Soundbytes: A classic example of pushing the vote out
This is usually the point in an election campaign when politicians, desperate to distract voters? attention from the shortcomings of the present, try to divert our gaze towards the glories of the past. So this week I shall be assisting messrs Major, Blair and Ashdown by talking about ancient Greece.
As anyone with a classical education knows, Athens was the archetype of popular democracy. While Spartan warriors lorded it over their helots, and the inhabitants of Delphi would not cross the road without paging the Oracle, Athenian citizens were free to vote on one very major issue of the day. All they had to do was take a short stroll up to the Acropolis, pick up a pottery voting slip, and lob it into the aye or nay container ? yes, even our expression ?casting a vote? comes from good old ancient Greece.
What, you will be asking, has all this to do with PCs? Because PCs online to the internet promise to be the clay voting tablets of the 21st century, for the first time allowing modern citizens to participate fully in government. The Web, say the pundits,will furnish all the knowledge required for informed decision-making, and votes will be cast by a simple press of the Y or N key.
The idea certainly sounds appealing. Rousseau may have been the first to point out that the British people are only free at election time, and are subject to a virtual despotism for the ensuing four years and eleven months, but he was not the last. And what with BSE, cash for questions, night club hostesses and the rest, faith in politicians seems to be at a particularly low ebb. What could be better than to bypass them, and give political power back to the people, as in the glorious days of ancient Athens?
But scratch the surface of that golden age, and you will soon see the base metal underneath. For a start, Athens was only a democracy if you were male and free. Women and slaves were not eligible to vote. Similarly, if the Net is to become the prime medium for the exercise of our political rights, what will happen to people who cannot afford a PC or internet TV, or those who are too old or technophobic to get the hang of using one? Can you realistically foresee the government of the day offering a grant of several hundred quid to every household in the land, just so we can all can get online and make politicians redundant? No, neither can I.
And what about the decisions which those politically enfranchised Athenians used to make? For all their freedom of choice, they seem to have been a pretty unimaginative bunch. Their foreign policy consisted almost entirely of fighting the Spartans, with an occasional home fixture against Alexander the Great to relieve the tedium. And for several generations, if memory serves me right, the leading lights in Athenian politics were called either Alcibiades, son of Kimon, or Kimon, son of Alcibiades.
Life in ancient Athens must have been pretty simple compared with Britain today. If the Athenians found it hard to be well-informed, how much more difficult will it be for us? By now, virtually the sum total of all human knowledge must be available on the internet ? if only we knew where to find it.
One day someone will produce an index, or an intelligent agent, which will deliver a tailored news briefing to our email in-box every morning. But this will only make things worse. True, we will all be able to read up, in mind-numbing detail, about the pros and cons of nuclear disarmament, or whether tea bags should be round or square. But there will be so much information (much of it rubbish) that by the time we have made up our minds we will have missed the vote, and we will discover that this week?s burning issue is state provision of nursery education, or the colour of pillar boxes.
Most important of all, how can we be sure that people will really want to vote several times a week on issues large and small? It is hard enough to dragoon them into the polling stations once every five years for a general election. Disappointingly, things were no different in the halcyon days of ancient Athens. You would think the average Athenian male would have been pleased to attend the polls, if only to get away from his house full of wittering slaves and the wife chaining herself to the railings demanding the vote.
But he was not. The only way the authorities could persuade citizens to take their responsibilities seriously was to throw a long rope around any public space and physically corral people to the polling point. The rope was covered with wet paint, and anyone who was found afterwards with paint on his clothes was fined for not attending the vote willingly. How are we going to replicate that on the information superhighway?