What does technocracy have to do with the cosmos?

The forgotten foundations of self-governance

When do democratic societies become vulnerable to collapse?

In his 1997 book, The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies, (MVDV) political economist, Vincent Ostrom takes up Tocqueville’s question after an academic career spent partly ‘in the field.’

A respected professor he was not an ivory tower elite. Ostrom studied and participated in finding self-governance solutions to groundwater management in California, and the drafting of the Alaskan Constitution. In his work he took a high view of human creativity, believing people could find ways of cooperating under the right conditions based on ‘shared understandings,’ goals, and values.

He wasn’t optimistic about America’s prospects at the turn of the 21st century, already decades-deep in its transformation from a federalist system to a “Presidential Government run from the Executive Office… exercising tutelage over an innumerable multitude” and a citizenry turning to the government to meet all of its needs and wants.

MVDV isn’t breezy reading but is thick with insights for the patient reader.

He traces the breakdown in American self-governance to the essential building blocks of human societies: religion, ideas, and, importantly: language. Animals may vocalize, but language is unique to humans. It is the basis of all forms of capital: social, human, and physical. It is culture-bound and grounded in our engagement with physical reality and with one another - connecting ideas and deeds.

Problems emerge when there is a gap between ideas and deeds, and the promises of politicians continually prove to be failures or outright lies. Trust is damaged leading to disillusionment and providing an entry point for demagogues who promise “Truth and Salvation.”

Ostrom points to dangers of “The New Newspeak” in media and politics. The use of big abstractions (Justice, Democracy, Truth, Freedom), emotional framings, and slogans serve to project omnipotence and manipulate perceptions that allow power-seekers to rule from above.

As Tocqueville observed, The Deity discerns everything. Humans do not. As a result, “General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather the insufficiency of the human intellect…[and]…they always cause the mind to lose as much in accuracy as it gains in completeness.”

And, when language loses its integrity and coherence we no longer have a basis for culture or community, or even decision-making.

Ostrom continually returns to the notion of language as the basis for social orders: reflecting both Michael Polanyi’s “tacit knowledge” and Karl Popper’s “objective knowledge”. Language is interpersonal always involving relationships within a community of persons, in physical reality. Language transmits learning and “institutional facts” across the generations.

“Civilizations can decline and disappear if succeeding generations of people do not maintain the continuities of language and learning and the meaning to be assigned to words and their referents.” - Vincent Ostrom

At the dawn of the Internet, Ostrom lamented the vapidity of TV and its zombifying and alienating effects. In the 25 years since, hyperconnectivity shapes language and relationships at a dizzying pace. Physical and virtual realities overlap. Communication is instant and disembodied. Social capital and human connection is weak. Intermediary association - churches, clubs, schools, volunteer groups, civic associations, continue to decline.

Amid so much cultural, political and social change what prospects remain for the recovery of civil society, premised on trust, The Golden Rule, and the inculcation of basic virtue, or what Tocqueville called, “the whole moral and intellectual condition of the people.” As we drift further from those cultural-religious moorings and shared meanings and instead isolate in virtual self-defining realities, when is the question of whether we have a government based on reflection and choice, or accident and force, rendered moot?