Since the beginning of human history, people have always had vigorous disagreements. Just as with Cain and Abel, those disagreements have frequently ended with violence. According to the archaeological record, at the same time that hunter-gatherers first began to domesticate plants and animals and live in settlements, they also quickly realized both the benefits and the challenges of living together in a community. And thus civilization was born.
As John Locke, the father of modern democracy, viewed it, people were willing to surrender some freedom in exchange for greater security, stability and productivity. Granted, the state of nature was enjoyable. Frolicking, grabbing fruit from the trees, and bathing in a brook at your whim was fun, but going without food when the hunt came up empty or being attacked by a hostile clan much larger than your own were considerable drawbacks.
Even though society has become far larger and more complex today, we are still reaping the benefits as well as the complications of living together in large groups. Today, the real question becomes how we realize our right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” successfully in a fast-moving, ever-changing world. More to the point, the purpose of our political process is to solve problems in the most efficient and effective way to increase the benefits and reduce the downside of living in a large and growing society.
This is not a new conundrum. Just as we are now experiencing in American politics, we have faced the same challenge in every other area of human endeavor. For example, science had a few exceptional individual scientists such as Copernicus, da Vinci, and Avicenna. The entire field of science, however, didn’t truly flourish and create exponential advancement until the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and the adoption of the scientific method. A very similar process unfolded in many other fields, including technology, industry, medicine and agriculture.
In all of these areas, the difference between medieval stagnation and decline and the wonders of modern achievement was the adoption of both a mentality and methodology of innovative problem-solving. By adopting this revolutionary new approach, we have transformed every aspect of our modern world and every facet of our daily lives.
Simultaneously, we have jettisoned the superstition, mythology, and slavish adherence to the tired, old, failed ideas of the deep, dark abyss of the Middle Ages. The ill are no longer bled with leeches on their sickbeds, agricultural production has multiplied exponentially, industrial advances helped create the middle class and modern conveniences abound. Today, everyone has access to more information than the scholars of all previous eras combined and we no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe.
If we were to apply this profound discovery to our divided and dysfunctional political process, it would have similar revolutionary consequences. If our purpose is to solve problems in the most efficient and effective way to increase the benefits and reduce the downside for our large and ever-changing society, then replicating the overwhelming, incontrovertible success we have experienced in nearly every other area of the modern world makes tremendous sense.