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<body bgcolor="#CCFFFF"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="6">EARTH WORKS</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">Essays on Human Development in Recent Earth History</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">by Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">1991</p> <p align="center">  <hr> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Copyright 2000, by Hugh M. Lewis</p> </font> <hr> <p align="center"><font size="5">Contents</font></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"><font size="4"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/EarthworksFrames.htm#one">I. Anthropological Prospectus</a></font></p> <p align="center"><font size="4"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/EarthworksFrames.htm#two">II. Nature's Clockworks</a></font></p> <p align="center"><font size="4"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/EarthworksFrames.htm#three">III. Earth State</a></font></p> <p align="center"><font size="4"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/EarthworksFrames.htm#four">IV. Population Bombs</a></font></p> <p align="center"><font size="4"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/EarthworksFrames.htm#five">V. Global Systems, Inc.</a></font></p> <p align="center"><font size="4"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/EarthworksFrames.htm#six">VI. Hidden Factors</a></font></p> <p align="center"><font size="4"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing/Publications/EarthworksFrames.htm#seven">VII. Final Solutions</a></font></p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="one">PART I</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">ANTHROPOLOGICAL PROSPECTUS</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">Whole Worlds in a Nutshell</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Anthropology has long stood aloof from the common existential concerns of it principle object of study, humankind as the academic arbiter of human understanding and the scientific referee of issues of human development and predicaments. Though many individual anthropologists may express strong concern for the welfare and affairs of the other. Anthropology has a corporate enterprise dedicated to the scientific understanding of humankind, has for the most part remained consistently along the sidelines of the unfolding events of human history in the making, and has, by itself, does next to nothing to alter the direction of recent developments on earth or to prevent the passing of many unfortunate episodes.</p> <p>We can look to anthropology for assessments, analysis, information, interpretation, and alternative points of view, but we can no longer naively believe that anthropology will ever provide the kind of assistance or intellectual support which will in the long run make a critical difference or a lasting contribution to the future of the world.</p> <p>For the most part, anthropologists as field researchers and as empirical scientists have preoccupied themselves with the local and the microscopic lens of human minutia, and from this they have sought to derive the definite general rules and principles of human culture and society, and the universal laws of human nature, but they have for the most part eschewed the global or even the regional or interregional as themselves legitimate, and currently appropriate frames of analysis by themselves, except in terms of hologeistic studies of cross cultural comparison in which the ultimate units of analysis remains the problematics of the other at a local level.</p> <p>But hypothetically speaking, anthropology remains the appropriate possible framework of understanding in a systematic and elucidating way many recent events which are of an Earth shaking scale and for the socio cultural dynamics and problematics of human development as both problem causing and potentially problem solving, and for the relatively recent history of human developments as critically bound up with the recent evolutionary and ecological history of the earth.</p> <p>It is the traditional and methodological holism, relativism, synthetic holism and comparatism that renders anthropology such a possible paradigm for the framing of such problematics, for it provides anthropology with a powerful way of seeing and interpreting human realities in which the interrelatedness of things humanly and anthropologically significant can be understood within horizons beyond implicit ethnocentric biases and normal boundaries of knowing the world. The inherent way of comparing elements and aspects cross culturally and trans-subjectively, and the ethnographic and ethnological instrumentality of integrating and configuring from a broad range of difference and diversity in the world general images and paradigms for understanding humankind, allows anthropology the potential power for stepping outside of its own academic boundaries and coming to terms with the collective existential human problematics in the whole world in such a way as to both provide substantial solutions for such problematics and to provide increased understanding about such problems.</p> <p>The world of anthropology, or what I’ve called anthropologia, has been undergoing a major crisis within the last decade. For some it is a crisis within the last decade. For some it is a crisis of professional identity, for others it represents a major paradigmatic revolution, for others it is the pre-paradigmatic birth throes of a fully developed, Mature Science of Humankind which will no longer be looked upon the horns of self-definitional dilemmas. The problem with this paradigmatic perspective is that all departments and all communities of anthropologists cannot yet decide upon and settle down to a single common set of paradigmatic definitions and puzzle solving praxis. Some think the way to such scientific unity and consensus is through cultural materialism, others believe it is in terms of a toned down political economy, still others believe it to be in terms of socio-biology and bio-cultural analysis. Still others believe that the future of scientific anthropology lies in more reliable cross-cultural comparisons. Even others more theoretically and philosophically inclined believe that perhaps anthropology is nonparadigmatic or at best poly-paradigmatic anyway, or is actually a strange in-between mixture of too much science and not enough of the humanities. So the long sought after sense of unity, and the general unifying theory upon which such paradigmatic normalcy can be based, still eludes the fieldworker and researcher of any and all persuasions.</p> <p>But the crisis of identity occurring within anthropology is not just a problem of its paradigmatic possibilities and its department dynamics or its professional politics. It is a more fundamental crises which is occurring throughout Academia, and which has roots much deeper in the history of ideology, understanding and in the earth itself, than many people yet realize. Existential human realities upon an encapsulated earth have caught up with Academia in general and with anthropologia in particular. Anthropologia has run up against its own basic existential horizons if earthboundness in a world which is changing more rapidly than its ‘tradition bound’ methods allow it to comprehend or grasp. Understanding of human reality, and the human realities of understanding, were not ever meant to be parsed up and separated into different, exclusive disciplines and academic fields of study. Such realities are becoming increasingly complex and interrelated, cross disciplinary, such that boundaries and horizons of human understanding once neatly bound within academic tradition are rapidly becoming disrupted and fused together upon the peripheries of collective human consciousness, and upon the margins of the Academic mainstream.</p> <p>The basic symptoms are the pervasive feelings of discontentment and dissatisfaction that the usual, time tested ways of doing things are no longer adequate or efficient enough to keep pace with the rate and number of changes happening in the human world. As a consequence, information and understanding is growing wider and wider, and more and more unbridgeable, between the said of the academic version of the world. The tried and the true of the time tested way of the past, and the done of the wider world of humankind that no longer prizes the past in the quest for the new.</p> <p>In terms of anthropologia, this crisis is experienced as an ex-colonial empire that has come home. In the rectification of its identity, names have changed but the basic rules of the game remains the same. Economic imperialism has replaced earlier version of political imperialism, but the underlying factors of military aggression and imperialistic predominance remain structurally the same.</p> <p>Political economic strategies and capitalistic systems of world order have relinquished their old charter of westernization for a new global charter of modernization. Bureaucratic encapsulization within a world system has co-opted and usurped the old way of administrative colonialism. Now there are more game players, and more pieces of the pie, and more people in the world who must be accounted for. What was once the Americana of manifest destiny and the new world, has become the Pax Amerikanicization and capitalistic acculturation of the new frontiers of the whole world and the entire encapsulated earth. Developmental policies have become political economic domination by other means, and the need for ‘defensive’ military aggression is but a temporary lapse of normal political economic function.</p> <p>As Empire returns home, anthropologia has becoming increasing reflexive in search of its lost sense of otherness that it had so long taken for granted in the world. Or, to put another way, what is increasingly happening to anthropologists is that they are awakening to a world in which only the self remains. The original other has become merged into our own sense of identity as other senses of the self. Anthropologists are no longer bent on making the strange seem familiar, but must now deal with a strangeness and estrangement of the familiar. And the anthropological sense of self which remains in the world, is not monolithic or monothetic. Beneath a very thin veil of a very narrow ego identity gains through association within the world system, the sense of self has become fragmented, shattered and disintegrated. The genuine identity of the multicultural anthropological self in the world has become culture shocked into a state of psycho social schizophrenia. Losing an objective sense of otherness in the world, we have also lost a subjective sense of self in the world. All that remains is a thin veneer of professional ego identity in search of both self and other in the world.</p> <p>Only if and when anthropology finally learns to step outside of the terminological and definitional battles of its own dialectics and beyond the sphere of influence of its own paradigmatic politics will it be able to recover an undivided sense of ego identity in the world. Only then will it be able to relearn how to deal with both otherness and sense of self in the world without the dilemmas of a dichotomized reality. Anthropology as a corporate enterprise cannot accomplish this difficult task, but anthropologists as independently acting individuals and as members of a shared humanity can and must attempt this feat. The world may never have needed anthropologia, but anthropologia has always needed the world.</p> <p>Anthropology, as an alternative way of understanding human possibility in the world, provides both a general framework for the theoretical understanding of the human world, and a realistic accounting of the general phenomenal patterning encountered in that world. Anthropology can offer a different way of seeing the world and a different way of relating to that world. As such, it can offer the promise of a different possible version of that world.</p> <p>A general global model of recent developments of earth history is available for understanding the interrelationships of many otherwise quite disparate but none the less interdependent elements and events.</p> <p>Simply put, continuing technological development in the directions of the past one hundred or more years, coupled with a rapidly increasing world population which is estimated to soon surpass the carrying capacity of lifeboat earth, is leading rapidly to basically unrehabilitated degradation and destruction of many ecosystems of the earth’s environment.</p> <p>General global environmental circumscription in terms if decreasing available resources, imbalanced ecosystems and human induced erosion and pollution, will become coupled with increasing social circumscription of global over population to further squeeze the world political economic system and to create stresses and tensions which on one hand will induce greater degrees of authoritarianism, and on the other, increasingly destabilize the functional adaptability and coherence of the system. The net consequence is that the world system has reached a supercritical zenith of its developmental growth beyond which periodic, expectable but wholly random and unpredicted damaging events will recur that functions to maintain the overall stability of the whole system.</p> <p>Food prices will continue to climb, along with basic energy costs, and the whole cost of living will soar to become essentially unaffordable to more and more people who are driven outward and downward by a System of capitalistic development that has run out off control.</p> <p>Increasing inequality coupled with decreasing availability will generate many minor revolutions of rising expectation, which either grow beyond control to induce drastic structural changes or else lead to extreme authoritarian reactions and much social violence.</p> <p>One expectable and likely consequence of this general development will be increasing global militarization in terms of horizontal escalation as opposed to continued vertical escalation of nuclear armaments. Horizontal escalation could in the long run prove to be more inherently destabilizing that the vertical escalation of the past has been, but one very plausible scenario of an outcome of such escalation, of multilateral armaments, is the occurrence of another World War, the basic destructiveness of which surpasses the nuclear threshold.</p> <p>Global nuclear holocaust would have sudden and drastic consequences for the future of human development and earth history. Humankind will thrust literally into another dark ages from which there may no be any adaptive reemergence.</p> <p>But even if a holocaust never happens, there will be definite destructive long term consequences of historically recent human events on earth. The quality of life for virtually everyone will continue to rapidly deteriorate, even for the fortunate few who struggle to remain in positions of control. Their long term success will hardly have been worth the net costs, and no amount of ideological delusion or deceit will be able to dispel the globally pervasive disillusionment for everyone which must inevitably be a consequence of the environmental degradation of the earth.</p> <p>For many more, life will only prove to be more poverty, violence, and opportunity-less than ever before. There will be fewer compensations or consolations for failure to make a modern living in the world. There will become fewer escapes or fewer ways out of the existential predicaments and entanglements, which we shall find ourselves, thrust deeper and deeper into.</p> <p>The loss of quality of life will be reflected in the increasing spuriousness, alienation, anomie and aloneness in an increasingly impersonal, over crowded and complex social world. Fewer and fewer people will be able to afford to find themselves, to avoid increasing exploitation or else systematic exclusion and under employment. Life and living will become more bureaucratically encapsulated and more political economically controlled indirectly by people whom we will never have occasion to meet, challenge or even answer for.</p> <p>Education, for example, will become increasingly consumption oriented and decreasingly productive per educational dollar spent. Education will entail economic and social institutional entrapment for many whose experience and personal development prevent them from entering the world system at a level commensurate to their level of education. Schools will become more and more be seen as social reservoirs which serve to keep in suspended animation a larger, exploitable pool of human resources who might otherwise, if left un-isolated in the world, have a destabilizing effect.</p> <p>No one really knows exactly how many resources are yet available, or actually how resilient the global ecology of the earth might be, or what its carrying capacity of the total population of humankind might be, or what the long term human responses to increasing levels of stress and circumscription, or social-functional-adaptive reverberations within the world system that might be resultant, or what kinds of militaristic crises might eventually be precipitated from increasing conflict, tension and competition for fewer and fewer resources, coupled with the over shadowing doom of future diminishment, depletion and deprivation. But anthropological theory and evidence supports the general model of increasing dysfunctional equilibrium of a global system and ecology and a likely scenario of major systemic events that produces damaging reverberations worldwide.</p> <p>Whether we might survive such a doomsday or not, whether intact or by bits and pieces. What role scientific and technological progress and economic development, in both spurring forward these dire developments, and in further increasing our ability to adapt, remains to be finally discovered. As it is today, it is extremely difficult to look beyond the storm clouds upon our current earth horizon, to forecast brighter, better days ahead.</p> <p>The kinds of question which will be of more and more concern for more and more people are existential problems of how the general global predicaments impact upon and affect elements of everyday life and living and what will be the daily signs and common manifestations of the changes which are rapidly taking place world wide. These are questions which affect neither the privileged elite at the apex of the progressive pyramid of world development, or the many more who have fallen into the abyss of absolute poverty below the base of the pyramid. Life in-between the two extremes will become more or less attenuated and more and more fragile in its long term stability, and increasingly over burdened by many different stresses and strains which pull in multiple, often opposite directions.</p> <p>It can be expected that everyday life will become increasingly characterized by competition against more and more people for fewer and fewer resources, which will mean that social pressures of downward social mobility will become stronger than the pulling forces of upward mobility. Fewer and fewer people will make it in ways that people used to in the past. And if does not prove to be true for many of us in our own generation, it will definitely prove more common in our children’s generation.</p> <p>Social institutions and services already strained to capacity will become increasingly overloaded to the point that they become practically dysfunctional in meeting the needs in which they were designed to serve. Bureaucracy will grow in both size and inefficiency to deal effectively increasing numbers of human problems. Bureaucracy will come more and more to serve a system reinforcing function rather than a social service role. Its administrative priorities will tend to negatively outline social problem areas and thereby serve to maintain and perpetuate these problem areas in ways which render them relatively neutralized in relation to the larger social system. On the down side this will entail erecting ever more complicated screens of obfuscation that shunt excessive people into circular networks which lead nowhere but back to the beginning. Ideologies of denial and closed door policies will tend to permit the development of more intricate and entangled hidden secondary networks within the system that serves the real arbiter function of serving private group interests.</p> <p>The environment of the earth which surround us will begin evolving in ever more rapid transition, and the social environment will begin to crowd in upon our lives and become ever more threatening to individual sense of autonomy, control, power and security in the world. Issues of relative powerlessness and the need for power, of lack of security and the search for security, of lack of control and autonomy and the need for exercising control and autonomy, will become greater concerns for the individual and the group, and non-being of human ego identity will come to replace in ever greater proportion the beingness of natural human self identity.</p> <p>Electronic media and mechanisms of information manipulation will increasingly come to intermediate our environments and will assume an ever greater measure of influence, both directly and indirectly, in our lives. We will become increasingly dependent upon such electronic intermediation and thus will become to rely less upon our own sensitivities in making our own independent decisions. There will be a gradual usurpation of our normative independence in a contextual and at an unconscious level. Electronic media will become increasingly our artificial senses, our artificial intelligence, our artificial imaginations, our artificial voices and even our artificial actions. Direct perceptual access to significant environments will become increasingly distanced by such electronic intermediation. We can witness the process happening even now as a whole world remains helplessly glued to television screens to watch the unfolding of military events which seem beyond anyone’s control. The indirect and vicarious experience of the electronically intermediated events have come to serve as substitutes for our sense of control in the world.</p> <p>What is even more problematic, that the long and complex networks of such electronic intermediation renders our basic perceptual horizon of the world subject to manipulation and interference and thus to control by agents, representatives, editors, reporters, cameramen, who cannot be accounted for and whose influence in our intermediation remains mostly hidden. This entails that ultimate, impersonal and grand interests of social organization are in manipulative and sublimational control of our electronic perceptuality and this control will always tend to be indirect, out of awareness and subversive to the very common sense ground of reality upon which our individual rights, freedoms and interests are rooted.</p> <p>Common sense itself, as the ground of our existential pre-understandings, of our sensibilities, of our conceptuality and rationality, our collective values and collective imagination, and even of our conditioned consciousness and perception, is being rendered more and more subject to this kind of manipulative control, such that the very ground of our implicit and intuitive knowledge of the world is being directed and influenced by interests that are contrary to our own and over which we have slight powers or capacities to counteract or correct for.</p> <p>While our collective existential electronically intermediated environmental horizons of the world will expand and become enlarged, on our own narrow personal normative horizons will proportionately shrink and diminish in relevance in relation to the world.</p> <p>As our natural environments and beingness become replaced by artificially constructed social environment and sense of nonbeing in the world, we must face more and more the inevitable consequences of a basic individual atomization, alienation and aloneness, if not loneliness, in an overcrowded, and impersonal world. We are having to learn to live with increasing existential indeterminacy and indecision, such that even the choices which we feel we must make are not clearly definable or discernible in our lives. We must act, but we will no longer know in what direction or exactly how to act.</p> <p>We are on the verge of a mass oriented world society of a mass oriented humankind defined in terms of increasingly mass oriented values and behaviors. As mass oriented it will be material but not spiritual; it will be collective but impersonal. It will be automatic and mechanical and participatory, but not voluntary; it will have great quantity but be significantly lacking in any quality.</p> <p>We must learn to live collectively with the ideological delusion and mythological illusions of a cyborg humankind—a cybernetically, electronically intermediated, orgasmic body of humankind which combines in strange in combinations natural and artificial elements, and yet in which the natural is always subject of and subordinated to the functions of the artificial. Our lives are becoming increasingly composed of a moiré patterning of both vegetable and organic elements and plastic and synthetic components.</p> <p>The future development of human civilization will not be all bad. It will mostly be just different, and much more difficult in some ways than it has recently been. Human flexibility, adaptability and creativity will respond in many unpredictable ways when genuine human needs become left unsatisfied by a grand and impersonal System. People will form loose and informal networks and associations, which to some extent fill in the deficit, left over.</p> <p>Humans can learn to cope with and endure situations of extreme stress and deprivation, and can rapidly readjust to changes if their survival depends upon such readjustment.</p> <p>The rise of ad hoc, extemporaneous, and extra legal social organization will be something to look forward to when artificial and unnatural social environmental circumstances tend to cultivate alienation, isolation and anomie of individual personal existence. It will provide a missing sense of interpersonal identity and meaningfulness, which will counteract the negative, anti-individual tendencies of the System.</p> <p>Such organizations will provide screens of resistance and alternative opportunity, which will brake the ‘totalizing’ tendencies of the System, and if successful, will in the long run erode the base of social support of the System.</p> <p>It will be from this direction that unpredictable change and potentially damaging, even catastrophic events will arise and provide a limiting influence to the growth and power of the world system. It can be expected that the world system will respond with violent force in order to control such uprisings and that this will become a primary source of conflict in the future.</p> <p>It is possible that the world will undergo a kind of civil war that will split world society into contraposed interest groups divided horizontally not so much along ‘ethno-national lines as diagonally along lines of class-caste lines of global social structure—dividing the world internationally between first and third world nations, and domestically within countries between the upper and lower classes. The long term outcome of such a kind of conflict would be difficult to estimate, except to say that like most civil conflicts it is likely to be very bloody and perhaps even unnecessary.</p> <p>The point is that many people who are systematically excluded from normal participation within the world system will not be left completely hopeless and helpless to struggle for themselves together against the dictates and over determination by the system.</p> <p>The main stratagem of the system will be to systematically divide and conquer social groups in order to turn the frustration of people against one another and to prevent aggression from becoming focused upon the system itself. It does this through exaggeration and inflation of competition between individuals and groups in the struggle for limited basic resources. Individuals will also tend to be selectively isolated or removed from normal participation within the system is a very surreptitious manner, and potential oppositional leadership will tend to be bought off or co-opted into the system to serve as administrative mediators on behalf of the interests of the system. But people who find themselves still existentially apart from the system will eventually awaken to their common plight and must sooner or later coalesce together to form social movements in resistance to or outside of the normal boundaries of the system. Such groupings will find common ground for grievance and resistance against the system.</p> <p>The only way which the system will be able to exert control and try to stem the rise of such unification of grass roots resistance to its dictates and determination will be to increasingly augment its mechanisms of programmatic behavior modification, brain washing, media manipulation and persuasion, and ideological conversion, by more and more authoritarian and totalitarian means. The react of naked force and brutal violence to suppress popular resistance may work in the short term but in the long term will tend to expose the raw inequities and naked power of the system, and will counteract to crystallize even more organized resistance against it. The long term consequences will be a vicious cycle of the escalation of violence and conflict as contraposed interest groups become more and more polarized between extremes and more and more people become caught in between in the crossfire.</p> <p>It is hoped that the long term outcome of this global civil war within the world system will be incremental democratization of the world system and a compromise and popular control of its power by increasing the level of popular participation within the system and by the elimination of socio structural exclusion. It will either be this or the eventual disintegration of the world system as we know it now into a plethora of struggle and competing ethno-national states accompanied by increasing amounts of corruption the higher up the ladder of consumption.</p> <p>The controlling elite will eventually be rendered incompetent to prevent the further fragmentation of the world system and the disaffection of its specialist functionaries.</p> <p>There are one of two general directions which the world can go, on an earth that’s living spaces are becoming increasingly circumscribed. One direction is towards increased polarization between the haves and the have-nots. This direction will entail attempts to maintain stability in core areas and to keep instability marginalized in the periphery. As long as the illusion of peace can be fostered in the core, virtually any amount of trouble can be tolerated in the periphery.</p> <p>Polarization will tend to create a two tiered world class caste society, the relations between which will be mediated by an in-between group which is part of neither tier. The upper tier will posses most of the wealth and control most of the capital and resources. They will tend to own property and will be characterized by their long-term inhabitance of core areas. The mobility patterns of this tier will be quite different from the mobility patterns of the bottom tier. They will regularly travel in wide circles, but maintain fixed locations as places of long-term residence. The lower tier will be characterized by its basic rootlessness and pervasive long-term homelessness. Their migration patterns will follow labor trails and routes of socio economic opportunity, but they will be as a class caste be characterized by their lack of property ownership, capital investment and wealth, and by their long-term transience and marginality at the edges of the core. Any given area will become characterized by a local elite who are more or less interlinked with a virtually cosmopolitan network of the elite, and by a movable mass that is characterized by its shifting and its geographic mobility, and which is interconnected with its own international network of labor traffic.</p> <p>The in-between middle class caste will be characterized by a lack of its own identity, by its own internal stratification and division, and by its sacrifice of both mobility and ownership for a modicum of social security and extremely limited and restricted control. In any area, it will compose the administrative bureaucracy. The functional, face-to-face intermediaries between the lower rungs of the upper class caste and the upper rungs of the lower class caste. It will be characterized by a shallow reactionary ideology of the system and by its pervasive superficial sense of false consciousness. From the standpoint of the upper class caste, it will be more like the lower class caste, but from the standpoint of the lower class caste it will reflect the values and symbolisms and authority of the upper class caste. Its primary function will not be one of gate keeping so much as gate barring or locking, and the maintenance of mechanisms which create screens of obfuscation which effectively hide the activities of the upper elite and also glorify their status. It will also have the dirty job of enforcing the authority from above upon the lower classes.</p> <p>Such a scenario would resemble somewhat South African social structure, except instead of enforced apartheid, there is a world wide cultural wasteland of shifting poor people, and many small defensive islands of the elite.</p> <p>The elite and the have not's will live and lead effectively separate lives, and the world wide social structure will be characterized by class caste endogamy and occupational specialization, such that the lower classes castes will fill all menial and skilled labor positions at the bottom of the hierarchy, controlled by managers of managers of managers that forms its own marginal middle class hierarchy within a hierarchy, which is in turn controlled from above by the elite.</p> <p>We are today not far from such a world order. It is one in which ethno national identities are being crossed out and broken down by hierarchical diagonal loyalties within separate class caste positions, such that members of one class caste in one nation have more in common from a socio- structural standpoint with their counterparts in other nations, than with their own ethno national elites. From this standpoint, foster ethno national consciousness is a way of effective sundering cross cutting ties between the lowest rank and file which might pose a problem to the elite, while the elite of different ethno nations are becoming more and more interlinked with one another and are beginning more and more to form common interest groups.</p> <p>It falls to the middle class caste managerial group again to interconnect the ethno national ideologies with the private interests of the controlling elite, such that they themselves tend to embody and act out the ethno national ideologies and thereby themselves remain effectively fragmented and segregated along these lines. These groups will come to adopt a standard ethno national cultural orientation that proclaims its own embodiment of tradition, mythology and values.</p> <p>This kind of Pakistan scenario will stress the social distance and unbridgeable between the few haves and the many have not's who are themselves organized in such a way as to keep one another from accomplishing anything in life. Buying into the illusions of the ideologies and false consciousness reinforced by the mass oriented media, the lower rank and file will compete with one another to rise to the middle managerial positions, which, despite the promise of national leadership, will remain basically insecure and precarious in its inter-positioning.</p> <p>The other kind of direction which world order can go is in terms of bridging more effective the gulf between the rich and the poor by the introduction and promotion of social programs, through socialization, of mechanisms which effective redistribute wealth and level it in such a way as to demote its accumulation in the hands of a few. Such a direction of development will lead to a formation of a strong, genuine middle class group, strong enough and wealthy enough to function separately and independently of any elite groups. In such a scenario, the middle managerial class will provide effective screens of opportunity and of support, which provide a means of escape from poverty at the bottom and which limits the accumulation of power and resources at the top.</p> <p>Instead of being characterized by its bureaucratic gate barring function, as immigration authorities’, and instead of the false consciousness and promotion of chauvinist ethno national ideologies, this class will be rather well educated and will tend towards a multicultural orientation promoting attitudes of tolerance for diversity and difference and protection of human rights and freedoms.</p> <p>An upper and lower class will always remain, but they will be more circumscribed than the middle classes that will be characterized by their diversity, and social forces will tend towards a convergence to the middle.</p> <p>It is possible that some of both scenarios will be present in the future, and that world order will be characterized by a curious admixture of both directions of social development. It is impossible that in these contraposed tendencies the lines of stress and future conflict will appear—between local societies tending to merge in the middle and International Systems tending to polarize toward the extremes.</p> <p>This kind of scenario depends upon the future diminishing importance of the cultural and geographical, and linguistic boundaries that have historically separated people into different groups, and the increasing power and significance of a world wide socio political economic system which is symbolically reinforced through the use of electronic media. Ethno-national identities, loyalties and interests will remain, but become encompassed by and encapsulated within a global framework of socio structural role status identity and personal interests within the world system. Civilization as a global, inherently trans-cultural phenomena of socio structural integration, will tend to become embedded deeper and deeper in the everyday life of each individual no matter what that person’s relative positionality, to the point that these social forces tend to orient that individual more toward functional and symbolic solidarity within a world order than in terms of ethno-national or traditional loyalties to separate cultural orientations.</p> <p>Ethno-national and cultural identity will remain, but it will become increasingly subservient to and functionally dependent upon the world system, as a principle mechanism of maintaining class caste hegemony and for promoting false consciousness and ideological disunity among the lowest classes.</p> <p>Either direction of general social development depends upon the rise of a global civilization and of world consciousness which effectively transcends and overcomes the culture historical barriers between different peoples. These differences between groupings of people will be long maintained, but how the groups become interrelated within a global framework will become critical to determining the final long term consequences of human development upon earth. The Pakistani model will tend to promote chauvinism between such groups which serve a legitimating and reinforcing function of class caste polarization within a world system. The second general direction of development will lead, instead of chauvinism, to widespread pluralism and multiculturalism, and to general tendencies of social integration promoted by the brokerage and intermediating function of the middle class. Culture historical identity and heritage will remain important, but will become increasingly relativized within an increasingly embedded context of a world wide multicultural continuum.</p> <p>Also central to the understanding of these two general directions of human development is the validity of the notion of class-caste and the kind of diagonal solidarity that it is implicitly based upon. Class caste is most generally reflected in the notion of first world, second world, third world, fourth world, fifth world and perhaps even a little recognized sixth world, which are most frequently used when describing world society. Class caste also recognizes the consequences of long term embedding of social stratification such that the definitional lines distinguishing clearly between a class and a caste are no longer sharp or even readily distinguishable. Global stratification within world society becomes effectively multi-tiered or in a sense triple canopied. Class castes exists mutually side by side, and lead functionally interrelated lives, but at the same time they lead lives which are in every respect symbolically and structurally separated and different. Important to this notion also is that international core periphery relations between upper and lower class castes will be reflected of and reflected by many similar domestic core periphery relations between the ‘local level’ elite and the local poor. Even now we can find many such social correlates between a domestic analogy. Say of homelessness, institutionalization, rural poverty, etc. and an international paradigm of refugees, immigrants, colonization, and the third world.</p> <p>More and more, the rise of global stratification and of world civilization will become characterized by an increasing structural isomorphism between international relations and domestic situations. International wars come to resemble more and more police actions to keep the peace, and such that international differences between core and periphery will become reflected and embodied in domestic relations between core areas of key development and peripheral areas of underdevelopment.</p> <p>These process will come to superimpose a global hegemony of a world system cultural orientation in which separate ethno-national versions will come to resemble more and more minor variations upon a common theme of capitalistic development. Ethno-national cultures will become more and more oriented around the same focal standards of the world system.</p> <p>The net affect of this is that in either direction, class caste differences within a global framework of a world system will come to increasingly override or undermine ethno-national cultural differences as the basis for political-economic and social determination.</p> <p>If polarization occurs along lines of the diagonal stratification between class caste, then it is likely that this difference will be symbolically and ideologically reinforced by a kind of fascism and social racism in which the elite class caste become associated with conceptions of natural beauty, superiority, rationality, ability, while the lower class caste become associated with conceptions of natural ugliness, pollution, ineptitude, inferiority, irrationality, etc. These may become racist to the extent that certain symbolisms of innateness become closely associated with certain body types, physique, facial appearance, manner of speech, etc. These racial preconceptions of superior natural fitness will cross cut old dividing lines of skin color or racial blood type, etc., such that selection will be on the basis of certain presumed natural physical characteristics etc.</p> <p>Which natural direction of development becomes predominant will be in part determined by which kind of value orientation of a world class caste culture become embedded—whether values emphasizing social difference and distance, of hierarchy, authority and symbolisms system. I would add two more worlds—a fifth and a sixth world, and would add that the international paradigms for these worlds have domestic equivalents within the modern social structure of any region.