Long Title
You
Choose – Continue Satisfying Your Personal Passions or Begin Serving the
Greater Needs of All. The First Will Lead to Tyranny and End in Revolution. The
Second is Your and Humankind’s Only Possibly Viable, Sustainable Option
Politico
Magazine
December 27,
2019
In each of the paragraphs in the above
linked compilation are descriptions of what Americans (citizens of the U.S.)
were and what we have become, and the precarious social, economic and political
perch from which we and much of the rest of the world are now embarking into
the future.
The good news is Humankind’s current
problems are now more starkly revealed than ever before. The bad news is the
stakes are higher because the decisions Americans and the rest of Humankind
make to address these problems are more likely to be catastrophic if we choose
to act wrongly, and more difficult to sustain if we decide and act wisely. We,
US citizens and the rest of Humankind, are facing yet another crucial decision
point in our species’ cultural evolution. At each previous point we chose
directions that served our short-sighted and short-term interests.
1
Primal
Accommodation
At Humankind’s first species-evolution
decision point 200,000 years ago, the demands of the East African environment
forced our earliest hominin ancestors to rely on complex language, high tool
dependency, in-group egalitarianism, and out-group cooperation and occasional
conflict. It worked. This newest mammalian accommodation of both individual and group needs proved adaptable in an evolutionary
sense. Homo sapiens survived and produced viable, fertile offspring. In
the process, we also began having more highly learning-dependent progeny. The
norm was an in-group balance of liberty, equality, and brother/sisterhood. Out-group
relations, despite occasional violence, were more often than not, maintained
through periodic ecological knowledge and technology exchanges, and most importantly
through extended family kinship ties. Politics, economics, and sociality
functioned as an accommodative unity, within and between groups.
2
Settled
Agricultural Autocracy
Next, as certain of our numbers grew,
our store of ecological and technological knowledge advanced, and life-sustaining
environmental conditions for hunter-gatherers in Mesopotamia worsened. In
response the human inhabitants of that region chose settled agriculture,
urbanism, and autocratic governance. This socioeconomic innovation also worked because
it was supported by in-group food commodity accounting, laws, and out-group
militarism. Populations grew in size and became ever more dispersed. Liberty
declined in response to laws and autocratic dictates. Equality declined in that
political power was moved from individuals to autocrats and their agents and
functionaries. Local fraternal allegiance was retained but ultimate allegiance
shifted from one’s personally known fellows to autocrats and their system. The
unity of politics (liberty), economics (equality), and sociality (fraternity)
ended.
3
Democratic
Oligarchy
At the next decision point, the best
thinkers among early Western Humankind gave their attention to moral philosophy
and efforts at answering the most fundamental and perennial human question: How
might people live optimally, both individually and collectively? This attempt
at defining and implementing optimal living was different from those of
200,000BP or 10-15000BP. The impetus was less on addressing environmental
challenges and more on achieving sustainable peace and prosperity. Liberty,
equality and fraternity became the exclusive province of the free and wealthy,
in particular, one’s male aristocratic fellows.
First, the Greeks followed by the Romans
chose governance forms of exclusive, restrictive democracy. Women, slaves and
the poor were excluded from participation. There was a degree of liberty for a
self-exalted few but equality and fraternity in their broadest sense were not
served.
4
Return
to Autocracy
The Greeks were conquered by the Romans
who ultimately “chose” empire-destroying, society-collapsing autocracy. Nascent
Greco-Roman democracy with a focus on a representative political body of select
individuals, the Roman Senate, began its demise at the end of the Roman
Republic in 27BCE. Then, with the quasi-democratic Senate under the thumb of successive
Roman emperor dictators, Western democracy, as limited as it was, came to an
end in 476CE with the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
With the now ‘barbarian’ West entering
the feudal Middle Ages only Christianity held fast to a notion of individual
freedom. Under feudalism the elite vied for land and wealth. The masses had
little more than a sense of local fraternity amongst themselves to assuage
their lack of liberty and equality. Nevertheless, there was a quasi-freedom
where each individual must choose religious salvation, personal favor, and
immortality through acceptance of the Christian God. Alternatively, a person
could choose Godlessness and eternal damnation. European
paganism remained a third option, for a while.
