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VIII. Earth Earns: An Open Participatory Earthropocene to Astropocene CoCreative Future

4. A Complementary Genocracy: me + We = US

Purdy, Jedediah. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Reviewed more in the Anthropocene section, a Duke University professor of law seeks to identify and scope a suitable democratic abidance.

Rihani, Samir. Complex Systems Theory and Development Practice. London: Zed Books, 2002. A new conceptual model is proposed for effective social policy, especially for emerging regions, based on an innate self-organizing complexity. The linear Newtonian paradigm is no longer adequate and its use explains why so many current programs do not work. Human societies are in fact dynamic, nonlinear systems whose component members need to be empowered, interconnected and supported by workable legal canons.

The Complexity argument is straightforward: the stimulating layer of self-organized Complexity that lies between deathly order and wasteful chaos could only emerge if people were free to interact and capable of interacting, and if their interactions were facilitated by appropriate rules that command popular support. (11)

Satin, Mark. Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004. The activist lawyer provides a vigorous exposition of how to breakthrough from the right/left, either/or gridlock that confounds us. Four guiding principles are cited: maximize choices for all, give everyone one a fair start, maximize human potential, help the developing world. Based on these inclusive concepts, many practical examples are presented.

Seeley, Thomas. Honeybee Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. The Cornell University entomologist draws on a lifetime of clever field studies to lucidly explain how these social insects are so successful in locating and maintaining their home hives. I heard Tom Seeley talk on Collective Intelligence in Honey Bees at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on Sept. 15, 2017 where he cited these five attributes: a common goal and mission, hive members have diverse information, this is freely shared, debate goes on but toward the objective, and via quorum sensing an aggregate, unbiased solution is reached. The buzz before and after was about how much political governments could benefit from such natural wisdom of agree instead of argue. It also points out how bereft we are of any common, Earthly human sapiens identity and purpose.

Shih, Chih-Yu. Collective Democracy. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1999. A scholarly and realistic study that China is indeed moving toward “democracy” but from its tradition of collective, village culture. A Western style individualist version, one size fits all, is simply not appropriate for their historic milieu. As a comment, rather than a single, enforced definition, “democratic” societies need to be situated in their bilateral Eastern and Western modes.

Shiva, Vandana. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. London: Zed Books, 2016. This is a new edition of a 2005 volume by the inveterate physicist, ecologist, activist, editor, and author. A new Preface over 22 pages provide an update survey with especial notice of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si, and a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Vandana Shiva offers an alternative, empathic, feminine vision whereof the welfare and enhancement of people, communities and nature is of paramount value, rather than market forces and profit motives.

Sperling, John, et al. The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America. Sausalito, CA, PoliPoint Press, 2004. Not an endorsement but one sociological study of how the United States seems to be sharply divided into red Retro and blue Metro states of Republican or Democratic values. A biased view which would push the polarization even further, the authors see Retro as white male, orthodox religion, conservative, intolerant while Metro is inclusive, progressive, not afraid of science, and so on.

Szpiro, George. Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy from Plato to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. An Israeli science journalist argues that the democratic ideal of palliative governance by, of, and for the people remains elusive because all manner of elective polities statistically will tend to thwart it. However might we then realize that our social abidance needs to respectfully become naturally organic, a reciprocity of free individual and supportive group? (See Simon Levin 2010 in A Viable Gaia)

Terrell, John. Evolution and the American Myth of the Individual. New York Times. December 1, 2014. The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, anthropologist and author contributes a rare clear, strong statement of the obvious archetypal personality complements of the two party political persuasions, ever locked in win-lose gridlock. This is so patently evident, yet political scientists cannot imagine its organic, complementary me + We = US resolve because no such greater reality is allowed. See also Terrell’s new book A Talent for Friendship: Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait (Oxford, 2014).

At least part of the schism between Republicans and Democrats is based in differing conceptions of the role of the individual. In a broad sense, Democrats are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding. Republicans often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.

Van Vugt, Mark and Jennifer Smith. A Dual Model of Leadership and Hierarchy: Evolutionary Synthesis. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Online October, 2019. A Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam neuropsychologist and a Mills College, Oakland, CA behavioral ecologist weigh in on polarized governing styles by way of a deep and wide census of their presence throughout animal groupings from cetaceans to primates. A set of working terms are dominance and prestige, whence the prior mode is narcissist, aggressive, coercive, intimidates, rules by fear, while the latter is agreeable, values affiliations, empathic, guides by empowerment. By turns, these are male and female roles, whence an obvious resolution of political gridlock ought to be a mutual complementary equity. See also Jon Maher’s paper Dominance and Prestige herein for an earlier reference.

From the popularity of authoritarian political leaders to the under-representation of women in boardrooms, leadership is an important theme in current human social affairs. Leadership is also a prominent research topic in the biological, social, and cognitive sciences. However, these active literatures have evolved somewhat independently and there is a need for synthesis. A comparative-evolutionary approach can integrate divergent perspectives by a distinction between two leadership styles, prestige and dominance, that have contrasting expressions, functions, histories, and neural developmental pathways. The distinction may help to resolve various scientific puzzles, such as: (i) opposing views on the different functions and expressions of leadership; (ii) the appeal of dominance-style leaders; and (iii) sex biases in leadership emergence in modern society. (Abstract)

Vanhanen, Tatu. Democratization: A Comparative Analysis of 170 Countries. London: Routledge, 2003. A continuum is found from autocracies where power is concentrated among a few to egalitarian societies which broadly share their government and market economies. The main quantifying measure seems to be the degree of resource or capital distribution amongst the populace.

….the best strategy to strengthen the social basis of democracy and to improve social prerequisites for democracy in non-democratic countries would be to carry out social reforms intended to further the distribution of power resources among various sections of the population. (189)

Victor, Jennifer, et al, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. As each field and domain in turn becomes redefined and embellished by way of previously unknown, endemic interconnections, so is our public and policy governance, or lack thereof. Some main parts are Network Theory and the Study of Politics, Political Network Methodologies, American Politics, Public Policy and Administration, International Relations, and Comparative Politics.

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