</p> <p>Briefly the six worlds consist of the following:</p> <p>The First World are the elite, less than five percent of the world’s population, who occupy the very apex of the social pyramid and who control and consume most of the world’s resources. Their primary function within the world system is that of consumption and symbolic reinforcement of the ethos of the system by sumptuary privilege. Typically, the economy of the first world is characterized as a professional, service related occupational structure within a consumer coordinator ‘post industrial’ economy. Service jobs are high paying with low supervision and facilitate the consumption of products of the capitalistic system.</p> <p>The Second World are the middle class bureaucrat managers who are the next fifteen to twenty percent of the pyramid and whose jobs are had within a redistributive centralized economy. Their function is to maintain symbolically the ideology of the system, to control and manipulate the dissemination of information, and to intermediate all relations between the first world and the rest. Their jobs tend to be low to medium paying but higher in security benefits. This world is characterized by its incorporation and embodiment of the values of the system, by its potential fascism, false consciousness, hypocrisy and hierarchy.</p> <p>The Third World consists of the next sixty to seventy percent of the population pyramid whose primary function is labor production within the world system—production characterized by low pay for long and hard physical work, high supervision, lack of job security, transience. This is a plebeian-proletariat working class whose jobs range from unskilled to semi-skilled to skilled specialization. Though they make up the greatest bulk of the global population, they control proportionately the least amount of the world’s resources. This group also comprises the rural peasantry of the world and consists of the greatest amount of intercultural diversity.</p> <p>The Fourth World are the bottom ten to fifteen percent who are characterized by their joblessness or marginality within the world system. They may be groups either internally colonized or as in black American ghettos of the US or in apartheid in white South Africa, or else they may occupy the no man’s land of the very fringes of the World periphery in harsh environments in which only the very most basic forms of resource production occur—forestry, mining, fishing, drilling, wild harvesting etc.</p> <p>The Fifth World are the bottom less than five percent of the pyramid, representing the very base of this pyramid. They are the international refugees who lack a permanent residence or a homeland, and the domestic homeless who have been systematically excluded from participation within the world system. These are the sacrificial victims of the world system which represent mechanisms of population control. These people have been selected out of the system as relatively unemployed and unemployable.</p> <p>The Sixth World is a marginal residual category comprise only of one to two percent of the world’s population. These are people who are permanently removed from participation within the system, or are forcibly isolated in prisons, asylums or as the inhabitants and street people of skid row.</p> <p>The last three Worlds represent the black hole of absolute poverty—people whose lives are caught within a inescapable and vicious cycle of lack of resources, opportunities and early violent death.</p> <p>The Third World is the bulk of the population and are characterized by their relative deprivation and the exploitability of their existential situations. Their life is a grand lottery game in which their little money is exchanged for high hopes and grand disappointments within the world system.</p> <p>It has been common to rank nations along this kind of scale depending upon the relative positions and proportions of population within these countries when compared nomothetically with other of snobbery and privilege, or else values emphasizing social equality, pan human commonality, individual identity etc.</p> <p>The defining features of class caste within the world system will be the coexistence of functionally integrated yet socially separate worlds that work and define themselves counter-referentially in relation to one another and yet which lead and live separate lives in separate socially constructed senses of reality. In essence the social structure of the world system will be a two tiered society in which the world of the upper and lower classes are functionally separated by one another by an intermediate class caste which defines its own functionality and marginality within the world system.</p> <p>It is interesting that as this system develops, what in one set of circumstances appears to be ethno-national exogamy or interracial marriage, may actually be instances of class caste endogamy.</p> <p>Social mobility and stratification can be described as diagonal within multiple overlapping hierarchies rather than as vertical within a single hierarchy or horizontal within multiple but separate hierarchies.</p> <p>Whether polarization increases between the upper and lower classes, or a direction of convergence towards the middle is achieved, will be reflected by the amount of class caste intermarriage and integration of the middle class, and by the degree of social mobility which can be achieved by way of the middle class. If the direction towards increased polarization occurs, then the middle class will become more and more functionally marginalized, and the amount of social interaction between the groups will be minimized. This group will then be characterized by its downward social mobility and its ‘delegation’ of negative authority as a rigid bureaucratic hierarchy. It will then tend to become endogamous.</p> <p>Within the social structure of the world system it has been typical to divide society up into four worlds defined by their separation and by their functional interrelation within the countries of the world. But it must be remembered that all six worlds can be found within any nation.</p> <p>It is also true that the positionality of any person or group or nation within such a framework is always relative to the local, regional or international context in which it is framed. It is the basic relativity of the positioning within the world system that renders such a typological scheme problematic, over simplifying and blinding to many expectations to its paradigmatic rule.</p> <p>People move between worlds quite frequently, boundaries between worlds are frequently undetermined and unclear, there exist structural inbetweens or inter-positionality in which people may share in more than one world at the same time. It is the case that the quality of life for many third world people may be relatively superior to that of many first world inhabitants, and that people of the third world living in core areas may have more materially and quantitatively than many first world people living in peripheral zones.</p> <p>Positing two alternative directions for human social development within the World System focuses upon an alternative theory of social change and structuration that emphasizes the central determining role played by the social structural middle ground, occupied by the intermediate functioning of a middle class, rather than by either the material substructure or the ideological superstructure. In this version of this version of the historical dialectics of the development of human civilization, the central inter-positionality of the intermediate groups are critical to the direction of change within the society at large. It represents the fulcrum upon which the social extremes teeter totter for control. In this regard the middle class can function hierarchically and reactively, and itself become effective sundered and nonexistent in the polarization between the extremes, or it can in its own coalesce create the major oppositional force to the predominant structure of any society. Change impacts upon and comes from the relative position and functioning of the middle classes in the articulation of the social system. They provide the source of leadership in alternative social movements, and can provide the loci of power and center of balance about which change within a society becomes determined. In their intermediating function, in their articulation of social process and change, and in their controlling function within the system and symbolic role of ideological reinforcement and embodiment, this class becomes the focal point of the stresses and conflicts within any social structure and paradoxically also represent the group with the greatest power and strategic control to effect changes.</p> <p>The history of human civilization, of the rise, fluorescence, decay and demise of societies on earth, can be seen as an accordion effect of contradiction and expansion of social structure, such that one period of growth in characterized by convergence to the middle, which is followed in dialectical counterpoint by a phase of expansion and polarization towards the extremes which effectively splits the middle class and leads to social movement and structural change.</p> <p>The development of human civilization has represented the spread of this historical dialectic of expansion/contraction, polarization/convergence, or mobilization/relaxation, such that more and more groupings of humankind become incorporated within this process as this process in the long run tends towards convergence in centers of development which organizes ever greater aggregations of people around its sphere of influence.</p> <p>In this sense, civilizations are part of a culture historical process of selection. Civilizations compete with one another in access to resources, power, control, until eventually a single one will win out and monopolize the world order, except that in the process of culture historical competition the nature and structure of civilization will itself become transformed through process of acculturative assimilation and integration of differences.</p> <p>The primary function of the middle class within human civilization has been the intermediation of differences and the process of social mobilization and mobility. As such the middle class is always inter-positional and somewhat precarious on its relation between upper and lower classes, and its relative status will be a marker of the structural state of a given society.</p> <p>One final consideration of anthropological importance in relation to the world system concerns the mechanisms which are readily employed for cultivating and maintaining conformity within the system and for controlling or eliminating nonconformity from the system. These mechanism may be glossed as the following:</p> <p>Propagandistic persuasion, deceit, manipulation, and control of information, official jargon, legalese, bureaucratese and double speak, designed to deceive, mislead, distort information, and to convince people of the legitimacy and authority of the System.</p> <p>Behavior modification, punishment, negative and positive reinforcement, social ostracism, scapegoating, in group/out group consciousness etc. Inducement of conversion through stress.</p> <p>Media manipulation of people’s psyche, consciousness, motivation, levels of aggression, symbolic violence, unconsciousness and even their perceptualization of the world. The use of subtle and subversive techniques of sublimation and symbolization.</p> <p>Ideological brainwashing to produce conversion experiences and to breakdown psychological resistance to ideological conformity.</p> <p>Widespread use and misuse of different drugs and narcotics to lower people’s rational resistance to the system and to induce passivity and controllability.</p> <p>Control, legitimization and professionalization of intelligence and information possession. Access to kinds of information is graded and restricted, and a great deal of censorship and editorship goes on behind closed doors to control what people know and think about.</p> <p>Symbolic promotion of values of material mass consumption which tends to hook people into dependency patterns within the world system in the long run to deprive them of actual or apparent independence from the system.</p> <p>Promotion of attitudes and actions reflective of authority, hierarchy, dominance, fear, guilt, aggressiveness, competition which tend to reinforce predominant orientations and the status quo of power structure within the world system.</p> <p>All of these mechanisms, as well as others, become interrelated and inter-functionally dependent in the reinforcement and structuration of the individual within the system. It is sometimes very difficult to tell where one kind of mechanism leaves off and another takes over.</p> <p>It is important to emphasize the difference between manifest and latent purpose of the system, to foster ideological support and false consciousness on one hand, and on the other to hide or systematically obfuscate the realities of power and transaction which goes on within the system, and to legitimize the persecution, exclusion or destruction of out-groups or nonconformist individuals in the promotion and protection of the private, special interests which drive and control the system.</p> <p>These mechanisms have all been technically developed and improved through trial and error and research and development, and have become much more effective in their power to subversively control the individual psyche and to render individual behavior more predictable and rational.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="two">PART II</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">NATURE’S CLOCKWORKS</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">Unwinding Time for Humankind</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>It is of paramount importance that we learn to see ourselves evolutionarily and ecologically in relation to larger spatio-temporal contexts of Nature, and come to understand how the predicaments of our current global situation is part of a longer and larger natural history of life on earth which has had its own recurrent patterning and its own sense of timing and its own scales of timing and its own scales of duration and cycles and rhythms of events and process of which we are ourselves but a very small part to play.</p> <p>It is not without relevance that we see how disproportionate our own brief span of culture historical consciousness is when compared to the much longer time scales involved in the bio-cultural evolution of human prehistory, in the evolution epochs of the dinosaurs and of the great mammals on earth, or of the still much longer span of the first primeval evolution of life on earth, or of the geophysical evolution of the earth itself from the stardust of which we are ultimately all composed.</p> <p>The spans of time involved in the natural unfolding of life have been so immense in comparison to our own diminished historical experiences that we really have no sound way of comprehending or coming to terms with its vast scale of change or enormity of its long duration. So much has happened in the earth’s past that we lack any proportionate frame of reference by which to relate or compare our own relatively brief breath of existence on earth.</p> <p>And yet our brief moment of human history and consciousness, but a few millennium of many millions of years, has had a special significance for the natural history of the earth, for the rise of human civilization on earth has effectively stopped the natural clockwork of evolution and has interfered with and altered irremediably many of the natural rhythms and processes of the earth’s fragile but flexible and enduring ecology.</p> <p>Life on earth will continue evolving on long after we have left it on its own, in spite of and because of our interference and destructiveness. It will evolve but not as we have come to know it, and not in the same way as it had in the deep, long past. We will become but another evolutionary episode of its evolving history, but the climax of another of its long epochs. There will in the future be some strange creature who will refer to the Age of the Dinosaurs, the Age of the Mammals, the Age of Man, the Age of ….</p> <p>And it is impossible to tell now whether we are at the dusk of our age or really the dawn of a new one. The twilight of our collective consciousness, whether we are just awakening from a deep evolutionary sleep or we are but the sudden psycho biotic climax of the evolution of sentience, presents us with a dilemma of how we shall regard both our deep sense of the past and the way we shall seek to know our future ward becoming. We are historically in a critical period of transition which is going on all around us and is happening within us which radically relativizes our own awareness of ourselves in relation to the world and confers upon our self conscious identity a fundamental sense of disorientation and of being basically ‘out of place’ with the larger scheme of things.</p> <p>We are individually, in our own brief span of four score and ten years, insignificant in relation to the whole history of the earth. We are but frozen instances of long march of changing events who can scarcely know or measure the slow rates of change in the world around us which in any larger framework of history would seem quite rapid. In all our will power, in all our science and technological skill, in the height of our own most modern state of civilization, we must yet bow to the mercy of historical and natural forces of change which we can barely understand.</p> <p>These changes are as likely to become realized through us as around us in our world, and to involve us in ways we cannot control and over the direction of which our influence will be only slight. And in the natural structure of the long run, we can never know whether our actions are actually helping or hindering such change, or are either a consequence or are inconsequential in the grander scheme of things. Our sense of history and consciousness are just brief fragments of memory and dreams of being awake and aware in the long night of the natural world, soon to become buried over and forgotten in the dust of cosmic time.</p> <p>We do not know yet how evolution works, either at a microscopic level of the ontogenetic cell differentiation and organismic development of the individual nor at the macroscopic level of exactly how speciation as a process of phylogenic differentiation actually happens, nor exactly how the different levels of evolution must be interrelated as a systemic process. Even more, we are missing a conception of evolution as an evolving ecosystem of the environmental contexts of the Earth—of interspecies co-evolution that might create in the environment new eco-niches and new possibilities of evolutionary development for different species.</p> <p>Learning to see that the coeval evolution of all interdependent forms of life, of the evolutionary ecology of the entire web of life within the earth’s biosphere, provides a handle on the long term structure of evolutionary patterning. In this framework, the evolution of individual species does not happen in isolation or as a separate selection process from the evolution of many other species. At any given moment in time, the entire earth’s ecosystem provides a cross section of an epigenetic landscape of many different, interacting life forms. Individual and species selection always happens within this larger evolutionary framework of self organized systemic, super species and inter-species selection.</p> <p>From the standpoint of this environmental context of the earth as ecosystem, we can see the fabric of life is for the most part continuous and seamless. We can furthermore speak of differential rates of selection at different periods of development, of different kinds of selection, of different levels of selection, at the sub-species, species and super species level, and of different actors which combine to create selective pressures. We can speak of exogenous and endogenous directions and pressures of selection, and we can also speak of different alternating phases of a selection, dialectic. Generalization and adaptive radiation imposes a stable selective regime, over population and consequential over specialization leads to a contraction phase in which more rapid, dynamic and basically different kinds of selection become inaugurated. A species may subsequently be reduced back down to minimal threshold below which it must either develop a new generalized program of adaptation or face probable eventual extinction. Furthermore, we can say that alongside of different gradients of selection, for some specially adapted species selective factors may become effective eliminated and in the entire species or phylogeny essentially stops evolving for a long period of time. It has reached a very stable evolutionary plateau at which its development is frozen. Randomizing forces of genetic mutation become counterbalanced by the positive selective profiles of previously existing genotypic/phenotypic matrices. Previous successful adaptation slows or negates further selective drift until environmental changes within the ecosystem accumulate to the point of render the adaptation more and more genetically dysfunctional.</p> <p>We may speak of certain kinds of wide margins or of relatively high tolerance limits that work in several ways at several levels of speciation which renders the entire evolutionary process relatively adaptively flexible and capable of withstanding a large amount of change and selective pressures and still assure genetic reproduction of its life forms. In a broad sense, the environmental ecosystem evolved this kinds of safety margins in order to promote and protect the evolutionary survival of its life forms. Only when particular individuals or groups or species overstep their safety margins, whether genetically, environmentally, or behaviorally, do selective mechanisms kick in like a thermostat to over determine and select them our as adaptively dysfunctional for the interests of maintaining equilibrium within the entire ecosystem.</p> <p>We can speak of the evolutionary development of the earth’s ecosystem as a cybernetic system of information process and regeneration and also of creation. The basic information is genetic. The instructions of life itself. Selection may work as first order and as second order feedback mechanisms to either kick on or turn off various directions of evolutionary development. The entire system can be said to be maintaining long-term homeostatic equilibrium, and the logic of this systemic order is embedded in its long term historical patterning.</p> <p>In this sense we can speak of the evolution of life upon earth as not being only the blind subject of random chance, but as inherently directive and deliberative. Evolution and some forms of selection serve definite purposes within the total scheme of things, whether this is the maintenance of long term eco-systemic equilibrium or shorter term selective development of particular species. Life has evolved towards greater responsiveness, interactivity and reading and controlling of its environment. The purpose of life on earth has not only been the transmission and regeneration of the information and process maintaining its own long term patterning, but to an evolutionary feeling out, exploration and active experimentation with its environments, in order to expand the radius of its own possibilities of patterning. Systemic selection has by and large served these functional purposes in creating environmental margins and possibilities that confer direction and the freedom of development to given species.</p> <p>From this alternative standpoint, speaking of purely genetic evolution discounts the contribution of phenotypic adaptation and behavioral influences upon selection, whether individual or group ordered patterns. It makes greater evolutionary sense to speak of certain ranges and horizons of phenotypic/genotypic profiles that forms the basis of species selection. Selection for phenotypic traits can lead to selection of linked genotypic matrices underlying such profiles. Acquired behavioral traits, like instinct or even less ritualized patterns of adaptation, must have a sub-species selective impact upon the reproductive gene pool of the species.</p> <p>All organisms, from the simplest prokaryotes to humankind, from complex behavioral patterns throughout their life sequence. No species is purely passively molded by the environment in which it is situated. The interactive component of the processes of living of an organism must some way or another have an influence upon the adaptive fitness and selective forces of an individual and its species. It is by this interactive process of living that a species, and life as a whole, participates in and explores the living environments of the earth, through which directions of selection and alternative adaptation open up or are created. Through such environmental interaction, it is not the acquired phenotypic traits which become genetically transmitted, but the successful genotypic profile underlying this successful adaptie acquisition which become selected for.</p> <p>Furthermore, from social insects to most forms of animal life, individuals are never born wholly autonomously and ready made to survive in the environment. Different species have a group life or a natural culture that is the net product of a history of group adaptation, and which exists independently of, but functionally interrelated to, the genotypic transmission of individual traits. Individual organisms are conditioned adaptively within such natural cultures in certain specific ways, and such cultures are transmitted as corporate, environmental contexts of group adaptation, alongside of and along with genetic reproduction and transmission. Individuals live and reproduce, and die, but species as whole groups evolve. For most species, reproduction depends upon some animal form of group life and behavioral organization. And such group life cannot be discounted as a set of selective factors in the evolutionary process of life on earth.</p> <p>For most species, this kind of natural culture cannot be totally fixed or instinctually determined (instinctively derived perhaps) or else the inflexibility of such group behavior would spell long term adaptive disaster for the group as a whole. All groups must have a flexible factor in their behavioral complexes which enables them to adjust and incorporate into their way of life environmental changes which would otherwise interfere with their adaptation. In this sense we may hypothesize that even social insects must somehow learn and modify their own behavior through reconditioning to adapt to new environmental arrangements. Such adaptive flexibility of phenotypic acquisition must itself be programmed as part of the organism as a constituent of the species.</p> <p>We may speculate that even at the microbiological level of the genetic matrix and process of development of an organism, there is a range of flexibility of possible patterning in phenotypic and ontogenetic expression which must feedback to phylogenic development. Some kinds of genetic traits or trait complexes may have wider margins of phenotypic expression than others, or be inherently more plastic. Other traits or trait complexes may be inherently more resistant and fixed that may confer an overall robustness and stability to the evolutionary process. Slight alterations might lead to rather dramatic redesign or reconfiguration of either genotypic or phenotypic matrices of traits, such that a whole new horizon of phenotypic/genotypic profiles may be produced in relatively short ad small increments of genetic variation. This may help explain the apparent saltational punctuated equilibrium of long term species evolution as a self organizing patterning of genetic possibilities.</p> <p>We may also speculate that fundamentally different selective and evolutionary processes are at work for the plant kingdom than for the animal kingdom, that more stable and static, classical Mendelian process of evolution predominate within the plant kingdom, and this form of evolution provides the ecological substratum for the more active and dynamic form of behavioral evolution found in the animal kingdom, in which more complex selective systems and process are at work. In this sense we may speak of fundamentally different environmental levels at which ecological co-evolution happens. Bacteria occupy a different environmental level than do plants or animals, in the same way that aquatic or terrestrial adaptation make a difference in evolutionary development.</p> <p>We may also say that speciation events are only apparent in hindsight than actually existing or happening in the present. What is actually happening is a different kind of historical process. At any given time a species exhibits continuous variation, and all extant living species represent however remotely and indirectly, continuous line of evolutionary development back to the very primeval beginning of the first experience of life. We cannot know evolutionary process exclusively on the basis of extinct lines of development which proved dead ends in natural history and which no longer exist today except as rather fragmentary and incomplete fossil records. It is the variety, diversity and functioning of life as it exists in the present that we must seek to understanding the unfolding process of evolutionary development and change.</p> <p>At any given time a species represents not so much a genetically homogenous grouping but a horizon of a range of continuous variation, which extends unendingly backward through time. Its present boundaries are always spatial and populational. Within such boundaries, multiple variations are moving in different evolutionary directions. The selective center of the species comprises, at any given time, the locus of the successful phenotypic/genotypic profiles. Perhaps statistically determinable, and from which the margins of deviation can be determined. What shifts through time is this selective locus or center—its shifts or drifts, converges or diverges in time. Differential loci within a single species may merge or converge, or a single loci may split or fission in time. The margins of these loci always represent relative genetic isolation or ‘social distance’ from the reproductive core of the species. As the loci shifts, so also do the margins surrounding such loci also continuously shift. A cross section of a species at any point in time, as what we basically find in the fossil record, will also appear to us as monolithic and relatively homogenous, because of the relatively overall constant and continuous range of genetic variation comprised by the genetic totipotency of the species. We cannot actually see speciation happening or catch a speciation event in the act except as a complicated complex of interactive patternings within a species range of variation, in which some individuals may be consistently selected for. The boundaries of the locus may be usually fuzzy or actually comprise multiple sub-foci in interrelation. It is only in the long term of hindsight that we can see the divergence of single life form into two or more different life form, or the change of a single species from one form to a basically different but phylogenically descendant form, and we recognize or infer from this speciation as an historically evolutionary process.</p> <p>In these ways we have an alternative long term view of evolution as an ecologically comprehensive process of earth history. Evolution can be seen as the exploration and subsequent patterning of the possibilities of life that are in part created by and in the evolving possibilities if the earth’s environments. Evolution is as much responsive to its environments as it is spontaneous within the environment of the earth. Evolution always appeared in the present as the epigenetic unfolding of all life forms on earth. Evolution not only explores environmental possibilities of being but it creates both the environments for being and the possibilities of being. It is the long term patterning of the past history of evolutionary development as selectively directive and purposive as a self organizing, system maintaining, patterning creating process of Life.</p> <p>Speciation has always been a process of divergence. By definition, two separate species cannot converge to create a single species of life. Even if the species received a chance endowment in its gnome of genetic material from a foreign virus, the chances of its adaptive success would be extremely slight. It is this single fact of biological divergence of the speciation process which renders the whole of evolution historically irreversible as a processural patterning of possibility. It is this irreversibility of its history which means that what came before will never come again.</p> <p>It is in this sense that the past patterning of evolutionary process can only be recognized as a history of divergences of separate species from a common ancestral form.</p> <p>It can be said that divergence did not have to necessarily entail geographic separation or isolation between groups before they could speciate into different forms. Rather, divergence between different reproductive loci within a single range of a species only need to have resulted in relative social distance between the loci such that the two loci become functionally isolated for a period long enough for speciation to be relatively complete. Once begun, such a process probably tended to become self-reinforcing as different systems of adaptation—social distance, already enough, leads to greater and greater functional differences until reproductive separation became complete.</p> <p>Divergence must be a long term consequence of certain polarizing selection pressures which impact upon a species differentially, tending to separate and eventually sunder the single species into two, reproductively inbound groups. Such separation itself might effectively bottleneck one or both sub-groups which might result in an accelerated rate of genetic differentiation.</p> <p>Any combination of a variety of factors may have contributed to such splitting processes of selection. Geographic distance alone, within a relatively extensive range of environmental radiation of a single species, such that members at one end of the range were effectively isolated from contact with members at the other end, even though there may have been continuous interaction and reproduction with intermediate members. Two ends of a long chain may in time become functionally isolated enough to result in speciation.</p> <p>Geographic radiation would eventually result in local adaptive specializations of phenotypic/genotypic profiles, especially if the range of adaptive radiation of a single species crosses several different ecotones. Minor differences of functional adaptation itself in different ecotones may be enough to eventual erect a functional reproductive barrier. It may be a direct consequence of a relative phenotypic plasticity and flexibility of the natural sub-cultures of the different groupings that leads to an eventually unsurpassable threshold to crossing over.</p> <p>Divergence of different loci may even be a long term consequence of differential local population densities within a region of radiation of a species. Dense regions of population spell at least short term adaptive success and more rapid rates of reproduction. Peripheral regions of relative population scarcity could entail greater natural selective forces against adaptation, lower rates of survival of parents or offspring, and a lower frequency of reproduction and a high threshold of relative reproductive isolation. In such scenarios, crossing over did occur at a certain random rate, its homogenizing effect may be still inconsequential to reverse the overall process of heterogeneous divergence between the two groups.</p> <p>Such instances of such crossing over would likely be one way, and though statistically counterbalanced by the reverse crossing over of other individuals, the net consequence may have been not so much a homogenization as a dissimilar genetic ‘recomposition’ between both groups.</p> <p>It also likely that successful members of one loci would be less likely to cross over than less successful members that for one reason or another fail to realize their reproductive capacity in a given vicinity, and so must move on. Such marginal types would either fail consistently to find an in-group and thus be selected out, such that their cross over had no net effect, or else their adaptation in the new location may have been superior such that they successfully fit in and contribute positively to the selective adaptation of the other group.</p> <p>It is also possible, and in the long term likely, that species divergence occurred within a single broadly based species within a single given region without factors of distance or functional isolation or disproportionate or differential population densities to explain the divergence. It may just be a long term consequence of species change, of unilineal drift and shift and the ever present state of continuous variation. Differential selective forces may impact differently upon individuals or sub-groups, or intra-specific competition between individuals or sub-groups for the same resources or for reproductive access may lead to local functional isolation or segregation which may be behaviorally and reproductively reinforced to the point that it sooner or later results in the populations divergence into two different, but closely related species. Differential selective forces may impact upon individuals or sub-groupings of a single species population in such ways as to drive their functional separation and reproductive isolation. Extreme types may face different but favorable selection, while in-between intermediate types face negative selection, though the actual differences may only be slight or mostly phenotypic, it could have long term reverberations which are quite biologically determinative.</p> <p>It is to be wondered whether even a relatively homogenous population upon a relatively ‘flat’ epigenetic landscape will nevertheless, if given enough time, end up as two or more separate varieties—whether or not there is some mysterious mechanism of differentiation that drives the whole process of speciation inherent to the biological makeup of the species itself. It seems, though, that what will be observed is the drift of a single species in a given direction, and the unilineal direction of the species into a derivative form. It seems that in order for divergence to occur, it must occur across space and there must occur some kind of relatively isolating boundary, border, barrier, whether this is a river, an ocean, a mountain chain, a forest, a wall, or an ecotone, a differential epigenetic gradient, distance, inference by a predator species, competition, population differentials, etc. Such divergence seems to require first that a species adaptively radiate over a fairly wide and ecologically diverse region such that such relative, environmentally related boundaries occur to subdivide the population.</p> <p>There is a sense that for the horizon of phenotypic/genotypic profiles of any given species, or even of a genus or phylum, there are certain kinds of constraints which function to ultimately limit the range and kinds of possible structural patternings that can be realized, and that in time, these patternings will eventually exhaust themselves if all other changes are controlled for. The genetic totipotency for any given time of life form is always so constrained by a ceiling of its possible developments. Within such structural constraints, for a species to develop in any one direction, must entail that it sacrifice possible development in other directions. To add a little here may mean subtracting from somewhere else. The genome or genetic matrix of any species is always fixed and finite—new material cannot be readily added, and the net amount cannot be increased or decreased, except perhaps over a very long frame of time. The irreversibility of its historical transformations means that once a species has chosen a given pathway of development, it is no longer free to choose alternative pathways leading in other directions.</p> <p>This means that a species within a given horizon will eventually exhaust its possibilities for development and its evolutionary clock will wind out. A species may become trapped at an evolutionary cul-de-sac without a way of backing out. We may refer this perhaps as overspecialization within a habitat of adaptation, but such biological winding out or evolutionary exhaustion of the possible patternings of a given species may be something more than too adaptively fine tuned to fit in any longer to environmental changes. An environment may not have to become radically altered before a species begins to no longer functionally it into its old habitat.</p> <p>One way of seeing this is to consider that for any given horizon of a species, there is a corresponding range of environmental adaptation. The extensiveness of this range will be proportionate to the degrees of freedom offered by the horizon. When a species overextends its own range, it must run up against negative selection pressures which tend to bound its advance. Over time, within such a range, increasingly successful adaptation will lead to population increase and to higher population densities. Such increase could lead to overreaching the carrying capacity of the range, and to a slow but irreversible process of environmental degradation. Such an Easter Island scenario would mean that the whole species might eventually climb a step evolutionary gradient only to suddenly step over a sheer precipice into oblivion.</p> <p>But even such a scenario might not be necessary to explain the mechanism of how a relatively homogenous species eventually frozen and inflexible in its evolutionary development. Selective forces favoring convergence and homogenization of profiles, rather than divergence and heterogeneity, must be seen in the evolutionary long run as headed in the wrong direction. Such tendencies towards convergence could result in an overriding cycle of development that reinforces itself to the exclusion of alternative avenues of development, tendencies favoring convergence could resist or counteract any tendencies towards diversification and divergence. A species may eventually find itself sitting on top of an epigenetic mesa or island from that it has not escaped as a natural group culture.</p> <p>Even then, we must ask if there aren’t fundamental differences between young species composed of basic, general traits and old species that are ossified by derivative, specialized traits which it cannot simply unburden itself from. In a similar vein, it is to be wondered whether there may also not be younger evolutionary worlds with fresh environments, and essentially old evolutionary worlds whose environments are inflexible and eroding.</p> <p>One seemingly irreversible tendency in evolution that must be noted is that in the long run there has been a general increase in the amount of genetic information and organizational complexity of the genome. Evolution has tended to augment and increase the amount of life, but it has never been observed to adaptive subtract or reduce the amount of genetic information. Another way of saying this is that basic, simple forms lead inevitably towards more derived and complex forms, but not the other way around. Perhaps individual extinction events in evolutionary history are merely instantiations reflecting this general trend.</p> <p>There seems to be another, related tendency at work upon individual species or phylum. Once a horizon or range of profiles becomes relatively fixed and stable in its adaptive selection, it must naturally tend to be more highly resistant to internal reconfiguration in a way which enhance adaptation rather than eliminate adaptability. Changes which become more likely to occur then are radical and catastrophic damaging that tends toward maladaptiveness and negative selection. The patterned possibilities settle into a plateau or into a channel of development, from which further alteration is more likely to become disruptive rather than constructive, and will tend to be further resisted.