5
European
Renaissance
Toward the end of the Dark, Middle Ages,
around the mid-1400s, a rebirth of interest in art and literature with individuals
as it focus began in Italy. This renaissance focused on Christian principles
and was financed by the patronage of the wealthy aristocratic/merchant class.
The invention of the Gutenberg press
around 1440 was also instrumental in this Western cultural renewal by beginning
a process of expanded literacy and increased public education, discourse and
expression.
Soon after, in the late 1500s, came the
beginnings of modern science where certain individuals began to discover observable
evidence about Earth and the cosmos, and dared to create new factual knowledge
about them. Such knowledge was not always reconcilable with the revealed
knowledge of Christianity as Galileo found out.
6
Western
Enlightenment
Individualistic inquiry then began being
engaged in and expressed philosophically and in political thought. This period,
roughly the entire 18th Century, we now call the Age of Reason or the Western
Enlightenment.
At this decision point, Humankind’s
Western intelligentsia had begun choosing reason and science as means for
achieving individual, social and political flourishing. This approach to human
living was followed by and coupled with the material abundance and
technological proliferation of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century.
Surely now, many thought, the greatest
good for the greatest number of people was within reach. In fact, rational
progress toward human individual and social perfection seemed inevitable to
many. Some were convinced an age of not only liberty but equality and
fraternity as well was finally beginning. That science, industrial
technology and reason could be used for the progression and perfection of Humankind.
This new approach began much to the dismay of the Roman Catholic Church, many
Protestant theologians, European monarchs, and their supporters and dependents.
The politically powerful and commercially wealthy soon also began to look
askance at philosophical notions of liberty, equality and fraternity regarding
their workers whom they soon came to regard as the uncultured, unclean and
therefore unworthy masses.
7
Erecting
the Gates of Paradise
Despite the hope the Age of Reason gave
to some, at the Enlightenment’s core were the seeds of its potential
misdirection and the possibility Humankind‘s extinction. But the allure and
intoxicating effects of modernity’s
potential blinded both the haves and have nots to the possibility of these
negative outcomes. The problem was one of more clearly defining and
codifying Enlightenment values and goals, and what the scope of these core Enlightenment
principles should be. What exactly was “freedom,” “equality,” and “fraternity”
and who was to be included in having them? Was everyone to be admitted, with
full benefits?
Despite the stated intentions of the American
and French revolutions, a consensus was never achieved in Europe and America over
the meanings of liberty, equality, and fraternity, or the methods for achieving
them. The language of constitutions addressed them but it would be nearly two
centuries before they would begin to be practiced in society. These 18th
Century democratic revolutions of and for the people were followed by a
continuation and deepening of European colonialism, the declaration of America’s
Manifest Destiny, and the U.S. Civil War in the next century. Though
the Civil War was a moral victory for equality and fraternity, it would be a century before
racial equality would become codified.
It was also the beginning of what German
philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas later
called the coalescence of commerce and politics into a “system,” and that
system’s gradual colonization of the lebensweld
or lifeworld of the masses. This meant that the meaning and scope of the
Enlightenment ideals would remain unresolved and increasingly contested
thereafter. Henceforth the system would have far more persuasion over an
individual’s lifeworld than anything the masses could muster individually or
collectively. Accommodation was not made through rational discourse between
individuals. It was made between individuals and the system.
This desire for unbridled political
liberty that would allow the wealthy and powerful to become as unequal as they
desired, was fueled by notions of European and American exceptionalism,
progress, and social Darwinism held by the political and commercial elites.
Such lust became insatiable and blinded those who had it to the threat such
passions posed to all. The masses acquiesced in part willingly because of the
material comforts they could now afford, and secondarily because their powers
of interpersonal persuasion were far outpaced by the persuasive coercion and
seductiveness of the system.
In late 18th Century America,
under such a paradigm there would be no liberty, equality, and fraternity for women,
enslaved Africans, and the continent’s decimated and displaced Native Americans.
