Searching for a model of governance

“What is the honey?” asked Chintan Kella, a researcher working on a PhD thesis titled “Novel Forms of Organising.” Chintan was in Auroville, which is one of the communities he is studying, and had invited a group of Aurovilians to a presentation of his idea of Auroville as a beehive. According to him, Auroville is best understood as a self-organising colony of honey bees, and if we understand how a beehive works, we will be able to apply those principles to the organisation and governance of the community.

Analogies from nature can be inspiring, but they can also be misleading. Looking at Aurovilians as workers, drones, scouts and queens has a folksy attraction. However, this way of looking at Auroville is perhaps a false analogy, a logical fallacy. We can get insights about our organisation using arguments from analogy: how is Auroville like a termite colony? Or like a troop of baboons? But taking any one of these organising principles from nature and using only that to organise Auroville would be a little naïve.

As always, the obvious place to start looking for a model of governance for Auroville is what The Mother had to say about it. In 1972, a French television crew was filming in Auroville and the Ashram, and they asked The Mother, “What political organisation do you want for Auroville?” The Mother replied, “An amusing definition occurs to me: a divine anarchy. But the world will not understand. Men must become conscious of their psychic being and organise themselves spontaneously, without fixed rules and laws – that is the ideal.For this, one must be in contact with one’s psychic being, one must be guided by it and the ego’s authority and influence must disappear.”

Most people balk at the idea of anarchy, divine or otherwise. It brings up images of chaos, unruly mobs, even violence. But that’s not what anarchism is as a political ideal. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, as a political ideal, it is the “absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual.” The word anarchy comes from the Greek anarkhos, which means “without a leader.” The anarchist historian Rudolf Rocker wrote that, “For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to social account.”

Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, put it brilliantly when he said, “the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name [is the] liberty that consists in the full development of all of the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognises no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our … being – they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.”

All this sounds really wonderful, so how did anarchism get such a bad reputation? Mostly because, for anybody with power, the idea of freedom is extremely frightening. No wonder the anarchist idealism of the Paris Commune and the Spanish Revolution were crushed by force.

Here in Auroville, we have been more fortunate. We were able to retain our freedom when it was challenged by the Sri Aurobindo Society. The Auroville Foundation Act has placed the Residents’ Assembly as one of the three “authorities” that make up The Auroville Foundation, the other two being the Governing Board and the Auroville International Advisory Council.

How has this translated on the ground in terms of our organisation and governance? Like in most other experimental communities, the idea of collective ownership and communal work has collided with our desire for autonomy, freedom and choice. Often, our instinct of self-preservation has been in direct conflict with community interests.

We have tried to codify our attempts at participatory governance through published mandates and a “Participatory Working Groups” manual. While the former is mostly uninspiring, the latter is a somewhat mysterious document. It promotes “the involvement of the community in its day to day functioning and a sense of dedicated sharing of the work,” but says absolutely nothing about how this aim could be fulfilled. It is not clear what the term “participatory” means in the context of Participatory Working Groups. Whose participation? In what way?

Participation is a laudable goal. As a note from the UN Social and Economic Council says, “Participation is a fundamental goal and object of value in and of itself. That is evident from the fact that the right to participate in a society’s decision-making processes has been accepted by the world community as a fundamental human right.” But it is not easy to set up systems for community-wide participation. Some of our own systems might even be counter-productive. Take the multi-day selection process for example, which we use for selecting members of the “important” working groups. The very fact that this process needs intensive time commitment over multiple days reduces participation. Also, we assume that this method of “selection through discussion” is better than an election, but it is subject to the same pressures of loyalty, interest groups and lobbying.

Electoral democracy, of course, has proven to be entirely ineffective. Again, The Mother was way ahead of her time when she said, “democracy always implies the idea of rich, educated people and that has shown itself to be totally inadequate.” We don’t elect our leaders, but we use voting in referendums as a method of community decision making. Again, the shortcoming is obvious – it is impossible for an ordinary citizen to fully understand the implications of a complex decision and vote with wisdom (Brexit is a prime example). In Auroville this has meant very low participation in decision-making.

But democracy did not always mean voting. The central principle of the earliest democracies, such as in Athens, was sortition – the assignment of people to public functions through a draw of lots. Venice and Florence used the same democratic principle. The idea is that a small cross-section of the population, randomly selected but representative of society’s diversity, can dive deep into an issue and make a decision that is better than the entire uninformed population.

There have been successful experiments with sortition in the US, Australia, and the Netherlands. Ireland has been the most innovative – in 2012, a group of 99 people started working on revising the constitution, of which 66 were ordinary citizens drafted by lot. The rest were elected politicians.

Is it time to experiment with sortition in Auroville? Could we select members of working groups through sortition? The obvious advantage is the elimination of “politics” in the selection process. Also, it will certainly save a lot of time. But will randomly selected people be capable enough? A qualified team of resource persons might be the answer. At any rate, given the problems we seem to face with many of our current groups, it seems unlikely that things could be much worse.

We are far from the utopia of a divine anarchy. Perhaps it is time to think in terms of a “protopia,” which is not the idea of perfection, but the idea of incremental progress. The futurist Kevin Kelly coined the term and described it like this: “Protopia is a state that is better today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualise. Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict.” But this is exactly what Auroville is about – “protopian” experiments.