</p> <p>It makes sense to posit the functioning of the clock-like mechanisms constraining evolutionary development and perhaps superimposing or predetermining time frames of duration for any given direction or line of development. In the development of new phylogenies, these time clocks become wound up and in the unilineal unfolding of a phylogenies patterned possibilities, it eventually winds back down. In a sense, such clocks are inherent latent in the undeveloped potentiality of primitive forms of life. These evolutionary undeveloped forms of life are the rough uncarved blocks of nature which are yet waiting to become shaped and formed and eventually eroded away.</p> <p>The irreversibleness of certain directions of development—of divergence, of overspecialized adaptation, of complex, derivative traits from simple, general primitive ones, of evolutionary convergence upon an island or plateau of development, all are evidence of the unwinding process of such clockwork.</p> <p>It is possible to see in the process of continuous divergence and speciation the rewinding of such biological clocks. Offspring species of a single parent stock are like the procreation of children from the parents. They are the regeneration and natural exchange of new fresh and young life for old. In this loose sense, ‘phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny’. We can find in the evolutionary development of new life forms a reflection of the individual reproduction of new life. We can find the rewound clockwork in our own neotonous development—in the vestiges of embryonic development in a watery world of a womb, in the brief appearance of gill slits, in our young chimpanzee like skulls that take us back to the earliest hominid of the Taung Child. From this basic traits, are derived the complex biological organisms we believe ourselves to be.</p> <p>It is possible that we can find in nature latent and hidden clocks whose evolutionary process of development has not yet been inaugurated. Such clocks await like perennial seeds within an enduring shell for just the right kinds of environmental conditions to suddenly set them in motion. These clocks might be disguised to our sophisticated sensibilities as relatively primitive trait complexes of life forms, their potentiality for evolutionary development transparent and invisible within a world that as itself been growing much older.</p> <p>It is also possible that many such seeds that have been dormant for so long may have been dead—the environmental conditions appropriate to the evolutionary inauguration of their development long since irreversibly lost in its own evolutionary unwinding.</p> <p>If we are to find evidence for such clockwork we must find it in the irreversibleness of its directional development—in its function of unwinding possibility. Some such lines suggest themselves—the irreversible development of increased body mass, which may confer such short term competitive or selective advantage but may entail a long term impasse. Another candidate is in the functional specialization of basically primitive appendages or body extremities—of turning limbs into fins, wings, legs and feet, arms and hands, or as apparatus for swinging from trees, or in the loss of limbs and a basic lack of limbs in adaptation to a life underground or on the surface of the ground. Yet another possibility is in the development of derived sense organs, and corresponding sensitivities, from rather crude to more sophisticated and specialized forms. This can be eyesight, hearing or acoustical reception, voice, touch, smell. Another kind of irreversible line might be in terms of the development of warm blooded, exothermic metabolisms, of lungs, of specialized alimentary systems, or of skin coverings which permit transpiration or perspiration or prevent dissipation. Certain kinds of bone structures may also be basically derivative and irreversible in their evolutionary development—skulls, teeth, jaws, spines, hips, fingers, toes, etc. Finally, we must look to evidence for the development of the brain as somehow a irreversible direction toward more complex and derivative organization from simpler and more primitive forms.</p> <p>It is also worth wondering whether all of life is set to a grand clock like mechanism which is slowly ticking away. Certain near universal characteristics shared by all life form the basic constraints to which biology must adhere. Besides the genetic structure of DNA itself, we have evidence in the bilateral symmetry of almost all life forms, in the carbon and water composition of all life forms, in the primary dependence upon the light of the sun as the engine of the entire food chain. Yet what the underlying principles and the basic clockwork of all life remain an insoluble mystery even to our science.</p> <p>Death and the longevity of an individual organism, are other constraints which are universal to all life.</p> <p>It must be wondered whether the clock of all life will eventually wind out in the exhaustion of its own possible patterning—whether life itself will grow old and inflexible with great age, and will, with decreasing capacity to adjust to environmental changes, eventually wilt away into the dust of the earth.</p> <p>To look at the genetic structure of the DNA and of the genome as a biological clockwork mechanism which reproduces and transmits itself with each pass generation of life on earth, and in the process become itself irreversibly altered—a mechanism that governs the rhythms and timing of process and change of all life forms. This genetic structure itself is moving in a direction of irreversible change, perhaps not in a straight direction, but it has become something in all life forms now extant different than what it was in size and in the amount of extra genetic material which it contains. Having more information than any organism really may need is perhaps to the species long term advantage, but it is also possible that the long term accumulation of too much such material may adversely alter or affect the patterned structure of a species long term development, or the ability to continue to diverge and differentiate successful into new forms of life.</p> <p>Examples of this may exist in the over breeding of some forms of domestic animals or plants, in the genetic engineering and experimentation which produces new hybrid wonder strains of certain kinds of plant, but at a certain cost in the hybrids adaptive or procreative capacities.</p> <p>We can say that there are now no underived or primitive forms of life which have remained essentially unevolved or unaltered from the beginning of all life. This must mean that all genetic structures today are more fine tuned and fixed in adaptive pattern than their great great great ancestors. It is extremely unlikely that whole new life forms are being created spontaneously today, except perhaps in some scientific laboratory. So it must be assumed that life universally is evolving its patterned possibilities, and has a last horizon on earth for its own evolutionary range of variation. A limited lump of clay can only be molded and remolded into so many different shapes. If each shape cannot be repeated again, then it will eventually become increasingly difficult to mold newer and newer shapes.</p> <p>The clockwork of life may not only be situated in the structure of the genome, but may in fact exist super-organically in the self creating evolving environmental contexts of life itself. The evolution of the living environments and natural ecological contexts of life may in the grand scheme also be somewhat directional and irreversible, such that the kinds of selection forces and tolerance limits allowed are continuously developing. Life that was possible in an earlier epoch of earth, may no longer be possible in the present epoch, not so much because of constraints imposed by the physical environment, but the lack of the biotic web of interdependency that originally fostered the evolution and supported its survival in the first place. Once having evolved from one state to another, it becomes extremely unlikely that the previous state will ever be remodeled or recapitulated again. As such, the biospheric environment and ecology of life on earth is itself evolving and cycling in the patterning of its possibilities for development, and though this grand scheme of evolving life may be infinitely variable, it is not without its own structural limits which define the ultimate evolutionary horizon of its growth and development.</p> <p>All life tends to grow until it over reaches the carrying capacity of its natural substrate upon which it depends for its energy and resource requirements. Such growth tends towards a super critical mass which becomes inherently destabilizing for the continued survival of the species. Bacterium grown in the agar of a Petri dish increase exponentially until they exhaust the limited amount of nutrient supply available to them, or else they poison their own substrate by their own waste. Many ecosystems and natural cycles of nature are basically conservational and therefore quite stable and enduring. They are self-limiting systems that tend to replace and repair the damage to the physical substrate upon which they depend. Such cycles did not just happen full blown, but emerged very gradually over time as the most successful strategy of long term survival and adaptation on earth. It is necessary that forests or the plankton of the surface of the ocean consume carbon dioxide, produce oxygen and in the process recycle water on earth. It is important that certain fungi or lichen clear away the face of hard rocks, that insects continue to cross pollinate many plants, and that many animals continue to eat the insects.</p> <p>In a sense many natural evolutionary experiments may in the long term structure of things prove to upset such natural balances and economies and thus either become selected against or destroy the basis of its own existence. The evolution of predator species high up the food chain, may not themselves be such mistakes but the development of the huge biomass prey species—of huge herds of animals which consume tremendous amounts of vegetable matter, and in the process of movement, mechanically destroy whatever is growing in their path. Nature must somehow act evolutionary to control the development of such life forms unless these upset the very cycles and balances upon which Nature itself depends for continued survival. Large predators, packs of small predators, scavengers, disease organisms, parasites, and even biotoxin-producing fungi all serve to keep the growth of such species in control.</p> <p>There are certain broad margins within which the continuum of evolutionary development is defined. Evolution can work within these horizon, perhaps even to extend its range a little upon the horizons, but it cannot grossly overstep or violate such margins without adverse consequences to its own future ward development.</p> <p>These margins themselves may fluctuate from epoch to epoch with the changing conditions of the earth’s physical environment. Some eras may have much narrower ranges of adaptation than others. Periodically recurrent ice ages may be the primary candidates for explaining such fluctuations, as may be earlier periods of increased volcanism or of meteoritic activity, or of general atmospheric alterations.</p> <p>Evolution of life is not guaranteed or certain to continue. Extinction of species represents of unrecoverable loss of evolutionary material and biological potential for future development. Life must continuously compete in evolutionary development of its own potential against randomizing processes of entropy which lead inexorably towards extinction. If the margin of Life goes through a period of contraction in which the rate of extinction tends to overtake the rate of evolutionary development, such that there occurs a net loss of biological evolutionary potential and such that natural rhythms and balances are being degraded or upset. It may be that during such contractive phases, life in general may work within relatively wide safety margins of its own, in which positive selection pressures tend to kick on to increase the rate, rapidity and diversity of evolutionary development. It may also be that in expansion phases selection pressures reverse themselves and become negative controls to further evolutionary development and that the rate if divergence and development slows down in proportion.</p> <p>There is an important lesson for the modern development of humankind on earth. Our own genetic success has not been achieved without disproportionate costs to all of life on earth. For every extinction event of a different species which can be accounted for by our own continuing, exponential development, there is a net loss in the evolutionary and reproductive capacity for all of life. We have artificially stepped beyond the natural selective pressures of nature and have induced a general contraction phase of life on earth, in the process upsetting irreversibly many of the natural eco-systemic checks and balances which in the long term maintain the equilibrium of the whole system. It may be that nature may react in her own way to select against our own future development. It may act through us as well as around us. It may be as well that we precipitate a natural contraction phase at the same time artificially lowering beforehand life’s ability to adjust and evolve to re-establish its natural harmonies. It may be that we can step in scientifically and make the difference or it may be that we ourselves have already made the critical difference.</p> <p>It can be assured, though, that in the evolutionary structure of the long run, the loss of life of earth will become our own loss, that the continued survival and evolution of life on earth will become our continued survival and evolution. In all our civilization and developmental progress, we are still of life. In our artificiality, we are still composed of and by nature. Our future will depend ultimately upon our ability to maintain and support the Natural checks and balances, the natural harmonies, which sustain life on earth and maintain its eco-systemic equilibrium on a finite planet earth. As we work to irreversibly destroy such harmonies and balances, we are working to destroy not only Life on earth, but the possibilities for our own future survival and development.</p> <p>We cannot trust or depend upon our somewhat myopic science to make up the difference or to correct the imbalances our development has caused. It cannot be relied upon to repair the damages its own progress and technology has lead to. It cannot restore rhythms of life which took many millions of years to create. The lesson of our modern epoch to be learned is that it is always much easier to destroy than to create. We have mastered the arts of destruction, but are amateurish children in the natural arts of creation.</p> <p>In a cosmological perspective, the evolution of life itself is but an extension of the evolution of the earth itself and the evolution of the whole universe. Our own evolution is but an complex elaboration of the physical processes underlying the changing patterning of the whole universe. The evolution of life may have been exceptional, but not physically impossible. Life will come to an end, as will earth, the sun and the cosmos as we know it. In a sense, the reductionists of science who seek to define all of life in terms of bio-chemical or physical process are correct in their fundamental presumptions that physical principles ultimately underlie and constrain biological principles of life. But the realization of these constraints may prove to be in ways which they little anticipated.</p> <p>We must learn to see in the evolution of the earth, in its earthquakes, volcanism, in its erosive forces, its wind and rain, in its rivers and waves of the ocean, the limits of our own development.</p> <p>A general story of the evolution of life on earth goes something like this. Life began, perhaps by fits and starts, as small eukaryotic forms that in their original adaptation become very successful and rapidly spread out in every direction, perhaps to encompass the globe. In the process of its adaptive radiation, these primitive life forms quickly differentiated into various interacting kinds. Biotic environments began to form on the basis of this first interaction. Slowly, but surely, multi-cellular life forms began to emerge in ever greater degrees of complexity. These multi-cellular creatures had complex organismic metabolisms within which cells began to perform certain specific vital functions. Once these more complex organisms got started, they radiated out in every direction possible, as well. At that point, life on earth became multi-tiered. The biotic environment began to develop a depth to its diversity and chains of interdependency. As these multi celled organisms radiated out in every possible direction, they also began to differentiate and diverge, resulting in more complex and varied range of creatures.</p> <p>These initial phases were perhaps long in happening compared to later evolutionary epochs. Life on earth was yet embryonic in its watery world, tiny, changing rapidly, gradually filling out the spaces of its womb.</p> <p>At some point, life separated into animals and plants—quite early on two distinctly different, yet mutually interdependent, directions of evolutionary development became realized.. By the time life forms began emerging from seas onto the land, life of the seas was already quite evolutionarily complex and in a sense complete. Plant life took much more rapidly to land than animals, but once animals firmly established a capacity for surviving on land without needing to be in the water, its evolutionary development became quite rapid.</p> <p>There was an overall tendency for life forms to grow in size to tremendous proportions. These large masses required a tremendous amount of energy consumption for their own maintenance and metabolism, movement and reproduction. It is without a doubt that these epochs witnessed a tremendous evolutionary expansion of life on earth. It is possible that the general tendency to increase in morphological size eventuated in several extinction episodes when the biotic substrate upon which such evolution depended became exhausted or no longer provided the base of support for these leviathans of the land. Could it have been that the plants evolved gradually under selection pressures created by this massive and continuous consumption, to forms which became less susceptible to such mass harvesting? It seems likely that once extinction began among the big plant feeders, it rapidly worked its way up the food chain to finish off all the big predators that were dependent upon these big feeders for their own sustenance. It is possible that these big predators eventually found nothing more to eat than themselves, and in the last phase, ended up within a vicious cycle of cannibalism.</p> <p>The mystery of these events is whether or not outside factors are necessary or enough to explain their apparent suddenness or rapidity. Though it is possible a huge comet might have struck the earth, it seems implausible that such an event alone could have eventuated in near complete biotic extinction. The dropping of the earth’s temperature a few degrees might have made such huge levels of biomass unbearable, or imposed certain constraining conditions which mostly endothermic creatures could no longer tolerate. The earth went from being a greenhouse to an icebox. But it is also possible that life as it was might have withstood such changes or environmental catastrophes, had it not become too evolutionarily overdeveloped and yet which could not cope with minor alterations in certain fundamental environmental relations upon which its systemic patterning was based. Removing a single brick in the edifice might have inaugurated a whole chain reaction of extinction events which culminated in the near total destruction of life as it was then developed. When dinosaurs ruled the earth, they were driven by blind libidinal forces and lacked the cunning to allow them to behaviorally adapt their instincts and habits and natural cultures to a changing set of environmental circumstances. The later age of the great mammals in a sense repeated many of the mistakes of the past, in their huge biomass. Their lives too was ruled by instinct, but perhaps it was instinct that was not as blind as before.</p> <p>For all their apparent slowness and clumsiness, the dinosaur had to have done something right to have lasted their 125 million years on earth. We have, in our own ‘wise’ state, only have been around for less than a million, and our whole hominid line is probably less than four million years old, and we have long been hunting whole species into extinction, irreversibly despoiling whole habitats, and now, in place of our own slight size, built new mechanical monsters which are rapidly transforming the whole landscape of the earth’s surface.</p> <p>The greatest mystery about evolution has been our own past and our own future. To explain why and how we have been lead by events to our present anti-evolutionary state, and where exactly it will be that we are headed with our own artificial version of progressive development, which has become our species wide answer to the ages old problem of evolutionary survival against the forces of natural selection. We have inaugurated forces of artificial selection that have effectively stemmed and cut off most, if not all, natural process of evolution, and which themselves have grown beyond our own severely limited ability to control.</p> <p>And this sense of our brief history of human civilization has not even been the greatest mystery of our past. It has all been a rather simple and straight forward social process to understand. The real mystery is how we acquired the capacities evolutionarily which we then sooner or later learned how to wisely use to our best advantage. After all has been said and done, this has been what our science has long been all about anyway. The real mystery is in the puzzle of anthropogenesis. The evolutionary origin mythology of our own biological beginning in nature that endowed us with our birthright to rule the earth once and for all.</p> <p>The kind of origin mythology that we choose for ourselves must inevitably say a lot about how we ourselves want to be remembered in the past, about the kinds of traits and embodied values that we find important enough to emphasize about our own evolution. Such stories abound in the literature, whether it is scientific, anthropological, theological, or fringe. The missing linkages of our past present us with a grand sense of critical absence within which we can configure what seems most essential and therefore important about ourselves, that we can legitimate because it has always been there since the beginning.</p> <p>In our stories reconstructing our own common past, we must learn to be cautious and critical about finding in the ground mere reflections of our own being in the present. If anything, we must learn to look within ourselves to find what might be vestigial impressions if a long lost sense of the primordial past. This will not be found in our own currently hyper-developed state of violence, aggressiveness or irrational impulse. These are after all the analysis but the by products and components of our own collective state. Nor will we find it in our own presupposed primitiveness—in our fossilized aboriginal ‘others’ or our closest biological cousins among the primates. All our artifacts and fossil fragments are in the last case but anachronisms and splintered survivals from a fuller sense of the past that has long been lost to our consciousness. But one way or another, in whichever symbolism we prefer, we must find our lost sense of the past if we are to continue to meet the future with a deep sense of purpose and reason for our being on earth. And humans never seem to live too well without some symbolic sense of purpose.</p> <p>We must see our own anthropogenesis in the development of a whole complex set of interrelated, and uniquely human characteristics—among these traits are bipedality, our vocal tracts, our hands, our hand-eye coordination, our large brains, our prolonged period of infant-child dependency, and our symbolic behavior. It is likely that all of these arose more or less together in time, and each developed gradually along with the others to what they are today. The problem is not to ask which ones arose first, but to ask how these traits became interrelated as a complex in the first place, and what kind of conditions preceded this development and selected for its improvement over time.</p> <p>There are also other associated sets of traits which surround this core but which are not necessarily exclusively our own possession in nature. This includes our upright body posture, our omnivorous, diurnal feeding patterns, the shape of our teeth with reduced canines, molars and incisors, our peculiar skeletal structure with reduced prognathism, the shape of our hips which widen at birth to accommodate a relatively wide skull, and our relatively gracile bone structure which is relatively light in weight yet strong.</p> <p>It seems that we were designed by Nature to accommodate to a relatively wide and diverse range of natural habitats. Our general, unspecialized body structure allowed us to move rapidly over wide ranges and to seek out a wide variety of natural food resources. Our designs, especially of our primary complex, seems to have preconditioned us for our peculiar sociability and for an early emergence of small group culture which depended upon vocalizations, hand signals, emotional expressions, and body postures and movements for communication. The way we seem to almost universally parse and categorize experience at a basic symbolic level which is non-specific and yet not too general—conceptual gestalts that predispose us to recognize similarity relationships in the environments and to carry information of past experience to the encounter of new environments. The movement to new environments required that we carried our natural culture and our group life with us where ever we wandered to, or else could replicate it in new worlds full of strangers. Such movement and continual adaptation also tended to include selection pressures which consistently favored just the kind of trait complex which we actually evolved. Young pregnant mothers who could walk relatively great distances, certain kinds of psychological-physiological stress responses, hands free to carry things or to make things or to pick things up in the environment, voices which could penetrate the distances and travel about visual obstacles to make sure that one didn’t wander too far from the group—voice patterns that carried instant recognition of individual identity at a distance, with omni-directional hearing to match. Brains that store and rapidly process and learn a fairly large amount of experientially embodied information which could then be transferred to new settings and situations. Longer periods of infant dependency which favored bonding, learning and the acquisition of social skills, tending to confer upon small groups a center of gravity, and a focus of group life.</p> <p>We were designed to be jack of all trades but master of none. If we had been confined exclusively to a single mode of adaptation in a single kind of environmental configuration, we would never have survived to evolve into the kinds of things we became. We have an innate capacity for aggressiveness and violence, but also for love and empathetic relation with our world. We must look to the kinds of traits and dispositions which we sacrificed in order to evolve into what we are now. We slowly gave up physical strength for a more gracile structure which is preeminently designed for endurance. We developed a predisposition for the accumulation of excessive body fat which enabled us to store energy for long periods of stress. We gave up large protruding jowls and vicious arcades of fangs for the effectiveness of sonorous voices. We gave up padded paws made to protect movement from sharp object for relatively fine and nimble fingers which could more carefully manipulate environments. We gave up the speed, the power, the stability, and the protection of being on all fours for the agility, long distance speed, climbing and reaching ability, and ‘prairie dog’ scouting of being upright and vulnerable. Finally, we gave up the assured predictability and natural efficiency of instinctual controls for the greater learning capacity and sentience of larger brains.</p> <p>It seems that we evolved in an intermediate range of an environmental mosaic—upon the periphery of any single kind of environment. We did not evolve in any single spot, but upon the peripheries of whole regions or even continents—filling in the interstices of the natural environment with our population. We evolved in relative isolation, effectively separated from any selective competition by better adapted species. It was the relative sparseness that conferred upon our natural mobility and advantage. It assured us of frequently running into other groups of proto people with which we might establish some form of contact—exchange information, genes, artifacts, stories, blows, etc. We may have evolved patterns of movement, of scattering and reaggregation, in response to seasonal cycles which necessitated alternative adaptations to a range of environments, periodic movements, meetings, etc.</p> <p>Some form of group culture was with us from the beginning, and its natural presence probably served to stimulate further, precondition and constrain the further evolution of our human trait complex. Adaptation to our particular cultural arrangements favored the survival and selective advantage not of brute, direct strength but of indirect, sometimes brutal cunning. Not of emotional postures and gesticulations of ferocity and anger, but of the verbal communication of subtlety and convincing sounds. It favored our increased sociability and ability to get along well with others, as well as a deeply ingrained fear and distrust of ‘instinctually’ unpredictable strangers. It favored the development of tools or other artifices which could be carried with us to new contexts, which allowed us to bring our functional adaptability in new environments with us. It favored the kinds of designs of general adaptability that precluded natural selection and biological adaptation. It favored planning, predicting, producing, promising and protecting strategies. It favored cooperative, coordinated group activity, but also allowed for periodic individual separation and isolation. Finally, it favored its own transmission and elaboration, along with the reproductive transmission and evolutionary elaboration of the trait complex.</p> <p>From this standpoint the early gene-culture co-evolution produced first and second order feedback mechanisms within a species wide cybernetic system which promoted both the evolution of the natural trait complex described above and the development of the kind of culture around which and upon which this trait complex was focused. This evolving system had a great general stability in both the sense that it occurred upon margins away from competition with other life forms better biologically adapted to more specific habitats, and itself promoted a generalizing orientation in the further integration of the trait complex. It is this general stability of the evolutionary conditions of the emergence of humankind that has gone unrecognized, a stability in a marginal, intermediate range of mosaic of different settings that allowed humankind to consistently evade direct confrontation and competition with other, better adapted species, and thus to eventually indirectly, out evolve such species.</p> <p>At some stage in this systemic evolution of both natural and human culture and the associated trait complex, there occurred a dramatic turning point at which period, probably relatively recent in human prehistory, cultural development began to take off on its own trajectory independently of further evolution of the human trait complex, which essentially halted with the elimination of the neutral selective forces which had been at work in creating this complex. Human cultural development preempted this selective forces and essentially brought a stop to human biological evolution in the directions which lead to the development of human culture in the first place. It can be intuitively guessed this occurred about the time of early domestication of plants and animals and the beginnings of agriculture. This may have been at the stage at which the current racial differences had appeared in different regions of the earth. Human evolution has continued steadily, but not in the same manner as the process which happened before which led to the development of the basic trait complex.</p> <p>It an be expected that gradual human population increase occurred over the long term until movement became more or less constrained in most regions. People began to settle down at this point, and with this settling down, a base was soon created for the rapid expansion of human population around settlement centers. Settlement sizes gradually increased in size and representation of the human population until it eventuated in the formation of chiefdoms and even early stare development. Settling down conferred a new kind of cultural stability for humankind. It allowed humankind to increasingly manipulate and exploit the surrounding environment, to create safety margins from natural environmental hazards. On the other hand, it was the enhanced exploitation of natural environments which allowed human populations to settle down in a certain focal area on a year round basis.</p> <p>It is at this point that cultural development of human civilization took off  on its own trajectory less and less constrained by the inter-linkages of natural selective pressures and forces of evolution. Human development became its own feedback system with the exploitation of the environment at its base, and human interchange and network patterns as a system of expanding the horizons imposed by any single environment. Systems of symbolization emerged as well to confer a sense of universal unity of experience and to allow the integration of differences encountered in the world.</p> <p>Human cultural development gained its own historical momentum and acquired a life of its own relatively independently of the actions and lives of its participants and enactors. It came to replace and gradually substitute the natural environments in which human evolution originally happened by ever growing regions of cultural environments in which human beings came to increasing define their own lives and experience. As human cultural development increased and expanded, the natural environments of human evolution were reduced and their horizons receded.</p> <p>Human culture shifted from a natural function within natural environments of conferring selective advantage and survival against selective pressures, to an artificial function of reconfiguring and controlling natural habitats and of reducing the continued existence and survival of humankind. It proved so successful that it has eventually brought natural evolution to a standstill.</p> <p>As has been said, the rest is a matter of human history. But it was a matter of gradually exchanging increasingly culture historical processes of the pan human development of civilization for the natural history of the evolution of humankind on earth. The sense of historical processes and patterns became increasingly different, and the kind of structural dynamics underlying these processes also are different. While human biological evolution and its natural history on earth had been driven by the forces and pressures of natural selection within an evolving environmental context, human culture historical development has occurred increasingly driven by divergent social processes and practices, within environmental contexts which were increasingly man made or regulated by human involvement. Furthermore the dynamics underlying culture historical development were dialectical and occurred at three levels simultaneously. The symbolic level of unfolding Mind, the social level of human organization and interrelation, and the environmental-ecological level of human adaptation and experiential adjustment of physical environments. The stratification of human historical reality into these three levels of simultaneous coexistence and involvement has imposed on human reality the historical problem of dialectical reintegration of these levels.</p> <p>The patterning that has subsequently for human culture historical development has been a kind of complex dialectic occurring between these levels such that no single level can be considered primary or derived, but form a feedback system in their inter-functioning that has evinced and explains the development of human civilization.</p> <p>It can be said that the extremes of the dialectic—human symbolization and Mind, and the infra-structural base of techno-environmental material adaptation, are neither a priori or primary in the development of the dialectic, but occur always relative to a dialectical center of human social relations whose primary existential problematics are those of social order, transmission and reproduction. Whatever the contradictions between the top and the bottom, or the mind and the body, these must tale place within a social context, be intermediated through social interrelations, and must effect or be effected by reverberations and changes in the patterns of these interrelations. Change can begin in the center of the social mass, and find its consequences in the change if this social mass. The relative contradiction or polarization, or alignment and convergence of the extremes, must always be measured in relation to the social center.</p> <p>In a sense, this alternative social dialectics of human culture historical development turns Marx, Hegel, Marvin Harris all inside out and sees the historical error of stipulating or presupposing either extreme as primary and a prior in importance in understanding the dynamics of human historical change. Human evolution and culture historical development was always preeminently a social phenomena. Social patterning was never just a consequence of human history, but always also a cause in human history. Social environments exert a constraining influence on human adaptations and which become reflected by and directed by human systems of symbolization.</p> <p>We need a new, revised model of human social dynamics and process which sees this as central and preconditioning in the understanding of human history. Social relation, order, transmission and reproduction always present humankind with problems of maintaining patterned organization, systemic functioning and directive change through time, whether this is the natural time of evolution or the artificial time of culture.</p> <p>In unwinding time for humankind, it becomes apparent that the clockwork of human culture history has been different from the clockwork of human natural history, and that the development of human civilization has been on a different time schedule than that of natural human evolution. Furthermore, it has proven difficult and dangerous to get these two general frames of time mixed up or confused in our understanding if human reality and the history of this reality.</p> <p>The growth of human population on earth is in a fundamental sense a measure of our success, both as a species of natural evolution and as a human civilization. It is perhaps an inevitable, natural and unavoidable outcome of this success of human history. It is in terms of the social body of humankind, in its relative state of growth and development, that we can see the long convergence and interfunction of the two different kinds of clockwork.</p> <p>It has been reiterated that human population growth is outstripping our every resource and the advancement of our culture historical capacity to effectively deal and cope with it. It has been estimated that we are rapidly approaching a developmental climax that will represent the zenith of the development of human civilization and that will comprehend and exhaust the carrying capacity of our world. What lies beyond this horizon we can only guess.</p> <p>There is a sense of inevitability and irreversibility in the unwinding of historical time for humankind. We cannot wisely regress backwards to earlier states of development or evolution, we cannot historically recover or even reconstruct the detail and complexity of interrelations that made previous life full and complete in the world.</p> <p>There is a sense that we are bound within our different frames of time, and are carried inexorably forward in its unwinding. There is a grand sense that the biological clocks are ticking within us, slowly, unstoppably. We cannot stop this ticking, or replace these clocks with our artificial clockwork. The most we can accomplish is to accelerate the processes of their unwinding, and to hasten them forward to their historical conclusion. There is a sense that no matter which way we go, which course of action we presume, the net consequences will now be generally the same. Perhaps it is the most we can accomplish in the world, is a slowing down of their rhythm and the rate of their changing, such that we can allow ourselves a little longer time in the world to figure it all out before we too must change.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="three">PART III</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">EARTH STATE</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">How Green is Your Grass?</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>It has not been uncommon in contemporary American culture for homeowners to become obsessively preoccupied with the state of their yards, and especially with the green and even condition of their front lawns. Their local community status in the neighborhood is often linked to how green and neat they are able to maintain their lawns, and it is always possible to tell a household that is having management problems when weeds begin to take over and the lawn becomes browner and browner over the years. A nice yard and a deep green lawn is often a deep source of pride and relative status for the home owner, and it is not unusual for individuals or neighbors to gossip about the relative merits of Joe and Jane So and So based on the current state of greenery of their lawns. It has become a norm in many busy suburbs to have a gardeners to regularly come and give the lawn a haircut and trim and to dump a few pounds of ammonia or phosphates over the yard to maintain its healthy green coloring. It is more prestigious to have in some places a Japanese gardener who really knows his lawns. Individuals are always keeping a eye on each others yards, and worrying about ‘keeping up with the Joneses next door.</p> <p>In order to maintain to what amounts to a flat, even few hundred or thousand square feet of thin turf in a perennial state of green many avid homeowners will spare no expense, or go to any expense, even if they themselves or anyone else rarely if ever even walk upon it in such a way that they might enjoy the lawn of a local park, of a baseball diamond or football field, or of a golf course, or even a backyard barbecue. These homeowners will make the seasonal sales of the local nurseries or gardening departments of bigger merchandise stores, and upon the advise of the resident expert, buy such and such kind of fertilizer, herbicide, insecticide, soil condition, at so many pounds per square feet, so many dollars per pound, rent or buy to own mechanical spreaders and self driving cutters, and commence to spread regular doses of chemicals over their browning, dying lawns in order to maintain them in a perennial state of green rejuvenation.