Dunbar’s Number: Human Intimacy and the Future of Democracy (#SIZEDOESMATTER)

The anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed in the 1990s, in light of studies of primate and human kinship societies, that the number of sustained personal relationships most people can entertain is around 150—the so-called “Dunbar’s Number.” One can recognize a far larger number of individuals, according to Dunbar, but only on condition of not carrying on with them in-depth social relations. Only sustained individual social relations establish some degree of intimacy. If I interact with someone over time, sharing observations, opinions and experiences, I gradually discover something of that person’s interior world, and vice-versa. Even if the views and opinions expressed by that person turn out not to agree with my own preferences and values, I can still witness, through our exchanges, someone who processes thoughts and emotions more or less as I do, a person with whom I can identify as someone not unlike myself. As our relationship develops, our understanding of one another is bound to deepen. Without this interaction, compassion and love cannot flourish. Absent such an exchange of intimacy, other people remain abstractions, stereotypes, or cartoon figures. Only in intimacy can a common humanity appear.

Our differences, of course may intensify, and end in conflict, even with greater intimacy. Human beings can betray one another in the closest of circumstances, and domestic violence is well recognized. We can certainly find evil in intimacy. Yet it is only in the domestic sphere of direct family and community relationships that we also find the countervailing force of human empathy. In this sense, intimacy remains the indispensable basis for any possible moderation of the differences among us. By contrast, the one-way recognition on my part of others with whom I do not interact personally provides no corresponding humanitarian check on my judgments. Lacking feedback from such more distant others, I am reduced to characterizing them out of my own subjective experience. The result is a range of stereotypical judgments imposed upon others on the basis of superficial external observation. Such judgments may be positive or negative, but their subjective nature makes any correction difficult. On the other hand, once such observations are put to the test through sustained interactions—through getting to know people—stereotypical judgments can be evaluated and moderated accordingly, perhaps even eliminated.

This is why we need a new science of democracy based on human intimacy. This new science—call it popular democracy–will take sustained personal interaction as the basis and limit of the political realm. In politics, it turns out, small really is beautiful. As soon as human relations become impersonal, we leave the intimate political realm in favor of some kind of unnatural abstract system, some externalized and large-scale complex of beliefs and presuppositions that we impose upon one another. This line was crossed historically a long time ago, when complex state societies began to replace relatively simple kinship societies. Kinship societies are essentially extended families, organized into clans and tribes; everybody is related in some way, and no one is entirely a stranger. Behavior is regulated by social mores, not by codified law. Decisions are generally communal, with all adults playing important and respected roles. This is not to say that kinship societies were some kind of social paradise, but their worse features (torture, slavery, human sacrifice) were primarily directed against those perceived to be strangers and outsiders, especially those from other, unrelated tribes. Indeed, humanity was recognized only within the tribe; those beyond remained essentially alien, and not necessarily human. The sheer growth of population within clans or tribes could also stress interpersonal bonds to the breaking point, creating an internal class or caste system, as indeed was commonly the case in more complex kinship societies no longer within the range of Dunbar’s number.

The integrity of kinship societies was disrupted most dramatically and permanently, however, when one kinship group came to dominate another, mainly through warfare, resulting in their unequal integration. This created a new kind of society, one in which strata of rulers and subjects, masters and slaves, men and women, came to be hierarchically institutionalized, usually in cities—a newly invented setting where people increasingly interacted as strangers rather than as relatives. Several thousand years of state society—dating back at least to ancient Sumeria—have normalized these once abnormal human relations. We are now used—beyond our immediate and shrinking circle of home and family and friends—to sharing public social spaces with strangers according to impersonal rules. Our political structures reflect this state of affairs; they have institutionalized almost invariably the dominance of various groups over others. Social relations in state societies have been depersonalized into abstract codes of law maintained by force (police or military power) rather than by persuasion or social pressure, as in small-scale kinship societies.

