A recent article in Newscan Daily appended below concerns a problem which increasingly haunts politicians these days. This is the steadily declining turnout at elections, both local and national, except at times of crisis when it perks up. But, once the crisis is over, the turnout falls again and resumes its decline.

It seems to me that the growing apathy is a product of two forces. The first is the egalitarian education system (in as much as it has been attainable in developed countries) which has led to much greater job selection. This was Michael Young's fear when he wrote about this in 1958 in his book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. This was a satirical book and he was hoping to be able to head this off. This has led to increasing demarcation in almost every aspects of our lives -- in the types of jobs we have, incomes, and the localities where we live. In many large cities, the demarcation between an attractive well-maintained area of high incomes and a run-down, crime-ridden area immediately next to it can be drawn precisely. I can remember staying at a hotel in San Francisco some three years ago and being told by one of the staff: "When you reach the end of the road, you can turn left to the city centre, but you mustn't turn right because you'll almost certainly get mugged."

I am not, of course, suggesting that we should reverse the increasingly equal opportunities available at state schools (albeit only achieved by allowing achievement standards to decline), but this, along with the increasingly lengthy educational experience, inevitably increases the ability of higher education institutions and employers to select the most able. There is no way of equitably reversing this trend. Selectivity will increase, particularly as the skill requirements are rising, and it is perhaps surprising that Michael Young, even 40 years ago, should not have realised this.

The second reason why voter apathy is increasing is due to the abundance of cheap and easily available energy, which has become cheaper every year for the last 200 years. This has encouraged the development and maintenance of gargantuan institutions of every sort -- in government, politics, production, marketing, etc -- way beyond anything for which we have appropriate genetic behaviours and skills. All this has led to the increasing alienation of larger and larger numbers of people who have been pushed down so low in the rank order that they have no chance of influencing whatever system that happens to be impinging on them at any time.

It should therefore be of absolutely no surprise at all that people are increasingly voting by remaining on the sofa and watching soap operas or soccer games on TV. Before too long, the voting will be down to about 30% -- that is, what seems to me to be the only proportion of the population that is intelligent, qualified and connected enough to look after themselves in this increasingly complex world.

Now that we are beginning to discover that the human species is, in fact, a species with strong genetic predispositions, and not some sort of malleable etherial being outside nature that can be governed by rational thought, political ideologies and their associated systems (but forever vulnerable to power-hungry politicians), then we might have a chance of changing to more appropriate ways of governing ourselves. Instead of trying to change human nature or reach for impossible aspirations as we have been doing for the past 200 years or so by a variety of large-scale political and social engineering experiments, we ought now to agree -- if we were sensible -- that human nature is largely a given and will always remain so. It's about time we got into the business of small-scale habitation engineering instead of large-scale social and political engineering.

In the past, there have been many attempts at this sort of habitation engineering, such as the Essenes, the Benedictines, Robert Owen's New Lanark, the Israeli kibbutzim, etc. They haven't lasted long. They might have been deficient in various ways, often because of false assumptions about human nature, but they are not be scorned, as they usually are. In my view they failed mainly because they were overtaken by more powerful economic forces before they could adapt.

Economically, we're now balancing at the edge of no-growth. Our per capita energy use is highly likely to be on the decline from now onwards. I think also that most people in the developed world don't have strong motivations to add significantly to the stock of their possessions mainly because they insufficient time to enjoy more of them. At the most, they will simply replace their consumer goods or buy fashionable new versions or move to higher quality housing areas as and when their incomes rise. This is insufficient stimulus for the sort of economic growth as we have known it in the past century. It is also fairly well proven by many careful research projects and polls that in the developed countries we are no happier now than we were in the 60s. Is it reasonable to expect to be happier in the future by means of further economic growth -- even if it were possible for energy resource reasons?

