The First Noble Falsehood

All of the religions of the Classical Civilized Paradigm have in common a core belief about the relationship between the soul and physical existence. This belief is expressed in different ways in different faiths, but the most elegant expression in my opinion is the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, first of which is that all life contains the element of suffering, or, more simply and as believed in practice, that all life is suffering. For Buddhists, the joys and pleasures of life (while acknowledged to exist) are, in essence, the bait for a trap. They’re here to bind us to the world so we can suffer more. The point is to get out.

No other religion puts it quite that way (or, in my opinion, quite that well), but all of the Great Religions share that conclusion: the point is to get out. We don’t belong here. We belong somewhere else or in some other conditions: in Heaven, in Paradise, reunited with God from Whom we have become separated, or restored to the bliss of non-manifestation. The details vary widely, of course. Religions of the Hindu/Buddhist complex believe in reincarnation or soul transmigration, and so teach that we may go through many incarnations before finally being freed to go where we belong. Religions of the Abrahamic lineage (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) don’t have this belief, and so teach that there is a single lifetime after which comes God’s judgment and (hopefully) a passage to the place where we belong. But in none of these faiths is incarnate, manifest existence on the physical plane seen as anything but a mistake.

This idea – that we are here by mistake, and our focus should be to remove ourselves somewhere else – is what I call, in a play on the Buddha’s teaching which I’m sure he will have enough enlightenment to forgive, the First Noble Falsehood.

In fairness to the Buddha, we can’t be sure that this is what he actually taught. No writings by him have survived, and that’s rather a mystery. The Buddha, who was a prince, was certainly literate. Did he really not write down any of his teachings, or were his writings lost – or suppressed – after his death? We may wonder the same thing about Jesus and Mohammed, who were also literate and who have also left us no writings. Be that as it may, an inevitable disconnect occurs in communication between the teachings of an enlightened spiritual leader such as the Buddha or Jesus, and the form those teachings take when embodied in an organized religion, especially after the old boy isn’t around any longer to interfere with the process.

Part of that disconnect arises simply because of the difficulty of communicating the deep truths of the spirit in words. Language isn’t designed for that purpose. Its vocabulary communicates things from one person to another that both people are already familiar with. In giving you directions to the post office, I know that you know what a street is, what a post office is, what it means to turn left or turn right, and how to identify various landmarks that I may give you to show the way. If someone wants to communicate something that is a bit outside his listeners’ experience, then one starts with the things the listener knows and builds on that. But to communicate spiritual reality is very, very difficult, because it is outside of the experienced world of most people. It can usually only be done in metaphors and parables, and even then most people will attach meanings to the parables that aren’t correct. “He who has an ear, let him hear.”

But beyond this, further problems came in for all Classical Paradigm religions as they became established and involved in politics. Ideas and teachings that did not serve the political purposes of the faith were suppressed, and ideas that were necessary for that purpose were introduced. And it is at this juncture, I believe, that the First Noble Falsehood arose.

Politics is in large measure about privilege. It’s a battleground between those who enjoy an elite, entitled, privileged position, and those who would like to see them lose it. Sometimes those who would like to see them lose it simply want to replace them as the privileged elite. Sometimes the goal is to eliminate privilege altogether or at least reduce its prerogatives. In modern times that latter manifestation has become more acute, but in the ancient times when the Buddha lived, the elite (to which class he himself was born) had things pretty much any way they wanted. Politics – a game the Buddha’s social class played exclusively, commoners need not apply – was thus all about upholding and supporting their status and power, except of course when it involved infighting among them for a larger share of power than one’s fellows.

Religion was, under the Classical Paradigm, always a partner with the state. Often, it was an actual arm of the state. As such, it always served the purposes of the state, which included public order, but also included the upholding of privilege. Now privilege, to the enlightened eye, is unjustifiable. It is simply wrong, and needs to be abolished. And so, if religion is to serve the purposes of the state, a filter must exist to allow the passion which an enlightened teacher’s teachings inspire to be twisted into the service of privilege, something he would in all cases have abhorred. And the First Noble Falsehood serves that purpose admirably, by taking that passion and turning its focus away from this world altogether and towards another reality where there is no social privilege to be threatened.

The challenge to privilege and power represented by spirituality when focused on this world where we actually live can be seen in modern times. Look what Gandhi accomplished for Indian independence or Martin Luther King for racial equality in America. There is magic in genuine spirituality, a power of the heart that moves the hearts of others. To the holders of privilege, spirituality is dangerous, and must be channeled into non-threatening, or ideally even privilege-supporting paths.

Jesus was not put to death on a whim.

