CHAPTER 2..... History and the Quest for Meaning Introduction Democracy and Meaning What is "Human?" A False Sense of Union The Test of Time The Origins of Democracy The Inner Return The Nietzschean Challenge The Ultimate Source of Meaning Democracy Opens The Way Meaning as History A Human Interest Story The Twenty-First Century

History and the Quest for Meaning You will have the power to sink to the lower forms of life, which are brutish. You will have the power, through your own judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola The Oration, 1486 Introduction Since actually existing democracy and history both contain more variety than one mind is able to grasp, they are ultimately unknowable except in incomplete or abstract form. Nevertheless, when we are confronted with great complexity--whether it be partially organized or completely chaotic--the human mind searches for a pattern that is meaningful. The need for a meaningful pattern is of such intensity that we tend to project structure into the unknown even if none exists therein. With this in mind, we can assert a meaningful structure in history and a place for democracy within that structure. Authentic democracy's unique role in history is to lift human life to a higher level of adaptive intelligence. Human systems have an impact on virtually the whole biosphere. In the future, if democratic systems survive and prosper, humans will have the ability to transport themselves as well as other life forms to extraterrestrial locations and to transform the environments there. Democracy, therefore, has a special meaning in relation to the evolution of all living systems. Because arguments about democracy are likely to grow more clamorous during the crises of the next half century, we will need to develop a more thorough understanding of both the historical role and the larger meaning of democracy. The advocates of democracy will have to contend with vociferous, deceptive, and determined opponents. Like radio static left over from the "big bang," anti-democratic noise has been present from the beginning. In the case of democracy, however, the ruckus gets louder from time to time. Those who believe in democracy's potential would do well to strengthen their arguments in support of democracy. Utilitarian approaches based on efficacy--or moral persuasion based on human values--will not be enough. Democracy, it would be nice to add, is also a better opening to the rest of the Universe, to a deeper understanding of the human spirit, or even to the "mind of God." Democracy and Meaning Let us look first at the nature of meaning as we experience it, or fail to experience it, in our personal lives. In 1971 I had the pleasure of meeting a man whose courage and sacrifices on behalf of the idea of democracy were well-known. He was a neutralist legislator in South Viet Nam during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his life had recently been threatened (again) by extremists. I asked him, "How do you maintain the courage to continue risking your life for peace?" "I owe it to our children and to all those who have died in the struggle for peace and independence in Viet Nam," he answered without hesitation, and added, "If you were in my shoes I think you would do the same." In his own mind, at least, this man's struggle had meaning in relation to real people in both the past and the future--and in relation to his vision of an independent, democratic Viet Nam. He was confident enough of his worldview that he fully expected me, a brief visitor, to understand and agree with him. To him meaning and history were interwoven in such a way that his means and his ends, though shared overtly with only a minority of his compatriots, were clearly understandable and worth the risking of his life. In the absence of war, egregious injustice, or obvious political repression, it is not always so easy to be clear about the meaning of one's life nor, for that matter, of the history and meaning of one's nation. The sheer complexity of the modern state, the hidden logic of its systemic rules, and the dynamic forces in global society may combine to drive a social system so that the whole society may act in ways that seem inexplicably inconsistent with the consciously accepted values of a majority of its constituents. Its actual direction and meaning then appear to contradict the system's explicitly self-defined meaning and aims. Such seems to be the case, though it need not continue to be, in many modern societies that call themselves "democratic." What is "Human?" Whether living in a modern, "democratic" society or in a traditional, rural village, however, we all have some difficulty ascertaining the meaning of life and the definition--exactly--of a human being. Although we can often ignore these questions for a long time, events sometimes unexpectedly cause us to doubt our previous assumptions. A journalist's report from Rwanda, written shortly after the 1994 slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, reminds us of these issues in a particularly dramatic way: "Juliana Mukankwaya is the mother of six children and the murderer of two, the son and daughter of people she had known since she herself was a child. Last week, Mukankwaya said, she and other women rounded up the children of fellow villagers they perceived as enemies. With gruesome resolve, she said, they bludgeoned the stunned youngsters to death with large sticks. "'They didn't cry because they knew us,' said the woman. 'They just made big eyes. We killed too many to count.' Wearing a black shawl and a blank expression, the slightly built 35-year-old said she was doing the children a favor, because they were now orphans who faced a hard life. Their fathers had been butchered with machetes and their mothers had been taken away to be raped and killed, she said. "Mukankwaya is a member of the Interahamwe, the name for the innumerable Hutu tribal militias that have been blamed for slaughtering an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people... "Sixteen-year old Kitazigurwa--who said he had no first name--said his job was to spy on people saying bad things about the government. People he named were killed... Joseph Rukwavu, 74, said he was too old to kill anybody but acted as the key authority in his village. 'Two hundred were killed in my sector, even my wife, because she would not join Interahamwe,' he said in a dull monotone, his face unmoved even as he mentioned his wife's death. "'The militia gathered everybody up near a big hole,' he said. 'They were weeping, even the men. Even the week before we killed them they were weeping in fear. He said the army supplied the villagers with the necessary killing tools and oversaw the slaughter. "'They (the victims) said, 'Oh, we are the same people, we are your neighbors. Instead of hiding us, you are killing us.'" "...Lieutenant Vincent Anyakarundi, a rebel officer, said the captives [those speaking above] were being 're-educated' rather than punished because they were exhorted and coerced into killing their neighbors. The instigators, he said, were the government, local officials and soldiers, who the prisoners said supplied them with weapons ranging from clubs to grenades. "'They are peasants,' he said. 'They are just puppets of the government.' "'...People who would carry out such massacres, especially against children, are less than animals,' said Tito Rutaremara, 49, a former party coordinator and leading political influence in the rebel movement. 