The new science of popular democracy advanced here proposes to reintegrate communities on a personal basis. In this new science of democracy, self-governing local communities, small enough to operate on a personal scale, are linked together into representative bodies, also personal in scale, which are strictly accountable back to those local communities. This kind of popular democracy—to be outlined in more detail as we proceed–is rooted in human ecology, in the personal relations of people found in natural networks of family, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, which are themselves part of the particular physical environments in which they live. The chief principle of this new political science is that the limits of humanity are those of direct and intimate human acquaintance. Only in sustained face-to-face human interactions among peers can individuals take their mutual measure; only there can they expect to find love, respect, compassion, and justice. Beyond the circle of those we know directly, other people are necessarily more or less abstractions; their inner characters largely hidden, and their superficial features open to a variety of distortions and stereotypes. The impersonal stranger is the classic Other, someone who is more likely to be perceived as a threat than a help–the opposite of what happens in personal communities, where someone is more likely to be perceived as a help than a threat. The stereotypical characterizations of strangers are inherently dehumanizing; they are at best benign caricatures and at worse mortal threats. What we propose here is a politics of popular democracy which is structurally confined within the limits of personal interaction.

Mainstream liberal political theory–from Machiavelli through Hobbes, Harrington, Locke, and the American Founding Fathers–has accommodated a society of strangers rather than one of personal relations. Whether it was the divine right of kings justifying a feudal order of estates, or a social contract theory justifying the rights of property-owners over those of the property-less, we have had one or another hierarchical scheme based on abstracted, stratified, and externalized relations among strangers. The inequalities of wealth and power which underlie state societies have dictated our modern political structures. Popular democracy—personalized local self rule, the one-time norm of kinship societies, still echoed in modern times in rural communities—has been marginalized. In its place what might be called corporate democracy has been installed. A series of abstractions—the government, the citizen, the voter, the taxpayer, the constituent, the racial minority, the man, the woman, the property owner, the special interest, the expert, the professional, the worker, etc.—has replaced the intimacy of relatives, friends, and neighbors. Corporate democracy deals in large scale categories governed by complex rules subject to manipulation by some at the expense of others.

Kinship traditions, we might note, were still important in ancient civilizations, and informed democracy in Athens and other city states, including the Roman republic. The democratic impulse was found as well, at least in the Western world, in early Celtic, Germanic and Slavic tribes, where kinship precedents were also important. We find aspects of personal democracy later in the Swiss cantons, the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the English colonies in North America, the communes of Paris, and other revolutionary centers, including those of the Spanish anarchists, the soviets of the Russian revolutions, the workers councils in revolutionary Germany after World War I, and the Polish Solidarity movement of the 1980s, among others. The later examples in this list testify to the spontaneous emergence of the democratic impulse for personalized self-rule in times of breakdown and upheaval. In all these (actual and would be) democracies, there existed as well, at least among those admitted to membership or citizenship, a corresponding sense of economic fairness, or at least of its possibility. The cry for democratic participation—for self-rule or decision-making by the citizens themselves, not just for the delegation of authority to representatives–was commonly linked with a call for a more or less equitable distribution of resources. It generally presumed some kind of personalized economic as well as democratic practice, with citizens interacting and deliberating on a individual basis.

Today, the populist revolts sweeping the developed nations of the West once again raise the demand for political and economic justice. If that demand is not to be frustrated, as so often in the past, a clear sense of democracy has to be established adequate to resist easy co-optation or dismissal. A new science of democracy is needed, one which replaces impersonal corporate democracy with personal popular democracy. The fundamental principle of that new science, it cannot be overemphasized, is that politics remain strictly within the limits of personal interaction in a face-to-face context. That may seem strange if not self-defeating, at first blush. If politics is to be refounded strictly on personal relations, how can it possibly hope to function outside of a small community, a neighborhood or village at best? How can it ever hope to address the challenges of modern mass society which, for all its problems, is not about to disappear?

