I’m not the writerly type, more the visual type. I can barely remember people’s names but I could draw their faces after meeting them. As far as my blob time going to re-imagining Dune… there are a host of things I ought to be doing. I ought to be teaching myself something useful so I can become a productive member of society again. And so I can feed myself in the coming Apocalypse. ;)

I disagree with the etymological argument “rule of the people” = democracy.

You know me, man, I’ll call it Bob and put a tassel on it if it will move the conversation along. But ‘democracy’ has accumulated remarkably little pejorative baggage over the centuries and sports an immediate rhetorical appeal, so it’s usually worth seeing if it will fit.

Kvond: The question is, would that be called “Democracy”? And what would be the importance of labeling it as such?

What you say is true of representative liberal democracy, but at least potentially not true of a more comprehensive willed community based not on individual rights but collective duties and virtues, as imagined with some important differences by communists and anarchists.

I suppose the obligatory source for a well-imagined anarchist polity is Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but I recall liking that the anarchists (unlike, as I recall, the citizens of More’s utopia) are just as petty, stupid, shortsighted etc. as anyone else. What distinguishes them is a different fundamental ethic – really, more a matter of basic habits of mind – about how things should work. So they take obligation to the community as an ordinary matter of course, and can’t make any sense of people who don’t.

Isn’t the luxury of democracy a luxury of representation? That is, one must have the luxury of having “the people” as representative of “where the power and direction comes from”. This seems to stem from the very conception of individual determination, which requires a market place. In order to praise democracy, does one not also have to praise “choice” itself. I wear this brand of jeans, I vote for this kind of candidate. Are these not two parallel products? I see your point about material buffer, but there also has to be a conceptual buffer, the luxury of luxury so to speak.

Fortunately the global information infrastructure that makes blogs possible (not to mention the lot of time we have to hang around them) also enables cost-free experiments in democratic process. I treasure your contributions to this one, the more off color and snarky the better.

And although Kvond’s right about Palestine, I think that idea of a radical history of Dune has legs. Any chance some of your blog time could go toward that?

I wish I knew. In the sense of actually knowing and not guessing. There does seem to be this conflict between a true egalitarian society, what I imagine the democratic ideal to be, and our “natural” hierarchical social structure, our preference for an alpha male as a leader. I don’t see a final resolution to that. Maybe, like many things, the good stuff is found in the chaotic boundary between the two, but what do I know?

I don’t have answer to these things. I’m just a poor person with a lot of time who hangs around academic blogs like yours, Crooked Timber and several others. Who has learned enough to shut up mostly but can still make the occasional off color snarky remark.

Kvond: I thought someone did, it’s called Palestine, isn’t it.