'You have to teach people to forgive and forget. It's like the Nazis. Most people were behind the Nazis, but you can't punish all the people...'" [Fritz, 1994] Puppets? Animals? Peasants? People who need to be taught how a human being behaves? What are "they" and what are "we" that watch and allow such horrors to continue? Did the German concentration camp guards and their supportive families, or the U.S. soldiers who participated in the My Lai massacre of old men, women, and babies seriously consider the possibility that they had lost something that is essential to the definition of a human being? Possibly. It is more likely, however, that later they themselves wondered how they--as human beings--could have done such things. The question of who or what is "human" and therefore worthy of being accorded human rights arises not only in war but in smaller ways during more routine phases of civil society. When does a fetus acquire human rights? Should physicians who perform abortions, or who perform physician-assisted suicides for people dying of cancer, be called "animals" and then killed? Should we execute [murder] convicted murderers [executors]? What about adults who have sexually abused children? How about those who worship different gods, slander a particular religion, or don't believe in God at all? If we assume, as I shall, that all members of the homo sapiens sapiens species are "human" and that humans--most of us anyway--are, under unusual conditions, capable of committing atrocities like those mentioned above, while at other times we commit acts of heroism and great love, then how shall we find or create meaning out of the extreme range of behaviors and beliefs that we observe in ourselves? The answers, I think, are to be found in an understanding of the rigors of a long evolution of humans from lower animals. In order to survive and evolve we had to acquire, via natural selection, a wide repertoire of behaviors, affective states, cognitive abilities, and social patterns. We had to be capable of responding to violence and to complicated, threatening environments. In short, we had to have a greater variety within us than was present in the dangerous environment around us. As we evolved, and as we continue to evolve, new dangers arise--some of them our own invention. We gradually emerge, however, into new and higher phases of human existence, more advanced and more inspiring modes of functioning. In this evolution we retain the capacities necessary for functioning at a lower, more atavistic, level of existence. In new environments we develop those skills and attitudes that are specifically needed to survive and prosper. Old skills, behaviors, and beliefs that are no longer needed tend to be repressed and socially redefined. Murder, for example, is still sanctioned and even ordered under conditions of warfare, but in a well-ordered society during times of peace it is regarded as primitive, bestial, immoral, twisted, or as an act of supreme stupidity that is associated with a lack of normal problem-solving skills. Under certain conditions, however, when a peaceful society is destabilized, we may revert to a narrowed down set of values and priorities. Instead of human survival, for example, we may think only of ethnic, racial, family, or personal survival. Under difficult conditions we sometimes indulge in hatred toward anyone or any group that allegedly threatens ourselves or the groups with which we identify. We rationalize and engage in "animal" behaviors, and when peace is restored we wonder who or what we are. A False Sense of Union Worse, the hatred or violence expressed toward other "tribes" almost always initiates a cycle of yet more hatred and violence--some of which is directed back against ourselves. "An eye for an eye," Gandhi said, "will make the whole world blind." Or as Professor Fouad Ajami recently put it: "The detour towards ethnicity is totally ruinous. The tribal consolation is a false consolation. It is a false sense of union, an ethnic binge you indulge and then you realize it doesn't do anything for you. But you cannot reason with these furies. The call of blood is powerful for a moment, then people will wake up in the wreckage of it all." As the Vietnamese legislator must have experienced, life has a way of unexpectedly changing "history," sometimes quite radically. One can never know what later definition or meaning will be assigned by others, or even by oneself, to one's own actions. For example, following the massacre of 200,000 to 500,000 of the minority Tutsi people in Rwanda, the Hutu perpetrators of the genocidal effort then lost a military contest with the Tutsis, and two to three million Hutus had to flee their homes because of their guilt-ridden fear of retribution. Alison Desforges of Africa Watch made this observation: "The Hutu politicians have created a situation from which there is no escape. They have made their opponents into such demons that they have no outs for themselves. There is no way to turn back. The language of extremism is the appeal to fear. There is no longer the possibility of recognizing a human face. [italics mine] There is no means for negotiations. They would have to discredit their own propaganda." The Test of Time In an environment of violence, extreme polarizations, threats, enemies, wild animals, or other physical dangers the consequences of violating the rules for safety are usually swift and memorable. The recent massacre in Rwanda, like the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust, was followed rather quickly by a "karmic" lesson on the strategic mistake of preaching divisiveness, hatred, and murder. If there is a long time lag between a serious mistake and its consequences, however, or if there is a highly complex and uncertain cause-effect relationship between events, then the human nervous system is less well-equipped for adapting to the cause-effect patterns. Although naturally better able to cope with this more treacherous situation, our social groups tend to divide and argue over the exact nature, the extant, the timing of the dangers, and the appropriate response--losing valuable time and frequently ending in a highly maladaptive state of inner paralysis. The problem of overshoot and collapse, described in the first chapter, is based on precisely this situation. Unless we organize ourselves to recognize and cope specifically with these types of situation, we could actually destroy the foundations of human existence long before we realize what we've done. A method for coping with dangerous time lags between causes and effects is proposed in chapter 5 under the heading of "organizational democracy." The Origins of Democracy Meaning in life, it may be argued, lies first and foremost in learning the causes and prevention of such self-destructive human savagery as described above. Secondly, it lies in the struggle for survival in the context of complex or time-delayed cause-effect processes, and thirdly in our images and plans for creating a better future for all human life and life-supporting ecosystems. We ought to remain aware, however, that deep within the human psyche, these issues of self-definition, meaning, and history exist side by side, in a highly fluid mix together with powerful, sometimes overwhelming, emotions. The proximal origins of democracy are to be found in this cauldron of the human soul. Surrounding the unconscious inferno of emotions, instincts, and archetypes we have the neocortical crucible that works, via the natural structure of its networks, to transform inner drives into behaviors that rationally integrate our needs with external realities--and with such biopsychosocially determined values as freedom, equality, and communal love, i.e., the foundations of democracy. The definitions and meanings in our lives may be subject to redefinition by others in relation to those primal values, but they are also subject to transformation within ourselves by cortical choice--by acts of free will, self-definition, even self-creation. The long evolution toward democracy, along with the evolution of everything else, begins at the end of Singularity and the beginning of diversity, i.e., with the primal, or "big bang," explosion of a unitary point into the entire, evolving Universe. Other significant advances include the various transformations of energy, the arrival of cell membranes and self-replicating molecules, the appearance of sexually reproducing organisms, and the evolution of languages. In brief, every aspect of the evolution of life-in-the-universe is relevant to the evolution toward, and the evolution of, democracy. Between 8 and 5 million years ago, bipedal primates took their first important steps toward a more efficient form of mobility that would later facilitate democratic assemblies. Two and a half million years ago we began to create stone tools, the early technological precursors to modern voting machines, media devices, and the computers that are used for voting and tabulating election results. Two further, and more dramatic, technological developments in the