Today I’m going to take you disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind, down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, the haunted frightened trees, out to the windy beach, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. It will be, as you might guess from that introduction, a journey that at times becomes dark. The light that shines into that darkness comes from you and from me, from the way our society fits together.
This line of thinking takes us onward because whilst Johnny, you don’t know Johnny, he doesn’t come into this story except to say that whilst he’s been in the basement mixing up the medicine, I’ve been on the pavement thinking about the government. I’ve particularly been thinking about democracy and Churchill’s quote that it’s the worst form of government except all others. What I’ve been thinking is that it’s a great line but he’s wrong. This is a reflection that would win prizes in the world championships for l’espirit d’escalier. Since there are no such prizes, no such championships and since you might not be practitioners of l’espirit d’escalier yourselves, I should clarify. Denis Diderot, the French philosopher of the enlightenment, created the phrase to describe the feeling of being put down at a party and leaving, crushed, out the front door and down the staircase to the pavement at which point, hopelessly beyond any kind of retort the perfect words come to you. Since the line about democracy being the worst form of government comes from a speech made in 1943 in which Churchill, who himself died in 1965, was quoting an earlier maxim, it’s clear that my comeback is hopelessly late. This is not going to deter me.
Democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people and it is a remarkable thing. You’ll note that there is here no mention of politicians, of elections, of government by majority – democracy is simply government by those who are governed to the benefit of everyone. Elections are the worst form of making this happen – except for all the other methods – and this may be what Churchill was thinking – certainly his wider musings on Democracy focused on the ordinary man placing a little cross in a box. Elections decide who is going to represent the people, who is going to do the jobs of governing and unfortunately – this is what makes them so bad – they give the impression that democracy is about winning and losing, about parties, about choosing someone who will act in your self-interest. It’s not. The job of MPs, senators, congressmen, prime ministers and presidents is to be the people who govern for the people. I think it’s easy for them to forget this – to think that it’s their side they are governing for, that the majority is right. But this is simply mob rule – it’s not democracy.
You may have already suspected that some of this assembly exists in quotes and I have indeed chosen a poet to illuminate my thoughts. Here we have a line from 1964 that seems very prescient in the light of January 2021. “Come senators, congressmen please heed the call, don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall. For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled. The battle outside raging will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls.” When elections are about winning, when democracy is government by the majority for the majority, we have mob rule and when you have that you invite a bigger, more violent mob to rule in your place.
My favourite example of democracy is not the ballot box but the jury room. A few years ago I was called for jury service – I was slightly grumpy because it was the first fortnight of my summer holidays and I was, as I always am by that point, exhausted. However, I believe in public service so I didn’t try to get out of it and I went down to Woolwich Crown Court with a copy of a book called The Juryman’s Tale by Trevor Grove. It’s a journalist’s account of being on a jury for a long fraud case – over a year. It’s a great book that is completely convincing on the argument in favour of trial by jury. I recommend it strongly even if you wait to read it, as I did, until you’re called for jury service yourself. My case was more straightforward than Trevor Grove’s: a young man was picked up late at night by the police and was found to have half a pound of cannabis in one of his pockets. The reason that I think this is such a good illustration of democracy is that his fate was not decided by lawyers or politicians or the good and the great – it was decided by twelve ordinary people from the communities of southeast London. Students, workers from hospitality and construction, small business owners, the retired and one rather sleepy headteacher. Of the people, by the people, for the people – and for the people we listened to the evidence, thought really hard, weighed up the arguments, argued extensively, brought all our different experiences and ideas and mixed them all up in the privacy of the jury room to do our very best to get to a truth we could all agree on. I honestly believe that democracy is the best form of government – it’s just that elections are the worst form of deciding on representatives (except for all the others).
