By ecological reasoning alone our 20th Century Democracy was broken from the start because it did not take into account that a technological ‘species’ must comprise diversely specialised individuals. What this means in terms of electoral democracy is that human beings cannot speak with a fully intelligent majority voice. While “universal suffrage” has been a long-fought and a hard-fought campaign, and worth every pair of boots on the street, nevertheless our votes can only intelligently direct public action through the careful coordination of humanity’s broadly distributed expertise by those who have become specialised in leadership.
A workable 21st Century Democracy will arrive only when educators, and those who put themselves forward as political leaders, begin to encourage voters to focus more and more on candidates’ proven leadership qualities and less and less on their policies. This must now be done by degrees, because the libertarian narrative of disproportionate wealth and the free-for-all of social media have conditioned us to reject this ecological human reality as merely another “philosophy”; in this case, as an appeal to “technocratic authoritarianism”.
Ecology was a new scientific field of study in the mid 20th Century, and I took some of the earlier courses in 1974 when I was enrolled at the University of Waterloo’s Environmental Studies Program. That my specific focus was called Man-Environment Studies is a tangential clue as to how we were not yet seriously questioning the prevailing “Man’s Place in the Natural World” assumption (See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2023/02/09/once-you-see-it-you-cant-un-see-it/), but the immediate question of how ecological reasoning might even apply to human politics, this was even farther from out minds at the time. It’s unfortunate, because the connection is simplicity itself: it’s just a case of recognising the very pronounced contrast between the specialisation dynamics of technologically adapting vs. genetically coadapted beings!
But, because of the aforementioned late 20th-century conditions—disproportionate wealth’s Libertarian narrative and social media’s equalisation of opinion—the question of how the study of Ecology alone (or more accurately, of population evo-ecology alone) can fundamentally change, apparently even reverse, our current electoral democracy’s “The People are are always right” truism now sounds . . . counterintuitive.
