(Māori) Kia ora koutou, everyone. I want to you today about democracy, about the struggles that it's experiencing, and the fact that all of us together in this room might be the solution. But before I get onto that, I want to take a little detour into the past.
大家好! 今天我想聊聊民主这个话题。 民主在当下面临很多问题, 而在场的所有人, 也许就是答案。 但在此之前, 我想稍微谈点历史。
This is a picture from Athens, or more specifically, it's a picture of a place called the Pnyx, which is where, about two and a half thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks, the ancient Athenians, gathered to take all their major political decisions together. I say the ancient Athenians. In fact, it was only the men. Actually, it was only the free, resident, property-owning men. But with all those failings, it was still a revolutionary idea: that ordinary people were capable of dealing with the biggest issues of the time and didn't need to rely on a single supposedly superior ruler. It was, you know, it was a way of doing things, it was a political system. It was, you could say, a democratic technology appropriate to the time.
这是一张雅典的图片, 更确切的说,图中的地点 是雅典的普尼克斯, 大约两千五百年前, 古希腊人、古雅典人 在此集会,共同做出 重大政治决策。 这里我说的古雅典人, 实际上只包括男性, 准确来说,是城邦内拥有财产的 自由男性公民。 尽管存在种种局限, 雅典民主依然具有划时代意义: 普通民众能够 参与共商国是, 无需仰赖某个至高无上的统治者。 这是一种处事之道, 一种政治制度, 也可以说是一种 因时制宜的民主形式。
Fast-forward to the 19th century when democracy was having another flourishing moment and the democratic technology that they were using then was representative democracy. The idea that you have to elect a bunch of people -- gentlemen, in the picture here, all gentlemen, at the time, of course -- you had to elect them to look after your best interests. And if you think about the conditions of the time, the fact that it was impossible to gather everybody together physically, and of course they didn’t have the means to gather everyone together virtually, it was again a kind of democratic technology appropriate to the time.
快进到 19 世纪, 又一个民主繁荣发展的时代, 当时的民主形式 称作代议制民主。 这种民主形式需要 选举一群代表—— 即议员,如图所示,这是 当时所有的议员—— 选举他们来最大限度 维护你的权益。 想想当时的条件, 根本不可能将所有人 实体地聚集到一起, 当然,也没办法将所有人 虚拟地聚集到一起, 这又是一种新的民主形式, 因时制宜。
Fast-forward again to the 21st century. And we're living through what's internationally known as the crisis of democracy. What I would call the crisis of representative democracy, the sense that people are falling out of love with this as a way of getting things done, that it's not fundamentally working. And we see this crisis take many forms in many different countries. So in the UK, you see a country that now at times looks almost ungovernable. In places like Hungary and Turkey, you see very frighteningly authoritarian leaders being elected. In places like New Zealand, we see it in the nearly one million people who could have voted at the last general election, but who chose not to.
进入 21 世纪, 我们正经历一场 国际公认的民主危机, 我称之为代议制民主危机。 人们不再真切认同代议制民主 这种处事之道, 根本上来说,这种民主不再奏效。 我们可以看到这场危机在 许多国家以不同形式上演。 正如今天的英国, 有时看上去几乎处于无政府状态。 在匈牙利和土耳其等国, 骇人地选出独断专制的领导人。 而在新西兰等国, 有将近 100 万人口 拥有最后一轮大选的投票权, 却选择放弃投票。
Now these kinds of struggles, these sort of crises of democracy have many roots, of course, but for me, one of the biggest ones is that we haven't upgraded our democratic technology. We're still far too reliant on the systems that we inherited from the 19th and from the 20th century. And we know this because in survey after survey people tell us, they say, “We don’t think that we’re getting a fair share of decision-making power, decisions happen somewhere else." They say, “We don’t think the current systems and our government genuinely deliver on the common good, the interests that we share as citizens." They say, “We’re much less deferential than ever before, and we expect more than ever before, and we want more than ever before to be engaged in the big political decisions that affect us.” And they know that our systems of democracy have just not kept pace with either the expectations or the potential of the 21st century. And for me, what that suggests is that we need a really significant upgrade of our systems of democracy.
