Introduction
Democracy, for Dewey, is a humble form of government in that both its inputs and its outputs are rooted in quotidian experience. Everyday life tells us where the shoe pinches, and what has relieved the chaffing.
In a democracy, moreover, the relevant experiences come from the humble of society just as much as the exalted. Equality in having our interests served, as well as judging how they have been served, forms the foundation of democratic politics (Neblo, 2015).Yet, there is also a kind of hubris in democracy. Everyday experience provides a notoriously myopic lens through which to view the good of the commonwealth. Those of a more aristocratic bent have long claimed that the common person tends toward avidity for immediate and personal gain at the expense of the long-term flourishing of all. T. S. Eliot, no democrat in his politics, cautions us against myopia toward both the past and the future. In the Four Quartets he writes that there is “only a limited value / In the knowledge gained from experience... The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” Like Burke before him, Eliot believes that we tend to overestimate our ability to innovate ways to realize our future goals reliably, and to underestimate the past as a guide to what we really should want and how best to get it.
Juxtaposing Dewey and Eliot like this puts one in mind of the useful cliche attributed to Churchill that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.The juxtaposition, however, also puts us in a better position to see why democracy is so allegedly bad, and how we might hedge against its badness.Attending carefully to the role of humility in democracy, then, can help us improve on its advantages over “all the others”—hopefully rendering the currently resurgent attractions of non-democratic regimes less tempting.
We first identify key distinctions between types of democracy, humility, and actors. The three models of democracy discussed here require differing levels of humility from different democratic actors, but deliberative models place particular expectations on citizens themselves.
To soften the apparent implications of these demands, we discuss the virtue of sophrosγne as a governor of just and humble discourse. Finally, we propose that a more complicated model of humility can provide plentiful room for further study regarding its relationship with efficacy and democratic innovation.
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