At the debate on parliamentary democracy recorded last week in Portcullis House for The Forum (broadcast on Sunday on the World Service) as part of Parliament Week, we in the audience were asked whether we thought democratic values were universal or whether they applied differently in different places. Most people voted for them being universal but I found myself in a dilemma. What does the question mean? Human rights must surely be everywhere the same. But does this mean that democracy should be the same wherever you are around the world? Do villagers living deep within the Swat Valley have the same democratic needs as shoppers on the Ku’Damm in Berlin?
We had just heard the three experts on the panel — Helena Kennedy, the barrister and expert on human rights, Ramachandra Guha, the Indian historian who now teaches at the London School of Economics, and Madawi Al-Rasheed, the political anthropologist of King’s College London — discussing whether western-style democracies could or should be applied everywhere. After all, as Madawi Al-Rasheed reminded us, in the past decade western governments have been dealing with political leaders who have not been elected and who have perpetrated terrible injustices in their own countries. Is this the kind of democracy that should be rolled out throughout the Arab world? And what about those blots on the British record for fair play, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay?
The Forum, chaired by the ever-brilliant Bridget Kendall, is broadcast to more than 40 million listeners across the globe. It would be fascinating to know what those villagers in the Swat Valley would have made of what they heard — if they had the opportunity to do so in their Taleban-dominated society. ‘To understand the history of democracy,’ says Ramachandra Guha, ‘it is salutary to look eastwards.’ That’s the best argument for supporting the World Service in its endeavour to maintain its role within the BBC. Its programmes keep on reminding us not to be Eurocentric, and that there are other ways of doing things.
In India, for instance, two lessons have been learnt, says Professor Guha: to keep the military out of politics, and that nurturing pluralism is essential. These are pretty obvious points to make, but in that context, right in the heart of the British Parliament, their meaning had a resonance beyond the words themselves. Surrounding the room in which we sat were the corridors of power. How should we protect them from misuse or misappropriation? How prepared is the British model of democracy to embrace the many cultures that now live side-by-side in the UK?
In A Short History of Story, also on the World Service (Saturday), Noah Richler explored the human instinct to tell stories. Where does it come from? ‘I hate this romance about aural stories,’ he was told by the Ghanaian novelist Kojo Laing. ‘When a flood wipes out a village we invent some Anansi story to explain it…If we’d known how to write novels, if we’d known how to tell lies, then we could have defeated the colonial invader.’ But what did Laing mean by trashing his own storytelling heritage?
‘The novel is a more calculating form of narrative than the aural story,’ decided Richler. Novels champion the individual rather than the communal values of aural societies. They come out of cities, of societies where a single species rules the roost over all the other species. Aural stories are narratives of societies where survival depends on the sustenance of the community as a whole. For the individual to survive, the community itself has to be sustained.
In a novel attempt to make the programme sound more punchy, less intellectual, Richler unfolded his ideas against a background of ambient music — as if what he was saying was far too complicated for us to grasp without the aid of this musical subtext. At first I thought it was a clever device to get us in the mood for listening, but the music made it so hard to concentrate that after a few minutes I drifted away into my own dreamlike thoughts.
Over on Radio 4 the new schedule has created a 15-minute slot between the extended The World at One and the daily visit to Ambridge. This week it has been filled with a new series on the history of the brain, written and presented by Dr Geoff Bunn. On Monday we discovered how even in neolithic times, when the only sharp tools would have been flintstones, trepanning (or drilling a hole in the skull) was quite common. Often, as Neil MacGregor proved so exhilaratingly, the 15-minute programme is a perfect shape and timespan for radio, but trepanning is such a mind-blowing process that Dr Bunn left me with more questions than insights. Did a 13th-century bishop, for instance, really survive for years after having a hole drilled into him to release the pus from an ear infection? How did they know where to drill? With what did they drill?
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