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When a society or country has been around for a long time, same as with a
person, problems and issues tend to pile up.
No matter how nobly a group starts off, if it attempts anything more difficult
than playing tic-tac-toe to a draw it will have failures. Its populace and
leaders will have done bad things as well as good and will have had both good
and bad luck, neighbors, ideas, and weather.
However, since the bad stuff sticks in everyone's craw and the good stuff --
being just the normal heroics of daily life mostly -- gets forgotten or taken
for granted, people tire of the society and its ways. Its ideals and laws look
tired and weak. The grass starts to look greener. The giant problems, the
kind that require unified and committed effort and therefore get kicked down
the road when unity is feeble and time plentiful, loom as impossible to ever
solve. Fear and panic might even creep in, or despair, or the obvious mammal
reflex to hate.
It is during such times, think of them as "middle" phases where difficulty has
gotten serious, that the dynamic of renascence begins to apply. What needs
bringing back are the ideals with which the society started, since reality has
dulled and dimmed their original glow, and the reason they need reviving is not
only that they have ebbed but that urgent problems are not getting solved.
Only a rather bad situation can ever justify a renascence, because when all is
well and good you coast.
Therefore every renaissance is accompanied by stress and danger, tension and
conflict, risk and uncertainty. After all, renaissance isn't the only option.
Some will call during major crises for going back in time, returning to a past
they believe was better and safer, simpler and crisis-free. (This is really
just fear settling in like numbness to the immobilized limbs of the body
politic as it were, since even if you went back to say 1953 you'd have to
pretty soon deal with 1954, then 1955, and would eventually find yourself right
back where you were.) Call this "wishful regress" or the "rewind faction," and
it's primarily nostalgic not necessarily or even usually conservative.
The third major option, after going forward and going backward, is the
opportunism of the demagogue.
The demagogue historically is an opportunist with the gift of gab who takes
over an ailing political party. This person is also an imaginary figure, like
turning back the clock is imaginary, but they can claim to be bringing a bright
and perfect future in return for the gift of power. The society itself, its
governing and cultural institutions, and its frameworks or fabric so to speak
become the enemy of society in a clever and adept sleight of hand. All the
demagogue asks for is to end the rule of law (replacing it with rule by them),
erase checks and balances, and abolish accountability (including quaint ideas
like telling the truth, a free press, independent judiciary, common decency,
and the like) so that their true and pure salvific power can truly radiate.
Sweep away everything that might impede me, promises the demagogue, and all
your dreams shall come true. (In reality, such figures rarely offer anything
but belligerent kleptocracy fueled by ethical surrealism and broadcast
hypno-aesthetics.)
In the twentieth century, almost exactly one hundred years ago, the demagogue
was Mussolini. He promised a perfect future in exchange for all power. The
result was tragedy.
What can prevent the same mistake today?
Renaissance or renascence, like starting over on better principles while still
being you, is not easy at all; and opportunities for such new starts are often
overlooked, ignored, or just plain botched for lack of skill and effort. But
such renewal or reinvention is the only practical alternative to the demagogue,
who if not stopped by a society's fabric reconstituted always crashes the whole
thing. This is because the demagogue's promises are lies, like hollow bricks
sold as solid ones, which inevitably crumble if built upon like the ancient
Greek hybris of tragic tyrannoi. If they were truthful promises, the demagogue
would be everyone's perfect solution. But they are not truthful, and the
demagogue merely presides over disastrous collapse accompanied by loud speeches
and marching bands.
+
How can the United States, formed in approximately 1788 along Enlightenment
principles, achieve renascence?
Well first of all, we have to realize that the Enlightenment was itself a
renascence of a prior renaissance, namely the Italian, having moved by
isomorphism out of that hilly land of zest and antiquity into the Anglo and
French and Spanish and Flemish and German and other lands near and far, and
translated by that motion from what you might call the personal scale to the
communal. How to found society, it was asked, specifically laws and
institutions, on the basis of Reason and Experience (including science and art
as equal peers) rather than Authority and Tradition alone (i.e. religious
monarchy), and by so doing avert the endless sectarian chaos and bloodshed of
the old world, l'ancien régime? In a nutshell they tried to look at everything
that had been done before (the past), sort out the acorns from the squirrel
turds, then apply creative innovation to pragmatically address then-present
problems. This is adaptation at work in every sense including the evolutionary.