The story of Christianity’s co-option by the Roman state in the 4th century CE is a good illustration of how the process works, and where the First Noble Falsehood comes from. I said above that under the Classical Paradigm religion was always intertwined with the state, but actually early Christianity represents an exception. Under Roman law, Christianity was an illegal religion, but the laws were seldom enforced. Christians could be arrested any time, given a chance to recant their faith, and executed in brutal ways if they refused, but most of the time they weren’t. The net effect was that Christians were free to practice their religion (except when some Emperor or other got a bug up his sphincter and started a persecution), but was not involved with the state at all. It couldn’t be, because it was illegal. Nor could intra-faith politicians (you know the type, all religions have them) call on the state to enforce their authority. For that reason, during the time between the mission of Paul and the Council of Nicaea, Christianity was one of the freest and most diverse religions of all antiquity.

It was also frequently troublesome. Christians refused to pay token worship to the official state religion, and so in the view of the state endangered Roman society’s relationship with the Gods, on whose favor it depended. Christians were also frequently pacifists and anti-slavery advocates, thus endangering the Roman state’s ability to defend itself against foreign enemies and the foundation of the Roman society’s economy. Here was spirituality acting as a threat to privilege, which it so often does.

Three Emperors attempted to stamp out the religion through persecution. None succeeded. In the early 4th century, the emperor Constantine tried a different approach: co-option. By repealing the laws against Christianity, by calling a council of “Bishops” (note that this in itself favored the more authoritarian forms of Christianity over the less so, since only the authoritarian Christian sects recognized “Bishops” to start with) from all over the Empire to iron out exactly what the faith stood for and taught, and finally by making Christianity itself the state religion of the Roman Empire, Constantine and his successors transformed it from a rebellious and dangerous spirituality into a useful tool of politics. One of the primary levers of this transition was to bring to the fore, and interpret in certain pro-privilege ways, the otherworldliness that had always been an element in the religion. Rather than oppose war and slavery in this world, believers were taught to focus on the next, where there was no war and where everyone was free. By the time of the Roman Empire’s fall, Christianity had become wholly a tool of civic authority and the defense of privilege. The First Noble Falsehood was an important part of that transition.

The transition to that state for other religions is less visible, and in some cases I suppose it’s possible that the First Noble Falsehood was enshrined from the beginning so that no actual transition occurred. What is certain, however, is that so long as religion and the state remained partners in politics, any religion allowed to survive would of necessity transfer any passions for reform from this world to another.

With the separation of church and state which has become the modern norm, spirituality is now free to manifest itself in worldly ways and has begun to do so once more. It is, I think, time to abandon the First Noble Falsehood. We are not here, embodied in physical existence, as a mistake, and our goal is not to leave this life for another, but to make of it the best and holiest thing we can, in love of those around us and in homage to the principles we cherish.

Personal Power and Political Power

“Money is power” is a cliché. That wealth leads to power, and vice-versa, is so well-known that an important underlying question is often missed. One finds arguments about which of the two is the more important for the commercial elite in our society – again missing that underlying question.

The important underlying question that’s often missed is this: what KIND of power? Are we discussing political power or personal power?

Political power is the ability to influence governing institutions. It’s held (obviously) by elected officials. Barack Obama, at present, has a great deal of political power. He can issue orders and have them carried out by the agencies of the U.S. government, by the United States military forces, and by the Democratic Party which he heads. He can use the persuasive power of his office to influence votes in Congress. To a lesser degree, all elected members of Congress also hold political power, as do Cabinet members and other important unelected government officials and those holding office in state and local governments, or in foreign governments throughout the world. Political power is also wielded by those who don’t hold government offices but who, through campaign contributions and lobbying, or through the ability to persuade a following among the citizens, can influence the actions of the government. Most of the time, when people speak of “power” being held or valued by the commercial elite, this is what they mean: the ability to influence government actions by means of persuasion and bribery.

If that sort of power, political power, is what we’re talking about, then I’d have to say on the whole – with a few exception – that money is more important to the commercial elite and power is only a means to the end of amassing more money. But there’s another sort of power that lies, I believe, at the heart of all desires to become mega-rich in the first place. Sometimes, for some people, it lies at the heart of a desire for political power as well. Both money and political power can be means to the end of amassing personal power: the ability to make other people, as individuals, into servants of one’s own will. Political power, in extreme or archetypal form, is exemplified by the dictator. Personal power, in extreme or archetypal form, is exemplified not by the dictator but by the slave owner.

Personal power is embodied in the powerful by a sense of superiority, and in the powerless by a sense of inferiority. Personal power lets a powerful person look at someone over whom he has power and say to himself – and, through various gestures and subtle means of communication, to his inferior as well – “I am better than you,” and makes the inferior say in the same ways, “You are better than I.” Unlike political power, it’s a very primal sort of power, with roots going back to the origins of our species. It pumps the body full of adrenaline and testosterone, or churns the guts with loathing, fear, and self-hatred.