evolution of democracy were (1) the atom bomb which significantly dampened the appeal of violence as a method of decision-making and almost instantly universalized the political interests of the whole species, and (2) the creation of rockets capable of taking human eyes and ears to observation posts far from the birthplace of human civilization, and ultimately, capable of lifting democratic communities far beyond the gravitational confines of the planet Earth. By about 100,000 years ago the human brain had developed close to the size and complexity that we now possess. The stage was then set for the migration out of Africa--and for the evolution of complex and varied cultures. A shift to more equal gender size, with human males only 15-20% larger than females, corresponded to a shift in the locus of power from dominant males to groups more skilled in cooperation and communication, i.e. to the power of community. This shift, combined with the increase in cortical size and complexity, and with the development of language, provided the basic elements necessary for what then became an almost inevitable evolution toward democratic information-processing and decision-making. A qualitative shift in human cognitive abilities, as evidenced by a greater variety and complexity of tools and other artifacts, appears to have taken place about 40,000 years ago with the arrival of modern homo sapiens. The development of written language, codes of law, and large, complex political organizations were further significant steps in the evolution toward a truly democratic social order on a species-wide scale--a process which is obviously still incomplete and which will eventually require the recruitment of nearly every individual into the democratic process. The deep relationships among the inner recesses of individual minds, group survival needs, and the ensemble of social events that becomes "human history" provide not only for the strong possibility that democracy will evolve, but following the invention of "the ultimate weapon that can never be destroyed," created the necessity of global democracy as the only viable strategy for human survival--and thus the special role that democracy plays in evolution. The Inner Return The system of human relations and social decision-making that is democracy reaches deeply back into the human mind and has the potential to reinforce the best in each of us. Almost as if recognizing its debt to the individual who contributes, democracy, when formally organized with a cultural content and a political process that is true to its ideal, provides a significant return to the individual. It offers the social means by which an individual can lift herself or himself to new levels of self-realization--and to those higher levels of the human spirit that will be necessary for the whole human species to survive the 21st century dangers of overpopulation, environmental scarcity, pollution, epidemics, and chemical, biological, or nuclear war. The true democracy actually goes even further, reaching out to the disadvantaged individual who hasn't received sufficient education in bootstrapping, or lifting oneself up, and assists him or her in getting a new start. Unfortunately, it seems that current levels of rationality, science, materialism, and secular democracy, have taken humans not yet to that peak of enlightenment necessary for human survival but rather nearer to that point of despair about which Nietzsche warned us when he suggested that we shall eventually have to become "overmen"[übermensch] in order to cope with the loss of God as an organizing principle in our lives. [Nietzsche, 1891] The lack of "meaning" that we now frequently experience in secular political systems has indeed become a vacuum that religious extremists threaten to fill unless secular society can find something other than wealth, material pleasures, or status to call "sacred." In contrast to the moral vacuity and lack of certainty in modern capitalist and socialist societies, religious authoritarianism appears to offer attractive, simple, and definitive answers. Consequently, it may become the most persistent challenge to secular democracy in the 21st century. The Nietzschean Challenge As Nietzsche understood, those who do not believe in God have lost or have given up a compass for the mind that has probably existed in various forms since the origin of the human species. Those who have faith in one God have a North Star, a constant and unchanging or absolute reference point, by which they can keep their moral direction and assign meaning to their lives. Those who believe in more than one God have a slightly more confusing set of directives--some of which may be mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, they have values and rules that are given to them--rules that are usually validated consensually and by tradition. I don't wish to oversimplify the lives of religious people. They, too, have difficult decisions to make--from understanding God's wishes vis á vis abortion and overpopulation to whether to choose paper or plastic at the grocery store. All of this is natural to the freedom intrinsic to human decision-making--until or unless excessive zeal and the extremist application of one interpretation of God's will leads to coercive action against those who think differently. The true believer of any creed, whether religious or ideological, achieves peace of mind through the exclusion of complexity and by a concomitant narrowing of focus. If the precise secrets common to the Dionysian, Eleusinian, Orphic, Gnostic, and other ancient mystery cults as well to modern secular, ideological, or religiously charismatic organization--as well as to certain drug-mediated highs--are ever discovered, it will likely be found that the "core secret" is the induction of a trance-like experience of physical pleasure, combined with the introduction of a new understanding of one's essential unity with others or with the Universe--and with the momentary creation of a confidence or reassuring certainty which is imposed on the routine mixture of uncertainty, isolation, and discomfort in life. The non-doctrinaire, scientific, or secular and inquiring humanist is not so fortunate. Values, rules, and purposes are not given. They have to be thought about consciously, and difficult choices have to be made. An awareness of the several aspects of every issue remains important. Doubts are an inevitable and natural part of this process. The Mephistophelian bargain, i.e., the surrender that achieves the security of authoritarian certainty--which always includes a kind of closure, ignorance, mindlessness, or death of the free spirit--is resisted by the fully conscious and sincere humanist. The candidate usually found most deserving of non-religious reverence, and the best secular response to fundamentalist authoritarianism, is the "mysterium tremendum" of Life, understood as an exquisitely fragile and sacred network of All Living Systems, that is, as Life striving consciously and unconsciously to survive and evolve to higher states or qualities, to higher levels of grace, intelligence, and adaptiveness in an increasing variety of ecological spheres. By "grace" I mean the ability to co-exist in mutually inclusive, mutually enhancing, and playfully creative relationships with our "selves," with one another, and with the ecosystem that surrounds us. If "God" does not give us clear and specific instructions for coping with overpopulation, ecological scarcity, or the danger of nuclear self-annihilation, then we must create for ourselves successive images of a healthy and desirable future toward which we can progress--together--for ourselves, for those who have lived before us, and for those who will live beyond us. If, as often hypothesized, "God" is created in the minds of humans to help cope with disorder, change, suffering, pain, fear, death, the mystery of the Universe, or the absence of other sources of meaning, then religions will flourish under conditions of social disorder in the 21st century. However, while each of the above hypothesized reasons for the existence of "God" in the mind of a human being has some validity, none of them appear adequate to me. It seems to me that the most important determinant of religious belief is a positive