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<body> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="6"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Third Millennium</p> </font><font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Essays on the Human Predicament</p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">By Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Palatino"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Lewis Micro-Publishing</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Copyright © 2000, by Hugh M. Lewis</p> </font> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#one">Introduction</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#fourteen">Part I--Basic Problems and Prospects</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#two">Basic Dilemmas of the Global Imperative</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#three">Cultural Selection and the Human Succession</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#four">A Brief Natural History of Humanity</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#five">The Population Bomb </a> </font> <a href="#five"> <font SIZE="4">and Global Social Circumscription </font> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#six">Global Environmental Circumscription</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#seven">Militarism</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#eight">Authoritarianism</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#nine">Socio-Structural Inequalities</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#ten">Ethno-culture: </a> </font> <a href="#ten"> <font SIZE="4">Acculturation, Differentiation, Stratification, Assimilation & Integration </font> </a> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#eleven">World Systems: Open and Closed</a></font></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#twentyfour">Part II--Basic Principles and Progress</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#twelve">Alternative Development</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#thirteen">Non-Violence & Pacifist Revolution</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#fifteen">Human Rights and States Rights</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#sixteen">Human Rights and Anthropological Relativity</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#seventeen">Earthboundness</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4"><a href="#eighteen">Human Development</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#nineteen">Global Eco-culture</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#twenty">Techno-Ecology and Eco-Technology</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#twentyfive">The Information Revolution and the Dawn of the Information Age</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#twentyone">Global Culture, Global Society</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#twentytwo">Global Civilization</a></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font SIZE="4"><a href="#twentythree">Beyond the 21st Century</a></font></p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="one">Introduction</a></p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is quite natural in the year 1999 to look forward to the dawning of the 3rd Millennium, and its implications for humanity on earth--especially for people of the Judeo-Christian tradition because the concept of the Millennium has long had vital connotations of the coming of a perfect age. Upon the edge of the 3rd Millennium, we can look both backward to where we have been, and forward to where we are now going to be.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is quite legitimate to ask but quite impossible to answer whether or not humanity will even be here in another thousand years from now, and if so, then what kind of state and world will our distant descendants then occupy. If we assume that a generation of humankind recurs every 27 years, on average, then in a thousand years there will have been approximately 36-7 human generations upon the earth. We can look back to the condition of humankind at 1000 A..D. Europe was then just awakening from a dark shadow of a previous Millennium of involuntary servitude and violence, of religious ignorance and feudal anarchy.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">At the edge of the 3rd Millennium, we can see clearly several major difficulties looming upon our collective horizon. A great amount of ink has been spilled on these issues already. It is nearly enough now to list them in rank order of their importance: Global Population; Loss of Bio-Diversity and Mass Extinction; Militarism: Human Authoritarianism & Inequality: the Global Challenges of Human Development. This ordering is paradoxically in reverse of the predominant trends in spending and policies pursued by most governments and major organizations today. A great deal of money and human energy is currently being invested in the pursuit of often short-sighted policies of economic development, and while other vast amounts of resources are consumed uselessly in vicious cycles of human corruption and in the maintenance of systems of structurally reinforced inequalities, and even more is wasted in building armies and destructive weapons. Proportionately very little effort or money is being spent upon solving more basic and in a sense more pressing issues of global pollution, loss of habitat and bio-diversity, and in concerted policies to control and alleviate the pressing problems of human overpopulation. These problems are all interrelated. They are the direct result of the rapid proliferation and success of the Human species on the earth, especially in the last few decades.</p> <p>Upon the dawn of a new Millennium we must ask ourselves honest questions as human beings about where we've come from, who we are and what we are doing in our world. We can make no more distinctions between black and white, Moslem and Christian, east and west. We can no longer afford the ethnocentrism and prejudice that had bound our ancestors to a long dark past of perennial violence and chronic suffering.</p> <p>It is time as a single world of modern human beings that we formulate our new one thousand-year resolutions, and these resolutions must be something we do not collectively forget before the following Springtime. Our resolutions for the new century and the new Millennium must now be built upon a deeper and more realistic understanding of what it means to be a contemporary human being on the modern earth.</p> <p>As mass communications and the information revolution breaks down invisible barriers and bring us all potentially ever closer together, we cannot escape the daily evidence of our shared and common humanity. On television we see live satellite images of suffering and violence from the all corners of the world, and we know that it could just as well be happening next door.</p> <p>Unlike our grandparents, we can no longer naively or with self-deception maintain the petty ethnocentrism, delusions of prejudice and hatred, and comfortable illusions of "our better world." It is our common and shared fate to become responsible members of the world community whether we wish to be or not. We have a collective identity and implicit responsibility to this global human community that we cannot freely shirk without a sense of having not done something right.</p> <p>This responsibility is in the final analysis a democratic one--one that is based on equality and freedom of choice. It is our responsibility to exercise this freedom and to actively participate in the possibilities of this new found global democracy. The ground swell of global democracy, the natural outcome of the information revolution, is potentially a grass roots movement of major proportions. It is our new found responsibility to put aside our emphasis and attention to cultural differences and our preoccupation with separatist and divisive chauvinism, and to promote those qualities that are shared and common to all human beings--qualities of individual importance, of achievement and success, of family love, of courageous and heroic commitment to causes beyond our own selfish ends.</p> <p>Like it or not, we are all connected together. Not only are we all connected to one another, but we are also all intimately connected, singly and in groups, and as a whole species, with our natural world and the larger physical universe. We cannot escape the fact and consequences of this sense of total, universal connection to our world.</p> <p>We are greeted at the dawn of the Third Millennium with an immediate and pressing set of problems that we must resolve if we are to assure the future survival and well being of our progeny on earth. There is no single worst issue or separable set of little problems--we are confronted immediately and dramatically by a single, large, complex problem that has an impending sense of urgency. Indeed, if we think about it, there is an overwhelming sense of immediacy that lurks in the background of all our lives. It is like a huge, black, ominous storm cloud that now overcasts the entire earth in a foreboding shadow.</p> <p>It is the global imperative of the dawn of the Third Millennium that we must collectively face this common set of problems, or, by failing to do so, face the threat of disaster and eventual extinction. It is a complex synergy of many kinds of issues connected together that demand our attention and remedial action. Its complexity and chaos entail also that the solutions cannot be simple or straight-forward to implement. But solutions are there, one way or the other.</p> <p>At the dawn of the Third Millennium we are confronted with the imperative that we must change ourselves and our old ways of doing things that were oriented toward isolated selves in many isolated communities. We cannot afford to simply continue in previous modes and maladaptive patterns of social behavior without in the long run dearly paying the piper and seeing our children led off into the mountain. We cannot afford to ignore these dilemmas and to delude ourselves that our actions do not have larger consequences in the world.</p> <p>We really have no choice any more. To fail to change is to allow the world to run amok within the next century. We can believe that this will never happen, we can wish that it wouldn't, we can rationalize how and why it probably won't--but we must assume responsibility for the roles we can and may play in the future turning of events. And with the increasing interconnectedness of our world, there is also increasing opportunity for both constructive philanthropic acts as well as for mass destruction.</p> <p>The dawn of the Third Millennium is a wake up call for all people to unite once and for all, to come together on common earth and deal together for a common future or to else suffer collectively a shared, tragic fate.</p> <p>The argument is made in this book that the only reasonable solution to the common predicament of humankind is to unite together into a single world federation of nations. A genuine global government--a single world state that is powerful enough to enforce its rule of law over all individuals and single nation states. It is true that the world is not quite ready to go this far, but it is imperative that this does happen sooner than later if humanity is to continue further without a great deal even greater of mass destruction and bloodshed than was witnessed in the previous century.</p> <p>The danger of a single dominant world state is to risk the rise to power of a single tyrannical and totalitarian entity that controls all things. The only means of creating a world state that is relatively immune to this kind of possibility is to define it as a democratic institution in which the rule and routine of the law is placed above the control or influence of any human being, but is the common mandate of all human beings.</p> <p>Modern nation states themselves, especially those that are totalitarian and authoritarian in structure, cannot be trusted to turn their weapons to plough shares. The effort at global unification must be at last a grass-roots ground swell--an effort ultimately "of the people, for the people, and by the people."</p> <p>It is the responsibility of all people, regardless of their nationality, religion, ethnic identity, to define a new kind of citizenship--citizenship of the world--that transcends and comes before all other socio-political identities. Legal citizenship to modern nation states that often demands absolute loyalty and coercive life-sacrifices of its constituency, must be made to yield its final coercive and violent authority before this larger and potentially more powerful sense of identity. National citizenship must be subsumed and encapsulated as but one alternate identity within the global nation of humanity. The basis of this alternative identity is to be found in a common and shared sense of humanity.</p> <p>This is both our destiny and our duty at the dawn of the Third Millennium.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="fourteen">Part I--Basic Problems and Prospects</a></p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>In spite of all the advances of our sciences and technology, at the edge of the Third Millennium we are still almost as socially backward and undeveloped as we were at the beginning of the last century. Major political issues in the United States today are anti-abortion, prayer in school, creationism and possession of firearms. China, containing one/fifth of the world's population, with misrepresented growth rates, remains still an essentially Orwellian world of big brother and newspeak--a totalitarian state controlled by only a very small percentage of the total. All economies today remain based almost exclusively upon petrochemical and fossil fuel exploitation, even though this has been clearly demonstrated to be the major contributory factor to global warming. Militarism, social authoritarianism and gross structural inequalities are not only prevalent in the world today, but in many respects are even more vicious and destructive in their consequences than they were one hundred years ago. Undoubtedly, the central problem that humanity faces in the 21st Century is the problem of humanity itself.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="two">Basic Dilemmas of the Global Imperative</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>There are a number of basic dilemmas now confronting humankind. Most of these problems are common knowledge, though the issue of their global interrelationship and complex negative feedback and synergism remains poorly understood.</p> <p>These basic dilemmas include:</p> <p>1. The problem of human over-population,</p> <p>2. The problem of environmental circumscription,</p> <p>3. The problem of militarism and authoritarianism,</p> <p>4. The issue of ethnocultural differentiation & assimilation,</p> <p>5. The problem of mass poverty, and</p> <p>6. The problem of modern socio-economic development.</p> <p> </p> <p>These problems concern basic structural issues that underlie the patterning of the relationship of humankind to the natural world. Structural relations are long-term patterns usually lurking in the background of the unfolding everyday landscape. In all their complexity they do not simply go away if ignored and they are fundamentally intractable to superficial and token band aid efforts at their resolution.</p> <p>The problem of human population growth is obvious to everyone, but its basic importance has been lost to many people. The human population is doubling very quickly. In fact, no one knows exactly what the total population of the earth is now at the dawn of the 3rd Millennium, and probably we cannot really know. The U. N. Declared the 6 billionth baby born just before the new Millennium, but this number was largely symbolic and most probably grossly underestimated both the actual rates of population growth and the total size of the human population on earth.</p> <p>The hard evidence suggests that the published statistics are probably lower than the actual amount and that the rate of growth is greater than we estimate it to be. Human population is fundamental to the global issue because more than any single factor it drives the other problems as a basic, feedback mechanism.</p> <p>Whatever the actual numbers or the eventual long-term consequences of human population growth, it must be understood that this problem is a "population time-bomb" ticking away in the background of all our lives. It has a delayed effect. We cannot know how long it will be before it goes off, but it can be seen in the structure of the long run that this is likely to happen sooner than later. We are witnessing the beginning of the consequences of the real "population explosion" in our own time in subtle symptoms that are easily ignored. The increasing social pressure of population in core regions, the stress of social systems and the increasing pollution of local and regional environments, the loss of habitat and the retreat of wildlife from the oceans, fields and forests, all indicate a basic problem of global circumscription of the human population.</p> <p>The population explosion is likely to really begin happening when the human population approaches or overpasses some hypothetical carrying capacity of the earth. Not enough arable land to feed the masses--too many people creating too much pollution. Increasing but unknown levels of regional and global circumscription should place natural limits on the growth capacity of the human population. This would be reflected in increasing rates of starvation, malnutrition, disease and poverty, even if these are indirectly the result of human conflict and violence.</p> <p>Just as we do not know the exact size of the human population, nor its real rate of growth during any one period, we also cannot really know what the finite limits of the earth's natural resources are, what its "carrying capacity" to support a huge human population really can be, nor when the limits of our own development and scientific technology may be eventually over stepped. These are basic but fundamentally unknown questions.</p> <p>But we do know that the human population is very large and growing larger by the day. We do know also that the global environment has been increasingly influenced and stressed by the presence and activities of so many humans. We also know that for whatever gains science may achieve on the frontiers of development, there are also many hidden costs that have not yet been measured.</p> <p>To continue to deny these basic realities is to deny the truth and experience of our own everyday sensibilities. It is to put on our ideological blinders and commit our selves to narrow-minded and short-sighted political agendas that are doomed for extinction like anachronistic dinosaurs from a by-gone era. To try to argue against these realities, and to preach attitudes and actions that are contradictory to their indications, is to push humanity and human civilization forward in a mad, headlong rush over the edge of the precipice of uncontrolled development during the first decades of the 21st Century.</p> <p>We cannot rely any longer on any established governmental agencies in the world to communicate to us a truthful, fully honest and realistic vision of the world. In the long run, they undermine our sense of credibility in their reliability and validity as agencies and sources of sound and realistic information about the world. But enough signals come through, even in extremely closed societies, to make it possible for any honest and sensible human to put the basic facts together in a logical way and to derive the kinds of conclusions that are in any reasonable analysis inescapable.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Pictures/Image362.gif" WIDTH="488" HEIGHT="553"></p> <font FACE="Palatino"> <p> </p> <p>The population "explosion" will have a delayed effect and will be felt by increasing annual increments of stress upon our social systems world wide. As the average age of the human population grows younger with each passing year, and average life span increases for adults across the board, we must realize that the final count down has already begun. As increasing numbers of youth reach adulthood, and reproductive age, their demands on the social systems around the world increase exponentially, changing in kind and focus, in volume and need, with each passing month of each succeeding year.</p> <p>The problem of population itself is a complex issue and is not just a matter of birth rates and infant mortality rates. It is an issue that inevitably involves other kinds of problems. One of the most important points about human population is that, being a culturally organized species, all human beings have some kind of impact upon their habitat and lived environment, and human social systems in toto have even greater cumulative impact on local and regional environments. This problem of the cultural impact of humankind on our environment brings to bear the second set of issues and that is the problem of environmental circumscription and ecological destruction of the earth's natural habitat.</p> <p>We are all witness to these events that affect the background of our lives, and yet we continue in the same modes of behavior that originally cause and lead to these very results. We know it is wrong, but we cannot help it beyond token contributions to rather weak and flaccid, mostly symbolic, efforts to assuage our own sense of guilt. And if we attempt to make a concerted effort, it is almost guaranteed that we will run headlong into the status quo of the established state powers that be and large private interests. We will realize just how powerful the petrol-chemical industry really is that fuels the global economy --how it controls government policy making, and conspires against people who induce changes that would be unprofitable for themselves. And this dilemma of structural inertia in the current system and of human social resistance to its change is central to understanding the solution to these dilemmas.</p> <p>We can add to the list of the oil-suppliers and automobile manufacturers, the gun makers, the makers of tanks and armored weapons, and the producers of missiles and military aircraft. We can name companies, mostly based in the United States and Europe, that are some of the largest private companies in the world. But behind this pattern of inertia and structural resistance to change, lies an even more perverse and pervasive pattern that I will call the pandemic of militaristic organization and mobilization and social authoritarian power structures that rely on the perpetration of military violence for the preservation of the hierarchical and asymmetrical order of nation states within the current world system.</p> <p>Militarism is a very old story. Human beings frequently resort to organized forms of social violence to achieve their aims, protect their interests, and promote a stilted sense of communal solidarity and purpose. It is not difficult to find numerous examples of such violence even in the most recent past or in the modern era. It is not unusual to find strong suggestion and evidence of inter-human violence in the fossil record. The history of human civilization is in fact mostly a bloody history of military conquest and destruction of one group of people by another.</p> <p>Anywhere we go we can find corrupt governments backed by even more corrupt military people in control of entire nation states. Wars occur globally with a regular and expectable frequency. It is necessary to understand that militarism is a kind of social pathology, a disease of the body politic that leads to a destructive orientation and eventual destruction. It must be understood also that, anthropologically speaking, authoritarianism is a panhuman pattern structurally characteristic of all developed social systems, and that it begets patterns of parasitic corruption and violence that result in obstructing positive social innovations. Authoritarian power structures are all similarly characterized. They are anti-democratic and aggressive in establishing their own prerogatives at the expense of many others. More extreme forms shade off into dictatorship and oligarchical totalitarianism.</p> <p>Poverty must be construed as a by-product and result of the dominance of authoritarian power structures in the world. If democracy begets economic growth and development, then it is clear that its opposite leads to stagnation and depression. Endemic poverty is the result of the chronic lack of access to basic resources, the lack of social productivity, and in the larger framework, the unequal distribution of productive resources and their by-products. This uneven distribution is so pervasive and becoming so acute that in the "underdeveloped countries," mostly those that belt the equator, there has emerged a permanent underclass of dispossessed people who increasingly dwell in absolute poverty.