The Era of Democracy Has Closed. Long Live Democracy.

 

Democracy is the luxury of elites who have plenty to share between them, who feel they are safe to share their power. Then, who is "elite" in this democracy can be defined to include non-property owners, non-men, non-whites, non-cis-gender, the non-wealthy, even non-nationals! Who is elite, and for whom democracy operates, can be defined to be an entire nation, as long as there is enough to share, and as long as everybody is ok with sharing. Correction: Capitalist Democracy is a luxury of elites. 

Unfortunately, as the Non-s proliferate and demand shares of the fruits of a democratic society, some folks freak out. Their freedom, wealth and privilege having been premised on the oppression of some of these Non-s, and they get less willing to share. They see all these OTHERS, all these Non-s, gathering around, and they see the water rising around them, in many cases very literally, while others escape in their yachts, sometimes literally, and they see the value of their wages going down, and their health care getting too expensive to use, they’re losing their homes and jobs and they’re not better off than their parents, and the for-profit system is stripping all the value out of their paychecks and they’re feeling super-stressed and when they look for a reason for this stress, the words of a demagogue are soothing. Don’t practice humility, don’t be vulnerable, don’t ready yourself to take responsibility for unspeakable horrors, don’t ask “What can I do better?” Blame everyone else. Blame the OTHER. Blame the Non-s. Blame for your embedded guilt for the acts of genocide and slavery of your ancestors, blame for your embedded guilt for hoarded wealth, everyone else. But don’t blame the elites. Don’t blame them with the bullhorn. Don’t blame them with the checkbooks. Don’t blame them who can do something about it. They have what we want. And why would that include democracy for everyone else?

And while some people freak out because the Non-s are coming for their share, the Non-s might have some pent up rage, and hate at them who ain’t willing to share. So there might be some tension in the air. And danger of riots. 

And if we get Donald Trump for another term, it may be a very long term, maybe the terminal term, not just because he has so cleverly crafted his rhetoric and used his powers of manipulation, but because the conditions under which democracy, and sharing, are possible, are collapsing from our self-serving neglect of our democracy.

How is it that democratically controlled town boards cannot set building standards for the residents of their towns, so that when fires rip through, those houses will not be destroyed? If this is democracy, democracy is about to kill itself on the altar of personal freedom to choose to die in an inferno. If a scientific fact cannot be accepted by the democratically elected Congress, and that Congress cannot write legislation to fight global warming, what good is democracy? Correction: capitalist democracy.

Because democracy doesn’t work when you’re selfish, when you’re only asking “Where’s mine?”.

Meanwhile, autocratic China is able to declare — credibly — that it will be net carbon zero by 2060. Meanwhile, research I have read informs China policy makers on how to preserve ecosystem services by reducing sprawl. I hate the genocidal aspect of the Chinese government, I hate their brutal methods of restraining population growth, but it may be the autocratic Chinese government that saves most of the people of the capitalist, individualist west from their own self-annihilation. But only if the Chinese succeed soon enough.

How to avoid both of these possibilities? How do we avoid both democratic-hedonistic self annihilation, and autocratic assimilation? We have to do things I don’t count on us to do. We have to share: political power, wealth, food, opportunity, the benefits of trust and caring. Radical equality. The rich have to give their money away, have to unwind the privileges rigged into the system, to make the system work for everybody. They have to pay very heavy taxes, so we can have health care, affordable housing, The best child care and education for every child in America and the World. We have to live by the maxim “I can only be safe if I am safe for you.” We have to stop hating on each other. We have to listen to those who oppose us, who want to hurt us. This lesson from the prophet Jesus redounds brilliantly to this moment. We have to vote for leaders who will act in the best interest of the country and the world, we have to ask ourselves “Which candidate is the best for everybody?”. 

We have to give up on our own personal importance. We have to re-imagine our personal value as the value we derive from the happiness and survival of everyone we know — including those we used to hate on. Please stop hating. Time is running out. When you are staring into your own death, don’t your priorities get reset? When you are staring into the death of your planet, could it be time to reset how we, as humans, do things?