tendency, inherently present in the human mind, to strive for greater longevity, love, intelligence, power, communication, and mobility--in other words, for a more perfect--and inclusive--existence, a more perfect survivability for self and loved ones. God is unconsciously and consciously created to assist us in this eternal project, to help us overcome the loneliness intrinsic to individual organisms--to survive in greater perfection, to love and be loved, forever. If the world order tends toward more disorder and confusion during the next 10-50 years as is suggested by current trends, then religions, and especially fundamentalist extremists, are likely to multiply and to intensify their claims of god-given laws and certainty of meaning. If, on the other hand, democracies are strengthened and science progresses, if sustainable economies develop and if peace with mutually beneficial cooperation becomes the international paradigm, both the need for faith in a supernatural god and the power of religion over human minds will probably begin to wane, and it will need to be replaced with a secular vision, verging on the sacred, of life facing the infinity of the cosmos. There is, however, a small problem with this latter course, too. Faith, deriving ultimately from a strong desire to join with perfection, and to survive with love, has a powerful psychological and social hold on billions of people. Every belief system has its extremists, and religious extremists hold so fiercely to claims of "god-given" rules and values that they sometimes become indifferent to other factors in life--particularly those problems that have more recently arrived, such as, for example, overpopulation, ecosystemic limits, AIDS, or the dangers of nuclear war. The intensity of their emotional commitment is sometimes remarkable to behold. Without "absolute values," it often seems, we cannot pursue goals with the same emotional intensity as those who have "blind faith." This may explain why at the origin of every movement, whether religious or secular, there is initially a unity which is then followed by a split between those who strive fiercely to maintain the unity and to build an organization based on one, usually authoritarian, interpretation of the original values and beliefs, and those on the other hand who want a more open, decentralized, and evolutionary approach. Although we don't usually think of democracy in this way, democratic systems represent the appropriate integration of these two opposing tendencies in human nature and in human organizations. Secular humanists (mistakenly referred to as "just another religion") strive to be open, accurate, fair to other points of view, willing to change, and realistic--knowing that reality will always be a little fuzzy. We work to improve our methods of learning and of testing our knowledge about the world--especially our knowledge about the best ways to structure our relationships with one another. We ask for "reasons" in order to understand what we do, why we do it, and to predict the consequences may ensue from our actions. We try to comprehend ourselves as meaningful parts of our own expanding, mental representations of space-time and "history." We strive to create a social organization that will be beneficial to human beings. We are capable of seeking a vision of the future as an "infinite game" with a playful understanding of the rules of that game.[Carse, 1986] However, because we are not certain of anything, this quest does not produce, in most humanists, the same neurotic intensity of emotional commitment, or the same degree of difference-obliterating-unity with others, that is achieved when people are guided by "blind faith." It appears, too, that the mechanics of belief in an ultimately certain, yet imperfectly unknowable "supreme being"--whether it be an idea of God, an ideology, or a racial identity group--is a self-reinforcing process in the human mind and within a social body. If strong desire for meaning exists, and if a conceived entity promises to fulfill that desire, and if there is an absence of satisfactory, competing "ultimate entities" or of proof that the Absolute Value does not exist, and if family, friends, and loved ones who share the same desire overtly subscribe to belief in that entity, then the individual's mind will almost automatically redouble its efforts to cast aside all doubts and will insistently urge that others do the same. Casting aside doubts, that is, blinding the mind to other views or to conflicting evidence is "blind faith." And blind faith is strong, because by excluding contradictory evidence or other beliefs all the emotional forces within the person cathect, or become attached, to a single belief. The social forces among a group of believers then reinforce that belief, all the emotions which attach to it, the attachment itself, and strengthen a similarly cathected attachment to those other persons in the group who must assist in maintaining that one, socially acceptable, belief. To further understand the roots of this process, however, and to find that point of bifurcation within ourselves where we might have the freedom to consciously choose our beliefs or "meanings" in life, we must go more deeply into the human psyche. The fact of our continued existence as adult human beings is based on the paradox that each of us has an instinct and a conscious desire for survival, and simultaneously, a knowledge of the inevitability of our own death. These two contradictory facets of our existence come from a single, underlying force that is intrinsic to life: eros, which Freud described well as "a drive toward ever higher levels of unity." In our youth we are in the grip of eros, but as we grow older we begin the eventual surrender to our increasing awareness that we will not survive to participate in any ultimate culmination of that drive. (Freud, on the other hand, thought that thanatos was a separate drive toward self-and-other destruction--a drive which we strive to exclude from our conscious minds.) The pain involved in this paradox can be partially resolved in only two ways, one given by nature and the other invented by humans. The path offered by nature is the built-in instinct to partially reproduce ourselves by sexual recombination of our genes with those of another. The "invented" path to immortality is through cultural artifact or historical process. We live on as the information patterns in stories, books, art, films, in the minds of others--and in the social patterns or products that we create. Within most of us, then, there is a strong fear of death and a strong desire to go on living. We would probably each assert, if magical thinking were more permissible among mature adults, that we would like to live forever--free of want, pain, and the effects of aging. We desire, along with this imagined existence the characteristics which can reasonably be assumed to facilitate immortality and simultaneously to increase the pleasure of living--namely, greater intelligence or wisdom, more power to influence external events or other people, and an ability to be several places at once or to move instantly from one place in space or time to another. In short, along with immortality we desire the qualities of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence that we have as children assigned to our parents, and as adults down through all the ages of our species, to God or to the gods. The Ultimate Source of Meaning These qualities of the gods--immortality, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence--are the qualities of an ideal, self-organizing system--a being that can go on forever, adapting to any change, powerful enough to transform the world in any way that it wants, and able to be everywhere or anywhere. They are the qualities, in Hegel's terms, of "an idea that thinks itself," an Absolute Idea that ultimately needs for its survival nothing outside of itself. It is in relation to such an ideal, an ideal that we can all imagine, the ideal that we each magically wish for ourselves, an ideal that incorporates ourselves with our loved ones and our collective identities, that humans have always found their ultimate source of meaning. It is in the direction of that ideal that humans have always striven--unconsciously, personally, and