Is Republicanism Passe?

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

Republicism has become Passe
It no longer takes sending a man on horseback to Washington to represent my vote.
Nor do I need a rich lawyer to give me a stump speech in order to inform me on the merits of any national issue.

I can get myself fully educated in domestic affairs and foreign policy over the internet and then put my finger on the computer key and cast my vote instantly.

If we do this nationally it will mean the end of; representative government; party politics; corporate lobbying; pork-barrel spending; congressional grid-lock; millionaire candidates.

In short: A vastly expensive, wasteful and antiquated election and voting system, which once served us reasonably well, is now clearly redundant and can go into history.

All those who say aye to this initiative, vote here.

2

right. direct democracy is the way to go.

democratic lynch mobs.

we voted, you die.

we didn’t vote for that policeman to protect you.

-Imp

3

Um yea I am with Imp on this one… Those up in washington are bad enough, You want mob rule? Can I get off the bus now? I left my guns at home.

4

Cynicism and pseudo-intellectualism are bedfellows.
Mankind is essentially go(o)d.
In a real democracy the majorty prevails.
In the phony one you prefer the reverse rules.

Both the peasant class and the noble class trust in Man and God.
The merchant class only trusts in cash.

5

if mankind was essentially good, we wouldn’t need laws and morals forcing men to act in accordance with their good nature.

stick your neck out in trust…

-Imp

6

Innately good generally implies an innate knowledge of the good, not “good” in the sense you mean it.

7

I mean good in the godly sense. That is how He made us for He had no other image to work from but His own. Without that atomic core of goodness mothers and fathers would have eaten their first offspring and not cared for them. The challenge of an evolved reflective consciousness is to remain connected to that godly base and not be seduced by the apple.

8

rouzbeh probably can contribute to this thread :stuck_out_tongue:

9

If you’re serious about god giving us some kind of morality then be quiet, just be quiet.

First of all humans have a tendedncy to be ‘innately’ good to ingroups, even that natural tendency has its breeches. Humans are also inately cruel to outgroups, the natural result of in-group stability/loyalty is outgroup distrust.

humans come equipped with a ‘moral tuning knob’ the default turning or tune to this knob is not “Everyone is your ingroup” today we can do such through society/learning, but na turally we’d be distrustful of people different from us, people who held different beliefs. Humans are good and bad as a result of adaptations that were produced in our evolutionary history, god has nothing to do with it.

Statements like ‘Humans are innately good’ are just absurd and assinine, we’re innately good or bad under different circumstances, blanket statements eitehr direction without examining those circumstances are just wrong.

10

Your reasoning regarding the foundations of human consciousness, like that of all social philosophers, from the time of Aristotle onwards, is distorted by the fact that you are trying to make a general analysis amidst the maze of twisting branches near the top of our family tree. You have to go all the way to our roots to find our what is natural and what is artificial.

We invested 99.9% of the time evolving a reflective consciousness during the Stone Age. What separated us from all other primates during that critical formation era of human infancy, was the ethics of family group sharing and caring. From that time until the onset of the Bronze Age of agriculture (circa 20,000 BC) we honed those social niceties to an advanced degree. It is the sharing ethic that has made our survival so successful.

Caring for others is not merely an “in group” sensibility. We instinctively care for any infant, not only from other cultures but other species as well. We were never originally loutish brutes bashing in neighbor’s skulls. That outward expression of brutality, (which is also an innate survival instinct, though not on mass scale) expressed itself outwardly much later - towards the end of the Bronze Age, when our continued success as a specie made crowding and farm-divisions uncomfortable and uneconomical.

Mass agression then served an evolutionary purpose by uniting fueding clans into national systems. Where once clan scarification meant death or ransome beyond clan boundaries, national totems kept internal security and spelt death only to other national totems. The nations were then united in New World colonies. Wops, Ities, kykes, niggers disappeared into the international consensus which we more or less enjoy today.