当前所面临的这些问题 和此类民主危机肯定有许多原因, 但我认为,其中最主要的原因 是我们的民主形式没有与时俱进。 我们仍然过度依赖这套 从 19、20 世纪 继承来的民主制度。 之所以得出这样的结论, 是因为在多次调研中, 受访者对我们说, “我们认为,我们没有获得 公平的决定权配额, 决定发生在 我们之外的其他地方。” 他们说:“我们认为,当前的制度 和我们的政府 并未切实保障公共利益, 以及我们作为公民应有的权益。” 他们还说:“比起过去, 我们不再惯于顺从, 我们更加期盼, 我们更加渴望 参与到关乎我们 自身的重大政治决策中。” 他们明白, 我们的民主制度 并未跟上民众期盼的步伐, 也未展现 21 世纪应有的样貌。 在我看来,这所揭示的 是我们亟需显著地提升民主制度, 这十分重要。
That doesn't mean we throw out everything that's working about the current system, because we will always need representatives to carry out some of the complex work of running the modern world. But it does mean a bit more Athens and a bit less Victorian England. And it also means a big shift towards what's generally called everyday democracy. And it gets this name because it's about finding ways of bringing democracy closer to people, giving us more meaningful opportunities to be involved in it, giving us a sense that we're not just part of government on one day, every few years when we vote, but we're part of it every other day of the year.
这不意味着完全抛弃 现有制度中的一切, 因为我们总是需要一些代表, 来完成部分复杂的工作, 实现现代社会的运转。 但这里提到的提升意味着 更倾向雅典式民主, 而偏离维多利亚英国式民主。 这也意味着一次重大转型, 目标即通常所说的 “日常民主”。 之所以得名, 是因为其设法让民主更贴近民众, 让我们得以有契机参与其中, 并意识到,不是只有 每隔几年投票的那天, 我们才是政府的一份子, 而是每两天,我们就是其中的一员。
Now that everyday democracy has two key qualities that I've seen prove their worth time and again, in the research that I've done. The first is participation because it's only if we as citizens, as much as possible, get involved in the decisions that affect us, that we'll actually get the kind of politics that we need, that we'll actually get our common good served. The second important quality is deliberation. And that's just a fancy way of saying high-quality public discussion, because its all very well people participating, but it's only when we come together and we listen to each other, we engage with the evidence, and reflect on our own views, that we genuinely bring to the surface the wisdom and the ideas that would otherwise remain scattered and isolated amongst us as a group. It's only then that the crowd really becomes smarter than the individual.
日常民主有两个关键特征, 在我所进行的研究中, 我见证了他们一次次 证明自身的价值。 第一个特征是参与。 因为只有当我们作为公民, 尽可能多地 参与到关乎自身的决策中去时, 我们才真正得到了 我们所需要的政治, 我们的共同利益才真正得到保障。 第二个重要特征是审议。 简单来说,就是高质量公众讨论, 因为参与者都是素质较高的人, 但是只有聚在一起, 聆听各自见解, 运用各式论据, 反思自身观点, 我们才能真正挖掘出 潜藏的智慧和好的想法, 否则它们就将散落、隔绝 于人群之中。 只有那时,集体智慧 才真正大于个人智慧。
So if we ask what could this abstract idea, this everyday democracy actually look like in practice, the great thing is we don't even have to use our imaginations because these things are already happening in pockets around the world. One of my favorite quotes comes from the science fiction writer, William Gibson, who once said, "The future's already here, it's just unevenly spread." So what I want to do is share with you three things from this unevenly spread future that I'm really excited about in terms of upgrading the system of democracy that we work with. Three components of that potential democratic upgrade.
当人们问起这种抽象概念, 即日常民主, 实践起来是什么样的, 幸运的是我们不必依靠想像, 因为世界上已有先例可循。 我最喜欢的一句名言 来自科幻小说家 威廉·吉布森(William Gibson), 他曾说过, “未来已来, 只是在这世上分布不均。” 所以我想与你们分享三点, 基于这个“分布不均的未来”。 令我十分高兴的是 它们有助于完善民主制度, 这是我们所致力于实现的。 未来完善民主有三个要素,
And the first of them is the citizens assembly. And the idea here is that a polling company is contracted by government to draw up, say, a hundred citizens who are perfectly representative of the country as a whole. So perfectly representative in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, income level and so on. And these people are brought together over a period of weekends or a week, paid for their time and asked to discuss an issue of crucial public importance. They're given training on how to discuss issues well with each other, which we'll all know of course, from our experiences of arguing online, if nowhere else, is not an ability that we're all born with innately, more’s the pity. In the citizens assembly, people are also put in front of evidence and the experts, and they're given time to discuss the issue deeply with their fellow citizens and come to a state of consensus recommendations. So these kinds of assemblies have been used in places like Canada, where they were used to draw up a new national action plan on mental health for the whole country. A citizens assembly was used recently in Melbourne to basically lay the foundation of a new 10-year financial plan for the whole city. So these assemblies can have real teeth, real weight.