There is, rather surprisingly, a cogent response to this objection. It’s called confederal democracy, an important extension of natural or popular democracy, and it was first outlined, albeit informally, in a series of letters written by Thomas Jefferson during his retirement at Monticello. Jefferson was a great advocate of direct, local democracy, which he knew well from the period leading up to the American revolution. The backbone of the revolution, as he and others understood it, lay in the direct democracy that had developed in the colonies, especially in the settlement and frontier town meetings of New England, and also among the native Americans. That democracy, when challenged by British authority, responded by deliberating how to respond at town meetings, followed by the organization of committees of correspondence, local militias, and other expressions of self-governance. Largely autonomous, relatively egalitarian, self-governing local communities fiercely defended their independence. Local towns sent representatives to reconstitute state legislatures, replacing royal authority, and they in turn sent representatives to a new national body: the Continental Congress.

This make-shift arrangement was adequate to winning the Revolutionary War, but foundered afterwards under the Articles of Confederation, when popular resentment against creditors (mostly urban elites) by indebted farmers (Shay’s rebellion) boiled over. The question—at least as far as pro-democracy early Americans were concerned–was how to integrate local self-governing communities into broader representative bodies while maintaining the flow of power from the bottom-up. The wealthier elites who distrusted democracy had other ideas. They wanted a strong, centralized federal government in which the people had a minimal though legitimizing voice. The elites dominated the convention called in Philadelphia in 1787 to reform the Articles of Confederation, and ended up writing an entirely new Constitution, one which marginalized local self-government in favor of oligarchic rule by the wealthy. The subsequent debate between pro-Constitution Federalists and anti-Federalists led to some modifications (the Bill of Rights) but retained the essence of the new Constitution.

Jefferson, for one, remained dissatisfied with this political outcome. In his view, the American Revolution remained incomplete given its frustration of local democracy. In his correspondence from Monticello after leaving office, Jefferson suggested an alternative scheme in which local democratic assemblies were made the heart of a representative system accountable to them. In his system, local assemblies, or “ward republics,” as he called them, would exercise local self-rule, or direct democracy. His innovation—perhaps adapted from ancient precedents–was to envision these local communities sending representatives from local assemblies to county assemblies, with those in turn sending representatives from among those county representatives to state legislatures, and finally those in turn sending representatives from among state legislators to the national legislature, or Congress.

Imagine, as a thought experiment, this system replacing our current system with its large electoral districts and impersonal politics. Notice that at each level we have small, face-to-face deliberative and decision-making bodies operating inter-personally. At each stage in this confederal system of popular democracy, representatives are chosen from and strictly accountable only to the assemblies which chose them, beginning at the local or town meeting. Their accountability could be further ensured in various ways, not developed by Jefferson. They could be instructed and recalled, as necessary, and could be required to regularly report back to the assemblies they represent. Legislation might also be returned for ratification to the level being represented. A proposed county law, for instance, could be returned to the towns of the county, with a majority of towns’ support required for ratification. And similarly, a proposed state law could be returned to the counties for ratification, and a proposed federal law could be returned to the states.

We can imagine how representatives could move from level to level. If a town’s representative to a county were elected in turn by the county assembly to the state legislature, he or she could be replaced in the county assembly by another representative from the town. Similarly someone from a state legislature elected to the national Congress could be replaced in the state legislature by another representative from his or her county. Representatives would serve at the pleasure of their constituent assembly, to allow for continuity as desired; if not reelected or if recalled, they would cease to be representatives. All representatives would continue to be citizens of their town meetings, and would thereby remain eligible to be elected again as representative from their town to the county.

