Growing Pains by Gwynne Dyer

Author:Gwynne Dyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL000000, POL062000, POL042020, POL008000, POL070000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2018-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Moveable type had been invented in China four centuries before Gutenberg, but it did not flourish in a language that used thousands of different ideographs: it was too costly to keep a set of type that contained 100,000 or more blocks, including dozens or hundreds of copies of the more common characters, so printers mostly stuck with woodblocks instead. European languages written in alphabetic scripts needed only fifty or sixty different pieces of type, and publishing immediately became a profitable and growing industry: around 10 million books were printed in Europe in the 15th century, 200 million in the 16th, and half a billion in the 17th. Tom Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, advocating the establishment of an independent, democratic republic in what would become the United States, sold 120,000 copies in the first three months in the Thirteen Colonies, and may have been read by half the population (then about 2.4 million).

It was no coincidence that the first modern democratic revolution happened in the Thirteen Colonies. Most of the colonists were of English descent, and were therefore heirs to the English Civil War of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which had established the principle that the king ruled only with the consent of parliament. Equally importantly, about 85 per cent of men in New England could read, and although literacy was lower in the southern colonies and among women, it is probable that around half the total adult population was literate. This was even higher than in England, and indeed was probably the highest literacy rate in the world in the 1770s.

Printing and literacy mattered so much because they restored to populations numbering in the millions the ability to discuss means and ends and to come to collective decisions that had been lost with the rise of the mass civilisations. The first mass medium, the printing press, removed the roadblock that had made democracy — the political expression of the principle of equality in a mass society — virtually impossible for so long. Given the suppressed longing for equality that had never been extinguished in the mass societies, despite thousands of years of repression, people were bound to take advantage of the new circumstances to take it back.

Conducting the debate through newspapers, pamphlets, books, and large public meetings was obviously a more cumbersome and less satisfactory process than the old hunter-gatherer decision-making tradition of a few dozen adults debating decisions around a campfire until a consensus emerged, but it could be made to work. In an astonishingly short time, the mechanisms of a representative democracy were designed and put into place in the United States, including the constitutional ‘checks and balances’ that would serve as a modern and less oppressive substitute for the obsessive levelling customs of the hunter-gatherers. The constitution that incorporated the revived egalitarian values and the new rules and devices needed to make a mass democracy work was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.