Were the US Constitution Framers Deep Ecologists?
A More-or-Less Late 4th of July Post
You know how you always hear the argument for abolishing the electoral college, and how it’s usually stated: “land doesn’t vote!” But why shouldn’t it? Land is affected by people’s votes, I don’t know why it shouldn’t be factored into the voting count at all just because someone observed that people they often don’t like tend to be the ones to get those votes. When I originally thought that, however, I didn’t know the term deep ecology. Deep ecology is an outgrowth of a philosophy that says there’s no such thing as fixed human nature, so therefore the ecosystem shouldn’t only be considered in terms of its utility to humans.
I would actually generally-speaking agree with this philosophy, though I have largely been loath to say that, because it’s often associated with left-wing ideas that would get interpreted as “woke” in the culture wars, and I think “woke” is stupid even if I don’t like culture wars at all and view them as a distorting framework that didn’t exist for the vast majority of history and prehistory. Yet, if you do believe land should vote, somehow this gets you considered far-right rather than far-left. I think that actually works out as an argument about why I don’t like culture wars at all. This is doubly odd because it turns out that the person who came up with the electoral college is none other than…
Yeah. I think the US should keep the electoral college and countries that abolished it should probably bring it back. There’s one patriotic, non-nationalistic thing I can genuinely say for the belated American Independence Day. Happy belated Independence Day!
