Introduction
The purpose of this book is to examine the social turmoil that is causing great distress in western democracies today. Many of these democracies are experiencing democratic drift or system decay, and some are moving toward authoritarianism (Albright, 2018; Applebaum, 2020; Arendt, 1968; Berman, 2019; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). Over the past few decades, there has been a confluence of significant factors leading to great stress across democratic society. Changing demographics, systemic racism and xenophobia, environmental collapse due to global warming, new technologies dramatically affecting society and individual human life, plus growing inequalities among the population are the overarching challenges to human individual and social life today. These stressors are tempting some democratic countries to flirt with instituting authoritarian policies in their governing structures. Because of the distraction produced by the recent attempts to replace democracy with authoritarianism, the critical environmental and social justice issues that are now critically affecting humankind are not being adequately addressed. This book examines the stability of democracy at a time of great change and anxiety among the populations of the world due to climate change, extreme income inequality, social injustice, mass migrations, and the advent of new technologies that are shaking the workplace to its core. Overlaying all of this is the Covid-19 pandemic that is ravaging the world.
The forces promoting authoritarianism have different priorities than the issues raised above demand, and the flirtation with authoritarianism is distracting society away from addressing social injustice and the pending environmental disaster that is before us. The authoritarian forces in society today, like their predecessors in the early 20th century, refocus society on distractions, such as xenophobia, and issues of race and white nationalism, rather than addressing the real crisis as discussed earlier. They replace rational thought and science with nostalgia for a past that probably never existed in reality. They promote grievance including blaming others (people of colour, immigrants, and elites in society) for deterioration in their social status. Those promoting authoritarianism engage in conspiracy theories and blame liberalism (usually naming them socialists or communists when they are clearly not) for the ills they are experiencing.
To gain a greater understanding of these issues and how democratic society has arrived at this juncture, the basic social contract that provides for social solidarity among the population and the increasing social progress that we have all come to expect are analysed and reviewed throughout this text. Present governance systems were spawned from the basic premise of the social contract. It has provided a platform for an unending trajectory of social progress that promised to carry humans to higher levels of civilization as time progressed. Social progress seems to have become dormant, however. Recent events in the USA and other democratic countries around the world require a re-examination of the present social contract to reassert its relevance to social functioning or introduce change aimed at resetting its role in strengthening society’s institutions. It is also critically important to determine how these basic social constructs are being jeopardized by the intrusion of authoritarian forces into democratic society. To accomplish this goal, it is necessary to provide a short history of human social progress, particularly as it relates to the development of the initial rudimentary, and later, more sophisticated social contract.
Human Development and Social Transformation Then and Now
The story of human development and social transformation is a fascinating one of constant and fluctuating change. Since humans established themselves as the dominant species on the planet they have progressed through many biological and social alterations, some of which have been transformational, and some have led to dead ends. In prehistoric days, biological evolution played a dominant role in human development, but later cultural development became central, and technological development now epitomizes the hallmark of present-day human life. Perhaps not surprisingly, change was relatively slow in prehistoric times but steadily gained in momentum until culture eventually replaced biology as the determining characteristic of human progress. Although it is difficult to say precisely, culture was certainly the central driving force of human development by 50,000 years ago. Cognitive development and technological innovation have provided the drivers for the complex development that Homo sapiens experienced over the years. Most recently, growth in both domains has been exponential and not simply gradual linear development. Of course, each of these domains is intimately connected and did not develop separately or independently.
Early humans lived in small kin groups and existed under the law of nature for much if not most of their existence here on the earth. The law of nature essentially pitted one individual against all others. It was virtually every person for themselves. A person’s possessions essentially amounted to what they could capture and hold on to. As time went on, and social groups expanded beyond one’s kin, humans transitioned into larger collectives and left the law of nature behind in favour of developing the social contract where a group of people ceded their individual authority to a sovereign ruler usually a shaman which eventually graduated to a high priest or king.
I speak here about the social contract and social progress as if they were evenly developed consistently across the world. This is not the case, however. Although most parts of the globe did develop some type of social contract and engaged in social progress as various parts of the world defined it, they approached it in their own way and time frame. In this book, I focus on western democracies recognizing that other regions of the world, particularly in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, developed their own version of the social contract and social progress in an entirely different manner than did the West.
Technology played a huge role in human cultural development right from the beginning. Since the start of early human life, technological development and innovation have steadily picked up speed. As Kurzweil tells us, “the pace of change of our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace” (Kurzweil, 2006, p. 30). Now, technological innovation may be proceeding faster than our social institutions are able to accommodate, adding to the stress in society. Technological innovation is dependent on our cognitive ability to learn and understand complexity, so the separate but interlinked domains of biology and culture are tied together and interact in a complex and complicated system. Brain power has certainly permitted human society to become highly technological. Post-modern humans are now developing technology that can emulate the human learning process and extend the capabilities of modern humankind into unknown territory. Today, many believe that culture is now shaping human biology and will continue to do so into the future at an even faster pace than it is doing today (McNamara, 2004; Kurzweil, 2006). Soon technology will drive human development more so than biology. Biological advancement will respond to cultural, most notably, technological development.