</p> <p>They will also spare no expense to install complex, self timing, multiple scheduled sprinkler systems in their yards to maintain its constant state of greenness. Homeowners will frequently invest large amounts of time, energy and money into the establishment and maintenance of green front lawns. If the old lawn falls into a state of exhaustion, they will hire a crew to come in, spray it down, cover it with plastic, and eventually scrape it off and roll out a new living carpet of fresh, green hybrid grass. Or they may be more motivated at attempt to do it themselves renting from the local rental yard a rototiller, churning up the earth, buying a few cubic yards of manure, and spreading their own grass seed, frequently with quite mixed results.</p> <p>Beyond picking up a few tricks of the gardening trade, a few rules of green thumb, a limited folk knowledge of ethno-botany, and a few trade and technical names of plants and chemical products, and perhaps a few details gleaned from the local library or the gardening section of a book store, from Sunset magazine, or Better Homes and Gardens or the Home supplement of their Sunday newspaper, the understanding and awareness of the larger realities and connections with the wider world which the possession and maintenance of nice green lawn entails, usually ends at the cashier of the store they buy their gardening supplies from. And the authoritative sources of their gardening knowledge and supplies cannot really be relied upon to better inform the green consumer of where the fertilizers ultimately come from, what the wholesale mark up really is, what ingredients are in their chemical sprays and amendments and what the ecological or physiological health hazards might really be, for such information, in the hands of the consumer, might threaten their profit margins and prove in the long run bad for their business.</p> <p>And broader ecological awareness of the current state of the Earth often does more harm than good in the hands of the contemporary minded consumer. The Ecology industry has become a fashionable way of being with it in the world, and often leads to the consumption of expensive plastic components or of synthetic organic products that promote the very industries pushing ecological awareness for their own private profit. People install expensive and fancy drip irrigation systems to save money, time and to conserve water, in their yards, gardens and patios, often to the point of substituting plastic process with what they used to do by hand with a sprinkling can. People xeriscape their beds with expensive mulches made from timber of trees or mulch their gardens with large sheets of thick, non-biodegradable plastics. People buy expensive, synthetic soil amendments with the name organic upon the label to improve the natural loam of their ground. These amendments typically come packaged in non-biodegradable plastic containers and typically contain unnatural and perhaps unhealthy soil additives.</p> <p>The maintenance of perennially green lawns in North America continues unabated in spite of the fact that such cultural practices are probably some of the least ecologically adaptive and efficient possible. The net cost in terms of fossil fuels, phosphates, nitrates, production of synthetic chemicals and substances which do not rapidly deteriorate in the environment, and the human energy, both physical and psychological, and the human time required for such upkeep far exceeds the net return of mulching grass clippings back into the earth. The money, time, energy, and resources consumed in this activity of keeping American lawns green could be better spent on more ecologically adapted activities which benefit a far greater world besides that of private homeowners. The fertilizers which American normally dumps on their lawns could be better used for the production of food in needy third world nations. The fossil fuel consumed in their manufacture and distribution could be better conserved for the next pending oil crises. The time spent in buying, deciding and spreading them could instead be spent reading interesting books, building rocks and cactus gardens, or in therapy. The money that is consumed in support of such industry might be better spent in support of ecological programs to save natural habitats, protect wild species from further human predation and depredation or put into savings account for children’s education.</p> <p>But the case of the greening of America’s front lawns is illustrative of virtually every other aspect of modern American culture which is based upon materialism, consumerism, fossil fuels, third world exploitation, multi national industry and the maintenance of widespread obsessive compulsive neurotic disorders. America’s answer to the natural problems of its frontier has always been to build a more modern shopping mall and a huge asphalt and concrete parking lot around it. It has been a part of our mass oriented approach of capitalistic culture in virtually every aspect of modern existence—media, education, eating, recreation, work, business, war, trade, charity, even our artistic expression and our religious rituals. There is no grander spectacle than to behold the story of the nativity in the Crystal Cathedral during Christmas time, just down the street from Disneyland with the huge paper mache mountain of the Matterhorn rising above the treetops and freeway overpasses.</p> <p>America supports a sophisticated modern civilization based upon mass consumption which has become the paragon of power and status in the world among all the rest. It, and a handful of other overdeveloped first world nations, occupy the top of the apex of the global consumption hierarchy, and it maintains its privileged predominance through the world wide deployment of a vast, extremely expensive and extremely effective military organization which it has somewhat euphemistically called the ‘Department of Defense’. The vast resources consumed in the process of developing and deploying this massive military machine, of building ever better arsenals of nuclear Armageddon , of ever more accurate missiles, ever more protective armor, ever more sophisticated systems of detection and communication, are vast resources which have long since been irretrievably wasted upon mass consumption activities which produce nothing of benefit or lasting consequence in the world except perhaps a false and illusive sense of security based upon a narrow definition of power destructive force and threat of violence, long contradicted by the lessons of our History.</p> <p>The amount of national debt incurred in making war in Southeast Asia against the phantom of communism, and now in the Middle East to establish our presence and power of influence over the primary fossil fuel producing region of the world, to protect our own guaranteed supply of black blood has been money which could instead have gone to the alleviation of a great deal of needless suffering in the world, both domestically and internationally—malnutrition, starvation, disease, poverty, lack of education—all due to a general lack of money in a world dominated by its money market economy.</p> <p> </p> <p>Ecocide of the environments can be defined as occurring at any point of the human development process which disrupts or destroys the ecosystems of the earth beyond these systems capacity to recoup or restore their evolutionary equilibrium. The points of no return, of irreversibility, of development, are impossible to determine. No one really knows what the healing capacity of nature might be, what the finite limits of the earth’s resources really are, or how much our science can continue to discover or invent means of alleviating the destructiveness inherent to development or render it more intensively efficient without making it extensively expressed. Beyond such points, there is ecocide because its lost potential becomes irrecoverable, irreplaceable, and its power to restore itself irreparable.</p> <p>This kind of definition for ecocide is problematic because it renders it relative to the process of development and to interpretive definition of what the limits of nature might be, what the limits of development should be and which directions are negative while others are neutral. This makes the relative definition of ecocide susceptible to manipulation and distortion—to compromise by interests which wish to continue with systematic programs of ecocide.</p> <p>A preferable definition of ecocide is one which claims that ecocide occurs whenever there is mechanical manipulation and alteration of the natural environment. In this definition, all development, especially extensively oriented development, is intrinsically and inexorably ecocidal. It becomes a question then of the relative irreversibility, range of extensiveness, degrees of damage and destructiveness, long term consequences, costs versus rewards, risks versus benefits. Definition of what the acceptable limits to ecocide are still subject to interpretation and hence negotiation, compromise and potential corruption, but it tends to set minimal limits to development and to predefine standards of what is humanly necessary and what is relatively unnecessary.</p> <p>We can neither allow development to have a free charter to go whichever direction t chooses, nor can we so limit and constrain it that we frustrate its potential progress in directions which are less rather than more destructive, more beneficial at less cost to the environment. Development should be promoted to some point that it meets minimal standards of human health, rights and freedoms but beyond this it needs to be restricted and regulated such that its further pursuit does not continue to damage the Global Ecology of the Earth.</p> <p>In this sense we can say that bombs and guns are more intrinsically ecocidal than are rubber balls and running shoes. Similarly, bicycles and buses are better than sports cars and limousines. A small nature reserve is less ecocidal than a shopping mall or strip center. A passenger train driven by steam is less ecocidal than a super sonic transport, a space shuttle or jumbo jet run on jet propulsion fuel. Chicken and beans are less ecocidal than beef, pork and fish.</p> <p>The history of ecocide of the earth has been a history of unintended consequences of progressively directed development. No one suspected that a dam up stream will reduce the flooding and fertilization of the riverine plains downstream and reduce the estuarine siltation at the mouth. No one suspected that spray cans, air conditioners and charcoal lighter fluid would rapidly erode the ozone layer of earth. Countless examples of the essential blindness and myopia of development designs which either backfire or produce a whole plethora of environmental reverberations that no one planned upon. No one in the fifties counting on the miracle fuel of nuclear fission/fusion and design aircraft to be powered by nuclear reactors, expected a Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. No one driving new gas guzzling cadillacs and sports cars in the late sixties anticipated a sudden oil crises and embargo in the early seventies.</p> <p>Ecocide is largely a function of the Ecological interconnectedness and interdependency of the entire web of life on Earth. Cutting down forests in Southeast Asia or in South America might be indirectly related to the production of carbon dioxide by the fossil fuel driven economies of the industrialized first world, such that a gradual green house effect would occur and with global warming glaciers would retreat at unprecedented rates, winters would be unusually warm and summers unusually unseasonable, and that the sea levels would eventually start rising again to swamp all the developed coastal regions on earth. No one expected that wasteful over consumption and careless contamination of groundwater tables, mechanical desertification of agricultural areas, coupled with paving over core regions with concrete and asphalt, would interrupt the basic water cycle of many regions and result in unrelieved drought and the increasing cost of portable drinking water. And yet oil continues to be spilled over the ocean, contaminates continue to wash downstream, lead continues to settle in Greenland ice, and manmade mountains of wasted plastic continue to grow. Food prices will continue to rise, as will oil prices, energy costs, forest will continue to fall until few tress are left standing, skylines will continue to rise, deserts expand, and the basic mineral resources will become depleted.</p> <p>The history of Easter Island is an exemplary model, and ecological paradigm, for the future history of the earth. There the Polynesians eventually cut down the all the trees of the island until no more existed. In the mania of Mana they carved out huge stone heads to capture and revitalize the forces of nature for the productivity and reproductivity of the people. The people, ruining their inescapable and fragile habitat, were left without a means of escape or of adaptation on a barren island world.</p> <p>Ecocide does not just entail the irreversible disruption and destruction of the earth’s ecology and natural environments. It also has entailed the destruction and disruption of the whole process of biological evolution of life on earth, and in a deeper and more profound sense, this is a much greater and potentially devastating loss than the kind of environmental/ecological devastation which is occurring everywhere at different rates. Every extinction of a species, directly or indirectly related to human development, entails an irretrievably loss of biological genetic material and of evolutionary potential which required millions of years to create. As more and more species become endangered or threatened, they lose not only important genetic, reproductive potential and flexibility, but the natural cultures of their group ecology in the natural environments are irretrievably lost and become irreplaceable. As we deteriorate or erode the life support systems, and the life systems of different species in the web of life on earth, we deteriorate and erode the entire fabric of life on earth, and the evolutionary potential of Life as a living environment on earth to respond adaptively and evolutionarily to changes on earth. We have, via the promotion of progressive development, virtually brought the whole evolution of life on earth to a standstill, and we are now attacking the very foundations for selection and survival in the natural world. Life on earth cannot be healthy, adaptive or long lived if it becomes institutionally restricted and dependent upon zoos and human goodwill.</p> <p>Ecocide is the term coined to describe what has been happening to the natural environments of the earth every time human beings pursue the progressive promise of technological development. It was what happened in Vietnam with our Roman Ploughs, five hundred pounds bombs, napalm and herbicides. It happens every time we level a hillside to build condominiums, clear an empty field to put in a corner strip center, or dump herbicide on weeds in order to plant new lawns. It is happening in the torching of oil refineries in the Persian Gulf, and in the spilling of oil into the ocean from oil tankers or platforms. It happens when we cut down the trees of the forests of the world to make lumber for everything from Japanese chopsticks to two six planks for our decks. We commit ecocide every time we explode another atomic bomb on earth, whether in the sea, in the desert sands or in the frigid wastelands of Siberia. It happens every time we ignite our charcoal briquettes with lighter fluid, use a can of spray paint, turn over the ignition of our cars and trucks, or launch another rocket into space.</p> <p>Ecocide describes our destruction of the natural ecology of the earth’s environments for the sake of the development of our civilization, and it is a term for the natural death of Life on earth and for the planet earth itself as a living, evolving entity. We continue to commit ecocide, and if we individually become disillusioned and seek to step off our merry go round of modernizing development, then there are many more others who will gladly, madly take our place on the ride. We are constrained to share in the perpetuation of ecocide because successful adaptation and adjustment to a modern, civilized world demands such participation. To do otherwise is to suffer self-abnegation, social death, ostracism, isolation and virtual annihilation in the world. Our refusal to participate is construed as a sign and symptom of abnormality in a world which has become normally and morally mad. It is to risk and suffer the consequences of rejection in a world which is moving forward at all costs, in spite of the consequences. And there are also great incentives for successful adjustment and participation in ecocide—the material amenities, the level of consumption and waste, the illusion of power and security, can be overwhelming to the sensibilities of most people.</p> <p>But the apparent worldwide normality of participation in ecocide is itself a measure and symptom of the degree to which our civilization has become unnaturally diseased and destructive. The fact that for all its sophistication, individualization, and enlightenment, modern civilization offer little latitude and few other legitimate alternatives other than such participation in ecocide, is the primary indication of how evolutionarily maladaptive and inflexible our human global society has become.</p> <p>This explains a generally pervasive mass psychology which is driving modern humankind forward. It is a fear motivated psychology, a hoarding panic to get what one can before the last of the supply runs out, to scramble viciously against others in the world to get ahead of them and to climb to the top of the material mountain, to do almost anything necessary, to compromise virtually any and every moral sanction, in order to make it in the world. It is a collective archosis of humankind which has come to the realization that the world is finite and that time is quickly running out—to get all you can while the going lasts. People also now know that to lose the race now, to fail out of the System, is virtually irreversible. if they opt out of participation within a basically ecocidal system, then they will become systematically eliminated from the reward structure of the system, and will not likely be allowed to reenter. This psychology is also characterized by a fundamental sense of mistrust, insecurity and existential uncertainty about the world, which entails the inordinate needs for the hypocritical illusions of trust, security and certainty in the world. The system is loaded with bobby traps, by which, if we are not careful and wise, can easily become victimized. Social relations are becoming increasingly spurious and based upon convenience and advantage. Such spuriousness of social relations is increasingly built in to the structure of modern living and so are unavoidable and unpreventable. Accompanied by all this, is a fundamental sense of social and existential alienation and anomie of the individual personality—of being isolated and alone in an over crowded, busy, and impersonal world running on illusion, hypocritical values and pretentious imagery.</p> <p>Getting hooked on the main line of mass media consumerism is the only way left for coping with participation in an ecocidal world system. Daily doses of mass media consumption provides us the temporary, transitory hypes that allow us to get through the boredom and essential meaninglessness of the day. The sublimation and mythological symbolization process of the mass media, combined with its distortion and selection of information about the world, is a powerful mechanism of the system for maintaining conformity and reinforcing consumption within the system. While the rhinoceros is being poached into extinction before our very own eyes, we can watch ten-year-old nature programs glorifying the natural habitats and beauty of the rhinoceros, and in the process accept the illusion that we are actually doing something to save the rhinoceros.</p> <p>It is important that the representatives of the system promote the status quo of power and inequality in the World, and that they continue to convince us that there is indeed no other way for the system except through ecocide. If we come to accept what they want us to believe, that we are absolutely alone, powerless and helpless to prevent ecocide from happening in the world, and that our only personal and social salvation is through participation and perpetuation of such ecocide, then that makes their jobs of administering life and death that much simpler and more morally unproblematic. If the whole world can become convinced that continuing development of world civilization is the best possible and inevitable future, whatever the costs and sacrifices, that science can solve any problem, even the problems of ecocide, then this will seal the fate of humankind and of the earth forever as unpreventable and unalterable from its present direction of development.</p> <p>To refer to earth states emphasizes the point of view that while their way may be in a general sense a single state of the earth. The current condition of the global ecology or status of the world system or the organizational structure of world order, there are also actually and more accurately different multiple and overlapping states of earth that will inter-functioning and interdependent to some extent, and also relatively separate. As such earth states may refer either to the differing ecological states of the earth’s atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere or of differing geopolitical nation states, international alliances, or of different socio economic states of the First World, Second World, Third World, etc., or of differing regional states of economic, socio cultural, historical integration. To segment the earth into different kinds of states is a way of cross examining these differing states in relation to one another, and to understand how these different parts and partitions fit together and to form the state of the earth as a whole.</p> <p>Our world is understood in terms of its participation and subdivisions. The whole has long been defined by the interrelations between its parts. To the extent that certain single parts or elements have come to predominate in the world, they have come to stand for and define the whole in place of the other parts. We come to think of the whole in certain specific terms instead of other possible ways, and we come to act in relation to the world as if the primary part were the whole world in disregard of the rest of the parts.</p> <p>One particular aspect of contemporary American cultural consciousness is the mono-linguistic, culturally monolithic worldview that it maintains in relation to the whole, and the relative lack of awareness, multi cultural literacy, and geographic ignorance it has about the rest of the world. American cultural consciousness is surprisingly inbound and this inboundness of our conceptuality about the world is a reflection of our attitudes about our own cultural superiority—that the world was meant to become like us, that all difference is the degree of distance from our own way of life, that our predominance in the world is legitimated by our natural birth right, that the closer different culture’s are our own, the more civilized they must be, that America is in the long run a global enterprise, in which Washington DC is the hub of the wheel, and that the rest of the world will become like us, democratic and capitalistic, if given enough time to eventually work out their own problem out.</p> <p>We are witnessing not only the progressive unfolding of global ecocide in the name of world development, but we are also experiencing socio economic monopolization of the world by private capitalistic interest groups and their fascist, social nationalist governments, socio-political-economic bureaucratic encapsulation of the world, and cultural homogenization of the world within a single system of shared values of mass consumption/production. These processes are going on simultaneously in every region and part of the world, and they are stimulating contradictory processes of the balkanization of the world into competing ethno-national splinter groups under the umbrella of structural integration of the entire world, such that different identities, solidarities, and motivations cross cut the traditional monothetic boundaries of states and undermine the previous order based upon the balance of power in the international arena.</p> <p>In the broader sense, these global processes render the recent pro-American involvement in the Persian Gulf, as the principal arbiter and enforcer of international justices and world peace, albeit Pax American style, and its continuing conservative federalism and republicanism, something of a maladaptive anachronism a world in which iron and bamboo curtains no longer exist, the Berlin wall has been torn down by the very people whom it repressed, and ethno-national communities everywhere have international contingents and foreign colonies.</p> <p>Our own forward posturing of military might in the world has suddenly come to appear quite morally awkward when the very enemy upon which its powerful presence was predicated has suddenly dissolved in front of it.</p> <p>Most Americans have been left with a deep seated gap in their conceptualization and evaluation of the world, such that they intuitive sense that something is not right, but their own systems of rationalization and mythologies preclude bringing it out and coming face to face with the problems. In the name of patriotism, national solidarity, strength even democracy, the so called leaders have secretly sold American economic interests out to foreign competitors for their own private and personal aggrandizement, in the name of prosperity and progress, and have in the process emptied American coiffures into their own pockets and into the hands of international business interests.</p> <p>America voted Reagan two terms as President not because of his inherent leadership abilities, which he did not have, nor his competence, but because he was preeminently an actor and a media figure. In him, Americans voted for a symbol, an empty voice, a figurehead of big business and powerful private interests. They voted not for leadership, but to acknowledge the vacuum of leadership, to renege responsibility and forfeit independence. People voted for a false sense of security in a big, impersonal system. It was a silent, unconscious acknowledgment that no one in control, that no one should be responsible, that what was left was for everyone to take all that they could get while the going was still good. In him, America acquiesced and capitulated to values of authority and impersonal power of the system.</p> <p>Americans have been slow to catch on in the Post Reagan construction period that their corporate public interests have been short changed in a bad deal with international interests, and slow to grasp that in the new world there is no more national leadership which can be relied upon. Bush has been making war here and there to divert public attention from this basic fact. Congressmen make glorious speeches about the general good and then silently vote in favor of private interests. Americans have been slow to realize that in the contemporary world, there is no more national leadership which makes any relevance or sense, if there was ever such a grand illusion. Now there are only special private interests promoting their own success at someone else’s expense.</p> <p>Without another public enemy upon which to declare war and to mobilize public attention and interest, America too must begin dissolve as a political unity into many different, competing splinter groups. The Washington puppet show cannot long maintain the illusion of cleanliness and sacred authority. The rest of the world has never really suffered the real world naiveté of American culture in all its virtue. Their world has always been a world of vice and corruption, and virtue exists not because of it, or in reaction to it, but in spite of it and in disregard of its influence, America, as a culture, is coming of age in an old world of humankind.</p> <p>The entire earth has changed rapidly right before all of us, and our old divisions, boundaries, and partitions of its spaces and regions are no longer adequate for the human understanding or relating to the world in an adaptive manner. As we carry our old, outmoded differences with us into our new earthbound environments, we are experiencing what Alvin Toffler long ago referred to as ‘future shock’—our previous frames and schemas no longer fit our new sets of experiences, and we become disoriented and at a loss to figure out so quickly what has changed about our ways of seeing the world. As long as the world continues to pursue collectively a policy of global development with its concomitant ecocide of the earth, then a sense of crises, helplessness, dependency, existential emptiness, anomie, and impending climatic doom must continue to unconsciously undermine our collective illusions and to contextually overshadow our collective horizon. It will continue to accelerate in its changing in ways which we are less and less in control to direct or prevent. They will continue to happen ever more rapidly in spite of what we do, because of what we do and in negation of what we do.</p> <p>The changes happening in our world are tending to skew obliquely our traditional and common sense categories and conventional ways of seeing the world, such that the world no longer seems to make sense given the inadequacy of our framework for understanding it. This skewing effect means that new experiences are transacting our previous lines of experience in ways which we can no longer clearly define and which create a sense of radical discontinuity and disorientation between past and present.</p> <p>Our previous interests and intentionality structures no longer make as much sense given this skewing effect of new experience. There is a divergence and conflict of interests and intentions between those rooted to the past and those oriented toward the future. With the skewing of interest and intentionality, comes as well a shifting of basic identity and existential sense of meaning and purpose in the world. With changing identities and loyalties, with shifting involvements and commitments, our values and relations with the world become reoriented about a new and different kind of focus. Our goals, expectations, beliefs, representations, are also becoming altered and reinterpreted in the confrontation with new experiences. We elicit old frames of understanding only to have them be consistently disrupted and defeated, entailing that we need then to somehow reevaluate these frames or else replace them with new ones which makes sense of the world and work for us in the world. The general feeling is one of losing a sense of balance, or a centeredness of being in the world, which we find vulnerable and threatened by strange new environments.</p> <p>The tension produced within current earth states are largely the consequence of differential distribution of resources, knowledge, expertise, money, power, material goods, food, etc. Such resources become concentrated in some regions and relatively scarce in others, and this unevenness of the structural landscape of earth leads to imbalances and stresses in its systemic functioning. The inequalities produced by this overall unevenness and differentials of distribution are becoming more pronounced and extreme as development continues in the way it has mostly been pursued.</p> <p>There is something fundamental about the competitive values of Capitalism which lead eventually to monopolism and a hierarchy of resource consumption/production—successful competitors eventually drive out unsuccessful ones, and big companies tend to swallow up or destroy smaller, weaker ones. A utilitarian philosophy premised upon the greatest good for the greatest number of people leads to an historical patterning of extreme polarization between the few have’s and the many have-not’s. Such a worldview is also premised upon a world of unlimited good—in order to increasingly maximize profits, producers must manufacture infinite numbers of widgets that are sold to infinite numbers of consumers. Such production requires that there be corresponding infinite numbers of widget components and infinite amounts of basic resources from which such components are made. Furthermore, the principle of profit maximization means driving out competitors by underbidding them, minimizing costs of basic resources by maintaining monopolistic control over their acquisition, and by exploitation of the basic labor requirements involved in the process of their production.</p> <p>Given the real world efficacy of such a world view, certain kinds of things in the world make sense. First, social evolution dictates that economic competition is a process of social selectionism in which the best survives. This selectionism underlies the principle of progress that is central to development in the world. It also then becomes understandable to link up social selection as a logical extension of natural selectionism, and to claim that only the fittest survive and the weakest must perish. It becomes of primary importance then to establish a scientific orientation that clearly and unequivocally demonstrates the casual linkages between nature and culture, between biology and behavior, genetics and social history. It is also sometimes forgivable if the System sometimes become ‘fascist’ in its extreme orientation and premises that those who survive must be the fittest because they survived, and that those who perish must be not fit to survive anyway. Therefore poor people are people somehow genetically misendowed and the biologically maladapted to success within the social system. The social system must also create bureaucratic mechanisms which reinforce this process by systematically excluding the poor, weak, failed from access to resources which would hinder progressive development and survival of the fittest. Thus social institutions of structural poverty, weakness, dependency are created to recapitulate the core values of such a world view. The flip side of this doctrine is that those who have become successful within the system must be the socially and biologically fittest to survive, and they must therefore be the ‘chosen’ ones who are privileged to reproduce above all the rest. Symbolic systems should reinforce this moral universe by extolling the beautiful people as the embodiment of natural virtues and as being inherently incapable of doing wrong. If they sometimes do err in their ways then their mistakes are quickly euphemized away and they are conveniently let off the hook.</p> <p>Another somewhat contradictory consequence of this is that to insure market maximization, a potential unbounded market of consumers, then birth control programs should not be reinforced. It is no coincidence that both Presidents Reagan and Bush have demoted the support of family planning in third world nations which suffer extreme problems of over population, and have also been side-line champions of right to life movements. Over population is seen in this case not as a global problem and a global responsibility, but as a local problem and a local level responsibility. Several corollaries come from this attitude towards the plight of the poor—the rich were meant to get richer, and the poor were meant to get more children. This assures that the wealthy will stay wealthy and the poor will increase in numbers and in proportion—it is the realization of the capitalist hierarchy in reverse. Also, rich people are encouraged to have more children, as this is construed eugenically as beneficial to the future of humankind—the reproduction of greatness. Also, though the poor are not prevented from getting pregnant, they are from the beginning chastised for the problem of poverty and population. If one child dies of malnutrition or lack of appropriate prenatal care or medical attention, then the parents can be expected to soon have another one soon anyway. It can be expected that the poor are good reproducers anyway. They need proportionately fewer Cesarean Sections and have higher rates of infant-mother mortality. A young girl who has her first child by eighteen, will be expected to have at least four or five more by the time she is thirty years old. If the young teenage daughter of the wealthy becomes accidentally pregnant, she can always be flown away to a different town, city, state or country to have the necessary operation. The poor get no vacations, the rich just take another vacation. Similarly, third world nations saddled with the social burden of over population are conveniently kept subordinate upon the global hierarchy by these attitudes and policies—by maintaining over population, they can be kept in a position of poverty and dependency, readily exploitable for their cheap labor, resources and recreational environments. Over population and a lack of birth control policies effectively reinforces and recapitulates the attitude that these nations were meant to be exploited—that their peoples are racially inferior and culturally backward, and must be looked after by the wealthier nations for their own best interests. By maintaining over population and poverty in these nations, these nations also form zones in which inferior products can be tested, experimented with, and consumed at least cost to the system.</p> <p>Another related value of this world view is the basic principle of social/natural hierarchy, which is reflected in taxonomic classifications of things in nature as well as of the social world which is rank ordered along a scheme of pyramidal hierarchy of an infra-structural base, a structural middle class and an ideological superstructure, or along the lines of a Great Chain of Being in which things higher on the totem pole are higher on the evolutionary scale of progress. From this perspective the third world nations can be seen as representing effectively the infra-structural base which is seen as the resource pool supporting the upper structures. The values of social hierarchy reinforce values of social conformism and authority, especially the authority of wealth and private property. Social hierarchy becomes reflected domestically in capitalistically organized societies in terms of a three tiered class/caste structure organized in the same manner as the world capitalistic system has become organized. The history of competition is held to determine who should get ahead and who shall fall behind in the struggle to get on top of the social heap. Those who are on top, or who at least appear upwardly mobile, must be naturally endowed with the right stuff for success. Those at the bottom, or suffering downward mobility, must be cursed with the wrong stuff which prevents them from climbing up the ladder.</p> <p>These values and their reflected attitudes can be referred to as social racism in the sense that it is a kind of biological determinism of class/caste boundaries which is somewhat skewed along the natural boundaries of race. It is not so much a matter of white or black, but of wealthy white and poor white and wealthy black and poor black.</p> <p>Another value which is a corollary of the capitalistic worldview is that money makes right and money is a sign of sacredness. This value is very basic to the capitalist world view and goes back to the protestant notion of one’s calling and of whether one is chosen or selected for admission into heaven. The fear of death, or what happens in death, and the lack of certitude about who is predetermined for heaven or hell, creates a fundamental sense of existential anxiety and cognitive dissonance that leads to the emphasis of the egotism of non-being—of becoming obsessively preoccupied with behaving as if one were selected for admission into Heaven instead of Hell. It becomes vitally important then to one’s personal sense of security in life that one adopt the attitudes, symbolisms and rewards of success in one’s calling, make lots of money, own lots of property, become a father like authority figure, and embody in one’s everyday being the principles and values of hierarchy.</p> <p>This close association between wealth and righteousness, not to mention cleanliness and virtue, which is found in capitalism, is not too different from the kind of hierarchy which is expressed in Hindu India under the Brahmanic tradition. Status symbolisms of wealth, showing off one’s status, as predetermined and select, becomes a focal preoccupation of culture to the point at which a dowry is more important than the bride that comes attached with the dowry—hence suttee.</p> <p>From this standpoint, the three tiered capitalistic caste system, the traditional Hindu caste system,, and the ideology of racism and the Great Chain of Being, in which Whites, then Yellows, Browns and Blacks are ranked, are similar kinds of systems which prescribe rules of endogamy or hypergamy and of occupational exclusion or separation, which is reinforced by an ideological and symbolic system of collective representation and belief, incorporating values of hierarchy, authority, the legitimacy and legitimating function of wealth, sumptuary status symbols and private property.</p> <p>It is possible to speak of a global market economy which is becoming increasingly characterized by a diagonally stratified class/caste system—in which vertical class boundaries are becoming skewed by overlapping horizontally stratified caste hierarchies. In such a system, individual allegiance and identity gained within a national culture is contradicted by and compromised by competing allegiances and identity with ethno-national groupings which have characteristics of both classes and castes within a global market framework. Promoting ethno-national identity and solidarity entails reinforcing internal class hierarchy and externally oriented caste boundaries in relation to other competing class caste groupings. These groupings become similar to Hindu ‘jati’s’ which tend to be localized and occupationally specialized and which juggle and struggle for position within a larger caste stratified society.</p> <p>The ethno-national, class caste sub-groupings of humankind working within a capitalistic world system can be stratified and divided along the lines of a number of different distinguishing traits—religious affiliation, political orientation, racial identity, sex, age, socio-economic status, location on the political spectrum, ethno-cultural heritage or identity, geographical homeland, psycho-geographic identity, and birthplace, status role identity or occupational specialization. An Irish American Catholic Democrat whose family hails from Boston might be very different from an Irish American Republican whose interests are centered in Southern California. Characteristic of this kind of componential or conglomerated status identity is its sociological interpositionality of status within multiple overlapping hierarchies with the correlated social psychological phenomena of increased levels of social confusion of identity, cognitive dissonance, the stress and strain of differential tensions, loyalties, commitments upon an individual, feelings of relative deprivation in comparison to other groupings or identities, feelings of frustration in blocked social mobility within one or more hierarchy of social status.</p> <p>This creates a pervasive and fundamental crises of identity within a larger system which is inherently competitive, alienating and disenfranchising anyway. A lack of upward mobility is tantamount to relative downward mobility. Going nowhere is a falling backward from progress. There is a pervasive need to keep up, to acquire the latest edition, the newest model of car, the most current design or fashion of clothing.