7000 years of repression
It's been more than 7000 year ago that civilization first offered humanity the opportunity to settle in central locations, with the advent of agriculture, to build cities to meet the needs of those who opted to settle rather than maintain a nomadic life, and to make laws to govern the behavior of those who settled.
For more than 7000 years, we have used repression to create comformity to moral and legal codes of conduct in hopes of settling conflicts and preventing bad behavior.
And for more than 7000 years, repression has not only failed at this task, in the biggest picture, but we have, subsequently, made a slow, all too slow, path towards liberalization to account for and correct the problems, abuses, and tragedy that repression has left in its wake.
It is amazing to me, looking out at a world that has many of the same problems with human conduct that it had when civilization first arrived, save for those that greater knowledge, education, understanding, peace, compassion, and freedom - the fruits of enlightenment and liberalization, including the understanding that traditional religious experience and ideas have had to offer in more liberalized form - have made more available to us, and think that we might still believe that more repression will mean more solutions to our problems.
It is nonsensical to me, at this point, actually. It is conventional thinking flying in the face of reason, for me, at this point. Because reason only and always leads me back to the same conclusion. Repression does not work. It, ultimately, makes many problems far worse and leaves much sad and unnecessary tragedy in its wake. And it is our fears and insecurities about liberty and what it has to offer that keeps us stuck in this cycle of greater repression as the dominant and repeated solution offered to problems that it cannot solve.
If I am wrong about this, I have hardly heard a very convincing argument to the contrary. I have explored this question for most of my adult life, at this point, and I have yet to read, see, or hear a convincing argument for the idea that power does more than make people less likely to share bad behavior rather than correct for its presence.
Power and the capacity to use force are obviously needed for situations where physical force is being used against citizens or when genuine danger lurks. Aggression will always beget aggression. But minimizing the use of it will improve our ability to correct behavior, if we could only see that.
The most convincing evidence for this fact is comparing the most egregious and the most genuinely good behavior of more liberal and more illiberal societies of this generation or any previous generation.
It becomes perfectly clear, when considering that evidence honestly, that more liberal societies engage in less of the worst treatment of their fellow human beings, are responsible for much of the bridge building that brings members of humanity together, including conceiving of a concept of universal humanity worthy of equal dignity and respect, and treat their fellows in humanity with the most concern, compassion, decency, and proactive, responsible efforts to improve their lives and conditions of any of the societies that human beings have conceived. The ugliest, most murderous, most brutal, most indecent behavior by human beings against fellow human beings has happened at the hands of the most repressive, with very few exceptions.
And yet we still harbor this insecurity about liberal societies and liberty that it is responsible for our ills, even as it has perpetually been responsible for our most serious, sustainable, and reasoned progress. And even as we watch illiberal societies languish in the generally impoverishing, destructive, and inhumane consequences of their repression.
For some reason, reasonable people cannot quite make the connection that the difference between the success of Western democracies and the failure of illiberal states like North Korea, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan, and the like is the degree to which those societies are democratic or undemocratic, free or unfree.
We talk of freedom in free societies like it is a dirty word that is responsible for all of our bad behavior. And this despite the ugliest and most depraved acts that humanity engages in being rationalized and practiced far more regularly and without the opportunity for open reflection that a free and democratic society allows in the most unfree places in the world, now and since the beginning of time.
All that I understand of this remarkably ridiculous fact of liberal democratic and illiberal undemocratic existence is that when people are afraid they turn to repression. It forever fails them. It forever causes needless tragedy. And yet they forever turn in this direction. They do it in liberal societies. They do it in illiberal societies. Our saving grace being that in liberal societies, they learn of the folly of this choice in contemporary and past societies thoroughly enough that they learn to question, criticize, and even correct this mistake more openly and more quickly than illiberal societies, past and present, are able to do for themselves.
7000 years of repression. It has failed us that entire time, with terribly tragic consequences. And yet we still turn in this direction out of fear that freedom means a world where people do terrible things to one another. Never quite coming to terms with the clear and present fact that 7000 years of repression is a history littered without end, seemingly, with people doing just that, and some hundred years experience with liberty better correcting that trend.
If someone has a stronger argument, a stronger understanding, a stronger way of seeing things, I am open to it. But I have yet to hear it.
And our propensity toward repression to solve problems it cannot solve and that it makes very difficult to solve more honestly rolls along as we are all left and remain cowards, in its wake, to face up to its failure.
Surely our history suggests a willingness to be better than our failures when those failures become clear to us.
That, it seems, is what we are waiting for. A clear understanding of our failure.
May it happen sooner rather than later. For the sake of all of those whose unnecessary tragedy are its legacy.