There have been many noteworthy points along the path of human development that could be singled out for their contribution to social progress. Certainly, the discovery and use of fire, tool making first using stone and then bronze, the advent of agriculture and its impact on the transformation of a nomadic to sedentary lifestyle are just a few of the major technological events that fundamentally changed the trajectory of the human condition throughout the ages. Little if any of this technological development could have occurred without the creation and implementation of the social contract.
Amongst the fundamental innovations that have led humanity to the dominant position it holds in today’s world is the invention of the social contract and the pervasive idea of social progress. Both of these abstract ideas played a critical role in the early development of modern humanity and are as central today as they ever were in keeping human society on the path of sustainability and development and not regress or collapse. And, while there are many critics of the imperative of social progress, especially how it is defined (Chapter three), the idea of social progress is fully imbedded in the modern human psyche and social system.
A Difficult Time for Humanity
There has not been greater political or social upheaval in the western democracies since the occurrence of such events as the abolition of slavery in the 19th century or the push for civil rights in the 1960s. This renewed upheaval requires renewal of such fundamental constructs as the social contract and the goals of social progress. Given the robust quality of the capitalist economy in the western democracies since the end of WWII, society has been willing to float along and enjoy the fruits of that economic growth without intentionally and collectively renewing and updating the end goal. It is thought that social progress will continue in perpetuity and without impediment. That is turning out not to be the case, however. Societies throughout the world, including the democracies of the West, are experiencing stagnating social progress in addition to facing looming environmental collapse because of human-created global warming. These social and environmental issues began over half a century ago, and they are now showing themselves to be impediments to the social development of a large section of the population. For these reasons, western democracy is in need of analysis that can uncover the roots of the major crises that threaten to dismantle democracy and replace it with authoritarianism. The purpose of this book is to examine the current attack on democracy and the threat of autocracy through the lens of social contract theory and the concept of social progress. These two basic social frameworks will provide the lens for an analysis of the turmoil we are witnessing in the Western world today.
There have been periodic authoritarian attacks on democracy throughout the last few centuries, including most notably in Germany and Italy in the early 20th century and more recently in Turkey, Hungary, and some lesser-known eastern central European, Asian, and South American countries. By contrast, some communist countries have attempted to throw off authoritarianism and adopt democracy. Putin’s Russia provides an example of an aborted attempt to transition from communism to democracy, a transition that wound up falling short of that goal and relapsing into authoritarianism once again. Democracy is hard to achieve in the first instance and a difficult system to maintain.
The most recent and perhaps best-known attack on democracy was undertaken by Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the USA. Trump launched a frontal attack on US democracy throughout his administration but most dramatically at the end of his term. He attempted to emulate the authoritarian’s siege of government, and while it may have been unsuccessful with a failed coup at the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021, it continues to fester within the Republican party and in some sectors of larger society and will continue to aggravate the political system for some time to come. It would be a mistake to think that the insurrection was exclusively a small group of rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6. There is a cadre of oligarchs in the USA headed by Charles Koch who are investing heavily in developing a surreptitious program to end liberal democracy and replace it with unfettered capitalism. Koch has funded numerous think tanks, such as the Cato Institute, giving them the explicit but furtive goal of eliminating all government functions except for the military and police, and to place all present services, such as social security and healthcare, in the private marketplace. As Nancy MacLean suggests, “(I)n the movement’s view, government was the realm of coercion, and the market was the realm of freedom, of freely chosen mutually valued exchange” (MacLean, 2018, p. 416). Let there be no mistake, there is an active movement that is attempting to do away with liberal democracy that incorporates the principles of the Keynesian Welfare State and replaces it with pure capitalism. If this were to occur, the result could be more accurately described as the capitalist state, not liberal democracy. This is the personification of Spencerism, and the adoption of Darwin’s popularized, but not technically accurate, notion of the ‘survival of the fittest’ to human relations. Little is known about this movement by the general public because the conspirators know that if their design became general knowledge people would soundly reject their scheme. So, they need to enlist the disaffected in society by focusing on the ‘loss of freedom’ even though what that idea means to the economic oligarchs may be quite different from what it means to the common person. For the oligarchs, freedom is unfettered economic freedom that restricts government from placing any restraints on their ability to generate wealth including many of the programs and policies of the welfare state. The role of government for the economic oligarchs is limited to creating a military to defend the country from outside aggression and police forces for maintaining law and order that protects their individual wealth-creating activities. For the January 6 insurrectionists and their supporters, freedom means individual liberty where their activities are not regulated for the benefit of society including civil rights. Although freedom for both these groups may seem similar at one level, in order to provide the oligarchs with the type of freedom they are looking for would limit the common person adversely and eliminate the type of freedoms they may be seeking. In fact, the type of freedom the oligarchs are seeking would constrain the general population, eliminating collective bargaining and the minimum wage, for example. They would also be seeking to privatize all of the social programs that are so important to everyday life such as social security and Medicare. They wish to commodify all human activity.
Because Trump’s debacle is the most recent and, pe...