</p> <p>Poverty is also a vicious cycle and has its own internal mechanisms that aggravate patterns of endemic impoverishment. Endogenous ethnocultural patterns become established among the poor, in exogenously reinforced frameworks of structural inequality and exploitation, including a pattern of secondary gain, that leads to their perpetually reinforced dependency and structural inferiority within the confines of the larger systems. Poverty is a major problem because the poorest people in the world are also the largest source of population growth in the world.</p> <p>The rich can blame the poor for the problems of the world, but along the way the rich must also acknowledge their strategic roles in the larger system and in the maintenance and articulation of its structural inequities. It is the structural imbalance and unevenness of the global system that is the primary exogenous factor producing poverty in the world today. Of course, poor people most often require authoritarian and military-style management, which asymmetrical requirements therefore justifies the pattern of authoritarianism and militarism in the world.</p> <p>It is logical to conclude that development as we know it is the final issue of consideration. It is held by many that only through development can we solve the problems of poverty and inequality in the world. But it has been recognized lately that development in the modern style that has most often disregarded the land and nature as an inherent natural resource base, has led to the systematic destruction of the environment. At the same time, such development that disregards human development as little more than a productive resource to serve technology, also produces the basic structural asymmetries in knowledge, technologies and in the capacities for people to apply knowledge effectively to their adaptation in a changing global environment. This reinforces the asymmetry between the rich and poor, so that promotion of development is mostly a catch-22 benefiting a few at the expense of the many.</p> <p>The global imperative is that the human system is now a complex one and is reaching levels of systemic super-criticality. Comparatively minor and fundamentally unpredictable events can cause random chain-reactions that spread and take their own course in destabilization of the larger system. The extent and consequence of these "minor events" affecting the profile of the overall system is unknowable, but they can be expected to occur with an increasing prevalence and frequency.</p> <p>We cannot know how much the increasing super-criticality of the global system is being offset by factors of economic growth and integration and technological development that serve to stabilize the world system under its own mass and complexity. Whatever the actual case may be, it is inarguably clear that the entire set of problems of the global imperative describe a complex vicious cycle in which negative and counter-productive patterns reinforce violence and destruction, and positive actions tend to become precluded at birth. But the world changes in its own way. The same technologies that may enslave humankind to its own vicious system can also liberate us from ourselves.</p> <p>The challenges are set down now clearly before us. The means to respond effectively has also been laid at our doorsteps but deserves and demands explication. Now it is time for us to think about these issues and then to act in a decisive manner.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="three">Cultural Selection and</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">The Human Succession</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>To understand the history of the earth is to understand that it has witnessed a continuous succession of one natural regime of life after the other. Seas and oceans turn into swamps that become deciduous forests and then turn into deserts. Mountains gradually lift and slowly erode away and decay as continents imperceptibly shift and large land shelves sometimes shake. Within each succession, there occurs a gradual biological pattern of extinction and speciation--new forms of life and selective regimes emerge in the new suite of changes and old forms of life based on previous adaptive patterns slowly give way and disappear.</p> <p>The mountains, forests and farmlands that we know today were not the same ones of even a thousand years ago. Pine is replaced by spruce and cedar, spruce by willows, willows by slower growing hardwood trees. Species of animal also constantly come and go on the global stage. We cannot know what the average life span of a species might be, we cannot know. Some say about four or five million years, but drawing a clear boundary around a species is difficult to do in space, much less through time.</p> <p>The human species has emerged as the one dominant species on earth today. Second place must either go to rats, cock roaches, or some incurable virus, if that is even a life-form--we have attained our "God-given" place on the great chain of being, but that is about all we really do know. The human species is not yet totally free of the vicissitudes of the laws of natural selection. Human extinction is perhaps an even greater possiblity in the modern era than it had been at any time previously in its natural history.</p> <p>The species of Homo sapiens cannot survive independently or completely separated artificially from the nature that we have so sought to dominate and control. In our obsession and compulsion to exclude death from our own lives, we have so squashed nature into square holes that we have run the risk of cutting ourselves off completely from the foundation of our own being in the world and, hence, of our very survival in that world. Like all masters, we are dependent and tied to the very thing that we attempt to dominate and control. We cannot do without nature without ourselves perishing in the process. Therefore, if we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves, and it is this conclusion that makes of our late destructive efforts on earth a form of ultimate self-destruction.</p> <p>The critical factor in understanding the natural history of the human species is our capacity for cultural adaptation to the natural environment. The original function of culture and its reason for emergence in the evolution of humankind was that it facilitated human survival, reproductive success and, eventually, our physical domination upon earth.</p> <p>It is somewhat foolish of some "bio-cultural" anthropologists who seek biological foundations to our cultural patterning to ignore the vast prehistoric and historic evidence that points not to a pattern of biological determinism, that is what humankind left behind when our ancestors emerged from the cave, but to a pattern of cultural determinism. Nature does not determine directly humankind or our social patterning--humankind is increasingly determining nature and nature's biological patterning.</p> <p>The term "world openness" has been applied to the human species as one of its key characteristics--behaviorally we have been freed from the fetters of nature, from its instinctual imperative, by the fact of our brains, our language and our cultural patterning. We have been permitted to reconstruct our environment to suit exclusively our own needs for survival.</p> <p>It is this same pattern of cultural determinism that is at work today in driving modern human civilization and our predominance on earth as a single species. So much has this happened that through our science we have gained control of evolution itself. We are now even manipulating the genetic codes of many species without regard to the long term forces that produced these codes in the first place. It is not to pass judgement on this process as good or bad. It is to state only that it is happening, and that it is an inevitable result of "human nature" to artificially manipulate and control their natural environments in ways that are fundamentally not the same as "animal nature." We have gradually replaced natural selection with a process of cultural selection</p> <p>Cultural selection can be found in the domestication of plants and animals. It was practiced even before this period with mammoth hunting and shell fish gathering that led to massive shell middens and mass kill sites of the largest game. Cultural selection is an influence of human activity on the processes of natural selection on other species. It is also a process that has affected the evolution of the human species itself. We have turned the processes of cultural selection upon ourselves even more than we have practiced it upon other species--this has led to both our own destruction and our success.</p> <p>Cultural selection has been the single most important determinant that has led to the predominance of the human species on earth, and the ultimate control the human race has upon life itself. It has led to what can be called the era of hominid or global hominid succession. This succession even has meant that whatever else nature has been doing, especially in the past Millennium, it has had to yield increasingly to the encroachments and demands of a human-made world--an artificial world of concrete, asphalt streets, factories, fences and pollution.</p> <p>It is indeed absurd and hypocritical to continue to formulate policies and theories of genetic determinism and bio-cultural selection driving human social patterning while in daily life depending upon the very agencies and faculties of our own cultural construction and selection. To argue this case is to simply and blindly ignore the realities of a human made world. It is equivalent to the hypocrisy of preaching creationism in class, while using the products of science to teach anti-scientific doctrines, computers, projectors, and microphones that are part of the exact same science that gave us evolutionary theory.</p> <p>The long-term survival of the human species will depend foremost upon our being able to find ourselves an adaptive niche or plateau in the larger natural order of life. If we do not create for ourselves such a position in life's web, then we are setting ourselves up for both the destruction of the environment, and of ourselves, because we are ultimately tied to this environment for our own survival. Hopefully, this adaptive plateau will be characterized by zero-population growth of the human species, and by obtaining natural limits of growth of our socio-economic development, a form of development alternative to the kind that we have so far advanced. Success at this stage of human development will not be measured in the degree to which we have overcome our natural environments, but by our ability for long term survival within a natural world.</p> <p>We can only wish for a return to nature. The fact of the matter is that it will not happen, at least not in the way that we know or understand it to happen today. It will happen in a different way perhaps. If we humans should finally drop the bomb upon ourselves, or if some new strain of hemophagic virus should become virulent and epidemic, then we can look forward to the rapid end of the human succession and the gradual return of a new selective regime of nature. We can only fantasize what this new suite of natural life would be like. I can imagine a 1950's science fiction movie with the irradiated rise of giant, human-sized insects and chitinous creatures with the strength of bulldozers and the viciousness of sharks, mass producing at a phenomenal rate while feeding on the remains of an irradiated and mutated human population.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="four">A Brief Natural History of Humanity</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>An encapsulated natural history of humanity on earth is not an easy thing to write. It might be better entitled a history of "inhumanity" but it has not just been one of violence. History proper begins with the invention of writing, and really takes off with the printing press in the mid-15th century.</p> <p>But to give a true consideration of humankind on earth we must push back the biological clocks at least 5 or 6 million years. Fossil evidence is gradually accumulating that point towards a divergence of a distinctly hominoid line at about this time. Interestingly, the first uniquely human trait to emerge at this time was the characteristic of bipedalism--that humans could walk, trot and run long distances on two feet, and did not need to use their knuckles or palms to help them keep balance. This is a evolutionary feat--we can look to special brain structures in the medulla oblongata and the cerebellum that permit this specialized activity to occur with an automatic sense of reflex and yet by virtue of our own voluntary power.</p> <p>Quasi-tropic traits are those that exhibit a remarkable degree of plasticity and yet which affect to some extent the biological conditioning and subsequent evolution of the human species.</p> <p>Coupled with bipedalism, there were three other sets of traits-- freeing of the hands to perform other, more complex functions than trotting and climbing in trees; freeing the mouth to function in other ways than as an organ for eating and biting; and freeing of our eyes to scan and take in a wider horizon and broader field of view than is possible with our noses to the ground. Though half facetious, this second set of traits is coupled with the emergence of other cerebral brain structures--special locations like Broca's area for speech and language apprehension, occipital regions for detailed visual pattern recognition, and the emergence of hand-eye coordination that permit wonderful feats of manual and pharyngeal dexterity. It is clear that language was not a bio-cultural miracle--an all or nothing occurrence to have suddenly burst on the evolutionary scene with one mutated Eve. It probably emerged gradually as an increasingly sophisticated system of calls, names, and hand gestures. Of course, perhaps Neanderthal and archaic Homo sapiens were more guttural than their modern descendants. Perhaps they didn't have the full vowel range or a complete set of consonants, but their language systems were otherwise no less deficient in basic communication needs than are our own today.</p> <p>In time language was indispensable because it made survival easier and it therefore hung around a long time, promoting larger brains. Those who communicated best tended to be those who more readily apprehended the dangers of their world and responded more intelligently. Selection favored the talkers. Another pattern that probably emerged 2-3 million years ago was one of gradually increasing infant dependency and slower development of human growth. This is another kind of those quasi-tropic traits that only interest anthropologists.</p> <p>It is really a hen or egg kind of question. Longer periods of infant growth and dependency enabled longer, more complex learning, which enabled bigger brains. Rapid selection for bigger brains was obviously the rage at this time, as there is a tremendous increase in cranial capacity from 4-500 cc. up to a phenomenal 1500-1600 cc. This increase appears to be steady and lineal, and points to the fact that something important was happening during the "stable" period of Homo erectus. Related to this emergence was the wide adaptive radiation of hominid species. For the first time our precursors were to be found in large numbers out of the African continent, and in far-off places like Asia and the Pacific. Also associated with this period is the distinctive use of flaked and chipped stone tools. The chopper chopping tool complex characteristic of the Chinese remains suggests that the adaptive radiation occurred at a fairly early period, and this tradition took its own course of development.</p> <p>Evidence has arisen that modern Homo sapiens began populating the earth about 50 to 30 thousand years before present, and relied heavily upon watercraft by which to do it. Archaeologists tend to be rather conservative and data bound in their conjectural constructions of human prehistory. They tend to want to keep dates and achievements as proximal to the present as possible. To grant the development of an extensive network based upon common adaptation to shared waterways as a secondary mechanism driving early cultural development is something that Archaeologists in general are not prone to do. To build a hypothetical reconstruction of such a waterways system when most of the evidence is washed away with the tides, is anathema to building the past from the depths of the ground.</p> <p>Nevertheless, archaeological evidence of the early peopling of the Southeast Asian Archipelago, the Australian continent and the New World, suggests that waterways had to be effectively breached in mass. It also suggests that long distance trading mechanisms had long been in place that may have indirectly integrated many regions of the globe.</p> <p>The rise of pristine agricultural civilizations in the last 10 thousand years, and especially in the last 5 Millennium, were indirectly the by-products of an earlier and more extended period of waterway adaptation that circumnavigated the globe and that probably reached back a previous 30 thousand years in time, perhaps culminating sometime in the late Neolithic when sea-levels had reached their lowest levels.</p> <p>The subsequent historical spread of technological civilization is common knowledge. It is enough to remark that by and large the conventional history of humanity has been a bloody military history of imperial conquest and colonial subjugation, and gradual emancipation of both the spirit, the minds and bodies of humanity from the social constraints and cultural bounds of its own making. Perhaps we turn against nature with such fervor and zealous violence because we cannot really turn against our selves and our own cultural machinations. Nature and the fallacy of naturalization, a form of reification or misplaced concretization, is a way of symbolically displacing and legitimating on a very basic level the fact that our cultural realities are of our own making.</p> <p>Human cultural history has also been a long buried history of endless trial and enduring tribulation, of failure and folly, of ignorance and prejudice. We see only the few humanistic glories and scientific successes in the march of humankind like landmarks scattered along a distant road of broken backs and littered bodies and bones. This road has been built upon the back of nature.</p> <p>It is necessary mainly to point out that the basic acculturative processes of civilization are trans-cultural, or acculturative, and trans-national in nature, and they are fundamentally irreversible in their largely unintended historical consequences except through total destruction. Once societies acquire a new invention or innovation that is beneficial, they will not willingly give it up. The sweeping changes now being created by the advent of semi-conductor technology will penetrate and cause permanent changes in all of the furthest corners of the globe, and it will not all be monopolized by one computer software mogul.</p> <p>We cannot predict the exact consequences of this new technological transition. This information revolution has the effect of changing the developed parts of the world as much as they are altering the undeveloped. Its impact will be felt in almost every aspect of our daily and shared lives, and will reach symbolically deep into our conscious and unconscious life. But we can expect that the world will inevitably change for better or worse.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="five">The Population Bomb</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">and Global Circumscription</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </a></font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>The main sign of the success of the human species is of course the size of its population. How big are we? The world has just recently celebrated the birth of baby 6 billion in Sarajevo, as officially announced by the United Nations, but there is something suspect and false about this business. The statistics and methods are strangely secret--the lack of real evidence betrays a reality of false reporting. We honestly do not and cannot really know how many people there are, though we have been well over 6 billion and we, the human species, are probably in fact quickly approaching 7 billion.</p> <p>We must understand the geometric aspects of this natural growth curve. At the time of the birth of the United States, in 1776, there was estimated to be about 2 billion people on earth. By the year 2012 we will be over passing the 7-8 billion mark.</p> <p>Many claim now at the dawn of the 21st Century that there is no cause for concern. Many say that six billion is in fact a very small number. Many put the old Malthusian theorists who make pronouncements of the population explosion as unrealistic dooms-day criers.</p> <p>The total number of humans to have lived on earth is put at 70-80 billion, but we cannot really know this as well. We do not know how populated the prehistoric world was. Take the New World for example--population estimates for the pre-contact Americas vary from 2 to 20 million souls. We might apply this principle of variation to almost every region on earth.</p> </font><font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p></font><font FACE="Palatino">The problem of population is that large numbers of people simply do not go away. Humans live for years, not just for months. Physiologically speaking, they all have about the same nutritional and medical requirements. If they do not eat enough protein or consume enough calories, they will suffer malnutrition. If they eat too much fat or carbohydrates, they will suffer over-nutrition.</p> <p>The central problem of a large population is that of feeding itself, reproducing itself and surviving to a ripe old age. Invariably, populations will stress the environment in critical ways. Larger and larger populations must venture further and further afield to obtain the necessary resources to sustain the population and its growth rate.</p> <p>In a global system, a huge population stresses the global environment, such that demands of large populations in one corner of the globe can have large effects on populations in other regions. Now the huge population of the Han Chinese, probably 1/5th to 1/4 of the world's total population, is probably one of the least innocuous upon the world system--to a great extent its population is self-contained and self-subsistent. It imports little rice and grain from other countries, unlike the United States whose much smaller population consumes a much greater proportion of the global natural resource base. But it is clear that no human population, in large enough size, can be inconsequential or entirely innocuous upon the earth's environment.</p> <p>Relatively small populations--the 270 million in the United States and the 100 million or so in the commonwealth countries and in Japan, are probably the world's greatest consumer, and thus their demands and needs can have far reaching global impacts.</p> <p>With development, we can talk about a concomitant "need-inflation" that is the result of increasing patterns of consumption and integration. Inflation of needs results from increased patterns of material and resource consumption and in turn leads back to increasing patterns of consumption.--this pattern is fueled by increased development. It is a predictable pattern of global economic integration.</p> <p>This means that with increasing population in the world, coupled with increasing development, there will accompany the "population explosion" and a resulting "revolution of rising expectations," especially when this is fostered and fueled by the mass communications media and by the global information revolution. This revolution of rising expectations will also lead to greater revolutions of equality as more and more dispossessed poor people of adult-age begin demanding a greater place in the global system and a greater, more proportionate share of the earth's available resources.</p> <p>It is doubtful that birth control in the form of voluntary and family planning programs are as effective as they ought to be. Religious resistance to such programs and basic ethno-cultural values of kinship that place a premium on child birth help to demote such programs in some of the poorest and most populous regions of the earth.