Before the election, British scientist Richard Dawkins was expecting Democrats to win the popular vote and he criticized America's Electoral College. Devon Eriksen issued a righteous response.
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Dear Richard:
First of all, how we run our own affairs is none of your business. You are not American. You are British.
You have no skin in the game.
However, I am going to answer in more detail, not for your benefit, but for the education of the audience.
This nation is called "the United States of America".
If you had really been paying attention, and treated that phrase as if it were composed of individual words which mean specific things, instead of just a name, this would have told you all you needed to know.
The United States is a union of states. Not of citizens. That's why it's called the United States.
In the United States, the states are not merely organizational units established by a central bureaucracy. They are independent republics, who agreed to join a union and manage some affairs jointly.
The United States is not a democracy. It isn't, it never was, it's not supposed to be, and we don't want it to be.
Instead, it is a republic. Casual thinkers, such as boomers, or biologists who think that only biology is complicated and everything else is just bar-stool conversations, often think these two words mean the same thing, because their Greek and Latin roots have similar meanings.
But words are not just proxies for their etymological origins. They mean things.
A democracy decides matter of policy by vote, in a manner proportional to voters.
A republic appoints agents to represent political interests. These can be the political interests of individual people, but they can also be the interests of other entities.
You see, the people who wrote the Constitution understood that a nation is more than just a collection of people. It also consists of all the organizations, processes, institutions, and industries required to actually keep those people alive and have a functional society.
All of these things need political power to defend and advance their interests, allowing them to function.
So, the Constitution itself was designed as a balancing act. Some things are up for a vote, and others are not. And when representation is apportioned, it is not doled out equally by head count.
This is not a bug. It's a feature. And it's incredibly wise.
The more technologically advanced a civilization becomes, the fewer actual thinking human people are employed by life-sustaining industries.
That's a good thing. It is the whole fucking point of technology... free up most of your population from whacking at the dirt with a stick to survive, and they can be engineers, businessmen, tradesmen, entertainers, and artists. People are freed from drudgery, invent cool stuff with all their newfound spare time, and life is better.
But what about those life-sustaining industries? They still have to run. They still need political power in order to make sure the laws protect them, and society sees to their needs. But their work involves very few people, and a lot of machines.
And machines don't vote.
So it's not only very important, but gradually more and more important, to the health of your nation that the political will of a cattle rancher in Wyoming carries more weight than that of a fashion magazine editor in San Francisco.
Because fewer and fewer people in your society even understand what is necessary to keep everyone fed.
That's not the whole story, of course. It's simply one example of one the many, many reasons the Constitution is written the way it is.
Surely someone intelligent enough to understand evolutionary biology can find others.
If he is looking for them.
Which brings me to a larger point.
I've always understood that "Herp derp, Americans are fat and stupid" is a game that Brits like to play because it makes you feel better about having frittered away your empire, then decided to get drunk and become a third-world nation.
I've always been more or less content to let you play that game. I thought of it as a harmless way of preserving your rather fragile self-image.
But we are getting to the point where it is hurting not just you, and not just us, but all of humanity.
You can't imagine why we do things the way we do, not because you lack the capacity to understand, but because you lack the patience and humility to even realize there is something to understand.
You respect biology, realize that life is a complex system, and therefore devote attention and patience to studying it, instead of just looking at a polar bear for five minutes and going with your first take.
But you don't appear to have the same respect for the complex systems of human society.
Which is perhaps why you waged a decades-long war against what turned out to be one of the load-bearing structures of civilization. You just didn't pause to think.
You only understood the concept of Chesterton's Fence when it was a fence made of DNA. Every other kind of fence just looked like firewood.
Well, now that your nation is deep in the throes of a cultural suicide that you helped to bring about, I would offer the following suggestion:
Examine the possibility that Thomas Jefferson knew something you don't.
Try thinking about that for more than five minutes.
Try thinking about as if civilization were a serious and complex thing, like a polar bear, as opposed to a football match between two or three political vibes.
Try imagining reasons why the early Americans wrote law with the same seriousness that you try to imagine reasons why polar bears might be white, even though the seals are not trying to sneak up on them.
This is serious. Persuading people of things has consequences. History has not stopped happening.
Look around you. Look at your country.
Look at it.
Do I really have to explain, now of all times, to you of all people, what kind of damage can be done with a careless word or two?
Your mouth is robbing your ears.
Tom |
