Category Archives: Our Present Culture

Our Present Culture, Power and Domination

We Are At War

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We are at war, and we are losing.
We are at war, and we are losing.

Bill McKibben of 350.org has now named the issue. In a New Republic article, A World At War, he leads with “We’re under attack from climate change — and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII.” The article is worth reading in its entirety, and there is a summary on Common Dreams, also worth reading.

Thus the leadership is mobilizing. McKibben proposes that, following the American election, the new president will mobilize American society. Hopefully!

But I see a number of deficits.

First, McKibben’s 350.org is only one organization of many. We need a concerted effort to have all the major players come together in a cooperative movement, all demanding a war-like mobilization. Perhaps then the political machinery will listen.

Second, as I have been saying, “Leaders lead — followers create the change.” It remains to be seen if the followers will also engage. Worldwide!

Third, and perhaps most important, the leadership has not yet had the courage to name what must follow if we “win the war.” After WWII, there came the deluge of consumerism. We cannot have such as that to occur again.

We must be willing to challenge the entire basis of our civilization. Our entire culture balances between the ravages of domination and the desire for cultural maturity. It is time to move beyond this pattern.

I am currently re-reading The Parable Of The Tribes: The Problem of Power In Social Evolution. At the end of the first chapter, the author names what I consider to be the crucial issue:

The laws of man require power, for power can only be controlled with power. The challenge, therefore, is to design systems that use power to disarm power. Only in such an order can mankind be free.

I will write further about this shortly.

Global Warming, Our Present Culture

Worse Than We Thought

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Coming soon --- bigger storms.
By 2100, most coastal cities will be underwater!

As indicated previously, I am now promoting The Climate Mobilization — largely because my take on the climate issues is that we are no longer near the edge of disaster — we are starting to fall over the edge!

Here are a few recent articles that are very pertinent for me:

Over the past seven or eight years, I have found that every major scientific report indicated that the previous report underestimated the dangers. These reports continue that theme.

As well, National Geographic is reported as about to launch a landmark climate series just before the American election: A Murdoch-Owned TV Channel Will Air A Landmark Climate Series Before The Election — Years of Living Dangerously (the trailer on the webpage looks very informative). Given that the Murdock empire has had a reputation of climate disinformation, surprisingly this series promises to be very blunt as to the dangers of global warming, again emphasizing how serious the issues are.

Such programs provide leadership, but as I have been saying recently, change is created by followers — the leaders provide the direction, but the work is done by followers. We need to mobilize the followers, and it seems to me that The Climate Mobilization is doing that.

Important Concepts, Language Concepts, Our Present Culture, Power and Domination

Acedia and Evil

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The desire to give up! Caught in despair.
The desire to give up! Caught in despair.

I’ve been reading some of the articles accessible through The Climate Mobilization website, especially those concerning what we are now learning about the risks of global warming, even at our current level. It is so much worse than I thought! And I regard myself as well-informed in this area. For me, the issues are so related to the acedia of our civilization.

Gradually we are shifting. More and more leaders are speaking out for the need for profound change. However, all that leaders can do is lead! It is followers that create the bulk of the change. We need the majority of our culture to speak out.

And there is some evidence that the cultural majority are aware of this need. Recent research suggests that 54% of people in four Western countries acknowledge high risk of our civilization ending, and 24% recognize the risk of human extinction, all in the next 100 years.

Acedia and Evil

In this post I want to finish with the topic of acedia, in particular the nature of evil.

In The Hope: A Guide To Sacred Activism, Andrew Harvey tells the story of a major agribusiness CEO who knew exactly what destruction he was causing to the lives of thousands of people, but proceeded anyway simply for the sense of power that it gave him. When I reflect on modern tragedies such as

  • the duplicity of British Petroleum in the 2010 Gulf environmental disaster,
  • ExxonMobil being aware of the impact of fossil fuel on global warming in the 1970s, and deliberately hiding this information (presumably for profit to the company),
  • the Koch brothers’ massive manipulation of the American political system,
  • and many other political-economic-environmental disasters of recent years,

I cannot but consider these actions as evil — the active antagonism of what life offers, the hiding for political-economic power. Such actions must be identified, and stopped, but there is the danger of focusing on these issues, rather than looking at the system (the Cultural Lie, including myself as part to this system) which allows such actions to develop.

