57 | Astra Taylor on the Promise and Challenge of Democracy

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2019

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone” — or so suggests the title of Astra Taylor’s new book. We all know how democracy falls short, in practice, of its lofty ideals; but we can also appreciate how democratic values are crucial in the fight for a more just society. In this conversation, we dig into the nature of democracy, from its origins to the present day. We talk about who gets to participate, how economic inequality affects political inequality, and how democratic ideals manifest themselves in any number of real-world situations.

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Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, author, and activist. Her documentary films include Zizek!, The Examined Life, and most recently What Is Democracy? Her books include The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital age and the new Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. She has taught sociology at the university level, and written for publications from n+1 to The London Review of Books. She was active in the Occupy movement, and is a co-founder of the Debt Collective.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:04.5	Several years ago I watched a documentary about philosophers called Examined Life.
0:10.4	There aren't that many documentaries about philosophers and it was just a very enjoyable,
0:16.0	thought-provoking kind of experience. You had these philosophers out there in the world.
0:20.0	They weren't just behind their desks in their offices or lecturing in a hallway.
0:23.9	They were out there in cars on the streets doing things and then talking about the relationship
0:29.0	between philosophy and practice and the real world. So I was interested to find out that the
0:35.6	documentarian who made this film Astra Taylor has recently been working on the idea of democracy.
0:40.9	She has both a new another documentary that just came out called What Is Democracy?
0:45.6	And she has a new book that has just come out called Democracy May Not Exist, but we'll miss it
0:51.1	when it's gone. I think that's almost exactly right. As soon as you say, well, Democracy,
0:55.6	blah blah blah, so many people say we don't live in a democracy. Either we live in a republic or
1:00.2	they try to say, well, we don't really have the voice that we should truly make it a democracy and so
1:04.9	forth. And so Astra is saying, yes, that's right, but there's still good things about democracy that
1:10.1	we should think about trying to make them better rather than just despairing that it can't be done.
1:14.1	So she goes all the way back to ancient Greece, you know, Plato and Aristotle, our founding philosophers,
1:19.9	were notoriously against democracy. They didn't really like the idea, but Athens was definitely
1:25.7	the touchstone for the flowering of democracy subsequently in the Western world at least. And Rome,
1:32.2	as those of you who have listened to Mindscape know from my conversation with Ed Watts, Rome was more
1:37.5	of a republic than a democracy. It's interesting to compare those. And it's interesting to
1:42.0	move things forward to the present day where we have technology and we live in these huge societies
1:47.5	where the relationship between individual voters and what their governments do grows increasingly
	...

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