Envision, then, the United States as a political pyramid with tens of thousands of local assemblies, or town meetings, at the base, followed by a few thousand counties, fifty states, and one national government. This bottom up progression would guarantee that all the diversity of the nation would be represented as never before. The major political parties, which have interposed themselves between the people and their government in favor of the special interests, would no longer be necessary, and could be bypassed entirely. Deprived of mass electoral offices for which to recruit and run candidates, the parties would no longer serve any purpose. Party identification would no longer be required to participate fully in the political process. Nor would there be any need for a political donor class to fund media elections. The political agenda would be set at the grassroots, with local issues and challenges dealt with at the local level, and larger questions resolved at the broader, representative levels on the basis of input from below.

To take things a step further, a confederal system of direct democracy at the local level, and direct representation at the broader levels, would have no need of a separate executive. The imperial American presidency–with its unconstitutional power to wage war, its vast patronage, its powers of surveillance and coercion, its executive orders, and its cult of personality–has come to serve increasingly destructive and potentially tyrannical purposes. Executive functions could be carried out instead by legislative committees at the federal level, as was done under the Articles of Confederation, with the Speaker of the Congress serving as ceremonial head of state. The Continental Congress, we might recall, whatever its later failings, successfully fought the American revolution with no separate executive branch.

The confederal system or popular democracy outlined here envisions a series of unicameral assemblies. The idea of a second parallel assembly—as in state senates and the US Senate–has traditionally been promoted as a check on populist excesses. It would seem, though, that the broad grassroots-based process of confederal democracy would obviate that concern. For it ensures that the will of the people is determined not top down by elites, but through an extended system of face-to-face deliberation whose diversity and decentralization provides an built-in check on any excesses. The idea that a senate—whose members are chosen in even larger mass elections, and so is even more removed from the people–is needed to block the impetuous will of the people says more, as history has shown, about a concern to retain elite control than any serious threat of democratic anarchy. Demagogues, after all, are most effective if they can command the attention of a large and atomized electorate, and much less so in small, face-to-face assemblies. In the former case, as opposed to the latter, it is nearly impossible to challenge propagandistic claims, hate speech, and outright falsehoods. This may be why the Founding Fathers, who exercised, if only among themselves, a personalized politics, avoided demagoguery. State senates or a federal senate as we have known them would be redundant at best in a confederal democracy, and a barrier to governing at worse. A national Senate, at best, might be useful as an advisory body. It might in that case be comprised of a limited number of distinguished former members of the national Congress. But, even if all legislative power and executive power were placed in a system of unicameral confederated assemblies, it would still be necessary to have a separate judiciary to ensure the independent review of legislative actions at all levels. It would also be necessary for all levels to share a common Bill of Rights to ensure a uniformity of justice across the board. All of this could be accomplished by amending the Constitution.

What is remarkable about this deceptively simple confederal scheme is that at each stage it operates within the range of Dunbar’s number. Town assembly, county assembly, state legislature, national legislature—can all be made small enough to function on an ongoing, personal, face-to-face basis. In other words—and this cannot be overstated—there is no mass politics in this system: no large electoral districts where candidates run impersonal, media-driven, propagandistic advertising campaigns aimed at persuading an anonymous body of atomized and distracted voters to choose them over someone else, in the same way as consumers are cajoled into buying one brand of toothpaste over another.

Jefferson’s confederal system, if implemented, would entirely eliminate politics as we have known it, and all the evils it brings. There would be no political campaigns. There would be no Congressmen, Senators, or state legislators as we know them. There would be no elective legislative offices for jurisdictions with tens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of constituents. Communities, not aggregates of atomized, abstracted voters, would be represented. Representatives chosen by their communities to represent them would be citizen-representatives, not power-brokering politicians: the modern, secular versions of feudal dukes and barons. If would be difficult for representatives in a confederal system to ignore their constituents, or to play some off against others. Instead of representing an abstract body of voters they can manipulate, with all the unaccountable power that comes with that, representatives would remain beholden, at each level, directly to the assemblies which sent them and to the colleagues with which they had to work.

