Mattthew Syed - Sunday Times

From the Sunday Times 27 March 22

Our democracy is chaotic, shrill and utterly terrifying to autocrats

"I tuned in to Question Time (BBC One) on Thursday evening after a long hiatus during which I haven’t felt any inclination to watch. Over the years, the programme has become more shallow, less willing to discuss complex issues and, with five guests rather than four, more shouty. People tend to hector more to get their points across, and as a consequence one learns precious little.

As I watched, though, I became intrigued. It wasn’t the content of the debate that struck me so much as its tone. The panellists slated the government on the economy, the cost-of-living crisis, the response to the Ukrainian refugee disaster and workers’ rights. Words such as “risible”, “disgusting” and “shameful” were common, and that was just in the first ten minutes. At times the hostility was volcanic, and the live audience roared along.

But, perhaps because I have recently returned from Poland, where the ideals of liberalism are still being cemented (and in some cases contested), I found myself watching the programme through an entirely different lens. Normally I would have been rather dejected by the hostility and rancour. Instead I was marvelling at the system we call democracy. Strange though this may sound, I am not sure it has ever looked so alluring.

I mean, how on earth does our system survive this kind of bitterness? This is the miracle that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are, perhaps more than anything else, intimidated by. All that anger, all that freedom to express it, all that potential to spill over into violence, and yet democracies continue to bumble along. Economic growth in the West since the 18th century remains one of the greatest stories in history, eclipsing anything that has happened in autocratic societies, which have largely copied (or stolen) western technology. Even China is now hitting the middle-income trap.

How they envy what we have here. How they resent the way all this chaos can be channelled into so much creativity and dynamism. How they wish they could undermine the miracle of co-operative competition, something they haven’t yet come close to matching. And how they puzzle over the invisible thread that runs from the ideas of the ancient Greeks through those of the Enlightenment thinker John Locke to the articles drawn up by America’s founding fathers and beyond.

I mention this, too, because Joe Biden was quite right to state on Friday that the world faces a choice: one between democracy and tyranny. I hope that all of us can now see the risks of the latter more vividly as Putin brainwashes the Russian people through the ruthless control of information while using batons to quell dissent. What is perhaps less well understood is the logic of China’s social credit system, which many western scholars seem to think is some scaled-up version of the ratings system on Uber or Airbnb but which is slowly morphing into the ultimate instrument of oppression.

In one of the social credit schemes individuals are judged on what they buy, what they say and even the friends they have on social media. The Communist Party wants to measure everything so it can determine which individuals are “trustworthy”. Those who say the wrong things, who befriend the wrong people and who are guilty of thought-crime are marked down. Those on the blacklist are already denied air tickets, train tickets and university admission — a trend that is coming to dominate life for 1.3 billion people, perhaps even in their most intimate interactions.

Doesn’t this reveal the stakes of defending our way of life? Last week I watched as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe tore a strip off the British government for taking so long to secure her release from incarceration at the hands of the criminal clericsy of Iran. I noticed a couple of emails from friends vexed that she had focused her ire on those who had liberated her rather than those who had imprisoned her, but, here again, I couldn’t help marvelling. Here was a free citizen slamming those in power for not doing more, while fearing to call out her persecutors, given what they might yet do to her extended family in Iran. Could there be a more perfect illustration of what we have in democratic societies, and what we must never lose?

The late American novelist David Foster Wallace began a graduation day speech at Kenyon College, Ohio, in 2005 with the following parable: “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”

Wallace’s point is that when you are surrounded by water all your life, you stop noticing it, stop valuing it, perhaps even start taking it for granted. It so permeates your experiences that it becomes a kind of background factor that melts away from everyday observation. As Wallace explained: “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

Hasn’t this become true of democracy? For so much of the time we are focused on the squalls of everyday interaction — the petty online arguments, the crass sound-bites in parliament, the social media squabbles amplified ad infinitum by banal algorithms that feast on the divisive and sensationalistic — that we have almost stopped noticing the miracles embedded in our way of life: the willingness to rub along despite our differences, to accept the verdict of democratic elections even when we hate the result, to transfer power peacefully to opponents whose views we’ve slated. What the hell is democracy? This is democracy!

It perhaps goes without saying that the strength of democracy across the West has been in retreat over recent years, something that most of us can see all too clearly. But every now and again it is worth celebrating what we have, not least because it provides the impetus to fight for it.

As the writer Melody Beattie puts it: “Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

@MatthewSyed"