Annals of Earth Articles
Link to VolXXVI, Number 1, 2008 articles
Catastrophist Governance and the Need for a Tricameral Legislature.
By William Irwin Thompson © 2006
As American school children, we were all raised to believe the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson's " That government is best which governs least." Americans of a Republican and Libertarian persuasion feel that interference of the state in the life of the individual is evil, and the excesses of Fascism and Communism in the nineteen-thirties and forties confirmed their Superman comic book sense of the superiority of the American way. Even to this day in a new century with new problems, the Republicans and Libertarians in their think tanks like the Cato Institute continue to rant on about the evils of Big Government.
When government is seen as an intrusive menace, then cutting taxes as a way of starving it to death is the basic neocon philosophy of governance--a philosophy that Bush has eagerly sought to implement. In an updated version of Kipling's nineteenth-century imperialism of "the white man's burden," the neocons have sought to bring Republican party politics to tribal, medieval, and socialist societies in a policy of enforced modernization through unrestrained market economics and military invasion.
The liberalism of FDR's New Deal was a response to a man-made economic catastrophe, but the historical landscape we are now entering is one of natural catastrophes: of tsunamis that can devastate the coastlines of many countries at once, of earthquakes and hurricanes that can decimate entire cities, and of volcanic eruptions that can darken the planet's skies and eliminate summers and the harvests that come at their finish. When one adds human contributions to the forces of nature in the form of global climate change, then one begins to see a new world in which the individual citizen is utterly powerless to address the rise of oceans or the shift of tectonic plates.
A philosophy of government based upon nothing more than tax cuts simply won't cut it any more. In a tranquil world, nature can be taken for granted as a stage upon which the human drama unfolds, and agriculture and industry can be used as the foundation for a business model of political governance. Farmers and merchants become the first wave of representatives elected to Congress; then, as the process of governance becomes larger and more complex, lawyers become the representatives of the businessmen who support their campaigns for office.
But this tranquil world is a thing of the past. The first rumblings of a new global storm have sounded on the horizon with the tsunami of Boxing Day, 2004, and Katrina. When hurricanes devastate our coastal cities again, and earthquakes strike the populous cities of the West, this global storm will strike us head-on and full force. At that time we will need something other than businessmen grousing about Big Government and proposing tax-cuts for the wealthy to serve as our philosophy of government.
What will the politics of catastrophe look like? In a crisis, our first instinct will be to revert to the archaic politics of the primate band and look to some alpha male to deliver us from evil. We will pray to some archaic paternal god in the sky to save us and we will surrender to the will of some dominant Big Brother to protect us through martial law and even stronger versions of the Patriot Act. But dominance and military power will be utterly incapable of addressing the problems we face. In this crisis, we will need scientists and not more soldiers and lawyers.
Certainly, when East Coast multiple hurricanes overlap with West Coast earthquakes at a time of massive neocon war deficits, we will enter a time when natural catastrophes, and not just terrorist attacks, create the punctuated equilibrium that drives evolution. At that time, the smug boomerism of capitalism that takes nature for granted in industrial development and distorts the ecological sciences to reinforce its own ideology will be as historically irrelevant as peasant magic was to the industrial revolution. At this time, whatever culture is able to miniaturize science into a civilization—American, European, or Asian—and keep it intact during a period of catastrophes, whether from global warming or volcanic eruptions, or both, will determine the fate of humanity.
No doubt, human fear more than Western science will shape our response and probably create a mood of religious superstition and End of the World popular scenarios in which the face of Jesus is seen in the clouds and Elvis sightings are reported over Graceland. The Executive branch of government will probably once again seek to manipulate this fear to its own ends in the same manner that it used the fear of terrorists to secure its re-election, but in other biomes within our national ecology of mind, we might just begin to glimpse an opportunity for a new era of democratic revolution.
