Message #204691

[Vixen]

This is true, but Rifkin doesn't go far enough. As I noted in "The Promise of Popular Democracy: Origins," when James Madison spoke of the need for "intimate sympathy" among a people, he was pointing to the bonds anthropologists like Christopher Boehm have found among our earliest human ancestors, bonds that led to egalitarian, proto-democratic checks on authority. The Greeks didn't invent democratic practices. They emerged long before Ancient Greece, 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. Thorkild Jacobson, Norman Yoffee, Raul S. Manglapus, Jack Goody and others have written about these early egalitarian, democratic relations.

One possible reason it seems easier to resist authority rather than advance an egalitarian vision is that our democratic practices appear to have emerged in resistance. Empathy is a fundamental human capacity. But the will to power is also present. So is the need for leadership. When leaders became bullies, bonds among the bullied could -- and did -- topple the leader. Exile, ridicule, even term limits were employed long ago by proto-democrats.

It's also no accident that the rise of the scientific worldview and rationalism rejected empathy as dangerously emotional. Rational management and historical determinism, in both Marxism and capitalism, became hallmarks of the modern democratic era.

Prairie humanists want to return our political relationships to something like the neighborliness that marks private life across ideological boundaries. Think how much easier it would be to advance environmental initiatives and the greening of industry if we had already been re-framing progressive politics along these lines. Think how different the health care debate would be. The insurance industry argument depends upon an all-against-all worldview.

Prairie humanists drop old, liberal, technocratic talk of managed solutions. We focus upon consequences. How can our neighbors and we best secure health? What are our responsibilities to such a cause?

The unfettered pursuit of private interests obviously dooms collective opportunity and the constitutional guarantees of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have to contain -- and topple -- the political and economic authority that enforces this ideological trap. As we've seen, humans have been doing just that for a very long time. We can do it, too.