The demagogue on the other hand will tell you there is nothing but turds in the
societal basket, and that only their unique spirit can lead you to the golden
horn of plenty brimming with plump hazelnuts. But they are just selling you a
bill of goods, and have no path but the road to ruin, though they will accept
your money gladly along the way. To declare Enlightenment ideas like voting
and free expression to be passé, false master narratives long abandoned to the
dustbin of history, might feel cathartic but it only helps the demagogue.
Enlightenment, like modernity itself especially in any sustainable form, is
ongoing, not post- or past despite having become an ordinary and routine
expectation. (Are we really post-voting, and post-caring about voting? Only
in an arbitrarily dramatic and hypocritical sense, which frankly breeds only
despair and imaginative apathy by exaggerating in pursuit of shock value.)
This does not mean, however, that preserving a constitutional republic is easy,
a forever fait accompli which never needs any upkeep.
To revive the ideals that make the USA worth preserving and for which its
preservation is necessary means to refresh and rededicate ourselves to
principles like human rights, the rule of law, voting rights, and freedom of
expression, adding genuine contemporary innovation and creativity in holistic
cultural, biological, technological, environmental, temporal, and spatial
contexts, then apply the entire process network to the two toughest problems of
the century: climate and poverty. If renascent constitutional democracy does
not take on these tasks then the demagogue will. It's unfortunate but true.
There is no benevolent referee or omniscient grownup ready to swoop down from
their house on the hill and fix it all for us.
Furthermore, what is probably this and every century's heaviest burden and most
essential task -- discovering a means to persuade all major parties to choose
peace over war as Tolstoy admonished -- is necessary for renascent results. So
be it. This means accepting hybrid design for many systems, in several of
which the twentieth century unreasonably sought purity, while adhering to the
very ideals we hope to help regenerate. Fiercely-held opinions will sometimes
need to abate or adapt in the interest of cooperative progress.
For additional detail, even the ever-loving Rand corporation wrote a report
some time ago about the possible main global scenarios for 2040. The ideal
best-case one was called "a renaissance of the democracies," which might be
something like what we are talking about here. The likelihood is maybe 10% or
less, but that math can be changed if good choices are made by sufficiently
many. The key point is plural: all the democracies. "America Before Everybody
Else," or (ABEE), cannot renew democracy or the USA. The approach must be "All
Nations Evolving Together," as much as practically possible, if it is to avoid
devolving into might-makes-right. Teamwork is unavoidable. Mere might makes
right along the lines of Machiavelli is the demagogue path which undermines any
renaissance scenario. That's not to say the Machiavellian future isn't the
odds-on favorite: like entropy, it always is.
+
To renew the renascence of renaissance therefore we have to go back to the
source, which was even the Italian Renaissance's own source, "ai rivi di
vostr'arti" and of the river of all your arts, "esperienza," if you would but
try it, experience and experiment, methodical science and imaginative art: the
modern double-helical pillar which hopes to prop up from collapse the
two-legged stool of church and state. Dante wrote of this word "esperienza"
with "extraordinary overtones," but it took Leonardo, whose wings were actually
made for such a flight, to paint its portrait. He couldn't safely name it
outright but knew how to leave enough pointers that we could, just barely in
time, find his map, how-to-guide, blueprint, score, dictionary, song, stage
direction, laboratory procedure, and playbook for sustainable modernity. Nor
are indigeneity and the earth's "vegetative soul" or living being excluded from
this source; and as Pater wrote in the essay which for Yeats contained the
"first modern poem" (about the smiling portrait) and from which Proust, Joyce,
Eliot, Stevens, Wilde, and more all found common grist, “The movement of the
fifteenth century was twofold; partly the Renaissance, partly also the coming
of what is called the 'modern spirit,' with its realism, its appeal to
experience. It comprehended a return to antiquity, and a return to nature.
Raphael represents the return to antiquity, and Leonardo the return to nature.”
