Column: Federal Election, unnatural selection
By Charles Jeanes
I asked, “what should we do, when the leaders take us to ruin?” He said, “Wait.” — Charles Eisenstein
Democracy: yearning to make it real
Democracy is a very old word, and the resonance it has for modern Canadians, Americans, and Europeans, is peculiar. Since the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, the American and French Revolutions of the eighteenth, and the salvation of democracy from Fascists and Nazis in the twentieth, we in the West have held democracy to be the best without argument.
This essay is for Westerners, most particularly Canadians during our federal election. An election is a selection; there is nothing “natural” about it, but we seem unable to do without it insofar as representative democracy is based on choice by ballot. Democracies have employed a lottery system to choose their personnel of government, in ancient Greece and medieval Italy, without harm.
This topic of democracy is dense, hence, long appendices and frequent links.
An American view of the magic in democracy
Walt Whitman, a nineteenth-century poet, a profound mind famous in the US and beyond, said much about democracy in his nation. For historical and cultural reasons, Canadians have not yet grown a voice comparable to Whitman’s.
“Walt Whitman drew on his knowledge of American ideals and the ideas which led to them. Leaves of Grass [his iconic poem] both embodies the spirit of the transcendentalist movement and marks a clear progression of the American mindset from the chaotic state of nature of Hobbes to the Transcendentalist belief of inherent human goodness.”
[He] surely read “Circles” and “Self-Reliance,” and “The Poet,” an essay in which Emerson called out for a genuinely American bard. Sitting quietly, Whitman read, “We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials.” I suspect that the phrase tyrannous eye puzzled Whitman. There was nothing especially tyrannous about him, nor would there be about his poetry. But as to knowing “the value of our incomparable materials”—maybe that was something Whitman could claim. [Lewis Lapham: please see Appendix I]
Whitman had a mystic’s notion, appropriate for someone involved in the movement known as Transcendentalism, that Democracy was absolutely necessary to the Soul of the American people. He fervently believed his nation to be an example to humanity.
Canadians never have produced an ideology of mission to teach the world democracy; Americans have done so often. Leonard Cohen’s well-known song “Democracy” is a Canadian view of the American condition. Cohen admits “I love the country, but I can’t stand the scene…” Canadians understand that.
American and Canadian: two solitudes, two distinct mental universes
This American idealism of Whitman, his belief and faith in his fellow-citizens, is not a sentiment one finds in Canadians. Historical explanations for that are not difficult to discover, since the past experiences of these two peoples were so unlike. At one time, briefly, America and Canada were part of one Empire.
The yoking of the two lands under one King only lasted from 1763 to 1776. Then the Thirteen Colonies that laid the foundations for the USA, made a forceful bid for independence and republican government, and Canadians chose not to follow, but instead remained under the British Crown until this very day.
Canada’s other way could only produce a quite dissimilar society, State, and popular consciousness from the American. Canadians did not start their existence as a People by embracing a fervent, idealized, peculiarly-christian ideal of Rule of the People, for the People, by the People.
Our present election is the right moment to consider Canadian Democracy.
Canadians at polls: choosing one person to do the work of a nation
Canadians are exercising our “democratic rights” as citizens to vote for our federal government and ultimately our Prime Minister, the individual who is peak of the pyramid of political power under the constitutional authority of our Sovereign, King Charles III. Got that? The P.M. is not “the Sovereign.” Our Constitution is clear about that.
Canada has “representative constitutional democracy” — we pick one person for each riding who will represent you and me and everyone in the riding, in the House of Commons. It is a very peculiar kind of democracy, this representation. Someone is taking your place and speaking for you. Athens had direct democracy; you attended in person or your voice was not heard and no one ever claimed to represent you in your absence.
One person, the Prime (first, but not the only) Minister (ministering, to the business of sovereign rule), has the authority to direct the federal government; in its activity as law-maker, law-enforcer, economic mastermind, and so forth, for the nation, its foremost director is the P.M.
Just exactly how each P.M. exercises their authority over their Party, over the bureaucratic machinery that is the offices of government, over the apparatus of Parliament, and over the jurisdictions of the Federation in each Province, is very much an individual mystery, but partially explained at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_Canada.
Justin Trudeau was blamed for a lot; is that fair? It is and is not. What we are allowed to know about the exercise of power is not a lot. Much of governing processes are opaque to the ordinary citizen, and we accept that limitation, while trying to be as informed as we may be. Our news media try hard to tell us about our leaders and their doings, but these are hardly neutral perspectives.