Personal power is a man’s ability to seduce another man’s wife right in front of him, and have her be afraid to say no and him be afraid to do anything about it. Personal power allows a person to demand that others bow and scrape and show their submission. Personal power allows cruelty to others without penalty, and enables retaliation for even the most minimal slights. Personal power is what the power-hungry desire on a visceral level, and freedom from anyone having personal power over us is what we mean in our hearts by the word “liberty.”

Personal power is a face-to-face thing. Unlike political power, it isn’t impersonal power over the masses, but one-on-one power over an individual. It’s the ability of one individual to make another grovel, serve, and obey.

Government officials seldom hold personal power over ordinary citizens – we seldom interact with government officials in any direct way. They have personal power only over their employees, interns, and so on, and those who come within the purview of their immediate jurisdiction under the law.

Employers, on the other hand, always have personal power over their employees. We have laws protecting the rights of workers for that very reason, to limit the consequences of personal power. Landlords have personal power over renters, and we have laws protecting tenants’ rights for that reason. All such laws were fought tooth and nail by employers and landlords when they were proposed, partly because obeying them is often an expense, but in large part because it removes some of the payoff of personal power.

Every time an employee successfully starts a small business, or becomes self-employed, he gains freedom. The commercial elite may still have a lot more money than he does, but he is no longer dependent on any of them. No employer holds personal power over him. Every time a person buys his own home, he gains freedom. No landlord holds personal power over him.

That’s the underlying, unspoken reason why the pressure is on to keep wages suppressed in America. It’s not the only reason, of course; it’s reflexive for business owners for whom wages are a cost to be kept down, and who seldom consider the larger picture. But as long as wages are kept low, the number of people who will be able to escape from wage work and become free is limited, and so is the number of people who will be able to afford their own homes. With more and more money funneled to the very rich at the top of the ladder, they have more money to play with and gamble with, but at least as important is that the majority of the people are kept on the treadmill, where they can be controlled. Where they can be told what to do, and made to serve.

Personal power needs to be recognized and understood. We need to stop thinking “government” reflexively when we use the word “power.” Sure, government power is important and potentially dangerous. We need to make sure it is restrained by the three safety controls we put on it: separation of powers, public accountability, and explicit limits of government action such as the Bill of Rights. When these become frayed, as they have in recent years, we need to restore them.

But on a visceral level, the government is not what most people think of when they imagine freedom. They think of their boss, or their landlord, and being able to tell them to shove it. They think of being in a situation where no one can tell them what to do. The real enemy of freedom in a democracy is not the government, but rich and powerful individuals able to exercise personal power. To judge whether a government is a tyranny, a good rule of thumb is to ask to what extent it serves the interest of rich and powerful individuals – helping them to exercise personal power over others. To say that government secures and protects people’s rights is another way of saying that it protects the weak from the strong. A tyranny instead aids and abets the strong in dominating the weak.

Of course, the rich and powerful often try to confuse the issue by saying that a government interfering with their freedom to tyrannize others is a tyranny, and to them, it is – as it has to be; if it weren’t, it would be a tyranny to the rest of us. In just that way the slave owners of the antebellum South complained of the tyranny of Washington. We need have no more sympathy for our capitalist masters today than we do in hindsight for the plantation masters of yesterday.

This Is No Time For Compromise

Can we now dispense with the word “bipartisanship” now?

We are in a Crisis era, a Fourth Turning. Roughly once a lifetime, we go through a period of civic upheaval in which our national institutions (political and economic) have, for one reason or another, become dysfunctional. The last time this happened was in the 1930s-40s with the Great Depression followed by World War II. The time before that was in the 1860s-70s with secession, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. The time before that was in the 1770s-80s with the American Revolutionary War and the framing of the Constitution. You can find out more about the concept at this web site: http://www.fourthturning.com/. But what I want to write about today is not the overall concept of the generational cycle and the Fourth Turning. I want to talk about a specific characteristic that all Fourth Turnings have, this one (so far) included. That characteristic is divisiveness. It’s something that is often decried, but it is in fact a good thing – indeed, an absolutely necessary thing.

A Crisis era (such as this one) is a decisive time. It’s a time when much-needed reforms are put in place, reforms that have been neglected for decades. It is not a time for compromise or soft talk or middle courses. It’s a time when consensus cannot be achieved, when conflict arises between those who see a need for the new and those who would preserve the old, however dysfunctional it may be. It is the nature of such a conflict that it cannot be resolved through agreement. There must be a victory, and there must be a defeat. Consider the three Crisis eras from our nation’s past, beginning with the American Revolution.