</p> <p>Within such a diagonal social structure of the world system, the psychology of Nonbeing becomes the social psychological phenomena of a collective archosis of a culture dedicated to the values and orientation of Nonbeing in the world. Personal and social identity is no longer ideography—the cult of individuality is but a superficial irrelevance. Identity becomes preeminently nomothetic within multiple classificatory hierarchies and taxonomies on the world.</p> <p>Within such a world culture and social structure, there is a pervasive, almost paranoid, mass psychology that the grass is always greener on the other side. We need human categories upon which to externalize, project and objectify as if real our own deep seated feelings of inferiority and fear of failure in the world. We need to see our social world in such a way that our values of hierarchy, authority , status, make objective sense in the world. We need to always feel like or at least appear as if we are getting ahead, upwardly mobile, going somewhere. We need to associate with the right kind of people, evince the right attitudes, adopt the right behaviors.</p> <p>Within a competitive framework, other counter reference groups success could and should be one’s own. What things of value other’s have are potentially one’s own possession, and what one does have one deserves, no matter at whose expense it might have been by.</p> <p>Within such a world, the values and orientations of equality and egalitarianism is largely an ideological fiction, a falsehood, a sense of false consciousness, and, when in bodied by certain representatives within the system, a matter of fundamental hypocrisy of identity. Equality and egalitarianism become anti-structural values that can only exist marginally, counter culturally, separately, or in ritually outlined contexts of ceremonial communitas, liminality and rites of reversal.</p> <p>Social hierarchy has been a near universal principle of social organization of humankind, except perhaps at the level of the band on which almost all relations are face to face and interpersonal and everyone knows everyone else within one’s cultural universe—but this is a relative equality perhaps. Elders still have some measure of influence over juniors and the group as a whole still constraints the behavior of the individual in ways which set the interests of the group above those interests of one person.</p> <p>It is entirely likely that the values of social equality are inherently unrealizable and unrealistic, and that values of social hierarchy are perhaps necessary and ineradicable in the world. Even in democratic North America, where all people are constitutionally created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, still it goes without saying that within its long standing system of common law and justice, some people are more equal than others, and rights protected under the law become relative to one’s social worth and the amount of property one owns. The legal system protects the rights of private property over and above the personal rights of people such that the latter inevitably become alienable and compromised by the former when the two sets of interests they represent come into conflict. No society can be created which does not reinforce hierarchy and entail inequality to some minimal extent and still ‘work’ in the world as a corporate social entity.</p> <p>But both equality and hierarchy are socially relative matters—hierarchy can be more or less extreme or emphasized. Its values can be stressed or left unmarked or be basically devalued and dysphemized. Equality, too, though never absolute, can be relatively realized as a reduction of hierarchy and a general ‘evening out’ of differentials of uneven distribution or access to resources. The gradient between the top and the bottom does not need to be so steep or extreme, and the hierarchy can be leveled or flattened out such that the differences between those at the top and those at the bottom are not so disproportionate. This would concomitantly increase social mobility in the world and reduce the possibility of evil which comes from the emphasis and exaggeration of hierarchy, inequality and authority.</p> <p>Such leveling out entails certain fundamental changes in our capitalistic way of doing things. We need a blanket socialism of basic services which guarantees the protection of human rights and basic freedoms from exploitation and violation. We need a global reign of peace rather than of terror and threat, such that the values leading toward equality, of tolerance, respect, nonviolence can be cultivated in the world and the insecurities which nonbeing depends upon can be reduced. It requires as well that we put a handle and a brake upon development and slow it down from the speed of a hare to the pace of a snail. We must stop further ecocide and allow nature enough time to heal some of its wounds, if it is not too late.</p> <p>Our basic sense of social identity would go from one stressing class caste status to one of multiculturalism and pan humanism along a single integrated multi cultural continuum. Boundaries will still be there to negotiate, but they will be more like passageways and thresholds for passing between different states of reality than like gateways or fence preventing such movement.</p> <p>There has nothing actually necessary or inevitable about the recent events and developmental states of the earth which our own failure to face the facts, to confront reality with courage instead of cowardice, to direct change in alternative ways than what has actually happened, have not made it so. The probable problems that the world is now facing were recognized long ago by enough people that things could have been done to forestall and prevent many unfortunate consequences. Development has been what we’ve decided to make it, and continue to make it.</p> <p>The United States had the vision and the reason twenty years ago in its first oil crises to adopt policies leading to an alternative fuel economy. Now, much of the economic stagflation and recession, the growing polarization and deficit, have been due to the continuing and increasing dependence of the American economy and development upon fossil fuels derived primarily from the Middle East. It is not an accident that twenty years ago the Pentagon and CIA shifted its long term strategic objectives from the halting of communism in Southeast Asia to the securing of America’s oil reserve in the Middle East, and it then began laying the basic tactical and strategic designs which culminated in the recent war with Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a very convenient and not entirely coincidental scapegoat for our own aggressive political policies and military posturing there to protect our vital national interests. An unrestricted supply of oil to the US may be vital to its national strategic interests, but it has never been absolutely necessary. We had options, and alternative avenues to development, and we failed to take them.</p> <p>Now we are struggling to survive under the spell of the continuing delusion of the givenness, taken for granted necessity of our system and its way of life. It has been our grand illusion which we have failed to confront and come to terms with in its entirety. The system under that we struggle to survive is similar to the ecological system of the entire earth in that many things are functionally interconnected to many other things, such that changes in one aspect reverberate and have consequences in many other aspects of the system. Professors can in their insularity and immunity berate and derogate people like Ronald Reagan or George Bush, with good reason, and yet turn around and promote ideologies of socio biology which uphold and legitimate basically social racist orientations of the system, or in other ways of funded or endowed research, promote the existing interests of the system. An educated engineer can be against war in the Gulf and yet his/her lifestyle will continue to depend upon his/her design of ever more accurate guidance systems for military missiles. Similarly, in the name of anti-communism, we may participate in the systematic destruction of the rain forest, and its inhabitants, in Vietnam. A public housing developer may genuinely deplore the destruction of the forests on earth, and yet wipe out whole natural habitats of flora and fauna on the course of building a project. It is relatively easy to look out in a general way to see the broader outlines of the problems of the world, but it becomes an entirely different manner to focus in on the specific interconnections between these problems and our own personal existential predicaments and dilemmas. To see how and in what exact ways development and ecocide become our own reasons for being in the world and sense of purpose for the world.</p> <p>We are living within a system that is increasingly embedding itself into our awareness and our unconsciousness, into our environments and our experiences. We are living in a world that is becoming increasingly bureaucratic and administratively top heavy, with an increasingly polarized class structure and increasingly inflexibility and frozenness of social mobility. It is happening within the span of a single lifetime, of a single generation. We are increasingly engaged in role performances and enacting our parts within the system without reflecting on the consequences or existential realities in which our actions are situated and over-determined. We increasingly take for granted as given and necessary a great deal of social inequality and noise that is not necessary or a priori to our own construction of it in our social realities.</p> <p>The range of choices available to us today, the degrees of freedom open to us now, are much more restricted than they were twenty years ago. They will quickly become even more restricted, and alternatives increasingly more effectively impossible the longer we procrastinate and perseverate in our old, tried and true ways of doing things. The solutions and alternatives available to us twenty years ago are no longer available to us, and our ability to do anything about the developmental direction we are following will continue to diminish to the point of ultimate no return.</p> <p>Today we are creating boundaries, differences, divisions between people when none need occur. We are reinforcing such boundaries and differences, and creating greater social distances between people in an increasingly over crowded and shrinking social world, when we could be bridging these distances and diminishing these differences. To emphasize and promote divisions, difference and distance in a social world of diminishing space, resources, alternatives, must eventuate in explosive consequences for all of us.</p> <p>When we speak of the greening of the earth we are not talking about putting more fertilizer on front lawns of American homes, or about moving to where the grass is greener. We are talking about promoting ecologically minded, environmentally protective and conservative, and evolutionarily adaptive strategies of living on earth with ourselves, and among ourselves, in ways which do not lead to developmental destruction or ecocide. It entails a basic existential realization about the extrinsic and intrinsic limits of our lives and of the system we live within—in spite of how we were raised, we cannot have our earth cakes and eat them too, we cannot continue to have everything for virtually nothing, and we cannot expect to achieve and develop at other people’s expense. It entails an acceptance of our own personal responsibility for participation in the development, or underdevelopment of the system on earth, and a way of seeing and relating within and in spite of the system such that we can become more aware of the net, long term consequences of our own and others actions on earth, and of the alternative possibilities for acting and reacting on earth, both naturally and socially.</p> <p>More specifically we associate the green movement with a radical group of ecological extremists who blockade nuclear tests and sabotage environmentally destructive development projects. But as a ground swell social movement, greening of the earth entails a more pervasive and powerful sense of public awareness and involvement in the issues of ecocide and the future directions which development will take. There is more voting power in the daily decisions made in the market place by the average American consumer to create changes, to boycott environmentally or socially destructive products or practices, to become better, more realistically informed and disillusioned with the system. In this sense, to declare an international holiday—to give the earth a day off, to take a one day break in the whole process, and to slow development by a single day, to go sit under trees and to celebrate nature, would be better than to promote development even one more day.</p> <p>Where we are headed, globally, locally, and personally, we should not be in to big of a hurry. We cannot go too slowly forward, and we cannot afford to be in too much of a hurry. We should not have to feel constrained to do anything socially significant tomorrow except take the day off.</p> <p> </p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="four">PART IV</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">POPULATION BOMBS</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">Many Millions of Malthusian Miracles</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>Real numbers too large to count, millions or billions, are really beyond our ability to realistically conceptualize or even imagine in terms of powers of ten or as so many zeros following one. They are numbers far too great to even remotely comprehend or clearly conceptualize in any but the most abstract way. Now, if we multiply these numbers by the kind of complexity that even a single human life time presents us with, then we have some vague sense of the enormity of the anthropological problem in trying to embrace a realistic notion of a pan human reality in the world. We can only handle such a problem by gross over simplifications or mass generalizations in terms of national character stereotypes or in terms of a standardized inventory of cultural traits in a large, cross cultural sample or survey. Though it is rarely acknowledged as such, it is the shear enormity and vastness of this human reality which renders cross cultural studies and pan human theories in Anthropological research most difficult and problematic. </p> <p>The necessary reductions, simplifications, reifications, which are inherent in any such task usually go unmentioned and unquestioned in anthropological literature, because if this problematic issues of scale were opened up, it would most likely make anthropology seem like so much singing in the wind—interesting perhaps, but too narrow and limited in scope to necessarily reflect human reality in any but the most hypothetical way. Statistical surveys involving a few hundred, or a few thousand subject, are of enormous logistical and methodological difficulty—much less hundreds of thousands, millions or billions. No one really has a good idea of the whole picture of human reality as it is unfolding before us, or as it has unfolded during the past. We can only risk our credibility on gross estimates based upon theoretical conclusions, intuitive insights, a great deal of ignorance, a few leaps of faith and some wild inferences and wonderful guesswork.</p> <p>The Renaissance Genius was supposed to live in a world which was comprehensive in its intellectual totality. The world then was supposedly much smaller, simpler and perhaps less sophisticated that it is presumed now to be. Now, it is held, the contemporary conceptual world is too specialized, too complex, too compartmentalized, to be comprehended by any single mind or even any group of intellectuals. Today, it is held that there can be no more Renaissance Genius who knew of everything.</p> <p>We live in a world which no one has a bottom line in, in which no one has a complete picture of the whole, or even understands most of the it. Today, the most we can hope for is partial, fragmentary, and rough comprehension of the world—seen in outline form only from a great, estranging distance.</p> <p>We must learn to swallow what it has been that we’ve been doing with our anthropology of the world with a great grain of salt. For every world that becomes recorded ethnographically, there are many more that have vanished forever from human memory. For every reality that becomes enlightened ethnologically, there are multiple alternative realities that have remained undiscovered. We must learn to accept with some disillusionment that we have not actually been doing quite what it was that we believed we were doing, and then seek to better understand what was we have actually done in relation to the world. The world, and its realities, remains larger than life, intransigent to our investigations and probes, and aloof from our approximations.</p> <p>What we have been doing is more on the order of careful speculation based upon a limited amount of information, rendering generalizations from quite fragmentary evidence which push us toward a sense of universal awareness. The success of such approach depends upon careful, painstaking attention to minor detail and careful analysis before then leaping to conclusions. We have been more like detectives on a case, sorting out and piercing together a few clues to try to figure out what actually happened at the scene of the crime. We frequently depend upon witnesses whose credibility and reliability and actual experience may be no greater than our own, and frequently much less. From an accumulating number of such studies, we range over the literature of previous and current work being done, and add our two cents worth, and try to pull out from it a more complete comprehension than before.</p> <p>We have been reconstructing a patchwork anthropological version of the real world—more of a collage or mosaic of roughly interconnected accounts and momentary pictures—particular instantiations frozen forever for scientific exhibition. And in a sense, this piecework of collage of Anthropology is more important to active anthropologists than is the real world upon which it is hypothetically, presumably based. The real world of people is only a source, a background, a reservoir, the field which one gets one’s information. Once having obtained the interesting or important or significant data, a sort of extraction process resembling strip mining or panning for gold, then the anthropologists is free to discard the informants, disregard the rest of the world, return to his/her office in the Ivory Tower, and begin weaving a new part of the tapestry. The real world becomes rapidly left behind after the first few phases of research, the researcher achieving enough authority on his/her area of study to no longer be dependent upon the ultimate source of their information, being able to put the real world upon a shelf, to collect dust until further need arises.</p> <p>What seems most missing and lost in this process of ethnographic extraction of anthropological information, is the preliminary question of the real world relevance of subsequent work, of what happens to this knowledge and information once it leaves the field for the office, the distantiaton of surplus value as the substitutes for reality sit upon the bookshelves of the library collecting dust until some fresh new naïve researcher rediscovers it again. It is readily apparent that the products of anthropological research and work, which stand as symbolic substitutes and representations for the portions of reality which they authoritatively subsume, become in the process of annealing the real world material into ever longer and thinner and more tenuous connections, more anthropologically significant and relevant than the actual real world itself. After all, these are the things which will make or break an anthropologists professional career, and the real world be damned.</p> <p>More often than any anthropologists would like to admit, real world relevance becomes subsumed away under the guise of subsequent academic authority, lost between the pages of the mountain of literate understanding. The specialist observer becomes the official spokesperson for her/his special people in the world, no matter whether that voice or understanding may really know these peoples personal names or actually witness even a small portion of their actual, lived experiences in the real world. The naïve, simplistic sense of realism in its thin veil of written words is really all that anthropology can depend upon for its credibility and relevance in the world, and this is too often a poor substitute for the actual experiential realities which it disguises and displaces in the imagination of its readership. It is indeed only a thin line separating this anthropological imagination about reality and the uncharted ocean of anonymous ignorance upon which it floats.</p> <p>It is in reaction to this irreconcilable difficulty of doing anthropology that makes the anthropologist want to believe that they are extracting not only the essence from the experiential material of the real world, sorting out the critically important from the chaotic trivia, the relevant, more meaningful information, from the static nonsensical noise, selecting out the key elements from the hodgepodge admixture of many different shapes and colors. It is not enough for the anthropologist to be a Sherlock Holmes, adducing whole worlds from grains of sand, but the anthropologist must also be a physical scientist. A chemist who in a natural laboratory is figuring out the principles of material relations and reactions in the world—fine tuning the extraction process on the basis of empirically demonstrable, cross culturally and statistically verifiable, principles and laws of social interaction and human belief and behavior. But it is not quite certain whether the alleged chemistry of the anthropological investigator, as scientist in a white lab coat, is not always by some sleight of hand performing a feat of alchemical magic and trickery—a performer before an audience creating fostering an illusion of the transmutation of real worlds into the paper bound reality of anthropology.</p> <p>In spite of this fundamental limitation of the horizon of anthropological awareness, and in spite of the criticisms against the reality of its enterprise, anthropology, has achieved remarkable success in representing the world in a realistic and naturalistic manner, which remains literally interesting and scientifically intriguing. It may be mostly illusion, but it remains perhaps a necessary world of illusion—an antidote to what could otherwise prove to be a very monochromatic and monotonous world. Given the limited range of our own senses and sensibilities, it is perhaps the best we can do in representing the world realistically and naturalistically, and it has thereby enlarged our world by its presence and participation within it. Our worlds are not the less for it.</p> <p>In our valuation of its scientificity, anthropology claims to be neutral in its relation with the world. It is neither philanthropic nor misanthropic as an enterprise. If it takes from the world in one way which might seem to diminish or desecrate the private lives of the people it studies and whose lives it reifies on paper, then it also gives back to the world in other ways which can make peoples public lives more complete and fulfilled. As an enterprise, its directional development has been relatively harmless in the world when compared to other kinds of developmental activities. If its products are sometimes misused by other people beyond the capacity of anthropologists to control, this is perhaps true of any kind of information about reality which is subject to manipulation and distortion by people who have deliberate purposes in deception, distortion, and manipulation in other forms of directive development in the world. If it sometimes misrepresents the real world, then it mostly does so unintentionally and by accident, and this act of misrepresentation in the world is also a part of its own developmental history.</p> <p>Perhaps being the best we can do in the world, and lacking any better means for going about it, we can learn to make the most of its limits, to live and work and perhaps even prosper within them.</p> <p>There is a sense that we too are natural living species of the world, and that even our culture, its artificiality and development itself, is a product and function of the larger natural world from which it originated and within which it works. In this sense, the ecocide of development becomes our own ecocide as well. As we work to destroy nature in the world around we are also acting to destroy the world of nature that exists within ourselves as well. In this sense, we must reconsider the possible ecocidal consequences of our own anthropological developments in the world—the ways in which our own predominant directions of human development might possibly be affecting our own adaptation in the world and hurting our own special ecology in the world.</p> <p>When we refer to the history of development, we are also implying the natural and cultural histories of human development—of the ways we have become changed, biologically, psychologically, and socially as a consequence of our development in the world.</p> <p>We must seek to understand the ways that anthropology, in its own development, have contributed deliberately or unwittingly to these human developments in the world, whether enfunctionally or dysfunctionally, whether philanthropically or misanthropically. To the extent that anthropological development has been rooted in a tradition of enlightenment which implies a notion of progress towards some perfect state, and some form of directive change over past, imperfect states then anthropology must share some of the responsibility in the creation of modern utopias and dystopias in the world.</p> <p>The history of human development in the world has been a history of distinctively mixed results. It has been carved out with a double edged sword which has in the process of distributing its fine sense of justice to the world, also created in its wake gross inequalities and violent injustices in the world. By and large, human development has so far benefited mostly a few in the world, just as anthropological attention has so far mostly focused on only a few in the world, and it has by far done nothing for, or perhaps even detracted from the development of any more in the world whose faces have since passed by unnoticed, whose unwritten names have been forgotten, lives unrecorded passed away, and whose voices have been lost in the background silences of the libraries and reading rooms of the interior, intensive worlds of anthropology. We cannot recover so much that has been lost in the process of constructing and reconstructing our own histories from the past, but we can remind ourselves of our own hubris of our anthropological intellectuality and the great need for human humility and humbleness in our development.</p> <p>Hung up by its own problems of its authority, and authoritativeness, in the world, anthropology has suffered from a perennial crises of its professional identity. This crises has been particularly acute during the last decade and is becoming more extreme in its divisive consequences upon the world of anthropology. It has long been a crises of ego-identity—of ego reality testing, ego rationalization, ego definition, ego defense mechanisms designed to protect its sense of consistency, coherence and continuity in a rapidly changing world, to give some overarching sense of symbolic unity to the diversity and frequently disruptive and discordant experiences of reality. It is, more importantly, designed to protect and promote the efficacy and illusion of its own nonbeing in the world—its fundamental symbolic vicariousness that allows its own somewhat oversimplified and abstruse representations to stand for so much else actually in the world. It has sought to substitute its fundamental nonbeing in the world for the experiential realities of beingness in the world—beingness that works to continually undermine its own collective representations and to historically relativize its knowledge and understandings of the world, however implicit or explicit in form or function. </p> <p>This anthropological nonbeing in the world comprises its own ideological false consciousness, the primary purpose of which is the denial of its own natural history, and an evasion of the fundamental existential dilemma of death in the world. Its worlds are dying before its lens, if not eyes, and it becomes history faster than it can be recorded, researched and reconstructed as reality. Failure to confront the natural processes of the dying world of which it is a part, of people, culture, civilizations, and histories inexorably changing and passing away without any ethnographic epitaph, and to come to terms with its own historicity and relational contextuality in the world, leaves the anthropological enterprise, and the anthropological ego-identity which is part of this enterprise, and the anthropological ego-identity which is part of this enterprise, in a permanent, fixed state of loss and disorientation, which it must then somehow recover and repair.</p> <p>Humpty Dumpty has fallen from its fence, and all the king’s men and all the king’s horses can’t put him back together again.</p> <p>There is an important connection, though, between this acute crises of professional identity which anthropology is suffering from, both personally as an individual ethos of belief and behavior, and paradigmatically as a collective nomos and as a corporate enterprise with its own directions of development and its own sense of social solidarity and its own connectedness to the world. This connection is that the crises inflicting anthropology internally is as much a reflection and representation of a larger external crises in the world as it is an intrinsic problem to the world of anthropology. The ecocidal changes in the real world, the acceleration of its historical movements and irreversibility of many of its linear transitions, has been causing major symbolic and experiential reverberations in the interior domains of anthropology. The crises of identity infecting the average anthropologist is part of a larger world wide crises of identity affecting most of humanity as it struggles and seeks to define itself in a rapidly changing world. Old labels, definitions, references, interpretations, no longer fit new situations, people, environments.</p> <p>If the world had remained relative static and its changing relatively steady and stable, then the anthropology would most likely have reflected this steady state of the world in its own relative harmony and paradigmatic stability. History would still be happening to both, but not in quite as unsettling and discordant ways. What now is a crises, would then perhaps have seemed more like a minor stare of tension in regard to difference in the world—more of a soothing, background noise than a loud, disrupting explosion.</p> <p>It is no wander that the last decade in which such tensions have become increasingly acute, that anthropologists have become increasingly reflexive about their own status and relation in reality—increasingly aware of the fact that as the world changes all around anthropology, anthropology is also changed by the world. As the certainty and stability of their own sense of situation, of their own positions and stances in relation to the world becomes increasingly relativized by the rapidity and unpredictability of so much transition in the real world, anthropologist become increasingly introverted and introspective through their own lens, question the very ground and whole raison-d’être, sense of purpose, objectivity and intentionality and historicity in relation to the wider, truer world.</p> <p>It is not just that empire has returned home and that Humpty Dumpty is unreconstructively shattered, but the rise of reflexiveness with anthropology represents as well in very real terms anthropology’s return of the repressed—the sense of difference which in a younger, fresher world it could project outwardly upon the other in the world with immunity and relative impunity if the consequences, were in fact differences waiting to be discovered within ourselves which we had conveniently, perhaps necessarily, repressed in order to be sense of symbolic unity of anthropological world view. Anthropology’s own past, its own relationship with the world, are coming back as ghosts to haunt it in the present, and anthropologists must conduct their own intra-departmental witch hunts to discover the sources and causes of its own differences. In catching up with the changing world, the changing world has caught up with anthropology.</p> <p>The reason of the repressed and its own introspective reflexivity points up an intrinsic contradiction in the world and praxis of anthropology. In its ritual praxis, and academic embedding, anthropology has always actually been more intensively oriented towards its own academic interiors, caught up in the pathways of paradigmatic power, than it has been really extensively oriented towards the exterior world. In this sense, going to the field has been more of an anti-structural’rite of passage in the professionalization of the Academia bound anthropologist—and the realities of its empiricalness and ostensible extensiveness of orientation has been more of a veil of Maya than the actual structural determinants of successful adaptation within academic anthropology. What remained repressed was the public recognition of this intensiveness and interiority if anthropological realities as the basis of its authorial authority in the world.</p> <p>What anthropology has long failed to face is the illusion and intensiveness of its own source of power in the world—of the dependence of its power upon academic insulation and separation from the real world as so many symbolic fictions and collective representations of reality, and also the actual marginality and relative powerlessness in its extensive orientation in the world. Its extensiveness in the world is as the professional stranger and the marginal observer whose real world orientation is defined betwixt an between different worlds in a world of difference. But what mattered was the intensive orientation of the insider’s position within the academic status role hierarchy—the list of publications behind the professor’s title, the number of citations in the literature, the relative position within insider’s networks which opened or closed doors and provided windows upon the external realities of the world, the number and amount of research grants earned, the number of graduate students lined up outside the door waiting to be let in, and the degree to which one becomes a mentor in a father/mother role model.</p> <p>Now anthropology is facing a world which is simultaneously exploding in its extensiveness and imploding in its intensiveness. The academic boundaries and borders have been invaded and cracked wide open, and the larger than life, really real realities have come rushing into its quiet, dimly lit interior world. The barbarians are at the gate, and are demanding to be let in with their battering ram.</p> <p>It really should be no surprise that anthropology is in a state of crises, which is growing worse each year. It should come as no surprise, and with little sadness and regret, if anthropology will never, ever again be able to look out upon the world with innocent, rose colored glasses. The mirror of Humankind is more than cracked. It has shattered like the Humpty Dumpty it long reflected. Anthropology will be left with just the pieces with which to reconstruct its worlds. In its maddening celebration of Dionysian difference, Apollonian reunification and order will never be again be restored.</p> <p>All this is a prerequisite pretext by which to frame the anthropological problem of global over population and its consequences for the future of human development in the world.</p> <p>It is as if each of us were wearing our own watch or time pieces which we could not take off. It is as if in each of us there are a separate and different biological clock which is ticking away minute by minute. We attempt to synchronize our watches and clocks with as many people in the world as possible, such that our schedules can run smoothly and on time in as coordinated a manner as possible. But there are just too many people with too many different senses and sets of time, that the possibility of their coordination and synchronization in the world is lost to the chaos of different schedules, conflicting routines, alternate rates of change.</p> <p>It becomes even more problematic that for each of us, our clocks were wired up to an internal device—a time bomb or a mechanism set to trigger into activity at any possible moment, possibly leading to self destruction after some lapse of time.</p> <p>We continue walking, interacting and living in a world with many other people, always aware of or reminded of our own time which ties us into the larger scheme of organization, but never sure of when or how the devices within us will trigger, or of what may then happen. Within such an anthropological world of humankind, we are always being controlled, never sure of our control, and never knowing when and if we may suddenly lose control altogether. As we become preoccupied more obsessively and compulsively with control in the world, the changes in the world are getting more and more out of control.</p> <p>In order to cope with the scope and extraordinary dimensionality of the global problem of population, anthropology must adopt an orientation of greater extensiveness than it has ever had in its past. This is not an easy feat for anthropologists, as it would entail reorienting their praxis and ‘betweenness’ in a world of difference. It must learn to cope with not so much relativity in the world itself, but its own relativity of anthropological praxis within the world.</p> <p>We cannot be of the center, or be created in relation to the center, and adopt a genuinely de-centered framework which is outside of the center. Anthropology cannot expect itself to maintain a central intensive orientation about its own very restricted base of power in the world, and expect to achieve an orientation of extensiveness which would be diametrically opposed to such an intensive centeredness of orientation. We are defined by the context which situates us and our perspective and praxis in relation to the world cannot but be expected to reflect our basic positionality and orientation in the world.</p> <p>In becoming more extensively oriented, anthropology must begin taking greater account of its own historicity and of the general problematics posed by coming to terms with human historical patternings. As such, it must adopt a genuinely ‘diachronic’ approach which embraces its own synchronic analysis of reality in terms of the synchronicity of events in the world, and the independent co-occurrence of similar events. As such, it must give up a search for essential structures and fundamental structural homogeneity underlying the spatial patterning of relations in human reality, and its synchronic perspective of diachronic events as multiple overlapping time frames, as causal or correlational, sequentially arranged events in time. Shifting from an intensive and space like orientation, to a more inclusive, extensive and time like orientation, requires that anthropology give up certain of its time honored practices and associations with physical sciences, that it disinvest itself with the search for first and ultimate causes and laws underlying the behavior of human developmental history.</p> <p>Though basic extensiveness and history of beingness are core elements of its ethnographic praxis, anthropology does not know really how to deal with these aspects of its reality in an unbounded, unframed, non-intensive way, in a way that can preserve the historiographic and ethnographic context of its realistic and representational work, and yet spare the larger world some of its more general verbiage about unifying structures, underlying principles, etc.</p> <p>The virtue of anthropology is its empirical ground in a world of difference, in difference to the world. For an extensive orientation, difference is enough in itself. It explains itself in its experiential definition of reality, of what it means to become and remain uniquely and distinctively human in an increasingly human world.</p> <p>The anthropological problem with global population begins with counting people. No one knows exactly how many people there are in the world now, or have been in the world in the past. The rate is increasing so fast now that the current global estimate of five billion is likely to double within the next four generations, or just over one hundred years. The carrying capacity of the earth has been estimated to be just around 7.5 billion, that will be reached within two or three generations. If we start trying to directly count every person alive, and to keep track of all births and deaths, by the time we are finished we would still have to start all over again, or we might be unlikely to finish our counting as the population would be increasing at a rate faster than we could keep up with. Besides, people have the intransigent habits of slipping through the cracks in the system uncounted, or of moving here and there and so missing the census altogether or else of being counted more than once.</p> <p>Complicating this simple task of directly counting people, are the problems presented by the differential rates of population increase in different areas of the world, as well as the corresponding birth and death rates. Some nations have populations which are increasing very rapidly, while other nations have maintained near zero or even negative population increase. Hence, the problem of population is more acute in certain regions, especially undeveloped third world regions, than in others, notably the most developed first world countries. It also is a problem if gross inequality in the world between the wealthy and the poor.</p> <p>We must look at global population increase in terms of the patterning for human development which it entails. The age structure and social dynamics of the global population will change considerably over the next three generations—but we are not exactly sure how it will change. The population is estimated to stabilize within four generations if the current rates of growth are brought under control, but this is a big if, and it is possible that the global population will develop its own mechanisms of population control whether we are effective with family planning or not. As the age structure of the world population changes with each advancing year, the social environment of the earth will also develop in related ways proportionate to this changing age structure. It can be predicted without much uncertainty that the natural environments of the earth will only become increasingly strained and eroded under the pressure of this massive increase, but it is the issue of social circumscription that such numbers must entail which are more problematic. Each passing generation will grow up and learn to live in a world fundamentally different from the ones before, and the sense of reality predominant or apparent today may not necessarily be the same, or even similar to the realities actual or apparent tomorrow or the day after.</p> <p>Any previous experience of our history will not quite prepare us for what we and our children and grand children will begin soon to encounter in ever increasing capacity. Our children and their children may even become socialized at a very basic level in environments and realities considerably different from any that has come before—their whole worldview from any that has come before. Their whole worldview, way of experiencing and sense of being in the world may be different than what it was for us now or had been for our ancestors at any time previously. Furthermore, our children and grand children will come of age in a world which offers very different challenges, opportunities, problems and complexities than we are now aware of.