The P.M. is a concrete individual exercising powers over a “Nation”, a collective abstraction. One must feel a profound empathy with that person believing that they can make a difference to our lives that they promised in an election campaign.
In a very imperfect balance between the rights of each of us (individuals) and the rights of all of us (in the mass) — Canadians — getting it “correct” is never a matter of fact. It is always a matter of opinion. [ see Appendix III, on Rulers]
As I remarked earlier, the electoral method is not natural selection; it’s artificial in the extreme. The person who ultimately makes decisions of enormous importance to you and I is not someone we will ever truly know. Not natural.
Ancient ideas
Our attitude to democracy is not how ancient or medieval people felt about the word. Aristotle was dispassionate about the term, including it in his list of types of government — monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy — without any inclination to say it was the best form. Plato mistrusted it.
Monarchy was not in low regard, nor was aristocracy, among all Greeks everywhere, but only among Athenian citizens for a certain “peak period”.
Athens, home of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, was ruled democratically – with the caveat of severe limitations on women and slaves — and the democracy lost a catastrophic war against totalitarian Sparta. Sparta was momentarily supreme while being ruled by the strangest political constitution one can imagine. [ see Appendix One note on Sparta ] The utter defeat reduced Athens’ power and left it subject to the military monarchy of the Macedonians; Macedon’s King crushed democracy.
But, under the leadership of King Alexander the Great, Greek armies then went on to conquer the known world and lay Asia under the rule of Hellenic kings — as much of Asia as they knew, at least.
Plato the Athenian — and (perhaps) Socrates his teacher — held democracy up to philosophical critique exposing serious defects. For Plato, in his treatise The Republic, Athenian democracy was a base form of government. Why? It was the democracy of Athens which put Socrates on trial, found him guilty, and passed capital sentence upon him for the crime of corrupting the youth of Athens. As the court demanded, Socrates drank the hemlock poison.
Thereafter, Plato was bound to reject democracy; he designed his own conception of a Republic ruled by the Philosopher-King and his elite of superior men, the Guardians.
Why a philosopher-king? Plato argued that only such a king would “ spread happiness throughout the city by bringing the citizens into harmony with each other … and by making them share with each other the benefits that each class can confer on the community.”
https://iep.utm.edu/platopol/ [see Section 5 in this essay]
https://www.if.org.uk/2017/02/05/ancient-sparta-a-perfect-gerontocracy/
Each individual equal and sovereign: how to design self-government
The Founders of the American experiment in government, a republic freed from the British Monarchy, included men who believed in the genius of their people to be equal to the task of ruling themselves. The Declaration of Independence asserted as a “self-evident truth” that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” This sovereign individual was a rational being with soul, with natural instinct. Christianity was his faith. Each man would and should be Sovereign over himself (and his family) and he had a right to his property and pursuit of happiness.
Christianity did not take as a revealed truth that humans being equal, no one should own another human. Slavery was not against divine law. Medieval thinkers such as Pope Gregory I and the English revolutionary priest John Ball also propagated the idea of the equality of human beings. Slavery continued.
Plato had written long before 1776 that there are different kinds of humans. Some are to be entrusted with rule over others – for example, philosophers are trustworthy [!] — but not all.
Strangely to us, Greek minds of Plato’s calibre had none of our repugnance for slavery; it was assumed in his time that the soul of a slave was self-evidently inferior.
The Declaration of Independence was not enforced in statute law, and the USA was not a state where all were equal; that fact was recognized in a multitude of ways. Slavery continued there, while the British Empire condemned it in 1833.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Britains-Role-Ending-Slavery-Worldwide/
The individual and the collective: a reality and an abstraction
Reasoning over democratic self-government begins with the notion that one can design government for each individual citizen with a system that is collective. A person alone governs her/himself. Where there are two people, there are politics.
Society is a collective, and is an abstract noun. An individual is a solid, concrete noun, as you are, reader, and as I am; the reality of me/myself is not questionable, but the reality of my people or my nation, is less certain. Who are these others? I cannot know the reality of The People, just ones I know.
How do people, a nation, a community, a collective mass — organize so free self-rule of each one actually works, so each and all are governed — and are ‘at liberty’ and ‘free in their person’, also?
What is the relation between one person and “The Government”? (I assume readers see that “government” is another of those slippery abstract nouns!)
