On democracy and 24/7 libraries
Credit to Author: SASS ROGANDO SASOT| Date: Wed, 03 Apr 2019 19:59:48 +0000
DEMOCRACY has been prefiguring a lot in our national discourse in the last three years. I’ve been contemplating it. Here are three streams of reflection that flowed out of the well of that contemplation.
Democracy and impermanence. Democracy is a way of managing complexity. It does this by clearly locating the legitimate source of political power: the demos (the people).
Though the boundaries of the demos are historically contingent, there is nothing ambiguous about democracy’s source of political legitimacy. As political scientist Arash Abizadeh puts it in On the Demos and Its Kin: Nationalism, Democracy, and the Boundary Problem, democracy demands “that the human object of power, those persons over whom it is exercised, also be the subject of power, those who (in some sense) author its exercise.”
Though I agree that democracy doesn’t entail arriving at answers that are definite in perpetuity, the enactments of the demos are definite in their own context. Certainly, democracy cannot provide ultimate answers; but this is not because democracy is about ambiguity, as historian Leloy Claudio said in 2015, when he warned people against voting for Rodrigo Duterte.
This is because the demos renews itself. With each renewal comes the possibility of revising, for better or for worse, the decisions of earlier demos. What democracy brings is not ambiguity but temporary certainty.
Instead of continuing to live in ambiguity about who has the right to exercise political power over them, the demos periodically elect people who would have this right. To bring order to their relations, the demos decide the rules that could keep them all in awe. These rules are certain until the demos decide to replace them with new rules. These are temporary certainties that the demos enact in order to tame the wildness of the political dimension of the human condition.
Democratic maturity. Democracy didn’t die because you lost in a disagreement. Democracy is a means to an uncertain end. The ends of a democracy are determined by democratic contestation, i.e. as a result of political struggle. Part of our duty in living in a democracy is to accept the inevitability of the non-finality of our ideals as they would always be subject to being changed through democratic contestation. Just like in every contest, someone wins, someone loses.
Democratic maturity then entails accepting that you can’t always get what you want without fighting for it and that losing the fight is as legitimate as winning it.
Democratic mindset. In Handyside v. UK (1976), the European Court of Human Rights identified the three principles that serve as “the hallmarks of a democratic society”: pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness.
Pluralism refers to diversity. Diversity and not intelligent and informed discussion serves as the foundation of a vibrant democracy. Diversity is not a gathering of people singing praise to one another, massaging each other’s personal or supra-personal egos, intellectually masturbating each other, living in a blissful state of duplicates singing “Kumbaya.”
Diversity is friction, a ceaseless encounter with the abrasive, offensive, and obnoxious. Broadmindedness demands of us that we get out of our comfort zones and face with courage the fire of Otherness.
What tolerance entails is best expressed by British author JK Rowling’s reaction to Trump’s offensive views: “I find almost everything that Mr. Trump says objectionable. I consider him offensive and bigoted. But he has my full support to come to my country and be offensive and bigoted there. His freedom to speak protects my freedom to call him a bigot. His freedom guarantees mine.” In other words, you cannot use freedom of speech to silence objectionable views; you can only use it to protect your right to respond to them.
Democracy then is not for the faint of heart. If you cannot handle the inevitable ridicule, bashing, and hate you will get whenever you speak in a democracy, you are not fit for that kind of political order.
Those democratic thorns are inevitable because every perspective invites an opposition, whose form and expression you cannot determine. Democracy cannot and shouldn’t be baby-proofed for those who cannot handle those thorns. The faint-hearted should force themselves to mature and strengthen their gut, so they could roll with the punches, and take everything on the chin.
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I fully support the idea of Sen. Sonny Angara for 24/7 public libraries in every city. Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña spearheaded such an initiative in March 2018 after an engineering student mentioned the idea on the mayor’s Facebook page. The initiative resulted in a 296 percent increase in library users. Afterwards, two cities in the National Capital Region replicated it — Makati and Quezon City.
A 24/7 library isn’t only a great help to our students who need a conducive space to study at nighttime. Such establishment also serves as a balance against the 24/7 consumerist culture we now have in the Philippines, a consequence of our expanding economy. We need these free spaces, where we can interact personally with each other without the need to consume anything.
Furthermore, 24/7 libraries will also encourage our people to continue learning. The education that they will get from our library isn’t just going to be free, they will also be self-directed, a path to their own self-discovery.
E-mail: srsasot@gmail.com
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