</p> <p>Death control is an alternative strategy, but there is even greater moral resistance to its systematic implementation. As far as death control is concerned, medical developments in general are gradually but steadily prolonging the life expectancy of adults in most parts of the world, and rapidly lowering rates of infant mortality.</p> <p>Death control may well take its own direction in a larger framework as new diseases born of human social patterns spread and cause their damage. The final or lasting effect that this form of natural death control takes cannot be known or estimated. The plague in Europe and European-based diseases in the New World during the contact and post contact periods were significant factors in the massive reduction of these populations, far more than any wars, natural disasters or other forms of human violence.</p> <p>Weapons of mass destruction make the prospect of death control by human violence increasingly expectable, especially when combined with the growing likelihood of political conflict and competition for resources indirectly resulting from both population growth and uncontrolled development. Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has been occurring on a large scale for the last half century, and this process is proceeding rapidly. It is in the long run an inevitable consequence. The paradox is that these weapons are now falling into the hands of leaders in some of the politically least stable regions of the earth.</p> <p>It is hoped that increasing socio-economic development and integration will stabilize the world against this sort of violence. At the same time, there is an inherent deterrent value in the use of weapons of mass destruction because in general everyone is killed and there is no clear discrimination between allies and enemy. On the other hand, there is an increasing potential for the use of such weapons in acts of terrorism that remain essentially beyond any political control. Terrorism is clearly waxing on the global horizon, as small, unstable and radical groups realize a greater potential to affect politics by random acts of violence. A World War III that dwarfs the scale of destruction of all previous wars on earth cannot be predicted but this remains also a possible outcome of current patterns of military development.</p> <p>The population explosion is not something that happens suddenly--not even in one night or even in one year. It will transpire gradually and perennially, over a period of a decade or so, and will culminate in a climactic set of events that will most likely be violent and destructive. Thus it is an internal "implosion" event of the global system more than a literal "explosion."</p> <p>The real consequence of human over-population is that over-population is not just a local or even regional kind of event. It is a global phenomenon and is beginning to have real global consequences. As its result, we can refer to the phenomenon of increasing global circumscription--the human species reaching its limits of growth everywhere and anywhere, and suffering the increasing restrictions, privations and consequences of this situation. These limits will be felt increasingly in many different ways. We can look to an average decrease in the quality of life for most people--loss of opportunity, greater competition for even minor or trivial resources, etc. At the same time, we can expect an even greater and growing disparity of class inequality between the richest and poorest people on earth. Not only will the number of poor people increase, but the wealth of the rich will also increase and become more concentrated in the hands of the few.</p> </font><font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p></font><font FACE="Palatino">This is perhaps an inevitable process, as there exist no structural mechanism in place to prevent or compensate from its occurrence. The current capitalist world system is founded on basic structural inequalities of global resource distribution that were rooted to an earlier period of colonial imperialism. The post-colonial era has served the interests of the old masters economically. Only global scale warfare can alter the basic profile of these structural relationships. At the same time, development efforts in the underdeveloped regions of the earth where the greatest and poorest concentrations of people are found, continue to run up against the perennial obstacles of corruption, cronyism, and nepotism that is the consequence of the control of authoritarian power structures. The foreign policies of state of the developed nations do little to promote democracy in the third world. In fact, first world nations deliberately encourage the status quo of authoritarian regimes, as this tends to reinforce the larger status quo of the system with all its structural inequalities. It leads to certain kinds of basic contradictions of the global system--the developed countries can enjoy the freedom of democracy because they are developed and wealthy enough to do so. The undeveloped countries must continue to suffer the tyranny of violence and authoritarian control because they are undeveloped. Certain powerful religious organizations are also implicated in this process.</p> <p>Underlying this theory is the hypothesis that economics is a principle determinant of other structural and political patterns. Alter the profile and patterning of the distribution and utilization of basic resources, and you must concomitantly alter the political and social organization of the society in question. The paradox is that before one can alter the basic profile of resource distribution on a global level, one must first change the pattern of resource-control, which leads back to the question of politics and social structuration.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="six">Global Environmental Circumscription</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>The second major dilemma faced by humankind at the dawn of the Third Millennium is the increasing amount of human impact on the natural environment of earth. Global circumscription of the natural environment is an increasingly apparent reality. Many will argue that this impact is negligible and therefore relatively unimportant, just as they argue that human population is not really a major issue. But global circumscription that is reducing our natural resource base very rapidly, and that is causing permanent loss of other environmental "resources," remains a persistent and increasing problem that cannot be honestly denied or forever avoided without dire consequences for all of humankind.</p> <p>The critical issues of environmental destruction includes, in general:</p> <p>1. The question of global warming, which seems to have been occurring at a steady rate at least since active monitoring began in the late 1950's.</p> <p>2. The question of the bottleneck and loss of species diversity and the replacement of natural habitat for natural selection processes by human-made or artificial habitat.</p> <p>3. The pollution, damage and permanent destruction of these natural habitats and the permanent loss of non-renewable resources available within these habitats. Desertification and soil loss are a part of this third dilemma, but we can also point to the eventual depletion of accessible petroleum and coal deposits, and the destruction of natural forests world-wide.</p> <p>Global warming is not a certain trend. Long term weather and climactic trends are difficult to determine. But the evidence of the melting glaciers and polar ice caps, rising sea levels and the increasing turbulence of the weather--unexpected draughts, unusual flooding, multiple hurricanes--all these patterns suggest that there has been a general shift in the global weather pattern towards gradual but steady increases in average annual temperature..</p> <p>The case for global warming is mostly a case against the fossil-fuel industry, upon which the global economy runs. The burning and manufacturing of petrochemicals produces a number of gases that are toxic to nature, but it is not a clear case. Sea water levels are gradually rising each year. On the other hand, nature may also have built-in mechanisms that can serve to arrest or balance the patterns produced by humans--except that we chronically debilitate these natural capacities by our development and deforestation.</p> <p>The situation of global warming points directly to the dramatic effects of the human impact on nature, and that is the destruction of the natural ecosystems of the global environment. We are now in a mass extinction event. We do not need to wait for another large meteorite to fall to the earth to wipe out the majority of mammals on earth--we are doing that ourselves. Of course the only species left to be wiped out by a natural event would be the human species itself.</p> <p>The destruction of the rain forests is the primary example of this damage assessment of human civilization, though it is not the only form that this destruction takes. The rain forest habitat is recognized as the richest and most diverse set of natural ecosystems on earth. It is a concentration of life teeming with bio-diversity. The largest rainforest region is the Amazonian drainage system. This is followed by the rainforests of the island of Borneo and the numerous surrounding islands. These ecosystems have been ages in the making, but it has only been less than a century in its undoing.</p> <p>The real loss this represents for science is the bottlenecking of the genetic totipotency of biological life on earth. As species pass into extinction with each passing year, and as natural habitat allowing for the speciation and production of new species is systematically removed to make room for pasturage, plantations and small farms, new roads, townships and hydroelectric projects, we lose irreplaceable biological information that is the product of billions of years of evolutionary history. This loss of species diversity is critical, and can spell disaster for life as we know it, because it leads directly to the restriction of the ability of life in general to adapt and respond successfully in the long run to new changes and new environmental regimes. The factors that drive natural selection within a larger ecosystem are broken down. The loss of this bio-diversity is a tragedy of the greatest proportions.</p> <p>With the destruction of the natural environment and its rapid replacement with a humanly constructed one, the "home" for wild plants and animals is being destroyed. Natural habitat loss is the single greatest contributor to the modern mass extinction of species on earth. Once disappeared, this natural habitat cannot simply or easily be repaired or replaced with an equally viable one.</p> <p>Global circumscription is the unavoidable consequence of increasingly massive human population and the cultural impact on all natural environments. This impact occurs on many levels and is not completely understood. Indirectly it has been affecting even the remotest and least populous corners of the globe.</p> <p>Circumscription is about the fragility and complexity of the relationship between the human species and its cultural adaptation and development and its natural contexts in the larger world. It is about the ultimate finiteness and limitations of the natural earth and its resources, which limitations impose upper limits to both our cultural adaptation and our population growth. The realization of those limits comes gradually but undeniably--as we strain these relationships we increase the risk of disturbing irreversibly not only the natural ecosystems upon which life on earth is made up, but also of destroying our own relationships and adaptability for survival in such systems.</p> <p>Increasing global circumscription brings with it the realization of the natural limits of our human population growth and cultural development--we must learn these limits and to abide by these limits if we are to continue in the world.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="seven">Militarism</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p></font><font FACE="Palatino">The history of warfare, and indeed most conventional history is de facto military history, is one of increasing scales of violence and involvement. All over the world, extensive evidence demonstrates unequivocally the basic social violence that human beings are prone to. Almost all pristine civilizations were founded upon the rule of the sword over neighboring groups of people. Things have changed little, as science and technology has only made the killing more efficiently horrendous.</p> <p>Beyond seeing a military orientation, any military orientation, as a "duty" or an obligation, it is important to construe it as something else, as perhaps a necessary evil, but also as a kind of organized madness and culture of destructiveness that achieves no other purpose than death and destruction and that has no other function than promotion of the rule by violence. In this matter, "our" armies are no better or worse than those of the enemy, as the end result remains the same. The necessity of war and of military styles of life entails a kind of tyranny of violence over people and over the natural world.</p> <p>It must be acknowledged also that military organizations are for the most part unproductive and even parasitical to the host society that supports it. Military organizations drain off expensive and precious resources, and tie these resources up as weapons and tools of violence and destruction--they produce nothing of lasting value. This is even more true in modern times than it was in early human history. The meaning of "total warfare" assumes larger and more grotesque and tyrannical dimensions with each succeeding generation. This destruction extends beyond the bounds of human destruction to incorporate the massive destruction of the environment as well. Most governments, even the smallest and poorest ones, continue to spend the major portions of their national budgets on the purchase of new and expensive weaponry, resources that would be available and more wisely spent on more benevolent programs are drained away.</p> <p>It is important to see militarism as a kind of social disease, a social pathology that affects groups of people with delusions and attitudes of in-group solidarity and out-group projection. Militarism is a product of human culture--it is value system that is taught and learned and passed on from generation to generation. That human beings have a proclivity towards violence, especially mass violence, is undeniable. This predisposition is well rooted in our deeper history, and suggests biological origins of the human species in contexts of competition and warfare.</p> <p>The notion of militarism as a kind of social disease that has destructive consequences constitutes a kind of social theory about warfare and human violence. In this we must understand the patterns of socialization for aggression and enculturation of violence and tolerance of levels of violence. Human aggression and violence are to be seen not so much as or only as innate instinctual drives, but as these basic drives that have social direction, social definition, and that are molded by cultural constraints, sanctions, rewards and incentives, that give it focus, meaning and tangibility in human behavior that it might not otherwise have. How we show our aggression, and what we do with violence, and the tolerance and promotion for violence, is, in other words, culturally constructed and therefore also culturally malleable--it can be shaped in almost any direction that we wish to turn it to.</p> <p>Organized and group violence as it is evinced in the modern form of warfare is different and separate from violent behavioral tendencies of individuals. The relationship between social patterns of violence and individual acts of violence is at best only indirectly and complexly related.</p> <p>Militarism is a product of our social organization and social pressures to conformity. It is an institutionalized form of violence that, under special conditions, legitimates such violence on a massive scale. Underlying the military cult of violence is a kind of culturally embedded authoritarianism--a generalized worldview and belief system that power and force are intrinsically necessary and makes right and that the world is indeed justly ruled by the tyranny of force.</p> <p>Militarism as a social disease is but one facet and symptom of a deeper sense of disorder that has long affected humanity. It comes through an emphasis on conformity to authority, especially forceful and potentially violent and punitive authority, and it also entails the de-emphasis and devaluation of the role and development of the individual in the world, especially as a naturally creative and independent being in the world. In this sense, violence is a form of frustrated creativity that is innate to the human psyche--one that results in a compulsion toward destructive violence and a pathological preoccupation with control, death and the symbolic forms and results that violence takes.</p> <p>In other words, human beings are so violent and destructive, not so much because they were born that way, but because they learned how to be this way as the result of their socialization, enculturation and integration into violent and warlike societies. Human beings have an innate aggressiveness that is related to their sexual and creative drive--this aggressiveness can be sublimated to a great deal of productive and creative energy, but also it can otherwise be frustrated and rendered into something perverse and violent.</p> <p>Military social organization and the mobilization for social aggression on whatever level or scale, entails the maintenance of certain ideological symbolic structures, of ethnocentrism, and of internal authoritarian power structures that are based on asymmetrical structural hierarchies. It entails fostering and maintaining socially and subjectively on an impersonal level certain rigid and dogmatic mindsets, values and world views that preclude alternate orientations or the possibility of adaptation or adoption of a greater variety of understanding. It entails a kind of behavioral conditioning on lower order patterning of defensive mechanisms and response that preclude the possibility of more sophisticated and differentiated forms of response.</p> <p>Humankind pays a heavy price for its social organization for violence in many ways. Not only do military organizations parasitically consume basic resources and expend energy and technology for fundamentally destructive and counterproductive purposes, but it also limits, constrains and distorts human development and the human resource base that is available to a society.</p> <p>The paradox and dilemma of our orientation for social violence is that we require military style organization to effectively defend ourselves from other people and societies who adopt an aggressive, military way of life. Pacifist appeals to a common humanity frequently do not work with madmen and totalitarian dictators who thrive on death and destruction. In a world where violence is always a very real and sharp-edged possibility, violence always begets more violence, and only the foolish and innocent fall victims to the conqueror's sword. Emancipation often entails taking up the sword to break the chains of bondage.</p> <p>The real challenge therefore is how to effectively constrain military violence in the world and maintain sufficient but minimal defensive military organization in the world, without becoming the victims or servants of our own military predisposition or of other's. Furthermore, this must be accomplished on a global or trans-national level, and in a genuinely democratic way. This has not yet been accomplished except through rather imperialistic means of one nation or the other achieving hegemonic military control over the world.</p> <p>Just as civilization has grown and advanced, so too has militarism, as a kind of social affliction of state civilization, also developed and evolved into a form much greater and in many respects more terrible than it has ever been before. We do not anymore need to imagine the horrors of nuclear holocaust to see and feel the real power and terrorism of militarism. We can find it now even in conventional warfare that can be waged with pinpoint accuracy and extreme lethality from a safe, push-button distance. Rarely any more do people need to engage in hand-to-hand combat and blood-letting to realize the consequences of warfare. Rarely now is combat confined only to a small group of professional soldiers. Usually modern warfare involves as its victims innocent children, average citizens and just about any body else who happens in harm's way. The weapons that have become more accurate and lethal in one way, have also resulted from and in a far less discriminating pattern of mass destruction.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="eight">Authoritarianism</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </a></font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>Authoritarianism is the disposition of people to adopt a strong, anti-democractic and hierarchical disposition in relation to other people. Authoritarianism is a fact of human nature and human culture. We are all potentially authoritarian and every society has aspects of authoritarian control in the world. In face, authoritarianism on some level is necessary if we are to live in an ordered and fair society. The human capacity for authoritarianism is derivative of the human capacity for aggression and for its compulsive repression, control and sublimation into other aspects. Socially, it is the human capacity to control and manipulate others unfairly--a projection of our own compulsive repression, and a derivative function of structural asymmetry in society. It is a very deep-seated and fundamental aspect of human nature.</p> <p>Authoritarianism has several aspects. Authoritarian people value conformity over individuality. They value strict punishment. They value shows of strength and brutal solidarity. Authoritarian personality tends to be dogmatic, closed minded and prejudiced towards out-groups. Symbolically, they show strong attachment to and dependency upon external symbolism, especially in the concrete and literal sense. They show little capacity for abstraction, lateral thinking, or a tolerant attitude towards human differences.</p> <p>Psychological authoritarianism refers to those personality characteristics that lean towards bigotry, prejudice, and hatred of out-groups, especially as measured upon the classic F-Scale inventories. Different varieties of authoritarian attitudes have been recognized based on response patterns to different kinds of attitudinal inventories. Authoritarian character tends to be more compulsive than usual, and more ego-centric. Also, they tend to be under-achievers in normal social life, which means that they also tend to be afflicted with low self-esteem and a poor sense of social status and ego-identity, which they frequently over-compensate for in seeking dominant positions in society.</p> <p>Social authoritarianism refers to several recognizable types of government, most commonly found among undeveloped nations, in which rule is by a small oligarchy or even a single dictator, who is in control or is controlled by the military. Authoritarian power structures refer to the pattern of authoritarian behavior accreting into administrative positions of power and prestige in governments.</p> <p>Anthropological Authoritarianism must be understood as the cross-cultural and comparative aspects of alternative forms of authoritarianism in the world, and an elucidation of what can be considered the pan-human capacity and predisposition for authoritarianism, as well as the structural aspects of authoritarian social organization and socialization for authoritarianism that is shared by all societies on some basic level. Authoritarianism as an inherent facet and distinctive patterning of humanity has not been studied as such by anthropologists, though many anthropologists have remarked upon and noted its occurrence and patterning in the world.</p> <p>Authoritarianism can be said to be characteristic in one form or fashion of all societies on earth, although its expression and elaboration varies considerably between different cultures. Some groups enhance and elaborate violence, social asymmetry and authoritarian tendencies, while others tend to play it down and suppress its expression culturally. There are many variable factors that influence its expression and historical development in society, and this creates a complex explanation for its occurrence.