The end of liberal democracy

At the Intelligence Squared event last night at the Royal Geographic Society (RGS), presenters from Oxford University’s James Martin 21st Century School had lots of interesting eutopic and dystopic views of The World in 2050.

Particularly interesting was Porfessor Julian Savulescu’s comment that comes from a book he’s writing now. 

Civilisations that last, says Savulescu, are either small states or totalitarian ones. So where does that leave the liberal democracy we know and love today, where we’re tolerant to different ways and values?

To deal with the challenges of the 21st century, he says, ‘we may have to give up our commitment to liberal democracy’ – and some of its essential traits.

Three key ones include:

(1) increased surveillance; 

(2) give up our privacy;

(3) we may have to look at influencing people’s moral dispositions, their behaviour through education; government will shift from holding a liberal, neutral position towards values, to giving people certain, specific values.

Given that we already have 4.2m CCTV cameras in the UK and our behaviour, from the amount of rubbish we throw out to how much electricity we use is increasingly being monitored, I’d agree and say we’re heading that way.

After the talk, I asked Savulescu if this all sounded like a shift towards using the sort of influence Sunstein and Thaler propose in their book Nudge, and a shift from a liberal democracy to a paternalistic libertarian one. He agreed that it was.

The end of liberal democracy then? The beginning of the end, certainly. And don’t worry, it is a good thing.