Because every other path leads to Global Flood and Global Inferno, leads to the planet purging us, and all of life as we know it, in a great fever.

Pop-quiz! List everyone you know. Include yourself. Imagine a car careening at this huddled group, and one person could stop that car by standing in its path. Would you step forward?

 

Stephen Marshall, Who am I?

 

Assignment for CDAE 351 

Who I am, right now, is entangled with the volume and complexity of the work we are expected to do. I am wondering whether this was a good idea after all. But I will fight, I will muster any energy I can find, to do the work.

I grew up in a post-WWII development neighborhood in Yonkers New York, that was mysteriously free of black or colored folks (whom I met on the bus to the YMCA summer camp), which was safe and gave the illusion that somehow the world would keep going as it was. When I learned about the collapse of the Roman Empire, and the idea of the collapse of American democracy formed in my mind, I thought it was inevitable, given enough time, but not in my lifetime. Not understanding the injustice and inequality supporting the world that I lived in, or the depravity of the human soul, the promise of American democracy seemed perfect. I would never see its end. There was genocide and racism, but placed in my consciousness as side shows, that I could safely ignore.

But then there was the Vietnam War ("American War" to the Vietnamese), there was poisoning of the planet, overuse of resources, there was the Civil Rights movement, and invisible to me, the crass pursuit of personal wealth at the expense the lives and health of other people. There was the rise of the xenophobic, demagogic, racist politics of the Republican party under Newt Gingrich and his successors, then the continuing genocide and betrayal of the native Americans, and police brutality to support institutionalized racism, then global warming, and then there was Donald J. Trump. Apparently the liberal world order is fragile, apparently there are many people who feel they are getting shafted and that the liberal world order is to blame. Apparently the collapse of American democracy is possible, and it may occur within my lifetime. Apparently the "liberal world order" was a front for privilege and an excuse for doing nothing to help other people lift themselves out of poverty.

I imagine a world in which WE, humanity, turns toward helping each other. In which WE decide to arrange the economy and our relationship to the planet to provide means of survival for every person, and minimize harm to the planet. "I can only be safe if I make the world safe for you." In which every day our leaders are driven by the question, "How can I make the planet and my community safer, more healthy, more verdant and sustainable, today?"

Human beings have an instinct to address danger: the tribalistic impulse. When in danger, gather your people around you and put up defenses. A skilled manipulator, a proponent of the inequality and injustice that caused that danger, can take that fear and use it to destroy the last remnants of your impulse to share the American promise, can use it to destroy the hope of generosity and cooperation promised by the hypocritical liberal world order.

There was always inequality and it never mattered who was in charge, because the laws are always written to protect the wealth of the wealthy and drive the middle class into poverty. Democrats used a hypocritical allegiance to African Americans, poor people, and labor, to systematically hold onto their privilege, they used the promise of "growth" to defer justice, just like the Republicans. Republicans, without nuance or shame, disavowed any policy that would reduce the capacity of business to concentrate wealth for the few, and motivated their electoral base with the illusory notion of "freedom" and the right to get wealthy. By declaring for the right of each individual to act in their own interest, the Republicans have given Americans no opportunity for collective action except that which they, the Republican elites, would find useful. The Republicans have set up Americans for only one form of unity: the unity of war against other Americans.

Everyone is justified to be angry. The elites at universities, in government, in corporate boardrooms, have systematically deprived us all of a sustainable, just world, in service to their personal aggrandizement. Democracy in America was a hoax, just as the promise that "growth" will lift everyone out of poverty is a hoax. As a leftie from the '60's, I have been waiting a long time for the revolution. Revolutions are ugly and can't produce justice or sustainability. But justice wasn't, isn't, going to happen on the path we are on. Somehow, WE have not learned how to manage our affairs to make the world safe for everyone.

In ecological economics, we talk about cooperation and how to achieve it. As if the world is full of individualistic, self-fulfilling "rational actors" who don't know how to cooperate. But that is wrong. Those "individuals" are forming into a massive human action. We better get our heads out of our butts. Our current theory does not explain this.