The dream of freedom and prosperity under Western capitalism also ultimately influenced
the rise of increasingly more powerful 20th Century European
nationalism and fascism. And, in no small way, influenced the reactionism of Russian
and Chinese communism as both arose primarily as responses to the autocratic
impoverishing of their respective masses.
In looking back, what really happened to
the Enlightenment belief that reason and science were necessary and sufficient to bring about human
social and material progress and flourishing? Beyond a failure to extend
liberty, equality, and fraternity to all, there was a shift in the locus of
persuasion away from person-to-person discourse, and toward what Habermas
called the “colonization” of, or what I call the incursion into, the individual
and collective lifeworlds of Western peoples. This is how the notions of
liberty, equality, and fraternity began to be systematically restricted by the
elite.
The success of this incursion into and
redefining of the beliefs and values of the masses was not based on superior
rational argumentation. It was based on a form of persuasion and coercion that
led to the masses setting aside egalitarian reasoning for deciding what was
best for them individually and collectively.
The European masses during the 19th Century, in the midst of the
highest standard of living and geographic and social mobility so far, looked
inward, individually, to what each as newly “liberated” persons might acquire
and become. Equality and fraternity faded into the background of their respective
personal lifeworlds. They came to believe that these more social versus
personal pursuits would impede their quest for personal wealth the wealth/power
controlling system promised them. The emptiness of this promise was hidden by
just enough downward leakage of power and wealth from the elites to avert an
obvious and widespread revelation of the falsity their promises and a full revolution
of the masses.
Multiple methods were used by the ruling
elites of modernity to this achieve this end. All of which have been
masterfully documented and described by Pam Dewey, independent scholar of
American social and cultural history. See here. I have also described
these methods here,
and elsewhere.
8
Our
Faustian Reckoning
How long can Humankind sustain its
forsaking and abandonment of the equality and keeping of its brothers and
sisters? Surely the time has come, like Faust, to begin our time in Hell. Or, in
some other way pay the piper many of Humankind have and continue to so merrily
dance to for two and a half centuries. Shall we choose the hell of
civilizational collapse that is all but guaranteed under unchecked consumer
crony capitalism? Or, shall we turn more equitably toward each other?
Beginning with the ancient Greeks and
Romans, though theirs was an improvement over autocratic monarchy in
Mesopotamia, all subsequent efforts at political governance and economic policy
have failed or are in various stages of collapse. This is so primarily because
of the various elite’s unwillingness or failure to create forms of governance
that achieve a sustainable balance between liberty, equality, and
brother/sisterhood. This includes the Left’s descent into oligarchy and tyranny
under totalitarian Russian and Chinese communism, and their copiers under the
name of African
socialism in the mid-late 20th Century. Conversely, 20th
Century racial and ethnic nationalism and fascism were descents into tyranny
from the Right’s desire for liberty for only its own. European and American equality
and fraternity applied only to themselves - within, racially.
Why did each of these peoples, nations,
and empires repeatedly deviate from the possibility of full liberty, equality
and fraternity for all? They did so in response to their greed and insatiable
appetites, especially those of the wealthiest and most powerful; and because
these elites were supported, willingly or coercively, by those who elected them
and aspired to a measure of their leaders’ wealth, power and privilege. This emotion-fueled
appetite was not deeply, strategically considered. It was a tactical strategy
to reap as much wealth and grasp as much power as possible in the shortest
possible time. Let tomorrow and the next generation take care of itself.
Further, what has taken place, in the
West and increasingly in the rest of the world, does not reveal an inherent
characteristic of our human nature as many in the West believe. We are not
innately tribal or greedy. We transcended such non-human animal herd/pack
instincts 200,000 years ago primarily through enhanced tool dependency, complex
language, cooperation and compromise, and deep, life-long learning. Our ancestors
were not conflict free. However, violent confrontation was the exception,
usually under dire environmental conditions or at the provocation of rare
tyrannical leaders. It was not the norm.