</p> <p>With each advancing year, the growth rate of the population will creep forward and higher up the age levels of world society. Now, and for the next generation, the effects of global population increase will be mostly felt at the lower levels as most of the population will be disproportionately younger than they are older. Consequently, nurseries, day care centers, pediatricians, elementary schools worldwide should be expected to first start feeling the effects of this increase, not to mention the tired, over worked, underpaid, frustrated parents of these children. The effects will increasingly creep up the ladder of socialization to affect high schools, colleges, universities, and the job and employment structure. The kinds of demands made upon the system will be expected to change accordingly—basic necessities, jobs, money, food, even water, will become increasing in demand and shortage as the larger population grow older into adulthood and begins to have their own children.</p> <p>With the arrival of our grandchildren, there will be a well developed vicious cycle of human developments occurring on earth—most of the social Systems of the earth will be strained beyond their capacity, and ever increasing numbers will soon be on their way. We can speak safely of a progressive deterioration of services available to meet human needs. Areas which focus directly with the concern of human growth, health and development will be especially hard hit—schools, medical facilities, social service agencies. The vicious cycle of human under development will be one of generally decreasing quality of life for more and more people and lower and lower average standard of living levels world wide.</p> <p>Death rates must begin increasing, after a brief period of delay, and with perhaps unanticipated patterns. Infant mortality rates must increase, as well as mother mortality rate. More people will begin dying younger and the average age of longevity for the world’s population must begin to gradually decrease. Death rates by disease, malnutrition, by Helminthic infection, by accidental trauma, by old age, by war and disaster, by violence and by suicide, must all be expected to eventually increase in time with deteriorating social environments. It may become a very real problem of how to dispose of all the corpses when few people have enough money to pay for a funeral.</p> <p>With the development of such a grand, vicious cycle, we can anticipate rather explosive reverberations when the functional structure of the World System suddenly breaks down under the cumulative weight of overpopulation. Global overpopulation is a time bomb that has a delayed fuse. It is not so much that exponential increase in population growth doesn’t have its fullest impacts until the last few moments of its natural history of development, but that as the younger grow older, they will make increasingly unmet demands upon the system to fulfill even basic needs and expectations, and in the face of extreme inequality, these people can be expected to finally do something about it.</p> <p>Certain patterns presuming a kind of ego-logic of environmental determinism can be expected to emerge in the near future. Birth control measures and abortion represent more cost efficient means of controlling population, than say childhood starvation or systematic elimination from the social system. There has been a greater proportion of resource investment in a mature, exploitable, adult than in a young child just starting out in life. A mother can afford to give up a young baby to prevent herself from starving—better to save the reproductive mechanism rather than its by products. She will soon likely have another new baby anyway.</p> <p>As resources grow tighter and scarcer, as with scenarios of local over population, strategies of resource diversification, of hoarding, and patterns of social atomization, panic, migration, and perhaps even warfare as a population control mechanism, can be expected to occur. The problem with global over population as compared to local overpopulation is that there will be fewer and fewer places to escape to and fewer and fewer alternative resources to find in the shrinking earthbound environment.</p> <p>It can be expected that unexpected and unintended patterns will happen in different directions of human development. Science may create new wonder drugs, miracle foods, and healing therapies to alleviate much of the human suffering in the near future. Science may also be relied upon to devise new mechanisms of human annihilation that effectively removes sizable portions of the human population from resource consumption and selective social competition. Models earlier in this century are already available. Perhaps many people will decide not to have any children, nor any kind of professional career. Programs of eugenics and dysgenics might become inaugurated and socially sanctioned or reinforced—programs of sterilization or forced abortion for poor people, or of selective privileged reproduction for wealthy people. The television industry will sure to boom, along with the pharmaceutical industry.</p> <p>The near future of our earth may not be all doom and gloom. People may really decide after all that on lifeboat Earth there is always room for a few more, and learn how to adjust and tolerate the ever deteriorating social conditions. Maybe, amidst all the suffering and death, more people will learn to appreciate and respect the essential dignity and potentiality of human life on earth, and act in a more concerted and determined fashion to foster equality and equivalence on earth. Maybe we will eventually give up our bombs and our guns, and instead devote our lives to helping those most in need of help rather than to continue hurting them any further. Perhaps we will wake up soon and realize what human development is all about anyway, and that none of us are that different in the world after all.</p> <p>The problem of over population in the world will become expressed as ever increasing numbers of people having their basic needs for survival being met less and less within the World System. This will become especially apparent in the need for nutrition. The world will see an increasing incidence of widespread protein calorie malnutrition, childhood nutritional diseases of Marasmus and Kwashiorkor, greater amounts of utter starvation from lack of anything to eat. Food prices are guaranteed to rise above the ability of increasing numbers of people to afford quality or adequate amounts to eat. Protein calorie malnutrition is a relative form of deprivation of essential amino acids, which are irreplaceable in the body, and of ‘balanced proteins’ which provide the full complement of protein in the body for its maintenance. The body can adjust itself to lowered levels of protein intake, and of caloric intake as well, but not without cost to the orgasmic functioning of the body, its deterioration, and increased susceptibility to diseases and illness, and the lowered level of efficiency and energy. The availability of certain important vitamins and minerals, especially calcium and potassium may become strained or scarce in certain regions of the world, even though these are relatively easy to replace artificially in the diet.</p> <p>Given widespread malnutrition, multinational institutions like McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken are likely to become curious and especially profane, tokens of a bygone era of fast convenience foods. In the long run, feeding of lower levels of the tropic chain of life will become more and more necessary in the world of greater and greater need—cereal, grains, cabbage, chicken and eggs will become more efficient means of feeding the population than cows, milk, sugar and potato chips.</p> <p>Fresh drinking water can also be expected to become in ever greater demand and ever decreasing supply. Contamination and pollution, desertification and desiccation, wastage of ground water and the concrete watersheds of the core regions, will insure that more water will have to be treated, filtered, processed and bottled to be assured of being portable, and that fewer and fewer people will be able to consistently afford to buy such necessary but luxurious commodities. More and more people will end up having to rely upon water not fit for human consumption, and thus will become more and more susceptible to bacterial infection, mineral poisoning, etc. as a consequence.</p> <p>Draught will affect not only human habits of water consumption, but the availability of fresh foods, patterns of preserving and storing foods, and the amount of arable land available for cultivation. Cleanliness may become not so much a virtue as a sumptuary privilege of those who can afford to fill the bathtub with fresh water.</p> <p>Energy resources will become increasingly in demand, decreasingly in short supply, and more and more expensive and unaffordable for more and more people. People will not be able to afford the cost of boiling water to make it safe to drink, or of cooking foods or meats to free them from parasites. Energy costs in packing, procuring and distributing food, water, etc. will cause the costs of food, water and energy to increase even more.</p> <p>While these problems will increasingly have traumatizing affects upon the poor, and will tend to make more and more people poorer and poorer, the rich people will remain relatively unaffected by these changes. They may have to restrict their budgets a little bit, but the percentage which the increasing costs of basic necessities affect the overall income will be well within their means, and have less overall impact upon their lives. But even they too, will eventually have to adjust. They will be able to eat steak and lobster only once a week instead of every night, and they may end up having to lay off their cooks, housekeepers, and servants.</p> <p>It can be expected that local economies and food getting patterns will emerge in response to local needs and demands for good, cheap and clean sources of food, water and energy. A good example of this is the kind of hawker economy prevalent throughout Southeast Asia in which a single cook, at a single charcoal burning stove, can feed fifty or a hundred people or more in a day, and in which it is cheaper to eat at such stalls than to go to the markets, buy the charcoal and cook oneself. Development oriented governments will try to restrict and limit such activities as part of an underground economy by health regulations, licensing and taxation, or by safety and building regulations, but the only alternative will become homeless missions, soup kitchens and Thanksgiving and Christmas turkey dinners.</p> <p>People must eat and drink if they are to survive, and it requires energy to enable people to eat and drink. Hungry people are generally not very happy people, nor very productive people. This will be the bottom line in the World System attempting to cope under the strain of global over population. People who are slowly starving to death have absolutely nothing to lose in the world by seeing the system changed.</p> <p>Bureaucracy has been a great social innovation of human civilization. It is the Grand Achievement of the system designed to keep people in their appropriate places within the hierarchy of social relations, and to internally reinforce the structural functioning of the system as a corporate enterprise.</p> <p>Bureaucracy of the Big Brother variety can only be expected to grow and proliferate in direct proportion to the increase of global population and increasing hunger in the world. There will be increasing numbers of regulations to violate, forms to fill out, faces to interface, doors to close and lock, and lines to wait in. The person behind the window, or on the other side of the counter, will not be too much better off than those standing in line—the only difference will be they do not have to stand in line for their food. The question of conformity to the power of the system will become more and more naked—"Do you want to eat?" The price people will have to pay for such naked conformity will be their own humanism and the freedom of their own souls, chained as they are behind desks, windows and counters.</p> <p>Bureaucracy itself tends to grow, following Parkinson’s Law, in both size, top heaviness and increasing inefficiency, or in bureaucratic self sufficiency without necessary external stimuli. Once bureaucracy becomes officially institutionalized, it becomes more difficult to remove or control. The chains of authority grow longer and longer, more interconnected and more impersonal. Responsibility becomes more diffuse and negative. Bureaucracy creates designs which shunt excessive people into loops and maze-ways and reservoirs in endless waiting—always with the deceitful promise that their file, form or case is being processed in some pile upon some other bureaucrats desk.</p> <p>Behind bureaucracy is a whole threat of persecution, punishment and violent force—a legal justice system, a police force, a military organization, ready at a moments notice to step in and reinforce coercively the dictates of the bureaucratic system—this is called mobilization. Once such mobilization is set in motion, the great inertia of bureaucracy creates a tremendous momentum which makes it hard to manage or stop again. It tends to create its own historical trajectory.</p> <p>A world which becomes increasingly burdened by bureaucratic inertia will become increasingly unable to meet the needs of the masses, and will become increasingly inflexible to change and maladaptive. People will become increasingly anonymous and alienated within the System, and the System will increasingly malfunction and make more and more ‘mistakes’ which will victimize more people but will not be the responsibility of bureaucracy to correct.</p> <p>The bureaucratic system will become increasingly susceptible to corruption and amoralism, and will come to hide greater and greater circles of deceit which go on behind closed doors to advantage people within the dystem and increasingly disadvantage those without.</p> <p>Bureaucracy will more and more erect more effective screens of obfuscation and delusion that are designed to trick and fool the masses that something is being done to help them, if only they continue to cooperate and wait their turns in line.</p> <p>Bureaucracy represents the ultimate form of reification of the human being—of alienating humans from their own natures, from their own needs, from their own rights. Bureaucracy, more than any other social institution, besides war, turns people into things that can then be destroyed or conformed for exploitation.</p> <p>We can measure the complexity and development of our civilization by the sophistication and scale of its bureaucracy.</p> <p>It seems to be Parkinson’s paradox that the only way to serve and guarantee the protection of peoples basic needs and rights is through socialization of the government institutions designed for these purposes, and that therefore inevitably entails the growth of bureaucracy, which in turn results in the corruption or denial of peoples rights and needs. Another way of looking at these is to see that government organization is always challenged by serving two contraposed sets of needs—the private interests of special groups and the public interests of people. While organizations may be set up ostensibly for service to the community, its functioning is often undermined by increasing sets of demands from private, special interest groups. To fail to meet the second set of interests may result in conflict or resistance to public policies and in interference with the proper functioning of the organization in service to the people. Either way, it is usually the needs and rights of the people whom the bureaucracy is designed, at least ostensibly, to serve, which become compromised, and tend to become ‘secondary’ in the systems sets of interests.</p> <p>We must anticipate with the growth of population, the growth of bureaucracy to manage the problem of this population, and with this growth, its continued compartmentalization and specialization in dealing with certain precise aspects of the problem of the people. Those specialized compartments will be staffed by professional need experts who carry the knowledge and authority for manage the needs associated with their particular domains of authority. It an be expected that increasing human needs will become increasingly appropriated, defined in context to the system, and the power to meet these needs increasingly usurped or co-optated by the system.</p> <p>In relation to the system, the problem of population may affect it simultaneously and differentially at several levels of socialization. Increasing failure or problems with primary socialization associated with the rise of poverty and its social problems will tend to undermine the ability for the system to achieve effectively secondary socialization. Also, increasing differentiation and specialization of the system creates greater internal contradictions and discrepant possibilities for such secondary socialization to occur, tending to render it incomplete and problematic. The effects of such general failure of socialization to occur is that people’s basic identity will conform less and less, and become increasingly intractable to the established constraints of the system, whether these constraints are direct and explicit or indirect, contextual and mostly implicit. Given such a downgrading or deterioration of its overall effectiveness, the system itself must become increasingly inefficient and ineffective in its function of its own corporate reiteration and in its transmission and reconstitution of its structural nomos and ethos and pathos in succeeding generations of humankind.</p> <p>The system may be expected to respond in several different but interrelated ways. First it must adopt techniques leading to the intensification and enhancement of its socialization and resocialization processes. When before it demanded commitment and dedication, now it involves sycophancy, mindless devotion, fanaticism, and personality conversion. Where before it was a nine to five routine, now it becomes a round the clock ritual process. One strategy will be the creation of a Brave New World Utopia in which social engineers and technocratic psychologists create Alpha, Beta, Delta, Epsilon, categories into which people become slotted from birth, in which consistency stressing environments indirectly reinforce behavior modification such that there is a basic sense of complacency, expectation and satisfaction with ones lot and position within the system, and in which enough compensatory mechanisms provide the continuous levels of gratification which keep people existentially benumbed and subdued. In such an order, ethno national groupings will become the targets of such rank order hierarchical classifications which define one’s class caste positionality in relation to the whole—defining one’s values, the level of one’s access to resources, to rights, one’s status role identity and occupational profile, and whom one can and cannot marry and reproduce with.</p> <p>Another strategy,, not mutually exclusive with the first, but perhaps quite complimentary with it, and applied more effectively to the lower echelons of the system, is more of a Big Brother dystopia based upon a minimizing kind of military social structure in maximizing control and conformity. Uniformity, lack of individuality, denial of subjectivity, of humanity, and sexuality, among the Proles rather than elaborative and techniques of behavior modification and brain washing will favor more negative reinforcement and punishment and the threat of violent force than the kind of ‘kinder, gentler, world order’ for the higher echelons. The people of these echelons will be socialized for supervision, for obedience, and for destruction.</p> <p>It can be expected that the upper echelons will be maintained in a state of perennial routine operational normality—a relaxed steady state of functioning, while the lower echelons will be maintained in a perpetual of repetitious state of crises mobilization in which reactionary regimes and regimens within the system will continuously assert and exercise their authority and power.</p> <p>The system can be expected to work in several ways to reinforce its plausibility structures and where these are no longer possible, given the potential for discrepancy between the real and the make believe, the said and the done, the official and the actual, then it will resort to other means, namely brute force, by which to constrain the human masses into passive submission. Without a doubt, advertising specialists, social psychologists, and industrial and management sociologists are working right now on ways to further perfect the system’s means of inducing socialization, of persuasion conversion or delusion.</p> <p>A great influence in favor of the system's self-maintenance is just its embeddedness and overarching contextuality of its everyday enactment by so many people caught up within its grips. People the world over proceed in their routines in relation to the system as if this were normal, expected and basically unquestionable mode of reality—as objective as the rising of the sun every morning. The fact that this system is becoming increasingly monolithic in the World Order, increasingly coherent and non-contradictory, increasingly predominant in social structural, political economic sense, and increasingly culturally hegemonic in its basic value orientation and focus, confers upon the system a tremendous massiveness of its self evident credibility. It seems to work quite well, all we have to do is to look around and find the proof of its scientific efficacy in our everyday lives.</p> <p>In a way, global overpopulation can be seen as a way of nature catching back up with human development of its technological civilization, through its own natural history of human development. Global overpopulation will soon be outstripping development, in the sense that the improvement and changes brought about by new development in the ideological name of progressive betterment of humankind, will soon no longer be able to stay ahead of or keep up with the growth and size of the human population. It will not bring about the kind of scientific and technological paradise for humankind which it has so long promised.</p> <p>In another sense, it will be at that point that human evolution will begin again, so long slowed in suspended animation of human culture-histories progressive march towards civilization and power. With widespread, uncontrolled disease, hunger, malnutrition, violence, and with human again responding to environments in basic ways in relation to basic needs, selective pressures will become set in motion which might lead to the evolution of a new kind of human better adapted to future environment of contamination, pollution, and ecocide, but it may not be the kind of people we either want or expect to become.</p> <p>It is at this point to that system fractures and breakdowns of the functioning of the system in surprising and sudden, and catastrophic ways, can be expected to occur with increasing frequency. With such breakdowns, the system can be expected to lapse into a long term cycle of degeneration of systemic functioning, a kind of self destruction of the entire order in a process of negative cybernetics. One set of detrimental effects will trigger off a chain of other detrimental effects, which will indirectly rebound back to further deteriorate what had already become detrimental.</p> <p>In the process, it can also be expected that a great many people will perish before the system, or what left of the state of the earth, achieves some kind of lower order stability. Global population may actually begin decreasing substantially in such a dying off of humankind, but in the process selection pressures for human evolution may be reinaugurated in some evolutionary directive way. This kind of scenario is too reminiscent of the holocaust and of the Nazi superman ideology and its programs of systematic genocide. Perhaps there is a history of such events in the human past.</p> <p>Given the irreversible structure of change in the Universe, the overarching principles of randomization and entropy, and given the histories of unintended consequences which have plagued the past of human development, there is no reason to presume or believe that our reality will become anything but increasingly different as never before, that we will ever achieve a more stable or steady state of affairs on earth, or that things will eventually get back to normal in the many ways we’ve learned to expect them to. Nor is there any reason to believe that our realities should follow our science in its progress towards greater coherence and consistency and unity of understanding in the world—relativity and diversity is in the upswing, and is here in the world to stay. There is no reason for believing that our realities will not become increasingly divisive and different, and that any previous sense of order will ever be able to comprehend such potential difference. The pattern of human history could be becoming less predictable, stable, steady and self determining than before, rather than more.</p> <p>It is of deep and great importance that we learn how to see the unique realities of the individual not as expendable, but as necessary and invaluably precious, not as exploitable but as potentially possible, not as things within the system, but as people who will the system into power. It is vitally and profoundly important that we learn to look at all people, and at the whole population of humankind, not as so many mistakes of Malthusian world states, but as ephemeral miracles of nature in need of nurturance and freedom of expression. The Malthusian world may shrink infinitely, but there will always be room enough on it for a few more people.</p> <p>If we begin looking around to decide who should get off the life boat earth first, then we must first look to ourselves. The world does not need greater energy power, but it does have greater people power which has so far gone untapped and wasted. This is the true wellspring of human development that cannot be counted in census or measured in statistical estimates. It is logical that the system should find passive indirection, non-participation and non-violence fundamentally threatening to its sense of order in the world and to its continuing functioning in control of the World. It would be logical if it tried to annihilate, effectively exclude and taboo and punish people for such practices, especially if they try to create effective alternative plausibility structures for such practices within, and yet separate from, the dictates of the system. The issue has always long been one of self determination in confrontation with the world, except that very few people have ever realized this enough to put it into practice, and if so doing, then it is likely they become annihilated in the process.</p> <p>Many good Christians were fed to the lions in Rome long before Rome became the capital of Christianity. The greatest potential for determination remains in the non-determination of people’s possibilities.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="five">PART V</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">GLOBAL SYSTEMS, INC.</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">Multinational Human Dynamics</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>The short history of the recent, brief war in the Gulf is a text book example in anthropological history of how the World System functions in a concerted manner to annihilate a threat to its structure status quo and sense of order in the world. The caricatures all played their parts so superbly and convincingly in this grand, global stage production: it unfolded with so much socio historical dramaturgical effect. For a brief spell, it swept up everyone’s attention and focused it in a single direction of the unfolding developments within the system. The props were all in place. The scud rockets reminiscent of Hitler’s V-2 rockets, the threat of poisonous gas, plastic bags over babies heads. The little satellite colony of New York, Israel, being threatened once again. The vindication of modern American technology in the ‘Patriot’ missiles which seemed to effectively prevent the landing of the scuds. The war itself—the air war, the countless number of daily sorties and raids and missions, huge self-guiding explosive bombs falling from afar down chimneys, through windows, into doors—exploding out whole bunkers filled with who knows what. The torched oil fields of Kuwait, glowing on the satellite land sat maps. The huge black clouds like a perennial darkness.</p> <p>The whole show had a surreal quality about it that was reminiscent of the devastation of Vietnam—of the most sophisticated technology mobilized in concerted action, to make systematically reduce the structure of an entire nation to so much twisted and broken rubble. The landscapes of burned out hills of tanks and armored vehicles, smoking in silent stillness. The maps, generals, soldiers, the newscasters, the public reactions, the President’s speeches and prayers.</p> <p>The war in the Gulf has provided us with a clear paradigmatic example of how the systemic development functions in relation to the environment, in social interrelations, in its overwhelming magnitude and massiveness, in its international mobilization of resources and technologies, in its huge cost. It is not irrelevant that more Americans died accidentally in the preparation and persecution of the war effort than as casualties of enemy fire. The war may have unfolded in a less clean way, it may not even have been necessary, and many other people in the world continued to go hungry in spite of it.</p> <p>What exactly is the world system, and how precisely is its development affecting the general human condition on earth? The world system has certain distinctive characteristics which serve to distinguish it and which explain its style and pattern of development on earth, and that entail certain decisive consequences for humankind condition on earth. First, it is a function of scientific and technological civilization. Second, it entails industrial development of certain core regions that rely upon resource exploitation and the undevelopment of surrounding peripheral regions. Thirdly, this differential of its development entails as well asymmetrical social relationships between people of the core and of the periphery. These asymmetrical relations become reflected by and reflective of its internal hierarchical social stratification into separate tiers of class caste, in the formation of labor requirements in service of the system. Fifth, the world system has a history rooted in a capitalistic political economy. Its defining feature is that of free market capitalism, whether it is protected or controlled or regulated by the state. As a predominantly capitalistic enterprise, the world system can be seen as a corporate social organization in which its functioning and structure extend beyond the purview of any individual constituent of the system. It is big and impersonal, and like a nation, exists on its own identity separate from any or all of the identities of the people who compose it. As such, it has an ideological superstructure, a techno-econo-environmental infrastructure and a social structure which exist in a dialectical relationship to one another. It as a general world view and a general cultural orientation associated with it wherever it takes hold,, but this world view and cultural orientation is not shared equally or completely by all the people who comprise the system. It exhibits an increasing degree of social integration and organization based on organic solidarity and professional specialization, mass production, labor management practices, and extreme division of labor. It tends to functionally define and integrate most or all social institutions in relation to its center and to annihilate any form of social resistance toward its own promotion.</p> <p>In order to promote and reinforce its hegemony in the world, it relies heavily upon techniques of mass dissemination through the media, and with the increased effectiveness of techniques of manipulation, this reliance upon the media as a controlling device has increased with its development.</p> <p>Historically, the development of the capitalistic world system has had certain consistently evident consequences upon the human condition. First, it tends to disrupt local economies and cultural ecologies, supplanting these and tying them into relations of dependence based upon commodity production/procurement and access to money. It has, wherever it has grown, entailed a rearrangement of interpersonal relationships, or family organization and life, and of cultural orientation around its own predominant ethos and existential dictates. Third, it has tended to generate a surplus of underemployed labor, supplanted by technological developments, which has tended to generate a large reservoir of readily exploitable labor supply. It tends to have erected bureaucratic screens which tend to systematically exclude this surplus labor reserve from full participation within the system. It has tended to equate rights and freedoms within the system with property ownership or legal title, and to systematically deny rights and freedoms and access to resources to those dispossessed of property ownership or legal status. Its development has long been based upon unregulated exploitation, of both human and nonhuman resources, and thus has always depended upon the relative availability and accessibility of these resources.</p> <p>Often overlooked in political economic studies of the world system is the important relationship which the political side of control has played in the promotion and development of the system. In this sense, some form of administrative colonialism and military imperialism has always accompanied economic expansion and exploitation, and industrial forces of development have always depended upon the control established by basically fascist military forces to enforce the systems dictates. The connection between fascism and capitalism, imperialism and development, and colonialism and exploitation, has often been overlooked in historical studies of the rise of the capitalist world system.</p> <p>It is time to set the historical record straight, and to take each of these aspects of the World System in turn and see where they lead us in our inquiry into the recent history of human development. Finally, it is necessary to consider the functioning of the system as a corporate whole which is leading humankind down its own pathway of development regardless of the long term consequences.</p> <p>Human culture historical development on earth has appeared similar to natural evolutionary history. Separate cultural groupings of humanity can be seen as separate species evolving under different selective pressures. The difference is critical though. While the genetic information carried by a species remains unable to be transmitted between species, the elements composing any culture can and have been readily transmitted to other cultures. While elements or even combination or aspects of a culture are transmittable, culture historical patternings of a whole group remain more or less untransmissable. We may hypothesize that some features, aspects or elements of a culture are more readily detachable and transferable than other characteristics, which are closer to the center of the core of the culture. The cultural core is focal to the culture history of a group and remains relatively resistant to change and relatively conservative in its orientation, even though it is at the core that the greatest amount of elaboration and endogenous development of a culture will occur. It is also this core of a culture which will be fairly prototypical in the culture historical representation of the group. It will provide the templates of understandings by which experience will become modified and group identity and social life will be shaped.</p> <p>The relatively non-focal aspects of a culture that are more independent of the culture’s distinctive identity, and thus of more neutral and unmarked valuation within the culture, will be more readily detachable and movable to other areas. The transmission of such traits is not unlike the transmission of disease agents carried by vectors which move between cultures. It follows the typical s-curve of epidemiological patterning of disease, from introduction, to mass infection, to a leveling off.</p> <p>Civilization can be described as an inter-cultural and pan human phenomena of historical development. Its possibility arises from the transmission of elements between cultural groupings, and the interactions between people which lead to changes. It is similar to the evolution of life in the sense that it represents an evolving environment and ecosystem within which speciation events take place, and yet its rate of growth is much more rapid and its patterning is much more flexible, hence unpredictable, than what evolutionary changes bring. Civilizations arise form the transmission and interrelations established between culture historical groupings, in which one group may become assimilated, amalgamated, or integrated within another, either partially or as a whole. Such process usually result in either the destruction of the original focal center of a culture, or at least in its critical shift in relation to a new, predominant focus presented by its relations within another cultural area of influence.</p> <p>Cultures may be quite selective in what they incorporate into their sphere, and transmission may depend as much upon the selectivity of the receiving culture as it depends upon the fact of transmissibility or of availability of features itself. In this sense, there are endogenous, intensive factors of cultural change at work, primarily within a cultural focal center, and exogenous and extensive factors of change, occurring in the relations of transmission established between groupings. Endogenous and exogenous factors form mutually constraining limits which work in an historical dialectic in the development of civilization. Whole cultural groupings, center and all, can be forcibly incorporated into another cultural sphere of influence, and its unique patterning thus becoming critically altered or even obliterated, while its endogenous elements become swallowed up ad reintegrated within the historical patterning of the receiving culture.</p> <p>The development of human civilizations has largely been an irreversible process leading to greater levels of socio structural integration and to greater intensification of elements. This has been the result of primarily exogenous forces overwhelming the more naturally evolutionary processes of endogenous development and gradual speciation between cultural groupings, evidenced in the dialectical differentiation of a language into mutually unintelligible languages over time.</p> <p>The gradual rise of civilization has lead to a reversal of this process as supra-cultural entities arise from the structure of exogenous relations and changes. Separate groupings are brought together under a single sphere or umbrella of historically stable and corporate relations, which tend to persist as a structure of the long run. This development has a cyclical periodicity and a patterning of growth decay and rebirth in that periodically the natural endogenous tendencies towards differentiation tend to overwhelm the supra cultural structure and to break it down, as so many barbarian forces of entropy. But in the process of a civilization’s demise and disintegration, the seeds are sown into more fertile soil for the rise of new civilizations which encompasses and transcend the old.</p> <p>It is a paradox that while exogenous factors lead both to the rise and collapse of historical structures of civilization, the possibility for such patterning depends upon its incorporation of endogenous cultural elements of change, and upon its primarily endogenous orientation towards its development. Thus, civilizations, like the cultural groupings which they incorporate, are primarily intensively focused and exhibit characteristic, proto typical core style patterning which are in an historical sense relative and particular to its own provenience, and that, as a whole, is not able to be transmitted.</p> <p>The dialectic between the natural development of cultural groupings, that tends to be endogenous yet extensively oriented, and the historical development of intercultural civilization, that tends to be exogenous yet intensively oriented, from the historical parameters by which to frame a culture historical understanding of the rise and development of the present World System in which we live.</p> <p>All civilization, and our current world system, can be said to be predominantly intensively oriented in its structure and functioning in the world, in a way that it impacts and orients our lives about its center of power, turning us inwardly rather than outwardly in the world.</p> <p>Development of civilization occurred upon three levels of social integration—the material techno environmental level, the social, interactive and reproductive level, and the symbolic, ideological and cognitive level. No one level has been causally predeterminative or independent of the other levels, and together they form a complex dialectic of development, such that basic changes in any one level may entail concomitant changes in the other levels.</p> <p>The rise of civilization has been represented by the differentiation and dialectical interrelations between these three levels of development. Elements comprising each level, whether these are tools, agricultural techniques, or ritual practices or institutional arrangements or ideas or symbolisms, become transmitted between cultural groupings, or from civilizations to civilization, and become reconfigured into new patternings of the development of historical civilization..</p> <p>It is the individual, distinctive elements which are the substance of civilization, that become carried and transmitted between peoples, reconstructed and utilized. Factors that determine why some elements of civilization become selected out while other elements become selected for in the process of civilized development are probably multiply determined, but there are some general principles of this selection.</p> <p>First, the design of elements themselves tend to become elaborated and stream-lined over time as they become reproduced and reworked and continuously modified to fit new environmental arrangements. New elements are created to replace old elements which better fit into new environmental arrangements. The design, selection and displacement of elements is determined by both form and function of these elements. They may work better than previous elements, or their overall design may be aesthetically more pleasing or more in harmony with the prevalent patterning which the elements may take.</p> <p>In general, there has been an overall tendency for elements to be selected for which allows a directional pattern of development towards greater intensification of civilization and toward the realization of power which such intensification entails. A particular element of culture may work, where previous elements may no longer fit adequately. It is not enough for such elements to be merely different, or to differentiate in an extensively random fashion. Such elements must change, but in a more integrative, intensive direction.