@Aldarion I do find much of this post to have extremely great value.
I find that skepticism with democracy in the context of science fiction and fantasy is relatively common, and it ties into a general conservative thread in science fiction--in nominally futurist literature and thought--which was especially prevalent in the 60s and 70s. Because of that thread, I'm going to quote fairly heavily from Frank Herbert while agreeing with you. My argument is that recognising that the human condition is negatively impacted by democracy and that it has a tendency toward authoritarianism is actually much more common in pop culture than would be recognised, but has steadily been pushed aside since the 1980s.
To start with, there was a kind of strain of celebration of primitivism during the period of the 60s and 70s which was very much alive, a desire to disconnect from a world that was seen as being incredibly dangerous, in which modern society was actively harmful to people and their ways of living. This didn't reject technology per se, but rather the technological civilisation and its schema in general. The Aristasian movement I've promoted the values of here before (without being strictly affiliated) certainly qualifies, separate from the related religious development of Filianism.
I think we should go back to what we're seeing in the modern democratic world before we consider where this poison comes from. For example, there were some books from the period that emphasized this like "Stand on Zanzibar" that were influenced by the Stanford Rat Experiment. Which basically saw a systematic psychological breakdown in rats if there was overcrowding, even if all of their needs were objectively being met. So there's something going on in cities so that it was recognised that continued human population growth on Earth was very deleterious. Modern Representative Democracy is fundamentally a system of one person, one vote, which means that the concentration of people in psychologically unhealthy cities--producing neuroses--in fact makes the majority of voters in the modern world neurotic.
One possible solution to this overcrowding was for humans to begin space-steading, so there was a lot of crossover between people who were worried about the civilisational impact of urban diseases of the mind, essentially, density and overcrowding, with those who wanted humanity to move into space. So there was a thread of "techno-conservatism", which wanted to actually advance material civilisation to get us into space for the purposes of moral renewal, by allowing the people in cities to essentially be rural pioneers in a new frontier (space colony plans in the 70s could be quite lavish in terms of living space--see Gundam).
So, on to Frank Herbert. He had a kind of conservative vision of "Deep ecology", which is normally treated as a very left-wing concept, of a living Earth and interconnected web of humanity being fundamentally impacted and influenced by the surrounding environment. The maxim from Dune of "Harsh Lives Make Harsh Ways" is a fundamental conception of this. This is deeply conservative because it dictates that the traditions of our ancestors were essentially always correct, having evolved in congruence with the ecology in which we exist, and therefore are the essential "natural" way of living in a particular time and place. So to me, that puts Herbert firmly down on the side of being conservative (just, like any good conservative, he was deeply skeptical of power).
In Herbert's analysis, societies like modern Arab Civilisation have their nominal cruelties because they have spent thousands of years adapting to their local environment, and what to an outsider seems like incomprehensible, primitive evil, is in fact an incredibly sophisticated set of adaptations which collectively create a culture which can manage living in a very harsh environment.
This is a cultural adaptation in which humanity both influences its environment (as the indigenous Americans did most graphically by actually engineering the soil and the mix of trees growing in areas of the Amazon to support fertile human life, literally making the red soil into the rich "terra preta", the black Earth, or when the indigenous Americans in the Northeast Woodlands essentially crafted them into a fertile garden environment)--and in which the environment influences humanity by creating culture.
So you end up with a situation in which a human culture to be healthy must inevitably be in a state of harmony or balance with its surrounding environment, and that environment will in fact directly influence the mode and mechanism of government.
Because of this I see, for example, the formation of the United States as a kind of "indigenisation" of the American colonists, in which the founding fathers adopted a system of government similar to and inspired by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as part of our settling into the Northeast Woodlands.This was natural and in principle the process can only continue. Until the white settler nations generally occupy the same ecological niche that the indigenous people in that area did before them.
The problem is in those urban areas. New England Village democracy, nor the participative and deliberative process of the Haudenosaunee, is not inherently unhealthy. Nor was the American constitution inherently unhealthy, originally.