I am keeping this simple. I am not even going to talk about property and its rights. [see the essay by Lewis Lapham in Appendix I for a wonderful exposition about property, capital, and democracy.] Inequality of property and wealth in democracy is a given, a fact not disputed in the definition of democracy.
‘History’, and, ‘The People’ : two fictitious entities we believe in
The People of the US, states the American Constitution, create their Republic. But of course the People are not a noun like “the king” — one is concrete and singular, the other abstract and collective. We think we know what we mean when we say the People. We deceive ourselves.
Another great personified thing that is abstract, not real as one person is real, is History. History supposedly teaches lessons, but of course that is nonsense. Individual humans teach, and some of them assume they can teach History to others. But these historians teach facts about the Past: they are not teaching lessons until they go beyond facts to put those facts into a meaningful “conclusion from the facts.” A lesson is not merely a recitation of dry fact.
A great deal of human confusion and bad government proceed from acting as if we know who the People are, and what History teaches the leaders who make decisions in our name. Leaders execute policy but policy is mere guesswork.
And ‘leaders’ are not the best of us, just people who strived for and attained power. [see Appendix III on Leaders]
Public space and civil manners: without one, the other fails
There can be no effective government without agreement over how to talk to one another. And in 2025 enormous issues have arisen over whose version of The Rules will regulate this activity, speech.
Individual people do not need manners when they are alone; put them with others and some consensus has to exist if relationship is real. Language is one of humanity’s consensus inventions; our species-genius is on display when we can actually have conversation. But conversation is a fraught experience.
Humans invented politeness and civility the minute after we invented language, and in the next hour, we learned the agreement we make for nice manners is a piece of governance. Agreement over civility is government over our behaviour.
Conclusions: soil, seeds, roots, trunks, flowers.
Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction. — Veronica Wedgwood, 1946
I hope no reader expected conclusions to the kind of essay I have presented here. I did not intend this Arc to present arguments, but merely rock our Canadian democratic boat and provoke the passengers to think harder.
Government is but one end product of a long line of historical processes that go before us, before this election, before this system we call democracy. Canada is a tree. History and culture are the trunk of the tree, but there are deep roots in the facts of geography, population, economy, and consciousness that precede the making of the historic nation-state properly-called Canada [see Appendix IV on the colonial root of this country].
One branch of this tree is government; higher up, flowers are social order, and culture, and the lives of all the individuals who live here on this piece of the planet. You are a flower of this tree — a point Whitman was making in his time — so that democracy is much more than a system. It is an aspiration.
The individual souls who are governed by it are as much a raw material as an end product of what Canada is. And as Wedgwood noted in the citation above, democracy is an organism, and it can die for lack of the right kind of materials in the body politic, poisoned, or starved of nutrition. Are we the right material?
It is laborious, this act of self-government. As each of us governs our Self daily, that self-rule is the soil of our democracy. People get the government they deserve, I firmly believe. Hold government accountable; begin with yourself.
Apologies for these lengthy readings. They are for those interested in specific issues.
Appendix I
On Walt Whitman and Democracy in the American mode
“We have frequently printed the word democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken’d, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten. [I learned] one thing conclusively—that beneath all the ostensible greed and heartlessness of our times, the generous benevolence of men and women in the United States, remains constant.” — Walt Whitman
cited by Lewis Lapham in
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/uncivil-liberty
more on Whitman and American Democracy
https://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=english_class_publications
II
Social engineering: citizens constructed to the rulers’ design
Governments have in the past, both long ago and very recently, taken on the purpose of designing and creating a model individual, one that would be the right kind of human being for the government to rule over. The New Man and Woman would be the result. States such as this have produced monstrosities of social engineering; in my opinion derived from study of history, designing individual humans by State policy is government at its worst. And the aspiration to make humans in the image of a Plan has not ended by any means. The dream of better people made by an enlightenment-teaching ruler, is alive.
Here is an extreme example of the malady, Leon Trotsky predicting the better human of the future which the Bolshevik state in Russia would attempt to make real:
“ …all problems in a Socialist society – the problems of life which formerly were solved spontaneously and automatically, and the problems of art which were in the custody of special priestly castes – will become the property of all people, one can say with certainty that collective interests and passions, and individual competition will have the widest scope and the most unlimited opportunity.