Our present way of thinking about
liberty, equality and fraternity is a potentially human extinction deviation
we’ve incrementally opted for over the past ten to fifteen millennia, and a
state of being we have gradually come to accept as optimal, just and “natural.”
Both unbridled capitalism and iron-fisted communism and every form of modern
economics and governance in between have so far succumbed to this appetite.
This path is/was not laid out in our genes and brain chemistry. It was forged
from our various local and narrow views of Humankind and the choices we’ve made
over the more recent centuries as to what it means to be human. Since the
Enlightenment, the liberty of the politically powerful and economically wealthy
has trumped the equality and fraternity in the minds of the masses in the West
and increasingly throughout the rest of the world. A critical number of the
world’s masses either support this, the system’s views, or raise no objection.
Those who cite the success of the Nordic
nations as having achieved a high level of liberty, equality and fraternity must recall that they
have achieved and sustained democratic socialism not from their own independent
doing. They found a balance between liberty, equality and fraternity on the
sidelines, in the backwaters of the Cold War, and due to the protection of the
US and NATO following World War II. A freely chosen future of true liberty,
equality, and fraternity, with sufficient internal safeguards for preventing
tyrannical oligarchy, has never been achieved. Many think the choosing of such
an enlightened future is being forced on Humankind now that rising populism and
autocracy are hastening the collapse of unchecked crony consumer capitalism,
and its associated destruction of the ecosystem.
Until Homo sapiens finds a path
to sustainable democratic socialism, nationally and internationally, there will
be no sustained peace throughout the world, and no way of avoiding the social,
economic and ecological collapse inherent in unbridled consumer crony
capitalism. Reform through education and social democratic politics is the only
way that gives Humankind a chance of avoiding catastrophic wars, and economic and
social collapse.
But these two remedies, education and
the reasoning that supports social democracy, don’t influence how people vote.
Modern people don’t vote based on knowledge-based reason or moral judgments
about politics. They vote based on what and who they believe (not think) will
deliver to them the most immediate and personally satisfying emotional state,
material abundance, and security.
How do those who understand this
persuade those who don’t? How do you persuade a significant portion of today’s Humankind
to use reason to guide their emotions and thereby amerliorate the worst and
most destructive of their passions?
How does Humankind reform and avoid
revolution and collapse? By humbling ourselves, individually and collectively,
and choosing less of the relatively abundant liberty we now enjoy, and making
efforts at increasing equality and fraternity in all our affairs, individually
and collectively, for the greater good of the individual and the whole. If we
cannot or will not choose to do this, especially at the individual day-to-day
level, then we will remain slaves at the mercy of tyranny and revolution, and
whatever they may lead to.
It is our choice. Continue to be self
and passion driven. Or, we can make greater effort at ameliorating our personal
emotional desires while helping raise the liberty and quality of all, and doing
what each of us can to truly become our brother’s and sister’s keeper.
9
Cultural
Evolution Replay
If each of the above decision points
influenced Humankind’s arrival at its current decision point, how was that
possible? How could no-one have foreseen the existential threats to Humankind
no sooner than the mid-late 19th Century when capitalism was called
into question by Marx, and later by Habermas and others? Or, no sooner than the early 20th
Century when nature conservation and resource protection from the destructive
forces of capitalism began?
Perhaps the better question is how did
the mostly unfavorable aftermath of each decision point keep us blind to the
long-term economic and ecological dangers we would face if we continued in the liberty-over-equality-and-fraternity
direction we were headed?
Where would Humankind be today if at
each decision point our ancestors had focused on a balance between liberty,
equality, and fraternity? It would certainly not have resulted in utopia or
heaven on earth. Such perfect social conditions do not suit the masses of an imperfect species such as us. But living conditions surely would have been
better for more people along the way. More importantly, it is less likely we
would now be standing at the Faustian gates of Hell awaiting entry, or trying
to pay interest to the Man and his agents their due, or paying our penance of
absolution to our brothers and sisters through belated efforts at achieving
greater equality and kindness. We will never know what might have been but I
think it is useful to think about such as we face a very uncertain future.