A sidestep into some thoughts from the poet. He asks us three questions:
Ah. Just doesn’t see what? Doesn’t see the mountain washed into the sea, doesn’t see people not allowed to be free, doesn’t see slavery, injustice, violence, death? Our poet is Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Minnesota 83 years ago; he’s a Nobel prize winner, possibly the greatest songwriter of all time and woefully under-represented in our assemblies, at least partly because whenever I reach for a New-York based singer-songwriter from the 1960s I turn to the slightly more melodious Paul Simon. The Zimmerman family, like everyone if you go far enough back, were immigrants: Bob’s paternal grandparents had escaped from the Russian Empire following the 1905 pogrom and his maternal grandparents were Lithuanian Jews who had come to the US a few years earlier. The 1905 pogrom was the worst anti-Jewish pogrom in Odessa’s history up to that point – ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Greeks killed over 400 and damaged or destroyed 1600 properties. I say “up to that point” because although this was only one of five pogroms in Odessa and Odessa was only one of dozens of locations of anti-Jewish pogroms across the 19th and early 20th centuries, it doesn’t come close to the events of October 1941 in which over the space of two days around 25,000 Jews were shot or burned to death under the Romanian military occupation of what is now western Ukraine.
A story like that has us asking why, and how. Why would anyone behave like that, how can society have broken down so far to allow it. Bob Dylan looks to the blowing of the wind for answers, but I think it’s closer to home than we’d like. I think that it comes from othering minorities – thinking their value is less because there are fewer of them; I think it comes from envy, acquisitiveness, a desire to make our own lives better no matter what it costs others; I think it comes from anger, from grudges being held at past wrongs, from an inability to seek or offer forgiveness; I think it comes from fear, from wanting to harm the other person so they can’t harm you; and I think it comes from a willingness to turn to violence to solve problems, to turn our back on discussion and disagreement as a way to peace. I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes and just for that one moment I could be you. And I wish that I could offer that blessing to every quarrel, every war.
I can’t. And wars go on, and people die, and the world right now has towering injustices, atrocities, cruelty and I’m not ok with that but I don’t know how to stop it – put your guns down and stop killing the babies would be step one, but the people who do what I tell them are in this room and you’re not the ones with the guns. I told you this got dark. Bob Dylan tells us that democracy don’t rule the world, you better get that in your head. This world is ruled by violence, but I guess that’s better left unsaid. He’s right in a way – democracy isn’t the natural state of affairs, it’s not just what happens, it’s not the American Way, nor the British one for that matter – it’s what you get when we people decide to put down our guns and swords and rocks and anger, and talk to each other; so long as we also lower our voices, listen, allow each other to speak; so long as we make space for everyone who makes space for others.
That last line is an equivocation – I don’t believe that tolerance means putting up with intolerance but I do believe that we have to put up with those whose arguments we find hateful so long as they are making the arguments rather than fighting for them, so long as they are listening to the arguments of others, so long as they are making space for us as we make space for them. The only thing about democracy that’s easy is the elections – the gladiatorial contest, left-right, right-wrong, good-bad, yah-boo. Put your X in a box and count up to see who’s won. It’s the worst possible way to choose our representatives – except for all the others – but so long as we remember that they are our representatives, that their role is to govern the people as the people for the people, and so long as we remind them of this, and live as though we believe it to be true then maybe we can keep our democracy. Maybe we can continue to live in a world where a young black man, found at night by the police with illegal drugs is not deported secretly to South America but has his case heard in open court and has his guilt determined not via ideology, not according to politics, not by the privileged few, but by a gaggle of ordinary men and women, ordinary people, doing their best to find the truth.
Though you might hear laughing, spinning, swinging madly across the sun it’s not aimed at anyone. And, if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme to your tambourine in time it’s just a ragged clown behind, I wouldn’t pay it any mind, it’s just a shadow you’re seeing that he’s chasing and if you can come up with a suitable and coherent riposte to that poetic thought before you’ve descended the staircase then you can consider yourself truly one step up on both Denis Diderot and Johnny, you don’t know Johnny, he’s still in the basement.
Footnotes:
1. The Bob Dylan songs quoted are Mr Tambourine Man (1965); Subterranean Homesick Blues (also 1965); The Times They Are A Changin' (1964); Blowin' in the Wind (1963); Positively 4th Street (1965) and Union Sundown (1983)
2. Democracy is also a theme in World of Difference
3. It's possible (but unlikely) that the Johnny in this assembly is the same one as in I Got Rhythm