vol 2: Synopsis
part V: Applied divinity
page 36: Politics
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Politics
The world has infinite variety, but it also has physical constraints. We can only do do one thing at a time, so we must choose between the possibilities. This process of choice we call politics. It is constrained by the fundamental principles of justice, truth, and equality, confronting the finite nature of the physical world. Good political decisions need to meet these constraints while increasing the wealth and freedom of the community.
Politics, in this scheme of things, works at the concrete task of keeping the peace within the constraints provided by religion. Good religion precludes such political expedients as killing everyone who does not fit some dictatorial version of social organization. Murder is certainly out, but so are the subtler methods of suppression like legislated inequality and controlled trade.
The peace is threatened by the tendency of concentrations of wealth and power to grow by plundering the lesser powers surrounding them. This may cause the political system to fail. The peacekeeping force that balances concentration is justice, that is the notion that the each human niche in the world should give its occupier equal chances, so that the game of life is fair. To give ourselves long term stability, it looks as though we must extend the idea of justice to other species and the world's environmental services to life as well.
Justice is not just an nice idea. It incorporates the notions of truth, equality and freedom that contribute to the maximization of communication, and, by the peace theorem, maximization of stability. By stability here we do not mean the absence of change, but controlled change. Exactly analogous to driving a motor vehicle. As young drivers learn, it is dangerous to lose control, since I can no longer prevent a collision even if I see it coming.
Politics is made necessary by the finite nature of the resources for life. An examination of human history reveals that if populations do not tailor themselves to the available resources, violence of one sort or another arises. Starving people must either capture new resources, forcibly reduce their population, or overexploit their resource base, perhaps leading to later collapse.
The spectrum of human needs ranges from energy, through material goods, to information and spiritual goods. Our energy supply is practically unlimited as long as the sun shines. All material goods can be recycled, using energy, so that in the long run we need face no shortage of material. Finally, information and other spiritual goods, because they can be encoded either in ourselves or in very small amounts of matter, are practically unlimited.
By encouraging cooperation in the exploitation of these features of energy, matter and information in a just way, a suitable political system can meet the conditions set by the peace theorem and so remain stable. In order to have the information (entropy) to achieve this result, an important political decision is to devote sufficient resources to scientific (theological) and technological (religious) development to give a reasonable probability of finding optimal survival strategies. Ideally we would like this probability to be indistinguishable from 1.
The safe exploitation of our planetary habitat requires the global political harmony, which hopefully will result from global religious unity. The unity of science is based on evidence and the unity of the world we study. We expect the theological unity arising from the exploration of one visible god to lead to religious unity. Given religious unity, we have a hope of political unity, that is a political network with protocols and bandwidth sufficient to cope with all the issues arising in communal life on earth.
Books
| Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, W W Norton and Co 1997 'Diamond's book is complex and a bit overwhelming. But the thesis he methodically puts forth--examining the "positive feedback loop" of farming, then domestication, then population density, then innovation, and on and on--makes sense. Written without favor, Guns, Germs, and Steel is good global history.' Amazon.com Amazon back |
| Diamond, Jared, Collapse: How Scoieties Choose to Fail or Succeed, Viking Adult 2004 'As suggested by its title, this book is about societal collapses - past, present and future - and the factors that cause human societies to fail. ... [Diamond's] primary mission is to determine the ecological, political and cultural conditions that lead to collapse and to contrast these with the conditions that favour success. ... Collapse is based on a series of detailed case studies. ... Diamond then provides a fuller exploration of the many rich parallels between these historic cases and select modern societies. ... What emerges most clearly from [his] analysis is the central role played by environmetnal decay in undermining human societies. ... In the end, [his] painstaking toil in the deep mines of history rewards him with sufficient nuggets of hope that he emerges 'cautiously optimistic' about the human prospect. ... The most important lesson to be drawn from Collapse is that resilient societies are nimble ones, capable of long term planning and of abandoning deeply entrenched but ultimately destructive core values and beliefs. This, in turn, requires a well informed public, inspired leadership and the political will to go against the established order of things. ... ' William Rees, Nature 433:15, 6 January 2005. Amazon back |
| Forsyth, Muray, and Maurice Keens-Soper (editors), The Political Classics: A guide to the Essential Texts, Oxford University Press 1992 Jacket: 'This book aims to make the classical writings of Western political philosophy accessible to the modern reader. It provides a lively and informed introduction to some of the greatest works of political thought, starting with Plato's Republic and ending with Rousseau's Social Contract. The other works examined are Aristotle's Politics, Augustine's The City of God, Machiavelli's Discourses and The Prince, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Locke's Second Treatise of Government.' Amazon back |
| Gaddis, John Lewis, The Cold War: A New History, The Penguin Press 2005 Jacket: 'Many will remember what it was like to live under the shadow of the Cold War: the ever-present anxiety that at some point, because of some miscalculation or act of hubris, we might find ourselve sin the middle of a nuclear holocaust ... How did this terrible conflict arise? How did wartime allies so quickly become deadly foes after 1945 and divide the world into opposing camps, each armed to the teeth? And how, suddenly, did it all come to an end? Only now that the Cold War has been over for fifteen years can we begin to find a convincing perspective on it. John Lewis Gaddis's masterly book is the first full, major history of the whole conflict and explains not just what happened, but why it happened ... Gaddis has synthesized all the most recent scholarship, but has also used minutes from Politburo meetings, startling information from recently opened Soviet and Asian archives, ... and above all the words of the leading participants themselves -- showing what was realy on the mind of each, with a very dramatic immediacy. ...' Amazon back |
| Larsen, Egon, A Flame in Barbed Wire: The Story of Amnesty International, Frederick Muller 1978 Jacket: 'This book tells the story not only of [Amnesty Intyernational's] phenomenal growth, but also of the various personal and policy crises that have rocked the movement. But the main subject is man's inhumanity to man in our time of violence; it is a tale of human suffering and heroism, of torture and of ordinary people's idealism in one of the great causes of today.' Amazon back |
| Popper, Karl Raimund, The Open Society and its Enemies (volume 1) : The Spell of Plato, Routledge 1966 Introduction: 'This book ...attempts to show that [our civilisation] has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth - the transition from tribal or 'closed society', with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man. ... It further tries to examine the application of the critical and rational methods of science to the problems of the open society.' Amazon back |
| Popper, Karl Raimund, The Open Society and its Enemies (volume 2) : The High Tide of Prophecy, Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath , Routledge 1966 Jacket: '... "a work of first-class importance which ought to be widely read for its masterly criticism of the enemies of democracy, ancient and modern. His attack on Plato, while unorthodox, is in my opinion thoroughly justified. His analysis of Hegel is deadly. Marx is dissected with equal acumen, and given his due share of responsibility for modern misfortunes. The book is a vigorous and profound defence of democracy, timely, very interesting andf very well written".' Bertrand Russell Amazon back |
| Reynolds, Henry, and (compiler), Dispossession : Black Australians and White Invaders (The Australian Experience), Allen & Unwin Amazon back |
| Walker, Geoffrey de Q, The Rule of Law: Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, Melbourne University Press 1988 Jacket: 'The author argues that the survival of any useful rule of law model is currently threatened by distortions in the adjudication process, by perversion of law enforcement (by fabrication of evidence and other means), by the excessive production of new legislation with its degrading effect on long-term legal certainty and on long-standing safeguards, and by legal theories that are hostile to the very concept of rule of law. In practice these trends have produced a great number of legal failures from which we must learn.' Amazon back |
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