We have lost a very great deal in the process of economic growth and the biggest loss, besides personal happiness, is of the small, human-scale community in which we evolved for millions of years and in which we are still at our best. We can also best look after the weak and the handicapped there instead of shuffling them off into the care of the governmental social services, as we are increasingly doing (and increasingly not able to afford!). I don't suppose for a minute that our present crop of politicians will be able to lead us in desirable directions of smaller communities -- although they frequently talk about 'decentralisation' these days -- because their interest still lies in large governments where they have more power. However, I rather think that a new crop of entrepreneurs may be just around the corner. The steady growth in gated communities and Disneyland-type managed communities, even though existing in only small numbers at present and abhorrent though they might be at present to some intellectuals, gives me a strong feeling that these are the forerunners of some quite new economic developments in which people can work and live in the same place. And if some entrepreneurs make immense fortunes by getting the life-work formula approximately right, then that will be all to the good. And then, as usual, once the consumer starts setting the pace, the politicians will have to follow behind.

I am not suggesting that all individuals will want to live in small-scale communities all their lives. In particular, the young will undoubtedly want to leave and go to more lively cities mainly for reasons of finding partners. The evidence is, though, that once young people are educated, have found their life-partners and wants to raise children, then they are keen to return to live in a secure community. Also, there are will be many communities which become oppressive for one reason or another and people will want to leave these to find happier places. But, by and large, it is going to be technically possible for small-scale communities to be largely self-sustaining in the future, able to produce sufficient energy and to supply a work infrastructure for its inhabitants -- even if they might formally work for different employers in distant places.

In short, I'm sure the majority of the population will find smaller communities very desirable to live for most of their lives. If this ever starts to take off significantly as a status good -- albeit quite expensive too start with and only able to be afforded by the affluent -- I'm pretty certain in my own mind that this scenario will be inevitable as alienation grows within our present society, and governmental systems will have to accommodate themselves to this new pattern.

I believe that the nation-state as we have known it is finished and we had better start getting used to the idea so that we can start to think more constructively about the future. But this can only happen when we understand what the modern sciences of anthropology, genetics and other evolutionary sciences are telling us about human nature and avoid being railroaded by the sort of political and religious ideologies which have brought widespread distress to so much of human history so far.

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WORTH THINKING ABOUT (NON)VOTER APATHY

Author Thomas E. Patterson offers this description of America's "Incredible Shrinking Electorate"

"The voting rate has fallen in nearly every presidential election for four decades. An economic recession and Ross Perot's spirited third-party bid sparked a healthy 5 percent increase in 1992, but turnout in 1996 plunged to 49 percent, the first time since the 1920s that it had slipped below 50 percent.

"Many expected turnout to rise in 2000. The Clinton-Dole race four years earlier was one-sided from the start. The contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush, however, looked to be the tightest since 1960, when John F. Kennedy won by the slim margin of 100,000 votes. 'Close elections tend to drive up voter interest,' said CNN's political analyst Bill Schneider. Turnout did rise, but only slightly a mere 51 percent of U.S. adults voted in 2000.

"That was a far cry from the 63 percent turnout for the Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960, which became the benchmark for evaluating participation in subsequent elections. In every presidential election for the next twenty years, turnout fell. It rose by 1 percentage point in 1984, but then dropped 3 points in 1988. Analysts viewed the trend with alarm, but the warning bells really sounded in 1996, when more Americans stayed home than went to the polls on Election Day.

"The turnout trend in the midterm congressional elections has been no less alarming. The voting rate was nearly 50 percent on average in the 1960s, barely stayed above 40 percent in the 1970s, and has averaged 37 percent since then. After a recent midterm vote the cartoonist Rigby showed an election clerk eagerly asking a stray cat that had wandered into a polling place, 'Are you registered?'

"Fewer voters are not the only sign that Americans are less interested in political campaigns. Since 1960, participation has declined in virtually every area of election activity, from the volunteers who work on campaigns to the viewers who watch televised debates. Few today pay even token tribute to presidential elections. In 1974, Congress established a fund to underwrite candidates' campaigns, financed by a checkoff box on personal income tax returns that allowed citizens to assign $1 (later raised to $3) of their tax liability to the fund. Initially, one in three taxpayers checked the box. By the late 1980s, only one in five marked it.

Now, only one in eight does so."

NewsScan Daily, 3 September 2003 ("Above The Fold")

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