There is, I believe, a political consequence of our modern "knowledge explosion" that has yet to be widely recognized. That lack of recognition may have very grave consequences. The founders of our "Modern Occidental World" -- France's philosophes, Great Britain's "Members of the Royal Academy", America's Founding Fathers -- were men (and a very few particularly enterprising women) who "knew everything". If you google "the last man who knew everything" you'll find several candidates... but none are modern. Even such wide-ranging intellects as Hawking and Sagan never pretended to "know everything". Human knowledge has vastly outstripped the capacity of any single human mind. That seems like an obvious statement... but it is in fact quite a recent situation. The men who wrote the Constitution of the United States of America "knew everything". As a group, they held all human knowledge: economics, physics, medicine, geology, ... everything! When those men decided policy, they could -- by themselves -- take account of all human knowledge. Back then, any (fairly intelligent) person who was determined enough, could collect all the knowledge needed to competently understand the policy decisions that the Founding Fathers were making. (Not incidentally, human population and human technology were still such that the Earth could digest any negative consequences of erroneous decisions.) Democracy was possible, because demos could in fact be competent. This is no longer true. Demos has absolutely no chance of being competent on the complex and interlocking topics of today's world. If an incompetent demos tries to run the world, the inevitable result is erratic, erroneous policy with no basis in fact: Tea Party America. We are not competent to decide policy; but no political organization has yet had the courage to say, "We propose to choose the experts who must decide and manage policies on such-and-such criteria"... which would be the best that demos could hope to decide with any degree of competence. I fear that democracy is a zombie. Walking dead. And we have yet to even begin to discuss its replacement. ... meanwhile, the Koch brothers are deciding our future for us...