Urban areas are, as I call them, "social reactors". They're incredibly productive, but they also operate according to conservative laws that we have been lately discovering, which collapse a great deal of what is honestly the greatest indictment of left-wing ideology in the modern world, which is urban planning. It may be driven by compassion, and I do sincerely believe that, but urban planning has consistently begin one of the greatest unmitigated disasters in western civilisation. The first completely planned city of modern times is a good illustration of the beginning of a very chequered legacy, taking for example the city of Palmanova:
The humanist theorists of the ideal city designed numerous planned cities that look intriguing on paper but were not especially successful as livable spaces. Along the northeastern frontier of their mainland empire, the Venetians began to build in 1593 the best example of a Renaissance planned town: Palmanova, a fortress city designed to defend against attacks from the Ottomans in Bosnia. Built ex nihilo according to humanist and military specifications, Palmanova was supposed to be inhabited by self-sustaining merchants, craftsmen, and farmers. However, despite the pristine conditions and elegant layout of the new city, no one chose to move there, and by 1622 Venice was forced to pardon criminals and offer them free building lots and materials if they would agree to settle the town.
So the Humanists' urban theories failed miserably. What followed was a period of two centuries in which theoretical thought would be fixated on the idea of creating utopia by engineering and changing the conditions in which humans lived. In the mid-19th century, the great capital reconstructions of Europe were dictated by social considerations of the prevention of revolution, take for example Baron Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris for Napoleon III; the city's shape was supposed to, in military terms, actively deter the ability of a Commune to form and to seize and hold the city in insurrection against Napoleon the Third. Well, the Commune still rose anyway, though Napoleon III had already been despatched by the Prussians. In Britain the movement really came to the fore as the "Sanitary Movement" of 1800 - 1890 which thought that it could achieve moral sanitation for the working class as well as physical sanitation by centralised, top-down urban planning.
By 1900, the idea that an urban planning could alleviate the social problems of factories and industrialisation was widespread in society, and in fact one can argue that it drove the growth of the "new liberalism" which became our modern moderate left. In 1899 Sir Ebenezer Howard founded the Town and Country Planning Association to promote his "Garden City", the idea that greenbelts combined with proportional arrangement of agriculture, residences and industry would promote the health of the workers by giving them access to fresh air and other vital qualities.
Instead, of course, it isolated the residences into complicated approach roads, made it difficult for people to enter and leave, and ultimately culminated in its mid-20th century application in, to quote an urban planner who later regretted it, "everything that could go wrong in a society went wrong [...] [it] became the centre of drugs, it became the centre of violence and, eventually, the police refused to go into it. It was hell." Unfortunately many American Urban Housing Developments followed the Garden City principles in miniature, isolating poor residents and making it harder for them to get ahead and making the areas impossible to police. These developments were essentially engines of deracination, which disconnected people from the landscape and the environment, and therefore from the culture and society of their ancestors, those key things which had made them healthy in the first place.
But they were still voters.
By 1900, in short, the idea was fixed into the head of urban planners, decision makers, and intellectuals, that centrally planned cities could actually yield positive improvements--reduction in crime, improved employment, improved health for people, elimination of racial tensions. Indeed, the arrogance of the movement culminated in the idea that proper central planning of cities might even effectively bring about world social peace. What instead happened each time central planning was actually used on cities was that all of these metrics got worse. The Urban Planning process remains the most profound indict of this kind of process. What actually happened was that rigidly formalised urban planning led to impoverished people being relegated to unplanned slums in much of the world, and constricted into isolated, crime-ridden massive projects from which they could not leave to get jobs in countries that had enough money to build them.
By the interwar period this led to the rise of Le Corbusier, Moses, and even Frank Lloyd Wright, whose architecture was acceptable but whose idea that the automobile would revolutionize human life by planning cities around them as deeply flawed. All of this culminated in the sheer megalomaniacal arrogance of Housing and Urban Development through the Johnson years--a combination of massive freeway construction shattering neighbourhoods and the construction of huge urban housing projects which would lift people out of poverty, while in fact it merely trapped and concentrated them. This era of Modernism in urban planning marched hand in hand into brutalist architecture to produce vast central-government planned and executed projects, even in relatively free countries like the United States, that culminated in this kind of insane, Ozymandias-like collapse best typified by the immense Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project in St. Louis which began to disintegrate the moment it had been completed in the mid-1950s and by the late 60s had become legendary for its crime, poverty, and profound racial segregation. This was the objective when it was built:
"We must rebuild, open up and clean up the hearts of our cities. The fact that slums were created with all the intrinsic evils was everybody's fault. Now it is everybody's responsibility to repair the damage. "
That was the result--devastation worse than anything which the slums themselves had provided.
