The Perfect Storm
Printer-friendly version
Someone asked me a question the other day about how I though life came to be on this very spot. Why Earth had developed life and how we, students at Amity High School, ended up here in our places as we live life today. I suppose I could have taken the question existentially and given some treatise on religious creationism or self awareness, however I thought to myself in a somewhat more scientific manner as to how things have generally turned out as we see them today.
The phrase that immediately came to mind was that it was, the "perfect storm." Circumstances set Earth in the perfect position in orbit around a sun, whose heat was ever so perfectly trapped in a manner by the gaseous atmosphere formed by the release of chemicals from the surface that a semi-greenhouse effect was created, along with countless other circumstances that all occurred so perfectly as to make the environment conducive to another reaction of inconceivable odds in the forming of life out of inanimate matter. Then for events to transpire to the point where I am sitting here on a computer typing this article are inconceivably unlikely and can be described as nothing else in my mind then a "perfect storm."
As I sat down to start studying for the AP about the American Revolution, it truly was the same "perfect storm" of democratic revolution. There was an overextended mercantilist nation on the threshold of its own revolution who founds colonies whose brilliant leaders happen to be students of the Enlightenment period. This then became the ideological basis of the removal of divine right monarchs from Europe, and what the Founding Fathers used as the base for the argument of protection of natural rights violated by the British, i.e. validating their secession from English rule via the Declaration of Independence. With favorable fighting conditions and a push from the French, the conditions then wrought the perfect storm of assaults on the colonist’s liberties, combined with the fear of the mobocracy, to culminate in the writing of the Constitution that has held together this great nation for 222 years.
The idea of the "perfect storm" made me think of democracy then in a new light. Perhaps it wasn’t something that was uniquely American, which makes sense considering its Athenian roots and its ideological base in European philosophy. Perhaps democracy is an innovation, and the American Revolution served as that moment of creation, where inanimate ideas of the philosophical abstraction, just as those inorganic compounds did millions of years ago, congealed in the "perfect storm" of situations to form something that would grow and evolve as it spread throughout the world. I brought my chain of thought full circle, thinking about the recent revolutionary developments in Iran, Thailand and Kyrgyzstan and why they are in the midst of a revolution some 200 years after the worldwide democratization sparked by America. It seemed just as the progression of society is diverse across the global plane, as was the development of government. It would seem as though government, and vis-à-vis democracy, was, and is, an integral societal advancement just as values, beliefs, sciences, cultural practices exist and evolve.
However the metaphor isn’t perfect, government has clearly existed in one form or another since civilization began and has become seemingly intertwined with the cultural, social, and ideological practices of the peoples it governs over. When the needs and practices misalign or outgrow the scope and usefulness of the government, new ones arise. For example, the colonists ideological demands, in conjunction with growing independence and significantly helped along by British taxation, were all just developed conditions that evolved in the colonial society in North America and their colonial government was insufficient to meet them. Just as it happened with England before, France soon thereafter, and what is happening in countries still today like Iran and Thailand.
As the peoples of a nation progress, their ideas, values, customs and societal interactions change and evolve as part of a natural progression of mankind, and government is not removed from this process. The evolution of government away from theocracy and monarchial influence was a step achieved all over Europe during the Enlightenment period as philosophy, literature and societal practice ushered in an era of as historian Peter Gay put it, "freedom, democracy and reason," straying away from the Church. The works of Locke, Rousseau and others then specifically in the realm of governance rejected the practice of divine right, therefore religious and despotic governments faded out of vogue with the spread of cultural and social democracy and reason.
One of the many hallmarks of the Enlightenment and what many consider to be a beginning point was the Glorious Revolution in Britain where King James II’s divine right power finally fell to the political legitimacy of Parliament and new, more democratic rule under William and Mary. Perhaps such an end will befit the situation in Iran, and the "Green Revolution" in the country, although not entirely secularly minded, will usher in a new era of rule there and in the Middle East under new democratic grounds. However the determining factor is in the end the people. It will be by their hand, and their hand alone, that legitimate democratic reforms come about in Iran. Although they are being suppressed, the will of the majority is a strong one and one that if overwhelming and will prevail, sadly perhaps at what Jefferson deemed the "price of liberty" as he watched the slaughterous reign of the French Revolution in the early 1800’s.
Progression of the people’s ideas and their leaders can and should be the only determining factors in the change of an autocratic government such as that of Iran. The reason political revolution and reform can happen so rapid and seamlessly in the US and other democracies is due to its government "of the people, for the people, by the people," as Abraham Lincoln stated. For a country without fair voting, without justice, and checks and balances on power, the change in power may perhaps be more of a rough endeavor. Then again, the "perfect storm" doesn’t imply the most tranquil of events.