In 1773, tensions had been rising between England and the American colonies for decades. The expensive conclusion of the Seven Years War (or French and Indian War to Americans) moved the British government to try to get the colonies to contribute financially to their own defense. A reasonable request, of course, but it ran head-first into the colonists’ conviction that they had come to America in the first place in search of self-rule, and that Crown and Parliament had no proper sovereign authority over America. London’s position was diametrically opposed: the British government insisted on its right to govern all British territory, including the colonies in America.

This impasse had grown over time. Prior to the French and Indian War, the British government didn’t really make any attempt to govern the colonies. Britain used America as a convenient dumping ground for condemned criminals (as she would later use Australia), a source of raw materials, and a market for manufactured goods, but otherwise left the colonists to their own devices. Thought in Britain had always held that the Crown and Parliament held sovereignty and the right to govern, but why bother? As American society became more developed and sophisticated, though, as population grew, and as the war with France forced Great Britain to take an interest in (and spend more money on) America’s defense, the attitude of the British government and that of the Americans approached collision.

A number of taxes were imposed on the colonists in the years following the end of the war, provoking a storm of protest. The government backed down and repealed most of these taxes by the early 1770s, retaining only a token duty on imported tea.

Was the tea tax onerous, an unconscionable burden threatening to reduce Americans to abject poverty? Certainly not. It was barely a tax at all. It would fall short of paying for the French and Indian War by millions of pounds. Most Americans would likely shrug their shoulders, pay the duty, and hardly notice. But the Tea Act, if allowed to stand, set the precedent that Parliament had the authority to tax the colonists and to legislate in other ways. Rather than accept this, a radical group led by Samuel Adams engaged in a bit of guerrilla theater, nonviolent civil disobedience, and applied vandalism, and destroyed a cargo of tea in Boston harbor.

This was not a move intended or calculated to provoke compromise. In response, the British government didn’t compromise, either. It imposed a series of Punitive Acts (or “Intolerable Acts” as the Americans called them) which further roused the Americans’ ire. Americans began forming militias and stockpiling arms and ammunition. The Crown dispatched reinforcements to America and negotiated with the German principality of Hesse for mercenary troops. The Americans formed a provisional government and appointed George Washington commander of its newly created army, which set about besieging the British forces in Boston. Battles were fought. Washington’s forces outmaneuvered the British at Boston and forced them to withdraw. The British thereafter returned the favor at New York City and nearly (but not quite) destroyed the Continental Army. The Congress passed a motion to declare independence from Great Britain. From that point on, the lines were drawn and no compromise was possible. Either America would become fully independent of Great Britain, or the colonies would submit to British rule, but the prior condition of loyal but self-governing colonies would cease to exist, one way or another.

Does this begin to sound familiar in terms of our current situation?

We can also compare it to what happened in the 1860s. Tensions had been building over issues related to industrialization of the country, particularly slavery, for many years. The territories acquired during the U.S.-Mexican War were a focus for much of the argument, since they would eventually become states and their representatives in Congress would weigh in on one side of the divide or the other. The newly-formed Republican Party represented the interests of the northern capitalists and of the abolitionists (who were in agreement over the specific issue of slavery; both opposed it although for different reasons). A moderate Republican, Abraham Lincoln, was nominated for president in 1860. Lincoln was not proposing to outlaw slavery, but did propose to keep it out of the new states formed from the western territories. This would, over time, result in an anti-slavery majority in Congress, and the planter interests saw the writing on the wall.

A true compromise on the issue of slavery would have resulted in gradual emancipation with compensation paid to the slave owners for loss of their property, but the hard-liners were not interested in that on either side. Southern fire-eaters saw an opportunity to provoke secession from the U.S. by states that permitted slavery. The strategy for this was to ensure a hard-line pro-slavery Democratic candidate in the election. Moderate Democrats held their own convention, with the result that the party split and nominated two competing presidential tickets, both of which lost (predictably enough) and Lincoln won with a plurality of the popular vote, exactly as the fire-eaters had intended. Seven states promptly seceded. Lincoln initially attempted a compromise solution and peaceful rejoining of the Union. The seceding states were having none of it. They formed a new central government with a Constitution modeled on the one they had abrogated (with a few appropriate changes) and, in a dispute over a federal fort within the borders of one of the seceding states, went to war.

