(Not A Government Publication)
One could argue that the formal order of the liberal state depends fundamentally on a social capital of habits of mutuality and cooperation that antedate it, which it cannot create and which, in fact, it undermines.*
- Have you heard the latest from our cretinous corporate Nazi?
- You're referring to the president?
- What do you think? Is there any way out for the country? How do we turn things around?
- No hope, if things go on as anthropologists say they have in history, where in every case we find that democracies decline into authoritarian states, and never find that authoritarian states rise up to democracy.*
- But our kind of state is different.
- How different?
- As our technology is different than that of primitive communities the anthropological argument is based on: we improve our science in a cycle.
- New knowledge, new tools based on it, new evidence based on use of the new tools, new experiment, new knowledge, new tools based on that knowledge...
- Yes. The rules governing our modern states are similarly not fixed. They're not supported by taboos, by unreasoning fear, but have been consciously chosen and maintained by reasoning.
- Progressing perhaps like science but, unlike science, as our democracy declines, as all have declined in history, we have in our political technology not a continuous progress, more like a balancing, a countervailing force lifting democracy back up from recurring decline.
- In myths of the founding of democracy the laws are said to be brought by a law-giver, mortal or god. Could it be that our reasoning is doing what it can, barely keeping our heads above water while we wait for our very own lawgivers to appear, with whose help we can fall ever more slowly from ever-greater heights?
Further Reading:
The Art Of The Possible
The Future Of Science
Kant & Compromise
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* Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play, James C. Scott
