Conversation

The difficulty of imagining post-democracy conditions that are NOT backslides to monarchism or communism or paleo-hunting-party libertarianism is a DIRECT consequence of the fact that it’s hard to spin “progress” narratives around the politics of the human condition.
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Are we better off materially? Food, longevity, freedom from pain and disease etc? Absolutely. Politically, are we “better” people? Doubtful. Much of apparent political progress like abolition of slavery was really a positive externality of material/economic progress.
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We didn’t become better people. Material progress simply made it easier to be good rather than evil to each other in more and more ways. Did we make spiritual progress? Has consciousness been continuously raised since the Neolithic revolution? Most religions argue the opposite.
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You have the fall from Eden in all Abrahamic religions. You have the decline into Kaliyuga in Hinduism. For the record I think this is bs. But there is a historicist narrative og political and spiritual evolution that is coherent: Fukuyama’s end-of-history model.
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Fukuyama refrains from a valuation of the story that “ends” in liberal democracy. Besides gesturing at Nietzche’s contemptuous “men without backs” last-man archetype, he simply indicates that there IS a secular component to political/spiritual evolution. It’s not just cyclic.
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Others are less shy about it. Arendt’s model in The Human Condition (which presciently foreshadows Fukuyama) is clearly 90% a “fall from Grecian grace”. She sees some good in the story — for example the “invention” of forgiveness in Christianity — but it’s mostly a decline.
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So, where does that leave us. We’ll probably get to post-market economics with blockchain sand smart contracts and the convergence of code, law, and finance. That’s great. Fun times.
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Will we get to a post-democratic politics, with a new technology, or is Fukuyama right and liberal democracy is the end of the road? With the only ways out being backslides? Or will technology create new modes of consensual mutuality beyond “voting” that allow further evolution?
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This is perhaps the most interesting and important Big Think question today. The reason I was skeptical of the Cowen/Collison Progress Studies proposal is that they assume economic progress narratives can be easily extrapolated into political/spiritual spheres. This is doomed.
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Questions of political/spiritual “progress” are independently foundational. They are coupled to material/economic progress narratives (in fact they supply whatever assumed positive or negative valence the former takes on) and can be driven by tech. But they are not derivative.
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To connect to my earlier physics analogy. Progress Studies in the Cowen/Collison sense is tautological. If your basic process models are *defined* and *designed* to be positive-only, of course net evolution will be “positive”, with negatives attributable to noise of some sort.
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Until you add process models — politics and spirituality — that can *independently* take on negative values, you can only make vacuous, high-minded statements about “progress” within an assumed consensus Whig epistemology. How do you do that? Take Fukuyama, Arendt etc seriously.
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Going by responses so far, it sounds like people think I’m pointing to a design imagination gap. Like there’s a way to put existing tech together in a new thingocracy or thingarchy that will get us to “post democracy”. No. Nothing ending in -cracy or -archy can fit the bill.
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There’s an *invention* gap here. We need a new breakthrough technology that makes new classes of design possible. Writing was one. The printing press was one. Radio/TV too. Most recently cryptography. Your -cracy or -archy is just a remix unless it uses a new tech in a new way.
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The mark of that is the creation of new political/spiritual freedoms that didn’t even exist before. For example: Literacy (printing press) liberated minds to explore new intellectual domains. Literate politics organized that new freedom.
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Cryptography might create new political freedoms, but this isn’t some trivial extension of economic affordances like blockchain voting. What new freedom does it create and how does it organize the collective use of that freedom? What’s the new freedom literacy?
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My favorite candidate new freedom that could be organized by new political models is mobility. Live/travel freely anywhere in the world. My preferred post-democratic human condition would solve for vastly enhanced mobility.
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About ~60% or more humans live in meaningful democracies today iirc. But only 3% of humans travel beyond national borders today. The tech problem is zero-carbon transport. The economic problem is making it orders of magnitude cheaper. The political problem is open borders.
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