Once again, an irreconcilable conflict existed. The southern planters wanted to preserve an antique way of life based on wealth generated by growing cash crops with slave labor. The northern commercial and industrial interests wanted to pursue an increasingly mechanized and industrialized future in which slaves would be replaced by machines and finance capital would dominate the entire economy, and the emancipationists, their temporary and ad-hoc allies, wished to free the slaves for moral reasons. A solution might have been found short of war, but it would have required the planters to accept defeat and seek the best compromise deal they could get. They were unwilling to do that. And so the lines were drawn once again, and the conflict fought to the finish.

The Great Depression was less violent, but no less uncompromising. A breakdown of the capitalist economic system with its governing philosophy of laissez-faire left some 25% of the workforce unemployed. Neither the breakdown nor dispute over that philosophy was new; the industrial economy put in place after the Civil War suffered periodic financial panics and depressions roughly every 20 years. The philosophy itself was opposed by labor union activists, anarchists, socialists, and Communists. Class conflict had been intensifying for decades. The Depression brought it all to a head. Herbert Hoover, the president when the economy tanked, was no laissez-faire purist, or so one would judge from his past. But he moved in that direction in the face of disaster, perhaps out of genuine conviction or perhaps because the Republican Party demanded it of him. The conflict this time was political and electoral and did not involve guns (which we may take as a sign of progress), but it was no less decisive. Over the years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, laissez-faire was abandoned. The workplace was unionized, the government regulated the banks and other industries, and the first social welfare programs (Social Security and unemployment insurance) were put in place. By the time World War II was over, a new economy had been crafted, a mix of capitalist and socialist elements. This was not accomplished through bipartisan compromise any more than the changes of the American Revolution or the Civil War were. The divide was sharp and partisan, with the Democrats on one side of it and the Republicans on the other. The Democrats won, and the Republicans lost.

In the present time, we again face a situation similar to those three. The economy has again broken down, although not as severely as during the Great Depression. In addition, we face shortages of key raw materials and severe environmental dangers. The problems this time are global in scope. The global economy is beyond the power of any one national government to regulate – an international means of regulating it is required. One economic problem that was not present in the 1930s was a shortage of fuel; the U.S. was still a net exporter of oil then. Today, we are faced with the need to transform our energy economy away from its dependence on oil – no easy task. We cannot simply apply the same methods that worked in the Depression, despite a superficial similarity.

On all of these points, we do not find national unity. There are voices on the other side, claiming that the problems don’t exist, or that we can solve them without changing the way we do business. In many cases, these voices are cynical and insincere, acting not with genuine public concern but out of a desire to protect private profits. We saw how fiercely the lines were drawn over the health-care reform debate. This is the template for the next few elections. A compromise, “bipartisan” solution will, almost by definition, be an unworkable one. We must accept that the conflict exists. It’s too soon to broker a negotiated settlement. First, we must win. Then we can make peace.

I hope – and given the example of the Great Depression, I cautiously believe – that I speak of “winning” and of “peace” only in metaphor. Some violence, however, has already occurred. It remains to be seen whether those who are defeated at the polls (rather, some of their crazier supporters) will resort to the cartridge box instead of the ballot box. Let us pray not. Such efforts would of course be defeated, but in the course of it lives would be lost for the most futile of causes. In that sense, I hope that we have peace now, not after victory. But at the same time, we cannot let the danger of violence deter us from doing what must be done.

In any case, it’s time to jettison the search for “bipartisanship.” There will come a time later on, after the necessary reforms are in place and their opponents have accepted reality, when consensus may be sought once more. But that time is not now.

The Advanced Civilized Paradigm III: Government

This is the third entry in the Advanced Civilized Paradigm series, concerning government. As with the economy and religion, we can recognize two stable, long-lasting forms of government in our history and prehistory, before entering upon modern times and the whirlwind of change we’ve become accustomed to. When I say “long-lasting,” I mean over time measured in the thousands of years.

When the species Homo sapiens first appeared on the planet, the government structure of the Precivilized Paradigm already existed, as did its economic forms and, very likely, its basic religious ideas. The hominid species that preceded us, H. erectus, had already invented the fundamental technologies with which our ancestors faced the world: simple stone tools, the controlled use of fire, clothing, basket-weaving, primitive medicine. True humans quickly refined and improved all these technologies, but even so it was a long time before our ancestors resorted to the key technology which changed the paradigm of social life: agriculture. As long as humans lived by foraging and hunting instead of by planting and husbandry, certain forms of government, economy, and religion prevailed. It was a simpler, more egalitarian, less formalized way of life.