The general goodness of man is essentially one of family kindliness and non-trespass. 99,000 generations of practicing animism during the Stone Age, imprinted all of us with that same sense of superstition - that it is wrong to trespass, that bad luck will result from it. It is part and parcel of our makeup - all religions evolved out of it, this includes atheism.

If our evolution has any meaning it will return us to that condition of family group egalitarianism - in a more sophisticated mass state… At present we are simply experiencing the prodigal symptems of a rebellious youth. International comptetitiveness will gradually evolve into sensible planet management. We may be temporally mad at each other, but we are not a stupid specie. Environmental realities which once forced us sequentially into family/clan/nation/international group cooperatives, will also force us into an egalitarian global cooperative eventually.

11

we spent well over 99% in hunter/gatherers, our consciousness is probably a result of the demands of both cooperation and competition among humans in our ingroups and outgroups. Sure it was our sharing and altruism and etc that made let us survive.

Hunter-gatherers were violent, very violent and modern hunter-gatherers who don’t engage in agriculture are violent. This doesn’t paint them as mindless brutes or anything else, we have complex adaptations for cooperation and competition.

yes expanding nonzero sum games has been the driving force of peace for quite some time and hopefully it wil lead to such. That being said.

  1. Naturally people are violent/suspicious towards outgroups, all tribes engage in warfare with other tribes, hunter/gatherers were tribes.

We can over-come this today in today’s civilization because we’re less exposed to the things that generally give ‘negative’ (defined as goals we don’t want today) input into the adaptation, we can change that knob today with en vironmental stimuli, learning or whatever, but in natural circumstances hunter-gatherers were certainly more violent towards other tribes then most people are today.

12

Thats an awfully simplistic view of human mental evolution, one that isn’t supported by evolutionary psychology, hunter-gatherer studies, archaeology, good anthropology, etc.

13

Yes we were, though theres some reason to suspect violence against women wasn’t as high as it could have been, i’m talking about likelyhood to die as a male in tribal warfare or violence oriented wasn’t as low as most left anthropologists make it out to be.You could probably find a specific example of exactly that, neighbors bashing in each other’s skulls.

theres a huge point i want to make too, and one which might not be as rational or as logical as I tihnk it is, but i’ll give it a go anyway.

For a human to be able to survive in a tribe that was exposed to agriculture, a tribe that is ruthless, devious and cruel in such amazingly clever ways there would need to have been significant adaptive pressure on humans in the past to adapt protective mechanisms against human predation, the fact that the adaptations work so well under such brutal circumstances would lend some evidence to suggest past humans were indeed one of our largest predators. Many anthropologists do say that the homo genus was our own greatest enemy, our mental architecture is rife with evidence of this.

For a modern day human to survive in super intelligent/cruel tribes in which everyone is a head-hunter at one point or another and so so in super-complex ways, for people to ever survive their foes they would have needeed to encounter a super selection in the past, for detecting human threats.

Some ‘tribes’ after agriculture are brutal and devious in ways we can’t imagine, and will kill man woman or child, the fact that another tribe ever survives an encounter with them, or even originally survived an encounter, or the fact that humans routinely survive such brutal encounters with each other, even without having prior experience with them, is suggestive of somthing, people don’t naturally ‘think’ things out in these situations, there would be no time, our brain takes fragmentary information and alarms us of HUMAN threats.

so the idea that we weren’t violent is dead, the idea that we weren’t very violent is dead, the idea that we were less violent then now under serious, serious, serious question, and thats just from cognition specialization alone.

I don’t think this idea is original with me and may have been somthing i read in atran or another’s work, just incase I am taking credit for someone elses elaboration/explanation.

14

The essense of any good idea is simplicity. The basic logic of our social progressions through each Age of development speaks for itself. It does not require a rocket scientist to figure it out - especially if you have taken the trouble to go into the field and observe it for yourself.

If you want to retain a complicated view then keep reading what all others have to say and ask yourself why we are still knee deep in doodoo with nobody suggesting a way out.?

