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 19th and 20th 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 20th 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.
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