Democracy was first built on a lot of loose rock.

Can democracy now be rebuilt on that very same ground?

Recently, I spent a long afternoon on a dusty and rocky Athens hill called the Pnyx for the first meeting of a novel assembly inspired by the past.

It was the most audacious and beautiful democratic event I’ve ever witnessed.

The Pnyx rises just west of the Acropolis. There, the ancient Athenian Ecclesia, consisting of local citizens mostly chosen by lot, gathered more than 100 generations ago to make all important government decisions. No assembly had met there since 322 B.C.E—until that warm early fall night.

This new People’s Assembly was open to anyone, unlike its ancient Athenian predecessor, which excluded women, slaves, and foreigners. Indeed, the 92 attendees I counted were roughly split between men and women, and included people from more than 15 European countries, plus a few visitors from other continents.

But the transformational potential of this People’s Assembly goes far beyond inclusion. If its members can establish their assembly in the governance of Europe, it might change everything we think we know about democracy.

“Citizens of Athens, citizens of the world,” declared Kalypso Nicolaidis, a Franco-Greek scholar who helps lead the assembly and is chair in global affairs at the European University’s School of Transnational Governance, “we would like to invite you to change yourselves.”

Around the world, democracy is seen as a system in which the public, through elections, chooses its representatives. But the People’s Assembly wouldn’t consist of elected politicians. Instead, it would be composed of everyday people, chosen by lottery processes that ensure that the body is a demographic mirror of the people it represents.

These wouldn’t be just the people of one city, or one province, or even one nation. The People’s Assembly would be a transnational body, with members selected by lottery to represent all of Europe. There’s no body like that on Earth.

But what truly sets apart the idea—and what would make it revolutionary—is its permanence.

Assemblies chosen by lotteries have become increasingly common around the world, especially in Europe and Japan. But almost all of these assemblies are temporary bodies. They are convened to answer some big question or reckon with some thorny problem. They meet for weeks or months or even a year or so. Then they issue their plan or recommendations—and dissolve.

The People’s Assembly would never go away. Certainly, its members would change frequently, often after just months, with a new lottery to refill posts. But it would become a permanent feature of the landscape, its own branch of government.

It also would signal that the age of the elected politician is fading. Politicians are already an unpopular group almost everywhere—corrupted, incompetent, ineffective. Democracy by lottery is appealing because it offers a model to allow citizens to check politicians, and perhaps one day to replace them.

A move away from elected politicians, and toward representatives selected by lottery, also would mean a greater diminishment of elections. Ironically, eliminating or reducing the frequency of elections might be a way to save democracy.

In many places, elections no longer reinforce democracy. They are too compromised—by diminishing social trust, by money in politics, by the outsized power of parties and interest groups. Their outcomes often lead to conflict, violence, even war. And elections are routinely used by authoritarians and dictators to gain popular legitimacy.

Which is why a successful, continent-wide People’s Assembly would likely inspire the creation of more such permanent bodies—at the national, provincial and local levels in Europe and elsewhere. In turn, the spread of such assemblies would require changes in political infrastructure, new modes of lobbying, and new kinds of technocratic agencies to support lottery-selected representatives.

How might government and democracy be different in an era of these assemblies? Camille Dobler, a veteran facilitator of assembly processes at the Paris-based Missions Publiques, answers that question in a word: “trans-localism.” By that, she means a fusion of transnational and local governance.

Which makes sense. Assemblies by lot, from those Athenians gathering 2,300 years ago to the new versions today, are fundamentally local tools. Because it’s easiest to assemble with your own neighbors. But in a deeply networked world facing planetary problems of climate and health and war, there is a need for transnational governance.

So, we are likely to see new networks of local and national assemblies that collaborate through transnational bodies, like the People’s Assembly. How such collaborations might best work is one of the most urgent governance questions of the future.

It’s easier to foresee the failure of current democratic structures than the journey to the next forms of democracy. There is so much to figure out—new systems, new demands on everyday people, new modes of collaboration.

So, the people and organizations behind the People’s Assembly have announced that they are embarking on a “Democratic Odyssey” to talk to people across Europe about how they want their assembly, and the future, to work. Next fall, they plan to return to Athens to reconvene the Assembly, and begin its formal work.

“We are ready to get our boots dirty,” Nicolaidis said while standing on that rocky hill.

