People tend to take the concept of democracy for granted. Commenting recently, a friend of mine added that democracy is a way of life that exists as an old brand name. It needs a renewal of the problem it addresses and its severity. It cannot continue to return to the cliché of its Greek roots. It must explore new forms of indigeneity.
Democracy only lasts if it is constantly reinventing itself. For that, it needs a different kind of storytelling and a different sense of philosophy. It should be reworked almost as a fresh pedagogical exercise.
One must begin with the fact that democracy needs a new theory of nature. Christian cosmology tended to see nature more as a utility, a commodity—something to be subjected to cost-benefit analysis. Now, some new theories of nature are being worked out within science. Prominent among them is the idea of Gaia formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margilus. The hypothesis says that nature should be treated not only as a collection of higher mammals – the virus plays an equally important role.
Lovelock showed that for more than a million years, it was viruses that maintained the atmosphere. One needs a social contract in a multiverse where trees, roots, bacteria, animals, people interact in a more complex way. It is the sins of nature and its associated cosmologies that man needs to develop a new sense of the sacred, a new kind of interactivity. An evolutionary worldview that connects life, lifeworld, lifestyle, livelihood and the life cycle – the five L’s, as I call them.
