Social sustainability: New Zealand solutions for Tocqueville's problem.

• Author: Baehler, Karen
• Position: 19th century French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville

Abstract

The 19th century French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville described democracy as a two-edged sword, noble in its embrace of equal human dignity but always in danger of descending into ignoble servitude when the rigours of liberal egalitarianism became too great. This paper draws on Tocqueville's scenarios of democratic deterioration to formulate a model of unsustainable social and political life. It then considers some distinctive and enduring features of New Zealand political culture and social practice that have protected this country from the perils of unsustainability, including a compound idea of equality, a willingness to subordinate private property arrangements to the goal of social harmony, and an unwillingness to succumb to mediocrity. These features begin to sketch a New Zealand model of social and democratic sustainability that social policy analysts can use to guide their advice to government.

INTRODUCTION

I believe New Zealand can aim to be the first nation to be truly sustainable--across the four pillars of the economy, society, the environment, and nationhood. (Prime Minister Helen Clark 2007) Most of us probably have some understanding of what sustainability means in the environmental realm--i.e. do not extract natural resources faster than they can regenerate and do not produce more waste than the planet can safely absorb. Economic sustainability is also relatively clear--i.e. do not take the easy road to a high-employment, low-wage, economy by pursuing only short-term opportunities and failing to invest in future innovation and knowledge-led growth. More mysterious are the concepts of social sustainability and sustainable nationhood. What could sustainability mean with respect to these "pillars"? By embracing social and nationhood sustainability as goals, the prime minister has set the challenge of defining them and then designing public policies that contribute to them.

This paper aims to shed a bit of light on the first task of defining what sustainable society and nationhood might mean in contemporary New Zealand, and it does so by appealing to a rather unlikely source--a French aristocrat who died nearly 100 years before our current prime minister was born, never visited or paid any particular attention to New Zealand during his lifetime, and did not use the term "sustainability" in his writings, so far as I can tell. Despite these facts, Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis proves highly relevant for the task at hand because his concept of "the social state" captures the rich and complex relationship between a nation-state's socio-cultural life and the health and fitness of its governance regime, thereby offering a framework for examining society and nationhood in their broadest senses. The result is a model of social and political sustainability in everything but name.

Tocqueville's analysis provides a framework for thinking about social sustainability, broadly understood, as well as a foil for examining selected elements of New Zealand social thought and practice. Based on this encounter across countries, cultures and times, this paper constructs a working definition of social sustainability for contemporary New Zealand. The argument proceeds as follows: in the next section I describe Tocqueville's doomsday scenarios for democratic un-sustainability and decline, and the factors that contribute to them. The subsequent section explores elements of a New Zealand model for warding off decline and building sustainability, and identifies features of this model that correspond to and diverge from Tocqueville's ideas. The concluding section is a call to action to use the core elements of the sustainability framework as criteria for social policy analysis.

TOCQUEVILLE ON DEMOCRACY'S SELF-DESTRUCTIVE IMPULSES

To better understand social sustainability, let us start with un-sustainability. In his masterpiece, Democracy in America (2002), Tocqueville famously examined the American model of democracy to determine how the United States managed to dodge the kinds of social and political evils that transformed the French Revolution into a reign of terror. The book's importance extends far beyond its American setting and historical boundaries, however, because it presents Tocqueville's vivid and logically systematic account of the natural sources of instability and decay that perpetually plague all egalitarian democracies. Of course, the purpose in studying democracy's perils was to find methods of counteracting them, and toward that end, Tocqueville identified from his experiences in the United States a list of social, cultural, and institutional factors which, he argued, had protected the Americans against democratic decline.

They were not the only possible remedies, however, as Tocqueville himself acknowledged: "I am very far from believing that they [the Americans] have found the only form of government that democracy can give itself" (p.12). The specific American remedies that he identified are broadly of interest and potentially transferable across nations and historical eras, but they are also somewhat culturally bound, and for this reason, the present paper focuses instead on his analysis of the universal threats to egalitarian democracy--i.e. his problem definition rather than his suggested solutions. In so doing, we are better placed to ask what kinds of distinctive solutions New Zealand might offer to the generic problems of egalitarian democracy.

Separating the problem from the solution is easier said than done, however, because both boil down to equality, an idea that features as both hero and villain in Tocqueville's story. In the heroic role, equality lays the foundation for democracy, which Tocqueville ranked above other regime types because it is "more just, and its justice makes for its greatness and its beauty" (p.675). Democracy's justness stems from its embrace of the famously self-evident truth of equal human dignity. If people are truly born equal in worth, then it is difficult to justify any governance system that oppresses some while concentrating power in the hands of others. For this reason, Tocqueville welcomed the liberating trend toward egalitarian democratisation, which he perceived as the dominant political force and "providential fact" of his day.

Equality also plays the villain in this story due to its observed dampening effects on excellence and its paradoxical tendency to deteriorate into subservience. Tocqueville lamented the "universal uniformity" and mediocrity that seems inevitably to accompany egalitarianism's leveling influence (p.674). Across "the face of the new world", he observed, "almost all prominent points are worn down to make a place for something middling that is at once less high and less low, less brilliant and less obscure than what used to be seen in the world" (pp.673-674). He worried about equality's tendency to smother revolutionary ideas and passions, ossify thinking, and deprive democratic citizens of the will and capacity to "make a sudden and energetic effort when needed" to alter the course of their destiny. Weighed down by this incapacity, he gloomily predicted that "the human race will stop and limit itself", "man will exhaust himself in small, solitary, sterile motions" and "while constantly moving, humanity will no longer advance" (p.617).

Graver yet for Tocqueville were "the perils that equality brings to human independence" (p.672). Although the idea and practice of democratic equality began as a sort of liberation movement aimed at freeing people from economic, political, and intellectual bondage to traditional structures of authority, Tocqueville argues that equality also has a perverse tendency to undermine liberty. It does this by setting people adrift from traditional sources of authority, thereby isolating them, leaving them too feeble to exercise independent thought and too insecure to risk non-conformity. At the same time that equality ostensibly empowers the individual against the mighty forces of oppression embodied in monarchy, aristocracy, and theocracy, it thus makes citizens acutely aware of their individual weakness. This weakness stems from the obstacles to success posed by economic liberalisation and "the competition of all" (p.513), as well as from the fact that political equality spreads power so thinly across the population that no one individual can ever acquire enough to accomplish anything. Without real economic or political power and without any superiors to turn to (since everyone is equal), the citizens in Tocqueville's unhappy scenario "feel the need to be led and the wish to be free" (p.664) and so they follow their "very contrary instincts" to place all trust in the central government, "the immense being that rises alone in the midst of universal debasement" (p.644). As the people willingly submit to the yoke of the sovereign, equality is stripped of its liberating and empowering value once and for all and becomes the "new face of servitude" (p.410).

Tocqueville specified three types of servitude to which equality logically leads: majority tyranny, mild despotism, and industrial oligarchy. As illustrated in Figure 1, the downward spiral toward majority tyranny begins when liberalism's newly minted, autonomous individuals quickly discover that exercising their own powers of reason on any and all matters of public concern is nearly impossible due to scarcity of time, energy, will, and intellect. Overwhelmed by the increased burdens of egalitarian citizenship, they long for short cuts to public decision making. These short cuts appear in the form of raw, reflexive, mass opinion, to which the beleaguered citizens flock as if it was the voice of reason itself. Popular sentiments and ideas eventually become self-reinforcing, because, in addition to offering a cheap and easy substitute for critical thinking and public engagement, they also carry the apparent moral weight of consensus. As...