Democracy is under pressure, but history suggests it will return

Democracy is in retreat or at least on the defensive almost everywhere, while wars are getting bigger and more frequent.

The trend lines are frighteningly bad. There are big wars in Ukraine and Sudan and another one is only on temporary hold in Gaza.

Smaller wars are underway in Yemen, Myanmar and Thailand/Cambodia and a larger and nastier one will start if the US attacks Venezuela.

It hasn’t been this bad for a long time. Similarly with politics: the biggest countries are already controlled by authoritarian populists (India and the US) or outright dictators (Russia and China).

Britain, France, Germany and Brazil could also easily fall into populist hands at the next election.

All those regimes except China and India would deny climate change, so that disaster would accelerate.

We can’t wish this all away by putting it in perspective. The risks are real and the problems are urgent.

But they are all problems caused by human behaviour, which means that human beings can fix them.

ALSO READ: Makgoba warns that democracy is under threat in South Africa

Start with the perceived decline of democracy, which most people see as a recent and fragile system. It is nothing of the sort.

Democracy is actually the innovation that made us fully human. Like our nearest evolutionary relatives, the chimpanzees, our distant ancestors lived in small groups that were constantly at war with their neighbours.

We presumably also started out with a similar social structure to the other great apes: a dominant male cowing the other males into submission and trying – but failing – to monopolise sexual access to the females.

But there must have been a social revolution long ago, because when anthropologists began studying the last isolated hunter-gatherer groups about 75 years ago, they were all living in egalitarian bands: all hunters were equal.

They had also become “imperfectly pair-bonding”: most people lived in two-parent families, although the status of women varied from group to group.

This, not the events in the US and France in the late 18th century, was the true democratic revolution. The principle of equality is the real foundation of democracy and it probably took root as soon as little groups of humans developed language complex enough to express that idea.

They went on fighting wars, of course, because resources were always scarce. Their egalitarian bands were often quite oppressive, because they methodically cut down the tall poppies in the name of equality.

But all our ancestors lived in tiny democracies until we developed civilisation. Civilisation killed equality for 10 000 years, because the social rules that enforced it had relied on direct contacts among a quite limited number of individuals – almost always fewer than a hundred.

ALSO READ: Are South Africa’s laws too complex to work?

They could not be adapted to mass societies that lacked mass communications. But then, about two-and-a-half centuries ago, democracy re-emerged in the first societies with mass media.

Of course, it came back. That’s who we really are, although we also have this older tradition of chimpanzee-style tyranny that occasionally comes to the surface.

Maybe it’s even useful sometimes, in extreme emergencies. But give people mass communications and they will eventually find a way to reinstall democracy.

As for war, it remained acceptable – at least to the winners – until the cost of winning got too high. That was only about a century ago and, frankly, progress since then in getting war under control has been faster than anybody expected.

When the first nuclear weapons fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nobody believed they would not be used again for eighty years. Eighty years and counting, actually.

These perspectives offer no consolation whatever to Ukrainians, Palestinians and Sudanese of today and the scale of potential catastrophes grows with the scale and complexity of our civilisation. Nuclear weapons, global pandemics, climate change, artificial intelligence: it’s a lot to manage, but so far so good.

Adam Frank of the University of Rochester is our best guide on that. He began building simple “toy” models of imaginary global civilisations more or less similar to our own to see if any of them made it through the kind of bottleneck we seem to be entering now.

He ran the programme hundreds of times and the answer is that most of them didn’t make it through. But some did.

NOW READ: Ramaphosa defends SA’s unity amid ‘false narratives designed to sow fear and hatred’