collectively. Religious institutions embrace that ideal as a supernatural being which has the ultimate powers of the perfect self-organizing system--one which created us as parts of itself or as subjects that must obey. In tribal legends, myths of creation, science fiction, and late night cable TV we are entertained and indoctrinated with tales of beings whose magical powers we would wish for ourselves--though usually not out loud. Since, as puny humans, we cannot expect to actually achieve those magical characteristics that we primitively and secretly desire, (if we actually did claim such powers we would be locked up or killed) we project them into fantasied, unprovable beings that could, if they wished, take all or at least something from the perishable part of ourselves and keep it alive. But in addition we sometimes attribute to our projected, all-powerful, supreme beings one more magical attribute: a parental concern for the well-being of each of us. With prayer we beseech that parental God to remember us, to favor us, especially us and not certain others (our enemies), and then we round out the family with a bad parent--thanatos, death, satan, an evil, angry, or beastly god that will punish or seduce us if we do not behave in accordance with the organizing instructions, or principles, of God--The Perfect Existence. By such means humans have, for centuries, unconsciously or consciously imagined or urged themselves to move upward toward their ideal--the ultimate in adaptive intelligence and autonomy, in love and in being loved, i.e., toward perfect being. It is intrinsic to human nature that we seek an image of a more perfect existence and that we strive to obey the rules by which we unconsciously hope to achieve, or at least to approach, that existence. We pray, chant, and follow rules prescribed by those who say they know "God's Word" or "The Way." We pray to be given "faith," meditate to achieve "satori," study to attain "enlightenment," and practice to achieve the "flow state," all of which are finite and representative samples--attainable within the condition of mortality--of perfect self-organization. But there is a dark side to this pursuit. Unfortunately, a glance at history makes it possible to argue that blind faith in a particular version of "The Way" toward that more perfect being has led to much more killing and much more human suffering than it has prevented. Then, too, autonomous peace within one or a few individuals often tends them toward a neglect of those other "lost souls" who are not so wise. But unless we care for all those others, unless we open our hearts and minds to other humans, ultimately we and "others" will develop differently, eventually disagree, and eventually become violent. Then personal or group "salvation" becomes impossible, for if our personal or group success doesn't include everyone, those it doesn't include will eventually intrude upon us--especially on a finite planet that is becoming increasingly crowded with people. And if we blindly attempt to impose our own view of the infinite upon others, they will resist or will, just as blindly, attempt to impose their views upon us. Thus in the struggle for survival we find a struggle among different views of God, or of a more perfect existence. In this struggle human beings create both history and meaning for themselves, and in this struggle democracy has a particular role. It provides a means of resolving differences peacefully and a way of incorporating all views into the evolving organization and purposes of human society. By utilizing the abilities and experience of many minds rather than just a few, democracy can--if it structures itself well--achieve a much greater adaptive intelligence than is possible when decisions are controlled by a few. By incorporating the participation of everyone democracy can avoid the intense and violent resistance--and the violent competition--that develops when power is exercised by a few and in the interests of the few to the exclusion of others. Democracy Opens The Way Further, democracy provides an opening, an evolutionary step, a chance to advance toward a more perfect organization that may exist for us in the future. In our minds and in our policy formations, democracy exists as rational manifestation of the desire in the present for a better, and longer, existence in the future. However, the desire for a better democracy, which is desire for more perfect self-government, i.e., for "self-organization," must contend with a need to be accurate in our perceptions of reality, to be realistic about the forces which oppose democracy or the common good, and to keep an undistorted history of ourselves and our relations with those other manifestations of "reality," and especially of other democracies. In particular, democratic systems must be extremely careful not to allow their meaning to become this: that their size and complexity, i.e., their "success," creates opportunities for special interests to secretly profit at the expense of people. These special interests are the analogue of corrupt priests of every religion who profit at the expense of the believers. With regard to the particular interests of religious views, the freedom of each of these to exist must be protected by the democratic state. Each religious belief system has something of unique value to offer humanity, a different conception of the "perfectly organized being," which can be incorporated into new and better human systems--so long as they do not advocate ritual sacrifice of living beings, aggression against humans, or a violation of the rights of others--in short, so long as they do not sacrifice living systems to their own selfish attachment to their imagined "perfect being." No particular religious conception can be seen as "special," or favored, by the democratic state without creating hostilities in, or injustice to, those groups which hold to a different view of the "Almighty." The corollary of this is that each belief system is free to present its "truth" to others--with all the risks involved in the others' voluntary acceptance or rejection. Thus the principle of freedom of religion makes necessary the principle of the separation of religious and state powers. Both principles are necessary to the idea of democracy as a society in which all can participate equally without prejudice against anyone. Ominously, however, these principles and the democratic idea are rejected today by the fundamentalists in many religions. Democracy, which can be seen as a logical extension of the idea of a separation of powers, itself an idea that is absolutely essential to democratic process, can also be seen as a logical extension of the principle of cujus regio, ejus religio, which was affirmed by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and gave to each principality the right to choose its own religion. Unfortunately, this complex of ideas is threatening to the fundamentalist who reasons that since his or her interpretation of God's way is the only way, then we should be completely governed by that way. To be a fully moral person, the possessor of absolute truth must carry it all the way and insist that all others do the same. Ergo, we don't need a secular democracy that protects other points of view. The Peace of Westphalia established the framework for the nation-state system which subsequently evolved and within which liberal democracy struggles today. It was, therefore, present in Europe as an incipient idea at the very origin of what has become our "international" world order. The European idea of a system of nations each free to choose its own religion, and the American idea that each nation must guarantee freedom of religion with a separation of religious powers and secular powers, has been thoroughly challenged by such ideas as pan-Arabism, religious fundamentalism, socialist internationalism, or the international dictatorship of the proletariat. Nevertheless, the secular nation-state system continues, at present, to be fairly well established on all continents, and with it, the nationalist ideal. Euro-American nationalism has outlived its usefulness, however. It is now little more than a "trojan horse," for the universalist, democratic ideal that grows within it has an irredentist