As with the economy and religion, we should ask ourselves a key question: what is government for? What purposes are served by having an empowered authority over society, whatever form it takes? As with economy and religion, the answer is a simple one, despite the amazing complexity and variety of tasks before modern governments. A government has two functions. First, it resolves disputes among citizens. Second, it decides, coordinates and implements collective action. Every operation of government – armies and navies, police and courts, bureaucracies and legislatures, aid to the poor and corporate subsidies, men on the moon and men in black – serves one or the other of these purposes. Humans are a social species not a solitary one, so both these function of government are always necessary regardless of the particulars of society. Wherever people interact, disputes arise, and if we are not to resolve all of them by individual violence, we must have some method in place for resolving them by recourse to decisive authority. Also, all societies of necessity do some things collectively rather than individually, and so a means of making collective decisions and effectively giving orders to participants is required. These needs are constants, but the way in which they are met has varied – yet not endlessly.

In precivilized times, people lived in small bands. Everyone in a band knew everyone else, and most of them were related to each other. Leaders of the band were chosen by informal consensus, and collective decision-making was by informal discussion. In short, there was no formal government, really, nor any need of one. Like the economics and religion of the Precivilized Paradigm, its governing structures were maintained universally wherever human beings lived for somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years. It’s difficult to imagine life going on without change in its patterns for such a long time as that.

In fact, though, it didn’t quite. Technological progress occurred in precivilized times at a glacial pace, but over 100,000 or 200,000 years, even glacial-pace technological progress adds up. Humans improved their techniques of toolmaking, going from the thrusting spear or swung axe to the thrown spear to the spear-thrower to the bow and arrow. They learned to use domesticated dogs as hunting companions. They developed new and better methods of food preservation, and applied borderline methods that skirted between gathering and agriculture. As food supplies increased, so did populations, until the pressure of numbers forced human societies to make use of agriculture proper. As soon as that step was taken, the nature of human society, including its governing institutions, began to change.

The change occurred over at least a thousand years, going through several transitional forms, including the chiefdom and the council of elders and the primitive republic, until tribal life evolved into the city-state. From that point on, government assumed the form of the Classical Civilized Paradigm, and retained that form, with occasional temporary exceptions, for about seven to eight thousand years. The elements of government under the Classical Paradigm in nearly every society that lived in cities, from the earliest known city-states in the Near East until things began to change in the sixteenth century in Europe, remained constant, and revolved around hereditary monarchy, with the royal power compromised by the influence of the hereditary landed warrior elite, of the priestly class, and (where a significant commercial element existed in the economy) of the merchant class. In a few exceptional cases, the elite classes governed without a monarch, sometimes with a pretense of democracy; this was the case in classical Athens and in the Roman Republic. Such societies always had a very strong commercial economic base, and were the exceptions to an overwhelming rule. Not only was the governing structure of the Classical Paradigm the norm in agrarian, pre-industrial societies of the western Old World that had contact with each other and might conceivably have influenced one another through imitation, but also in societies that evolved with relative independence, such as the monarchies of ancient India, China, and Japan, or even with total independence, such as the civilized monarchies of Mesoamerica. This form of governance was not, I would argue, something primarily learned by one society through contact with another, but rather something dictated by material circumstance. A warlike society with a primarily agricultural economy, in which land was the primary source of wealth and labor to work the land the primary necessity for its exploitation, readily available in the form of captives taken in war, naturally developed an elite class of warriors who were rewarded with land ownership and slaves to work their land. The king was in origin merely the most powerful and influential noble, but through the support of the priestly class and the machinery of formal government became something more than that, his power a check on that of ambitious aristocrats – not always successfully. Where the material circumstances shifted away from the norm for agrarian societies, most often when a society could achieve greater wealth through trade than through large-scale agriculture, a divergence was sometimes seen from the Classical Paradigm pattern.

The same array of technological changes that resulted in other divergence from the Classical Paradigm – the printing press, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, electronics, computers, the Internet and, in future, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence – have also resulted in a change of government form. I do not believe, however, that our society has finished changing in terms of government any more than in terms of economy or religion.

The changes to government in the centuries since the divergence began have all been in two directions. One direction has been that of equalizing influence on the state and elevating formerly powerless classes of people to greater power and greater protection against government abuses. Hereditary government positions have been replaced with elected ones, and the franchise extended to broader and broader percentages of the electorate, until today the vote is held by all people living in modern states except non-citizens, the very young, the severely mentally ill, and in some cases convicted felons; i.e., voting has become a right with relatively rare exceptions instead of a privilege held by few. Voting has probably been extended as far as it can be, but there remain two sources of privileged influence, one being wealth, and the other political office itself.

The other direction of change has been the expansion of the size and scope of government. As society has grown more complex, government has taken on more functions over time that were previously handled by private agencies, if at all. In addition, the size of territory administered by the “top layer” of government has grown, and the number and scope of intergovernmental bodies – government at a wider level than that of the nation-state – has increased.