其一是公民大会。 思路就是,政府与 民调公司达成协议, 举个例子,民调公司召集一百位公民, 整体上,他们要能够 广泛地代表这个国家的公民, 广泛代表性需体现在年龄、性别、 民族、收入水平等方面。 将这些人聚到一起, 花上一个周末或一周的时间, 给他们补贴, 让他们讨论具有 重大公共意义的议题。 他们要接受培训, 学习如何较好地合作讨论。 众所周知,鉴于我们 在网上争论的经历, 如果没有在其他地方争论过的话, 合作讨论并不是我们 与生俱来的能力, 这很遗憾。 在公民大会上, 人们眼前就是论据和专家, 他们有时间与其他公民伙伴 深入讨论相关议题, 并最终形成协商一致的建议。 加拿大等国已采纳 这种公民大会的形式, 用于起草 一项新的国家精神健康行动计划, 以改善全国现状。 近期,墨尔本通过公民大会 为一项新的全国十年财政计划 奠定了基础。 可见,这些公民大会具有 真实效力和影响力。
The second key element of the democratic upgrade: participatory budgeting. The idea here is that a local council or a city council takes its budget for spending on new buildings, new services, and says, we're going to put a chunk of this up for the public to decide, but only after you've argued the issues over carefully with each other. And so the process starts at the neighborhood level. You have people meeting together in community halls, in basketball courts, making the trade-offs, saying, "Well, are we going to spend that money on a new health center, or are we going to spend it on safety improvements to a local road?" People using their expertise in their own lives. Those discussions are then pushed up to the suburb or ward level, and then again, to the city level and in full view of the public, the public themselves makes the final allocation of that budget. And in the city where this all originated, Porto Alegre in Brazil, a place with about a million inhabitants, as many as 50,000 people get engaged in that process every year.
完善民主的第二个关键要素: 参与式预算。 思路是,地方议会或市议会 拟制定预算,用于营建新建筑 或提供新服务, 并表示, 我们打算将大部分 预算决定权交给民众, 但要求你们相互之间 仔细地讨论过相关议题。 接着,整个流程从邻里间开始, 人们在社区礼堂、篮球场开会, 权衡利弊, 讨论着,“我们是该把预算 用来建一座新的健康中心, 还是用于市内道路的 安全养护呢?” 人们基于自身的认知参与讨论。 随后这些讨论上升至区 或选区级别, 再后来,上升至市级, 全面考虑公众想法, 由公众自身决定最终的预算分配。 参与式预算的发源地 巴西阿雷格里港(Porto Alegre), 拥有约 100 万居民, 其中每年有多达 5 万人 参与这一过程。
The third element of the upgrade: online consensus forming. In Taiwan a few years ago, when Uber arrived on their shores, the government immediately launched an online discussion process using a piece of software called Polis, which is also coincidentally, or not coincidentally, what the ancient Athenians call themselves when they were making their collective decisions. And the way Polis works is it groups people together, and then using machine learning and a bunch of other techniques, it encourages good discussion amongst those participating. It allows them to put up proposals, which are then discussed, knocked back, refined, until they reach something like 80 percent consensus. And in the time, in this case, within about four weeks, this process had yielded six recommendations for how people wanted to see Uber regulated. And those, almost all of them, were immediately picked up by the government and accepted by Uber.
完善民主的第三要素: 线上达成共识。 几年前,美国打车应用 优步(Uber)进入台湾市场时, 当地政府立即发起了 一项线上研讨程序, 使用的软件名为Polis, 不管有意无意, Polis恰是古雅典人 集体决策时的自称, Polis的工作原理就是 将人们放在一个社群, 通过机器学习技术 和一些其他科技, 鼓励参与者积极讨论, 参与者可以提出意见, 这些意见随后用于讨论, 遭到反驳,再完善, 直到达成 80% 左右的共识。 在那场台湾的讨论中,大约四周内 这一流程产生了六条建议, 反映民众希望怎样管理优步。 几乎所有的建议 都立即得到了政府的采纳, 并被优步公司接受。
Now I find these examples really inspiring. People sometimes ask me why I'm an optimist and a large part of the answer is these kinds of innovations, because I think they, you know, they're really show us that we can have a kind of politics which is deeply responsive to our needs as citizens, but which avoids the peril of the threats to human liberties, the threats to civil liberties that authoritarian populism descends into. They show us that even though we live in what looks like quite a dark time, there are things that act a bit like emergency lighting, guiding us towards something better. And although these are all ideas from the Western tradition, they can also be combined with, adapted by Indigenous traditions that also value turn-taking in speech and consensus decision-making. And the thread that binds all these traditions together is essentially a faith in other people. A faith in people's ability to handle difficult decisions, a faith in people's ability to come together and make political decisions intelligently. In the Polis example, we see that government can be agile and nimble in the face of tech disruption. In the participatory budgeting, we see that we can build systems that are disproportionately used by poor people and which deliver infrastructure that is better quality than the traditional systems. In citizens assemblies, the experts who observed them time and again, say that in those good conditions people's ability to listen to others, to engage with the evidence, and to shift from their entrenched views is consistently astounding.