Psychic devastation of the actual electorate, and therefore the governance of the country. Likewise, the great car-based cities like Brasilia disintegrated horribly, but also, mass transit projects rammed through for the sake of mass transit are frequently completely useless to the inhabitants of a city and do nothing except gentrify areas and further isolate the poor--the latest theories, in short, are just as bad and useless as those before.
So we get to what I call the "Law of Cities". This is a pithy way for me to describe the results of this situation:
The Law of Cities.
Ancient settlements and modern cities follow same rules of development
Recently derived equations that describe development patterns in modern urban areas appear to work equally well to describe ancient cities settled thousands of years ago, according to a new study led by a researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The Pre-History of Urban Scaling
The Pre-History of Urban Scaling
Cities are increasingly the fundamental socio-economic units of human societies worldwide, but we still lack a unified characterization of urbanization that captures the social processes realized by cities across time and space. This is especially important for understanding t...
To quote:
Despite notable differences in appearance and governance, ancient human settlements function in much the same way as modern cities, according to new findings by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute and the University of Colorado Boulder.
Previous research has shown that as modern cities grow in population, so do their efficiencies and productivity. A city's population outpaces its development of urban infrastructure, for example, and its production of goods and services outpaces its population. What's more, these patterns exhibit a surprising degree of mathematical regularity and predictability, a phenomenon called "urban scaling."
But has this always been the case?
SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt researches urban dynamics as a lead investigator of SFI's Cities, Scaling, and Sustainability research program. When he gave a talk in 2013 on urban scaling theory, Scott Ortman, now an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at CU Boulder and a former Institute Omidyar Fellow, noted that the trends Bettencourt described were not particular to modern times. Their discussion prompted a research project on the effects of city size through history.
To test their ideas, the team examined archaeological data from the Basin of Mexico (what is now Mexico City and nearby regions). In the 1960s—before Mexico City's population exploded—surveyors examined all its ancient settlements, spanning 2000 years and four cultural eras in pre-contact Mesoamerica.
Using this data, the research team analyzed the dimensions of hundreds of ancient temples and thousands of ancient houses to estimate populations and densities, size and construction rates of monuments and buildings, and intensity of site use.
Their results, published in the new open-access journal Science Advances this month, indicate that the bigger the ancient settlement, the more productive it was.
"The bigger the ancient settlement, the more productive it was".
Economic productivity is a function of human density, that's it.
So, let's go back to the infamous Stanford Mouse (sorry, it was Mouse, not Rat) experiment:
The Behavioral Sink
This experiment led to Calhoun's ominous equation:
Mortality, bodily death = the second death
Drastic reduction of mortality
= death of the second death
= death squared
= (death)^2
(Death)^2 leads to dissolution of social organization
= death of the establishment
Death of the establishment leads to spiritual death
= loss of capacity to engage in behaviors essential to species survival
= the first death
Therefore:
(Death)^2 = the first death
So, human cities are extremely successful social and economic reactors which produce powerful economic benefits. But traditionally, in the middle ages, they were population sinks, filled with disease and death. They were a limited part of society, which performed a necessary and important function, and frequently had functional democratic governance. But they were self-containing. The presence of disease kept them from growing too large and too dense (the very largest in China reached two million people in a single urban area, very briefly).
Rural areas were the healthy and safe areas. You went to a city to get rich, or because your personal situation was hopeless, but you did not survive it, not often, not in terms of having a long-term sustaining family.
Cities were, literally, bluntly, and forgive the indelicacy, death traps.
Nonetheless, they were very economically productive--within the limits of the population and density of the times, literally as productive as modern ones, the Law of Cities provides this, which I formalised as:
"The Intensity of Human Interaction in Time and Space is the sole relative Determinator of the Economic Productivity of a City."
