood politicians with all their
imperfections may start to seem as dispensable as the elections that we have thus far used to
choose them.
Omniscient computers that run the world are a staple of science fiction, but they are not what we
are talking about here. As Churchill said, political machines do not need to be perfect or all-wise, just
less error-prone, ignorant and/or venal than democracy or any of those other forms of government
that have been tried from time to time.
Science fiction stories also often feature people rising up in arms against machines, violently
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overthrowing their too-clever-by-half computers before they take over mankind’s future. But I
suspect that this scenario has no more connection with reality than Isaac Asimov’s Foundation
trilogy, one of my favorite science fiction renditions of the all-knowing computer that controls
human society. After all, we already casually entrust our lives to algorithms. There was a time when
people worried about computers controlling traffic lights, but because they did such a good job of it,
that fear eventually subsided. Now, some worry about driverless cars in much the same way, but
these fears will also fade if the vehicles cut the number of fatalities on the road by 99 percent by
2050, as McKinsey consultants have predicted. In doing so, they would save 30,000 lives and
$190 billion in health care costs each year in the United States alone.
My guess is that humanity will almost certainly never face a momentous, once-and-for-all choice
between following our instincts or following algorithms. Rather, we will be salami-sliced into a postdemocratic order as machines prove themselves to be more competent than us in one area of life
after another.
How Democracy Rises and Falls
One reason it is so difficult to forecast where this trend might take us is that there is a shortage of
good historical comparisons that would allow us to see how other people have coped with similar
issues. There is, in fact, really only one: ancient Greece.
The use of historical analogies is a problem in its own right, because one of the most common
blunders in policymaking is drawing simplistic, 1:1 correlations between a current event and a single
case in the past. Noting similarities between contemporary problems and some earlier episode (say,
between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s moves in Ukraine and Hitler’s actions in the
Sudetenland), strategists regularly — and often erroneously — conclude that because action A led to
result B in the past, it will do so again in the present. The flaw in that sort of thinking is that for every
similarity that exists between 1938 and 2015, there are also dozens of differences. The only way to
know if the lessons we are drawing from history are right is to look at a large number of cases,
identifying broad patterns that reveal not only general trends but also the kinds of forces that might
undermine them, causing a specific case to turn out much differently than we might expect.
But because democracy has been an extremely rare occurrence, examples of societies abandoning
democracy are also extremely rare. Therefore, we have little alternative to comparing our own world
with ancient Greece. The analogy, though only able to provide limited insight, is still rather
illuminating.
Ancient Greece differed from the modern world in many ways, the most obvious of which were its
low levels of technology and its small scale. (Even a relatively huge Greek city-state like fifthcentury Athens had only 350,000 residents.) Not surprisingly, its democracy differed too: Rights
were restricted to free adult males, who made up about 20 percent of the population, and
democratic values regularly coexisted alongside slavery. Greek democracy thus had more in
common with 1850s Virginia than with today’s United States.
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And yet, ancient and modern democracies have all shared the same basic logic. Since around 3000
B.C. — as far back as our evidence dates — nearly all complex, hierarchical societies have rested on
the belief that a few people have privileged access to a supernatural sphere. From Egypt’s first
pharaoh to France’s Louis XIV, we find the same claim repeated and largely accepted: Because we
kings and our priests know what God or the gods want, it makes perfect sense for the rest of you to
do what we say. But for reasons that continue to be debated, many Greeks began rejecting this idea
between about 750 B.C. and 500 B.C. Around A.D. 1500-1750, many northwestern Europeans
(and their colonists in North America) went down a similar path. Both sets of revolutionaries then
had to confront the same pair of questions: If no one really knows what God or the gods want, how
can we tell what to do and how to run a good society?
Both groups gradually drifted toward similar answers. Even though no one knows so much that we
can leave all the big decisions to him alone, they said, each of us (or us men) knows a little bit.