In a struggle so disinterested and tense, which will take place in a culture whose foundations are steadily rising, the human personality, with its invaluable basic trait of continual discontent, will grow and become polished at all its points. In truth, we have no reason to fear that there will be a decline of individuality or an impoverishment of art in a Socialist society …
It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1941/v05n34/trotsky.htm
Sparta had the earliest form of social engineering ever known in history. Lycurgus at Sparta planned the perfect warrior-citizen in a rigid political/cultural State. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF03406108.pdf
Jean Calvin set up theocracy in Geneva to make his Reformation program for perfect Christians into reality. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/reformational-thought-and-the-social-covenant/
The Anabaptists in Munster tried to make the New Jerusalem. https://www.danceshistoricalmiscellany.com/munster-rebellion-creation-16th-century-theocracy/
Nazi “scientists” had a blueprint to form the perfect Aryan German man and woman.
“Himmler was much struck by Hitler’s ideas on the origins of the German people. The Nazi party leader believed that many of his countrymen could trace at least part of their pedigree to a primordial master race—the Aryans, who had brought civilization to a primitive world. This was pure fiction, but Hitler employed it skillfully to stroke German vanity. “All human culture,” he wrote, “all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.” https://www.historynet.com/himmlers-utopia/
The political Left typically had projects for moulding perfect revolutionaries in the New Society after the revolution; in the dreams of Robespierre in France, and Lenin and Stalin in Russia, we see the men who think they are “liberating humanity”, planning to make humans conform to a design.
Robespierre answers: “There do exist pure and sensitive souls. There does exist a tender, but imperious and irresistible passion . . . a profound horror of tyranny, a compassionate zeal for the oppressed, a sacred love of one’s country, and a love of humanity still more holy and sublime, without which a great revolution is no more than the destruction of a lesser by a greater crime. There does exist a generous ambition to found on earth the first republic in the world. . . . You can feel it, at this moment, burning in your hearts; I can feel it in my own.” The plain message when the bombast is deflated is that, since the people have been corrupted, they cannot be trusted to know what is good for them, but he, Robespierre, knows, because he is uncorrupted.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-robespierre-chose-terror
https://www.artforum.com/features/social-engineering-soviet-organizational-science-235845/
Pol Pot in Cambodia intended to re-make his state in the image of a perfect society.
https://www.thecollector.com/pol-pot-overseer-cambodian-genocide/
III
Rulers, Leaders, Teachers
True leaders
are hardly known to their followers.
Next after them are the leaders
the people know and admire;
after them, those they fear;
after them, those they despise.
— Tao Teh Ching, 17
See also chapters 80, 53, 64, and 32
I include this piece of political insight from the Tao, to remind readers that beyond the West, in China and India, other views of government have been taught. The Tao is mystical about leadership, advising the Taoist Sage to never lead. Wu wei, said LaoTzu. Act without action, ‘do non-doing’. The People are not ruled; when the Tao is aligned with them and they with Tao, there is no government but there is perfect harmony of humans. Government is never a good, in LaoTzu’s vision.
I recommend U.K. LeGuin’s version of the Tao. https://wesleyac.com/dao/refs/leguin1998.pdf
https://ctr.naer.edu.tw/v17.1/ctr170105.pdf
I asked, “what should we do, when the leaders take us to ruin?” He said, “Wait.”
— Charles Eisenstein
IV
‘So-called Canada’: Democracy confronts historic injustice and criminal acts
There is one new challenge falling upon us now, we Canadians, posed by the phrase — have you heard it or read it? — “so-called Canada.”
https://www.waterwatchers.ca/what_s_up_with_so_called_canada
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/so-called-canada/
https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2024/07/canada-daze/
Canada as a nation-state is believed by some — and Canadian civil servants, intellectuals and cultural leaders are major figures in this some — to be an illegitimate state, lacking any right to exist. We are a colonial-settler society, living on land stolen in criminal fashion from the aboriginal possessors, and pretending we have a right to be here. We are here because we murdered, killed in war or with disease and neglect, the natives.
A government “of the People, by the People, for the People”, has now been yet further complicated by making a meaningful distinction between people with a legitimate right to be here, and people who are here only because of vast wrongs committed, the colonial settler population who have a human right to be here now, but whose presence here originates in a crime of vast proportion.
The Doctrine of Discovery was wrong. Killing the indigenes of the land was murder. Colonialism was evil.
So Canada is wrong. Not my words, reader, but the idea is not uncommon in certain circles.
What does that do to your understanding of our democracy, dear reader?
https://politicalscience.uwo.ca/about_us/docs/news/JMN-Memory-Politics-Paper-07-10-22.pdf
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