The Age of Consent. George Monbiot
to sustain the accumulation of wealth. They have been, by and large, abandoned by central government.
Their loyalty to other members of the tribe is unimpeachable, but whenever the livestock belonging to another tribe come within range and are insufficiently defended, those men with sufficient arms will attempt to steal them. These forays, especially since the arrival of modern weapons, can be exceedingly bloody. When I was working with the Turkana of north-western Kenya, my visit to a cattle camp was delayed by illness. By the time I arrived, all that remained of its people were their skulls and the remains of their clothes, scattered across the savannah after their bodies had been eaten by hyaenas. Warriors from another tribe had arrived in the night, surrounded the camp, and inoculated it with bullets. Ninety-six of its ninety-eight people were killed.22
The anarchists may respond that the brotherhood of man has, in this case, been corrupted by modern weaponry. There is no question that automatic weapons have accelerated conflict, but long before they first experienced the electrifying sensation of holding the stock of a gun, the people of these anarchist communities murdered their enemies when they perceived that they were favoured by the balance of power. Indeed another anarchist tribe, the Maasai, armed only with spears and knives, seized almost all the grazing lands of what is now central and southern Kenya and northern Tanzania within a century of emerging from the region the Turkana now inhabit. So the anarchists, as well as disposing of states, greed, wealth and power, would also need to disinvent all weapons which could be used to harm another person: not just bombs and automatic rifles, but also, as the massacres in Rwanda show, any bit of metal, stone or wood which can be sharpened on one side or knocked into a point. Theirs may be the perfect political system for another planet, inhabited by life-forms whose responses to scarcity and competition are the very opposite of ours. Regrettably, it is not a system destined to enhance the lives of those who live here.
The absence of government, then, is unworkable and ultimately intolerable. Communist government appears to depend on the extermination of entire categories of human being, while vesting power in the hands of unaccountable dictators. The dictatorship of vested interests, which is what passes for governance at the global level today, is oppressive and unjust. Unless some other system, which all political philosophers have so far overlooked, emerges, we are forced to conclude that all we have left is democracy.
Democracy is unattainable unless it is brokered by institutions, mandated by the people and made accountable to them, whose primary purpose is to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak and to prevent people of all stations from resolving their differences by means of violence. The collective noun for such institutions is government. So democratic government, of one kind or another, appears to be the least-worst system we can envisage. It is the unhappy lot of humankind that an attempt to develop a least-worst system emerges as the highest ideal for which we can strive. But if democracy is the only system which could deliver the Age of Consent we seek, we immediately meet a paradox. The reason why democratic governance is more likely to deliver justice than anarchism is that it possesses the capacity for coercion: the rich and powerful can be restrained, by the coercive measures of the state, from oppressing the rest of us.
This is not the only sense in which democracy compromises consent. In long-established democracies, no living person has volunteered her consent to the system under which she lives, for it pre-dates her. In some of the newer democracies, the majority of those of voting age alive today may well have supported the political system’s formation, but those who are coming of age, and will also be forced to submit to the system, have not been consulted. Succeeding generations are likely to inherit the structures approved by their parents, whether or not they wish to be bound by them themselves. Of course, we can vote for reform and seek to persuade our representatives to change the constitution, but even in the most responsive of democratic systems, citizens are unlikely to be permitted to vote to dissolve the state, not least because so many powerful people have an interest in sustaining it. As Marx noted, ‘Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own making.’23
A further problem is that, even if we do change the system, and a large majority approves of that change, there will always be people who do not. Yet they, just as much as everyone else, must surrender their consent and submit to the will of the majority. This is a distressing property of the democratic order: that it does not permit those who wish to remove themselves from the system to do so. But it appears to be a necessary one, if we are to prevent the powerful from escaping the legal restraints which defend us, however inadequately, from exploitation. This does not mean that we cannot break the rules with which we disagree. Indeed from time to time, many of us in the global justice movement violate the laws against criminal damage, obstruction or breach of the peace for political purposes, and believe we are morally justified in doing so. But the sustenance of the democratic state requires that we should expect it to seek to prevent us from doing so. We can, of course, use civil disobedience to try to change the law when, as it so often does, it discriminates in favour of the powerful. But without a body of law and the assumption of equality before it, the weak are without institutional defence.
In another sense, however, democracy is more consensual than any other political system, in that it is the only one which, in principle at least, consistently provides us with opportunities for dissent. It permits us to express our disapproval of policies and ideologies which offend us, to vote against them, and to overthrow them without bloodshed. No other system offers this. Orthodox Marxist regimes are viciously intolerant of dissenters. Anarchist systems appear to offer great scope for dissent within a community, as well as the opportunity to leave that community and join another one, but because they do not protect us from persecution, the only means of dissenting from the violence of others is through greater violence of our own. If we happen to possess the less effective weapons or belong to the smaller community, that dissent will be pointless. The dictatorship of vested interests offers opportunities for dissent only to those who represent the vested interests.
This is not to say that democracy is without substantial and systemic dangers. The most obvious of these is the tyranny of the majority. There have been plenty of states run by democratically elected governments which have, with majority consent, persecuted their minorities. The theoretical defences against this danger – such as weighted voting and special consultation rights – are flimsy and introduce problems of their own, such as complexity (rendering the political system less comprehensible and therefore less accountable) and definition (the laws designed to defend oppressed peoples can be exploited by oppressive minorities). But in this respect democracy appears to work rather better in practice than it does in theory. In most democratic countries, despite the recent advance of the far right, public acceptance of ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals, children born out of wedlock and other oppressed groups appears to have increased with time. The same could not be said, for example, of the Muslim theocracies. Democracies whose people have access to communications technology appear to be self-improving in this respect, because they provide the political space in which minorities can explain themselves to the majority.
Another obvious danger is the crude and clumsy nature of the decision-making process. In representative systems, elections tend to be won or lost on just one or two issues, yet almost every party standing for election has dozens of policies. By choosing one potential government over another, we are forced to select an entire package, parts of which may be disagreeable to us. Representative systems permit a small degree of modification. If a political position turns out to be so offensive to the general will that it can threaten the survival of the government, it is likely to be dropped. But this is an insufficient safeguard, as most policies, though they may be particularly hurtful to a few people, or mildly hurtful to most people, are unlikely to generate sufficient opposition to threaten the entire government, especially if they are so complex that few will bother to discover what all their implications may be. This can be ameliorated a little by introducing an element of participatory democracy into a representative system, though this, as Chapter 4 shows, has its own limitations.