The Rise and Fall of the American Republic Part. 1

Republics function under very similar restrictions to cells. Any given cell has a terminal limiting ratio: surface area to volume. What this means is that if the cell gets too big, if the volume increases past a certain point, the cell no longer has the necessary surface area needed to supply the cell's volume with the nutrients it needs to survive. This is metaphorically true for republics literally and figuratively. As Adam pointed out to me the other day, Rome had no capability to feed itself. The whole of North Africa was farmed into a desert over decades of effort trying to keep the republic supplied with bread. But this ratio has more pressing figurative implications.

The original colonies started the fight for independence over a simple notion, "no taxation without representation." This was perhaps not the singular impetus for the Revolutionary War, but it was the rhetoric that catalyzed the colonies into action. Republics are of the people. That's their shtick. And after the war we rose in power, having great resources both natural and theoretical from which the cell of our nation was born.

The current political state of our nation is that of a representative democracy,--those two words being loaded with meaning.
Democracy, because the founders recognized that the "right" of self governing arose from the people, and that there was no such thing as America without those people. Representative, because they understood that as a nation increases in size no one citizen can know enough to be informed adequately to vote in a meaningful way on every conceivable thing that a nation would face.

Here's the catch. Though there are some interesting parallels between Rome's dependence on imported wheat, and our dependence on imported oil, there is a larger issue at stake. Our republic has grown to such enormous girth and diversity that the notion of representative democracy is just that, a notion, it's no longer a reality. This has created an instability in our nation, having a system that was designed to work with limited population over limited geographical area. Now, this instability can be solved in one of two ways. Radical centralization or radical decentralization. Either the Federal government needs to have more power, or the states need to become the real seat of power.

The current administation is trying desperately to centralize. But the situation that centralization creates is too similar to the original impetus the colonies used for war. Given the diversity and size of our nation centralization precludes representation.

Double click

If you could push a button and make it all go away: pollution, industrialization, atomic power, oil derricks, the moderinized world, would you? I had this conversation with a good friend a few months ago, we stumbled around trying to get to a conclusion that just didn't seem to be there. At the heart of this issue is the question--will we ever learn self control? If we learn that we are currently living the antithesis of a sustainable lifestyle, can we change?

But before we go on and try to tackle that question, I want to deal with the notion of sustainability. There are a lot of assumptions when it comes to sustainability. First of all, that life should be sustained. Second, that it is possible to sustain. And finally, that if life is worth sustaining, and that it is possible to sustain it that we could actually realize that possibility. I was attracted to sustainability precisely because I think life is a good thing. And the way we live, we are running out of life as fast as we can. But, here's the kicker--sustainability is an illusion. We know about entropy, we learn about it in highschool physics. The energy of an organized system always tends toward disorder. There is no sustainability with the physics we have,--there is however conservation. And because life is good, we have the responsibility to offer its gift to as many we can.

But back to the question of button pushing. My friend was ready to push the button. He was also a little upset at the conversation because it was a moot. We don't have a button,--short of nuclear armegedon. And as I have thought about that hypothetical button I've realized that I think we need to fail. We need it so desperately that I hope against hope that we do. As a civilization, a global civilization, we need to fail at this modern endeavor so that we don't repeat the same mistakes in the future. So that our children's children can learn self control before they get this apparently limitless power of modern technology. So that when we build up again, we can do it with an eye for the fragility of our little biosphere, and the dramatically limited resources that we actually have.

So in essence we do have a button we can push. Not to make this go away, but to make sure that when this comes again, we understand its mercurial nature and use its powers not to spend harder, but to live better.