The Banality of Acedia and Evil

I also know from Hannah Arendt’s work on the banality of evil and Milgram’s work on obedience to authority, that the possibility of evil is a fundamental human characteristic. I consider evil as the end-point of the spectrum of acedia, as shown in the accompanying diagram. The manifestations of acedia (self-righteousness, laziness, fearfulness) are not evil per se, but they set the stage for evil, especially the acceptance of evil acts by others, wherein acedia displays as an attitude of “it doesn’t matter,” “who cares?,” or “it can’t be helped.”

AcediaSpectrum1

Yet the fundamental difficulty of evil is the attempt to eliminate evil — it sets a false dichotomy of us against them, and if only we eliminate them, things will be fine. When we as individuals fail to recognize how our silence and/or tokenism in the Climate Lie perpetuates the system, we support the evil of actions such as above.

As a culture, we have enjoyed the benefits of technology, and have been unwilling to recognize or pay the costs. We live gross inequality, with massive world poverty (amidst conclaves of richness), extensive hunger (especially starvation of  children), mistreatment of minorities (especially women in underdeveloped countries), waste and pollution (our garbage accumulates), amongst other inequities. We live the acedia cycle, especially in our lack of charity in resolving these issues. We have extensive “charitable organizations,” yet as a culture we lack the charity to resolve these  difficulties.

So what to do? Most of the power is held by those who are creating the inequality, mainly the leaders of the multi-national corporations. (Likely only a small minority of these corporations — I presume most are honorable, but we must find a way through so as to disempower those that create the most disruption of equitable society. And in any event, I am not interested in created the us versus them dilemma.)

The Need for Civil Disobedience

Gier (2006), in Three Principles of Civil Disobedience: Thoreau, Gandhi, and  King, notes that effective civil disobedience requires that:

  • one maintain respect for the rule of law even while disobeying the specific law perceived as unjust;
  • one should plead guilty to any violation of the law; and
  • one should attempt to convert the opponent by demonstrating the justice of one’s

I believe that civil disobedience is the only route that we can take. To engage in evil to combat evil will not lead to a mature culture. We have made attempts, such as the Occupy movement, but they need to continue.

Are we worthy of being a mature culture? I hope so.

Important Concepts, Our Present Culture

Acedia and the Climate Lie, Part 2

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The desire to give up! Caught in despair.
The desire to give up! Caught in despair.

The Climate Lie

I take this term from what I read in The Climate Mobilization website — it refers to:

Our society is living within a massive lie. The lie says, “Everything is fine and we should proceed with business as usual. We are not destroying our climate and, with it, our stability and our civilization. We are not committing passive suicide.

The lie says we are fine—that climate change isn’t real, or is uncertain, or is far away, or won’t be bad enough to threaten humanity. The lie says that small changes will solve the problem. That recycling, bicycling, or closing the Keystone Pipeline will solve the problem. The lie allows people to put climate change in the back of their minds. To view it as someone else’s issue—the domain of scientists or activists. The lie allows us to focus on other things. To proceed with business as usual. To be calm and complacent while our planet burns.

… [The lie is] sustained by people living within the lies. Our lie is a lie co-created by the government, corporations, the media, and the people. These organizations encourage the lie, but it only exists because we, the people accept it and choose to live within it. The basic lie is “We should continue with business as usual, for everything is fine. There are three  major ways that the Climate Lie operates: intellectual denial, emotional denial, and environmental tokenism.

I agree that all this is the climate lie, and I suggest the problem is even bigger — it should be called the Culture Lie, subsuming scientific materialism and consumerism.

The Difficulty of the Climate Lie

It is so hard to write about — it is so big, and so entangled, that I cannot do justice in this small space. Yet I strongly urge the reader to take the time to read the key documents on The Climate Mobilization site. They are well-written, but long, and require a lot to time to digest.

And that is the weakness — the intricacy of the Climate/Culture Lie is such that the average person is likely to give up — it takes too much effort. Frequently I give up — I am forced by time and despair to accept descriptions that I cannot adequately validate nor can I understand their complexity, but yet the descriptions seem to make imminent sense in how they describe the complexity. Examples for me include my attempting to understand the older Keynesian economics and how they were replaced by neoliberalism, both of which have led to the destructive consumerism of modern culture.

