Thompson's gazelle (credit: Wikipedia)

Democracies and Their Ways

A key term in our understanding all living things is the term “ecosystem”.  It is our word for any entity made of millions of living things that are sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating, but nevertheless, in the scientific view of them, forming a single thing that has an existence of its own, greater than that of any of its parts. Any part in an ecosystem is expendable; any one of the parts can die, cease to exist, break up into dead pieces, while the larger entity, the ecosystem, goes on.

The whole system is constantly in a state of vigorous interactions, all balancing and counter-balancing each other. It appears to stay roughly the same, but internally, it is always changing. In fact, some parts dying so that others can take over their protoplasm, i.e. eat them, is sad for the individual living thing, but good for the ecosystem. Gazelles eat grass; lions eat gazelles. Please note that the lions tend – most often – to kill the gazelles that are hurt, sick, slow, or stupid. A fawn that prances just out of a lion’s reach is likely going to die young. The lion seems sleepy, but he is only seeming so. The lioness is hiding in the grass 5 meters away. “Dance a bit closer, little fool. My cubs are hungry.”

                                                     Lioness (credit: Wikipedia) 

Thus, the weak, slow, and stupid are cut off from reproducing. The stronger, faster, more prudent have more grass to eat so they live to pass on the genes for strength, speed, and prudence to more fawns. The lions benefit the gazelle herd and the whole system over the long term. Internal pressures inside dynamic balances are what make an ecosystem.

Over millennia, all species that survive, reproduce, and evolve into new forms of themselves are members of ecosystems. No individual and no one species ever exists in isolation. They interact and, mostly are made stronger over the long haul, by living in complex relationships with others, especially other species.

In our larger understanding of our world and ourselves, these ideas of balance and ecosystem are vital.

Another area our understanding of our world in which the ecosystem idea is useful is in our study of ourselves.

People’s daily decisions, habits, and values are mostly shaped by the ways in which they are programmed by elders of their cultures when they are young. These too evolve for whole variety of reasons. Men’s hair has been fashionable long, short, shaved off, dyed, etc., all in my lifetime. And now? Any of the above. 

What we need to see next is that a human society is a kind of ecosystem. A tribe or nation contains many different kinds of people, all performing different roles within the overall community. Farmers, ranchers, and fishers provide the basic nourishment that the tribe must have in order to live. Lumberjacks and factory workers provide the materials for building shelters, which any tribe that seeks to grow its numbers must have to keep its people from the elements. Tradesmen use the textiles and lumber to make and maintain the food, clothes, and shelters that enable the tribe to grow and spread. Teachers don’t make physical things, but human ones: citizens that seek to work together to solve their disputes via the rule of the nation’s laws. All of these trade services, and the roles, get much subtler.

A human nation is not an ecosystem if we demand of anything labeled with that term that it contain individual organisms killing and eating each other all the time. Nations – or more accurately, democracies – are designed to avoid routine destruction of some of their components. In truth, to prevent such killing. 

But a nation is an ecosystem in the sense that it contains a lot of very different members who interact and sometimes compete with, and sometimes support, each other’s functions. Workers work for owners of the means of production in order to get things that the workers want. Owners hire workers and agree in advance to pay them in specific terms. Owners seek to hire workers because the owners own large enough factories or tracts of land that they know they can’t do all the work themselves. Even early in our natural history, the spear-maker trading with the hunter and her medicine woman allowed for individuals to get more skillful at their crafts until they were medicine women or spear-makers full time. By sharing labor, and trade, tribes became larger and more efficient.

The point is that a society or nation can be seen as an ecosystem. The ecosystem view of society yields many useful insights into how we humans work.

We can even draw further analogies between natural ecosystems and human ones. In a natural ecosystem, we see the real actors in the drama as being not the material plants, animals, and micro-organisms. Not even species. The action is being guided by the genetic codes behind these species. These change as the soils and climates around them change. Shift the climate toward less rain in an area, and trees die out; grasses spread; grazers flourish; some tree dwellers adapt by gradually updating their gene codes, and some die out. Ancestors of humans had to move out of life in trees or die out. Some tribes survived by changing their ways of life. Found different foods. Learned to dig for edible roots. Some did not.

