Yesterdays discussion on democracy

[D KALYANARAMAN]

I had played around a little bit with Googles NGram viewer and wanted to check out the possible correlation with democracy and wars. I also thought old karl might have had something to do with the evolution of thought in the direction of democracy. Here are the results (attached)

Notice how democracy peaks during the times of WW1 and 2.

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Regards

Kalyanaraman

[MG Subramanian]

 More Ngrams...Unmistakable decline in the bigram "moral virtues", massive rise in fundamental rights etc-ganu

[Rajesh Kasturirangan]

 If you see the attached graph, freedom is strikingly correlated with democracy, so the question that arises is what happens if we take the semantic network of freedom (i.e., the words that a dictionary says are related to freedom) and the semantic network of democracry, the semantic network of  war etc. That will be a more reliable measure of correlation. In order for these correlations to be systematic, someone will have to write a script that looks at a whole range of words and their correlations.

Rajesh

[MG Subramanian]

Distracting a little bit from democracy but some investigation of relative frequency of phrases "within a (semantic?) network" of connected processes - oil prices, solar energy, renewable energy, global warming.

Note <solar_ energy> was well ahead of others much before the <oil_ prices>, grew with <oil_prices>, possibly spawned or accomodated <renewable_energy>. 

Why does <global_ warming> peak in mid nineties? Possibly due to  diminishing "concern" with oil prices or rising "chatter" in <solar_energy+renewable_energy>? 

Misplaced complacency, mistaken optimism or plain old fatigue or is it a case of " Hey we can do nothing in the short run anyway? Get that story off the headlines and bookshelves!"

There is some narrative to be teased out of examining internals of semantic networks and pitting one semantic network against another for sure!

[D KALYANARAMAN]

Very interesting. And probably exceedingly relevant today.

 If we revisit historical reasons for democracy to take root, however,we may find that (personal) freedom is the new kid on the block. it could have all started with security (threats to life and property) issues, moved on to barriers to community activities (religion, tradition etc.)Then with increased well-being of people, expansion of trade must have played a role. Personal freedom became all-important as other needs(in the hierarchy) are more or less satisfied.

Events like wars, famines and other natural disasters could have played a role. Technology probably accelerated this tendency.

As political entities, we are still in transition. In my view, the equilibirium position is one of democracy.In the short term there may be pockets of autocracy albeit with a lot of internal tension.

  

kalyan

 

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 10:41 AM, Rajesh Kasturirangan <rkas...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Regards

Kalyanaraman

[MG Subramanian]

If x'cracy is a category of governance the rise of democracy must be traced as an evolution of governance systems. If one then were to separate the scope and ends of governance and means of governance and we may get somewhere by tracing these across centuries

If it is important that the manner of alignment of "means and ends"  in any X'cracy should be adaptive, democracy possibly does the best job. A correlation between wars and democracy can be investigated from the following of view. How did this war or that catalyse changes or changes in perception of the next improvement that needed to be made in governance?  Wars or famines or economic growth may have merely provided the opportunities for conducting "tests of goodness" of the governance system and provided the feedback for re-engineering. 

We needn't have a great designers, Blinder watchmakers and  tinkerers than Kautilya also may have played their part. Like in biological evolution chance variation may have created partial forms that need some skill of analysis to recognise, in retrospect, as an " evolutionary step". Panchayats or village councils seems to have evolved as local democratic governance devices within one-ruler-or few-ruler'cracies! Their presence has been recorded in the Chola period. Bureaucracy under a largely federal system seems to have played a part in the very slow democratisation of China, but that conclusion is part of a Guide Talk I got for my twenty dollars in the Beijing museum !

 It is also possible that democracy may not survive in the same forms. The parliamentary form/degrees of federalism are simply structural parameters that can cahnge from time to time pretty drastically. Look how coalitions have become the new skill to be mastered in the last couple of days.

If the " governance with the consent of the governed" is a defining criterion of democracies rather than forms(" Westminster type parliamentary democracy") or deliverables (" freedoms above everything else") some future situation ,say sever shortage of energy or water, may force people to give "intelligent consent" to technocracy of some sort.

*****

What would we really want to model? How democracies evolved from older forms of governance or what can make them morph/progress or regress? 

Something very simple needs to be abstracted for modelling. Not sure if we are anywhere near.

-ganu

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[D KALYANARAMAN]

quote

If x'cracy is a category of governance the rise of democracy must be traced as an evolution of governance systems. If one then were to separate the scope and ends of governance and means of governance and we may get somewhere by tracing these across centuries

unquote

exactly my thoughts!

If aamadmi is sufficiently motivated to be interested in governance, well that's the beginning of democracy for you!

kalyan

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Regards

Kalyanaraman

[MG Subramanian]

 Another method is to trifurcate the evolution into three branches

 1.The ends of governance 2 The rules of governance 3. The means or mechanisms of governance

And of course pay attention to the triggers of transition (such as wars, famines, death of kings or appearance of messiahs!). In this view triggers are just intense shocks to the system that push it into a new goverance configuration and equilibrium with which the circumstances were already pregnant. These would be the Storming of the Bastille a shot that was heard around the world , or even an occasional occasional Lorenz's Butterfly that help things along, push the movie faster after the intermission and popcorn!

Look at the basic rules of governance (2) and the task of applying them(3). In agricultural societies the proper sharing of waters was a local governance issue. The ruler who collected the taxes, to the best of my knowledge had no say in applying the rules locally(3) in a given season. It wasn't practical nor would it have been optimal for him. Now the rules regarding this must evolve in a highly local context using the technical content of community owned knowledge with such codes of sharing  that had been in practice at that time.That may not have been "equitability",a latter day 'democratic' concept. That may not be "optimal" for community subsistence if there were lands with different fertility. Pragmatic consideration of the overall yield may have trumped any ideology.The point is rules for communities may have evolved spatiotemporally with quite a bit of diversity even under one King. Actually quite independent of the overlaid forms of governance.

I am sure muddies the water even as it tries to clarify. I hope it does.(I mean muddy!). It is so much more fun building models about the Princes (or Prime Ministers?) of Persia  than Moments of Inertia. 

Any poets ready to code yet?

-ganu

[Rajesh Kasturirangan]

Kalyan and Ganu and others,
Once again, lots of ideas... Can you create a wiki page for the "democracy and other forms of political organization" like we did for the education page. I will also contribute. The page can contain a summary of our deliberations so far and then we can start looking for things to model.
Rajesh

[MG Subramanian]

The last time I tried, I did not succeed in creating a wiki folder.Will try tmrw evening..-ganu

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 12:02 AM, Rajesh Kasturirangan <rkas...@gmail.com> wrote:

Kalyan and Ganu and others