</p> <p>Needless to say, studies of enculturation indicate that authoritarian patterns of socialization are deeply rooted to a particular cultural orientation, but vary systematically with other related factors in fairly expectable ways. Thus anthropological authoritarianism does have a more general paradigm of understanding, at least on a hypothetical and theoretical level.</p> <p>Authoritarianism is not uncommon. In fact evidence suggests that in many circumstances it is the rule and not the exception, lending credence to the notion of Homo hierarchicus. People psychologically and socially tend towards the abuse of their power over other people when in positions of control. This is often unconscious, or at least unconsciously compulsive or motivated.</p> <p>Authoritarian people tend to adopt certain ideological belief structures that symbolically reinforce and legitimate their attitudes and actions--these belief structures are characterized as closed-minded and narrow in focus, rationalizing and self-seriving in expression.</p> <p>Authoritarianism is a social patterning that is mostly the product of primary and secondary socialization, particularly, I believe, socialization for aggression. The predisposition to resort to violent aggression as a means of resolving conflicting issues is a suggestion of the lack of development of more sophisticated ego-control mechanisms that would otherwise effectively channel innate aggression and socially induced frustration in more constructive directions.</p> <p>Authoritarianism is also culturally reinforced. Success based upon authoritarian characteristics is frequently rewarded in most state societies, even in contexts that are ostensibly open and "democractic" in orientation. People value symbolically the appearance of "strength" and dominance, even more than the cunning of intelligence and the wisdom of good temper. Symbolic forms reiterated and frequently portrayed in the mass media appeal to a lowest common denominator that reflects this basic authoritarian orientation. Cultivation of non-authoritarian value orientations is marginalized and construed as a form of weakness and vulnerability. Thus it connotes, among other things, a predisposition to failure.</p> <p>But the cultural reinforcement of authoritarian orientations is more basic and insidious than this. People do not need to be muscle-bulging weight lifters to be capable of blind and violent conformity to the narrow norms of a society. Violence and tolerance for violence is acquired and valued, often surreptitiously, within a society. It is a social psychological phenomenon of mass appeal that bypasses intellectual reason and appeals to the gut-level of instinctive aggression. We can all be secretly supermen no matter how weak and plain we may really be, nor no matter how perverted the expression of our secret desires may become. Thus we have cases of successful figures of society, obsessive-compulsive to the extreme, beating their wives, abusing their children, and committing violent atrocities to strangers.</p> <p>The holocaust in Germany is only one example of many in the modern era when a supposedly rational and well-ordered society can run amok with authoritarian actions. It is perhaps the clearest modern example of how blind obedience to conformity can be fostered among children, women and otherwise good-hearted adults, and how, in the name of duty, this can be subverted to systematic evil. But this can happen to any society--no modern society is fundamentally immune to its possibility.</p> <p>It is a paradox that the striving for competitive achievement that is an earmark of developed societies, tends at the same time to foster a kind of compartmentalized competitive authoritarianism that, in its extreme form, leads to an undercutting of achievement by the strength of compulsive repression that may especially hinder the higher level development of cognitive-behavioral faculties. Achievement must therefore be understood as a culturally defined, culturally sanctioned value. Being relative to its cultural construction, achievement is usually a social value on which one's ego-identity and status-identity in a society is based and rewarded through resource acquisition and opportunity. The emphasis on achievement that is constrained in specific social settings and contexts, may preclude the development of other achievement orientations in alternative ways, and can result in the long run in a form of distorted or exaggerated achievement orientation that is driven by the fear of failure more than the desire for success.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="nine">Socio-Structural Inequalities</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>Inequality is a fact of life. Many inequalities are rooted in nature and physical differences cannot be undone. To be born physically or mentally handicapped is a fact of life that cannot be simply reversed. Cultural practices and social institutions exist to either exacerbate the basic inequalities of life, or to attempt to reverse some of these basic differences between people to create a context for the realization of greater equality.</p> <p>The concept of equality is, like that of human rights and human freedom, an ideal that exists as a possibility in the best of all possible worlds. It is like a perfect triangle--though rarely seen in nature, we cannot deny its mathematical and a priori truth. The source of this sense of equality, and its demand on earth, comes from the same source as does the understanding of human rights and freedoms. It springs from the subjective experience of human suffering and from the sympathy we extend unselfishly to others. This inter-subjective capacity of human beings to share the experiences and feelings of others in the world is what separates us off as something more than mere animals. At the same time, because it is not necessarily innate or fixed by nature within us, it creates also the possibility of its denial and failure.</p> <p>Equality is an ideology that is touted by almost all nations, but is realized in fact by very few. Absolute equality is an unrealizable ideal. The emancipation that human beings have struggled for through history and sometimes won was a greater degree of relative equality. The realization of greater rights, freedoms and opportunities for people who are in a structurally inferior position in a society. The demand for equality often leads to the overturning or toppling of an entire state system, as happened in the French Revolution or later the Russian Revolution.</p> <p>Social inequality is inevitable in a stratified state system, because state organization requires the concentration of administrative authority and the separation of classes along occupational and marriage lines. It is inevitable in a stratified global system as well. To expect it can ever be otherwise is unrealistic. It is not a question of creating a completely fair system of total equality. Such an attempt leads to dysfunctional and counterproductive "communal experiments" that fail in the long run either because they turn into totalitarian entities to "get the job done" or else nothing gets done because no one has the authority to enforce state decisions.</p> <p>The central issue is a question though of creating relative conditions of greater or lesser equality in any one area, of constraining authority and the effects of authoritarian power and control in ever narrower margins, and of inducing the kinds of freedoms and cultivating the kinds of responsibilities in more parts of more people's daily lives, such that inequality eventually may become not so disparagingly blatant as it is today and increasingly becoming.</p> <p>The realization of the notion of equality is a relative one--we can speak of averages and relative degrees of equality achieved in any one situation or place, compared to other similar cases.</p> <p>In order for equality to be realized more broadly on earth, it is necessary that we redefine our human identity of ourselves and others in the world, to see past all the myriad differences of people, and to enlarge the symbolic circle of our sense of community to encompass all people on earth. This entails relinquishing or at least playing down nationalistic and ethnocentric prejudices which place our own "kind" before others and separate our selves and our communities from other people of other communities. This redefinition must be done on a broad scale. It can only come from the realization of the basic humanity all people share.</p> <p>Enlarging the circle of our shared identity in the world also entails that we expand our sense of self-identity as individuals in the world. We are not just exclusive members of any particular grouping of humankind, but on a basic and shared level we become implicit members of all groups. We must become capable of seeing ourselves in many different kinds of people and of learning to walk in the moccasins of many roles and types. This entails that we must relinquish some of our basic compulsions and inhibitions that serve to restrict us and channel us along narrow pathways in life.</p> <p>The realization of human equality in the world entails a realization that all people have both good and bad, that all people are equally capable of doing good and bad things in the world. We are none of us so innocent that we are free of guilt and responsibility to try better, and few of us are so guilty that we absolutely forfeit our rights to our humanity completely.</p> <p>The notion of equality is an ideological one--it is an ideal that we either regard as valuable or not. Even the writer of the Declaration of Independence and many of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, some of the most important statements ever made about equality, kept slaves--this was the basis of an unresolved issue over equality that led a hundred years later to a bloody civil-war. The problem of inequality and equality is indeed a statement of the history of human civilization. Human civilization was to a great extent founded upon the blood and sweat of slaves and involuntary servitude.</p> <p>Slavery still exists, and involuntary servitude takes other forms. Coercive structures that impel people to live and do things they would not otherwise do have changed with the rise of the world system. But coercion and exploitation of human labor and reinforcement of structural and social inequalities remains a fact of life in the beginning of the 21st Century.</p> <p>It is important to separate the issues of social and structural inequality. Social inequalities are what one notices in everyday life in the class based distinctions and pretensions that so many people adopt in relation to one another. Structural inequalities are more pervasive, more perverse and usually occur unnoticed in the backgrounds of our lives. They are the inequalities of opportunities, the impersonal and systematic discrimination based on category or quota, the inequalities of advantage, education, information.</p> <p>Altering the structural system that reinforces and creates basic inequalities in the world cannot constructively be accomplished overnight. Any major revolutionary change in this regard can only have consequences that are more destructive than constructive, and that may end in a system more tyrannically coercive and violence-based than even the current world order.</p> <p>Reform of the structural system is had in small bits and pieces and is a cumulative process that begins in everyday life and in common places, extending itself gradually to a grand scale and momentum. Different forms of equality are recognized--we can talk about political equality, social equality, economic equality, and ideological equality. Many regimes pay much lip service to ideological equality, but in fact promote programs of great actual inequality and violence. A large proportion of humanity today live in conditions of blanket ideological equality guaranteed by their state, when in fact the degree of totalitarian influence and control is extreme.</p> <p>Ideological equality in itself does little without the actual instantiation of equality on earth, but it does create the symbolic justification and preconception which is prerequisite to the greater realization of equality in the world. The grant of one form of equality does not necessarily entail all forms. What we strive for is finding greater relative equality, while working for the realization of greater potential equality. Authoritarian control can never be completely eliminated in state organized societies--it must be narrowly delimited and restricted in its scope and degree of control in our daily lives.</p> <p>Without a doubt, greater equality cannot be achieved in the system until the tyranny and disease of violence and authoritarian power control is lessened in the world.</p> <p>Greater human equality in the world cannot be realized until a world state is created that will provide the structural framework protecting and promoting such equality. As long as people remain divided into ethno-national groupings, there will be wars, totalitarianism and human inequality. We can argue what form such a single world state should take, but without a doubt it must be democratically organized, for only in a genuinely democratic state where the average citizen is given political freedom to vote and decide independently, and powers of individuals are regulated and restricted by the fair rule of public law, can the setting exist that will create genuine human equality.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="ten">Ethno-culture</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Acculturation, Differentiation, Stratification, Assimilation & Integration</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>Ethnoculture is the distinctive cultural identity situated in place and in period of time, that defines itself at least in part in relation to other, alternative groupings. It may in fact be a distinctive sub-grouping of a larger cultural identity--as per se a national culture or an ethno-national cultural orientation. Ethnoculture tends to be local in orientation and distinguished by detailed traits commonly shared and acknowledged by the members of the grouping.</p> <p>We all share some sense of ethnocultural identity and heritage that is in part what we inherit from our parents and grandparents, and also what is the consequence of our own histories and the impinging of the larger context on our everyday lives. Ethnocultural identity often embodies some model of kinship and a familial framework that is core to its constitution and symbolic articulation in the world. It is this relational network which makes ethnocultural identity such a basic part of our experience--so much so that we tend to accept it as natural or "God-given." In fact, we are bound within our ethnocultural identity on very basic levels in our preferences, speech patterns, appetites and aversions, and we cannot easily escape or forego these patterns even if we try to.</p> </font><font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p></font><font FACE="Palatino">Ethnoculture is a concept of human identity that situates the individual as a "social animal" in the nexus of a web of interpersonal relations and a culturally defined context from the time of birth until final death. Ethnocultural identity tends to be distinctive and unique for individuals and for different groups of people who share a suite of basic traits--it is inherently differentiating through time and across space, and leads to greater division and discrimination between people based on relatively minor and superficial qualities or characteristics.</p> <p>Through our ethnocultural experience, our attitudes, views of the world and response patterns to our experience of the world are shaped and constrained in fundamental ways, and this mostly invisible and mysterious force in our lives largely pre structures and determines the kinds of relationship we will maintain with the world throughout our lives. It situates us definitely in everyday life in both time and place--it locates us in certain, undeniable provenience of the stream of human life.</p> </font><font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p></font><font FACE="Palatino">Why not culture and why "ethno-culture." The name "ethnoculture" is not intended as a politically correct term or to highlight the notion of "multiculturalism." Ethnocultural studies are systematic and distinct--the subject and objects of their research are clear, and the methodologies that demarcate its sub-disciplinary boundaries are unique to it self. Ethnoculture is to Cultural Anthropology as Ethnohistory is to History writ large. Ethno-culture attempts an ethnographic description and ethnological explanation of a distinctive grouping of people--primarily in endogenous terms--in the people's own terms, and particularly in relation of the "proto-typical" individual to a larger context of relations with other groupings and in the identity of the group in literature.</p> <p>At the same time, it seeks to locate the individual subjective experience in the framework of the larger historical and cultural realities impinging upon the group, as well as the range of both individual and group variation found within a particular ethnocultural orientation, both over time as well as across space.</p> <p> </p> <p>Ethnocultural studies tend to be analytically detailed systematic, engaged explicitly in minutia, as well as comprehensive and nonexclusive in scope, and integrative or systematic in framing the small in relation to the large. Its excoriation of meaning and information in the patterning of people's lives borrows much from the older paradigms of culture history and philology.</p> <p>Ethnocultural differentiation is a natural process of groups to splinter and split apart and to define an essentially separate identity as against the host or parent body. Like the related processes of linguistic differentiation, ethnocultural differentiation is a natural process of cultural development. Because it is essentially an historical or what Boas would have called a cosmographic process, it is one that is complex and non-predetermined.</p> <p> </p> <p>Ethnocultural differentiation is contrastive to the larger historical processes of acculturative fusion and assimilation that occurs especially when more powerful or cosmopolitan societies come into contact and relation with more closed and localized groupings. Trans-culturational processes of human civilization also tend to run against the grain of more normal and "natural" processes of ethnocultural differentiation. The "uni-dimensional" culture of modernization is an example of how very different groups of people will converge on certain specific traits because of their common sharing within a larger global exchange system.</p> <p>At some level, people are still prone to go to fight with one another over minor symbolic or cultural differences, because competition and group identity dictates conflicting relations between groups, even if in fact they share common language, clothing, cars, etc.</p> <p>That the concept of ethnoculture may be important to understanding our Global Imperative has escaped the critical notice of most people, though wars of increasing violence based mostly upon ethnic difference and differences of ethnocultural values such as religious belief, are still occurring and are quite persistent.</p> <p>Ethnocultural differentiation and stratification are in fact occurring at a greater rate than ever before, and we are having to bear more and more directly the consequences of this increasing human pluralism in the world. Most of this differentiation is politically organized from above by a few elite who seek dominance and exclusive control over a narrow resource base, and are contrived by vested interests who attempt to mobilize groups based on their ethnic identity and solidarity. Difference between people become highlighted and marked as boundary maintenance mechanisms. Groups work together to provide mutual advantage, often at the expense of well-defined out-groups. Thus, ethnic stratification has become a new kind of political-social-economic game of manipulating peoples world views, attitudes and actions for some kind of gain in the world.</p> <p>At the same time, the possibility and potentiality for increasing integration within the global system also presents itself in world society. The possibility for overcoming prejudices and discrimination based on the ethno-schismogenesis and exaggeration of in-group/out-group boundaries is much greater as people can more freely share their own subjectivity to a broader range of people via the Internet.</p> <p>People hold dearly, often violently, to their mother cultures, especially when they feel these are threatened by rapid change or by the presence of alternative out-groups they little understand. These feelings of intense attachment and identity are very fundamental in our self-awareness, and these often lead to great violence in the world.</p> <p>Ethnocultural stratification can be referred to as the long term structural relations that are established between different ethnocultural groupings of people, especially when these relations tend to be asymmetrical and non-reciprocal in a political or economic standpoint. Ethnocultural stratification tends to be "diagonal" and it occurs as much within ethnocultural groupings as between different or distinct ethnocultures.</p> <p>Ethnoclasses are sub-groupings within a society that distinguish themselves by the interconnections between class and ethnocultural identity--members of the same general ethnoculture may be separated nonetheless by occupying different</p> <p>Ethnocultural assimilation refers to the process of the absorption of one ethnocultural grouping or its traits by another, often dominant grouping, and by the loss of identity of the original ethnocultural orientation and the adoption of the ethnocultural patterns of the dominant group.</p> <p>Ethnocultural acculturation refers to the process of exogenous borrowing and change that is the result of contact between different ethnocultural groupings in time.</p> <p>Ethnocultural shock is the result of sudden loss of original or support ethnocultural contexts, as with immigration, refugees, or destruction in the face of natural disaster or human aggression.</p> <p>Ethnocultural integration is the process of creolization between different ethnic groups, often entail intermarriage, or amalgamation, or the mutual symbiotic coexistence in a common setting of two or more ethnocultural groupings, often exchanging or sharing affinities with one another.</p> <p>Ethnocultural aggression & conflict is frequent and often very bloody. It is rooted in hate and intolerance, that defines prejudice and ignorance about others, it is rooted in stereotypes which dehumanize the other as something less than human, it is rooted in structural competition for resource which can appear to threaten the survival of a grouping, it is rooted in a demand for group solidarity and conformity which excludes all possibility of alternation and which seeks to reinforce its boundaries by targeting out-groups as a rallying point. It is true that ethnocultural violence is not waning in the modern world, but is actually on the increase as more and more people come into collision and competition in the global market place.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="eleven">World Systems: Open and Closed</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </a></font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>It is commonly understood and acknowledged that we live within what has been defined as a capitalist world system, dominated by the "core" countries of the United States, Britain, Japan, France. We can consider it on a grand level as a kind of economic imperialism in which foreign policy and economic trade relations are reinforced through trade sanctions, embargoes, etc., and sometimes even through the use of military "intervention."</p> <p>The actual extent of development of the World System remains somewhat questionable. Only several communist countries remain effectively outside of this system, and there are a few "rogue" or pariah states as well that do not function fully within the framework of the system. The global system itself is largely an undetermined one, as much as the major players like the United States, Japan and Great Britain, would like it to be otherwise. This means that ultimate control over its development is largely absent, and no single entity has achieved a complete monopoly of control in the international arena. In fact, from a political and an economic standpoint, it is very much a chaotic system that frequently runs "out of control."