The end of democracy has been in vogue recently. I don’t mean in Islamist circles, where the blasphemy of replacing divine law by the individually guided human conscience with all its variations is despised, but in the democracies.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had a weekend debate over whether or not democracy in this country is broken. The U.S. has been debating the idea since the Bush administration came to power, and more specifically the past month over the health-care issue through the ructions raised by the drug and insurance companies via their surrogates, incoherently angry Republicans. And just two days ago, the Indian write Arundhati Roy was asking on TomDispatch, Is Democracy Melting? http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175119/arundhati_roy_is_democracy_melting

The idea, then, is in the air. Why are voter turnouts so low? Is democracy failing? Has it failed? If so, what replaces it? As one wacky example, I know someone online who harps on some of Aleister Crowley’s sillier comments about the virtues of feudalism: Crowley was clueless in the realm of political ideas. Then again, theocracy is more widely popular, in certain Christian circles as well as in Jewish Orthodox fundamentalism and Islamism. Feudalism tends to follow on from theocracy, though, so maybe my online contact can have his cake and be flogged for eating it, too.

I admit the issue concerns me, and I turn it around in my head from time to time. Can we make liberal democracy work in a six-billion population world, when most of the wealth is held by mega-corporations, military-industrial complexes (Iran has successfully copied the U.S. on that, and taken the notion quite a bit further) and banks? Who cares about voting when starvation is the ever-insoluble issue? The problem I see is the issue of will: democracy works when there is a sense of purpose to it. The purpose itself can be secondary to that impulse. And will stems from desire: awaken the latter, and the former jumps into action.

But liberal democracies don’t have much desire. In Europe and North America, where we have largely taken care of survival needs, we have concentrated more on liberalising our social structures. This, we have done. You don’t get jailed for being gay any more: you take part in a parade and get yourself interviewed on TV. Or ignored. You can still be persecuted for having a dark skin while being poor, but redistribution of wealth might even beat that one in the wealthier countries in time.

For its first 150 years, the United States had a purpose. First, it had to consolidate the huge wilderness it held within its frontiers and the territories it later acquired. Then, for another century, it pushed those frontiers to the Pacific, while starting to industrialise. By the early 1900s, it had conquered its native tribes, its wilderness and the problem of acquiring wealth.

Everything fell flat in 1929, and the Great Depression produced a surge in membership of the Ku Klux Klan, the communist party, and various flakier movements. But by 1942, World War II was comfortably under way, democracy was redefined by the U.S.’ fascist and militaristic enemies, and when that was all done, there was the Cold War.

That current seems exhausted. The U.S. seems aware it is losing its place in the Sun, and unsure how to hold onto it. Democracy there keeps on looking for more individual freedoms, not an enemy that can inspire collective action.

Europe shares the problem, and feels the weight of its centuries of conflict. World War II might be just another movie script now on this side of the Atlantic, but the recent commemorations in Poland of the country’s invasion by Nazi Germany and then by the U.S.S.R. stirred strong memories and anger.

Wars are very bad for democracy. George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four after serving at the B.B.C. during World War II, and ideas such as doublethink, Newspeak, and perpetual war arose as much from that experience of broadcasting on behalf of democracy as they did from serving with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and seeing Stalin betray that movement.

And we’re fed up with wars. We have had Iraq II, Afghanistan and, it might yet be, Attack on Iran, and we don’t want it. Although endless wars help to inflate the Pentagon’s budgets, a new war just isn’t going to push the right response buttons. The recruiting offices are just not full enough to supply the troops, even during a period of recession like now. Remote-controlled weaponry can’t replace infantry ( = boots on the ground), as both Iraq and Afghanistan have shown, but getting half a leg blown off by an IED isn’t as popular as some people hoped it would be.

What then, do we desire, apart from free internet content and music, gadgetry and cheaper air-fares? How do we provoke the consciousness shift, which is what we need, to recreate will? What is the thing we need to discover – life on a nearby planet or moon, or something about our earth itself that we never noticed or understood before? Because it seems as if we need awareness of a physical thing that alters our spiritual self-perception in order to regain the will to act in an effective way politically.

It seems trite to write it, but space exploration has long struck me as a key component in any sort of optimistic future. There are people who insist we should “focus on our problems here on Earth,” but the truth is we don’t want to. That doesn’t stir desire in many people, and thus it stirs no will. Even global warming isn’t viewed as a big problem, unless people live on a low-lying Pacific Island or a coastal city.

But rekindling the idea that we ought to be heading out to the threshold of the stars touches something deeper in us. We are all aware life on Earth is becoming hazardous as we start to exhaust our water supplies and arable land. More to the point, the intractable people who don’t want democracy in any form are likely to make life increasingly unpleasant here in decades to come.

Beyond that practical excuse, though there is pure vision involved in going out into space. Just our solar system’s space is as huge and forbidding as the ocean once seemed to the explorers leaving the ports of Henry the Navigator of Portugal, or to the crews on Columbus’ ludicrously under-sized caravels. It requires not just technology, but also the sort of courage those sailors, those explorers of the prairies or those climbers of distant mountains felt until the last century opened most of the wild places left to us.

It also offers the chance to re-direct the vast expenditures on weaponry without bankrupting the huge manufacturing infrastructure that supplies the technological beast of the military.

Partly because fictional portrayals – the fantastical Star Wars, the slightly less fantastical Star Trek series and their ilk – gave as the feeling of old hat around space, we have tended to see the job as essentially handled. But, as anyone can see who looks up at the skies an hour’s drive outside the cities where most of us now live, we have hugely under-estimated what awaits us.

Democracy works because of two things, One is a sense of collective purpose that can be expressed through electing leaders. The other is a feeling of personal worth that makes us want to participate in affairs rooted beyond our immediate need for survival. Few people, initially, could actually leave our planet, but if we persisted, we would find more and more ways for more and more people to do so.

It seems like an odd way to get people to care and to vote, but I don’t see anything else for the majority of us beyond survivalist wars and dumb compliance if we don’t look once more to what waits beyond the safe air of our planet.