</p> <p>In this manner, we can see the advantages which culture had who had the bow and arrow over those without, who had the conception of zero, or of the wheel, or of gun powder, or of a single God, versus those with many animistic spirits, or those who devised a republican assembly, or a court system, or stratification or bureaucracy, over those which remained lead by chiefs or big men. Once such elements were created, their self evident value in cultural integration and intensification lead to their easy recognition and transmission across cultures. The silk worm was a secret which the xenophobic China kept for many years, as well as the art of making fine porcelain. Keeping an element secret confers advantage of one cultural grouping over another, but once the secret gets out, the advantages of its being kept secret become counterbalanced by the exogenous developments its transmission and reiteration, and subsequent modification leads to.</p> <p>There are those anthropologists who would privilege material and technological developments over other kinds of elements, as predeterminative of the general directionality of civilized development of humankind. But this is more an arbitrary preference for material artifacts and ‘objects’ with a substantial, easily recognizable identity as so many ‘facts’ but there is no way to prove that the domestication of a wild plant for cultivation necessarily had greater impact upon a civilization than the formulation of the idea of a single God, or the creation of middle level managers or a Mandarinate to run the affairs of state upon a local level.</p> <p>Any given element of civilization can be defined by its paradigmatic prototypicality in subsuming a range of possible alternative patterns in which change can occur. No single element is purely technological, or purely symbolic or purely social. Each element has symbolic, social, and technological aspects and consequences in its reality. A tool or a weapon is never just a device for mechanical alteration, but also carries certain symbolic and social values and functions. The conception of God is never purely disembodied or abstract, that it does not somehow become represented or substantiated through social ritual process or symbolic material forms.</p> <p>Such elements, become arranged in regular syntagmatic patternings within a given cultural context which allows them to function and make sense of the world. Such elements can be said to constrain human experience and behavior, and to be contextually constrained within a tradition and history of a cultural sphere, and allow the mediation of environmental change. The syntagmatic arrangements or patternings of elements are based upon the objectifications of their intentionality structures and their pragmatic, functional structures.</p> <p>Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations are temporal-spatial dimensions of the on-going instantiation of the historical patterning of human reality. They dialectically precondition one another such that syntagmatic order of recursive structure determines the selection of paradigmatic alternatives, and syntagmatic ordering are determined by the selection of overarching paradigmatic categories.</p> <p>The only a priori rule governing these arrangements are that they make sense given the contextual environment of relations in which they occur. This environment itself is changing and developing in certain directions and the rise of the proper set of circumstances can precondition the invention or innovation of new elements to fill in the gaps created by the changing contexts. In this way, we get independent simultaneous inventions when conditions become ripe for their creation or fruition to take place.</p> <p>The developmental patterning of human civilization, which has been seen as progressive has been the long term epiphenomenal consequences of fundamental human symbolic behavior and creative capacity. Human creativity to produce new and different elementary forms, and to purposefully alter forms to fit new functions. Elements are preeminently symbolic, whether they are tools, social roles or identities, or ideas, and it is this symbolic capacity of these elements which allows their mediation of environments, their functional integration and intensification and their selective alteration.</p> <p>The functional constraints occurring in the articulation and instantiation of symbolic elements are based ultimately upon the basic range of human needs, experiences, relations occurring within a natural context, and the existential entailments involved in the fulfillment of these needs. Any element is unlikely to be retained for very long in an untransformed state if its own existence interferes with the adaptive functioning and interests of the people carrying it. There really is no way of demonstrating the a priori existence of a basic structure underlying such constraints beyond that functional structure dictated by the limits of these basic needs.</p> <p>The elements and contexts conditioning their expression become recursive and reiterative in its perpetuation of basic patternings or structures. The number of elements manageable within any delimited or bounded system must always be finite. Systems composed of too many elements, too many choices, too many relational possibilities, too little constraint, become clumsy and incoherent in their patterning over time. They become noisy and cluttered systems. There does seem to be natural organic limits to human information processing and symbolization which to some extent predetermines how many elements or possible combinations or ordering of elements, or event the basic kinds of elements involved.</p> <p>Once begun, the self organizing patterning of such systems become to some extent preconditioned by the environments of their own total history of relations within the system. The robustness of the systems whole environment and historical patterning functions to condition and constrain the possible alterations of its elements—their space, their function, their capacity and potentiality for development within the system.</p> <p>Once invented, elaborated or widely diffused, elements are not simply eliminated or eradicated. There tends to be a gradual accumulation of elements over time. Rules governing selection, survival elaboration and development of particular elements are determined by their on-going functionality and usefulness in the mediation of change within the system. Elements fall into disuse if they serve no objective sense of purpose, and tend to become displaced by more objective sense of or active elements. Elements can be stored in pools or reservoirs, tool kits, armories, treasuries, libraries, dictionaries, oral traditions, customs, rituals, to be indefinitely preserved or stored until they are recalled, reinvented, or revitalized. If no such system of their storage and stockpiling exists, than these symbols must become forgotten and lost and irretrievable to the system. Storage enhance the flexibility of the system.</p> <p>With the development of civilization, needs redefined socially in social environments, as derivative or secondary socialization/institutionalization, become developed with the possibilities for the perversion or prevarication, such that elements may be promoted or elaborated within the system which may interfere with the needs of some people, or occur at their expense, while augmenting the fulfillment of inflated needs of other people. With the rise of intensification and integration, differential relations of power in the expression and articulation of elements arise. Some elements may become ‘emphasized’ and elaborately inordinately or disproportionately, while other elements may become de-emphasized or devalued. Differential topographies of civilization arise, such that there occurs different culture historical patternings of elementary salience, interest, and functioning.</p> <p>The development of elements in civilizations has seen the emergence of multiplex functions or relations between elements, increasing integration between elements. There has occurred as well increased stratification between elements, stratification of elements within elements, embedding of elements into experience and everyday life, as well as increased domestication, internalization, and interiorizing of human social environments in which these elements are articulated. The process continues today. These are consequences of such systems of elements hyper-compartmentalizing into discrete or highly abstract functions, partly as a form of storage, and the development of the systems capacity to deal with more elements in a more efficient manner. Such processes continue today, and their innovation and design too were elementary creations of the development of the system.</p> <p>There has been a certain amount of shortsightedness and narrowness of view in the development of human civilization. Humans may be creative, but rarely are they exceptionally so. They are much better innovators and modifiers of preexisting elements than they are originators of brand new forms with new functions. Once an idea is invented or discovered it tends to eventually catch on and spreads rapidly, becoming quickly elaborated and refined in the subsequent history of its development. There are countless examples off such development. Early man may have stumbled across naturally occurring fire many times before anyone figured out actually how to make fire happen, but once learning how, almost everyone became a master fire maker. Similarly, human flight was long believed to be an impossibility until the Wright brothers demonstrated its possibility in defiance of common sense. Then it was only a matter of a few years before humankind was flying to the moon and back, and the possibility of flight became an everyday human reality.</p> <p>The original creation of new basic elements opens up new ranges of possibility for developmental patterning which did not previously exist before, and creates revolutionary reverberations in the development of the whole environment of civilization itself. Their potentiality may have been circumstantially evident or suggest a long time before anyone hits upon the way to make it happen. But once started, there is usually no turning back the clocks of historical development.</p> <p>In this sense, the development of a secular science based upon the understanding and manipulation of natural ordering principles of the universe, was an inevitable outcome if the development of civilization, as were the development of alphabets, of mathematics, of literacy, printing, of electronic media. All perhaps had to await the prior development of previous, preconditioning elements, but once the circumstances for their development occurred, it would only become a matter of time before it would have been realized.</p> <p>The development of human civilization to its present state was not mandated by natural law, nor is there anything intrinsic or principled about this development which made it a predetermined outcome. Also, its historical processes and patternings are not unlike or unrelated to those occurring in the development of other civilizations in the past. It was the cumulative outcome of may people interaction, and the gradual buildup of a civilized context that preconditioned the possibility of certain kinds of contributions—especially of science, and its technologies. Science and modern achievements if civilization were always possibilities waiting to become realized by human invention, or discovered by human learning, but it had to await the historical development of appropriate contexts and preconditions which would render its discovery and invention likely.</p> <p>When we refer to the world system today, we are referring to something a bit more than just its science, technology and industrial production, but we are also implying a social, cultural, and ideological orientation that has a particular capitalist spirit and ethos, that has become a predominant patterning in the world, to which all other alternative orientations are becoming subordinate and refocused to the system's center. When we speak of the world system, we are also referring to the human dynamics of being and nonbeing, of interrelationship and experiencing of the environment, and how these have been altered in adaptive response to the changing conditions under the system.</p> <p>It is important in these regards to understand that from a psycho- social and psycho geographical standpoint the success of the system always depended upon the political and economic and social organization and mobilization of a grouping of people distinctively defined vis-à-vis other groupings or marginal out groups which were seen to be either competitive with the group or else subservient or dominant to the group. The system has always depended upon the maintenance of its boundary identification and thus upon internal hierarchy of authority to reinforce its conformity, and in-group/out-group projection. It is the structure and the patterning of these groupings which have been changing within the system, and are still changing, remaking and reshaping the structural boundaries of the world in the process.</p> <p>The developmental changes in the system have had ineradicable and irreversible consequences, the patterning of the whole system has had an historical momentum of its change in the face of which individual groupings or organizations can do little to stop or prevent. Part of its momentum of directionality and irreversibility is due to its great contextual inertia, which, once set in motion, becomes much more difficult to stop. Also it is due to its diminishing degrees of freedom. Once having chosen a certain pathway of development, it becomes increasingly constrained in the kinds of subsequent options and alternative patternings which remain available to it. Being all that we are basically left with, people find they have little choice but to go along with it or to become annihilated by it. Too, it has meant mixed blessings, and many of its negative consequences have been unintended side effects and unforeseen possibilities of the long run, but its short term and narrow range of benefits continues to motivate and drive most people to seek it out and to promote its further development.</p> <p>The system itself has been founded upon the fundamental notion of its own self sustaining growth and development, which is seen to be potentially unlimited. Its growth orientation renders it a mass oriented system, such that greater mass production, mass marketing, mass organization, has always worked against the interests of the individual and the small entrepreneur, and for the promotion of organization and big business. Mass capital and the property ownership has meant greater profits, that in turn has meant increased growth within the system, and all attempts at its control lead to strategies of diversification and at circumvention of control which in the long run backfire by rendering the system more and more out of control. Though the system continues to grow upon its margins in an extensive manner, always enlarging its compass of involvement and horizon of activity, it leads to greater degrees of intensification as it tends to pull more and more elements, environments and people within its network and entrap and entangle these in ever greater degrees.</p> <p>This objective of unlimited growth is based upon a presumption and a requirement of free access to an unlimited reserve of basic resources of its commodity production, whether these are human resources of labor and know how, or they are natural resources of energy, minerals, food, land, flora and fauna. In its growth, it tends to gobble up resources in an unrestrictive manner, without regard to the long term recycling or replacement of these resources once they have been used up. In other words, the system has always been founded upon one of resource exploitation—of getting something for nothing, or more for less—whether this exploitation has been human, energy, material or environmental. Sometimes it is claimed that its increasing efficiency has resulted in better use of resources, but this must be seen within a larger context that the process of exploitation itself has become increasingly efficient, and its contribution to the system's growth has in the net balance of the long run lead to increased exploitation of resources at a faster rate.</p> <p>In regard to human resources, it has used people exploitatively for its own growth interests when and where it has seen fit, and has otherwise neglected or discarded people as inefficient burdens to its own growth, or has tried to redefine the human identity within the system from that of basic producer consumer to that of mass producer consumer. It will seek to exploit people at one end of its teleological-technological chain or the other—one way or another alienating people from their own basic interests and needs in the service of the system.</p> <p>Whether it exploits people as mass producers or mass consumers, its net consequences for most people are those of any form of exploitation—that of depriving people of their own basic rights, freedoms, and rendering access to basic resources and meeting of basic needs conditional and contingent upon the degree of status role identity and achievement within the system. Though it is implicitly loaded as a value orientation, there is nothing religiously moral or ethical about this survival imperative it tends to impose upon all people differentially. It is completely secular, and works implicitly at the every day level of common sense.</p> <p>Exploitation of resources leads to depletion and deprivation. Exploitation of natural environments leads to their degradation and pollution and eventual destruction. Exploitation of people leads to increasing alienation and basic dependency upon the System.</p> <p>The world wide pursuit of development has lead to its rapid intrusion upon many cultural life ways, and an inevitable upsetting of these life ways in ways which serve the interests of the system but which lead to increasingly exploitation, alienation, and dependency of the local cultural orientation. It has also intruded more and more into the existential life world of the individual caught within its grips, such that it comes to embed its as an internal controlling and orienting mechanism within the unconscious of the individual psyche, and comes to be externally reinforced in ever greater ways in the everyday environments of the individual. Psycho-geographic identity of the individual comes to depend upon its presence in the life world, and the consistency that this presence presents to the individual.</p> <p>The individuals basic nexus of social interrelations, the cultural nucleus of the primary family, and the local spheres of identity and sociality becomes reorganized and reoriented in relation to the focusing power of the dictates of the System. Differential distribution of critical knowledge, of money, of cash earning resources, leads to the disruption of traditional patterns and the introduction of new salience and values within inter-human relationships.</p> <p>It comes to reorganize people into relatively regimented life styles in rather rank order social units. All other activities and interests become subordinate and subsidiary to the primary interests and activities of service to the Systems interests. Individual identity becomes primarily based upon its status role identity within the Systems socio economic and political economic context. The individual exists within social spheres of influence and ‘plausibility structures that either come to reinforce or end to deny or annihilate this identity.</p> <p>Though the development of the system tends to be totalizing and totalistic in influence, and tends to necessitate a socio-centric kind of totalitarianism of control over the individuals life and livelihood, its not total in its control or influence upon human reality. There remain many gaps in its spheres and areas of influence in people’s lives, and other subsystems and underground systems tend to fill in those areas of human life and need which the system tends to leave vacant and unfilled. Individuals and sub-groupings within the system persist in counter reaction and counter valuation to the dictates or influence of the system, and many still resist its encroachments into their lives and relations in the world. But more and more, even these kind of responses to the increasing influence of systemic development within the lives of people tend to become, and be construed as, merely counter reactions to the system, or as regressive nativistic movements, or as deviance from the implicit normative standards of the system, than as anything which is merely separate from or independently different than the system.</p> <p>Difference and variation thus become allowed only within the broader or narrower constrains of the system, and become contextually defined by interrelations within the system. Attitudes, world view, beliefs, collective representations, values, increasing incorporate these constraints indirectly and in an implicit way, such that it becomes increasingly less possible to entertain or even imagine the possibility of difference outside of these constraints.</p> <p>The system, wherever it flourishes, promotes difference and differential access to resources, values of hierarchy and its own systemic authority, and leads to structural inequalities between people, where none before may have existed, and where none otherwise need to exist. It also leads to relationships of increasing interdependency and asymmetry within the world.</p> <p>With increasing structural interdependencies, differentials, and asymmetry, the range of choice and of freedom of functioning of people independently of the constraints of the system become increasingly narrow and circumscribed. Such choice becomes increasingly problematic and complicated under such conditions, and people become more normatively and behaviorally incapacitated in exercising such choice or in bringing such freedom to realization. In this, the system does not help, and even strives to hinder such alternative decision making as counter productive and resistant or inimical to the interests of the system, by educating and convincing people that they really have no choice at all but conformity to the system.</p> <p>The system, as an entity, must be seen as completely impersonal and non-subjective in its functional orientation. Though there may be many representatives and voices of the system, and though some people may fair better within the system than many others, and though some may seem on top of it while others may seem to be at its bottom, and though most people may come to embody the system in their life worlds as if it were vital and human, still, it is completely super-organic and ultimately impersonal and inhuman in orientation. It is a corporate affairs whose systemic interests encompass and encircle any and all individual interests or group interests. Its long term interests exist beyond the life span or life world of any of its composite people or sub-groupings. Though some people may appear in greater control of the system than others, and while there may be managers and the managed, the system as a whole, corporate human enterprise remains basically beyond anyone’s control.</p> <p>In the last analysis, the interests of the system and the long term objectives of its own structure and functioning, are not even in the interests of people or of its human components. Its reason for being is epiphenomenal as an historical patterning, existing for its own sake, than for the sake of the people who’ve made it happen. Though its promotion has generally benefited many people in many ways, and it is claimed that its long term development has lead to an improved condition of humankind globally and historically, such that people now are more absolutely prosperous, materially wealthy and productive, and medically healthy, and that life within the system has been sounder and more secure than life before or beyond its influence. These arguments and claims are undeniable. But these side effects of the system's functioning were not necessarily the reason for being of the system in the first place, which was primary power and profit oriented, nor does its continued development directly or absolutely benefit all of humankind, but rather only incidentally and relatively. The system exists for the sake of the system, its interests are other than those of basic human interests, except to the extent that people make its interests their own, and people are sustained and rewarded within the system in the way and to the extent that they serve its own interests, and promote its development. Development occurs for development’s sake, and only incidentally for human development.</p> <p>As such, this development has tended to favor increasing social organization over less, increasing mobilization and exploitation of resources, human and nonhuman, rather than rationing or conservation of these resources, greater degrees of human involvement and constrain, rather than constrained involvement and wider margins of freedom and unconstraint, and thus has tended to demand more conformity rather than allow more difference.</p> <p>Within relationships that are becoming increasingly interdependent, asymmetrical and differential, it can be expected that in general social relations should become more strained and difficult, and that under such strain, there is greater likelihood for the fissioning and breaking up of such webs of interrelations, as they come to reverberate and resonate in greater tension the stresses and strains which they incorporate.</p> <p>It can be expected that with such increasing normal tension of inter-human relationships, human social relations will become increasingly marked by competitiveness, impersonalness, spuriousness and mutual mistrust, and affective distance and estrangement. It can be expected that face to face, discursive events between people will become increasingly conflicting and concerned with the paradigmatic problem of control management in such events. Finally, it can also be expected that individuals will come to bear within their own private lives a great deal of the tension, stress and strain experienced in their social relations, and this internalization will come to have negative consequences for further human developments within the system.</p> <p>The illusion that the development of the system promotes human development must be maintained, even in the face of contradictory evidence or conflicting experience. The necessity of maintaining such an illusion is rooted in the human need to cope with stress by maintaining an experiential identity of perceptions. It would become increasingly problematic to simply redesign one’s existence and hand over one life to the dictates and service of a system that comes to be increasingly at cross purposes to those fundamental needs of human development. In the face of mounting counter evidence suggesting the contrary, it will become for many increasingly necessary to uphold and reinforce the illusion of the personalness and humanness of the system at any and all costs, even if this entails the flagrant violation of basic human rights and a total denial of the place of human subjectivity in the world.</p> <p>Within social circles which serve to foster and create such illusion, people who might otherwise be quite skeptical and human , will be lead to believe and behave in basically contradictory ways, and will be in their symbolic justifications of their experiences, make up the difference. Many people, caught within the influence of power and conformity, will come to believe and behave in ways which they may not, in a large context, realize they are behaving.</p> <p>Identity within the group, within the system, will increasingly become a issue of personal and social survival, the ante for success within the system will keep going up, and the risks of failure become heavier and heavier. The horizon of one’s objectiveness in life for advancement or promotion within the system, will keep receding from one’s reach. Others will seem to be getting ahead in the directions one is running towards but falling ever more behind.</p> <p>Within such a social environment, there will be less and less resistance to and great susceptibility to the influence of insider’s networks and circles of deceit which serve to foster the preferred interests of the select few to the disadvantage of others within the system. This will become the principal strategy for mobility and mobilization of resources within the system, and will become the predominant structuring principle of social order and organization.</p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="six">PART VI</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">HIDDEN FACTORS</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">Human Stress and Response</font></p> <p> </p> <p>What is the power of human imagination to create alternative worlds and different realities which it can then ring to realization, and what is the influence of our mythology that allows us to enact our myths and in the process, foretell our future.</p> <p>There is something strangely fascinating about many sciences fiction films which were created during the Cold War Era. They depict in terms of realistic settings and scenarios possible futures of our scientific quest for power in the world. They have an uncanny power to illustrate for us our own preselective interests, intentions and objectives in the enactment of our alternative futures.</p> <p>In the futuristic world of Scientific discovery, research and development, nothing that is imaginable is impossible. Thus we have before us in living animated color alternative visions of our own possible future—in cannibalistic, flesh eating zombies, in the invasion and taking over of the world by ‘plant like’ body snatchers, in the rise of gigantic man eating insects from the irradiated dust of nuclear testing, in Dr. Strangelove’s and Fail Safes, or in cyborg Worlds in which biology and technology, metal and soul, flesh and plastic, become fused into new forms of automated life and living automatons.</p> <p>The frightening, life like fascination of these Sci-fi visions are in their illustration of the possibilities of our own future development and becoming in the world. They stand as animated metaphors for our own scientific destiny and technological fate. The monsters which they bring to life before our very eyes—the Godzillas and King Kongs, are the monsters of our own possible becoming which we normally keep hidden and locked away from sight. They open the Pandora’s Box of human reality.</p> <p>It is no accident that interest has shifted from represses dreams of Frankensteins, Mummies, Draculas, Creatures of the Black Lagoon and Hunchbacks of Notre Dame and Phantom’s of the Opera—from the repressed Victorian visions of an Edgar Allan Poe, toward more life like and normally appearing human monsters of Freddie Krugers, Night Stalkers, Serial Killers, Chain Saw murderers, Zodiacs and the Son of Sam. We have gone from Jack the Ripper and Dr. Jeckyl/Mr. Hyde, to Edward Scissorhands and Heavy Metal.</p> <p>In many of these stories there is a recurrent meta theme of ‘death oriented’ science gone wrong, creating in the laboratory monstrous side effects which stalk and plague the city skyline. There is also a recurrent theme of a psychopathic killer and a social menace. In these themes we can recognize the ‘return of the repressed’ and the retributive vengeance which becomes wrought upon the world in increasing destructiveness. There is in such symbolic enactment the expression of violence and animal aggression which is normally bottled up or kept hidden and secret, chained up in the dungeon of the deep unconscious. The unconscious is not just personal and psychological, but even more importantly, collective and mass oriented. The monsters are importantly mass murderers and serial killers who nonetheless constitute the worst possible nightmare for each of its tormented victims.</p> <p>In all this human darkness lurks more than a few grains of truth about our possible future development. There is a very real sense in which those things which we cast out of or world with violence, which we repress into oblivion, may return in future generations to haunt and plague and victimize us. We can in these sci-fi visions, get a glimpse at the nature if some things which we have tried to cast out the gates of our paradise, or imprison away within its very depths. We can see the real unintended monstrosities of life created by a science gone wrong in its experiments, or the transformation of nature and of the natural human into a composite machine of living tissue, electronic circuitry and plastic organs.</p> <p>In this regard, death itself as the ultimate state of nonbeing and of becoming, represents symbolically the ultimate source of fear, terror, retreat, evasion, hiding, and attempted escape that we sometimes unconsciously use our science and our social worlds for. Whether death comes by accident, as an unintentional consequence, an experimental error, by deliberate violence, by incarnate evil, it comes nevertheless. When we try and exercise and cast death from the garden of Eden, we create the inevitability of its visitation in some future time. All our science and progress will not cure the disease of death or solve its mysterious and dark dilemma of our own nonbeing and nothingness in the world. It always comes back to haunt our illusions and dreams, and even if we face it in all our weakness, fragility and even courage, it remains the source of fear, anxiety, uncertainty and irreconcilable paradox of understanding in our world. Not being able to live without death, we are confronted with the challenge of learning to live well with it.</p> <p>There is another sense of intuitive understanding in which history is said to repeat itself. There is an inexorable circularity and cycling of historical patterning which states that if something happened before, especially recurrently, then it can possibly, even likely happen again, in ever greater presence than before. Thus if we have a First World War and then a Second, we are logically persuaded by the patterning of our history to expect yet a Third and a Fourth. And when we survey the military record of the human species as far back as we can discover, we find irrefutable evidence of the recurrence and increasing intensity of warfare.</p> <p>Similarly, we get a repetitive patterning and cycling in the rising and falling of historical civilizations. Empires come and go, wax and wane, and in their wake seeds are sown for greater climaxes of culture historical development. If we have had an end to a Pax Egyptiana, Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, then we can also expect an eventual demise of a Pax Americana. In the future we may even expect a new Pax Nippona or a Pax Sinitica, but who can really tell where the next centers of major civilization will really take place. Perhaps even somewhere out in space.</p> <p>Similarly, if archaeological evidence suggests that what happened on Easter Island may have happened in other contexts as well, and if paleontological evidence suggests that life on earth has gone through not one, but several episodes of biotic climax and mass extinction, then we must become suspicious that it could happen to us sometime in our future, and we must pay heed to possible warning signs of its occurrence.</p> <p>In the whole of the human past, there may not have been one ‘Dark Age’ but several, or even many. The dawn of human civilization was an emergence from a primordial Dark Age of the human condition. So it should not be unexpected that the experience of a Dark Age is something unusual or strange to the range of human experience on earth. It may merely represent a transition to a new mode of living and doing things, the passing away of an older way of life, and a refertilization in its ashes of the earth from which it was derived in the first place.</p> <p>There is a maxim which comes from the human experience of its own past. Those who do not learn from their mistakes, are bound to repeat them. There is a wide question now whether we have learned enough in our valuation of the modern and the present, from our own rather spotted and bloody record of the past. It always remain strong possibility that what we believe we are learning from the past is but the values of the present which we symbolically retroject upon a past that can no longer speak for itself. We may actually be rewriting our pasts in histories to suit our own future needs, and in the process of such historical revisionism for ideological intentions, we may actually be forgetting or necessarily have already forgotten, the real lessons of our past. The start of every fresh war we hear that this is the War to end all wars, and we celebrate its victorious completion with the assumption that there is now widespread, future peace in the world, which becomes our interest and duty to protect. But wars may not actually solve all the tensions on which they were founded, and may in their historical enactment, sow the seeds of even greater tensions and animosities down the road. War actually seems to solve very little in the world, except who gets to keep the sacred scepter of civilization.</p> <p>World War II and Vietnam were two very different kinds of war for the American people. Though we won one and lost the other, the lessons we seemed to learn from both we seem to have either forgotten or be unable to forget. In the first, our worst enemy became our best ally, and in the other, we made our best possible allies our own worst enemy. It is evident that the lessons that are clearly there to be learned in the history of both wars, of their basic lack of necessity, tyranny, and inherent evil, as well as the escalation of their intrinsic destructiveness, and that we have consistently failed to learn, or systematically forgotten these lessons. In the most recent war in the Gulf, we had a model of World War II clearly in command, and we all claimed that this was not another Vietnam. But the war lacked the sense of necessity, involved the inevitably tyranny and evil, and evoked the frightening specter of the totalization of the lethality and destructiveness of modern warfare.</p> <p>Given the expectation that the increasing tensions and straining forces within the development of the system will be felt in social relationships, it is fitting to look for symptoms and signs of such stress and strain in embodied terms of the way people come to incorporate within their own being and behavior, or learn to cope with or adjust to such increasing levels of social environmental tension. It can be expected that definite long term patterns of typical human responses will become evinced as these tensions gradually increase their pressure and slowly take their toll. Such stresses can be expected to have certain definite and permanent influences upon the human character. They will leave their imprint upon the personal and collective being of humankind, and this in turn will become transmitted to subsequent generations as certain enduring problems and the system as well will be expected to devise schemes and develop ways of further exploiting these patterns in ways which will further promote its own developmental interests.</p> <p>The principle psychological and sociological problem which humankind will have to face and deal with effectively over the next few generations are the psychological and physiological responses and reactions to pandemic, widespread, and unrelieved stress and tension in social relations. Whereas in the past of the development of the human system the central problem has been increasingly a preoccupation with the problem of control and the realization of power, this can be expected to continue except that the problem of control will become differently defined and will become increasingly a problem of not getting out of control. The problem of the realization of power will be in terms of the usurpation of personal, independent forms of power, and in increasing methods and mechanisms of persuasion and conversion to the dictates, practices and ways of the system’s development. The individual psyche and life world will increasingly become the locus of central control and the focus of interest in power.</p> <p>The grand paradox of this will be that human beings will become increasingly erratic and uncontrollable in their responses to stress and adaptation to alienating environments. Control and power will increasingly become a problem of human control and human power and of self control and self empowerment within the framework of the system. In human response to stress, the system will have reached its own human horizon to its own maddening pursuit of development. Upon the margins of this horizon, the development of this system will become increasingly less intensively orienting and increasingly more extensively oriented in its dealing with the randomizing forces which these human limitations will impose upon the development.</p> <p>These patterns of human stress and response, through expressed in local ways, will be quite pandemic and generalized within the whole system. Everyone will suffer, though not equally and in the same way. For many it will be a living nightmare, for others it will merely be a life long neurosis and desperation. Even the few wealthy controllers of the system will not be spared the effects of this suffering.</p> <p>The social environment will become increasingly threatening and chaotic for the individual. The threatening and chaotic nature of this predominant social environment will overshadow virtually every aspect of human existence. Patterns of avoidance, of fear reaction and projection, of over compensation, and uncontrolled frustration and aggression will become increasingly frequent facets of normal, everyday life.</p> <p>In this regard, perhaps, it is necessary to separate out the consequence from the experience of short term, but perhaps traumatically intense forms of stress, from death and separation to the witnessing of violence, from the consequences of long term stress which may be less intense but more widespread, subtle in its expression and yet nonetheless lasting and profound in its human alterations.</p> <p>Both forms of stress and response will increase, and there will be much overlap in the effects and symptoms between the two, but in their extreme they may produce distinctively different and perhaps opposite but equal kinds of human reactions.</p> <p>But whatever form it takes, neither the stress nor its results will easily go away, nor will humans be able to ever escape from their clutches. They will carry it around with them wherever they go, like a yoke around their necks.</p> <p>These patternings of stress and response create a degenerative cycle of cybernesis, both for the individual adaptation to his/her life world, and for the collective adaptation to changing world environments. This negative feed back cycle will be a vicious one from which no one shall escape, nor the system. It will work to minimize its losses rather than to maximize its own gains, and in the process of switching from an intensive or an extensive orientation, will inadvertently come back into alignment with basic human interests in survival and health.</p> <p>The vicious cycle of stress and response is such that decreasing adaptation and increasing maladaptation fosters a proclivity towards greater experience of environmental stress, which in turn begets even less adaptive response.</p> <p>The last consequence of this vicious cycle of dedevelopment of both the System and of human participant within it is either natural death, by one means or another, or else a kind of symbolic social death of the individual’s autonomous human identity. This has been referred to as desymbolization, and whether it leads to sycophancy or sociopathy, all it really eventuates in is the transformation of the person into a zombie—the living, unfeeling, dead.