More Monkey Business

I caught a review while at Heathrow airport a few weeks back of The Monkey Wrench Gang by science writer and London School of Economics Philosophy Professor, Colin Tudge:

Originally published in 1975, The Monkey Wrench Gang poses a question that is key to our own time: what should ordinary citizens do when their own governments do unspeakable things? According to some moral philosophers, the answer is nothing. Saint Paul professed to be against civil insurrection (though perhaps, given his devotion to the memory of Jesus, he was being disingenuous). And nothing, too, is the answer that Blair and Blunkett, Bush and Cheney would surely give: the due processes of democracy (and possibly consumerism) will sort everything out in the long run.

Here Professor Tudge is adding to the philosophical debate on how to govern the good society that has raged since the time of Socrates. However, he has made a breakthrough, no a quantum leap, nay brought forward a true revelation:

But in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes observed, we are all dead; and in truth there is no evidence that democracy, as currently understood, actually works, apart from at the level of the tribe, where the chief or chieftain rules only by consent, primum inter pares.

So, that's that absurd democracy nonsense done away with.

No doubht, we'll alll come to realise this when the hunter-gatherers of the jungle interior of Papua New Guinea come to rule the world, oh yes.

The big eejit.