Once in a while, a very drastic climate change can even cause a whole family of living things to go extinct. Dinosaurs, millions of them in thousands of species, did not have the complexity and depth of programming to cope with the meteor that hit the earth 66 million years ago. They all died.

                   Giant meteor striking Earth (credit: Frederik, via Wikipedia) 

Now, what is the point of this post today?

The codes that ultimately guide and run human societies are the sets of memes - ideas, beliefs, values - that the society is founded on. Teach kids at home and in school to value and practice 'will' and 'power', and you'll create an oppressive nation. Teach them to value and practice compassion and wisdom, and you will live in a cooperative, respectful one. And ...if these two clash, in the long haul, the society of mutual respect will win. Why? Because it will contain more members, and more varied, resourceful ones within its population as well. 

The design of democracy is the most glaring example we have of the ecosystem idea being put into practice in real human societies. Autocratic societies attempt to rid themselves of variety in their populations and fix their society’s vision on creating one acceptable kind of citizen. Uniformity. It’s reassuring in the short term, but my prediction is that in real history and politics, such a society will never be as dynamic or vigorous as its rival that promotes individual liberty.

The founders of the American nation especially clearly had the ecosystem idea in mind when they purposely created a nation in which English, Dutch, Spanish, and French, Protestants and Catholics, etc. all lived together, worked at their own crafts as they wished to, and got along. All of these groups had hated and killed each other in the centuries leading up to 1776.

The U.S. Constitution is designed to push people to live together under the rule of law, trade, resolve disputes in courts, and generally get along.

African and native people were being left out to start with, but evolution is always messy. There is no moment and no one fossil that shows us exactly when eohippus became mesohippus. But, the change is very clearly discernible over the long haul.

And the basic idea of a social ecosystem, under a democratic rule of law, works. In fact, it is so visionary that we marvel to this day at the way those framers of the constitution designed it. It even provides, in its legislative branches, for the updating of laws that are clearly not working anymore. Jefferson knew that slavery was wrong. He just also believed that it wasn’t going to get righted in his lifetime by the few who thought as he did. John and Abigail Adams never accepted that position and died still speaking out against it. One human being can’t – ethically – own another. Period. No deals, no exceptions. And the branch in charge of social evolution, i.e. changing the laws, is updating that code and has been for centuries. It’s far from righted, but change is gradually occurring.

Churchill in his less-than-perfect democracy summed the matter up by saying: “Democracy is the worst form of government …except for all the others.”  

             

                                                   Churchill (credit: Wikipedia) 

So I want to encourage readers facing upcoming elections in several parts of the world and especially in the U.S. to calm down and reason coolly. The U.S. democracy is still vigorous. The framers of the U.S. constitution may not have been able to explain what an ecosystem in a pond does, but they obviously had an understanding of how systems work informing the design that they ended up with as they wrote that famous document: many different entities at many levels of the government, all intended to create balance. The legislative, judicial, and executive bodies are all still in place and functioning vigorously. Legal lines separating areas of governance in which states’ rights take precedence over federal ones, and when the reverse is the case, are still being, by most, respected. The whole giant struggle is largely still being fought within the rules.

Best of all, it is very important for us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the ideals that inform all democracies: rule of law, not of individuals or cliques; provision for updating antiquated laws by peaceful means, not by violence.

If violence in the streets becomes commonplace and widespread, martial law restricts citizens to their homes at most hours of their week, courts, legislatures are shut down, and dissenters start to disappear, then we can start to panic.

But that hasn’t happened yet.

So? We go back to rational dialogue, evidence-based reasoning, persuasion of our opponents that some of their views are wrong. Because that’s what democracy was designed to do in the first place. Give as many citizens as possible decent, respect-filled lives, and allow them to seek redress of grievances and changes of the law by dialogue rather than fighting.

The rule of law matters most when it is hardest to maintain. And us? We’re still okay. Read what Lincoln had to endure. We aren’t nearly that stressed yet.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, still have a reasonable day.  

 

U.S. President Donald Trump (credit: Sheila Craighead, via Wikipedia)

Schadenfreude

Some days a topic which invites comment and posting just leaps out at us. In the milieu of the last two days, the word “schadenfreude” has elicited that in me. Schadenfreude is a German word that means “the pleasure one derives from seeing an enemy suffer”.