So, where does each of these processes meet its natural end point, beyond which further technological advance will take it no further? We must, as always, speculate about the Advanced Civilized Paradigm, and none of this is certain. I play here with ideas. That said, here is what I think will ultimately happen.

The representative democracies we have today will in the end be replaced by direct democracy, facilitated by communications technology – the Internet or perhaps something more impressive, a linking of person to person that is always on. We will still elect representatives, but they will no longer make collective decisions for us. Instead, they will act as legal experts and consultants, presenting suggestions for the people’s consideration. The people themselves will be smarter on the average than they are now, thanks to genetic engineering and/or artificial enhancements, and biological humans will be joined by robotic intelligences in a dual citizenship.

One very desirable effect of this arrangement will be to undercut and neutralize the current contemptible influence of lobbyists and campaign contributions. Wealth will have much less effect on lawmaking because the people, not the people’s representatives, will be making the laws. The representatives may still be lobbied, but it will be increasingly impossible to keep any such efforts secret, and they will be easily countered by the instantaneous registering of public opinion.

The scope of government will be both broader and deeper, encompassing everything except personal and private life. Remember that under the Advanced Civilized Paradigm, there will be no such thing as a job. Everyone will be an owner and receive an income from that rather than from work, and so all business will become a public enterprise. This will vastly expand the role of government to encompass the entire economic private sector as it stands today – but since nobody will be employed any more, this will not amount to a significant degree of government leverage over people’s lives.

While deepening, government will also broaden, and many functions that are now handled at the nation-state level will move up to the level of global governance. Other national functions will devolve to a regional or local level of government, and national governments will wither away (at least in part), becoming much weaker than they are today. A single global government will handle all matters of trade regulation, peacekeeping, and resource husbandry, while local and regional governments handle criminal law, most civil law and the management of local business enterprise. There will be very little for national governments to do, especially since military forces as they currently exist will be abolished by the global government, and war as we have known it for thousands of years will disappear. There will probably still be a need for armed forces to contend with terrorist movements and civil disturbances, but these could be maintained at a tiny fraction of the resource and manpower cost of today’s armed forces, freeing up immense resources for the public good.

A remaining question is how government functions will be handled once mankind expands off planet Earth. Will the communication technology exist to make the global government a solar system or even interstellar government? Impossible to say – and this suggests there may, eventually, be a state of society beyond the Advanced Paradigm. But the visions presented here should be enough to occupy our progressive dreams for a good long while.

Utopian Templates, or, Why Progressivism Always Wins In The End

What lies at the root of the differences between different political philosophies?

Exclude the obviously self-serving, such as the ideologies worn by many elected officials like makeup, or those employed by the voiceboxes of corporate power to justify rapaciousness and greed. Let’s confine ourselves to ideologies that people actually believe in sincerely.

Set aside also practical questions of methodology and political reality. These are important when facing real-world problems of implementation, but they are not what the disagreements are about. I am sure of this, because there is simply too little emotional energy invested in the hows, as distinct from the whats, to be worth fighting over. I mean, if you’re driving with a friend and you both want to go to the same restaurant, and you come to an intersection and you think you should turn left while he thinks you should turn right, that’s easily settled. You don’t fight about it. You just pull over and consult a map. Since you’re both trying to get to the same place, the one who’s wrong will shrug it off and say, “Glad you caught me on that one.”

No, the real disputes don’t come over disagreements on how to get there. The arguments happen when you want to go to the Chinese place and he wants barbecue. So it is, I would say, in politics. We don’t disagree about the way to get there. We disagree about where we want to go. If it were otherwise, we’d just pull over and consult the map, and come to an agreement.

If you care about politics at all, if it’s an emotional matter for you, if you pay attention to it and you think about it – if it’s not just another spectator sport for you (which it is to some) – then you are a visionary idealist. That is to say, you have a template in your mind, held there in various states of precision or vagueness, of the perfect society, and you chart your political roadmap based on what you think will take us there.

Now this template is usually not realistic. It can’t be achieved in any great hurry, if at all. If you’re wise, you realize this. But it colors all your political thinking just the same. It’s what guides you to sit up and say, “That’s wrong,” or “That’s right,” when faced with a policy choice. You have a sense that this policy choice will take society closer or further away from the template in your head of the ideal society, and you judge it (consciously or not) on that basis.

