- [i] Afterword for [[2021-12-22 Fumble (MF) (DRAFT)]] I teach a unit about different types of government that were seen in ancient Greece. There's a section of the unit where we talk about the pros and cons of each of the four "types" of government seen in the Classical Greek world: democracy, oligarchy, tyranny and monarchy. In some senses we present it as a cycle. Since it's directed at 11 year olds, and I only have a couple of days to teach it, I'm forced to oversimplify a bit, but there's a certain narrative inevitability to these forms of government. If you start with a democratic system, where rule is shared evenly inevitably it will be easier for people with more resources to dominate public discourse and decision-making. Eventually this dominance gets encoded into formal power structures, often centered around a familial model, which leads to oligarchy. Rule by many. The distinctions between oligarchy and aristocracy are fuzzy, especially in the Greek world, but from a plain-English perspective, oligarchical power tends to be based in money and aristocracies tend to base their power in armies and land and be subservient to a monarch. There are a couple of ways to jump from oligarchy to monarchy, but most of the examples I've seen are relatively unintuitive. Rather than being a case of consolidation of power, or one oligarch monopolizing influence until they take control, what often seems to happen is that there's a popular rebellion led by a demagogue who becomes a tyrant. Tyrants tend to either get toppled after a nasty power struggle with oligarchs, or transition into a monarchy when their heir takes power in a way that feels legitimate to the populace. None of this is inevitable, of course, and none of this explains the "monarchy to republic to dictatorship to empire" thing that went on in Rome. It completely ignores all the types of governments common in Asia and Africa and the Americas, etc.. It's really just a mashup of some stuff that happened in Greece a couple thousand years ago tied off with a neat little bow. I bring it up because the hardest thing for my students to grasp is usually the part where we discuss the pros and cons of each type of government. American culture has hammered the idea of "kings bad, democracy good" so hard that it doesn't even occur to them that the longevity and stability inherent to a particular system might matter. In my opinion, the biggest advantage of monarchy is stability. Sure, sometimes there are civil wars fought over control of the throne and the crown, but when I look at history, I don't see a lot of long-lasting representative republics ---- I see a bunch of dynasties, and a bunch of loosely organized quasi-democratic groups. Sometimes, when I read think pieces about the "decline of America," I can't help but worry about that. In the end, though, I keep coming back around to a novel I read years ago. I don't remember the title, but it pointed out that most people don't really care who is "in charge" as long as their lives are pretty good. It feels intuitively true that most people value competent government over abstract ethics. Toby is more worried about his next meal than invaders who are literally sailing into his homeland. It hasn't occurred to him to try and warn his neighbors, much less the local government. The civics teacher in me is a little horrified by his blasé attitude. The philosophy major who can't avoid seeing fierce Twitter debates about whether it's morally acceptable to attend a science fiction convention in Chengdu because of the actions of the Chinese government, though? She's looking around and wondering how much personal responsibility an individual citizen can and should take for the actions of a democratic government, much less an autocratic one.