So what humanity has been trying to do for the past two hundred years is cheat a fundamental law of the universe.
The quote that I just provided above requires some renewed emphasis:
The Intensity of Human Interaction in Time and Space is the sole relative Determinator of the Economic Productivity of a City because of how important it is.
But! But! So, we've learned that psychologically, we can't handle the rates of human interaction that cities provide us. Calhoun demonstrated this: Cities literally drive people insane.
Mammals in general, but especially people with their spiritual needs, whose cultures evolve in rural areas, whose cultures are in tune to the local land, cannot deal with the level of interaction in a city, the densification and overcrowding. The problem is that cities make everyone rich. So what do elites want to do? Elites do not want to admit that cities are a problem and definitely don't want to admit, in the slightest, that we have to accept reduced economic growth to have psychologically healthy people and psychologically healthy societies.
Likewise, massive economic areas of cooperation aide in the concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite, so while we should have a culture in each area of the United States which matches the ecoregion there, we have essentially tried to force the Northeast Woodlands culture on the whole of the United States to make everyone remain part of the country.
Essentially, the unity of large nations under the same laws is fundamentally a dangerous proposition when those nations do not share a single ecoregion, and therefore a single set of biophysical pressures on the development of the idiosyncracies of their culture.
The Aristasians saw the same thing in England in which London, essentially, ate the entire country, and used its culture to stamp out local and regional variations in custom, culture, and speech. They spent a lot of time talking about this and I do believe it was the finest--their best critique.
So to me, the "Pit" described in Aristasian Pit Crit is the attempt to use technology to cheat the laws of nature: To force humans to remain productive in cities despite the psychological pressures they produce, and to force ecoregions to remain politically unified even as their cultures begin to drift apart and naturally localise.
There is a fundamental, ineffable arrogance in this that the minds of these men are able to displace and replace the knowledge of thousands of generations of women in leading their communities. It is an arrogance that leads us into the destruction of the Pit. To circle back to Frank Herbert and quote some of the finest of his characters:
Taraza cleared her throat. “No need. Lucilla is one of our finest Imprinters. Each of you, of course, received the identical liberal conditioning to prepare you for this.”
There was something almost insulting in Taraza’s casual tone and only the habits of long association put down Odrade’s immediate resentment. It was partly that word “liberal,” she realized. Atreides ancestors rose up in rebellion at the word. It was as though her accumulated female memories lashed out at the unconscious assumptions and unexamined prejudices behind the concept.
The reason the Madrians, as the progenitors of the Aristasian movement, resisted so strongly the liberal notions of their femininst cousins is because they appreciated the dangerous arrogance of a small group of intellectuals assuming they could overcome the wisdom of tens of thousands of years of mother passing knowledge to daughter to conserve society.
Because, in fact, this was the same mistake that men had made to create the Pit--the idea they could engineer societies, engineer cultures, engineer cities, when these things instead develop organically, like living things, according to absolute laws of human nature.
The entire conceit of modern society is that roles filled by competition--democracy--and roles filled by knowledge--the social scientists--can actually preempt and plan human nature. This is an artefact of the entire urban planning process.
So the problem is not Jeffersonian Democracy per se, but what replaced it as human concentration occurred in the cities--the Neurocracy, the rule of the Neurotics. We now have this great majority of humans in western civilisation who are at some level fundamentally dysfunctional, and in the system of modern democracy, they may drag the rest of us in rural areas along for the ride.
And, interestingly, from my own conservative, feminine essentialist perspective, the conception of modern democracy favours male power because it inherently organises society around their conceits--competition. Anti-democratic forms of government are more inherently feminine. I am very suspicious of conservative movements in democratic societies making anything better, because they are not supporting the restoration of the natural order--patriarchal or otherwise--which would require a return to a society ordered around the land, and stripping power from the cities.
Nothing else will be sufficient.
But, in principle, a rural democratic order like that which Jefferson envisioned, is not immoral or doomed; unfortunately, it is a mere fact of history that things turned out differently for our Constitution.
