Election Special 2024

I am old enough to remember when Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson were their parties’ nominees for President. Heck, I can even remember Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Safe to say, this is not then…or even then. But the whining time is over! It’s election day.

If you have not already voted, today is momentous. Not that your one vote will decide the outcome…it won’t…not even if you live ‘on the Main Line’ (PA). But this is your opportunity to take your place on the Great Mandala, to situate yourself in history, if not to change it. 

Perhaps this is also an opportunity to look beyond the immediate partisan divide and consider issues from a deeper perspective – e.g. from the perspective of civilization itself.

Democracy is on the ballot. Everyone says so! But no two people agree on what that means. Is it just a matter of universal suffrage, unimpeded ballot access, and fraud free vote tabulation - or is there more at stake? 

Does a properly functioning Democracy require popular access to sources of at least semi-reliable information? Something that is in short supply today! We seem to be impaled on the twin horns of rumor and propaganda. 

In his 1966 book, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor, Tamotsu Shibutani, a detainee himself, wrote “the Japanese interned in (WWII) relocation centers…sometimes referred to their unsettled way of life as ‘dema-kurashi’, literally ‘existence through rumors,’ …but pronounced ‘democracy’.”

But in our well-intentioned effort to improve reliability we risk imposing limits on free speech that transform all communication into propaganda. ‘Jacques’ Ellul and Derrida would argue that this is already the case…and has been for some time. The quality and flow of information is always a challenge in so-called ‘free societies’…never more so than today!

Humanity is on the ballot. It sounds trite, but the World really has never been at greater risk. It’s not that we’re somehow less benevolent than we used to be; it’s that one bad (or even careless) actor can wreck a lot more havoc than ever before.

Nuclear War, Climate Change, Bioengineering and the Zombie Apocalypse (aka AI), to name just a few, all threaten our survival as well as our prosperity. It’s not just the economy, Stupid! On the other hand, the same technologies that threaten our survival also offer an unprecedented opportunity for meteoric and broadly distributed gains in health and wealth. 

50 years ago, R. Buckminster Fuller wrote about this moment in his aptly titled Utopia or Oblivion. So did the Deuteronomist, 2500 years ago: “I set before you life and death; therefore choose life.” (30:19)

Civilization is on the ballot. I do not believe that there is any ‘one best way’ to manage our social problems; and if there were, I do not believe we could know it with any degree of certainty. The links between cause and effect in our social world are much too loose for us to be able to exert any control over the future. 

Consequently, any social ethics rooted in imagined results (Machiavelli, Mill or Marx) is delusional. We act and the universe reacts; we propose, and others dispose. Marxists believed they found a way to game the system. They called it dialectics: Thesis provokes Antithesis which leads to Synthesis. 

No doubt! However, there is no evidence that this process can be brought under the control of an intentional agent (us). Instead, it is often invoked to provide cover for otherwise unimaginable atrocities. Can you say, ‘Cultural Revolution’…or ‘Pol Pot’? Nothing is so evil that dialectics (or mechanism or liberalism) cannot redeem it.

To its credit, Marxism correctly diagnosed the alienated state of the material world. Sadly, it failed to discover a praxis for harnessing or controlling that alienation. All we can do is, “Do the Right Thing!” (Spike Lee) But what’s that? Well, it’s not genocide; that’s for sure. Nor is it slavery in any of its multitudinous forms. 

If you want peace, practice it; if you value prosperity, share it. We cannot control the long term consequences of our policies, but we are responsible for the policies themselves…and that includes their immediate impact.

Now go vote…or not…as you see fit!

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