The post On a Rocky Hill in Athens, a ‘Democratic Odyssey’ Begins appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As I take a slight turn to the right, a woman and her German Shepherd appear, walking towards us from the opposite direction. She hesitates. The path is narrow, and for both of us to keep the required distance, someone will have to leave it. We both step aside, drifting apart from each other, but the dogs have a different plan. Skeletor wags his tail; the other dog does, too. They come close and sniffle, happy to see each other. The woman peers at me over her mask. How does she feel meeting another person? Is she even slightly glad to see me? Am I?

This situation has repeated itself a lot in the past few weeks. The dogs are always eager and approach without fear, and I start to feel as if Skeletor is walking me instead of the other way around.

I’ve never been good at keeping track of days. But since March 22, when the lockdown began in Athens, I am counting as if never before. Date and time have taken on a new urgency, as I try to calculate the right moments to leave the house.

For each outing, we are required to fill out a form or send a text message to the government. We must specify which of four activities we will engage in: an emergency visit to the doctor, grocery shopping, exercise, or walking a dog. The penalty for being a pedestrian outdoors without one of these reasons is a fine of €150. I’m choosing to fill out the form for now, but rumor has it that the government will require text messages from everyone soon.

So these days it takes me much longer than usual to prepare for a walk with Skeletor, because I’m fretting over what time to write on my piece of paper. How much time is enough to walk a dog in the morning? My usual morning walks would take an hour, and Skeletor needs them to let off some steam—but now an hour seems too much, a luxury. I try to bargain—maybe half an hour is good enough if I climb up the most remote part of the hill and make sure nobody is around. If I am late because I took too long to get ready, will I be lying to the police?

Skeletor appreciating the view from his walk. Courtesy of Eugenia Triantafyllou

Every few days, Greek social media and TV bulletins tell us there will be an extension of the lockdown. A few days ago we were doing well, but now the same measures are not enough anymore. We need to stay inside for longer. To be more specific about how much time we spend outside of the house, more frugal with our outings. “The next couple of weeks are critical,” the leading epidemiologist says.

But they said the same thing the week before, and the one before that.

People are confused. And worried.

My worries are not only about the authorities. In the mornings I wait until I hear my neighbor, an elderly woman with severely compromised health, go outside to feed the stray cats who depend upon her. I gave her some latex gloves a few days ago. Living in an apartment building makes it difficult to avoid bumping into each other in the entrance. So I listen for her usual sounds, imagining the scenario of not hearing her one day at all, and what I would do then. When I am sure she has finished her morning ritual and I hear the lobby door close, that is my signal to leave the house.

A few days ago, I read about an old woman in another city. She was seen walking her sheep downtown. Not a dog or even a cat. A sheep. A photograph showed her next to a building complex, the sheep grazing on some grass that grew on the lot right next to it. Her face was pixelated by the news media for privacy.

Had she always done this, before the quarantine? Perhaps. Nobody noticed then, or if they did it might have registered as something rural people did, something bucolic and colorful. Now, it is scandalous enough to make the news, one of many suddenly suspicious characters.

Another article describes a woman who was caught hiding one of her small children in the trunk of the car to escape being fined because only two people are allowed to ride together in a car. A man filled out a permit for personal exercise but was discovered by the police many kilometers away. A woman swimmer was forced to come out of the sea to be fined. The violations, according to social media, have reached 40,000, amounting to a total of €6,000,000 in fines, another number to count.

There are even priests who break the quarantine, insisting that the gathering of the congregation for the Divine Liturgy, including the Holy Communion itself, cannot possibly be a source of contagion.

Still, most Greeks are following the rules as best they can.

Greeks on Facebook protest that the government focuses too much on serving fines and policing instead of healthcare. One day the medical personnel were hailed as heroes; the next, police tried to break up their peaceful World Health Day protests. Gatherings of more than ten people are forbidden after the lockdown. Doctors and nurses gathered in the forecourt of Evangelismos, one of Athens’s big hospitals, protesting the shortages both in personnel and equipment that has been happening even before the coronavirus crisis. The government promises radical restructuring of healthcare in the next couple of months. There are plans for 500 mobile medical units that will test people for the virus at home.

As Orthodox Easter approached, the government also promised to enforce the lockdown with drones and raise the fine to €300 to deter people from leaving the cities. So people celebrated Easter on balconies and rooftops, where the traditional roasting of the lamb took place in pairs or alone.

On social media, we Greeks argue over every single piece of news. That’s nothing new. But somehow it feels more important, more pressing, to be right, to maintain a sense of control now in this chaos of information. Many call the opposite side “sheep,” an old expression for gullibility that feels as common nowadays as it is to roast one for Easter, if not to take one for a walk.

