Evolution of Governance
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[edit] Evolution of Non-Sectarian Governance - Modern Democracies
Throughout history governance and religion went hand in hand. In many cases the religious and governing classes were one and the same. There have been previous attempts in empowering the common man. The earliest declaration of human rights was by the Persian King Cyrus in 500 or so BC. There were forms of democratic voting in Greek city states in the first millennium BC. There was the Roman Senate in early AD. There was the British Magna Carta in the 13th century. So there were various attempts (mostly lip services) to empower individuals. What turned governance literally on its head was the American Constitution in late 18th century. It was the most unlikely revolution to succeed and at the time no one gave it a snow ball's chance in hell. At those time kings ruled Europe, there was a Shogan in Japan, an emperor in China, a Czar in Russia and a Pasha governing the Islamic world (most of it anyway). All over the world there was a common governmental morphology, a rigid organizational pyramid with the kings/priests on the top a very small elite class in the middle and everyone else was a poor bottom dweller. The American constitution literally turned the pyramid on its head. The collective of individuals were to rule through their elected representatives. Elections were to be held in short scheduled intervals and whoever didn't do the bidding of their constituents got fired. That experiment was unheard of. The biggest gamble was that no one knew how a large number of diverse groups with diverse interests could manage to self-govern. Before that all attempts in democracy where in small homogeneous peoples with common interests, like Greek city states, Algonquin tribes and alike. But James Madison's argument was that in fact you needed many diverse groups to balance against one another. And with a strong bill of rights to protect the individual against the rights of the states and majority mobs, the gamble actually had a chance to work. Be that as it may the constitution underwent a major bloody correction to right the slavery issue during the American civil war a hundred years later. And again it had to go through the civil rights correction yet another hundred years after that. It wasn't until late 20th century that there was enough racial diversity in the US to actually make Madison's idea of self balancing groups work in earnest. But that is only half of the story. The other is Alexander Hamilton's (at the time) experimental capitalism. There the economic capacity of all of the individuals in the land could be harnessed to fund projects that no one could dream of. The result of that was the industrial revolution in the 19th century America that opened up the entire north American continent and brought vast riches to bear. By then the American democracy had transformed from Thomas Jefferson's model of an agrarian farming society to Hamilton's Industrial society. We had the advent of Hamiltonian, market driven democracy, which came to a crashing halt in the 1929 depression. Then the system went through a social correction in the 1930s, this is where the purely capitalistic democracy adopted many social programs from the socialist movements (much to the chagrin of the purists) and therefore created a sense of balance between individual rights in capital driven enterprises and social rights of the people as a whole. And when the first and the second world wars came about the United States was in the position to bank role and implement the biggest military industrial complex the world had seen. That military industrial complex afforded the protection for democracies to flourish in western Europe after second world war. Throughout the cold war and after the collapse of communism, social, market driven democratic revolutions were permeating Eastern Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, in short the globe. And by the time the knowledge revolution came about in the late 20th century, America and the rest of the democracies had the money, the industrial capacity and the brain power to launch the global knowledge and information networks electronically. The result of course is a global economy, multinational entities, global rule of law expressed in trans-national entities such as United Nations, Wold Bank and International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, World Court, etc. It is not difficult to imagine a natural conclusion of the evolution of governance expressed in a formal, unified global governmental structure sometime in the future.
Having said all of that, authoritarian resistance to democracies continue. It is noteworthy that global coalition of democracies are in fact funding a dictatorial anomaly: the Oil States. As a rule we have observed that dictatorship, regardless of their governing philosophies, can not economically compete with democracies. That rule is broken with the Oil States because they live off of the oil revenues generated from the democracies. There, dictatorships literally buy off their populations into submission (much more on this anomaly in the social rift section).
[edit] Link
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/TOC.html - Comprehensive site on Epistemology, so big it'll probably be under construction forever
http://www.academicinfo.net/religindex.html - Religious gateway
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