Facts and Arguments about the Introduction of Initiative and ...

4. The democratic person
Democracy and motivation
A purely parliamentary decision-making system is not a democracy.
In such a system, the people cannot prevent the implementation
of an unwanted law. In a real democracy, where
there is any doubt, the people always have the last word.
However, the opponents of direct democracy do not allow
themselves to be persuaded by such a simple principle. Their
resistance to direct democracy does not usually rely on purely
rational grounds. Their opposition to the idea of full popular
sovereignty also derives from a gut instinct rooted in a
fundamental distrust of people. The universal franchise and
women’s right to vote also had to cope with similar irrational
resistance before they were finally introduced.
Opponents of direct democracy believe that when people
vote, they allow themselves to be swayed primarily by private
and egocentric motives. According to this view, majorities
would always mercilessly suppress minorities. Higher, universal-human
objectives would never be aimed for in a direct
democracy. Representative democracy, on the other hand,
enables a moral elite to make the decisions. This elite is then
required to recognise and serve the general public interest.
Opponents of direct democracy, therefore, have a very specific
view of people and of society. They consider society in
essence as a kind of jungle, a snake pit in which countless
private interests are in conflict with each other. Opponents
therefore implicitly adopt a particular motivational theory,
according to which people are primarily motivated by selfinterest.
They reject the logical arguments in favour of direct
democracy, and even the evidence from good practice in
countries where direct-democratic systems have existed for
centuries, because deep inside they consider the average person
to be morally defective and incompetent.
In what follows, therefore, we wish to have a closer look at
the phenomenon of human motivation. The impatient reader
can, however, immediately skip to chapter 5.
Good and evil as political core concepts
Morality is not to be found anywhere in the material world.
The laws of physics do not explain the existence of consciousness
(Searle, 1992; Penrose, 1994). Consciousness does not
play any role in physics because the latter does not describe
a single causal relationship that calls on the phenomenon of
consciousness. Rather, one must say that consciousness is a
prerequisite for being able to describe physical laws and relationships.
Physics does not include consciousness, even if it
is a prerequisite for physical research and discovery.
Because moral choice always presumes consciousness, physics
can never provide a basis for any distinction between what
is ‘morally good’ and what is ‘morally evil’. But politics cannot
operate without constant reference to good and evil, because
it is about making a choice between several different measures.
If one measure cannot be judged to be ‘morally better’
than another in some sort of fundamental way, politics
is meaningless. On the contrary, the real existence of these
moral distinctions must be taken as the basic principle of po-
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litical activity. Because morals fall outside the boundaries of
science, and yet are the basis of politics, politics is in principle
independent of science. That is not an unscientific or anti-scientific
viewpoint. It is nothing more than a confirmation of
the fact that the natural sciences cannot fully describe human
reality, because they are limited to material things.
The origin of morality is often explained by reference to Darwinian
‘natural selection’ (De Waal, 1996; Ridley, 1996). It is
asserted, for example, that human tribes with a more strongly
developed moral ‘instinct’ demonstrated better internal
cohesion and were therefore superior to tribes with a less
well-developed moral instinct. A tribe whose members are
continually fighting each other due to a lack of moral instinct
will weaken itself and be defeated in the struggle against a
tribe whose members assist and support each other. This is
how Darwin himself explained the origin of the ‘moral instincts’
of humans – an approach that is now widespread.
However, there are fundamental problems with this explanation.
Darwinian selection cannot explain the phenomenon
of consciousness. That an antelope notices a lion and then
takes flight can be fully explained in the causal-mechanistic
interpretation (on which Darwinism is based) via a series
of purely physical mechanisms. Light falls on the antelope’s
retina; a signal is transmitted across the optic nerves to the
brain, where the stimulus is converted via particular mechanisms
into a motor response, etc. The flight behaviour of
the antelope and the selective advantage arising from this
depend solely and entirely on the antelope’s physical organism.
The contents of the animal’s consciousness, its feelings
of fear or aggression, do not play the slightest role and thus
cannot provide any selective advantage.
In the case of the antelope, therefore, the causal-mechanistic
view falls short in two respects. Firstly, the laws of physics
give no clues at all as to the phenomenon of consciousness.
Secondly, this interpretation does not leave any room for the
possibility that consciousness can provide some selective advantage.
The antelope’s feeling of fear cannot therefore be explained
by reference to physical mechanisms, nor does it give the
antelope any advantage in the struggle for survival.
What is true for the antelope’s feeling of fear also applies, mutatis
mutandis, to the moral judgement of humans. This moral
judgement is also a content of consciousness which cannot
be explained physically, and which likewise cannot provide
any selective benefit. If a human being is “a chemical process
like any other” (the Dutch writer W.F. Hermans), then
the selective advantage that comes from cooperation arises in
a manner that excludes any role for consciousness or moral
judgement. Because consciousness and moral judgement
play no role in the creation of selective advantage, they themselves
cannot be explained by a Darwinian selection process.
The mechanistic view of reality, moreover, results in a kind of
logical short-circuit. If our thinking is entirely determined by
physico-chemical processes in our brain, our search for truth
and understanding is necessarily an illusion. We would never
be able to find out whether a percept that appears to us as
logical and correct is actually true in reality. We cannot rule
out that possibility – but it could equally well be the case that