By ecological reasoning alone our 20th Century Democracy was broken from the start because it didn’t 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 by way of two co-dependent specialties: The first is the careful coordination of humanity’s broadly distributed expertise by those who have become expert in leadership, and the second is the application of every voter to a single shared expertise, which is competence in recognising the qualities and experience that make for a good leader.
Perhaps we should include teaching as a third specialty that’s also key to electoral intelligence? (Don’t know; I’m making this up on the fly because it’s still a new way of thinking for me. Is it new to you?)
According to this way of thinking, 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 transition to a shared “voter expertise” 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 was introduced to this exciting new world in 1974, when I was enrolled at the University of Waterloo’s Environmental Studies Program. My specific focus was called Man-Environment Studies, and if you’ve read my other posts on this website you can take this as evidence the questions I ask today about 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/) were still far from my mind at that time. But the question I want to address in this particular post, the question of how ecological reasoning alone can help us reinvent human politics, an obvious difference between members of species and members of human electorates was also not culturally disposed to register in any of our young minds.
Given that we were pioneering environmentalists, who’d just learned that “Our Natural World” was dying, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that “saving the world” to us could only mean “everybody must know this stuff”. A closer look at this “unregistered but obvious” difference between members of species and members of human electorates would have shown us not only that everybody doesn’t, but as un-Naturally specialised individuals we can’t know all this stuff! So why has it taken so long to start asking these questions about the limits to evenly shared knowledge (which is what a ‘majority voice’ is) when the human situation vis-à-vis the Natural World is far simpler (as we can only be called “adaptive extremophiles” by choice) than the ecological dynamics of genetically speci-fied Nature that I studied in school? After all it’s just a case of recognising the very pronounced contrast between the specialisation needs of technologically adapting vs. genetically coadapted organisms.
Again I submit: our ignore-ance-of-voter-ignorance has lately been amplified by the aforementioned late 20th-century conditions of disproportionate wealth’s libertarian narrative, and social media’s equalisation of opinion, and this has ensured that any questioning which might fundamentally overturn our current electoral democracy’s truism that “the voters are always right” is now culturally weighted to sound, not just technocratic and elitist, but counterintuitive.