当下我认为这些例子 十分鼓舞人心, 有时人们问我,为什么 我是个乐观主义者, 我的答案很大一部分 来自于这些创新之举, 因为我认为, 它们向我们昭示了,我们可以 拥有心中理想的政治, 会积极回应我们的公民诉求, 规避对人类自由的危险威胁, 以及对公民自由的威胁, 这些都是威权民粹主义 退化带来的不良后果。 它们向我们昭示了,尽管 生活在看似黑暗的时代, 依然有像应急灯一样的东西, 指引着我们向更好的方向前进。 虽然这些都是西方传统思想, 它们还是可以与其他地区的 本土传统相结合、相适应, 那些地区的传统同样重视 话轮转换和共识决策。 而将这些文化传统 相互融合的想法, 本质上是对他人的信任, 相信他人能够完成困难的决策, 相信他人能够聚在一起, 做出明智的政治决策。 在Polis的例子里, 我们看到了政府在面对技术冲击时 展现出的灵敏机智。 在参与式预算案例中, 我们知道可以构建这样一种体制 能够为穷人广泛利用, 带来更好的基础设施, 其质量高于传统体制 所能带来的质量。 在公民大会中, 那些多次观察讨论的专家们表示, 在有利条件下,人们 能够倾听他人的意见, 运用论据辩论, 转变固有观念, 这无一例外令人惊叹。
And that's a really, really hopeful finding, because, you know, I think we live at a time where you see right around the world, huge suspicion of other people, of other citizens, huge doubts about whether people are really able to bear the burden of decision-making that democracy places on them. But if you're worried, for instance, about whether a lot of people out there, you know, are misinformed or fallen prey to online propaganda, what better way to push back against that than by ensuring that they're placed in forums. Forums like the New England town hall meetings shown here. Forums where they have to come face-to-face with other people, or at least be in close virtual contact, where they have to justify their opinions, have to deal with the evidence, and are encouraged to step away from their prejudices.
这一发现令人满怀希望, 因为我认为我们这个时代, 放眼世界, 看到的尽是对他人、 对其他公民的极度怀疑 深刻质疑人们是否能否承受 民主所带来的决策压力。 但是如果你在忧虑,比如说, 社会中许多人 是否已被误导或已沦为 负面网络宣传的受害者? 那么最好的应对方法就是 确保他们参与到公共对话中, 就像新英格兰的市政厅会议, 如图所示。 在这些公共对话中, 他们不得不与他人面对面, 或至少能够近距离接触, 他们需要论证自己观点的合理性, 需要应对现实证据, 我们也要鼓励他们 走出自身的偏见。
The Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath says that rationality, our ability to make good decisions, isn't something that we achieve as individuals, if we achieve it at all. It's something we achieve in groups. Our best hope of rationality is each other. Or to put the thing a different way, the problem with democracy is not other people, it's not other citizens. The problem is the situations in which they -- in which we all -- have been asked to do our democratic work. The problem is the outdated democratic technology that we've all been forced to use. And so what these examples show to me, the reason I find them inspiring, is that I think they demonstrate that if you get the situations right, if you get the technology upgraded, then actually the things that we do when we come together as citizens can be astounding, and together, we really can build a form of democracy that's genuinely fit for the 21st century.
加拿大哲学家 约瑟夫·奚斯(Joseph Heath)认为, 理性, 或者说正确决策的能力, 不是单个人能够拥有的。 如果要说我们拥有理性, 那一定是在集体中得到的。 我们对理性最美好的期待 寄托在我们每个人身上。 换句话说, 民主的问题不在于其他人, 也不在于其他公民。 问题在于,我们所有人 被要求去实现民主时所处的条件。 问题在于,我们所有人 都被迫使用过时的民主形式。 我讲的这些例子给我的启发, 以及我之所以认为它们鼓舞人心, 根本在于它们昭示着, 如果条件合适, 如果民主形式得到完善, 那么我们作为公民共同做出的努力 将惊艳无比。 携手前行,我们就能构建 一种完美契合 21 世纪的民主形式。
Thank you very much.
谢谢。
(Applause)
(掌声)