The Etiquette of a Democratic Nation

The process of democratizing our Western Civilization has been a slow, gradual but mostly progressive process. It is the process that initiated the Modern Age, which began in various places at different dates in the 15th century CE. In that century, the leading trends of civilization chose to no longer allow theocracy to justify hierarchical submission of the human intellect. From there other ideas began to evolve, including philosophical, scientific, political, social and economic. There were and still are groups that don't like democracy, though they may conveniently claim to for political purposes. Or, they may truly not understand what democracy actually means. Either way, there are people who are very patriotic about democracy, but their actions reflect the opposite. In this country today, we have people who don't like the idea that certain people have the right to vote, and they try to create obstacles (legislated and otherwise) to make it hard for targeted groups to do so. There are people who don't like certain groups of people to obtain socioeconomic stability or success. There are people who don't like women and other minorities to have leadership roles in business, science, politics or education. All of these qualities of thought are fundamentally undemocratic. There are also simple everyday behaviors that represent what are either rude or uninformed acts, if you are living in a democratic society and claim to belong to it. If you are reflexively rude or obnoxious to people in the service industry who are honestly trying to do a good job, that is reflection of aggressive class-consciousness. In a democratic society, there are rich, middle class and (sadly) also poor people, but the central idea is that we are all socially and legally equal. There is no etiquette book that says that because someone has a higher economic status that they have a right to mistreat or show unwarranted, unprovoked impatience toward a waitress/waiter, salesclerk, maintenance person, custodian or government servant who is trying to serve you. We do not legally recognize the prerogatives of aristocracy in this country, and neither should we condone social behaviors that reflect any such presumptions. A democratic society also does not condone or legally protect acts of rudeness toward a person because you don't like their gender, their race, their dialect, their economic status, their apparent sexual persuasion, their cultural attire, or their religion. Those people who are abusive toward others for these reasons are mentally inhabiting a totalitarian homogenized concept of society that does not exist upon the real democratic ground they actually tread. It is ironic that the people who are prone to these rude anti-democratic behaviors are often telling people different from themselves to leave the country -- even though whoever they are targeting have a perfect legal right to be here and usually are also citizens born or naturalized in our country. However, if there is any need to suggest who should leave, it should be those who act like the only people worthy of living here and enjoying its privileges are only those exactly like themselves. Of course, uncalled-for rudeness from people of any economic, cultural or gender status should really be frowned upon in any society -- democratic or otherwise. What is more, we didn't have the American Revolution so that we could independently recreate the same feudal society we broke from across the ocean.

Not Without Witnesses

You self-proclaimed "Lords of the Universe" with your evident designs of eliminating the middle class: your actions are not suffered without protest, without conscious understanding, without realization of the future ramifications of this reduction of society and civilization itself. We the People are keeping a record of what you so deceitfully undermine and carelessly destroy: meaningful, gainful employment; the judicial rights of real human beings; public education; decent medical care for all; versatile cities that serve all of humanity; public mass transportation; civic and interurban infrastructure; the unfettered teaching of the humanities and the social sciences; the inspirational endeavors of the fine and technical arts. We mark you who destroy these things in the name of all your false deities. You shall not get away with this without a testament of your wrongdoing. That testament we shall pass on to our children, and they theirs. All shall know that what has been lost has been stolen. All shall know that what has been stolen is our birthright as the American People. Your iniquities are exposed like a stripe of filth behind your beautiful suits. One day we shall have our country back, and if your kind is still among us, you shall play the humblest, meekest and most repentant of roles. And we shall rebuild what you destroyed, and you shall wonder why you felt you had to take it away from us in the first place, for America will shine as it never has before. And all that is now insane shall be healed with love and forgiveness and community for all.

We Put Down the Neanderthals But...

There were once other species of human on this Earth, even sharing this planet simultaneously: homo erectus in East Asia, homo sapiens in Africa (then outward!), and homo neanderthalensis in Europe and the Near East. Of our two cousins, the media and science itself express the strongest interest in neanderthals, because they were the first alternate humans to be discovered (and were once thought to be the missing link between us and other apes), and because they are the most closely related to us of all other human species that have ever walked this earth. Our common ancestor with neanderthals (homo heidelbergensis) dates back 400,000 years ago in Africa. Neanderthals were (objectively speaking) a highly successful branch in our family. From the time of their evolutionary emergence as a distinct species to their extinction, they were around for nearly a hundred thousand years -- that's twice the amount of time our own particular biological branch has been in existence. Their extinction is the tipping point of interest, and it is related to the entrance into their environment by our own species. Their numbers fell steadily as ours increased. There is not any direct evidence of warfare between the species, though skirmishes might have occurred. What scientists point to is the evidence for a rapid development in social organization, hunting weapons and domestic tools among homo sapiens, and the lack thereof in all categories among neanderthal culture. The general verdict is that the neanderthals were too conservative, and had smaller capacities (because of a flatter skull) for those parts of the brain responsible for environmental adaptation, cultural advancement, and surmounting new stresses in living circumstances. Steady contact between modern humans and neanderthals lasted from around 50,000 to about 30,000 years ago, and then the last neanderthals died off in their final redoubt in the Caves of Gibraltar. In the comparative analysis, the journalists and the scientists now like to trumpet the reasons why we (our glorious species) were the ones that triumphed. They talk about how skilled collectively we have always been at exploiting environmental resources to the most refined degree, and how we have continued to tinker with ruthlessly sophisticated strategies of social organization. The neanderthals, however, are criticized for being too culturally minimalistic, too socially simplistic. And yet in all the time the neanderthals enjoyed their environment free of our presence, they never hunted any species to extinction, and the archaeological evidence shows they decently cared for their children, their mates and their elderly. By comparing ourselves with them to their disfavor, we have been acting especially unreflective. We may be more intelligent, have more raw ingenuity, but we also have a certain flaw in the area of "our wondrous knack for social organization": the majority of any given human population has a habit of allowing itself to be ruled by a morally and numerically inferior elite group, no matter what time in history, nor what country, nor what form of government. This would not be such a problem for the survival of the planet or our species, if we did not now have incredible technologies harnessed to the ambitions of these ruthlessly clever but spiritually moronic leaders. If we destroy our living environment and consequently ourselves in the course of this present century (and there is currently no reassuring sign that we are making any serious efforts not to in a materially substantial way), then those "pathetic" neanderthals will have beaten the term of existence of our species by some 500 centuries. And remember, if it wasn't for us, the neanderthals would likely still be around to this day.