With all the recent turmoil in the Arab world, the subject of democracy keeps coming up. I hear people talk (or write) as though if only these countries will have democracy, all will be well. And considering these nations have lived under various forms of tyranny, I can see how people might think that all that's needed to make things better is that people will have the freedom to appoint their chosen government - which is basically what democracy is about.
The thing is, when we talk about democracy we often assume other factors which are not automatically part of democracy - we just associate these factors with democracy, because (and I'm talking about my own experience growing up in Israel and about my impression of what it's like here in the UK and also in the US - I don't know enough about other countries) we've been brought up on a kind of package deal, which includes stuff like: democratic rule; freedom of speech; equality of all citizens before the law; all sorts of rights for the individual, which we take for granted - but all these things are extras we have added on to the principle of democracy, the principle of a bunch of people ruling themselves.
I don't often find myself agreeing with rabbis, but there was an excellent article in The Times last Saturday by Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi here in the UK, who points out that this package deal we have in the west is a result of the combination of two different cultural influences: Greek and Jewish. From the Greeks we got democracy, but from the Jewish Bible comes the idea that each person, whether they are part of the strong majority or part of a small minority, whether they are rich or poor, whatever their status in society, each person deserves to be treated with respect, each person deserves not to be trampled on.
He gives an example which amazed me because I'd grown up with this biblical story (II Samuel 11-12) and had never, for one second, paused to think how amazing and radical the idea is - it seemed so obvious to me...
The example he gives is of King David's treatment of Uriah the Hittite - in brief: the king had taken a fancy to Uriah's wife; the king had Uriah killed and took his wife; Nathan the prophet rebukes the king and the king recognises he has done wrong and begs God to forgive him.
I'll say that again: the king recognises he has done wrong.
This had seemed so obvious to me until I read this article and realised how radical this idea was against the background of other cultures at the time, where a king could do as he pleased! The idea that Uriah had a right to his life and to his wife, that he had a right not to be killed at the king's whim and that he had a right not to have his wife taken from him just because the king fancied her - this was not the norm. (And Uriah was a Hittite - part of what we would today refer to as an ethnic minority.)
And the way Nathan got his message through to the king was through a parable about a rich man taking a poor man's sheep - the king identifies that as clearly wrong, but again, in plenty of other cultures people would have thought nothing of it, it would have seemed normal that people with power will use it against those who are weaker. But the Bible speaks very strongly about justice for the weak and the downtrodden, about being kind to the poor and the orphans and the widows and the aliens in our midst, about justice and mercy and charity.
And it's these values which make our democracies work so well (most of the time). Without these rights and freedoms which we take for granted, rights and freedoms for each individual, including minorities - without these, democracy can be extremely oppressive for people who are part of a minority.
Think about it: democracy means the majority gets to say what goes. What happens when the majority decide that people of your minority are evil and should be made to... I don't know... walk around with a yellow badge on their clothing?
As history has taught us, these values which we in the west today tend to think of as "inalienable rights" - they are not common to all cultures, they are not things we can assume everyone will agree on. And seeing as we don't believe in forcing our beliefs onto other people, we can't exactly go around the world making everyone live according to these ideals...
