Ringo Ossewaarde

In this article, we shed light on the emergence, diffusion, and use of socio-technological future visions. The artificial intelligence future vision of the German federal government is examined and juxtaposed with the respective news media coverage of the German media. By means of a content analysis of frames, it is demonstrated how the German government strategically uses its AI future vision to uphold the status quo. The German media largely adapt the government´s frames and do not integrate alternative future narratives into the public debate. These findings are substantiated in the framing of AI futures in policy documents of the German government and articles of four different German newspapers. It is shown how the German past is mirrored in the German AI future envisioned by the government, safeguarding the present power constellation that is marked by a close unity of politics and industry. The German media partly expose the government´s frames and call for future visions that include fundamentally different political designs less influenced by the power structures of the past and present.

This study seeks to understand a diaspora community narrative of rape and abduction suffered during the genocidal massacre of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire and its aftermath. Based on interviews with 50 Aramean, Assyrian and Chaldean migrants in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, whose families are from the village of Bote, known as one of the ‘killing fields’ in southeast Turkey, the article explores the ways in which descendants remember the ‘forgotten genocide’ of Aramean, Assyrian and Chaldean communities in 1915. The research reveals that the descendants of survivors make sense of the sexual violence experienced in Bote mainly through a religious narrative and that, for them, the genocide is, in spite of all the sufferings the males had to go through, a feminized event. In their gendercide narrative, the abducted and raped women are identified as the ‘heroines’ of the genocide.

In his introduction to the Democracy, Tocqueville announces that democracy is to be understood as “a providential fact”. He perceives democracy as being part of an overarching order. This order is not the creation of the human will and imagination, but a providential, given order, which means that humans can only fulfil their given potentialities within and not outside this order. Democracy, being divinely planned, is in accordance with the “hidden law of Providence,” that is, reveals “God’s laws in the conduct of societies.” Indeed, Tocqueville shows traits of a classical, theocentric thinker, with strong Aristotelian and Augustinian or Pascalian inclinations, who sees the field of human activity as being embedded within a greater order or “a general and constant plan according to which God guides the species.” Democracy that he understands as a “state of society in which everyone more or less would take part in public affairs”, must be carefully distinguished from aristocracy. Tocqueville interprets aristocracy, a state of society in which not everyone has the right to take part in public affairs, as a human – all too human – creation. Indeed, a providential order does not exclude human creativity and hence manmade social orders. Democracy, being providentially willed from the very beginning, had to allow the passage of various states of society, from tribal society and the Greek polis with its slaves to the feudal society with its privileges, before being able to make its entrance. It is not a jubilant Tocqueville who observes democratization in political history, trying to legitimize his democratic taste by bringing in providence. Indeed, it is with great difficulty that he is obliged to conclude, for the sake of justice or natural right, that “what seems to me decadence is therefore progress in his eyes; what wounds me is agreeable to Him. Equality is perhaps less elevated; but it is more just, and its justice makes for its greatness and its beauty.” Aristocratic inequality of living conditions is the rule of privileges, landed property and ascribed status (nobility) according to birth and family name. The aristocratic societies of “childish and ridiculous privileges” were unjust. Aristocracy is unjust, not according to human, democratic or legal criteria, but according to the divine plan: privilege is not part of the providential order. Even though aristocratic societies may excel in philosophy and poetry, and aristocrats may be great in statesmanship, such societies are always unjust. Any threat to democracy is a threat to justice itself. Knowing Tocqueville’s admiration for his compatriot Bossuet, it is easy to recognize a parallel between the statesman’s providential understanding of the Democratic Revolution and the bishop’s theory of universal history. Bossuet writes a providential history of Christianity; Toqueville writes a providential history of democracy. The former attempts to show that the whole of European history points to the advent of the true religion; the latter attempts to show how providence has been guiding humankind towards the more natural form of society. Bossuet stresses that the pagan mind had been unable to develop truthful knowledge of God; Tocqueville observes that the ancient pagans were unable to grasp the fundamental equality between master and slave, man and woman, black and white. The history of Israel, Greece and Rome, the advent of Christ in the Roman Empire, and the history of the Church are all meaningful events in Tocqueville’s history of democracy. Even the greatest philosophers and statesmen of antiquity, from Plato to Cicero, were, despite their enormous political wisdom, incapable of grasping the simplest truths of democracy. In Tocqueville’s history of democracy, “it was necessary that Jesus Christ came to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.” Christ, not Socrates or Aristotle, is the teacher of democracy. As Tocqueville sees it, the problem of democracy is that it does not promise liberty for everyone. Instead, it abolishes privileges and creates equal social opportunities or life chances, hence, making room for personal achievement and meritocratic rule. However, though democracy is a providential fact and therefore just in itself, it is still dependent upon human effort for its unravelling. Democratic culture that was still coming into being during Tocqueville’s lifetime, was no cause for great joy: “you know that I am not exaggerating the final result of the great Democratic Revolution that is taking place at this moment in the world; I do not regard it in the same light as the Israelites saw the Promised Land.” Tocqueville saw that the great passion for liberty or self-government was gone in the heart of his contemporaries. Equality, as such, does not exclude equality in chains. This is the great threat that becomes real if men are led to serfdom, that is to say, when democracy is left, without the statesman’s prudence, to its “blind instincts”. Human leadership towards a democracy of slaves may come from men, from demagogical parties and from populism. But reason and faith show that it is liberty, not equality, that is the supreme good. As Tocqueville states: “I cannot believe that God has pushed two or three million men for several centuries toward equality of conditions in order to have them end in the despotism of Tiberius and Claudius… Why He is carrying us along this way toward democracy, I do not know; but embarked on a vessel I did not construct, I look for the means to reach the nearest port.” Hence, for Tocqueville, reviving and safeguarding liberty, as it is classically understood, are the real challenges of democracy. These are most difficult tasks for statesmen and citizens, even more difficult than in an aristocracy. Liberty is a classical, not an aristocratic value. It is exercised by citizens, not aristocrats. Yet aristocrats are more experienced in “the art of being free”. A young democratic people is still in the process of learning how to govern itself as a citizenry. Democracy may well be according to the providential order, but it is civic activity that needs to make sure that it bears the fruits of a democratic culture where freedom and the respect for the equal dignity of each human being prevail. Providence does not imply human passivity, but is like a lighthouse that is present, even in the middle of nowhere, guiding the human race even when it has strayed far away from its final destination or telos. The search for liberty, in the democratic age, implies determining which cultural condition sustains or violates the natural right to participate in the common good, through civic self-government. This is achieved through a cultural study of “the sentiments, the ideas, the mores that alone can lead to public prosperity and liberty”, as well as of “the vices and errors”, which prevent a democratic people from being free. The struggle for freedom, then, requires a particular kind of democratic culture. This essays seeks to retrace the meaning of, and threats to, this particular culture of democracy that Tocqueville envisions.