If we want real democracy protecting universal human rights, then the world’s social order must evolve into a democratic Earth Federation, with liberty, equality, and community for all persons.
We live in an age that his seen a vast paradigm-shift from a static, atomistically understood universe to an evolutionary, holistic universe. This transformation began with the scientific work of Max Planck (1900) and Einstein (1905) and has continued to be solidified through both cosmology and quantum physics. Modern forms of democracy were first conceived in the 18th century during the earlier static paradigm. At that time, British philosopher John Locke declared that human beings have innate rights given by God and that government should be a “social contract” by the people to institute a system in which government preserves and protects those rights and nothing more.
The French and American revolutions were fought with such ideas in mind. The French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens” (1789) drew on these assumptions at just about the same time that the USA Constitution was signed (1787). Article 2 of the French Declaration states that “the aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.” The tradition of “natural rights” goes far back in Western history.
In ancient Greek thought, Plato and Aristotle were in tension with the Sophist tradition which held that moral principles were “merely conventions” and not inherent in nature. Plato, in the 5th century BCE, argued that on the contrary moral principles were ontological forms (eidos) embedded in the very structure of the Cosmos. In the first century BCE, Cicero affirmed that natural law was universal and eternal and known by objective human reasoning. His work was one of the inspirations for John Locke. During the Medieval Period, Thomas Aquinas developed a natural law theory asserting that the moral law was embedded by God in human beings and discoverable through reason, even though a higher divine law was also required for human salvation. All three thinkers declared that human institutions and government, including kings and popes, must conform to the natural moral law.
Even though the 18th century had shifted to the early-modern scientific paradigm as embodied in Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematic (1687), the natural law tradition drawn upon by Locke and the French Declaration held firm and has continued into the contemporary era as part of the ongoing struggle of human beings to achieve an unalienated humanum, that is a free, just, and equal world system in which everyone can participate with equal dignity and mutual respect. Ernst Bloch’s 1986 book, Natural Law and Human Dignity, remains a milestone in this continuing struggle. Historian Samuel Moyn’s 2010 book The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History argues that we are approaching our last chance to create a decent world system embracing human rights and dignity.
Indeed, we have failed to create a world system that works for everyone and we humanists are in part to blame because we have not been willing to think outside the box of the global status quo. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Again, natural law. Moral principles are not mere social conventions as the ancient Sophists argued.
Nevertheless, things are not so simple, because the new paradigm that began with Planck and Einstein sees the universe as an evolutionary holism within which human beings are a key aspect. The thinkers of this evolutionary holism, such as Alfred North Whitehead and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, have elaborated a world view in which human beings, their ideas, their institutions, and their traditions must be reinterpreted and reinvented in the light of the idea that we are not a static reality with a common “human nature” but we are an evolving, growing, and transforming phenomena expanding into the holism that characterizes the evolving Cosmos and all its features.
How does this bear on the idea of democracy? Has democracy reached some final embodiment in the governments of Canada or Western Europe? Or is it a poor specimen of its holistic evolutionary potential? In his January 21st, 2026, speech at Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke of a “rupture” that has taken place once the global hegemon turned its interdependence with other countries in the West into weapons of coercion and domination. There has been a break, he said, and Canada is leading the way in converting to greater autonomy, enhanced “sovereignty,” and multilateral trade pacts with countries around the world to reduce its dependence on the good will of the hegemon.
Before that time, he averred (quoting former Czech President Vaclav Havel), the counties of the West interdependent with the hegemon acted like the “green grocer” under Soviet Communism:
“Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn’t believe it, no one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel called this ‘living within a lie.’ The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.”
Carney asserts correctly that these western “democracies” have been “living within a lie.” The “rules based” system of the hegemon was hypocritical, excepting some nations from the rules and targeting others within an unjust global system of dominance. It is time to take the signs down and face the reality of this system. The break-away order will be a “value-based realism.” The break-away system will be “principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights, and pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.”
Is this a manifesto of evolutionary holism envisioning human rights as a future practical utopia? Is this the “final utopia” that Samuel Moyn says is necessary for human fulfillment? Or is it simply more of the same, for “the same” involved the “hypocritical” failure of democracy, the abandonment of the UN declaration that the foundation of peace, justice, and freedom is the universal commitment to human dignity? Canada and the West European nations helped the world slaughter the people of Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, with some 4 million of them dead. They helped the hegemon destroy the flourishing socialist federation of Yugoslavia. They helped to invade and bring chaos to Afghanistan and then Iraq. They participated in the destruction of Libya in 2011 in which a stable and flourishing society was turned into a hellhole of social chaos and terrorism.
If they take down the hypocritical sign in the window stating that “we support the hegmon with its commitment to worldwide democracy and human rights,” is this going to move the world in the direction of a real commitment to democracy and human rights? Not likely. For it is the world system itself that defeats democracy and human rights, and Mark Carney says nothing at all that challenges this world system. Worse, he buckles down on national “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity,” as well as the war-effort in Ukraine, thereby solidifying the fragmentation of humanity with its inability to protect universal human rights and dignity.
One 20th century democratic theorist who applied evolutionary holism to the idea of democracy was Amerian philosopher John Dewey. His Policial Writings (1993) discusses the concept of democracy at great length. He was most focused on American democracy, to be sure, but he framed his thought through a perspective that saw democracy as an evolutionary process for humanity. It is not a static form in which government is seen as some individual nations-states committed to defending the natural rights of their citizens within their territorial borders. It is much more than that because, for Dewey, the idea of democracy goes right to the heart of what it means to be human.