Contrary to how it might seem, we Greeks are not obsessing over sheep. But the irony of the imagery is not lost on me. People are afraid of being lambs, of being herded mindlessly and corralled inside their homes, an uncertain future ahead of them. But more than that, they are afraid of dying.

In our apartment, we don’t have a working stove yet—one of the perks of moving in just a couple of weeks before the coronavirus crisis reached Greece. We try to manage with cold food: sandwiches, fruit, some snacks from the grocery store. As Skeletor and I returned from our walk, we stopped by the small pizza place on the square. Exarchia—the neighborhood I was raised in and the only place I have lived in Greece—has a long history of anarchism and clashing with police forces. Here the lockdown, though necessary for public health, sometimes ends up scratching wounds that never healed. The virus has achieved what decades of police intervention haven’t: The square is empty except for a small squad of policemen, standing next to their motorcycles at the south side as a warning to unnecessary wanderers. They have not stopped me yet, although I carry my ID and papers with me at all times.

It’s almost eleven. I greet the woman behind the plexiglass and place my order. She offers hand sanitizer and tells me I am her first customer since she opened at 7 a.m. “It’s only pocket money now.” She shrugs.

There is talk on the news about a coronavirus subsidy for the private sector. I hope it reaches all the people who need it so they can endure for now. It’s important for everyone to endure as long as needed, to stay healthy and alive until it is okay for us to return to the world and take a look at it anew. Perhaps we’ll appreciate things we took for granted—a home cooked meal, brushing against strangers on the streets, having a cup of coffee in the sunlight, a long walk with a dog. It will be strange at first, resuming life after such a long pause. Maybe we’ll start the count anew: Which things remain lovingly, reassuringly, the same. Which ones broke during the pandemic and will need to be fixed. And which ones have always been broken but we refused to see it.

And I do hope in this restored world, the sheep will keep taking walks.

Editor’s Note, May 1, 2020: Since this piece was filed, Greece’s low death rate during the lockdown has prompted prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to announce a time frame for easing the restrictive measures imposed last month.

The post A Letter From Greece, Where Quarantined Sheep Go for Walks appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The fact that “barbarian” survives intact in modern English suggests that we still tend to see foreigners in a negative light. Controversy over immigration, that is, connects our time to that of the ancient Greeks. But as a professor of classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I hear deeper, and very different, echoes. If we read Greek culture correctly, it’s not just bequeathing us a hatred of foreigners. Rather, it offers peculiar contradictions in its attitude toward immigrants, which reveal a lot about the contradictions and myths of our own country and time.

The most interesting attitudes come from Athens, since Athenians wanted to think of themselves as sophisticated, worldly, and welcoming of immigrants. In a famous speech, the historian Thucydides has the political leader Pericles characterize the Athenians as a people whose city-state is open to the world even though, he explains, such unhindered openness may allow the enemy to profit from state secrets. This in contrast with Spartans, who are represented by Pericles as close-minded and unsophisticated.

But Athenians also had an origin myth that helped them to distinguish themselves from foreigners—a story of autochthony, or being born from the earth. Athenians said that Hephaestus (or in some versions, Poseidon) wanted to have sex with Athena. Athena, however, was an eternal virgin, so Hephaestus’ desire could not be satisfied. He tried anyway and ejaculated onto Athena’s leg. Athena wiped off the semen with a piece of wool and threw the wool onto the earth. Earth, harboring the sperm, nurtured a baby to term and then handed the child over to Athena to rear. He became the first king of Athens. In the myth, all Athenians are descended from him and other ancient kings also imagined to be born of the earth. Since ancient kings created institutions, like marriage and the Panathenaic festival (an important civic festival in honor of Athena), civilizing customs were also closely tied to the land.

At first this origin story sounds profoundly alien to American ears accustomed to tales of Thanksgiving day feasts involving maize, or of Grandma landing at Ellis Island with nothing but a samovar. Yet we have our own version of American autochthony in current claims that some citizens are “real Americans,” with deep roots in their native soil, and some are not. We also pride ourselves on openness, like Pericles in Athens, saying that we are a “nation of immigrants”—while also making sure to distinguish the “real” citizens from supposedly illegitimate ones.

Athens’ dirty secret, which wasn’t much of a secret, was that it depended on foreigners to do things Athenians didn’t do. In and around Athens there were tens of thousands of resident foreigners, known as metics. Some were non-Athenian Greeks. (Since there was no Greek “nation,” and Greeks instead identified with their city-state, Athenians considered all Greeks who weren’t from Athens to be foreigners.) Others were economically motivated Egyptians, Thracians, and Phoenicians, as well as many people from an area that lies within present-day Turkey (Phrygians, Lydians, Scythians). Metics had a citizen sponsor, registered with the authorities, and paid taxes. They received some legal protection, but they did not enjoy full citizen rights, such as voting and owning land.