Jefferson believed that the fulfillment of the American revolution required the kind of popular confederal democracy we have outlined. Perhaps the greatest advantage of this face-to-face, personal system of government is the civic virtue it promises to foster. At each stage, politics is a matter of direct interaction among citizens with an equal voice and vote. They would be beholden to no campaign contributors or lobbyists. They would need no money to participate. Political success would depend on persuading and being persuaded through sustained discussion with one’s peers in one or another small assembly. Such political interaction necessarily becomes a test of character, and moreover one open to all at the local level, where the practice of direct democracy and the challenges of self-rule provide the fundamental civic education necessary for a just and viable politics—something nearly lost today. Being elected a representative from a town meeting to a county assembly would mean first earning the respect of one’s peers at the town meeting on a personal basis. A representative emerges from sustained social interaction, not because he or she unilaterally decides, often egotistically, to compete for a political office they think they can campaign to win, whether qualified or not. Sustained social interaction in face-to-face exchanges remains the case at each level. At the county or state level, a group of peers assembles to deliberate and vote, face-to-face, on the issues appropriate to that level. The same intimate, personal politics prevails there, and there too representatives are chosen by virtue of the respect they have earned from their peers. By the time representatives reach the national level, they will have gone through a truly extraordinary vetting process, and gained an immeasurable amount of experience not otherwise possible.

The system of confederal democracy proceeds in a naturally organic and decentralized manner, being virtually self-regulating. It follows the possibilities of personal contact insofar they are allowed to unfold naturally. The new science of democracy it would institutionalize builds on political ecology, on the natural, organic relationships of equal and self-determining human beings. It rejects political decision-making made outside public, face-to-face deliberation. No one can buy their way into this kind of political process; no donor class calls the shots behind the scenes; no individual can dominate the process. The system is entirely bottom-up. Instead of the largely fictional and manipulative representation we see today by politicians of anonymous and disconnected individual voters, coherent communities would be directly represented.

The individual is not the unit of politics; the unit of politics is the community. Representatives who represent individuals, as in the current system, really represent no one at all. Only a representative who represents a community has something to represent, for it is only in and through constructing local communities together with others that individuals can define themselves. The resulting community constitutes a way of life; it is the sea in which we swim, our home, the place where our values are developed and sustained. In popular democracy, unlike corporate democracy, the interests of communities necessarily inform the concerns of their representatives; it is the combined interests of communities on broader county, state, and national levels which determine overall policy, not the notorious special interests which today interpose themselves, particularly at the broader levels most removed from the grassroots.

It is worth recalling that, when Cleisthenes at the end of the sixth century BCE implemented the reforms that became the basis of the astonishing popular democracy of ancient Athens, he proceeded by dividing Athens into 139 local districts or demes; these were neighborhood assemblies, the smallest units of government, the building blocks of the larger city-state. It was in the deme that one registered one’s citizenship. By way of tying citizens into their communities, Cleisthenes made membership in the demes hereditary. Citizenship today is hereditary as well; it passes automatically to one’s children. But modern citizenship is national, not local. A confederal system of modern, grassroots-based democracy is necessarily about re-grounding citizenship in one’s community. A nation is an abstraction but a community is a particular physical place with particular people. As the abstraction of nationhood dissolves into the pluralism and divisiveness of modern society, national citizenship becomes a hollow vessel, containing very little in terms of either value or practice. It is only in the places we live that today we can hope to rediscover commonality of purpose and spirit. Whether an urban neighborhood, a suburban tract, or a rural township, the physical environment in which we live and move, and which sustains us, is necessarily the bond we share. I don’t need to love my neighbor in order to cooperate with him or her to preserve and enjoy what we have together. I only need to respect my neighbor. Whether a city block or a country lane, it is locally that all issues ultimately come home to roost. A local, decision-making assembly is what makes a community self-conscious and self-realizing

Adrian Kuzminski is a thinker, writer, citizen/activist, and the author of many books about economics, democracy, and human scale.