Our eighteenth century constitution was conceived by rural aristocratic landowners and slaveholders who feared popular democracy as the rule of the urban mob, but it was also midwived by urban Federalists who wished to bring forth the economy of a modern nation-state. The machinery of the state with its checks and balances was an eighteenth-century steam engine fueled by the people but held on course by a governor. A bicameral legislature was that century's vision of balance between passion and reflection--between a lower house of pushy and uncouth merchants and farmers and an upper house of men of property and culture.
But in an age of global warming and sudden catastrophes from pandemics, earthquakes, coastal inundation, tsunamis and volcanoes, a scientific council will be needed for a tricameral legislature in which government is provided with sound and objective scientific information and informed guidance. The Bush Administration sought to constrain and edit science so that it would tell it what it wanted to hear for ideological reasons; or, in other words, it sought to treat science in the same way it treated Intelligence and the CIA in particular. Since the CIA has only the single client of the presidency, both the CIA and the Supreme Court have been corrupted by the growth of the "Imperial Presidency." A third chamber will be needed to be composed of truly intelligent and independent scientists, artists, scholars, and professors of constitutional law. These outstanding citizens will need to be men and women of "intellectual property," and not simply popular celebrities chosen through elections funded by the wealthy and the few owners of the media. They will need to be elected to this third chamber by an ad hoc electoral college composed of the faculties of the state universities and the outstanding private universities of the nation, from Harvard in the East to Stanford in the West. And it is this third chamber that should nominate members to the Supreme Court, and not the President. To avoid the imperial presidency that has sucked power away from Congress--since the days of Lincoln to George W. Bush--it would be better to follow a model closer to the Swiss Bundesrat with an executive council of four—a popularly elected president, and one member elected from each of the three houses of the legislature. An executive council would better serve for a new American Presidency than our contemporary simulacrum of a Roman Emperor. And to insure that the presidency is not some charismatic substitute for saint or celebrity, the presidency—meaning he or she who chairs the Executive Council--should rotate—as it does in the Swiss Bundesrat--among the members of the council for a term of two years each.
Of course, I realize that such an amending of the Constitution would open up the political process to crazies and not simply scientists--and to some crazy scientists as well. The possibility for such dramatic change would only be possible under unimaginable circumstances that I am here trying to imagine—such as the inundation of the East Coast. My suggestion for a tricameral legislature and an amending of the Constitution is merely a sketch, but the sketch, like any political cartoon, does come from a pattern-recognition of the dangers inherent in our new mediocracy. The electronic media have created a new technopeasantry whose attacks on the imaginary castle of science's Dr. Frankenstein now threaten to eliminate scientific textbooks from our schools to replace them with the Bible. As popular ministers thrust themselves to the head of the empassioned multitude, waving their Bibles in the air, we will be brought back to the ugly Thirty Years War of religions that preceded the Age of Revolution from 1689 to 1789. If we slide into that abyss of a new dark age, then we will have indeed fallen off the edge of history.
Warriors and high priests have been the entwined poles of human culture since the origin of urban civilization in the fourth millennium B.C.E. Now that formation is expressing its sunset-effect in the evangelical fundamentalism of Karl Rove's redesign of the Republican party and Cheney's Halliburton hostile take-over of Iraq. This supernova of the dying star of militarism and religious fundamentalism is, of course, not confined to Christianity, but also expresses itself in the extremism of the Israeli West Bank settlers, right-wing Hindu nationalists, and Islamicist terrorists. In ideological thinking, the content camouflages the structure, and that is why very often in conflict extremes are very much like one another.
But this too shall pass. Like the Dark Ages and Inquisition that preceded the Renaissance, or the period of global slavery that preceded the Enlightenment, humanity has still a chance to face the coming era of ecological devastation, pandemics, and natural catastrophes and respond in a way other than chaos and rule by war lords in collapsed states. Like the Dark Age monks who miniaturized classical civilization and made it a curricular content inside medieval civilization, whatever culture that can miniaturize scientific civilization and place it within a new formation of a post-religious spirituality of fellowship and not followership will carry us across the great rift into a new stage of cultural evolution. If we fail, then the dark age interval will be much longer.