</p> <p>What drives this global system? First, a huge and powerful military with state of the art weapons technology, and a near monopoly by the core nations on nuclear power and nuclear weapons technology. Secondly, there is a heavy, almost exclusive dependence on fossil-fuel technology that drives development and powers the heavy industry of the system. Third, the First world countries effectively maintain academic and government-sponsored leadership in science and technology, in particular, now the vanguard of the information revolution and the biological revolution. Fourth, a well-established banking and credit system that has been focused within the industrialized nations and has served to concentrate a vast amount of wealth and control of resources in certain core places.</p> <p>The world system is in fact not a new thing. Previous "world systems" have been around a long time ago. These systems are often construed as imperial civilizations, and indeed they have frequently been so. The traditional Colonial European Kingdoms--first Portugal, Spain, England, France and the Netherlands, vied for power and control on the high seas, in the frontiers of the New World and in the spice markets of the Old World. Later, with industrialization, this developed into another kind of system in which raw materials came from the colonial entities to be transformed into commodities in the home markets.</p> <p>The modern World System is the by-product of two world wars, a long Cold War that is not quite finished, and a shifting arrangement of socio-political and economic allegiances and treaties between the many nations of the world. In the modern system, Japan and Germany, albeit transformed through reconstruction as democratic entities, compete successfully with the old established ex-colonial superpowers. New up and coming nations enter into the competition for global markets and resources, albeit in lower-class positions.</p> <p>The current world system is characterized by economic structural integration in the face of ethno-national stratification and increased differentiation between groupings of people. This lower level ethno-cultural differentiation can be understood to be related to class closure at the upper strata of this system, through economic opportunities and marriage patterns. This partial closure of the global system entails, among other things, that social mobility from the lower to the upper levels are extremely controlled and circumvented by a variety bureaucratic and authoritarian mechanisms, and that symbolic identification within the system must be in other forms than that of achievement in terms of competition. Ethno-national identities are competing common interest groups that utilize their internal networks as leverage for achieving mobility within the system. Symbolic identification and constraints at the group level preclude individual participation of the members in a larger framework of resource competition. Principle competitors are construed as alternative ethno-national groupings, and not as the overarching controlling interests, which are, for the most part, effectively invisible in most contexts of everyday life except in very marked circumstances.</p> <p>At the same time, structural integration is marked by a kind of economic acculturative assimilation of "modern" values that are defined and dictated by the global market economy. Like ethnic stratification at the bottom, economic assimilation into the system encourages and enforces ties of dependency upon the normal structural relations of the system. Unequal and non-reciprocal ties that tend on average to systematically disadvantage the poor in relation to the wealthy. The poor are taught daily through the commercial hype of the mass communication media that they must "emulate" the life styles of the rich to achieve status, success and happiness. Indeed, even the core values of what it is to be beautiful, rich, and successful, are manipulated by this same system.</p> <p>Though the world system is a powerful one, it is by no means an infallible or absolute system. It remains basically open-ended and unfinished though it is also highly uneven and structurally unbalanced in favor of the elite. However powerful or asymmetrical in its structure, the World System is in fact a self-organizing one and is, in the structure of the long run, a basically unstable one. It is composed of no single nation or entity that has enough strength to enforce a confederation of nations. It is an increasingly complex system and economic integration entails crosscutting interdependencies between different nations that can both enhance stability and at the same time lead to super-criticality. In such an environment relatively minor events can create chain-reactions spanning the globe that can result in major systemic reactions.</p> <p>The basic structural openness of the world system can be both a boon and a bust for its continuation in the long term--destabilization and break down can occur relatively rapidly, but the economic costs would be tremendous and inhibiting. On the other hand, its openness permits a degree of flexibility that allows new nations and new organizations to come into the center of the stage for control and competition. This can be both stabilizing and destabilizing, but it does entail that the so-called "world system" might adapt itself to new arrangements in the long run.</p> <p>World systems are nothing new. What is new is the extent and actual global qualities characteristic of the new world system. Most of the globe is being effectively integrated at some level and in some way into the global system, and this system is a modernizing one that entails a foundation of sharing of basic technological amenities and worldviews whatever else the differences of culture, language and worldview. Only a few regions on earth today are beyond the reach or purview of this system.</p> <p>Structural integration of the world into a single system is inevitable and will continue to happen. The possibility for its break down and for world war are also always present in the background and complex chaos of the system. It is up to ourselves in the final analysis to determine which kind of system we wish to establish for ourselves on earth, and how much control and power we are willing to grant it over our lives. If we do not act soon to decide these issues, the likelihood of the long run is that somebody else will decide for us, and then the results will probably be less than satisfactory for most people on earth.</p> <p>The potential benefits of structural integration of the world far surpass the advantages of maintaining competitive and conflicting national differences and promotion ethno-schismogenesis in the world. The costs of ignoring the imperative of global integration--indeed it is also a part of our global imperative, is that we must in the long run pay the price of greater human inequality and suffering in the world.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="twentyfour">Part II--Basic Principles and Progress</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p></font><a NAME="twelve"><font FACE="Palatino">A better world in the 21st Century begins within our selves, and extends systematically out through our families, our communities and our homelands to encompass the entire globe. New technologies offer us new opportunities to realize greater freedoms and greater human potential in the world today. The realization of greater freedom and human productivity is directly related to enhanced global development and to democratization of human society. At the same time, the potential for greater realization of human potential also entails a concomitant realization of greater individual and social responsibilities to act in an appropriate and adaptable manner, both in relation to one another and in relation to the earth itself. Our imperative is to change or to perish. The destruction of the earth's habitat is the destruction of humankind on earth. The earth is our home, and we have become its stewards. <img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> </font><font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Alternative Development</font></a></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p><font FACE="Palatino">The future of the world is open-ended and underdetermined by the current powers that be. It can turn in any one of many possible directions. It can lead humanity to disaster, which is the greater likelihood if we continue in our current modes of adaptation unaltered, or it can lead us the realization of greater good in the world, if we make a collective effort now to change our worse habits and adopt newer, saner ways of doing things.</p> <p>It is clear that the predominant system that is controlled by vested interests have a commitment to the status quo that will stand in the way and create resistance to any significant attempts at fostering alternative development. These powerful interests have the resources to effectively prevent any kinds of changes in the world that they perceive as being contrary to their own private interests. But this is a temporary situation in the world, and the common interests of humanity are in the final analysis their own best interests as way.</p> <p>Alternative development must be accommodative of these orientations and interests groups, and not contradictory to them--but at the same time efforts at alternative development must not yield to these interests or to allow our primary objectives to become compromised and rendered ineffectual because of this resistance.</p> <p>Modern development and modernization as we have known these to be are not so much inevitable as they are politically and economically promoted and therefore permitted to continue in the way that they have. Many vested interests have huge stakes in the game of development. But conventional development in the way that it has been unfolding is without a doubt not necessarily the best possible hypothetical future to behold. It is not without its own intrinsic contradictions that make our whole-hearted and unquestioning acceptance of its mandate more than a little uncomfortable and in the long run futile.</p> <p>The future can unfold in any possible number of directions, and it is worthwhile in the brief period remaining before it does do so, to seriously consider some of the other options that may be available for humankind other than those that have been placed before us by the powers that be. There is a great deal of media-hype and information control that is dedicated to creating the illusion that the predominant world is the only possible way, and that any other way is not efficacious or unworkable. Many of the basic technologies upon which alternative development could be founded have been around for a long time now--at least as long as the fossil-fuel industry.</p> <p>The ignorance and prejudices, rooted in "common sense" that would resist such alternative development are in fact the by-product of this tremendous effort to hard sell the contemporary system as inevitable, desirable, and even "natural". It is paramount therefore that the promotion of alternative development attempts to counter and reverse some of this public attitude away from the consonance of the system and social inertia to basic change.</p> <p>Success of the human species in the Third Millennium will in the long run depend on how much it can promote alternative forms of development during the first half of the 21st Century. These alternative forms involve alternative power technologies primarily derived from solar energy, and upon the widespread adoption of basic democratic social innovations that lead to greater equality in the world.</p> <p>Alternative development is therefore a critical issue affecting the destiny and future course of human history. Alternative development includes as well a clearer notion of Human development--the issues of promoting Human development are inextricably tied to the promotion of alternative development such that one will not be successfully achieved without the other.</p> <p>The object of alternative development is to provide an alternative direction for world development and global integration other than what has been the predominant mode of the modern era in the 20th Century. Alternative development does not aim to replace or displace the current patterns of development that are mostly based on the petrochemical and military industries, so much as to complement these with a greater range of viable and profitable alternatives that are less violent and destructive of our world.</p> <p>Part of the function of alternative development is therefore in a sense "mediation" between the host world system and the natural and human world in a global, regional and local sense. It makes continued fossil-fuel development possible and tolerable, indeed sustainable, by placing brakes and constraints upon this development, and by reinforcing the current energy system with a safer and more sustainable substitute.</p> <p>Alternative development consists of a number of factors working together. Development of eco technologies and eco-cultural orientations which depend upon these technologies is an important step in this direction. The success of these technologies and cultural orientations depends on the scale of their adoption in the world, and therefore upon their active promotion among different peoples of the world</p> <p>Alternative development in part also involves alternative human development, and a redirection of the meaning of "human development" in the world. Human development has mostly meant "human resources" in the production systems of the past--it has rarely been construed as a kind of right, as something that is its own goal and objective in the overall <u>qualitative</u> improvement of the human condition.</p> <p>As a side note, an extension of human development entails the promotion and eventual adoption of more democratic institutions in the world, and a concomitant withering of authoritarian power structures. Economic well being and vigor depends on open and free market systems and upon the incorporation of greater numbers of people into the decision-making process.</p> <p>Promotion of alternative development requires redirection and cultivation on a mass level of alternative human values and views of the world. Human valuation is seen as an essential ingredient of the world system, underlying economic value and structural patterning on earth.</p> <p>It entails, among other things:</p> <p>1. The promotion of Pacifism</p> <p>2. The collective realization of Earthboundness</p> <p>3. The development of Techno-ecology and Eco-technology</p> <p>4. The cultivation of Eco-culture</p> <p>5. The realization of the Information Revolution</p> <p> </p> <p>6. Promotion of alternative Human development</p> <p> </p> <p>An alternative vision of the future sees a return to reliance on solar energy sources and spin-off technologies of these alternative energies to drive our system, and less reliance on the fossil fuel based technologies that have predominated, especially in the 20th Century. To some extent, it sees a return to steam-power, but not driven by the burning of dirty bituminous brown coal. Upon this alternative energy base we can see the gradual rise of new kinds of buildings, streets, and cities that are made of alternative materials other than timber and concrete. We can envision air-craft that fly into outer space beyond the grip of the earth's gravity, and cars that reach speeds in excess of 300 miles an hour--effectively turning a trip across the continental United States into a single day's drive. These are not fantasy visions of a science fiction writer, they are in fact the possible and better technologies that are available to us today. It also sees powerful personal computers and software that are cheap enough and available enough to be distributed more evenly and more equally in the world.</p> <p>The lack of initial profitability construed in the development of these technologies must be understood against the background of the increasing incentives and desirability of these technologies, and in fact, in the lowered cost of such technologies once they reach the level of mass production and global distribution. This lack of profitability and "high" cost thresholds to initiating alternative development are more apparent than real, and are biased by the predominant capitalist point of view that sees profits as primarily short-term gains.</p> <p>Such technologies in fact tend to be lower net cost in operation and to involve longer life-cycles of its components. The gain of such an alternative system is cumulative and gradual, but its development, once it takes root, will grow exponentially and in the long term, quite rapidly.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> <img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> </font><font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="thirteen">Non-violence & Pacifist Revolution</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>What are the values of pacifist philosophy. The concept of nonviolence entails a non-destructive approach to life. How shall we measure our destructiveness? By our capacity to do harm and control the patterns of the world arbitrarily--to bring to an end life. We can say that in a basic sense the world system that we currently live within is fundamentally a violent and destructive one. Many of its processes eventuate or cause the destruction of a great deal of life on earth. It has been happening at such a rapid rate and to such a great extent in the world that we can no longer blithely chose to ignore it or the consequences.</p> <p>Promotion of the values of pacifism is a difficult thing to do in a world full of aggression and violence. The principles of passive resistance require a kind of courage and self-sacrifice that is uncommon to the average human being. Few exemplars have existed to lead the way in this regard. And there have always been too many Hitler-types who would easily kill off every Gandhi in line without a twinge of remorse or second thought. On one hand the world must be protected from the innate aggression of mad-men like Hitler--thus the doctrine of pacifism must embrace a policy of active, strategic defense.</p> <p>Likewise, we cannot carry the concept of ahimsa, or non-violence, to the absolute extent that we refuse to deal effectively with a swarm of locusts eating our crops or with a strain of virus killing our children. We swat a fly in the house when it annoys us, and we smash a mosquito engorged with our baby's blood, but this does not make us violent in the world. Violence that we seek to undo is the structural and social patterning that results in violation of humanity's basic rights and in general and deliberate destruction of the environment on a massive scale.</p> <p>On the other hand, the use of violence in any form or fashion, even if restricted to defense, entails the risk of its misuse as well and thus a vicious cycle of violence begetting more violence. It is true and perhaps unavoidable that by adopting methods of violence to counter and defend ourselves from violence, we are rendering ourselves our own worst enemy. The sad conclusion about the reality of widespread violence in our world is that it forces us to become violent to defend ourselves--removing from us our responsibility and freedom of non-violence.</p> <p>Pacifist revolution is not defined only by the value strategy of passive resistance, but also by the concerted strategy of resistant activism--it entails a kind of aggressiveness and defensiveness that is essentially non-militant. The best military strategy is an indirect approach that wins war with the least amount of destruction and bloodshed. In the long run, everyone loses in the violence of war--therefore diplomacy that successfully accomplishes the goals is preferable to going to battle.</p> <p>Pacifism is a valuable, indeed, a precious doctrine. It must be practiced as much as it is preached, and tempered by the sober realization that humankind will probably never be entirely free of violence. It is a cultural orientation, an alternate orientation other than the predominant modes of national chauvinism that are promoted in the name of patriotism and loyalty under a flag. As a cultural patterning, it is something to be learned and taught--parents must learn to put into practice its basic principles, and then to try to teach these principles through example, modeling, emulation and valuation, to their children. Teachers have the same task to teach their students. Likewise, leaders must instruct their people.</p> <p>Concomitant to the principle of non-violence entails we must also cultivate an attitude of openness and tolerance to human differences and cultural variations in the world, as we are increasingly confronted with such differences and their consequences in our lives. Openness and tolerance must be construed not just in a passive way of live and let live, but in an active form of curious enjoyment and appreciation and positive evaluation of human differences in the world. One of the great religious doctrines of the world, the concept of universal love, must be applied in our daily lives and extended to every person.</p> <p>The principle of nonviolence and the promotion of active pacifism in the world thus entail another set of values that we must embrace in the world, and this is the value of self-sacrifice, charity and generosity in the world. The concept of greed and profit incentive that underlies so much of the capitalist system must be construed in a basic and fundamental sense to be contrary to the principles of pacifism and eventually lead to destructive consequences that are entailed in the exploitation and theft of other people's property or energy.</p> <p>Just as pacifism does not necessarily preclude the intolerance of Hitler, it also does not necessarily preclude the dynamic and beneficial aspects of an open capitalist market system. As it is not a contradiction to defend human rights against the violence of a Hitler, it is also not contradictory to promote profitable orientations through the organization of labor and capital in the world system. But this must be accomplished without corruption, exploitation--achieved through honest hard and intelligent work. Gaining of value for all is the ultimate purpose of development--value gained within the system should not be exclusively or primarily at the expense of others.</p> <p>What does a pacifist revolution of the 21st Century look like. It is an ad-hoc, grass-roots organization of common people as equals, regardless of their station or class in life, regardless of their language or national affiliation, working together for a common cause--the cause of world-peace and world justice. Working with the knowledge that without justice there can be no lasting peace, and without peace, there can be no true justice.</p> <p>At the same time, we must all be brought to the final realization of giving up our immature and somewhat childish preoccupation with the tools and weapons of violence--that violence is something easy to accomplish but impossible to ever undo. We must reach inside of ourselves to unlock the deep-seated compulsions that tether us to our violent toys and obsessions, and to release more creative forces in our daily lives. Thus a pacifist orientation entails a relinquishing of the symbolism and means of violence in our everyday life, and a deliberate, conscientious exploration of our own creativity and hidden potential in everyday life.</p> <p>The alternative system must promote this effectively in the world, providing leadership and an organizational framework and alternative cultural context that will allow people to securely and safely adopt alternative value orientations without fear, without discrimination or violence. This has always been a tall order, a well-neigh impossible requirement--but in the modern world at the dawn of the 21st Century, it is now not only a realistic and realizable possibility, it is becoming a necessary imperative.</p> <p>Much of what must be resisted emanates from what can be called "human nature" --it is so basic and so embedded in our world and our identity, that we even feel threatened by the suggestion that it may be wrong or lost. The refusal to bear arms under circumstances of national fervor over war will be construed not only as an act of cowardice or desertion of duty, but it will be treated as a crime against the state.</p> <p>At this level, the state is exercising its ultimate coercive authority over its constituency--the power to arbitrate the life and death of its people. It is at this level perhaps that this form of coercive authority, what is the privilege and power of nation states in the modern world and that leads to so much violence in the world, must be primarily challenged. This coercive authority of the state stems from the rights of states to make war to defend their independence and territorial integrity, which stems from the independent sovereignty of states.