FM>   It was this "second best polis" that Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of 
South
FM>America and child of the enlightenment actually used as his model for a
FM>constitution for Bolivia if you can imagine a backward area such as that 
afte
FM>three centuries of absolute rule under a church-dominated Spanish Empire
FM>trying (grin) to even UNDERSTAND the concept of the Nocturnal Council!!
FM>Bolivar, while genuinely admiring and saluting the founding fathers of the
FM>United States left South America for the last time muttering to himself 
he
FM>who makes a revolution PLOWS THE SEA!!
Certainly, a revolution causes fear an uncertainty and severe economic
disruption, all of which compel people to crave order in the form of
a strong man or some other dictatorial structure.
But you've implied an important point: government, I think, has little
to do with the top-down theories of a Plato or some Enlightenment
figure, and everything to do with the implicit and unconscious
culture of a people.  If several generations of a people have
unconsciously learned their attitudes, body language, and behaviors
in the context of a capricious Main Dude, then a democratic/republican
behavior system is simply not in their repertoire.  I remember seeing
a reprint of an editorial in a Russian newspaper a few years ago;
it complained that the basic Russian political style was not to
make a compromise deal that got things done.  Rather, the Russian
editorialist said, the Russian political style was to devastate
your opponent.
Some 15 years ago or so, I recall reading an article in what was
then the CoEvolution Quarterly, now the Whole Earth Review.
The basic thesis was that we Americans (and other British colonies)
do not get our political system from the Greeks and Romans; rather
we get our system from the Vikings.
I won't try to summarize an idea I last read 15 years ago, but the
point was that a parliamentary system was built into the _culture_
of the Vikings rather than being a top-down theoretical imposition
like Plato's _Republic_ or the declarations of the French Revolution.
Apparently there is an island somewhere in the North Sea that has had
a parliament for some 900 years now.
I have to reserve judgment on this idea because of my lack of
historical knowledge, but I do note that we don't get much
political turmoil from the northern states where a lot of
Scandinavians settled, just as we don't hear much political
turmoil from Scandinavia in general.  And it was England
(after 1066) that slowly evolved the political system that
allows both communal coherence and tolerance for the individual.
Interesting idea, anyway.
And it supports the idea that the real actual nitty-gritty politics
of a group are not acquired top-down from a theory but are learned
bottom-up by the body language of each generation.
Interesting idea, hah?
FM>   I think we owe to the irrepressible march of EMPIRE throughout the 
ands
FM>bounded by the oceananus both the resistance of the Greek philosophers and
FM>that of the Judeo-Christian prophets who attempted to preserve meaningful
FM>cultures.
I can't make head nor tail of that sentence, Frank.  Could you explain?
I personally think that most of human history, the wars of one tribe
against another, can be explained parsimoniously by the Malthusian
idea that human populations expand geometrically while food supplies
expand arithmetically if at all.  Eventually in each tribe there
will always be an excess population.  But no human can stand the idea
that he is just part of an excess, a mistake, a surplus.  So all
those surplus people quite normally resorted to the normal Magical
Thinking, and suddenly discovered that they were Destined to Own
the territory of the Scumbags Next Door, and thus we see what we
actually see in archeology: the endless territorial battles of
one tribe to slaughter another and take their land.  If you thought
they had the same right as you to their land, you would not be able to
slaughter them, therefore the groups that survived were the ones
who talked themselves into believing in their Divine Right to
kill the infidels and 'liberate' their land.
Throughout history most of the astounding violence humans have done
to one another has been justified by the concepts of God or Volk
(the People, that is, Us).
You can analyze this in terms of theology or sociology, but I think
it's more basic to analyze it in the context of mammalian social
groups, where the tribe is a powerful adaptive influence, and the
New Brain (neocortex) ends up being just the PR person trying to
come up with a story that covers what the mammal brain was going
to do anyway.  How else to explain the fact the the century of
mankind's greatest heights of civilization happens to be the same
century in which _one hundred million_ humans have been brutally
murdered in war?
 * SLMR 2.1a * .        Brevity is the sole of wit. -- Wm. Tagspeare
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