Pooling our wisdom won’t necessarily produce the right or best answers, but it should nevertheless
produce the least bad answers possible under the circumstances. Bit by bit, Greek city-states in the
sixth century B.C. transferred power from the aristocratic councils to broader assemblies of male
citizens. By the fifth century B.C., they had begun calling their new constitution dêmokratia, which
literally means “people power.” Similarly, between the late 18th and 20th centuries, European
states and their overseas colonists led the way in gradually shifting power from royals and nobles to
representatives of the people, eventually going beyond the Greeks by outlawing slavery and
enfranchising women.
In both cases, democracy rested on the twin pillars of efficiency and justice. On the one hand, the
unavailability of god-given rulers meant that listening to the voice of the people was the most
efficient way to figure out what to do; on the other, if everyone knows something but no one knows
everything, the only just system is one that gives everyone equal rights.
In Greece, this consensus began breaking down around 400 B.C. under the strain of the
Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. A few military leaders, including the Spartan Adm.
Lysander, accumulated so much power that they seemed to surpass ordinary mortals, and
philosophers like Plato began to question the wisdom of the crowd. What if, Plato asked, democracy
pools not our collective insights but our collective ignorance, leading not to the least bad solutions
but to the least good? What if the only way to find truth is to rely on the thinking of a tiny number
of truly exceptional beings?
The answer came in the persons of Philip the Great and his son, Alexander. The former conquered
the whole of mainland Greece between 359 B.C. and 338 B.C., while the latter did the same to the
entire Persian Empire by 324 B.C. Both men aggressively pushed the idea that they were
superhuman. In one famous story, set around the border between modern-day India and Pakistan,
Alexander summoned a group of Hindu sages to test their wisdom. “How can a man become god?”
he asked one of them. The sage responded, “By doing something a man cannot do.” It is hard not to
picture Alexander then asking himself who, to his knowledge, had done something a man cannot
do. The answer must have been unavoidable: “Me. I, Alexander, just conquered the entire Persian
Empire in 10 years. No mere mortal could do that. I must be divine.”
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Emboldened, Alexander proclaimed at the Olympic Festival in 324 B.C. that all Greeks should
worship him as a god. Initially, the people responded with bemusement; Athenian politician
Demosthenes said, “All right, make him the son of Zeus — and of Poseidon too, if that’s what he
wants.” But the sheer scale of Alexander’s achievements had genuinely shattered the assumptions
of the previous two centuries. A new elite was concentrating such wealth and power into its hands
that its members really did seem superhuman. When Demetrius the Besieger, the son of one of
Alexander’s generals, seized Athens in 307 B.C., Athenians rushed to offer him divine honors as the
“Savior God,” and over the next 100 years, worshipping kings became commonplace. Plenty of
city-states — more than ever before, in fact — liked to call themselves dêmokratiai, but small elite
circles with good connections to the kings’ courts took control of all important decisions.
Democracy swept Greece after 500 B.C. because it solved the specific problem of how to know
what to do and run a good society if no one had privileged access to divine wisdom. It unraveled
around 300 B.C. because the achievements of Alexander and his successors seemed to show that
some people did in fact have such access. Democracy’s claim to be the most efficient form of
government looked like nonsense once large numbers of Greeks began to believe that their leaders
were the sons of gods; its claim that justice meant giving every man equal rights looked equally
ludicrous when some men, thought to be demigods, so obviously seemed to deserve more rights
than others.
Democracy: A Solution to Particular Problems
While it is highly unlikely that the 21st-century world will follow the same path as Greece in the
fourth and third centuries B.C., I will close by suggesting that there nevertheless might be an
important lesson in this ancient analogy. Democracy is not a timeless, perfect political order; it is a
solution to particular problems. When these problems disappear, as they eventually did in ancient
Greece, democracy’s claims to superior efficiency and justice can vanish with them.
Democracy has a solid foundation to its claims of being the most efficient and just solution to the
particular challenges of the 19th and 20th centuries. But now, we are making machines that have
much stronger claims to godlike omniscience than either Philip or Alexander had. Economist
Thomas Piketty already worries about the growing gap between rich and poor that “automatically
generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values
on which democratic societies are based,” but in terms of significance, these pale in comparison to
the consequences of creating new forms of intelligence that dwarf anything humanity is capable of.
Put simply, the end of democracy may be one of the least shocking changes that the 21st century
will bring.
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