</p> <p>Part of the grand paradox of this human horizon of the development of the System will be that though it further intensifies, domesticates and interiorizes human existence, this will not be found in the realization of greater internal privacy of the individual, but in the internalization of the collective into the internal, interior spaces of the individual psyche. Interiors will become increasingly ‘collective’ interiors rather than private interiors, and such social interiors will become increasingly crowded and will in the process crowd out personal private space more and more.</p> <p>People will seek escape, even at the risk of death, from such crowded interiors, for the fresh air of being outside, in an extensive environment, however polluted, corrupted, and barren such a waste land may become. The interiorizing of development can be seen in its circumscription of natural environments, such as national parks, nature preserves, zoos, gardens, ostensibly to protect such environments from the degradation and depredation of extensive developments, but in their artificial in bounding such natural environments inevitably become fictitious, false and corrupted by the subsequent crowding of human traffic.</p> <p>For people, it will become an increasing existential dilemma and decision as to whether they wish to live an unnatural social death in an impersonal and alienating interior environment, or else to die a more natural life in the loneliness of an empty, barren desert.</p> <p>It can be expected that increasingly the symptoms of stress will be experienced and expressed in psycho social terms in the incidence of group archosis—the transferring of the psychological conflicts of the individual upon the social relations and collective orientations of the group. Such archosis may provide a temporary environment of therapeutic relief for the suffering of its constituency, but itself must lead to boundary activity between such groups which will eventuate in conflict and the creation of more stress between people.</p> <p>It can also be expected that alternative, counter groups or revitalization movements will arise as normal reactions to such stress, and that these movements will attempt to create alternative exterior spaces outside of the stressful influence of the system, and in adaptation to new extensive environments which offer little except relative normative freedom from the constraints of the system. The stress will remain, but will become refocused as an existential problem of environmental adaptation and survival.</p> <p>It is part of the grand paradox of development and its consequential redevelopment that the system will, upon its extensive horizons of human stress and response, become redeveloped and reconditioned as an instrumentality of human control and personal empowerment. Instead of reforming the individual to serve the dictates of the developmental imperative of the system, the survival imperative of the system itself will become increasingly rehabilitated upon its margins in its increasing service to human development.</p> <p>When this begins to occur with increasing frequency and rapidity, there will then become a shift and rebalancing of dialectical tension within the development of the system, and in the historical development of human civilization in general, between the people and regions of the core and the people and remaining resources of the margins that will eventuate in struggle, a state of world civil war for determination of the future of human and systemic development in the world.</p> <p>This will be a civil war of world wide proportions, and of lasting consequence, because it will not only split brother against brother, but will internally divide the individual between beingness and nonbeing of becoming, between the dying life and the living dead.</p> <p>The battle will become increasingly one for control over basic resources, spaces, and for the mind of humankind. It will become waged between the sycophants and sociopaths of the core who seek in ever more reactionary and conservative, fascist fashion, to maintain order and control over the peripheries, and internal hierarchy, and the marginal escapees and existential excludes of the system who will work to disturb, hinder and reapropriate access to basic resources for their own survival interests.</p> <p>Part of what may occur is the reinauguration of basic evolutionary selective pressures of humankind, such that there emerges upon the margins of civilization a new kind of Homo adaptor who is better adapted to deal with the stresses and tensions of existential survival in wastelands and perhaps a modified form of Homo civilatrix who becomes increasingly inbound and alienated from their own basic needs in survival. It can be expected that while the former variety will suffer many short term setbacks and losses, it will become in the long run a more adaptive survivor and generalized progenitor, while the latter civilized form will in its over specialization to absurd interior, intensive environments, go the way of the dinosaur and the dodo.</p> <p>Perhaps Homo adaptor will hunt Homo civilatrix done in a last struggle of genocidal extermination. But it is more likely that Homo adaptor will not need to do so, and will also recognize the moral need not to do so, and will benignly allow Homo adaptor to commit its own racial suicide.</p> <p>In the future contest for survival, the aggressors of today will become the inbound defenders of civilization tomorrow, and the barbarian hordes will be banging upon our gates. Cut off from access to their basic resources, these defenders will quickly deplete their stockpiles and reserves before they must perish or else surrender to the chaos that knocks upon their door. Some may open the doors to their paradise in the vain offer of reconciliation and renunciation of their power and control.</p> <p>The future will bring a new dark ages for the entire earth, whether or not there is an actual dark ages from nuclear holocaust. This dark ages will be one during which nature will recuperate and recover much of its own regenerative powers in the beginning of a new evolutionary epoch of life on earth. Humankind too will slowly rehabilitate itself in a renewal sense of extensive beingness in the world in evolutionary harmony with natural forces of selection. Chaos will not become so much of a threat to an old way of existence but a renewed way of life.</p> <p>The new dark ages of humankind will also witness the widespread birth of a new religious, pan human light which was born from the previous suffering. This new light will be formed on the basis of the near universal condition of suffering and stress of humankind in its previous state of degenerate existence, which will bring humankind to a collective understanding and empathy of the problem of human suffering by having it beneath their skin and thus will become normatively and morally immunized against the kinds of disease agents which caused this suffering in the first place. When everyone comes to suffer the same disease of stress and maladaptive response in interiorized environments, they will become similarly aware of the possibility of this suffering in others, and from this widespread awareness will be born a newly developed sense of human identity that is contingent upon the rehabilitation and removal of the causes of this suffering.</p> <p>In a strange twist of fate, the development of the System, in its redevelopment, will create the very ground for its own rehabilitation and resolution of the systemic consequences for human development. But the carriers and embodiers of the old tradition of civilization will sadly come to a realization of this after it is too late for their own recuperation or rehabilitation. They will come to know and understand the difference, but they will no longer be able to incorporate the difference into their style of life and development.</p> <p>It will become the new mission of Homo adaptor, primitive, marginal, unspecialized, like a mongrel or a mutt instead of a hybrid breed, to incorporate and embody this new, alternative civilizing mission of human civilization. Greening and Green Peace of the World System, will inevitably come, but more indirectly and at greater human sacrifice than anyone now would believe.</p> <p>The future world of humankind and nature will not be a paradise. A new kind of civilization will arise from the ashes of this one with many of the old templates and problems of the previous civilization. It will represent a new syncretism of many old elements along new thematic lines. But it can be expected that Homo adaptor will not longer be capable or culpable of perpetrating certain kinds of evils that it has been our human condition to suffer from. They will perhaps have a new set of dilemmas and evils to contend with, and they may once again set the development of their civilization on a renewed collision course with the natural environment of the earth. But it will not be in the same way that we have done so today, or it may be a long time in coming.</p> <p>Many of the old stresses and tensions may remain or become renewed in the redevelopment of human civilization. But what be of lasting importance is that the psycho social topography of this new civilization will be essentially different and altered in terms of its relative salience and depths of its textured fabric, in terms of the differential contrasts and tonal scales of being in the world.</p> <p>There may still be cores and peripheries within a World System of structural integration, but who controls what will become rebalanced, and the old differentials and asymmetries of power and control will be realigned in a more manner of distribution between core and periphery.</p> <p>In the realignment of old loyalties, what was once national identity that is becoming increasingly ethno national class caste identity, will in the future become increasingly pan human ego identity reaffirming the position and importance, and independent power of the individual in the social world. It will become increasingly an anthropographic human identity the landscape of which is focused upon and focused by the positionality of the interacting human being in a wide nexus of inter-human social networks.</p> <p>In this we can revitalized some old, outcast stereotypes of the peasant family bound within a village cultural tradition, and of an alternative fringe or petite cottage industry which stresses economic self sufficiency, handicraft production and barter and reciprocity of exchange.</p> <p>These stereotypes may have always been only stereotypes—the peasant inbound in his village world was never genuinely or completely independent of the larger political sphere in which his context situated him/her. Taxes still had to be paid, conscription still took place, larger cash markets still promised greater rewards and opportunities. But there remains something basic and genuine about such a way of life, something commons and unadorned which is of immense value in human adjustments and predicaments. Within such contexts, humans were more jack of all trades, master of few, rather than hyper-compartmentalized, over specialized organizational people. There is something to be said for the myth of five acres and independence, for grass roots self sufficiency, local control and familial responsibility.</p> <p>With the approach of the human horizon at the margins if systemic development, with the individual becoming more and more the locus of control and the focus of power within the system, there can be expected to occur a process of rehumanization within the system and of the system’s basic orientation. This can be seen reflected in the historical movement of social structure from earlier periods of socio-religious identity and kingship, to national patriotism and geo-political interest groups, to ethnization of the world and the rise of ethno-cultural and ethno-racial consciousness, or identity, towards what can be seen as the rise of an individually, anthropographic focus and a pan- human identity within the system. The other social difference will remain in the world as a basis of difference and inequality, but these will become structurally subsumed within larger more embracing orientations in which human identity becomes increasingly realized within the structural definitions of the system.</p> <p>In the personal and social atomization of humankind, people will discover in learning how to cope with the absoluteness of their own relative aloneness and existential loneliness in an over crowded world the ground for a renewed sense of human identity which learns how to transcend such alienating aloneness through inter-human relationship. When such conditions are pushed to the extreme, people will seek out an empty desert to fill with their aloneness than the suffocating and stifling pressures of the social masses in which their greatest fears and feelings of loneliness become most acute and expressed.</p> <p>People will learn to revalue certain aspects of previous lives, and to reinvigorate their secular civilization with a sense of lived tradition which in its secular, modern era, is all but absent in the prioritization of the new and replacement of the old.</p> <p>The globe may indeed become a new global village that is electronically intermediated. It may have some of the affinities of the old tradition bound village, but lack the localness and immediacy of its scale and presence in everyday life. It will be a human bound village, rather than a culture bound village. And if it becomes a global village, it is likely as well to become a global open air marketplace where the networks are long, the action is fast, the people are many and diverse. People may be expected to be seen once again haggling over the prices or relative worth of some item or service, without a fixed price tag or sticker and an unhelpful salesperson.</p> <p>In such a future for development, two kinds of ritual religious orientations can be developed. Her first, extensive kind of orientation harkens back to a long and commonplace culture historical tradition—a long stream of little traditions—that dealt with the ritual celebration and symbolic expression of death as a rite of passage and as a rite of separation and reintegration. This kind of ritual elaboration of death, associated today exclusively with commercialized Halloween and funeral parlors, has become largely outmoded in the secular age of science. Its renewal and revitalization in human redevelopment will provide a culture and symbolic context by which to bring death back out into the open, and provide a social means for dealing with the separation.</p> <p>The second tradition, associated with great traditions, is the Dyonisian celebration of life and the Apollonian reinstatement of order and organization in life following episodes which threaten chaos and disorder. This kind of ritual can be found in the Roman forum or coliseum where gladiators, Christians and lions shed blood to the delight and pacification of the masses. It is found today in modern sporting events, the Olympics, football and soccer games, wrestling and boxing matches, in which there is usually a great deal of betting going on and not infrequent episodes of mass hysteria and riotous violence. It can be found in popular concerts and at peace ins. It existed in Medieval tournaments and during military parades. In Brazil, it is the basis of the annual carnival celebrations and dance competitions, which go on in spite of the perennial persistence of suffering, poverty and everyday death. This kind of ritual process reinforces the system through its anti-structure, and is based upon the heightening of the illusion of nonbeing and becoming.</p> <p>The former kind of ritual process, which is becoming less frequent and less a part of normal, everyday life, is one which is rooted in an extensive orientation towards Beingness in the world, which entails a symbolic coming to terms with death as both natural, and supernatural process. The second kind of ritual process is intensively oriented towards the reinforcement of nonbeing and of becoming, involving the implicit denial of death or its projection upon the loser or displacement from the winner, during the competition.</p> <p>The former, extensive ritual orientation focusing upon death and separation, can be said to be a mechanism for dealing with short term traumatic experiences of death or separation episodes, which may be brief in duration, but uncommonly salient or important in its radical disjunction with everyday life. Such ritual provides a means of ameliorating and therapeutically rehabilitating the effects of this radical disjunction, and its disorienting influence, in everyday life. It frames the exceptional and makes it usual.</p> <p>The latter, intense ritual orientation focuses upon the celebration of the everyday experience of life, as a mechanism for reinforcing and coping with the long term endurance of many everyday, pervasive, and sometimes cumulatively overwhelming stresses and tensions of existence, deprivation, frustration, denial. These rituals provide a release of the built up tensions and a focus for aggressive and impulsive drives. The association with impulse control disorders, with gambling and physical violence, with sadomasochistic role reversals, is a way of highlighting and framing the everyday inequities and make them exceptional in their anti-structure and projection onto the abnormal.</p> <p>The two kinds of ritual process can be seen as complementary in everyday life, and as revealing, depending upon their relative emphasis, of the relative extensive or intensive orientations of the historical patterning in which they occur. The style of elaboration of either kind if ritual process can also be revealing of the underlying values and symbolic topography in which they occur.</p> <p>The patterns of human response to stress will be variable, but they can be expected to follow certain overall directions of development. First, there is an occurrence of ‘delayed stress’ reaction in which there is a predisposition to re-experience the emotionality of such trauma triggered by minor environmental stimuli. There is associated a kind of symbolic dissociation and passive cognitive withdrawal from normal, everyday involvement. There is a lower of thresholds of tolerance for suffering, frustration, stress which triggers inordinate and uncontrolled reactions. There is paradoxically an increased tolerance to the experience of pain, suffering and stress—a kind of desensitization of its experience as an everyday event. Avoidance personality patterns, adaptive response disorders, withdrawal from everyday, normal participation, disorientation and depression, and borderline character traits are the consequence of such stress. It could be that long term stress leads to the development of certain kinds of impulse control disorders, such as explosive aggression, repetition compulsion, gambling and substance abuse.</p> <p>Somatization of disorders, hysteria and conversion reactions can be expected, as well as a shallowness of affective cathexis and transference with others. Other long term consequences which could be involved are forms of disorder of sexual expression, psychotic disintegration and withdrawal from reality and patterns of social codependency and interpersonal abuse. Such patterns are associated with downward social mobility and with low self esteem and low achievement motivation. Low self esteem creates its own self fulfilling prophecy in which failure, setting oneself up for failure and finding friends who reinforce one’s sense of failure, all tend to reinforce low self esteem and the actualization of failure in life.</p> <p>There is in this the potential for a vicious, degenerative cycle of dedevelopment in which withdrawal from stressful situations, fascination and compulsion to stress, and patterns of maladaptation and failure beget ever greater stresses in life which lead to ever greater withdrawal and adaptive malfunctioning.</p> <p>Attitudes, affective expressions, behavior and belief patterns associated with this kind of vicious cycle become transferred from one generation to the next in early childhood socialization, in lack of strong role models, in miseducation and socialization for failure, in the transfer of low self esteem from the parent to the child, in the acquisition as primary socialization in bad habits.</p> <p>When such patterns become embodied and embedded at the level of primary socialization, they become much more deeply ingrained in character, much more natural seeming, and much more difficult to eradicate by subsequent ‘reconversion’ or alternation. In such a way, the sins of our fathers can visit upon us and upon our own children in unseen ways.</p> <p>A whole poverty of culture orientation and a cultural orientation of learned failure, can become cultivated and transmitted through time in an infectious manner, even though the initial causes for such an orientation may be long since absent. In such a way, major traumatic events can come to have cultural and symbolic repercussions which extend through many generations.</p> <p>When we speak of the kind of extensive ritual, we must see it as dealing with the primary process of death and separation at a level of primary socialization—alternation and reconversion. When we are dealing with the more frequent, intensively oriented ritual process, we are dealing primarily with secondary socialization dealing with separation and death as secondary, symbolically derivative aspects of nonbeing and becoming. In the former process, death is dealt with more directly and basically as a primary process of beingness.</p> <p>In a sense, incomplete primary socialization is a consequence of this vicious cycle of human redevelopment, and it leads as well to a failure of primary processes of ritual reinforcement. Secondary socialization and rituals associated with reinforcement of secondary process likewise become impaired in their performance. Discrepancies between primary and secondary process can occur, and such discrepancies can result can be due to or lead to impartial socialization or failure in the ineffectiveness of such ritual process. It is possible that the consistent failure to perform rituals related to death at the time of its occurrence, could lead to later impairment of socialization, or to impairment of the effectiveness of such rituals later on.</p> <p>It is understandable that secondary socialization process and secondary ritual process which aims at persuasion rather than at conversion, and at symbolic identification which is relative abstract, impersonal, and distant, must be continuously reinforced or reenacted to be effective, while primary socialization, ritual and conversion, though occurring less frequently, tends to be a more longer lasting and permanent process. The former aims at reinforcement and enhancement of one’s status identity, the latter leads to change or modification of this identity.</p> <p>There is a sense that only by coming to know and coming to terms with our own heart of darkness, with the full range of possibilities of evil and difference within ourselves, that we are able to extend our empathy of human possibility of being and becoming to encompass a wider range of human difference, and to embrace and tolerate a wider range of human weakness in the world. It is only by the recognition of such possibilities within ourselves, in our learning that we can become our own most hated enemy or feared monster, that we can learn live with such hate and fear in a way which renders them harmless, and even helpful, in our world, instead of allowing this same feelings, by their unconscious projection, to become enactments in the world of our own becoming and sense of nonbeing.</p> <p>Such empathy does not excuse the perpetration and perpetuation of evil in the world, but it does, by its understanding, does ameliorate some of its more pernicious consequences in our lives, such that we can learn to live in spite of it, rather than because of it or as a result of it. Putting fear into its proper perspective, by facing those unknown things we fear and personalizing them in ourselves, and in coming to terms with the destructiveness of hate in our lives, allows us to escape the patterns of avoidance and dependency which leads to the vicious cycle of promotion of hate and fear in the world.</p> <p>This cannot be accomplished in only or purely an intensive sense of secondary ritual performance or in interior contexts of relations. It must be carried out into the extensive world, and enacted upon the level of primary process of death and being in the world. It is effective as a conversion or alternation experience affecting our whole being, or else it is not effective at all. Seeking such experience at the primary level in an extensive sense, and learning to live with what one discovers about oneself and the possibilities of humanity in such a quest, is not an easy or straight forward thing. It is risky and sometimes dangerous, but it is a necessary trial by fire that if not undertaken, cannot yield the kind or quality of experience which is necessary for the growth of the individual.</p> <p>The system promotes a great deal of illusion and hypocrisy at the secondary level as a substitution process in place of things which should be sought for at a primary level in an extensive way. It is much simpler and safer to substitute words for deeds, and in the process convince only the foolish or the blind of one’s own genuineness of being in the world. Thus a great deal of what passes for genuine experience in our world is actually derived experience in name only.</p> <p>This is a basic difference between the global villager and the peasant villager of the past. One who never leaves the village to see the wider world or avails oneself of primary experiences in the world in existential relation with other people, must always suffer the fate of superficial existence and spurious experience—of nonbeingness, and vicariousness of being in the world. On the other had, an intensively bound tourist can travel the world over, and never ever leave his/her own culture bound way of life. Primary experience is waiting to be encountered in the world—but it must be actively sought out, and its acquisition is never smooth nor hazard free. Only by accumulating a ground of such extensive experience in the world, can an individual build up a fund of understanding on which to test and related subsequent experiences, whether there are intensive and derived or genuine and coming from the reality of another person. To promote professors who have never left the classroom environment or who only have traveled as first class tourists in the world, is to promote a derived intensive orientation in academia lacking any substantive ground in existential, experientially primary reality. It is to construct a paper thin version of reality which is lacking in its depth and in its breadth.</p> <p>It is vital that in primary education we promote approaches which undue the effects of incomplete primary socialization, by providing healthy role models, environmental enrichment, providing a healthy sense of personal identity and of self esteem for the individual child. It is also vitally important that in higher levels of secondary education that we complete the process of socialization in an effective, multicultural, extensive and pan human way.. Teaching values and perspectives rooted in multiculturalism and pan humanism are neither impossible nor necessarily difficult to do, but this does entail that we undo the effects of the kind of secondary ritual which tends to reinforce in the individual identities which are tied to nonbeing and becoming in the world, and which are rooted in social difference and inequality between people in the world.</p> <p>Education remains the most effective tool available for the transmission, socialization and enculturation of people. It is to the best interests of humankind that the goals of education be separated from the values, interests and dictates of the System, and that education works to promote human development rather than systemic development in the world.</p> <p>The future remains to be realized by humankind. Human responses to increasing stress in the world may lead to some interesting surprises. Humans tend to be much more adaptable and flexible than our histories usually give them credit for. They survive and continue in spite of what happens to them in their history. Not all alterations and developments in our future will be expected, and there will be some good with the bad, and some bad with the good.</p> <p>Perfection is not only an inhuman state, it is an anti human state of affairs. The realistic aim of human development is not progress towards paradise, but it is the relative alleviation of human suffering in the world and the relative realization of human rights, equality and freedom for the world.</p> <hr> <p> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a name="seven">PART VII</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="5">FINAL SOLUTIONS</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">Lost Causes and Lasting Consequences</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p>History has taught us a few important lessons. It is relatively easy to trick people into doing what is against their own best interests—all you must do is to lie to them in a consistent and convincing manner. Nazi Germany’s final Solution to the Jewish problem was one of the few times in recorded history that a state’s bureaucratic machinery set itself to the single minded purpose of actually annihilating another racially distinct group of people. Though the systematic deceit involved was nothing new. What is frightening is its recentness and its massive scale of intent. Though it was not the first time that one group has destroyed another, it has probably been the worst case of such mass slaughter of human life.</p> <p>But systematic bureaucratic exclusion of whole groupings of people from even minimal access to resources or to screens of support or to political economic participation within the world system goes on everyday as a matter of business as usual policy. And though it is not direct annihilation, its final consequences are often the same.</p> <p>One of the lessons learned from the Nuremberg was that knowledge creates responsibility. It seems to be a lesson that our world system has forgotten, or neglected to take to heart. What is even more frightening to consider, is that what happened in Nazi Germany could have happened virtually any modern nation state, even the most democratic and historically the most liberal ones, if the wrong group of people had gained control. With all our massive bureaucratic machinery in place, knowledge is systematically, routinely obfuscated, responsibility is routinely passed on and ultimately diffused into the oblivion of the system, and, once mobilized, the massive inertia of bureaucracy makes it extremely difficult to reverse or redirect.</p> <p>The history lesson of the holocaust is that it can very likely happen again, if we are not careful to see who comes to power in the world.</p> <p>There are many lost causes in the modern world. Pursuing paradise or a developmental utopia on earth is proving to be a lost cause. Saving the ecology of the earth is also proving to be a lost cause. Driving down the fast lane of Southern California’s freeways trying to get ahead in life is also a lost cause—there is always someone faster who is ahead of you. Dressing lavishly on credit for the daily fashion parade and impression management is also a lost cause. No matter how much you spend, there are many more spending more than you, and even more who do not care how much you spend. Getting a higher education in America is proving to be a lost, and expensive, cause. Similarly, pursuing peace on the earth through the escalation of increased destructive force potential, the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, and the mass production of expensive modern military machines, is also a lost cause. History has taught us that lasting peace has never been forthcoming from preparations for waging war. Consuming a limited supply of fossil fuels on earth is proving to be not only a lost cause but a bankrupting dead end in development as well.</p> <p>There are many things people are doing on a regular, daily basis which, cumulatively, will have lasting consequences for future earth history. Building plastic mountains of disposable diapers is one. Spilling oil into oceans is another. Razing all remaining forests. Laying more reinforced concrete is yet another. Exterminating the few remaining species of wild mammals on earth is yet another. Having more babies is yet another. Watching television instead of reading a book is another. Letting our children watch TV instead of reading a book to them is another.</p> <p>Casting about for answers, it should be readily obvious that there are indeed few if any final solutions to the predicaments which face humankind on earth. The pursuit of progress in the development of the System is one such solution which has been proposed and is widely promoted. Human development is another, alternative, and perhaps more viable solution that nevertheless remains largely unheeded and neglected. Nazi Germany believed it had the Final Solution to all human problems in its eradication of inferior, non-Aryan races of people on earth. Widespread interethnic discrimination, the world over, has been one systematic bureaucratic solution to the problems of development. Scientists will tell you that the only solution is in the progress of Science. Theologians of the world will tell you that the only solution is a religious one—mostly likely their own particular brand. Ecologists will tell you that the solution is the greening of the world and in Gaia. The average Joe and Jane Doe on the street will tell you in a more common sense manner that the solution is in ‘more police protection,’ ‘stopping crime,’ ‘controlling drugs’ or in kicking people on welfare off their arses. Politicians will tell you they have the solution, if only you vote for them, and the President’s solution seems to be in developing mightier military machinery.</p> <p>As we are running short on time, we must learn to be very careful in everything we do, that we are not pursuing lost causes, doing things that have lasting consequences, and promoting solutions to our problems that may be wrong.</p> <p>The development of the system has been historically a process of schismogenesis in which boundaries and differentials have led to competitive drives and development in competition. This has occurred in the arms race, the space race, the race to carve up the third world pie. It occurs in market competition between businesses, leading to new and better strategies. It seems that national mobilization and focus in many countries depends upon this kind of productive schismogenesis by the competitive presence of another enemy nation.</p> <p>Such schismogenesis has conferred upon the history of such patterning of development a kind of evolutionary flavor and sense of inevitability of its progress. But it has also led to the recurrence of conflict and to the breaking down of the international relations which maintain the system.</p> <p>There is a fundamental social psychology about such schismogenesis that entails certain characteristic consequences to its developmental cycle. It entails that people of the out group become derogated as something less than fully human, or if human, then as something fundamentally different, and inferior, than the in group. It also entails a kind of fascist solidarity of the in group which can turn into some forms of social hysteria and which can be easily manipulated and directed.</p> <p>There is a particular blindness about the schismogenic development if the system which means that it stumbles somewhat haphazardly down its pathways. Perhaps it is a necessary blindness—the kind of Nietzschian illusion which is the prerequisite to social action. It is not the same kind of blindness which characterizes natural biological evolution, as it is in a sense a self imposed and self reinforcing blindness while evolutionary myopia is innate and does not need to be self reinforcing. Selection will insure removal of species that reach their own dead ends.</p> <p>The kind of blindness characteristic of the schismogenesis of development is that we must see one another and ultimately ourselves, as something other than what we really are—as something less or more than fully, naturally human. It requires that we superimpose illusions of super humanness upon ourselves and our system, and dehumanize other’s and their systems.</p> <p>The blindness of schismogenesis requires that nonbeing and becoming be reinforced and that the subjectivity and naturalness of beingness in the world be consistently denied. It requires that we superimpose upon the world, in the name of development, the system, our way of life, a kind of moral imperative and normative injunction as a model or paradigm for the Nonbeing and becoming of the entire world, for all of humanity.</p> <p>The tragedy of the ideology of schismogenesis is that in the final analysis the development of the System is a totally inhuman one. And from the standpoint of human development, mostly unnecessary.</p> <p>Anthropology can and ought to make a lasting contribution to the realistic understanding of where the development of recent earth history is leading us. Anthropology can contribute the kind of understanding that Nietzsche claimed killed social action, "for action requires the veil of illusion." Unmasking the monster of development and the system. We can see that it is not a strange, impersonal god, but that it has an all too human face. The proper point of departure for a development oriented Anthropology is not the systemic development of global civilization, but the problem of human development within the transforming environments of global civilization. Such an understanding requires that anthropology no longer be so much a system’s science or a synchronic, structure oriented analysis, but that it become preeminently and historical, and culture historical science that means that we must also be dealing with an irreducible human science. To see the development of civilization as an extension of natural evolutionary process is to mistake the general principles and lessons of human history with the laws and constraints of selection governing natural history, and in the process to implicitly ignore and even deny the arbitrariness, customariness, ideology and unpredictable consequences that characterize historical changes. To ignore the human contribution to the making of this history, and ultimately, to deny humanness of historical realities altogether. It does not need to be reiterated that such system oriented, law searching, natural scientific and paradigmatic anthropologies are tethered to the structure and service of the system within their own mode of information promotes and promulgates.</p> <p>The crises of identity and definition which anthropology has been undergoing has in large part been a reflection of the larger world crises of change and history which it is internalizing and coming to be more and more reflective of. It is a consequence of its own failure to embrace the more human oriented aspects of recent earth history. As a matter of human development, and thus, in its failure to make any lasting contribution to the illusion-deflating understanding of the realities of this history, it instead becomes blindly crippled and susceptible to the effects of this illusion.</p> <p>Human history and civilization is running up against both internal and external constraints—what might be described as social/environmental circumscription. The system, given the finite delimitation of its basis for development, is reaching the zenith of its self organizing criticality. The system is being forced into a double bind in which, in its extreme hyper-development, must further develop in order to maintain its own systemic order in the world. It must continue to create ways to push back or circumvent the constraints to its development, but in the process, it must also further augment the constraining effects of those limitations.</p> <p>We have stepped outside of nature’s evolutionary fold, and in the success of our development we have virtually brought evolutionary process to a standstill on earth. But evolutionary clocks are ticking away within us as well as around us in our earthbound environments. We cannot escape the inexorable unwinding of this natural clockwork. Evolution is rebounding upon our development not only around us, but also through us, in our own problem of human over population.</p> <p>It is working through other ways to further stress and constrain our systemic development. As our development is leading to inexorable ecocide if the earth, we are inadvertently and blindly destroying with our technological development the very foundation for life on earth, our own included. The social structure of the system is becoming historically transformed in unforeseeable directions, in spite of what or where we expect or wish it would go. It is leading to increased differentials in resource acquisition and availability and in greater social inequality in the process of development. Old identities are suffering the shock of the new as structural realignments necessitate psycho social realignments.</p> <p>Further systemic development is running up against its own human horizon, as the stresses and strains and tensions of its super criticality become focused more and more upon the role and position, and tolerance of the individual within the system. Further development is leading down the road to human de-development, but in this effect, the system exhausts itself at its own human horizon. It cannot continue without itself becoming realigned and reoriented in a more human way. This may result in further, deeper, schismogenesis that sunders the system into two, into one which is more extensive and human oriented and one which remains rooted to the intensive development of the core, and the system oriented. It is possible that evolutionary process could be inaugurated in the impending ‘Dark Ages’ of human de-development of civilization, and that a new and different kind of human being may emerge from the ashes of the old.</p> <p>Overpopulation, over development, ecocide, evolutionary, all will have unintended and unexpected consequences and side effects for the future development of both humankind and its system. The blindness of our progressive pursuit of systemic development has always been a history of unintended consequence. But it is the consequences of the blindness and myopia of our systemic development which we will have to live with in the long run, whether this is a radioactive pollution with a fifty thousand year half life, no ozone layer, no natural primeval forests, no polar ice caps, no wildlife, no natural ecology, and no more mineral resources or fossil fuels.</p> <p>The paradox of the alternative pursuit of human development is that from the structural standpoint of political economy, it is relatively inexpensive and easy to pursue. It does not have the long term dangers which are inherent in the ecocidal side effects of systemic development, and it eventuates in the long term improvements of human quality of life and greater relative equality. Its paradox is also that it leads to the development of vision, instead of blindness, and of understanding, rather than delusion.</p> <p>We have a final choice to make in our determination of our own history on earth—to continue to pursue systemic development at the cost of human de-development or to instead choose the alternative course of switching to human development at the necessary price of systemic de-development. This is the lesson of our historical anthropology and anthropological history.</p> <font FACE="Arial"><font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> <hr> <p><a name="Copyright">Blanket Copyright</a>, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. 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