Acedia and the Lie

It is this giving up that pushes me towards my own acedia, and I suspect underlies the vast acedia of our culture. In my PhD research, I proposed that the internal conflict that precedes acedia is a force field of many factors. On the positive side are the processes that could lead to resolution (phronesis): wisdom (sophia), discipline, hope and playfulness, all of which are disparaged in our present culture.

A balance of forces, heavily weighted to acedia
A balance of forces, heavily weighted to acedia

On the acedia side are the ways in which we treat ourselves. Inherently we are pain avoiders (basic biology), but our cultural models generally push us to self-deprecation (especially self-criticism when we do not fit the cultural models of size, shape, success, etc.), familial trauma (as families struggle with many internal and external demands of success, personal satisfaction, finances, etc.), and cultural trauma (in the many subtle ways in which we struggle with the failed promises of technology and economic life). And from this stance, we treat the planet: we allow world hunger, the maltreatment of women and children, the subtle maltreatment of men (witness the farmer suicides of India), environmental disaster after disaster — the list goes on.

What a mess! It is the mess that requires long-term correction to take us to a culture that intrinsically values all human life, and all of creation.

But the first order of priority is to stop global warming, and its immediate antecedents, the fossil fuel industry in its many pervasive forms. If we do not do that, the rest doesn’t matter.

I have therefore joined the Climate Mobilization in its pledge of action.

Coming next: Acedia and Evil.

Important Concepts, Our Present Culture

Acedia and the Climate Lie, Part 1

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The noon-day demon, blocking all joy!
The noon-day demon, blocking all joy!

If you are like me, you probably have never heard of the concept of acedia. I had not until I started my PhD, this despite more than 50 years of extensive reading. In this post, we look at the nature of acedia, and how it is the cultural norm; next post, I will tie it into how we maintain the Climate Lie.

What is acedia?

Why has no one heard of it? For one thing, the word has been in and out of the English language since its inception in ancient Greek, frequently labeled as archaic; its history is documented in my book Acedia. Originally it was a monastic term, and it did not survive the philosophic shift from religiosity to scientific materialism. Acedia described the condition of objecting to the effort of living, of being loving or charitable.

It was replaced by terms ranging from ennui to depression — less depth and breadth though; acedia is a better choice for me. I came to regard acedia as any combination of laziness, fearfulness and self-righteousness, all terms that block the individual from authenticity or spiritual maturity. And even these terms are easily misunderstood, usually with scorn — as noted, acedia objects to the effort of being authentic.

When people encounter a painful situation, they inherently want to resolve the pain; they want to authentically feel good and be satisfied with life. They ponder the issues, and if they have enough wisdom (as depth of understanding of universal truths, what the Greeks called sophia), they move to resolution (so-called practical wisdom, or phronesis) — and feel good. If not, they are usually in some kind of internal conflict — they want resolution, but they also want the pain to go away. If they have enough discipline, they work through the issues, again to resolution. If not, they shift to avoidance — still, if they have enough hope, they again find a way to move to resolution. In all of this, the skills of awareness (recognition) and of playfulness further aid in movement to resolution.

AcediaEvolution

If none of this occurs, they move into some means of numbing the pain, some form of acedia manifest as laziness, fearfulness, or self-righteousness so as to overwhelm or transmute the pain into something familiar, some way to avoid. Then they cycle back into the patterns, with a different kind of pain, but one that they can mask.

It works! If it didn’t, we wouldn’t do it.

The problem is that acedia does not lead to long-term resolution, just avoidance. And in our culture, it is not easily challenged; it is judged inappropriate, but not shifted. Nor do we as a culture give much value to any of the needed skills: wisdom (sophia or phronesis), discipline (except for engaging in sports), hope (wishful thinking, yes; authentic hope, no), or playfulness (when do you really authentically play?).

Acedia as cultural norm.

So how has this become the cultural norm? I suggest that since the beginning of civilization, we have traumatized ourselves and each other. In The Parable Of The Tribes, Schmookler links the inherent difficulties of domination with the very nature of civilization. Since the very beginning (about 12,000 years ago), civilization has been a two-edged sword, with empire as the foundation. To have an empire means winners (dominators) and losers (subjects). The Greeks developed democracy, but were a slave culture. Fast forward to the Renaissance with the development of science and the Industrial Revolution, and industrial slavery and the rise of alcoholism. The 20th century brought technology and the valuing of women, and consumerism. The 21st century has given us the valuing of diversity, and global warming.