logic that is already beginning to erode national borders. It may well dissolve internationalist and bloc ideologies into a more natural evolution toward a globally democratic future. Meaning, historical destiny, and religious salvation will in the next century be detached from the power of the sovereign nation as well as from "the call of blood" that divides peoples against one another. Meaning as History Before we go any further in our analysis of meaning in relation to democracy and democracy in relation to history, we ought to define some terms. "Democracy," "meaning," and "history" are terms used in such a variety of ways that we cannot be clear about our topic without careful definitions. Of course, we may not be perfectly clear even with definitions. Nevertheless, by "democracy" I mean a self-governing society whereby each adult citizen is free to participate in social decision-making, has equal opportunity to participate, with equal access to the resources necessary for participation (which may be either directly or through representatives) in the decisions made by the society. "History" is usually understood to be "a record of past events." I will use the term to mean a "reconstruction of past events based on a selective abstraction of perceived elements from those events and on a worldview which influences that reconstruction, though this may or may not be consciously recognized." "Meaning" will be defined as "the effect of any action or information on a person, a set of values or principles, a systemic structure, or on any patterned process--including historical process." There are levels of meaning in relation to levels of organization and to temporal phases of a process. A person can, therefore, perceive meaning in relation to one's family, one's "people," a specific state of the world, an ultimate goal or value, or to the steps perceived as necessary to achieve a goal. Ideally, a person will find or create meaning at all those levels, and the meanings at each level will be integral with those at all other levels--all without violating the sense of meaning that other people create in their lives. In any case, each person learns, finds, or creates meanings for her or his own life. If those meanings can be shared with others, so much the better for each party involved. If those shared meanings are exclusive of the human values and democratic rights of someone else, however, then those meanings ought to be changed for they are not consistent with the minimum set of Universal Human Rights and Values that will be necessary for human survival in the next century. To the extent that capitalist economies submerge meaning under a flood of flashy products and a timeless quest for immediate gratification, we tend to be unaware of the power of either history or meaning in our lives. We are even induced to think that we don't need either one. When we think of them at all we usually keep them separate from the pursuit of personal well-being. We are tempted to rationalize that the advertising which strives to attach consumer products to biological needs may be greatly preferred to the propaganda of political or religious dogma. But surely those are not our only choices. History and meaning will continue to exist in their fascinating and inseparable relationship to one another, and neither is fully addressed by political dogma, religious dharma, or sensory distraction. In fact, our need for better relationships with both history and meaning continues so strongly unabated that each tends to dissolve into the other. We seek meaning from the structures of the past, but we also tend to force the past into conformity with the meanings we seek. Consciously or unconsciously we rationalize meaning in relation to present structures we perceive, in those that we project into the future, and in the actual process of creating, however playfully, new structures. "Meaning" is, in fact, so seductive that--unless we consciously and critically address our relationship to meaning--it frequently absorbs the perceived past, present, and future into itself. Fortunately, we have other clues as to the nature of reality. Real physical objects bump up against our bodies. We can see the effects of bullets penetrating the bodies of other people, of comets explosively colliding with the planet Jupiter, of a speeding auto striking a pet dog. But when we try to find a deeper meaning in the history of those bumps, their causes and consequences, we are never completely certain where history leaves off and meaning begins--leaving only grace, play, or creativity to rescue us from the painful seriousness our dilemma. This, of course, is not the traditional view of either history or meaning. Generally, we think of ourselves--particularly of our trained historians, teachers, and governments--as recording for us, with reasonable accuracy, the events of the past and present. We then draw lessons from these recordings which are useful in the future. As Santayana (who, incidentally, was opposed to democracy and thought of it as a "dissipation" of the strength of a people) warned us: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." On the other hand, one can argue, if we learn the past too well we are more likely to repeat it, because the patterns of the past would, as they often do, condition our perceptions and responses in the present. But if history is to be merely the leftovers from past dinners, how will we ever learn to eat anything new in the future? And if both arguments about learning from the past are partly true, we still have the problem of separating perceived facts from our appetites and desires. The answer to these problems, I believe, is that we can and by necessity shall, become more acutely conscious of "history" and "meaning," not as destructive to one another but as working--at least in our minds--with each other to create a larger construct. We will pay particular attention to the larger constructs that we choose, and we will strive democratically for a larger consensus in support of our choices. We will come to accept that our perceptions of both history and meaning are, in a word, "fuzzy." There is an uncertainty principle at work in our perceptions of larger space-time realities just as there is in our perceptions of smaller realities--and even in our democratic, social choice mechanisms. We can resolve our dilemma only by creating a semi-fiction that integrates, and shuts out, as much fact and fantasy as we dare mix to create a story that enables us to go forward toward our democratically chosen goals. The arguments over facts and falsities are secondary to the argument about our destination, that is, over the ultimate meaning of our lives--but that ultimate meaning will have to remain, to some degree, a playful pursuit--lest we ourselves become too deadly in pursuing it. A Human Interest Story The present world situation, variously called the "new world order" and the "new world disorder," differs from the "cold war" in several important respects. One of these is that we can now focus less on the hypnotic, superpower arms race toward species self-destruction and more on the response of democracy to the problems described in chapter one. We can thus see the broader outlines of the whole human story which I like to imagine as follows: The original human unity was broken thousands of years ago with the migration of humans out of Africa to scattered settlements around the world. Evolving in different ecosystems, we developed into different races and cultures--acquiring along the way many variations in the human value system and in principles of social organization. The appearance of agriculture, a ten thousand year history of accelerating population growth, increasing contact and interactions among various peoples who had long since forgotten they were of the same origins, the development of different modes of production, of empires striving for universality, of unique local societies, diverse cultural processes, countless numbers of wars between tribes and kingdoms--all characterize the manifold evolution of humankind. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 a structure especially significant to our times, the sovereign nation-state, evolved to protect and advance those former colonies, principalities, kingdoms, and peoples that had grouped themselves for each other and against foreign interests. The nation-state brilliantly succeeded in its consolidation of power and wealth but not in protecting its people. Though its internal populations continued to expand nearly exponentially, its concentration on the technologies of transportation, communication, and warfare accelerated the headlong crashes of different peoples and cultures into one another. The liberal democratic state developed and within it there was some room for close-knit subsystems to grow in relative isolation and peace, but its political parties could still form secret alliances and make decisions behind closed doors. For a variety of reasons, the people of some nations evolved more quickly toward democracy that those of other nations. Each nation, seeing its interests as sovereign, distinct and threatened by other groups, utilized new methods of capital formation and technological invention to extend its power in relation to other nations. Some nations formed alliances; some committed aggression. Wars between nations spread around the globe, destroyed the lives of millions of human beings, and still threaten to kill millions, even billions, more in the future. After the first and second World Wars, first the League of Nations then the United Nations were organized to try to solve the problem of wars among nations. Communication and spy satellites began the process of relaying pictures and messages from every place to every other place on Earth. The boundaries around formerly closed or relatively isolated peoples and around all secret organizations began to crumble. Startling new information and foreign values came crashing in faster than people could accommodate or assimilate. Organizational structures, individual behaviors, families, cultures, and other long cherished value systems began to disintegrate. Two superpowers evolved out of the human ashes of World War II, each striving to prove their superiority and to overpower the other. Each of them towered over the world as they expansively devoured parts of it, forcing their values and patterns on others, forming Machiavellian alliances in a global game of "Go" that threatened to eat up the whole board and all its stones. But for the courage and sacrifice of the people of Viet Nam and of Afghanistan, these powers may not have found their limits even yet--except in a final conflict with one another. Then a few, courageous scientists proved that such a conflict could only end in a "nuclear winter," and suddenly the massive, antinuclear protests around the world began to make sense to superpower leaders. Authoritarian government discovered itself not only unable to win by conquest and conversion but also unable to sustain a long political and economic competition. More "democratic" countries, too, began to discover that the shadows of authority still extend deeply into their quasi-democracies, creating their own hearts of darkness and a dissipation of their peoples' faith in the future. The growing loss of confidence in government, fluctuating monetary values, ethnic conflicts, widespread substance abuse, and AIDS all stem from the same underlying causes: fierce but outmoded tribal and nationalistic loyalties, secret decisions by special interests, chaotic breakdowns in the old cultural values and boundaries, intensified differences in wealth, population growth from within and migration from without, and endangered natural resources. Rapidly changing values, social problems, and/or information overload, i.e., a deviation-amplifying disorganization of both information and values, has affected all human systems from the personality to the nation-state. We remain presently without clearly agreed upon guidelines for facing the challenges of a new world at the very moment when the world is changing most rapidly. Leninist-Stalinist governments could not cope with these rapid changes and in 1989 began to collapse one after another in an inversion of the "domino theory." As the people in capitalist democracies became aware that they, too, harbored corrupt governments, authoritarian structures, and privileged elites, they began to realize that they, too, did not represent paradise on Earth. The bilateral superpower modes of good and evil became multilateral squabbles over multiple goods and evils. Here we stand now, at a new crossroads, but as always, one path leads to ever greater division and conflict, and eventually, species self-destruction; another, toward resolution of conflicts and a peaceful, mutually beneficial co-existence among differing peoples. We could, of course, stay at the crossroads and remain uncertain for a long time even as chaos grows around us. The first path does not lead to a happy, nor even a conscious, ending, but it does end. The second, perhaps, will lead to a human story worth continuing. Let us describe the rest of the story from a perspective far in the future: Democratic reform movements developed near the end of the 20th century and began to spread around the globe. After a few local wars between people of different race, religion, or nationality, it began to dawn on all the peoples of the Earth that their repetition and continuation of intense loyalties to separate "blood lines," to narrow group interests, to particular visions of "God" or historical "identity," only led to the destruction of life, and eventually, to the destruction of those "final" ends they each sought. New trade and international arms control agreements were signed. Wars became less frequent. The human race thus began its tentative moves from the last forms of a world organized on the bases of groups divided against one another toward the new unity--the first forms of a "universal civic society." Both the League, and then the U.N., had failed for a time to stop international wars, because they failed to replace the old divisions based on militarily defended national sovereignty with a permanent new, collective and global, security force. Then the U.N. was reformed into a truly democratic body of elected representatives, and a global security force guaranteed peace and the security of all peoples. The Holocaust and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by this conception of history, concretely symbolized the painful death and rebirth of a world order, signaled transformations yet to come, and notified us that the transition to the next world order would take place under the umbrella of a balance among nuclear powers. The images of death camps and mushroom clouds, followed soon after by the first pictures of Earth taken from outer space, combined to deliver a vivid message more powerful, if not more profound, than any religious teaching: the planet Earth is a beautiful but fragile, living unity that will survive only by a spiritual and political reunification of humanity. By "spiritual reunification" I mean the psychological and cultural integration of all peoples on Earth. Within this unification there was much that we held dear that we kept separate and different, but we also achieved--by necessity--a common acceptance of a minimum set of human values and beliefs, or we would have destroyed ourselves and our biospheric, life-support system. Everyone now thoroughly understands that any serious or prolonged, violent clash between peoples whose value and belief systems have hardened into mutual exclusiveness could in the future lead to the destruction of all human life. When opposing values and belief systems were mutually interpenetrating or bumping into one another as part of the world-wide, simultaneous, bewildering, and seemingly chaotic return of all the temporarily separated peoples of the Earth, this was not as clear as it is now. Now we are as one family, reinventing life and setting out to explore, perhaps to transform, the solar system. Summarizing the history constructed above, we can say that humans spread out from their origin, developed differently in separate clusters which then expanded. Aided by the technologies of transportation and communication we have been growing back together at an accelerating pace, with conflicts, with terrible weapons in our hands, with some groups enjoying a surfeit of wealth while others starve--and now we are approaching the