We need both, the voice and the face, as Leonardo knew, both word and image, to
mirror us back to ourselves better than Machiavelli's mirror for demagogues
teaching slaughter and destruction. The better mirror, it is true, will
prevail in shaping the formless potential futures that reside within those
living today. It is up to us whether we succeed or fail and we cannot blame
the universe's cold heart.
One such phrase as applicable to the USA, as if to jeer at us from the
balconies that line history's alleyway perfectly for dumping chamberpots and
hurling rotten vegetables, has been previously adopted by indeed the worst of
contemporary bigots and thus appears tainted beyond any possible reclamation.
(It also applies to a period of architecture that includes the Brooklyn Bridge
and Coit Tower with its Rivera murals.) The name-phrase in literature belongs
to those 19th century innovators Ralph and Nathaniel, Emily and Walt, plus old
sport Henry, a group more recently expanded to include Frederick himself. But
does it belong only to them? Maybe it does.
You might call it, if you felt the need, "democracy renascent," or "DR," a
Hippocratic self-health program in which all persons participate and somehow
coalesce enough to get past Scylla and Charybdis, Calvino's petrifying face of
the twin political abyss formed by right and left refusing to parley. You
might call it a new birth of freedom, for example. Or, you could say not
American but something having larger square footage like "World Renaissance."
("Human Renaissance" would certain put everyone's best skills to work on the
problem.) At the end of the day, a "Global Year of Renaissance Experiment"
might be a reasonable option.
It strikes me now though that the most proper name could well be Democratic
Renaissance (i.e. the Renaissance of the Democracies). Because if the US goes
demagogue, like it or not, so does everyone else.
Or, as Hamilton ended the Federalist 85, in the last paper's last paragraph,
quoting Hume who got many ideas from Bacon's 1620 book of modern knowledge
("our only hope is in the regeneration of the sciences, by regularly raising
them on the foundation of experience and building them anew"), which had drawn
perhaps in turn upon Cervantes' Don Quixote ("experience itself, the mother of
all the sciences"), a work animated noticeably by Montaigne's final essay "Of
Experience" from the country of Amboise where Leonardo left his remains (une
allégorie de l'expérience) and perhaps even his copy of Dante's Paradiso I&II
and the other Bacon's 1267 Opus Majus including said opus' book the sixth "De
scientia experimentalis," having started the Federalist's first paper with the
four fine words "After an unequivocal experience....":
'The zeal for attempts to amend, prior to the establishment of the
Constitution, must abate in every [person] who is ready to accede to the truth
of the following observations of a writer equally solid and ingenious: "To
balance a large state or society" says hee, "whether monarchical or republican,
on general laws, is a work of so great difficulty, that no human genius,
however comprehensive, is able, by the mere dint of reason and reflection, to
effect it. The judgments of many must unite in the work; EXPERIENCE must guide
their labor; TIME must bring it to perfection, and the FEELING of
inconveniences must correct the mistakes which they inevitably fall into in
their first trials and experiments." These judicious reflections contain a
lesson of moderation to all the sincere lovers of the Union, and ought to put
them upon their guard against hazarding anarchy, civil war, a perpetual
alienation of the States from each other, and perhaps the military despotism of
a victorious demagogue, in the pursuit of what they are not likely to obtain,
but from TIME and EXPERIENCE. It may be in me a defect of political fortitude,
but I acknowledge that I cannot entertain an equal tranquillity with those who
affect to treat the dangers of a longer continuance in our present situation as
imaginary. A NATION, without a NATIONAL GOVERNMENT, is, in my view, an awful
spectacle. The establishment of a Constitution, in time of profound peace, by
the voluntary consent of a whole people, is a PRODIGY, to the completion of
which I look forward with trembling anxiety. I can reconcile it to no rules of
prudence to let go the hold we now have, in so arduous an enterprise, upon
seven out of the thirteen States, and after having passed over so considerable
a part of the ground, to recommence the course. I dread the more the
consequences of new attempts, because I KNOW that POWERFUL INDIVIDUALS, in this
and in other States, are enemies to a general national government in every
possible shape.' [All caps from the original 1st ed.]
https://experiencedemocracy2024.org/experience-democracy-is/
+++
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