Is public participation in democratic government really a good thing – or is the question moot?
Current circumstances are making for interesting times on the Web, as all sorts of new questions & views pop up about what is happening around us. Underlying this I see growing disillusionment and anger about the state of world affairs, and a rising tide of despair about the future. For me, interesting thoughts relevant to TCR are triggered. For example I have just read a piece by Larry A. Hickman published in Free Inquiry (the journal of the Council for Secular Humanism) called Citizen Participation: More or Less? Hickman examines two contrasting views of the form that public participation should take in a democracy. First, there is the view that many people are simply not competent to participate in public decision-making, and so should be excluded. Hickman says: “For democracies, then, as opposed to theocracies and other types of dictatorships, the question is not whether there should be citizen participation but what form it should take. This question has received a wide range of r
