Out of the Fire

The reason I call myself a New Age Democrat is not because I am New Age or a Democrat. The New Age is a hybrid of Eastern and Western religions that incorporates meditation, yoga, crystal healing, homeopathy, channeling of Ascended Masters, and other things. A Democrat is a member of an American political party who wants to elect Democrats to public office. I do not practice any of the activities associated with the New Age, and I have voted for some Republicans for high and low public offices. I am a New Age Democrat because we are living in a new age of autonomy and democracy. The 1990s gave us the Internet, ubiquitous cell phones, and other information technology. This new technology has given the ordinary person a great deal of control over himself and other people. So much control, in fact, that we don't really need centralized authorities to help us coordinate the affairs associated with a state. Sure, we need a state that can enforce contracts and create a central monetary unit, as well as provide for the common defense, but we no longer need a state to provide us with information through a bureaucracy. For all purposes other than defense and finance, I am now the state.

The problem with states, from the local to the international level, is to coordinate with each other through trust. Now matter how many laws or institutions we create, we must trust those institutions and the decisions of the institutions in order to join them, and we must trust each other when institutions are absent. This trust is contingent on communication and empowerment. Technology gives the ordinary individual an incredible amount of power (what Thomas Friedman called super-empowered individuals, like Osama bin Laden), but it is the responsibility of the individual to use that technology to help other people, including himself. The more we help each other, the more we help ourselves. The new technology is based on the power of networks, but human networks have dissolved over the past 40 years. We need to restore human networks through communication. Hence, I am a democrat because I believe that the purpose of government is to act as the facilitator of communication on all levels. That is why I call the government a "Central Information Processor", similar to a computer. A government uses elected officials to communicate with the people and expedite decision-making. I do not follow the Burkian or Hamiltonian notion of representative democracy whereby we elect officials every two or four years and then simply say, "do as you wish, I delegate my authority to you, and I will check in two or four years to make sure you have been responsible with that authority." Instead, the people are the government, and the only reason we have elected representatives is to give us information that we cannot ordinarily get by ourselves, such as information on the internal affairs of other countries, or analysis of why things are happening in our own country. After all, even though we have a great deal of information at our fingertips, we, as ordinary individuals, do not have the ability to process that information on a daily basis. Processing, analyzing, and drawing conclusions, is the job of a government. This is the ideal of an open, democratic society.

This ideal is threatened by two things: stupidity and religious zealotry. Stupidity has been a constant threat to democracy since democracy was conceived. Democracy depends on intelligent citizens who can process some information and then intelligently share information with the proper analytical tools. Those analytical tools are given to the students by the government or by private institutions. However, private institutions to not serve democracy because they do not serve the public. They do not hurt democracy either, but they don't necessarily help. So, the common good must be served by state-employed educators who pass down the analytical tools that graduates can use to make decisions about their affairs. When citizens choose not to accept those analytical tools, or they use those tools improperly, the citizens damage democracy. Stupidity increases when we do not have enough time to adequately discuss issues, or to apply the analytical tools to those issues. Stupidity also increases when the state-employed educators do not understand the analytical tools they are passing to the students, or do not pass the tools to every student who needs it.
Religious zealotry is closely related to stupidity, but it is an even greater threat. Religious zealotry forces people to ignore analytical tools and cite authority instead. It also persuades citizens to kill their fellow citizens based on that authority. Thus, religious zealotry turns the open society into a closed society, while stupidity makes the open society impotent.

There has been a rise in religious zealotry over the past decade, associated mostly with the new millennium. Religious zealots from other countries have been trying to destroy the American economy and military, while religious zealots in the United States have been trying to destroy the open society. The best way to combat stupidity is to allocate more time to education and debate: make it easier to attend public universities (make them free, for instance, or very cheap); give more time for public television - 2 or 3 hours instead of 30 minutes or 1 hour. The best way to combat religious zealotry is to promote more religious dialogue through interfaith discussions and use the analytical tools acquired from education to establish the ground rules of the dialogue. While religion is fine as a motivating factor, it must be replaced by accurate facts when used for analysis. Thus, it is OK for Christians to use the Holy Bible to talk about their internal motivation, but it is not good for them to use the Bible to talk about how education or the government should operate. It is not good for them to use the Bible to make decisions about natural resources or about international affairs because the Bible is wrong on both issues. There aren't infinite resources provided by a benevolent God, and there will be no apocalypse or Armageddon. Religious zealots have been thinking there are infinite resources for millennia, and they have been thinking Christ will return for two millennia. Christ will not return, and resources are finite.

Consequently, it is time for religious zealots to get out of the fire. There is no hell, but we can create heaven if we desire it. Heaven is not some place you go to after death, but a condition that you can exist in on Earth, like good health. It is the responsibility of government, and of New Age Democrats in government, to give us the analytical tools to create Heaven on Earth.