Metics had occupations that were thought to be un-Athenian, like trade and commerce. A common smear of them was that they did not care about the state, but about themselves and their own personal gain. Metics are described in comedy as dishonest. Sound familiar?

One funny thing about these supposedly dishonest and disloyal workers is that the word metoikos includes the word oikos, “household,” which indicates the most intimate part of Greek life. The prefix meta could mean either “with” or “change,” so metics were “livers with” or “changers of households.” In practice, Athenian metics were not necessarily connected to the household, though they could be—women might be employed as wet-nurses. But today we can see a (different kind of) connection between immigrants and the oikos in immigrants who make their living by cleaning houses or working in childcare.

For me, though, the most interesting lesson of Athenian immigration is not the conjunction of openness and autochthony, or the reliance on foreigners. It’s the way Greek tragedies treat foreigners as both dangerous and magical, strange but offering mythic powers to the city-states who manage to keep them.

Tragedies were staged at the annual Great Dionysia festival, which was more like a State of the Union address than a Broadway play. The festival played out with pomp, circumstance, and celebration of Athenian ideology. Before the performances began, tribute from Athenian allies (or Athenian subjects, depending upon your perspective) was brought into the theater. The names of those who had benefited the state were read, and war orphans who had been raised at state expense were paraded before the crowd. From this psychologically comforting perch, Athenian citizens watched tragedies about terrible dysfunction (like a wife who kills her husband when he comes home from war) and ideas that conflicted with Athenian ideology. But they also watched tragedies that celebrated Athens as a highly functional polis, a place where difficult problems are set right.

In these latter plays, foreigners could be depicted as almost magical. In Sophocles’ tragedy “Oedipus at Colonus,” the formerly accursed king Oedipus is a “foreigner” from Thebes who arrives in Colonus, a small town on the outskirts of Athens; he is so unfamiliar with its customs that he walks right into a sacred grove. When elders appear shouting—“You cannot walk there! That space belongs to goddesses!”—Oedipus explains that he is an exile and that he would like to be admitted into their community. At first he does not tell them his name; when he finally does, the elders are horrified. Oedipus killed his father and slept with his mother. His actions are utterly barbaric.

Yet, over the course of the play, the elders teach Oedipus how to act properly in Colonus, because a prophecy from the god Apollo has indicated that if they get his body after his death it will offer protective powers. They give him detailed instructions about how to perform a ritual to appease the goddesses he has offended; they sing a sorrow-filled song together with him, in which they mourn for his traumatic past. When the king, Theseus, appears, he immediately announces that he will allow Oedipus to dwell in the land. Oedipus, for his part, explains that he is going to be a “savior” for the Athenians, because his dead body will offer them military protection.

Aeschylus’ “Eumenides” features a different sort of scary outsider–the Furies, a band of goddesses hell-bent on vengeance. The Furies are not easygoing ladies. They are terrifying, Gorgon-like creatures that slurp the blood of humans; Apollo describes them as monsters who belong where beheadings and eye-gougings take place. When they first arrive in Athens, they insist that they are going to bring a plague on Athens and destroy the land and the people. But by the end, persuaded by the goddess Athena, they agree to go beneath the earth, live there, and bring blessings. Donning the crimson robes of metics, the Furies become Kindly Ones (Eumenides). Like Oedipus (though different because he dies and they are immortal goddesses), they are incorporated into Athens in order to protect the polis.

Both of these plays suggest that integrating the most frightening of foreigners offers safety and protection—even military protection—for a powerful city-state. They also demonstrate that the polis can handle and even neutralize the potential threat of foreigners via its rules for accepting exiles and its well-run court system. In this way, Greek tragedies taught Athenians that their institutions could help the whole population benefit from the presence of foreigners. Institutions could take the worst—a man who had married his mother and killed his father, or those loose-cannon goddesses—and not only train them to be model citizens, but make them pay a dividend!

Until very recently, this was the story America told itself, and it has paid well: 51 percent of the country’s billion dollar tech startups were founded by immigrants. Rich American men have brought more than one good luck charm Slovenian model home to the pent-oikos. At the heart of successful, aggressive states is a paradox: They need a distinct identity and they need lots of merchants and wet nurses and “barbarians” to make the state more powerful. How they solve that paradox is how history remembers them.

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