Look around. How many people do you know who are truly happy? How many alcoholics do you know? What about domestic violations? Or world hunger? Or the numerous political-economic betrayals of the past 50 years? We have a strange culture, certainly not a mature one.

We live the Climate Lie, the Cultural Lie.

Coming next: Acedia and the Climate Lie.

Global Warming, Our Present Culture, Power and Domination

Acedia underlies global warming

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It's all too much.
It’s all too much.

Have you ever asked yourself how we have ended up with the problems of global warming? Or what stops us from solving these issues? We have avoided resolution of the issues for more than 50 year now. The superficial issue of global warming is technological, but what keeps us stuck is emotional?

First of all, the issues are incredibly complex; they overwhelm our political, economic and ethical systems (see Reason In A Dark Time: Why The Struggle Against Climate Change Failed — And What It Means To Our Future) — witness the repeated failures or only limited success of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change COP meetings, most recently in Paris, December 2015 — a non-binding agreement to limit global warming to 2°C, hopefully to 1.5°C. Scientific American in April 2016 indicated “The average global temperature change for the first three months of 2016 was 1.48°C” — and that does not include normal overshoot as the system stabilizes (see here for excellent visual representations of how all this has occurred since 1880).

But it’s only 1.5 degrees — so what. Well, look around at the superstorms and the changing weather patterns. They are only the beginning of potential “natural” disasters, at a temperature increase of less than 1.5 degrees. The earth is a very finely balanced ecosystem, with many feedback mechanisms to ensure stability, and we are exceeding the limits of these systems. It is likely that, by 2°C, we will have irreversible changes, including loss of at least 33% of all species on the planet (not yet us, though). By 3°, we could well be into run-away feedback loops that are not reversible, with almost certain loss of civilization for thousands of years, and perhaps our extinction.

But why? I know the issues are complex, and the propensity of modern life is to leave it to the experts. But why have we gotten to this dilemma in the first place? And why are we so passive about global warming? The scientific community is in agreement (at least 97% consensus), but the political morass wages on. Given all this, why do we not stand up and demand change? We actually do, in small ways: witness the Occupy movement, Avaaz, the many activists, but there is not the overwhelming process that we really need. Nor do the many small ways seem to be coming together in coordinated fashion.

So for the next few postings, I am going to be exploring what I believe is blocking us. Essentially I will propose that various features of acedia have been a major part of the problem.

It is possible that in the next few postings I will seem to be critical of almost every human being (including myself) in Western civilization. That is not my intention, but I do want to identify processes that affect almost everyone. Perhaps what I am identifying could be called “the elephants in the room that nobody talks about.” If you feel criticized, please understand that I have the deepest compassion for the struggles of living in the modern era.

The vast majority of people I know are good people — they do many good actions, but they are simply overwhelmed with too much stuff: too much information, too many demands, et cetera. In my book Acedia, I referred to a TED talk on apathy, and also suggested that the numerous subtle difficulties of modern life have become a form of trauma, constantly wearing us down. And in all this, to pay attention to the demands of global warming has just become another demand, especially when confused by the dis-information regarding climate change.

I believe that these people get on with their lives hoping that somehow the “experts” will eventually fix the problem, but I remain doubtful. Over time, I have moved to the stance advocated by The Climate Mobilization as noted in my previous post: the personal costs will be high, but the risks are simply too great.

I suggest there are three mechanisms at play:

  • collective behaviour of groups: in order to act (and overcome fear of criticism), human beings need to exceed a certain threshold of anxiety
  • acedia: a human characteristic is the risk of laziness, fearfulness, and/or self-righteousness as a way to avoid painful experience
  • evil: a more important human characteristic is that which deliberately sabotages movement towards health

In some fashion, acedia is part of all three. I will be commenting on each of these in the next few posts.

Coming next: The threshold of overcoming anxiety

Jamieson, D. (2014). Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed — and What It Means for Our Future. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

External Contributors, Our Present Culture

Contribution: We Must Pay Reparations Before Change Will Occur

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Don't shoot the messenger.
Don’t shoot the messenger.

Violations by police occur. I encountered this article via Facebook, and upon reading it, deeply resonated with its content, a content that strongly identifies what I am also wanting to identify as the malaise of our society. As a Canadian, I am not in any way wanting to point fingers at Americans; I believe the thoughts expressed are simply the tip of the iceberg that is our Western society. I have Larry’s permission to copy it here, and thank him for his contribution.

