"Today, democracy is facing numerous challenges. Many say it is our duty as democratic scholars to defend democracy in its present form, not to question it. They argue that our search for a more comprehensive concept of democracy opens up a Pandora's Box. It thus also puts the core norms of democracy up for discussion, which risks undermining democracy, or hollowing out its value."
This quote is from Norma Osterberg-Kaufmann, Toralf Stark, and Christoph Mohammad-Klotzbach's essay here: https://theloop.ecpr.eu/democracy-is-an-essentially-contested-concept/
Is the study of marginalised, lost and forgotten concepts and conceptions of "democracy", and the search for a "common core" among them, really putting democracy as it is conventionally known at risk today?
What do you think? If not, why?
If it does - is that not a good thing? Shouldn't we be trying to establish ever better, fuller, maximal, and pervasive democracies instead of guarding what have arguably always been racist, sexist, exclusionary, and capitalist forms of so-called "democratic rule" which are now becoming even more disfigured?
Opening Pandora's box (at least metaphorically) opens to a chaotic void of infinite choices that we don't really have.
It certainly challenges 'democracy' & 'sustainability', from the latest trend of 'net-zero-emissions' to the particle-physicist's new consensus for the 'net-zero-void'.
However, these formulations show a rather anthropocentric uncertainty. They imply a precision that really encodes considerable doubt as to how these can be measured.
An insight here come from Professor Guido Tonelli (until recently a team leader at CERN) who wrote, “Original chaos, understood as the void, is anything but disorderly. There is no more strictly ordered, regulated & symmetrical system than the void. Everything belonging to it is strictly codified, every particle of matter goes hand in hand with its corresponding antiparticle, every fluctuation dutifully observes the constraints of the uncertainty principle, everything moves to a cadenced & well-tempered rhythm, a perfect choreography without improvisation or virtuosic excess.”