The Whole Dream of Democracy

"The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois." -Gustave Flaubert

I have been reading an absolutely stunning novel from 1984 called "Flaubert's Parrot" by Julian Barnes. The premise is to examine Flaubert's life through the explorations and reflections of a retired and widowed physician who is obsessed with Flaubert as artist and person. Which is ironic on many levels, as Flaubert thought his work should stand entirely on its own, without reference to details from his personal life. But the protagonist in Flaubert's Parrot, who is keenly aware of Flaubert's preferences, nevertheless ends up compiling a kind of catalogue of the novelist's personal quirks and opinions.

One especially fascinating reference is to Flaubert's attitude toward democracy, captured succinctly by the epigraph above. This is, of course, a familiar perspective, that democracy is a form of government in which the blind lead the blind, more or less, into mediocrity. As it turns out, Flaubert had a vague preference for some kind of oligarchic rule by a few well seasoned wise men. But in the end his attitude toward politics was a cynical one in which deliberations about public goods almost always lead to the perpetuation of the status quo from which those very oligarchs would most benefit.

The problem here, I think, is that creating high art and maintaining a decent society are two very different things, with quite different criteria for success. I don't quarrel for a minute with the idea that Flaubert was a writer of the highest order, whose painstaking choice of the right words, sentences, and paragraphs set him apart from most other writers. His literary standards were impeccable, and one of the reasons we still read him with satisfaction was his insistence, like all great poets, on committing himself to a final result that puts the best possible words in the best possible order.

But maintaining a humane, democratic society is a very different project. It is by definition messy, unstable, even a bit chaotic. Any effort to take account of the interests of the multiple constituencies that make up a democratic community is going to lead to tensions and conflicts that are not easily resolved and thus give the appearance of indecisiveness. This is the nature of the beast. My sense is, though, that we, on the whole, we have done surprisingly well at acknowledging and balancing those different interests.

Of course, we are far short of a democratic ideal, and we continue to favor the privileged over the least well off, as has been noted often on this blog. But in my view it would be worse, much worse, if we relied on some kind of elite board of decision makers akin to Plato's guardians. And to the extent I am right, this is where we want to avoid the tendency to give artists more influence than is healthy. Flaubert, as great as he was as a writer, is no more qualified than even the lowliest citizen to make judgments about the kind of society we should have. It is therefore at our peril that we rely on public intellectuals during civic deliberations whose biases and particular ways of seeing the world often distort their vision regarding the needs of a whole community.

We need the Flauberts, of course, to represent a certain category of citizen but no more so than the Smiths or Gonzalezes or Changs, who also know best what their neighbors most require to become their best selves and to thrive as persons and as contributors to the democratic project. Too often, to the Flauberts, with their daunting artistic standards, this project appears to be an immense illusion. Perhaps it is. But it is an illusion well worth maintaining, just in case it can lead us to something finer and more in keeping with our better angels.