limits of the Earth's ability to feed and support our species. To date, the reversing of the human diaspora has been dominated by tragedy. In the future there may be many instances of joy and excitement, as when South Africans created a multiracial democracy or when the Israelis and Palestinians finally end their "blood and tears." The sense of discovery in our getting reacquainted may lead to a previously unimagined flourishing of human civilization, but until we can overcome the old habits born of centuries in relative isolation, in reckless exploitation of natural resources, in primitive tribal conflict, and in profound inequality it will be difficult to fully enjoy the family get together. The Twenty-First Century Although we cannot yet grasp the full complexity of a future century with precise, predictive validity, we can make some assumptions based on commonsense and on the computer models which have, thus far, accurately predicted a few of the dynamics of the global system. By avoiding excessive specificity, and by asking for a momentary suspension of disbelief, we can create a fuzzy outline of the future that may have heuristic value. Based on perceived historical trends and computer models, then, I will characterize, or mischaracterize as the case may be, three distinct phases in the next century. Early: Consolidation With the above qualifications in mind we can conceive of the twenty-first century in its early, middle, and late phases. In the first quarter or third of the century we can expect, or at least hope for, a further growth and consolidation of democratic processes. As de Toqueville said, during an earlier expansion of the democratic spirit: ... "the further that electoral rights are extended, the greater is the need of extending them; for after each concession the strength of democracy increases, and its demands increase with its strength." [cited in Rogers, 1992] There will be, however, a continued pressure to go after short-term gains that lead to long-term losses, and the "responsible" [Chomsky, 1992] classes will submit to democratic gains only begrudgingly and when forced. The post cold war period of hesitation and confusion regarding the "new world disorder" will continue for awhile--possibly with a few scattered but dramatic scares from either the threat, or an actual but limited, usage of weapons of mass destruction. Increased populations and exacerbated differences in the distribution of wealth and social goods will lead to more severe problems with organized crime, illegal immigration, and local wars over water rights and other scarcities. Environmental disasters, such as the Chernobyl incident or the Gulf War fires or oil spills, will sporadically but increasingly point up the need for dramatic action by supranational agencies. The AIDS pandemic, areas of mass starvation, increasing disparity in the wealth among peoples of the North and South, and an uneasy tension among nations will persist even as more democracies come into existence, new areas of free trade are created, and the United Nations is gradually transformed into a more effective agency for coordinating efforts to control violent conflict, to achieve implementation of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to coordinate the world food supply, and to facilitate greater coherence among cultures and governments. Mid-century: Crisis With considerable effort and good fortune, enough democracy will be established in and among the nations of the world to enable a coherent world response to the crises which will confront the human race by the middle third of the twenty-first century. If not, the early stages of the mid-century crises will be much more severe. They may lead to political conflicts that threaten the survival of the human race, forcing them (those adults who were the school children of the 1990s) to choose quickly between species genocide and a hastily constructed new world government that is empowered to keep the peace. World population will grow to ten or twelve billion people or more, and the limits of the earth's carrying capacity will have been far overreached. Food supplies will, having reaching a peak, begin to dwindle in relation to human needs. Certain natural resources will be exhausted. Global warming, soil depletion, and/or ozone depletion may damage most animal and plant life in significant ways. With the density of human settlements higher in all areas of the planet, any natural disaster, such as an earthquake or hurricane, will have an impact on much greater numbers of people. The crowding everywhere will make it more difficult to police against crime, terrorism, and atavistic turns to slavery or the selling of babies and body parts. Only a much improved organization of the human species, which can be accomplished via the significant extension of democratic processes, will enable us to avert tragedy of such a scale that it could dwarf the human spirit and the human ability to self-govern--leaving us in perpetual decline toward a new Dark Age. Late 21st Century: Purpose If we manage to organize a coherent, democratic response that enables us to survive the middle third of the next century with human rights and human self-respect intact, we will be ready to maintain and improve a period of sustainable world civilization that can begin an extensive expansion of life into the heavens. Although some humans may inhabit small settlements on moons or other planets of the solar system in earlier steps toward interplanetary civilization, it is difficult to imagine any significant expansion of the biosphere to other worlds before a sustainable and unified democracy on Earth enables such conservation and concentration of material resources as will be needed to lift the human habitat toward the celestial horizons. If this exploration and the further expansion of living systems out into the galaxy is to be accomplished with a minimum risk of ``star wars'' between opposing empires or federations, then it must be initiated and sustained as a carefully monitored extension of the democratic, social organism here on Earth. Advanced stages of democracy, unified to a degree perhaps difficult to imagine from the perspectives of our present cultures of self-interest and dogmatic divisiveness, will be necessary both to manage an intricate, delicately balanced, worldwide, human-centered ecosystem and to keep the new system of interplanetary settlements from collapsing into conflict and chaos. As we reach out into the cosmos, opening ourselves to the infinite and the cosmos to an infinity within us, we may find no gods but those within ourselves. The task of religious leaders and scholars in the 21st century will be to help us preserve the best in our old religions, and to lead us in the reinvention of the gods within ourselves--gradually merging those godlike attributes that are best suited to the creation of a new, universally popular religion for planetary and interplanetary living. Since the earlier gods and their laws were created to explain not only the great mysteries of the Universe but also to provide ideals, meaning, and an ultimate purpose for humanity, we will find ourselves beginning to imitate our own earlier, unconscious strivings by consciously creating values and purposes to serve life as it progresses toward the infinite. God, the ultimate self-organizing system, then becomes Ideal, the best self-organizing human system we can imagine ourselves achieving. Thus far we have summarized one view of the human story, its meaning, and how our great grandchildren may tell our tale in the 21st century. The most intelligent path through the next century would be an early creation of a thoroughly democratized world government, ensuring the health and security of all peoples, implementing the changes needed to create a sustainable world economy, and laying the groundwork for efficient and peaceful resolution of the problems that will become increasingly obvious in the years ahead. We have looked at a "fuzzy theory of history" that may help us understand the evolution of democracy. Next we shall turn to a closer look at the essential nature of democracy. In the following chapters we shall explore what may be the most promising strategy for improving democracy and coping with the coming crises.