Technology's challenge to democracy : what of the human?

Democracy is not only a political system—a set of normative rules, and legal and political institutions, constituted in accord with those rules. It is an ideal, an aspiration, really, intimately connected to and dependent upon a picture of what it is to be human—of what it is a human should be to be fully human (whatever that might mean). If we become more aware that in living out the practices of our form of life we are also living out a certain idea or ideas of what it is to be a human being, we will see more clearly that, whether we like it or not, intend it or not, we are fatefully defining what it is to be human through our practices. When we realize just what our practices are doing, we will be far more ready to respond to technology’s challenge to democracy. We may even learn the value of keeping open the question of what it means to be a human being; preserving its openness allows us more freely to frame alternatives to what heretofore seemed like its only possible answer. This is not a question we were meant to answer, but, rather, a question to which we must remain answerable.