Understanding Human Ignorance >>>>> Chapter Three >>>>> Authoritarian Governance

Human ignorance, then, is grounded in the reality of human infancy. 

 

Humankind is a temporal, intellectual, and spiritual infant. 

 

Violence has been the defining characteristic of human existence. 

 

Following and extending Hobbes, not only has the individual life been nasty, brutish, and short, but in like manner has the existence of homo sapiens on earth been despicable, caddish, and brief.  Inasmuch as the term homo sapiens means “knowledgeable human,” the appellation is a misnomer.

 

The male leaders who have dominated life on earth, especially since the advent of those more complex configurations known ironically as civilizations, have tended to seize power and restrict participatory governance to the very few.  The river valley civilizations of Sumeria, Egypt, and China all were headed by one of monarchical or imperial aspirations;  governance in Mohenjodaro and Harappa in the Indus Valley is less clear, but social stratification abided.  The Greek city-state of Athens gets favorable reviews for asserting the democratic principle, but civitas was limited to males who owned substantial property.  Romans during the republican phase did provide for a Tribune representing commoners in addition to the Senate of the patricians, but in almost all cases the leaders known as consuls were of patrician rank;  and as the years of the Common Era approached, republican governance gave way to the more exclusivist imperial style.

 

In China, the quest for the life of the scholar-bureaucrat became by the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) theoretically open to the meritorious of all classes, but the level of education needed to gain the academic degrees leading to high government position was beyond the reach of most humble folk, and in any case the emperorship operated on the principle of heredity.  Japan was dominated by imperial, aristocratic, and samurai elites.  Monarchies and empires abided in Southeast Asia, Mesoamerica, South America, and Africa.  Muslim empires---  Umayyad, Abbasid, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal---  were autocratic and patriarchal, with power held by the very few.  Hindu monarchies and empires that preceded or competed with the Mughals in India were typically short-lived, with territorial boundaries that fell short of aspirations, but whatever level of power manifested was the province of elite males.  Considerable social stratification is indicated by archeological sites of North America.  Village societies across the globe, including those of oceanic areas, featured shorter distance between ruler and ruled, but the propensity of male leaders to exercise authoritarian, imperial, monarchical, and aristocratic governance is clear.

 

Even as the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689) in Great Britain countered the authoritarian monarchical and aristocratic system with an increasingly powerful representative parliament, the franchise opened only very slowly to those other than aristocratic and mercantile elite males.  Similarly were the opportunities to vote and participate in governance limited to the very few even in putatively democratic societies in the 19^th and 20^th centuries;  in western Europe, Canada, and the United States, governance was the sphere of white males until women gained the franchise at the early-middle stages of the 20^th century.  Even then, women had limited inheritance rights and, if married, by law had to defer to their husbands in decisions involving money and property.  Nonwhites in all of these western societies faced severe discrimination;  in the United States, African Americans lived under conditions of the police state in the Jim Crow South and found urban life at the termini of the Northern Migration to be a severe disappointment in the context of hopes for full citizenship.

 

Not until the years spanning 1964-1973 did women and nonwhite ethnicities in the United States gain enforceable legal affirmation of citizenship status.  This legal advancement has met with considerable opposition from white males whose centuries of dominance have been challenged: 

 

Recent vigor in white male nationalism is but an extreme form of a general phenomenon. 

 

And across the globe, authoritarian patriarchy remains the rule to which there are few exceptions.  In an increasingly interactive globe of humanity, the social movements witnessed since 1968 in the United States and the West have had an impact and will have enduring influence;  however, given the level of white male resistance even in those societies deemed most progressive, the path to multiethnic, gender equitable governance will be long, difficult, and violent.

 

The pattern of governance in prehistory and, especially, history has been patriarchal and authoritarian.

 

In full realization of the promise of legal advances since 1968, women must take the lead in developing egalitarian political systems and in so doing alter the course heretofore observed in the human past.