</p> <p>But if the rights of states are ultimately even if indirectly derived from the rights of individuals within the states. Individuals either tacitly or actively yield their rights to the state for the sake of the protection and promotion this citizenship provides for them, then it follows that actions by the state that deprive its citizens of their basic rights and freedoms are unjustifiable and lead to the potential forfeiture and delimitation of state authority.</p> <p>This is a difficult question. It is clear that Hitler's aggression that ended in World War II was an illegal abuse and transgression of legitimate authority by the German State. To a great extent the German people were either induced by blind collective delusion or by fear to conform to his dictates and the systems coercion, or else to suffer a cruel death. On the other hand, American involvement in Vietnam is less clearly an act of overt aggression, though its continuance and escalation lead to a great deal of unnecessary destruction and violence.</p> <p>But it falls upon the shoulder of the people themselves to decide and determine the limits of its states, or any states, legitimate authority. The problem is that once instituted, states in fact yield a great deal of control and power over its constituency, and most often, individuals are in a very weak and disadvantageous position to enforce their ultimate prerogatives over the state. This is why in totalitarian states, as in modern communist China, the right to congregate in large numbers outside of state sanctioned activities is generally denied its people.</p> <p>Total warfare that is characteristic of modern warfare, that involves the mobilization of entire nation states and all their industrialized resources, is a consequence of the potential totalitarianism of the modern state. Again, Hitler's Germany is a clear example of this. But even very democratic and otherwise usually non-aggressive nations like the United States can at times adopt fairly totalitarian orientations in the world that result in total warfare. The world witnessed this in Vietnam.</p> <p>At the dawning of the age that, with the horizontal proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and with the kinds of technological refinements of modern warfare, we cannot and do not have to afford to continue with mobilization and means for making total warfare. The eventual outcome of such warfare is unthinkable for every rational human being.</p> <p>It is possible though to return the problem of defensive warfare to the business of highly trained and well-equipped professional elite, much as we rely on well-trained policemen and detectives to protect us and guard our rights and freedoms in the world. The means for organizing relatively small military organizations that can effectively enforce world peace without committing the world's resources to total acts self-destruction have been at hand for several decades now. What is missing is the willingness on the part of nation states to do so, because of the yielding of their own power and independent authority in the world this would ultimately entail. The peace keeping forces mounted by United Nations efforts are usually a joke, ineffectual even in preventing small arms violence by ill-equipped militia forces.</p> <p>Such development would require a joint commitment by the world's major powers to supplying the technology and expertise required for such a global police force. It would also entail a genuine commitment to a global democracy and to a strong paradigm of states rights that do not preclude the realization of individual human rights. In a world composed of powerful private interests and many petty authoritarian dictators, this is perhaps asking too much.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="fifteen">Human Rights and States Rights</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>Human rights are always a silent, chronic background issue in our lives. We struggle every day without a clear sense of what they are or what they entail morally in our world. And yet they are extremely important because they structure our relations with others in the world--they set limits to what we can and cannot do with others, and what others can and cannot do with ourselves. We mostly only know them when we really lose them or when others violate our sense of our rights.</p> <p>It is obvious that totalitarian governments in the world must by definition be anti-democratic and thus must actively demote and devalue the role of human rights in the world, and want to convince their subjects that human rights are either a threat to the state or a conditional privilege granted (or taken away) by the state.</p> <p>The issue of states rights deriving ultimately from the sanctioning and mandate of the people, the collective "will" of the people, so to speak, and being ultimately constrained by and legitimated by basic human rights, remains an important normative and philosophical point to develop, because a lot of real things in the world hinges on its justification.</p> <p>The power of independent nation states is derived from and granted, however implicitly, by its people. It is limited by its responsibility to protect and uphold the rights and interests of its people. The nation state is usually construed as a corporate entity whose organizational life and imperative is greater than the needs or rights of any individual within it, or even greater than the sum total of the rights of the individuals who compose it. At this point of its development, a state changes from being "of the people, for the people and by the people" in a direct and active sense, to becoming "over the people, above and beyond the people."</p> <p>This mandate of state authority is usually derived on the grounds of protecting or promoting the "national cultural heritage" of the people, which is held to be greater than the biographical lives of the people who compose this heritage. Much of this is ideological rhetoric and symbolic construct that has no necessary a priori--it is collective illusion fostered by the state as a means of secondary legitimization of its institutions and policies. It is at this level of "no-man's land" as with the gray regions of secondary and derivative human rights, that the possibility for prevarication and manipulation of rights and powers mostly occur and for which few clear solutions actually exist. It is this gray between area of derivative rights and privileges that lead us to extended court room battles.</p> <p>It is unfortunate in history that all too frequently vested and corrupt political interests have an undue amount of power and influence, and deliberately and underhanded exploit and exaggerate issues of ethnic identity and solidarity and out-group threat and scape goats, for their own empowerment and aggrandizement in the world. Most people appear too often to be susceptible and easily led in this way, and leaders not only realize this mass weakness, but presume it in many of their policies.</p> <p>Human rights is the only valid universal meta-ethical doctrine that exists for humankind, not because there is some natural imperative or mandate that makes it so, but because we in our history have collectively agreed to make it so. We know human rights mostly by their violation. We know it by our long history of slavery and the violence of aggression and totalitarianism the leads to the loss and violation of rights on a grand scale.</p> <p>Human rights are a semi-explicit doctrine ultimately about the fundamental value and worth of the human being, as both an individual and as a member of a larger society, in the world. It states that this value and worth is in some sense absolute and inviolable--we cannot justly put arbitrary limits or impose cultural constraints over it.</p> <p>The concept of human rights has gradually expanded over the decades, especially in relation to modern development, to embrace a broader range of issues and basic areas of life. These include in a general sense the rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. More specifically we recognize the rights to freedom of speech, assembly, religion, defense, etc. Among the basic rights as laid down in the American Bill of Rights, we can include several others that have subsequently risen to the fore as vital social issues. These include the rights to a home, to a job, to equal opportunity, to vote, the freedom of expression, freedom of privacy, freedom of information, the right to alternative life-styles, the right to health, education and basic welfare of our families.</p> <p>States Rights, the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of ethno-national groupings, are the symbolic and de facto extension of human rights, applied to the rights of groups to form for themselves and freely operate as separate and independent communities.</p> <p>Because the paradigm of states rights ultimate derive from the doctrine of individual human rights, the domestic analogy of individual rights becomes a viable and appropriate model for understanding the interactions and normal relations between states. Because states rights are derived from basic human rights, the power and moral, meta-ethical legitimacy of a nation to assert is prerogatives is fundamentally constrained by these same basic individual human rights. Nations cannot justly forfeit or alienate basic human rights, though they frequently do so. At the same time, no nation has the privilege to consider itself above or beyond the purview of the basic paradigm of human rights. The Nuremberg Trials and many war crimes trials subsequently have demonstrated the value and intrinsic importance attached to the doctrine of basic human rights by the international community. The case of cultural relativity cannot be justly made against the assertion of human rights either. Cultural variability in the interpretation of constraints, rights and responsibilities varies widely between different groups of people, but upon a meta-ethical level the actions of all states, either domestically or internationally, is fundamentally constrained by the doctrine of inalienable basic human rights.</p> <p>In the international arena, there is a place for an institution like the United Nations to enforce the doctrine of human rights and to keep peace among nations. The United Nations has grown in its effectiveness over the last decade, but it remains still limited and fundamentally weak to enforce its mandate even among relatively weak nations, unless it is backed up by the military might of its more powerful sponsors. The mandate of the United Nations will be made stronger and more effective when it is able to enforce its rule with a heavy hand among a genuine federation of nation-states that cannot legally act outside of this union.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="sixteen"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Human Rights and Anthropological Relativity</font></a></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p><font FACE="Palatino">As anthropologists, we have a moral obligation to search for some sense of realistic resolution to the dilemmas posed by ethical and cultural relativity for the doctrine of human rights. We cannot as professionals simply pose this problem and challenge the world to find a solution to it and then simply walk away from it claiming our professional ethics and disinterest of objective inquiry. Anthropological relativity of value and worldview is a realistic fact of human life--Roman slaves were little better than cattle, and people regular put to death in the Coliseum was a normal and popular, if somewhat brutal and bloodthirsty, form of entertainment. Even in the modern era it is not difficult to cast about and find similar examples of cultural practices that test our sensitivities and understanding about what basic rights and violence are. I would include in this the controversial issues in contemporary American society over gun control--when youth walk onto a campus carrying automatic weapons designed only to kill people. Communist China today claims cultural relativity of its long and ancient history--modern communists appropriating for their own purposes and empowerment and long heritage of traditional Chinese civilization, as it justifies totalitarian policies that lead to massive human rights violations and to wide scale corruption. It even goes too far as to define human rights as capitalist promotion of democracy and as a threat to the normal social order of the Chinese people.</p> <p>To deny the relativity of values on some level, even if just for the sake of philosophical argument and conjecture, is to side-step the centrally critical issues of real importance, that are relative status of human rights in the real world, and the limits of variation or of tolerance that the world community and humanity seeks to define in relation to human rights. There is a great deal of room for interpretation and misinterpretation of what are basic and derivative rights and freedoms, responsibilities and the limits of authoritarian domination. But if we honor and respect alternative cultural traditions that may place different valuations on people and their freedoms, at the same time, we also all implicitly recognize and on some level acknowledge the basic limits to authority and coercion in any society, beyond which there is only intolerable violation and cruelty.</p> <p>From the standpoint of a meta-ethical doctrine of universal human rights, we all of us, as equal members of humanity, have a moral obligation to respect and uphold some notion and practice of this doctrine, that ultimately transcends and places limits on the relativity and variations of the pattern of culture. To claim cultural identity and relativity, in other words, does not exonerate us from the moral constraints of the doctrine of human rights, and places basic conditions and limitations on the amount of cultural variation that we can ethically tolerate.</p> <p>Though head-hunting was a common cultural trait in Oceania, incorporation of these tribal societies into a larger world system of relations entailed that this pattern be arrested and prohibited. Slavery in Africa is another endemic cultural institution that, from a human rights standpoint, was construed as intolerable and was eventually eradicated.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="seventeen">Earthboundness</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </a></font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>Earthboundness can be described as a subjective and collective state of mind. It is the realization on some level of our being of our inherent limitations on earth, and of our vital relationship and dependency to earth, hence it is a growing understanding and a new sense of responsibility to caring for and managing the earth in a manner that is good both for it and for ourselves. The earth is our home, like it or not. We can make it a mess--we can destroy it, or we can clean it up and set it back in order.</p> <p>It is a common realization similar to the one that people of Columbus's age perhaps had when the earth was demonstrated to be round and interconnected east and west. Earthboundness can be a sense of the isolation of the planet earth in a vast and almost boundless universe. It can also be a sense of our common place in the greater natural scheme of things. Astronomers and astrophysicists search the edges of the universe for the big bang, but philosophers must still ask the question of what lies beyond all of this. And yet we are temporarily, for all intents and purposes, still tethered with our feet on solid little earth. This shared realization of our finiteness and the finiteness of life on earth, of the earth's resources and of our own longevity and tenuousness on earth, impinges upon the things that we do and how we view the world in many ways.</p> <p>Earthboundness is a steadily increasing realization of our responsibility, individually and socially, to the earth, to its stewardship as caretakers. This sense of responsibility is something that we cannot simply escape or ignore even if we choose to. It is always in the background of our lives like a gigantic question mark looming over the horizon. We must also realize that what we are in charge of taking care of is not simply our own to do with as we please. This has been our common problem for many centuries so far. Our sense of responsibility is as rentors. Mother nature is our land lady. We are realizing increasingly, especially as we enter into and take control of the world of the gene, that we cannot simply manipulate nature in anyway we see fit.</p> <p>Earthboundness is a very basic alternation of our collective world-view that is tied to the growing realization of the finiteness of the world and of the constraints of the human condition in the world. It is in a sense a preconception--a collective "preunderstanding"--it comes before and basic challenges our rational faculties for understanding and relating to the world. Perhaps, for many reasons, we are in fact "seeing" the world differently from the way our ancestors saw the world. This fact of altered perception of our world entails that we must reformulate our symbolic and ideological structures that would rooted to an earlier sense of vision and relation about the world.</p> <p>I call this new point of view "earthboundness" because I believe that the dawning shared realization of the limits and boundaries imposed by our basic relationship to the earth and our ultimate dependency to the earth, is at the core of this altered conception of reality. We are increasingly feeling and learning about these limits and boundaries in ways that our forefathers never could have known. With this new point of view, comes a growing awareness of new responsibilities and also of new kinds of freedom which is the by-product of our technological civilization.</p> <p>Earthboundness as a worldview is probably the first collective understanding that is genuinely or potentially pan human--one that is shared by all people together. It transcends all previous religious philosophies and ideologies. It is because part of the earthbound perspective is the common realization that we are all in the same big boat together drifting through the vast empty seas of space.</p> <p>Worldview is important because it orients us every morning, and allows us to sleep well every night. It helps to render coherent and orderly the multitude of experiences and perceptions. It provides us a common set of attitudes and symbolic framework by which we can communicate, explore new experiences, test out our subjective feelings, opinions, and sense of reality against those of others. Without a coherent worldview, at least implicitly, our sense of reality would be quite disordered and even destructive.</p> <p>So far, the earthbound perspective exists but only in the background of our lives. We all know it is there--the same sense of the earth's problems and our relationship to the earth is taught in China as it is in the United States. And yet, as a coherent, clear view of the world, and of our place within it, it has not yet been in itself rendered explicit.</p> <p>Earthboundness is also a state of mind, but more than a world-view, it is a state of being in the world. It is not a transient state of being--it is a habitual, regular and everyday way of living. We know that gravity is a subtle but extremely powerful force of nature that keeps us mostly right side up. There is no more direct evidence of our earthbound condition than when we clumsily drop something from our hands or trip and fall to the ground. It reminds us, among other things, of our humility before the forces of nature. We thus kow tow before nature without our willing to or not. We are embarrassed, but we need not really be.</p> <p>Because we are in some small measure rational beings, what we think and believe is important to our lives--it gives us a sense of order and direction, and sometimes even, we act upon this sense of order in ways constructive or otherwise. Earthboundness has several components. Earthmindedness, that in its explicit form allows us to think, feel and hopefully talk about our relationship to the earth in a variety of ways, and Earthbeingness, which is a hopefully conscious way of living when we come to accept in our everyday lives our sense of earthbound being. It is like the second thought we have when we go to toss out a piece of rubbish paper. We make sure it goes to the proper place rather than anywhere--we do this even if at first it requires a little extra attention and energy on our parts, until it becomes a matter of routine or habit.</p> <p>Earthbeing has a deeper sense of meaning. It can be construed as a state of being in the world that is not vicarious, but immediately apprehended in the apperceptive recognition of our own position and place in the world--of our own sense of being in the here and now. It entails a giving up of the illusions of ego-attachment, of fetishes, of impulses that are dangerous or harmful. It entails the cultivation of a spirit of being in a natural state, with our selves, with one another, and with the larger world.</p> <p>Earthbeingness therefore has wider implications for our socially constructed world--for our cities, our skyscrapers, our freeways, our suburban sprawls, our slums and ghettos. We must ask ourselves the honest question of what these are in our lives.</p> <p>Of course, a great deal of money is invested in advertising over the television to get people to accept and desire things that perhaps are not completely consonant with an earthbound way of living. We are told that bigger, faster and newer trucks are better than smaller, older and slower ones. It becomes a question of our status-identity in the world--if we own the fetishes of capitalism, then we are, at least for the moment, somebody important. It is difficult to resist the social pressures to affluence and to conformity. There appears little counter-voice or basis for alternation of value that enables us to feel comfortable and unthreatened about our selves and our ego-identity in the world.</p> <p>This pressure occurs on a symbolic level in our everyday lives. It affects how we see and feel about our selves and our worldview. It is inescapable if we are to participate successfully and normally even in a minimal way with everyday society, especially in the most developed regions of the world. It is constant and unyielding, like the fast lane of a busy freeway.</p> <p>Earthboundness therefore at some level will entail a reassessment, reevaluation and perhaps a revitalization of our symbolic structures in a way that yields a view and orientation to the world that is more consonant with being in the world, that is less vicarious, less attached to material fetishes and the corrupt sense of power and good this brings with it. It may entail a new found simplicity, a conscientious return to a simpler way of living that is less cluttered with the compulsions that drive us such long distances to acquire greater wealth and the status symbols that money buys. It will therefore entail a new sense of humility, and a disdain of the ephemeral vanities that the modern world is made up of.</p> <p>If this sounds like good Christian eschatology, it can also just as well be basic Buddhist or Hindu values as well. In fact, earthboundness knows no clear religious boundaries--it transcends all previously known religious doctrines, and, in the process, incorporates many of the basic values.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="eighteen">Global Eco-culture</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </a></font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>Eco-culture is an new form of general, pan-human cultural orientation based on the possibilities of social integration represented by free information exchange of the Internet, and by the eventual promotion of alternative primary institutions of production as well as consonant alternate secondary social institutions of symbolic legitimization and social organization. Institutions of primary production include solar based energy sources and extended electrical technologies derived from solar power, alternative intelligent and automated technologies of production, and secondary institutions of social organization and legitimization. It also entails on a subjective, phenomenological level, the promotion of orientations in everyday life, by our habits, the choices we make, our conversations and interactions, that are conducive to a non-violent and symbiotic relationship with the natural world.