So you can see what my interests are in a broad sense. I have been trying to understand what is worth fighting for, for my entire life. Science, anthropology, history, have informed my quest. At its root is the question, "How can I explain everything I am observing so that these beliefs and actions make sense relative to each other?" So my explanation does not depend upon someone else being wrong or the demon in my universe? So that we all emerge with a logical and purposeful intent, even if our concepts of the universe are in conflict with each other?

I read Paul Collinveux's Introduction to Ecology in 1988, and became fascinated by the r-K description of population growth. This dynamic, the variable strategies of rate of growth or sustainable maintenance, I thought explained a lot of human behavior. Also in my bundle of interests is the problem of Carrying Capacity. (Although I am an avowed liberal, the knowledge I propose to create could be used to justify genocide. But to me, it demands a just world, which makes conscious choices, allocates resources fairly.) This knowledge would help us to bring humanity into balance with the planet, could not operate without justice. That is what I care about.

"Natural Sciences and Social Sciences", For Graduate class Research Methods

The distinction seems so obvious I'm not sure I have anything to add. Science is a method of investigation. It puts evidence and rationality ahead of instinct and emotion. Science declares that there is a universe that is real and potent apart from the desires or needs of any human. Socio-religious knowledge puts human needs and desires at its center. Science recognizes that the universe is knowable but not perfectly knowable. Socio-religious knowledge expects the universe to be knowable and seeks to find a moral order that is absolute. Science posits that we can know what is real and true, if we are willing to observe, take evidence, and form our models from these observations and this evidence, if we are willing to let ourselves be wrong. Socio-religious models depend on the need of humans for explanations where the only evidence is contingent, emotional and instinctive, and since that knowledge is created under threat of not surviving, it cannot be wrong.

The greatest distinction is between socio-religious reasoning and scientific reasoning. Religious ideas are always produced as an answer to the contradictions found between the existing vision and the current circumstances (Karen Armstrong, A history of God, 1993). Scientific ideas are produced to address contradictions in evidence. So the critical difference is that while all reasoning is driven by the quest to explain human experience, pain, death, birth, creation and loss, scientific reasoning is limited to using models built from evidence that can be observed by any observer. Many, probably most, people can't step aside from the evidence of intuition and emotion, and their knowledge is cultural. It promotes survival. (When it stops explaining, when survival cannot be secured through it, its holders will become more and more erratic and desperate.) The activity of Science is engaged without the certainty that it will be useful or consistent with prior knowledge.

The paradigmic natural science is physics and the earliest employers of the Scientific method were studying the physical world. Copernicus, Galilei, and DeVinci, and before them Islamic scholars and the Greeks of classic Athens, are exemplars of this method, who studied the physical world. The success of the method of observation (such an astounding privilege to study the world without expecting your knowledge to have immediate utility!) set the pattern for later investigators, including biologists, medical practitioners, and social scientists.

Social scientists are people who study the person and processes of the same subject that would create socio-religious knowledge. They reflect on questions held by all of their subjects, but the evidence they use must be empirical, based on repeatable observations. They investigate a universe, human relationships, structures, arrangements, cultures, institutions, that are amorphous and changing, and their results could threaten someone's access to wealth. They can never create a unified and final theory of all things social, in contrast to physicists, who can hope for a near approximation of a perfect model. They hope to provide some insight that will help reduce the misery that people create for each other, but the evidence of the social scientist, carefully gathered through methods that seek to eliminate the bias of emotions and culture, are not understood by the majority of people who are trying to survive with their wits and culture. All of the dangers the scientific method overcomes pushes back against the efforts of the social scientist. Thus anti-vaxers and Q-anonymous.

The State of Vermont, and the people of the state, fit the pattern of the liberal vision: a free press, secure and popularly accessible ballots, use of data to make decisions, transparency wherever possible in government, and the commitment of its leaders to that liberal vision. Social Scientists are welcome and esteemed here. The elite conspiracy to hoard wealth exists, but it is less prominent. There are good people in government and our communities who protect the liberal traditions of openess, democracy, public trust, and a commonwealth. Here, the evidence of the Social Scientist is welcome, even if they do rely on a socio-religious construct that esteems them.