By ecological reasoning alone our 20th Century Democracy was broken from the start because it didn’t take into account the ecological reality 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. Hold on! I am not recommending authoritarianism in any of its technocratic or aristocratic forms when I say this! Yes, universal suffrage has been a long-fought and a hard-fought campaign — and worth every pair of suffragette boots on the street — but our votes can never reliably direct public action until voters in general (as the only exception to this “diversely specialised individuals” distinction for human ecology) come to share just one common expertise, which is the capacity to recognise good leaders based on their proven special expertise in human (i.e. coordination) leadership.
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 enrolled at the University of Waterloo’s Environmental Studies Program. My specific department was called Man-Environment Studies and so, if you’ve read my other posts on this website you can take this as evidence that the concerns I write about today, calling into question 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 more to the point at hand, a present day appreciation that I (we) were naïve about humans being a “natural species” in 1974 is still not a thing to feel superior about, because the question I want to address in this particular post was even further from our minds. Perhaps we are not even culturally, or intuitively, disposed to register this question yet?
This is the question of how ecological reasoning alone, recognising the obvious difference between members of species and members of human electorates, might help us reinvent human politics.
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 at the time could only mean “everybody must know all this ecology stuff”. But a closer look at this “unregistered but obvious” difference between members of species and members of human electorates would have shown us that it is quite impossible for such un-Naturally specialised individuals to 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 than the ecological dynamics of genetically speci-fied Nature that I studied in school? (I’ve argue elsewhere that a technological ‘species’ can only be called an “adaptive extremophile by choice” but this needn’t be accepted as a basis for the present “political” argument.) 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, this individual specialisation ecological reality means that our votes can only intelligently direct public action by way of two co-dependent proficiencies unique to a technological ‘species’: 1) the careful coordination of humanity’s broadly distributed expertise by those who have become specially expert in leadership, and 2) the application of every voter (therefor not a “specialty”) to a single common expertise, which is competence in recognising the qualities and experience that make for a good leader.
[But of course, since humanity’s individual specialisation strategy only makes sense as a small-scale technological view of the much larger cooperation ecological strategy, we are always in danger of drawing our lines a little too bluntly. Perhaps even at this scale we should at least include 3) 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 among other 21st Century phenomena have conditioned us to reject this ecological human reality as merely another “philosophy”; in this case, as an appeal to what The-People-Know-Best philosophers might call “technocratic authoritarianism”.
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.
