Elevation
Social Maturity and the Consent of the Governed

Purposes: The papers and airwaves crackle with the static of world governments, a cacophony at the beginning of the Century of Global Limits. Minds numb in the incessant droning; the dawn of the 21st century and our minds grow deaf to the meaning of daily bombs exploding in crowded markets, to the deaths of sons and daughters—ours and theirs, the distinction as meaningless as the deaths—on missions of foreign conquest, while the quiet drip-drip-drip of melting polar ice, the whisper of carbon emissions—oxidized from cretaceous sea creatures—and the subterranean slurp of oil-wells—soda straws at the bottom of their glasses—all drowning in the hiss of daily news.

Government, says our Preamble, derives its "just powers from the consent of the governed," but can we say that America is exercising its powers—in our failing campaign for global control of oil, the suspension of habeas corpus, or the steady transfer of wealth to the rich—with true consent? Is our government doing what we want it to be doing?

I submit that there is a greater need in government today. We are in the century when human populations finally exceed planetary carrying capacity. We exhume so much gas from our consumption of fossil fuels that we are melting the polar ice, raising the seas, flooding our own coastal communities. We have burned half of the oil and gas, and will consume the rest before the end of the century. We have reproduced ourselves into an unsustainable population; our numbers will fall, be it through plague or famine, before the end of the century, toward a population that can once again be sustained on the daily energy that falls from the sun. The challenges are new, in both complexity and scope. We have no experience to draw upon in our search for solutions. But it is clear that we will not solve our problems as individuals. We must solve them together, working through our governments.

Our governments, however, are not showing that they can elevate us. Local, state, or federal governments are falling short of bringing us to focus on what is most important for us to do. We quibble over the social agenda of the religious right—acting as though this myopic arena were the center of our collective concerns—yet most of that agenda is dishearteningly ancient, the product of world views rooted in the middle ages, views that have little residual relevance for the coming century. Our politicians dissemble, deny, ignore, and lie. Especially at the state and federal level, our governments pander, yet we consent to this; currently, our system is not serving us well. Or is it, rather, that we are not serving our system well?

Inherent in the concept of consent of the governed is that the governed should be able to give or withhold consent on the basis of knowledge or some ability to gauge the outcome of a decision. Yet on issues of global warming, energy futures, and population, there is little evidence that the American people, as a nation or within each state, has sufficient understanding of the crises we are in to offer informed consent. We are governing blindly, without understanding the enormity of the stakes. Never before has the need for a knowledgeable citizenry been greater, yet never has there been such an astoundingly high degree of ignorance of the key issues.