</p> <p>Lip service has been paid to the emergence of a "modern" global culture constituted mostly in the capitalist market place, that is increasingly erasing ethnocultural and national boundaries of identity. This modernization is apparently having an assimilative effect of bring all styles of art, architecture, fashion, and products of manufacture, into a common form or mold--streamlined and similar no matter where they are produced or designed. Very little of this new material culture of world civilization is in fact conducive to or a part of a genuine global eco-cultural orientation.</p> <p>Eco-culture in fact does not exist on a very wide or widely shared basis, but a general need and platform for its emergence does exist today. Much of what passes in the name of environmentalism is in fact a form of market-oriented appropriation of popular themes and consciousness. But eco-culture is not about environmentalism or environmental activism per se--it is not only about camping out in trees or protesting nuclear tests. It is about the cultivation of alternative life-styles that lead to a grass-roots movement--a ground-swell, that predetermines basic consumer attitudes and habits in the global marketplace, that redefine basic market values and reorients economic development toward new avenues that are considered more healthier than what is currently promoted. To unhook the average consumer from the status hype of new large cars, new clothes, sporting apparel, etc, and to symbolically refocus cultural attention toward alternative status and more mature life-styles would be to liberate a great deal of humanity from the chains of economic coercion and constraint that tie them to the modern system.</p> <p>To provide the average consumer with a viable set of reference points and a context and identity that allows them to better redefine their basic values and attitudes in relation to the system, more independently and more fulfilling of their lives in a meaningful way, is essentially to undermine the authoritarian power structures and the status quo of the current system which demands and expects absolute conformity on very basic levels.</p> <p>Eco-culture must be more than a mere ideology, or a vague philosophy of empty words--it must be defined by our collective actions and shared involvement in the real, material world, by its transmission to our children and by its institutionalization in our global social order. In this regard, promotion of eco-culture is an activist program, and to some extent attempts to encourage a revolution, albeit a pacifist, or non-violent, revolution in all that we do.</p> <p>Eco-culture is by definition global in perspective. We cannot see it as regionally isolated or preferential to a particular place or period of time. It exists for every human being equally. The present world system as it exists, divided politically into competing nation states, must not only allow eco-culture to develop, but eventually help to promote its development in the world. Without a doubt, active promotion of eco-culture on earth will encounter much resistance, some of which may be violent. Change in conservative and asymmetrical social systems is always met with forceful resistance, especially when the new changes threaten the status quo of the power-relations that already exist.</p> <p>Eco-culture is therefore a global culture, but it is alternative to the predominant mode of global culture as it exists today as the product of the capitalist development of world civilization. Eco-culture therefore is anti-thetical to many of the manifest and promoted values of modernism that exist in the world today--values that are largely defined by class and status acquisition of material fetishes and fads. Eco-cultural development is not anti-modernism or counter-cultural. It is simply alternative, different from the main stream of this development. It is in some ways complementary to this mode, and in other ways antithetical to it.</p> <p>It must be understood that eco-culture and its promotion is not reactionary or antithetical to the established order of relations. It effort is to provide to the world an alternative way of development on all levels of social and cultural integration that is designed to complement and reinforce the established order, while at the same time minimizing the most adverse effects of this order.</p> <p>Eco-culture can be described as a new way of living, a new world-view, a shared set of primary and secondary institutions and symbolic systems of conceptioning that is more consonant with our sense of earthboundness and more symbiotic to a steady-state of natural evolution on earth. Development will continue on earth--but the driving force behind this development and its main strategic direction in the aggrandizement of the power of a few, must change, and the ultimate foundation of this development must also as a consequence be changed. The compulsions to power, to status, to acquisition of material wealth and resources that has long driven capitalist development, the mass appeal to common human vanities, to vicarious enjoyment, to thrill seeking, must give way to a more sober and more sophisticated dynamo of human motivation and evaluation.</p> <p>Many of the values of eco-culture have already been defined in the context of this work--pacifism and non-violence, universal tolerance, creativity and openness, charity, generosity, honesty, thrift and productivity. Other values must also be seen in relation to this orientation--frugality, the golden mean, and the old-time capitalist values of hard work, punctuality and industry.</p> <p>The development of eco-culture on earth will entail therefore a kind of peaceful revolution, a casting-off of the chains that tie us to the big system, and a conscientious declaration of independence. This revolution will be slow in coming, but inexorable in its consequences. Part of the dilemma of its realization is that most of the poorest and dispossessed people on earth only want to become wealthy and rich, and would not give up this dream for values which remind them too much of the humility of their own disadvantaged backgrounds in life. The real resistance to the promotion of this kind of alternative orientation will not come from the wealthy, but from the poorest, people.</p> <p>Eco-culture must be about global equality in a maximum sense. It must be about freedom in a way that has not yet been realized. It must also be one that permits people greater latitude for achievement and acquisition than they would otherwise enjoy, even within the normally developed system.</p> <p>Eco-culture will be something that we teach to our children--something we value enough to teach to our children. Our children will have to grow up into it as if it were natural. But how to teach something that is alien even to ourselves, that we poorly understand? Cultivating eco-cultural values and a consonant way of life must on some level entail reconciliation of a host of discrepant realities between the world as it is and the world as it could and should be. We must battle with this issue everyday in many basic ways.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> <img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> </font><font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="nineteen">Human Development</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </a></font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>Human development is a critical concern of the 21st Century. There are billions of people on earth, but the promotion of human development lags far behind the promotion of economic and technological development--most often human development issues take second place, or are in fact demoted, in favor of frequently short-sighted strategies that aim at quick economic development. Governments, institutions and most people themselves cannot be trusted to be unselfish enough to want to promote human development beyond token symbolic efforts. The need for human development is increasingly acute in the world, and the consequences of its promotion or continued demotion in the world may prove fatal or critical to the long term successful adaptation of the human species on earth in the 21st Century.</p> <p>With so many new people on earth, the demand on resources and the requirements for development which strives to improve the average quality of life for all human beings is growing greater and greater by the minute, while the predominant system remains for the most part negligent and unconcerted in its efforts in this way. Basic and derivative human needs, upon which human rights are based, are increasing in direct proportion to the increasing size and environmental impact of the human population.</p> <p>Humans are seen, in light of the capitalist world system, as simply "resources" that can be developed primarily in terms of their efficiencies and productive capacities within the machinery of the global manufacturing and market system. Their social qualities are directly tied to their relative position in the global ladder of socio-political-economic success.</p> <p>Human beings are not simply resources--they are the ultimate ends of all development, and human development is not merely a form of economic development, but it is a goal in itself. We strive to promote human development in the world or else fail to do so, primarily because it is fundamental to the definition of what it means to be human on earth. Human beings, collectively, are the primary determinants and sources of all value on which the modern world system is built. Even economic values, in the final analysis, are derivative of basic human value.</p> <p>Human development is in fact a human right that is owed to each and every person. The promotion of human development in its more genuine aspects does not debilitate or take away from economic development. Rather, its greatest consequence is that promotion of human development in societies creates the preconditions to the greater economic growth and development of that society, especially when that development is based on institutions that create greater equality between classes of people in a society. This holds whatever the traditional cultural patterning or historical heritage of a particular society.</p> <p>Much that has gone on in the developing countries in the name of economic development has in fact resulted in increasing stagnation, corruption and greater violence. Programs currently aimed at human development are often compromised in their structural organization and function, or by their relative positioning within the global system, such that they are rendered corrupt and false in their representations to the world, and even frequently tend to the demotion and interference of genuine human development rather than the other way around.</p> <p>Promotion of genuine human development frees people from the constraining forces of the system they live within and allows them to accomplish their life goals. It provides new opportunities for people to realize a better life and to pursue dreams.</p> <p>The challenge becomes for us how to promote genuine human development in the world. Human development is more about the realization of innate human potential on an individual level, and about the average social improvement on a social group level, than it is about the "alleviation" of social "problems" that are themselves the result of structural asymmetries in a larger system and of embedded ethnocultural patterns on an interpersonal level. It begins on the proposition that beneath the skin, on a deeper level, all people are basically the same, and in general, expect and want and value the same basic kinds of things in life. The cultural form or the symbolic expression of these needs and expectations vary widely, as does group identity and patterns of group solidarity and goals, but these kinds of differences on deeper analysis tend to be relatively superficial and comparatively superfluous in comparison to the pan-human cognitive and normative framework that is derivable from the typical existential predicament that most people find themselves within, especially now within the modern world system.</p> <p>Human development derives from the fact that human nature is in fact inherently creative in orientation, and that it is not normatively healthy unless it is allowed to develop its fullest creative potential. We cannot, beyond the meeting of basic needs, dictate to all people or even any people what is best for them in terms of their own development. All people must be permitted and allowed the opportunity to realize this for themselves without social interference. The focus on the individual is a radical hypothesis in a world where most traditional civilizations and culture demote the position of the individual to group identity.</p> <p>This is the basis for the justification of the human value strategy of promoting human development in the world. It is rooted in a social philosophy that is basically philanthropic--human beings are born good and innocent, and are taught, directly or indirectly, to be bad. Not only are humans basically, by definition, fundamentally "good" but they have on average much greater potential than most of them realize in their life-times, for a complex variety of reasons.</p> <p>Human development is therefore a grand value strategy that is contrary to reliance on militaristic strategies of the threat of force. Indirectly but in a very real sense it affects economic production, because, by raising human value, this value translates into greater productivity and the realization of greater economic value, which in the final analysis is the social realization of human value in the first place.</p> <p>Promotion of human development in the world entails therefore the wide scale adoption of what Denis Gabor referred to as social innovations on the secondary level of socio-cultural institutionalization. These social institutions are primarily educational, and human service related organizations. Fostering new institutional arrangements in the world is no simple or straight-forward task. The most difficult aspect of this is inducing people otherwise set in their ways to accept new ways of doing things. Conservatism of traditional cultures worldwide, and all the attendant ethnocentrism found within these different orientations, have the inertial effect of resisting adoption of innovations on a scale that these would be effective in the world.</p> <p>The question of how to do this is a top priority in the development anthropology game. Fortunately, no single private interest has made a monopoly on this topic, for it they did we can be sure that there would only be more of the same old modernization!</p> <p>The realization of human development in the first place depends upon the freedom of humankind from the tyranny of violence and from the constraints of the threat of violence in everyday life. Furthermore, it entails the realization of individual independence and the protection of individual human rights in most social contexts. These are fundamental prerequisites to building a foundation for human development in the world.</p> <p>As far as the promotion of human development in the world, it is true that we are our own worst enemies. Human development begins at home and in our selves. We must work on ourselves first, and not worry too much about what others are or are not doing. Indeed, our cultural conformity and socialization frequently entails the embedding of unconscious repression and compulsions that foster our authoritarian relation with the world in very basic ways, and that limit our own development as human beings. Creating the preconditions that encourage and provide direction for this kind of alternative and individual human development is a requirement of society in general, but it comes to full force in the familial context of the home environment.</p> <p>Human development entails leadership training, alternation to more acceptable modes and values of living, rehabilitation and remediation, it entails achievement reorientation, motivational training, retraining and acquisition of basic and advanced skills in a variety of directions.</p> <p>Human development entails enhancing both the average quantity and quality of life for all people--the level of human development is measured and determined by this pan human standard. We cannot assess the level of attainment in human development by comparing average Americans with average Chinese or Malaysians--such comparisons only show us, more than any thing else, how far we have still to go.</p> <p>Quantity of life in terms of access to wealth and resources and quality of life in terms of basic indicators like relative health, well being, education, etc., are indeed interdependent sets of factors. We cannot ultimately improve the quality of life without somehow first increasing the average quantity of life. At the same time, we cannot simply enhance the quality of life by merely augmenting material possession or acquisition.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> <img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> </font><font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="twenty">Techno-Ecology and Eco-Technology</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>Modern industries were quick to jump on the new biological revolution that enabled genetic manipulation of corn crops. They did so short-sightedly and without regard to the possible long term or indirect consequences of human interference in the genetic transmission of biological information--the encoding and transmission of life itself. They did so only in the selfish desire of capitalizing on a new form of technology. Genetic manipulation is a clear and stark example of the effect that modern scientific technology is having upon the natural ecology of the earth--at many levels and in many different ways. The history of capitalist development reveals that most of it has been by definition short-sighted because it was always based simply and only on terms of rapid and immediate profit-maximization--or rather a strategy of the nearest possible, short-term gains.</p> <p>Modern technologies indeed create and foster their own kinds of ecology on the earth, as many otherwise feral species of life are forced to adapt to the new human-made conditions imposed on their natural habitats or else pass rapidly to extinction by habitat loss and extreme resource competition. These new human made ecologies prove usually to be not very adaptive in the long term--they tend to have destructive and unbalancing consequences for natural ecologies in the larger framework and the suites of species that normally make their homes within these regional contexts.</p> <p>Eco-Technology can be defined as the alternative technologies, such as the primary institutions of production, that promote more sustainable large scale adaptations of the human species on earth, or at the very least are less destructive of an eco-cultural orientation than are the currently predominant fossil-fuel based technologies. These primary alternative institutions are basically solar-powered, either directly or indirectly, along with a host of spin-off technologies that are derivable and exclusively dependent upon these alternative energy resources. The information revolution has made this new kind of technology not only more possible, but potentially even more efficacious and even more profitable than traditional-styled technologies!</p> <p>As Buckminster Fuller was fond of remarking, information is anti-entropic, and if we are to understand the synergism of an alternative system of basic and advanced technology, then it must be understood from the standpoint of its structural-functional integration derived from information technologies and the possibilities that this new kind of cybernetic integration creates.</p> <p>Eco-technologies have a primary derivative source--solar energy--either directly or indirectly utilized by a variety of means. Upon this general source of energy, technologies that are efficient and ecologically efficacious are elaborated as viable alternatives to the common forms available today. The wide-scale adoption and development of these alternative primary institutions sets up a new foundation for alternative development that is outside of the present system and yet remains complementary to that system.</p> <p>The challenge is the development of an alternative eco-technological infrastructure that is complementary to the existing fossil-fuel economy. Many of these alternative technologies have been around for a long time, but the justification for their lack of development has been the availability of less expensive alternatives and the high cost of their development.</p> <p>This is only partly true, and disguises the real issue that has been involved in the promotion of alternative eco-technologies. The large oil companies and derivative companies of automobile and truck manufactures would not want forms of competition to enter their lucrative market place that might in the long run undermine their own profits and profitability. In fact, in the long run, if properly designed, eco-technologies may actually be more efficient and less expensive than the current petrochemical based industries.</p> <p>The promotion of these alternative technologies does require some rethinking and rewiring of the system--old money will die and new money will be born. Even more, it requires a general receptiveness and willingness of current socio-political systems to adopt these kinds of programs. If the new alternative technologies can be cultivated and allowed to rise to the fore, then the old Industries of oil and coal combustion would become eventually relatively limited and specialized industries, with a few functions accomplished more efficiently by gas or other forms of petrochemical combustion than otherwise, hence being irreplaceable by alternatives.</p> <p>The promise of these programs promoting alternative development is that, relatively speaking, they are non-destructive of the natural environment, and produce far fewer harmful side affects that the current state of technology. They would be designed for the long run, to run on a regular or continuous basis without the need for constant inputs of huge amounts of coal or oil. Because on average they would tend to be long lasting, steady and relatively reliable, many of the issues that are contemporary to the petrol-chemical--cost of gas at the pump, for example-- industry would eventually simply become irrelevant.</p> <p>The focal foundation of techno-ecology is the elaboration of solar and gravity powered technologies, and the advanced application of these technologies to the viable and economical solution of practical problems in the world. Spin-off technologies would also be forth coming from promotion of this development. Furthermore, new development based on these technologies can be directly applied to accomplishing scientific objectives that have not otherwise been obtained.</p> <p>Alternative development will succeed in rendering global social organization more complex and occupationally differentiated--the structural dynamics of pan-human social order would take on new dimensions and new orders of magnitude as greater amounts of power become available to more people at less cost and greater net efficiency. It may also remove some of the foundation stones that currently influence militarism and current asymmetries in the world order--competition for access and control over basic energy resources, for example.</p> <p>The real challenges faced by alternative techno-ecological development is not its cost-effectiveness, but rather the organized resistance it will receive from many super-powerful lobbies and private interests who mandate government policies and manipulate public awareness and opinion. But these challenges can be effectively met, and in time, their resistance will wither away in the face of a growing global receptivity and demand for cheaper sources of power and the by-products and technological spin-offs of these sources.</p> <p>The sooner the human race gets unhooked on fossil-fuel consumption as their primary source of power, and becomes hooked on alternative solar sources, then the sooner the foundations for world peace and for pan-human development can be better secured in the world. In the meantime, we must concern ourselves with dealing with a world of our own making, but not completely of our own choosing.</p> <p>For such alternative technology and development to occur, it is clear that governments on all levels must become more cooperative and willing as participants in this effort. Promotion of such development will entail the extension and integration of regions world-wide that have little to do with political boundaries, much as the information revolution based upon the Internet has had little to do with national boundaries of culture, language or communications.