The first principle to understand is that human beings are social and communicative creatures. (This fact was later spelled out at great length by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas with this notion of “communicative rationality” as our central human capacity, higher than mere “instrumental rationality.” However, for the purposes of our present discussion Dewey’s thought is entirely satisfactory.) The great traditional religions, Dewey affirms, “embodied the organic intuition of the race and the whole man of the race.” And this organic intution of holism nourished the modern conceptions of “Democracy, Brotherhood of Man, Justice, etc.” Without this holistic intuition of our common humanity our “modern values” like “Democracy, Freedom, Justice, Reason” become “unreal idols,” mere “abstractions from the Whole that alone could give them breath” (23).
Before being a form of government, democracy is “a form of moral and spiritual association.” If one thinks of the great triune slogan of the French Revolution: “liberty, equality, and fraternity” (i.e., community), the most fundamental of the three, Dewey claims, is “equality.” Equality is not an arithmetical but an “ethical conception.” Every person on Earth is equal to every other: equality means “that in every individual there lives an infinite and universal possibility,” the chance to actualize themselves as “a person.” “Equality, in short, is the ideal of humanity; an ideal in the consciousness of which democracy lives and moves” (63). Democracy as a social and ethical ideal means people working together to solve concrete problems of production, etc., as well as to move society into ever greater forms of liberty, equality, and community.
The result must be an ever growing “social democracy” in which the elements that diminish equality (like vast disparities in wealth) are progressively diminished. For the end or goal of democracy is not simply a passive government protecting a priori natural rights. The goal is the development of a society of free and equal copartners working together for the common good. “Intelligence,” Dewey writes, “after millions of years of errancy, has found itself a method” (152). And that method for the further evolution of intelligence is democracy. The result is not a planned society, but a “continuously planning society.”
Differences that diminish equality, such as “race, color, wealth, or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life.” We must be thinking in terms of our common humanity and the whole of our precious planet Earth. “Democracy is a way of personal life controlled not merely by a faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished” (242). These proper conditions include the limiting of the wealth of the few that is characteristic of social democracy. But ultimately, we have seen, democracy as an ethical conception is about humanity as a whole.
War, which is the destruction and death of democracy as well as civilization, is solved, not by moral entreaties, nor by condemning the warlikeness of a few. The problem is an “absence of organization” that address its causes. Wars causes will be addressed by “a definitely organized federation of nations…in order that a variety of obligations might come into existence.” We must confront “the old idea of national sovereignty and irresponsibility.” If human beings are truly working together under the ethical principles of liberty, equality, and community, then they become “heralds of a changed social order….They are…the pivots about which turn active efforts for the reconstrution of the social order” (203). This reconstructed social order that will end war requires “a definitely organized federation of nations.”
I take Dewey to be very much on the mark in his concept of democracy as an ethical ideal that should govern the thought and action of people everywhere on Earth. This conception conforms to the evolutionary holism of our contemporary era. Human beings must engage in conscious evolution to move the world to a flourishing place beyond the threat of nuclear war and immanent climate collapse. That place is envisioned by the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. This document allows the people of Earth to end war, protect universal human rights, and protect our planetary ecosystem within the framework of global democracy premised on the principle of unity in diversity for all.
Prime Minister Carney bucked down on the current world system in his Davos speech. It will be a multipolar world of “sovereign” nation-states that, like Canada, will further militarize themselves and attempt to create multipolar trade arrangements that make them less vulnerable to the global hegmon that has percipitated the “rupture” in the post World War II system of the past 80 years. This is not evolutionary holism and, despite his claims, this will not help protect universal human rights and dignity worldwide. If we want real democracy protecting universal human rights, then the world’s social order must evolve into a democratic Earth Federation, with liberty, equality, and community for all persons.
If nations, like the green grocer, take the signs out of their widows affirming the “rules-based” order of the empire, that will not enhance democracy, which is the essential moral imperative of our common human existence. It takes more than removal of a sign to organize a new system that ends hypocrisy about democracy and become serious about actualizing our common humanity and dignity. Article 28 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.”
The world does not have that social order and can never have it under a global capitalism that creates radical inquality among people and nations, nor under a system of militarized sovereign nation-states that see war as an ever-present option. Does war violate human rights? Absolutely, every time. Some UN agencies and a number of global thinkers have formulated the “third generation right” called the “right to peace.” Every person on Earth has the right to peace, and the present system of militarized sovereign nations violates that right by its very existence, just as capitalism violates our rights to reasonable equality and our “second generation” rights to a decent standard of living, with health care, housing and eduction, rights that are violated for some one billion of the Earth’s citizens.
According to most scholars, the sovereign nation-state system began at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, when the Earth appeared incredibly vast to them and when they were largely fighting their wars on horseback with swords. The same time frame applies to global capitalism (of which Mark Carney has been one of the leading figures): it is more than three centuries old and today boasts a world with at least a billion people living in agonizing poverty while 1% of the world’s population owns 40 % of the planet’s wealth. Both systems are badly outdated, and both systems are failures.
It is time for us to really understand the meaning of democracy and to apply our understanding in terms of the evolutionary holism under which we now comprehend the Cosmos and everything with it. We need to grow to planetary consciousness and initiate a planetary organization, such as the Earth Constitution, that can truly actualize the ethical imperative of democracy, equality, freedom and justice. Our world is an unspeakable mess. We are in danger of making ourselves extinct as a species.
The natural law tradition correctly saw that human beings all participate in a common moral dimension. That dimension is no longer envisioned as a priori natural rights to be protected by a territorial government. This 18th century idea is dangerously outdated. Democracy means our universal potential for communicative action and cooperation on our tiny “spaceship” of a planet. Democracy means that we must establish institutions that mirror the universal equality and dignity of all members of the human family. Democracy, in our day, can only mean thinking in terms of a Constitution for the Federation of Earth. 