There are some 200 million modern onlogists who are sick and tired of pseudo-intellectual arguments and their ill-bred base of cyncism. We are ready and waiting to steward the planet without argument

You are talking about less than 1% of human development. In evolutionary terms, subsequent social dysfunction after the Stone Age ended - from the Bronze Age to the present is barely skin deep.

15

I am talking about more then 99.9% of human history, where we spent time as hunter-gatherers, despite the violence (evidence for violence) during these time frames coming from hunter-gatherer studies, archaelogy, good anthropology, evo-bio, evo-psych, etc, I am saying the complexity/super accuracy of people in tribal warfare after agriculture shows what kind of selection must have happened in hunter-gatherer societies, at least at one point or another.

16

I’ve taken the trouble, violence has been becoming historically less wide-spread, with certain ups and downs and large differences across different areas, but the trend is still there, part of that is nonzero sum games continuing (games where both can benefit instead of one, its easier to trade the go to war and better for everyone a lot of the time) and this should propel us towards globalization, but theres more then just nonzero sum games driving us, human cooperation and etc is a huge part, though some of it is largely unknown, there are clear reasons why we are getting less violent. Being ‘innately’ more good then bad isn’t it though, throw us back in hunter-gatherer societies or a violent tribe and we;'ll see which way we go then, humans are capable of each, have innate capabilties for each, and depending on circumstance/environment will go one direction or another, though ingroups are generally always ingroups.

I never claimed our history hasn’t been in complete progress morally/socially or that our innate ‘goodness’ isn’t responsible for it, what i’m saying is that whether we’re good or bad is dependent on a lot of variable circumstances: genes/environment and their complex interactions.

We have just as much innate capacity for bad, as we do for good. whichever manifests is dependent.

17

Good and bad are artificial terms. The Taoist symbol of Yin/Yang is far closer to the polar dynamics of an atomic universe.

Western philosphers have only made two coherent social statements in our entire history.
Man is Good, attributed to Pythogorus I believe.
And Freud’s statement that man has a troublesome ego.

All the rest in between have been suffering from massive doses of verbal diarrhea - and when arguing with each other, engaging in mutual inytellectual masturbation. The net result of their incoherent analysis has artificially escalated basic warrior wars into massively dysfunctional world wars and have left us on the mad brink of species extinction.

The only thing that has saved us from total insanity is the world’s great religions, which intuited our innate goodness and the problems of ego right from the beginning.

18

I meant good or bad as defined by human conceptions of good or bad, which was obvious given the context of this conversation. Good, as in nice and altrustic to a neihbor, or as in bad, spearing the shit out of your neihbor, or to whatever degrees.

This is obviously ignorant and obviously stupid and I feel justified in saying this and I hope without repurcussion from anyone. I don’t even want to point out Darwin, but theres that, and thousands of other people, freud was essentially an ignorant baffoon compared to many many many of them.

Theres not much evidence this is the case, and a lot of evidence to suggest otherwise. I don’t even feel like arguing with what seems on the face of it bold fanaticism, but i’ll hear you out, how the hell do you support that to yourself?

19
  • Darwin

That makes darwin one of the greatest social scientists of all time, in addition to the fact that it will be the foundation of all sensical psychology, social sciences, etc.

its one of the most profound/far-reaching social statement ever made.

20

Why is it you insist that the relatively tiny span of the last few generations of the Bronze Age define human behavior? Just because little has been written about the Stone Age does not mean that it was not highly cultivated. The crass ignorance about our longest and oldest Age always distresses me. Where do you think the base of every single one of our subsequent cultural advances originated? Where do you think theology comes from? Where does science and math come from? Where did family values originate? Nobody speared anybody in the Stone Age. We invested 99,000 generations in it and less than a thousand since. Unless we come to some basic agreement on this foundation I am simply pissing into the wind with you.

[/quote]
The parable of Adam and Eve in Genesis is quite explicit in explaining our early intuitions about the challenges of existence. The Upanishads are filled top to bottom with sage observations about the Human condition. So too the Buddhist sutras and the Koran. There are millions theologists who will back me up on this.