</p> <p>At the same time, governments alone cannot be relied upon to assume the initiate for beginning new programs of alternative development--the people themselves, as global consumers and producers, must assume the initiative and put the real power in their own hands.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="twentyone">The Information Revolution and the Dawn of the Information Age</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>The advent of the movable type printing press in 14th Century Europe spelled the beginning of a major cultural revolution and the dawning of the Renaissance. The availability of books to read lead to fresh perspectives and new accounting, that was the birth of science, capitalism, modern art and architecture and the exploration of the world.</p> <p>With the advent of the PC and global Internet services, we have been in the midst of a new kind of revolution that of the electronic information age. Conventional textual storage and printing operations have been rendered fairly obsolete as the primary means of information transmission and storage. We do not now know the full implications or possibilities of this new age, but it is happening upon the dawn of the Third Millennium. Many spin-off technologies have yet to be discovered or invented from the possibilities presented to us by this breakthrough in digital information storage and processing.</p> <p>One of the yet untapped possibilities of this information revolution is that control and manipulation of mass information, upon which modern nation states have used as a means for mobilizing and controlling their constituency, is being rapidly and effectively undermined by the free, immediate access to information on the web. Censorship and propaganda upon which modern totalitarian states have depended for the manipulation and control of the masses, is being rendered obsolete--an anachronism of a frequently brutal 20th Century. At the same time, individual people, given instant access to the entire globe, have the potential for making their own voices heard. The social consequences of this new information revolution may prove to be greater than the technological inventions that will be forthcoming from it as well.</p> <p>The information revolution promises new foundations for social exchange and integration and moderation of worldview on a level heretofore impossible. For the first time means are directly placed in the hands of people who can act privately, as individuals, in a potential forum and network that is worldwide in scope. People have the means now for voting directly on issues and for making their own voices heard around the world. Under such conditions, totalitarian and repressive governments, even secret agencies in otherwise democratic nations, are finding manipulation and control of the truth to be more difficult than ever--there are huge stakes involved in this game of mass communications and information manipulation.</p> <p>Information organized and transmitted electronically and digitally has a different form, function and topographical organization that did the previous form of printed information. Its presentation, its processing and its impact is also changing in basic ways. We can talk about the continuous reshaping of our world-view--a reorganization of how our attitudes and values about the world, and of our own identities and the identities of others within it. Old boundaries of our prejudice and ignorance must yield and wash away under the flood of new information available through the Internet.</p> <p>Electronic Information storage entails that a new form of literacy will take precedence over the previous form of textual literacy. This transformation of consciousness is an unavoidable consequence. Practically any kind of information of any level or quality will become available to anyone who has access to the Internet. The means of organization and presentation of this information will change in fundamental ways--the old outline form will yield increasingly to a new "electronic stream of consciousness" that will beget a style of learning and thinking that is based upon its interconnectivity with the virtual world.</p> <p>This new world-view is a global worldview--it is a globalized collective consciousness that we plug into each in our own way and on our own time. The structure of our social system is becoming increasingly intelligent, and super-organically synergistic, to use an organic analogy. As this informational capacity increases, communications become instantaneous around the globe and more direct than ever before. At the same time, people and organizations grow in their sensitivities and sensibilities about the world.</p> <p>As our worldviews and collective attitudes and values are being reshaped, so too will our actions and what we do also become redefined thereby. This is an inevitable process. Thus the information revolution will have teleological consequences that will penetrate and influence almost every aspect of our shared and private lives.</p> <p>These changes are inevitable. They will come regardless of government actions to prevent it. As more people connect up to the global system and share in its values, as the virtual system itself becomes more intelligent and responsive to the queries and needs of people, the system and its culture will begin to define itself more clearly and in a more differentiated sense. We cannot stop this process from now occurring--we can shape the direction in which it goes, and the overall consequences it will have in our lives.</p> <p>But the current electronic information revolution will have many more consequences than we can now imagine--they will eventuate in a degree of applied automated intelligent systems which will have the consequence, as did early industrial revolutions, of freeing many more people from the drudgery of hands-on work. Increasingly people, liberated from the repetitive, mindless drudgery of the assembly line, will be given the opportunity to "make work" on-line.</p> <p>Within a capitalist framework, this can result in the problem of the commons--the displacement and mass unemployment of people by new, more intelligent machines. This entails that political and economic reforms must keep pace with the rise and growth of electronic literacy and connectivity in the world, or else the potential for spreading the gap between haves and have-nots, or those in the know and those who remain outside of the information loop, and for fostering greater asymmetries and inequalities within the system, will be realized in a way never before imaginable.</p> <p>It is for this reason that the information revolution must have greater entailments for change than just technological invention and development. We must apply the same lessons we are learning in the information technologies to inducing social innovations and new patterns of human development that effectively compensate, indeed are better than, the losses experienced in the transition from an old fossil-fuel service economy to a newer automated digital information economy.</p> <p>At the basis of the information revolution is Buckminster Fuller's anti entropic formula--information through knowledge and communication creates synergistic patterns that defy the thermodynamic law of chaos. New information technologies create new values and new sources of value--these are invariably human in essence or meaning. They can effectively make something from nothing. It creates the possibility for new levels of integration and differentiation within the system that both empower the individual and realize greater resource potential for all individuals.</p> <p>By means of the Internet, humans have the capacity as never before to define their own sense of value in the world, to realize their own individuality and creativity, and to influence and participate in the important affairs of the world as equals. Political organization takes on new meaning and scope over the Internet, when many people can meet in a collective virtual forum to deal with issues of mutual concern--we no longer need to depend upon periodic elections to choose representatives to do our bidding for us.</p> <p>Gone are the dictators and military tyrants of the 20th Century who ruled by military violence and the threat of destruction. They have no place, no room, on the Internet except by futile attempts to control its access and by lame efforts to propagandize their own violence.</p> <p>The Internet provides means for directly accessing the will and conscience of the people--far more cheaply and effectively even than the penny-presses of the late 19th Century. It presents people, all people the world over, with the opportunity and the possibility for achieving a new level of structural integration in the world, one that transcends all previous styles and methods of doing so. It remains up to the people themselves to try to achieve this new form of organization.</p> <p>This global reorganization of human social relations entails that people must assume a collective orientation in a system that is largely self-organizing. Old forms of political organization cannot be trusted to disenfranchize themselves in the prospects of realizing a more stable global unity. In the final analysis, the information revolution becomes the revolution of the people, for the people and by the people. It becomes the freedom and responsibility that people must realize for them selves by means of the Internet.</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> <img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> </font><font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="twentytwo">Global Culture, Global Society</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Global Civilization</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font><font FACE="Palatino"> <p>We must look to the beginning of the Third Millennium as the rise of a new human orientation that transcends previous national horizons and ethnic chauvinism. It presents us the possibility of a new age human, the age of a global-human.</p> <p>To be viable, global culture cannot be the uni dimensional form of culture represented by modernity and modernization that is the exclusive product of capitalist development and participation in the world capitalist system. It must become an alternative culture that permits a wider range of variation and tolerance for basic ethnocultural differences. Structurally, it must provide all people with greater latitude and freedom of choice in defining their relationship to the overall system. It must help to empower people at all levels.</p> <p>The possibilities of the Internet and the information revolution are the foundation of a new cultural patterning that is by definition global in worldview, and individual and local in its manifestation and consequences, and that transcend all previous cultural boundaries and orientations that were fixed to locally specific or regionally exclusive orientations.</p> <p>The possibility for the rise of a new global culture is at hand that now transcends national cultural boundaries--not just any particular national cultures, but, at least by definition, any and all national cultures. Many of the institutions upon which previous national cultures have been based will be rendered simply inconvenient and obsolete by the realization of new possibilities through the information exchange of the web.</p> <p>The rise of global culture entails a merging together of the differences and the adoption of a common pattern of living that is transcending many of the basic boundaries that have separated people time immemorial. We can no longer afford the petty ethnocentrism and chauvinism of a bygone era--these attitudes and prejudices will seem increasingly discrepant as more and more people hook onto the Internet and as the Internet explores is greater levels of information & knowledge integration.</p> <p>We regularly use products that have been made by hands on the other side of the globe--often composites of sub-component manufactured and assembled in many corners of the world. And many of the products that we use are pretty much the same whether they were bought and used in the United States or in Russia or Uganda or Chile. Wars and the constraints of the present system remind us continually that the global system is not quite there yet, but it is well on its way.</p> <p>We can make out the outlines of global society already. It is without doubt a stratified society. Global stratification is increasingly cutting across ethnic and national lines to separate the few winners from the many losers. As much as it is an increasingly stratified society, it will also become increasingly differentiated--it will enable a kind of modular articulation that reaches to the level of the individual and the small group.</p> <p>As much as the new information and communication technologies allow for global integration across previous boundaries, they also entail an inevitable process of increasing differentiation of the global system in ever finer units of production and control. The hyper-specialization that was the ear-mark of the 20th Century will yield to a new kind of generalization that is focused upon the increasing realization of greater capacities of the individual who is no longer restricted to a single monotypical regime of work.</p> <p>Global civilization is a shared, trans cultural process that incorporates increasingly more people on the earth. As more groups become, one way or another, members of the global society, we are forced to ask ourselves the central questions of what kind of system we want it to become. To fail to actively participate and opt collectively for an open and democractically organized system, means that by default it will become an increasingly closed and autocratic system.</p> <p>The currently emerging global culture is a stratified one. It is defined as a "modernized" culture that is materialistic and technological in orientation. It is also really accessible only to the few privileged elite of each society that enters the ranks of the world system--most of humanity still remain locked in local parameters of structuration. "Modern" culture is primarily also "western" culture, as it derives from European styles and capitalist based economics. Promotion of modern culture as a global commodity to be bought and sold is the source of a great deal of acculturative stress and storm for many relatively undeveloped societies in the world.</p> <p>Acculturative pressures which stem from the metropolitan cores of the developed world have mixed results--it is rarely politically coercive, or directly assimilationist, but it is often indirectly so through the manipulation and control of resources to the national governments. It has substituted the direct forms of political coercion common in the colonial era to the indirect but far more effective means of socio-economic coercion available by mass communications and economic policies affecting trade relations and international markets. Acculturation in the post-colonial era does not aim at direct assimilation, but at indirect accommodation into the global system of diverse ethnocultural groupings in a manner that preserves the original status quo and asymmetrical hierarchy of the original order.</p> <p>It must be understood that the trans-cultural processes of civilization have always been "globalizing" even in the early proto-historical periods of humanity--civilization catches on and takes hold and does not regress. Of course, there are dark ages where knowledge is forgotten, but in those interim periods of the loss of one civilization, the seeds are sewn invariably among the far-off tribes of the world for the eventual rise of an even grander order of civilization. Once the secrets of silk production leave the isolated realm of China, silk becomes not just a Chinese monopoly, but a common possession of all humanity. So be it with Pentium processors and micro-software.</p> <p>The knowledge, technology and communications that drive this global culture is having an effect of imposing a process of modernization upon all people regardless of the differences and isolation. This process of modernization has a homogenizing influence--it makes cars, clothes, and modern values very similar in almost any airport in the world. It is also creating greater disparities between those in the main stream and the many fragments of humanity that remain disconnected on some level.</p> <p>Part of the wonderful thing about the emergence of the global culture is that increasingly the individual has potential to have a greater influence on the overall patterning.</p> <p>With globalization, there is implicitly a globalization of our responsibility. We can no longer act completely separately or with an exclusive sense that the consequences of our actions will not be felt around the world in one way or another. We cannot behave in ways believing that our behavior will escape notice and attention around the world. At the same time, it is creating new opportunities and possibilities for acting and for the realization of our actions.</p> <p>It thus puts upon us, individually and collectively, the new challenge of measuring up to the possibilities in a productive and philanthropic way. We live now in an interesting time. Individual actions can help to define new patterns in the world. The complexity and chaos of the emerging global system permits a kind of human butterfly effect. People must recognize this potentiality and try to organize their actions in a way that can have positive consequences for humanity.</p> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><img SRC="line4.gif" WIDTH="529" HEIGHT="11"></p> <font FACE="Palatino" SIZE="5"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><a NAME="twentythree">Beyond the 21st Century</a></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p></font><font FACE="Palatino">All indicators point to the fact that the fate of humanity rests in the balance of the early 21st Century. Totalitarian governments even now are in secret collusion in sales with one another of both conventional, modern weapons and with weapons of mass destruction. These governments, controlled by very few of their national populations, maintain strict ideological and behavioral conformity of their constituencies through symbolic manipulation and censorship control of the mass communication media and educational institutions, and rely structural on the rapid mobilization of their people especially against targeted out-groups in order to maintain their own stability.</p> <p>These governments for the most part remain outside the normal league of the Nations that are participating as full members of the modern global system. To the extent that they are systematically marginalized and excluded from full participation within this system, they can be seen as unstable elements in the structural self-organization of this system. The consequence of this is that historical happenstance can twist quickly the fate of the world, by the election of a mad military dictator, by the radical actions of a terrorist group, by a violent coup d'etat, or a reactionary movement of an extremist political party or mass movement. This type of scenario can rapidly ignite a World War III and bring to an end the current structural stability of the global system.</p> <p>As we approach quickly the edge of our collective world history, basic unchanged conditions of overpopulation, environmental circumscription, poverty, authoritarism and unrestrained militarism, create the supercritical conditions that would be ripe for such scenarios to occur in. They set the world stage for such catastrophic chain reactions to occur.</p> <p>It is vitally important that we learn to look beyond the next decade, even beyond century, beyond the bounds of the lives of our grandchildren, to what kind of an earth we wish to leave to our posterity. We must begin betting on the very long run of humanity, and put aside our own short-sighted preoccupations with profit-maximization and seizing the market moment.</p> <p>The question of our long term, collective fate, is an important question, and will not eventually go away by our continuing to ignore it. We have an increasingly earthbound sense of responsibility to try to answer this question, and this sense of responsibility is gradually dawning on our collective horizon. We have a choice, we can work together towards or better world, or we can, by default of our own passivity, allow the world to continue to go in the direction it has been taking. If it does so, all significant indicators point to the fact that it will not take very long to realize a worse fate for humankind.</p> <p>Our responsibility is not only to try to see beyond the current predicament of humankind, which is in the final analysis mostly arbitrary, constructed, and politically constrained, and to try to understand this predicament in all its detail and complexity, but we must also try to take action, both individually, and collectively, to attempt to rectify the global situation before it is finally too late. We must work together in this effort. The means for us to do so have presented themselves in the final hour. We have the information and increasingly the technology for using that information--now we must put it into practice in ways never hitherto realized or realizable.</p> <p>We do it not for ourselves, for our own aggrandizement and wealth. We do it for our children and for our posterity. When we say "our" we do not know any limits or boundaries of our collective identity--we mean all people, regardless of the color of their skin, their heritage, their history, or their choices and actions in life. We do it for our greater sense of humanity and for the long term good of all humankind. We do it because we are human and we share in this basic identity a collective relation to all other people on earth.</p> <p>This book has been written in the perspective of the long-term view of the world. It seeks to see beyond the next century, not so much in detail as in general scope. To deny the large storm clouds gathering on the common horizon of our world at the dawn of the 21st Century is to do a disservice to humanity and to our posterity. To know that something foreboding is looming large on our horizon and to fail to act is to commit a kind of crime, a crime of neglect.</p> <p>We make choices everyday which can effect, both individually and cumulatively, the final outcome of our collective destinies. We live in a world and in an age where the potential for our actions to have a global impact is much greater than ever before.</p> <p>As this book demonstrates, there are clear answers to these questions. We do have alternatives, and they are not simply windmills on the horizon. These choices and the solutions they represent are not simple ones--they are immensely complex, but they are in the end analysis finite puzzles that are capable of definite solution and resolution.</p> <p>It is fitting that this work should end with a proverbial clarion call--a call to arms--not of weapons, but of interlocked hands bearing help to the disadvantaged of the world, and barring the violence of the corrupt upon the innocent victims of their evil designs. This call to revolution is not a call to greater violence, but a call to seeking alternative life-styles that share some basic features in common. These include a common commitment to the improvement of the human race, to preservation and promotion of the earth's natural environments, to the realization of alternative technologies that do not erode and wear away the foundation for our own survival on earth, and to more responsible involvement in the decision making that is necessary to secure a better world.</p> </font> <p> </p> <p align="center"> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> s="na";c="na";j="na";f=""+escape(document.referrer) </script> <script language="javascript1.2" type="text/javascript"> s=screen.width;v=navigator.appName if (v != "Netscape") {c=screen.colorDepth} else {c=screen.pixelDepth} j=navigator.javaEnabled() </script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> function pr(n) {document.write(n,"\n");} NS2Ch=0 if (navigator.appName == "Netscape" && navigator.appVersion.charAt(0) == "2") {NS2Ch=1} if (NS2Ch == 0) { r="&size="+s+"&colors="+c+"&referer="+f+"&java="+j+"" pr("<A HREF=\"http://www.TheCounter.com\" TARGET=\"_top\"><IMG"+ " BORDER=0 SRC=\"http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383"+r+"\"><\/A>")} </script> <NOSCRIPT> <a HREF="http://www.TheCounter.com" TARGET="_top"><img SRC="http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383" ALT="TC" BORDER="0" width="88" height="31"></a> </NOSCRIPT>  </body>