In America there are a number of competing utopian templates, which is why we get so much political drama from time to time. Once we even had a civil war and killed almost a million of each other because we couldn’t agree on the templates. Luckily the one that provoked the secession is (mostly) gone, but there are plenty of replacements. There’s the religious right template, which sees utopia in a Biblical theocracy where everybody lives according to the Word of God. The more thoughtful believers in that one will acknowledge that it’s unachievable until the Second Coming, but they still hold it as an ideal to be approximated. Then there’s the libertarian template, in which the perfect society is one with the least intrusive (or just plain least) government. The American patriot template sees paradise arriving in the slipstream of a U.S. Air Force jet fighter and American military dominance of the world. The mega-corporation template sees the ideal society as one that allows the rich to become richest. All of these templates compete for dominance in this country, but all of them are outliers and also-rans compared to another utopian template which has existed from the beginning of our nation and for several centuries before that. This template does not always govern the country, and has never done so without competition, but it is always a strong force and, over the years, has moved us increasingly towards its fulfillment while all of the other templates enjoy at most only temporary success. I refer to the progressive template.

The progressive template isn’t specifically American. It goes back at least to the Enlightenment in Europe, but its roots are older than that. It arose in embryonic form in response to a sequence of technological innovations. It started with the printing press, which boosted literacy rates by providing affordable reading material so that most people had a reason to learn to read. This in turn amplified independent thought and gave rise to a whole string of revolutionary developments, from the Protestant Reformation to the scientific revolution to the Enlightenment itself and the movement for democracy. Further technological developments followed at an accelerating pace, and along with them arose more and more questioning of the way society had been organized for thousands of years. Why should certain people have privileges granted them at birth? Shouldn’t government be by the consent of the governed? Why should anyone be enslaved? Don’t workers have rights that should be enforceable against their employers? Shouldn’t women have equal rights with men? Shouldn’t all races be treated equally?

Prior to about the 15th or maybe 16th century, the pace of political and social progress was glacial. The same basic paradigm of society held sway for thousands of years, composed of hereditary privilege, monarchy, male superiority, state religion, and a bottom caste of slaves or serfs bonded to toil for the benefit of the elite. The same held true with technology. It progressed over those millennia, but so slowly that one can see this progress only by looking back through history; it was invisible to the people living in it. Then, almost as if a switch had been thrown, the pace of both technological and social progress accelerated dramatically. Now, we see both happening in real time while we watch. This is not a coincidence. The one rises from the other, because as we see technology progressing during our lifetimes, we are conditioned to think of all problems as having solutions and of change as normal.

A fundamental congruence may be observed between two sorts of observations. On one end of the equation, we say things like this: “A thousand years ago, nobody could cross from Europe to America at all. Five hundred years ago, the journey took weeks. My grandparents could make the trip in a few days. Today, I can fly from here to Paris or London in a few hours.” On another, we can also say things like this: “When the Constitution was first implemented, most African-Americans were slaves, women couldn’t vote, and neither could most men who weren’t rich. Since then, we have freed the slaves, and we have made suffrage universal.” Moreover, it is only a short step from this sort of thinking to imagining both technical and social/political solutions to problems that haven’t been solved yet. This willingness to contemplate how things can get better, and better and better, without limit, is the essence of the progressive template. Unlike the others mentioned above, the progressive template isn’t any fixed model of utopia, but rather a vision of a society that continually improves, with better lives for more people as time goes by. Whether the problem is a need for cleaner energy or for cleaner politics, for safer transportation or for fairer distribution of wealth, the progressive position is that it can be solved. No matter what happens, no matter how much things change, that one fact remains constant: they can get better if we put our minds and hearts to it.

And that explains why progressivism (also known as “liberalism”) has always been a major contender for the dominant utopian template in American politics, and, I believe, always will be. Other templates come and go. The white supremacy template, for example, was strong through the 19th and about half of the 20th centuries but has now dwindled to being the preferred choice only of an impotent fringe. The religious-right template has just about peaked and we will see it similarly dwindle over future generations. The libertarian template waxes and wanes but never commands more than a small fraction of the popular allegiance. The mega-corporate template is under siege right now, but is never very popular except with the very rich anyway. So with any other conceivable template based on a fixed ideal society. But the progressive template, because it evolves over time, and is committed only to continuous progress, is always in contention, and so over time inevitably wins. It can lose temporarily, for an election cycle, for a decade or two. But in the end it always wins.

That’s why we no longer have slaves. That’s why we have guarantees of racial and gender equality. That’s why we have workers’ rights built into law. That’s why we have regulations on business to protect workers, consumers, and the environment. That’s why we have aid for the poor. That’s why we have a government retirement program. That’s why we have guaranteed civil rights for sexual minorities.

That’s why we WILL have universal health care. That’s why we WILL have same-sex marriage. That’s why we WILL have an end to poverty. That’s why we WILL have narrowed income gaps. That’s why we WILL have an ecologically sustainable society. And that’s why we will, in the future, have more and better developments that can’t even be foreseen from the present vantage point, but which future progressives will see and will enact.

It’s only a question of when.