You are very selective in your reading matter, Jay.
I pointed out (often), that there are fundamental conditions for
a proper working democracy, and these conditions did not
exist in our history so far. However now we have the capacity
to facilitate all the necessary conditions Anyone, who disregard such a
self-evident point, won't get my attention, especially when
advocating dictatorship.
It's like saying, that slavery is ok,
because in our history so far the priods with slavery were long and
prosperous.
Eva
> >Natural selection and genetic development works in a
> >much larger time scale than social depelopment that
> >may change human hierarchical, obedient etc behaviour
> >in less than a generation and such socially
> >conditioned behaviour forms
> >are not genetically inheritable.
>
> You are correct. Here is a longer quite from Somit & Peterson
> that discusses "indoctrinability":
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This book seeks to explain an incontrovertible though hardly welcome fact:
> Throughout human history, the overwhelming majority of political societies
> have been characterized by the rule of the few over the many, by dominance
> and submission, by command and obedience.
>
> No matter the century or era, we see the same pattern -- authoritarian
> regimes are notable by their presence and persistence, democracies by their
> infrequency and impermanence. This has unarguably been the case in the past;
> an objective assessment of today's some two hundred polities compels the
> conclusion that, even in what is hailed as an "Age of Democracy," it still
> remains essentially the case today.
>
> The consistency of this pattern raises two very troublesome questions. First
> and most obvious: Why are authoritarian governments so common and
> enduring--and democracies, in painful contrast, so rare and, all too often,
> so fragile? To this question, many answers have been offered; as their sheer
> number and variety testifies none has yet been particularly persuasive.
>
> In this book we address the same issue but advance a quite different
> explanation. Although other factors are undoubtedly also operative, the most
> important reason for the rarity of democracy is that evolution has endowed
> our species, as it has the other social primates, with a predisposition for
> hierarchically structured social and political systems. In the pages that
> follow, we will try both to explain why and how this has occurred and,
> equally important, to anticipate the objections that likely will (and
> certainly should) be raised to such an unattractive thesis.
>
> The proposed explanation promptly triggers the second question: How, then,
> can we account for the undeniable occasional emergence of democratic
> polities? Many of those who have wrestled with this problem find the answer
> in some unique concatenation of economic, social, historical, and political
> "facilitating" factors. These factors undoubtedly play a role. Nonetheless,
> paradoxically enough, we must again turn to evolutionary theory for the
> necessary, though not sufficient, condition that makes democracy sometimes
> possible.
>
> Although it shares the proclivity of its fellow social primates for
> hierarchical social organization, Homo sapiens is the only species capable
> of creating and, under some circumstances, acting in accordance with
> cultural beliefs that actually run counter to its innate behavioral
> tendencies. The generally accepted, if lamentably awkward, term for this
> truly unique capacity is "indoctrinability." Celibacy and the (presumably)
> less demanding ideal of faithful monogamy are obvious examples of
> indoctrinability at work. Democracy, an idea almost as alien to our social
> primate nature, is another. It is indoctrinability, then, that makes it
> possible, given some conjunction of the aforementioned facilitating social,
> economic, and other, conditions, for democracies occasionally to emerge and
> to have some chance to survive.
>
> Our original objective was to address the two questions identified above. As
> we proceeded, however, a third task emerged. A neo-Darwinian perspective on
> the prospects of democracy in a social primate species can all too easily be
> misperceived as deliberately or inadvertently (the net effect is the same)
> antidemocratic in thrust. That is assuredly neither our position nor our
> desire. Our intent, rather, is to show that the democratic cause will
> continue to be ill served if we fail to take adequate account of our
> species' innate hierarchical inclinations.
>
> That evolution has endowed Homo sapiens with a genetic bias toward
> hierarchy, dominance, and submission need not necessarily be a counsel of
> despair. Better to grasp this reality than to blissfully believe that our
> species is innately democratic in its political tendencies and that other
> forms of government are unfortunate, but essentially temporary, aberrations.
> Only after we recognize and accept that fact can we begin to think
> realistically about the type of domestic and foreign policies required for
> the survival of democratic government, a subject to which we finally decided
> to devote our concluding chapter. [pp. 3,4, DARWINISM, DOMINANCE, AND
> DEMOCRACY: The Biological Bases of Authoritarianism, by Albert Somit and
> Steven A. Peterson; http://info.greenwood.com/books/0275958/0275958175.html
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0275958175
>
> Jay
>
>
>
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
