Another of those worried about something is Brian Eno. What he's worried about is democracy. To be more precise he's worried because too many people keep away from politics, with the result that somebody else does it for them and doesn't do it right.
As worries go, there could be less useful or more harmful ones than this - wanting greater involvement by more people in democratic politics. What caught my eye, however, is the way Eno begins his enumeration of issues that would potentially have benefited from a more active interest by more people in politics. He writes:
Whatever the reasons for our quiescence, politics is still being done - just not by us. It's politics that gave us Iraq and Afghanistan and a few hundred thousand casualties.
Two things are striking about this. The first is the notion that the Iraq war provides a good example of non-involvement in politics. In recent times it aroused more popular interest than most issues and had hundreds of thousands of people, in this and other democratic countries, out in the streets and squares on protest marches - to say nothing of the participation in media discussion, the letters to newspapers, the contribution to phone-in programmes, the blogging, and so forth. If you want an illustration of citizen passivity, Iraq isn't a good one. Second, Eno seems to think that the democratic voice would have expressed the same view about the war as he took. But it ain't necessarily so. Why is it so easy, this assumption made by a certain type of political critic that a healthy democracy is one in which most people think the way that... the critic does? (On which, see also the last paragraph here.) It's an impenetrable conundrum.
