The Devil We Create

The devil doesn't exist on his own, in and of himself. Someone opposed to the Devil is always the one who creates him, and he is always a myth. We call people the devil when they have some advantage over us-- cunning, power, amorality, ignorance-- that we don't care to inquire about, identify and understand. We create the devil when we give up and just blame them for winning without understanding, in a meaningful way, how they did it. To put it bluntly, our laziness is what creates the devil.

The Foundation of Democracy

People keep talking about the foundations of democracy, things like the press, freedom of speech, freedom, tolerance, etc. Yes, all of these things are important. However, I think what is more important than all of them is the existence of a community. Community is something that binds the people together despite disagreements and difficulties. Community is not voluntary; that is a change in the meaning of the term that has come about primarily in the age of technology. (Thinkers like Neil Postman and Zygmunt Bauma have made this point quite well.) The older idea of community means being stuck among people that you may disagree with but working it out because there is something else that binds you. It is more like family, like blood, than like free association. Community, requires compromise and identity. Compromise that allows the community to stay together through disagreements, and identity allows them to feel part of that community in their everyday life and personal experience.

All of the freedoms people usually talk about as being the foundation of democracy only tear the community apart unless the community is stronger than the individual's desire to exercise those freedoms and unless the responsibility (and it is really a responsibility to the community as a whole-- not necessarily to ideals or values) that comes with them is taken as seriously as the freedom itself. Tolerance taken to an extreme is damaging to the community as well because it can dilute identity to the point of making it meaningless. Intolerance damages the community by excluding members of the community instead of compromising with them and including them. Being over tolerant can lead to an identity that is connected only to abstract ideals that have no connection to a person's sense of self or their everyday life. That kind of identity is empty and useless.

The binding principle used to be that of a nation; that is why the rise of the nation-state and the rise of democracy coincide in modern history. But as the idea of the nation weakens, what will replace it as a binding principle?

In the US it was based mostly on belief in the political system. (I usually say that you can see what binds a people based on who and what they put on their currency.) That is why political division that erodes faith in the institutions is so troubling. In any case, that binding principle-- I like to think of it as a sense of community, or maybe family-- is the deeper foundation for democracy, deeper than all the rights, freedoms and values that people prattle on about. If that is lost, all these other things are unsustainable and maybe even dangerous.

Though people love to talk about freedom of the press (especially the press) and access to information (especially those providing us with information and technology) and their importance to democracy, neither of those is more important than a sense of community when it comes to sustaining a democracy. In fact, both of them can be quite dangerous to democracy when they erode or directly threaten community.

Ideals In Difficult Times

"All these questions remain obscure and difficult and we must neither conceal them from ourselves nor, for a moment, imagine ourselves to have mastered them. It is a question of knowing how to transform and improve the law, and of knowing if this improvement is possible within an historical space which takes place between the Law of an unconditional hospitality, offered a priori to every other, to all newcomers, whoever they may be, and the conditional laws of a right to hospitality, without which The unconditional Law of hospitality would be in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible desire, without form and without potency, and of even being perverted at any moment.
"Experience and experimentation thus." 

-- Jacques Derrida from On Cosmopolitanism

Derrida's deconstruction broke down the authority of ideas and tradition. The unconditional law, in this case the law of hospitality, can no longer be taken as unchallengeable and authoritative as if it were a transcendent Truth; it is simply something we have created. However, it is something that we have created and sustained. It is part of our tradition and is deeply rooted. It is a positive tradition that we see value in, believe in and wish to carry forward. This does not mean that it is practical or even sustainable in reality. Since it is our creation, we need to remember that their is no guarantee that it is practical, realistic or sustainable. We must 'experiment and experience thus' to see how practical, realistic and sustainable it is "within an historical space." All of our ideals, our core values, are traditions and ideas and could be put in the place that hospitality is put in here; they can be seen as unconditional laws.

I would add that it is reckless and foolish in difficult times to cling to and insists on the unconditional law, the ideal, as if it can save us and fix our problems. When the ideals are tested, it is time to-- among other things-- reassess how they have been implemented and how that contributed to creating the present situation that is testing them. This may change the ideal by reinterpreting it and strengthening or weakening it. It will definitely change how it is implemented. But these should happen through assessment of the historical situation, not through a bind and stubborn insistence on the absolute value and authority of the ideal. It must be practical but shaped by the ideal. For it to be radically idealistic in the face of practical and historical problems is dangerous and irresponsible.