Since people have started mailing me comments about these blogs, this particular stream of thought will now basically meander along the comments I'm receiving.
I should probably stress again at this point, that I am not in favour of handing out pitchforks to a thronging mob tomorrow, merely that the republican system we live in has swung so far to oligarchy that it has become instable and thus we need to find our way back to something more direct. I think Athenian democracy can offer us a good template here.
Someone recently raised the argument to me that Athenians may have been so willing to attend Assembly and participate in juries, because they didn't have anything better in the way of entertainment. That's right - no film, no TV, no radio, no computer games, no wonder they spent all their time measuring the sides of triangles. They must have been desperate.
This is only partially true. Athens had a certain entertainment industry of feasting, live musicians, epic storytelling, sporting events and theatre. In fact, the witty but raunchy plays of Aristophanes would fit in in Hollywood today (not joking here, read them if you doubt me). And if all that failed, you could always get drunk. But point taken, in that you had to actually make the effort to move your carcass to any of the above. Entertaining it might have been, but it wasn't piped into your living room every night. So even if direct democracy was implemented tomorrow, how could you get people today to pass up a riveting night of X-Factor to sit on a jury instead?
I contend, that despite their only nascent entertainment possibilities, the Athenians also had to deal with this issue and reached a solution that not only worked for them, but is worth considering now. They paid people, referred at the time by some lesser enthusiasts of the scheme as "bribing people with their own money". And they paid a fairly decent amount: for a day at Assembly or courts a citizen could expect three obols (half a drachma) or about half the amount a mason or carpenter could expect to earn for a day's labour. Those holding public office also received between three obols to a drachma a day in compensation.
Today, a carpenter in the United States can make between $20 and $40 an hour depending on unionization and workplace, or between $160 and $320 for an 8-hour day. Taking the low figure of $20 an hour, that would mean that a day's democratic participation would net $80, putting participation at least occasionally in reach of "working-class" people. Participation, as in Athens, would incur a loss of income, but thanks to pay, it would not be a drastic loss.
Based on the writings of Socrates and Aristotle, it would seem that pay for participation was effective in enabling the middle class a much broader opportunity to partake in decision-making than had previously been the case. According to Aristotle:
"all citizens take part in this sort of government because of the predominance of the masses, and they participate and exercise their citizen rights because even the poor (tous aporous) are able to have leisure by receiving pay"(1) and "the power of the Council is weakened in democracies of the sort in which the people in assembly deals with everything itself; this usually happens when there is a plentiful supply of pay for those attending the assembly, for having leisure they meet often and themselves make all decisions" (2).
Of course, this doesn't mean that everyone will line up for jury duty at the prospect of making $80 a day, but it does do away with one of the strongest incentives for trying to get out of it.
The second incentive for participation in Athens was the quality of that participation - when voters congregated in Assembly or on the juries, or carried out their duties as civil servants, they acted in a decision-making capacity. Let me admit, that I myself will be near to the last person who attends a townhall meeting to just listen or at most ask a question. So I got to ask a question, so what? Even voting in national elections is only a vote for who you think should make decisions at some later stage. It is qualitively different than immediate decision-making. Immediate decision-making that affects you is actually quite entertaining and downright attention-grabbing.
However, what about all those people who really would just like to sit down to night after night of reality TV? What do we do about them? The answer is pretty simple: nothing. The Athenians didn't bother with them, either. Sure, participation levels in Athens were phenomenal - it is estimated that approximately one quarter of all citizens participated in public life one way or another every single day - but they weren't universal. There was a certain chunk of the population who just didn't participate and the Athenians had two words for them: oligarches (those few wealthy individuals who often refused to participate in a system of government they fundamentally opposed) and "idiotes" - the rest of them, meaning a selfish person lacking judgment. The English word "idiot" derives from this term.
So, the short answer is, yes, you'll always have some idiots who can't be bothered to participate, but that shouldn't stop the rest of us. Via mechanisms like pay for participation and a rethinking of participation from passive to active modes, anyone who wants to participate can, without having to make any great sacrifices of time and money.
(1)Pol. 1293a3-7, both quoted in Markle, note 16, at 103 respectively
(2)Aristotle, Politics, 1299b, quoted in Markle, note 16, at 104