Richard Hoggart, British sociologist, director of UNESCO and author of First and Last Things:
“Democracy is never an abstraction. It has to be rooted in a sense of our own particular culture, of its virtues, strengths, limitations … It arises from the people we have known, loved, respected as we grew up, whether that was among the urban or rural working class, or the conscientious and public-spirited among the middle class, or the upper class.”
DFQ #008:
What can you take from this to think about today?
Democracy is simply a level of consciousness or awareness, and just as with other levels of consciousness; physics, metaphysics, mysticism, philosophy, God/not God or any other major idea, you either ‘get it’ or you don’t.
If you get it, it’s real and dynamic, if you don’t it’s an abstract idea in which you play no real part, you are confined to the role of observer, a non-participant, and at worse, a pawn in the game of the idea manipulators.
Richard Hoggart’s view strikes me as arrogant, elitist and condescending, no matter which ‘class’ he is referring to.
Surely UNESCO can do better than this.
The coordinates of our lives depend from the very beginning from the place and the age we were born in
To live in the question of how are my beliefs an expression of my total life experience. to look beyond the idea of democracy or any other belief and recognize that my understanding of it, its place in my life is influenced and shaped by my life circumstances