I never liked it. The feeling may be very human, in the sense that it seems to come naturally to all human beings. However, to me, it seems very clear that being a responsible, adult citizen of a democracy requires that I don’t indulge in every impulse that passes through me, even if it is very human to do so, and even if I see that many others do give in to it.

Let me explain a little.

I loved a girl back when I was a teenager of 19 and she was 16. We were crazy in love for a year or so, and yes, we did all the things that lovers do, including horizontal, heavy breathing exercises. For reasons that I don’t need to go into, her parents hated me. Reasons involving religious differences and their general, conformist natures. What the neighbors thought did matter to them. I was a wild, long-haired, rock musician in a band that played live gigs. The situation set up like a fated tragedy, and it ended in one.

For a lot of reasons, she committed suicide when she was 17. Tried once and did not succeed, mainly because I knew she was home alone, and when I found the place dark, I broke in and found her. Near death. Fill in the details yourself. They were that bad, at least.

A few weeks later, when the row had died down, she succeeded. I was working out of town at the time. Trying to act "normal". The work had been long planned. I was trusting that her parents would see that she got good, professional help. They got her a psychic.

My rage was infinite for the first few minutes when I learned the news. But I suddenly knew, even at 20, that I did not wish for her folks to suffer one moment longer than they already had. Blame is a myth made up by Pride.

I have had an aching empathy for the families of any suicide, and the victims too, of course, but especially in the case of the suicide of a child, since that time. And then, it gradually grew into empathy for all suffering. I don’t care how much you hate your enemies, it is wrong to wish them real suffering. The world contains enough of that without any of us secretly wishing to augment it.

That hard experience changed me.

    

 

                                                Bernie Madoff (credit: The Guardian) 

By the time 2010 came around, I had known a number of moments of rage at the Wasters of Wall Street. And the very worst example of investment industry greed, I thought then, and still think now, was Bernie Madoff.

He had built an investment company which had about $55,000,000,000 US in assets. Other people’s money. And the crash of 2008 had put pressures on it that had finally caused it to break wide open. It was all a Ponzi scheme.

His duped victims included Stephen Spielberg, Kevin Bacon, Zsa Zsa Gabor, John Malkovich, and many others. Most, however, were smaller investors and many of them had risked everything they had with Madoff. Many lost their whole savings. Their hopes of retirement. And for many of these, the losses could not be shrugged off as they could for the wealthy, multi-millionaires. Millions of small investors were left flat broke. 

But then, shortly after Madoff was arrested, his son, Mark, committed suicide. And Mark was no teenager. But apparently he could not live with what he had been a major part of: the fraud his father had perpetrated.

I shrank inside when I heard that news. And examined myself very hard inside. But I found that I simply had not wished such misery on Madoff. No matter what he had done, mostly to fairly ordinary people like me (though not to me personally, thank Heaven) he did not deserve the internal torment I knew he was going to go through. A long prison term, yes. His son’s suicide. Never.

And I knew, somewhere over the long years, I had sunk it in. In the life-sized view of ourselves, schadenfreude is just sick. It’s wrong. It may come naturally out of our atavistic impulses, but so do rape and murder. We can train them out of ourselves. We really can. In fact, that’s what being a civilized human being means. Unlike the Romans, we today do not go to a sporting contest hoping to see some excellent killings. Times change. People change. Slowly, but …sometimes, even for the better.

                                                   (credit: historycollection.com) 

What does all of this have to do with the last two days?

I know inside the deepest parts of my own conscience, I do not want to see the current president of the U.S. sicken and die of Covid 19. I want him to run in a free and fair, democratic election. I want him and his party to lose so badly that they are all but wiped out as a political party by the voters. For a decade. Then, I want to see him face arrest, trial, and prosecution. He has broken the law. He deserves that kind of punishment. But not death by Covid. Death will come soon enough. 

Schadenfreude, when it gets what it thinks it wants, solves nothing. Helps nothing. In fact, that feeling, if it gets what it thinks it wants, ends in making circumstances worse than they were before the event that called that feeling up in the first place.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a decent day.