Governance Provenance
Where does the concept of governance come from? I have read the anthropological books like Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond that delineate the history of governance from the tribal to today’s democracy in all of the areas of the world. What Diamond suggests is that none of the development of civilization are really due to any inherent superiority of one race or culture of mankind, but is rather much more attributable to a combination of the environment in which they operate and is largely driven by a combination of agricultural development and technological development, not unimportantly including immunological development which arises from a combination of agriculture and technology. However, he also attributes a goodly amount of history to the manner in s which societies and cultures form their governance practices. Those practices are often a function of the physical environment and geography of the areas where people live such that wide open spaces that have less barriers lead to more cross-fertilization of people, skills, knowledge and immunity.
While this is hardly the only or even the dominant theory of the root foundations of civilization, it is a particularly well-respected one that won a great deal of acclaim and acceptance over the past twenty-five years. It seems particularly relevant in today’s world with the combined forces of immunological and nationalistic issues dominating our lives. Perhaps the most interesting issue is the one about balkanization, which means the breaking up of society into smaller, more isolated governance units or nations (more or less the old world city-state model) which are suspicious and bellicose towards their neighboring civilizations. Indeed, it is well accepted that balkanization leads to more primitive societies that do not benefit from cross-cultural influences and immunization and hence do not easily develop the sort of broad divisions of labor that lead to the freeing up of people who can be free to innovate and create technology or scribes to write and advance the assimilation of knowledge beyond that which is required for daily subsistence.
This line of thinking should jump out at all of us in today’s environment where everyone is being driven into his or her corner and nationalism is once again on the rise. We are hearing about and thinking about the curtailment and perhaps even the end of globalization due to these factors and this should all trouble us a great deal. Nothing breeds resilience and innovation like globalization. On a personal level, I know that my years of living in the tropics and then Europe (as well as in the West, Midwest and Northeastern U.S.) all made my immune system highly resilient. I haven’t had so much as a sniffle in the past three years while the world has suffered over five million deaths from COVID and countless more millions of people have suffered unknown potential follow-on effects of the respiratory disease such that lifespan has been generally reduced by almost three years, which is meaningful. Furthermore, I know that I prize innovation and creativity, including the importance of technology and its adoption, far more than most people. It can make me a “bleeding-edge” guy at times, but mostly it has kept me on the forefront and thereby kept me younger at heart and deed.
On the subject of governance, it is interesting to me that the new corporate trend toward ESG (Environment, Society and Governance) hits on all of these factors at a time when they are of utmost importance to our collective civilization. It is almost as though, as the old saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher will come. I cannot image the student being more in need, which may be a way of saying he is ready (one can hope), so the teacher has come and it has come where people feel it the most, in their portfolios. Those companies that are taking the ESG concept most seriously and implementing good, enlightened policies are benefiting almost immediately in the form of their stock price action. Those that are not moving in that direction quickly enough are being equally punished. There is no greater incentive known to man than economic incentive. It is what he best responds to and most notices the soonest. That seems to be acknowledge most starkly in the advent of the use of economic sanctions with which to wage warfare rather than as much physical violence as we have seen in past conflicts. Physical warfare is hardly absent, just ask the Ukrainians, but the arrows and miles that could be flying between East and West are heavily dominated by economic weaponry.
As for the topic of governance itself, it is clear that over the millennia, equal amounts of good and bad have come from systems where a small group of people make decisions for a larger group of people. There certainly have been and even are good governance systems that seek to minimize kleptocracy and maximize the common good, but kleptocracy is ever-present it seems and really only the most egregious and visible bad outcome of a misaligned governance system. Man seems to understand that governance of some sort is essential and that is especially so in a world of eight billion souls, most of whom haven’t had the pleasure or the ability to think about Jared Diamond’s grand theories. At ground level, man is an animal with all the native instincts that we attribute to lesser beasts. Maslow explained the hierarchy of needs and until those basic needs are transcended, man cannot exist on any higher plane than the plane of natural selection with all the cruelty and self-centered news that entails. Christianity and other organized religions may be the longest-lasting form of governance we know since it has prevailed over such a large portion of mankind for two millennia, unlike any national or empire-based governance. And yet, most philosophers will distinguish religion from governance. In fact, the Apostle Paul says in Romans that men should submit to and follow the laws of man for whatever system they are a part of. That is an interesting notion and the separation of church and state is a long-held credo that we tend to believe in and adhere to.
We are now seeing those walls come down while the walls of balkanization are going up. Stop and think about how antithetical that really is. For years we have recognized the evils of merging church and state and yet people focused on preserving their identity and dominance are pushing it forward once again. For years we have pushed for, fought for and shed blood for globalization. I would argue that the nomadic tendency of man has less to do with wanderlust and more to do with self-preservation. Man seemed to inherently recognize the value of diversity and cross-fertilization. Plants and animals inherently understand this, so why shouldn’t man? The more we remain insular, the more we are vulnerable. Governance structures are man’s expression that he needs to go beyond himself and his innermost circle in order to survive. Collectivism certainly has specific and practical demands, but it also has higher-level sustainability objectives which while not always glaringly obvious are inherently understood.
Maybe man has finally cracked the code on governance. One can certainly argue that democracy as we have known it in this country for two hundred fifty years has successfully demonstrated its ability to propel human prosperity. In much the same way the Judeo-Christian-Muslim religions have dominated the cultural side of man’s existence for an even longer time and seem to be the best example to date of that spiritual governance system. But humans will always be animals at their core and those lesser instincts will come into ascendancy at times as they have now. The challenge for mankind may be to allow the provenance of governance (both pragmatic and spiritual) to arise as it needs to regularly. No systems better represent the collective will of the people than these and it is these governance systems that will always prevail when even a modicum of enlightenment is available in the world.