For me, the basic message is two-fold:

  • address the systemic issues. That is where the major difficulties of our culture exists; the individual examples that distress us are simply and mainly examples of how the system works.
  • don’t shoot the messenger. Don’t tolerate violations by the messenger, but don’t shoot the messenger. He or she is simply doing the dictates of the system.

We Must Pay Reparations Before Change Will Occur

Larry Winters, 2016 July 16

What do Americans want?

As a Vietnam Combat veteran I’ve asked this question since 1967. I did my duty in an unjust and immoral war and then came home to find my country directing their rage at me and my fellow veterans, not at the people who engineered and underwrote the war.

Fifty years later, this generational schism has never closed. There is a similar split opening now between the public and the police. We are living through very dangerous times and, of course, Americans want protection from crime and violence by having our police step between us and the perpetrators. But once again we are unable to separate our anger at the root causes from the people and agencies charged with protecting us. And today each mistake a police officer makes becomes a bullhorn for the anguish of living in a dangerous world.

Like American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, our police work and live on the front lines. They do not make the rules of engagement. They simply serve the power structure of this country: the politicians, the generals, the congress, the Supreme Court. In turn, the people in those positions are controlled by big business interests, and they are the ones who then determine how well funded troops and police will be in the wars and street battles.

As a result, our country’s policing infrastructure is underfunded, and our police officers are underpaid, undereducated, and inadequately supported by the government and public. Just like Americas veterans. And if our politicians don’t acknowledge this chasm between our public and its protectors, it’s clear we shall step further into pandemonium.

So maybe the question is not what do Americans want, but what do they need? We need to face who we are. Our ancestors have committed courageous acts. They have also participated in holocausts starting with the native peoples of America and continuing on through the promotion of slavery, bigotry, and all the unjust and immoral wars right up to this very day. When we look honestly at how our past and present remain connected, we see a vast moral and financial debt that has never been paid. Years of politicians feeding the public the American dream has lead us to the current capitalist nightmare. The unpaid reparations for our present and historical deeds are nothing more than institutionalized moral corruption.

Instead of owning our past, and attending to social amends necessary for recovering moral balance we continue the legacy that every American has an equal chance at prosperity and safety. Instead of confronting leadership on taking moral responsibility the public and media focuses on the mechanics of our dilemmas, where the burden of change is on the men and women on the front lines. The leadership believes fixing the police, repairs the historical race issues. This over used myopic focus has provided no substantive changes. Only when we begin to pay long owed historical reparations of respect, truthful dialogue, and moral and financial recompense for the human rights we’ve ignored and continue to ignore, will we stop our focus on what Americans want, and consider what Americans need.

Larry is a retired psychotherapist, an ex-combat Marine, and the author of two books: The Making and Unmaking of a Marine and Brotherkeeper.

External Contributors, Our Present Culture

Climate Action: Urgency, a poem by Carol Chapman

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Like us, a stressed species
Like us, a stressed species

I encountered this poem via Facebook, and upon reading it, deeply resonated with its content, a content that strongly identifies what I am also wanting to identify as the malaise of our society. I have Carol’s permission to copy it here, and thank her for her contribution. She adds that this poem is part of a series called Visions of a Possible Apocalypse.

Urgency,  by Carol Flake Chapman, 2016 July 18

Time’s winged chariot looms behind me

Nudging my bumper like an Italian driver

Blaring the horn, go faster or get out of the way

It feels like bullets are flying everywhere

Everywhere, that is, but here

Ice is melting, fires are burning

Oceans are rising, rivers are sinking

People are fleeing, walls going up

It feels like danger lurks everywhere

Everywhere, that is, but here

They are shooting elephants and rhinos

As polar bears drift away on Arctic shards

And wondrous varieties of birds and fish

Succumb to the human tide spreading everywhere

Everywhere, that is, but here

The unhinged are pushing buttons, pulling triggers

Unleashing death and fear as zealots egg them on

As we shop, diet and unroll our yoga mats

It feels like everything is unraveling

Everywhere, that is, but here

Where are the ancient mariners

To collar passersby with cautionary tales

Or the fiery prophets of yesteryear

Who warned, shape up or else

They are everywhere but here

Where are the witnesses who have seen it before

Who have seen the moving finger of blame

That lights the flames of hate

It feels like business as usual everywhere

Everywhere, that is, but here

Here where we hunker in illusions of comfort

In our safe houses, our virtual storm shelters

Where bad news comes in tweets

Here, where we have shot the albatross

Where we cannot hear the canaries in the mine

Here, where we have killed the golden goose

Where we have muffled the messengers

We could at least open the windows

To hear the distant clamor

Of the world as we know it falling apart

Our Present Culture

UK politics not compatible with maturity

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Self-righteousness and cooperation are not compatible.
Self-righteousness and cooperation are not compatible.

Today’s digression: What would it really take to move us towards a mature culture — the impact of our acedia.

I am finding that one of the aspects of writing a blog is to find a balance between:

  • responding to current issues (because I feel some excitement about the issue), and
  • maintaining a theme (such as daily life in a mature culture) over a few days.

Thus, in making choices as to what to write each day, I create digressions from the themes I am developing. I usually consider these digressions valuable to the content of the themes, and also recognize that writing a blog is not that of writing an academic article (which I have been doing a fair amount in the past few years). As always, comments would be welcome on the choices I am making.

So, today’s digression: in writing about daily life, I have been pondering as to what would need to happen in our current culture to make us move towards a more mature culture. Ultimately we need to become:

  • individually committed to our personal growth as human beings, and
  • fully cooperative with each other, not just lip service to cooperation, but a deep commitment to do the hard work required.

Both of these requirements generally entail extensive and very painful work. They also require that we recognize, both individually and culturally, we are the problem. As said years ago by Pogo[1]: “We have found the enemy, and he is us.”

In a previous post, I indicated that the nature of change requires hurting in safety, a vision that fits, tools for the transformation, and the overcoming of our acedia. I’m going to introduce acedia here, and come back to it (and the other aspects) in later posts.

So, what is acedia? The description I like best is that “acedia objects to the effort required in living into a relationship of love” (equally, instead of love,  I could use the terms charity or cooperation). In my PhD, I defined acedia as any combination of laziness, fearfulness and self-righteousness that blocks this effort.

What has prompted my current digression is the announcement of the appointment of Boris Johnson as UK foreign secretary, and the reaction this appointment has stirred. I do not know much about Mr. Johnson other that what I read in the occasional newspaper, and I have no interest in criticizing any human being, but the reactions expressed in this BBC article suggest to me a man of emotional immaturity, someone at high risk of self-righteousness, and therefore highly unlikely to be committed to cooperation, let alone his own personal growth.

I could be wrong, in two ways at least. I could be wrong in my assessment of his character; if so, I apologize. But I could also be wrong in that his appointment could lead our culture into deeper pain, something which, unfortunately, we may require before we are willing to move into greater maturity. Sometimes change occurs in the most unpredictable of ways.

We live in such interesting times!

[1] Kelly, W. (2011, May 2). We have met the enemy and he is us. Retrieved July 24, 2011, from I go pogo: http://www.igopogo.com/final_authority.htm

Our Present Culture

Brexit related to emotional maturity

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People want cultural maturity
People want cultural maturity.

I’ve been loosely following the events persisting in the Brexit issue of Great Britain. Many people are protesting (EU supporters march in London, denouncing Brexit vote), and the leadership is in turmoil (David Cameron’s dumb referendum). Both articles emphasize for me the huge need for emotional maturity in the leadership of a mature culture, underlining that the Brexit process is NOT a good example. Leaders need to be statespersons, not politicians, the subject of a previous post (What values would be important . . ., part 3) and one that I will likely expand upon in the future.

The denouncing article notes:

One organizer, comedian Mark Thomas, says British MPs should not legislate for an exit based on a result driven by anti-EU campaigners exaggerations and distortions on immigration and EU spending. “We would accept the result of the referendum if it was fought on a level playing field. But it was full of misinformation,” Thomas said.

The Cameron article notes that the leadership of Great Britain is now in turmoil, and underlines:

In a functioning representative democracy referenda are almost always a bad idea. They necessarily reduce complex policy choice to a light switch. They never unite, but divide. . . . Edmund Burke, the intellectual father of British Conservatism. Burke understood that a representative democracy was not a menu from which you chose the issues you were electing representatives to decide — and the ones you retained a personal veto on. Our politicians are elected to make the hardest and most painful choices, not merely to decide what to spend where. . . . Burke defined the obligation eloquently: . . . “Government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment and not of inclination … Your representative owes you not his industry only, but his judgment: and he betrays instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”