"News that's not known, or not known enough."
Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
|
"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
The end of a
This is not the time to join ideological camps. It is the time to start collecting the scattered threads of Community that have been torn and rendered by the anti-life bacchanalia of the preceding millennia. Community is the expression of our biological inheritance. It has no room for dominant ideologies. Hope, in the context of our social challenge, is a form of ideology. Subsumed in the ideology of hope is the idea that we can quell emotion with illusion. Emotion just is. We set out to destroy ourselves as intact biological entities when we embark on a program of manipulating our own emotions or allowing them to be manipulated "for the common good." If we refuse to be informed by our emotional responses we are like zombies staggering aimlessly about. If we allow ourselves to be ruled by our emotional responses we are just like so many headless chickens running about with an apparent illusion that safety is to be found by running. I am not being cynical, really. What I am is a biologist. My emotional responses to what I perceive, whether they be hope, despair, anger, resignation or some twisted, chaotic state, are the product ofmillions of years of biological evolution. I, and all of us, have a limited emotional range that is best adapted to conditions that existed eons ago when the population of our species represented an infinitesimal amount of the biomass of the Earth and our impact on our life support system was negligible. Some millennia ago some of our species began the process of social aggregation with the aim of dispossessing our neighbors, including our non-human neighbors, or avoiding dispossession by them. It was the kind of error in judgement that leads relentlessly to a spiral of destruction, analogous to an individual caught in the web of addiction, that culminates in the perfect storm of catastrophe that we now see unfolding. Some have described this as the age of "peak everything," but I prefer to see it as the end of a nightmare of delusion. Gee, it turns out that violence, exploitation and subjugation are bad things! Who'da thunk? True individualism, individualism grounded in our biological reality, is conscious of the balance between independence and interdependence. It values both individual creativity and community solidarity. It is aware of free will and the need to make choices that sometimes conflict with the desires of the collective, but desires always to form a harmonious set of relationships as a path to survival and abundance. False individualism responds to the siren song of personal aggrandizement at the expense of others, and sets the stage for the destruction of community. Our true biological self identifies with the needs of others in our Community and strives for social status based on our ability to help others, to provide for the young and the weak, and sees part of ourselves in everyone, weak or strong, old or young, that we relate to. The true trajectory of life is first to get to get, then give to get, and finally, and gloriously, to get to give. It is biological. This episode of species insanity that is coming to an end has been based on the willingness of individuals to remain as children, to forego advancement to adult status, to arrest our intellectual and moral development for the sake of being part of an ever larger collective where only a few individuals are allowed to assume adult roles. What is not growth is death. We have chosen to see to the growth of our dominator cultures by virtue of piling heaps of our own corpses on a bonfire that keeps fewer and fewer of us warm. With this seemingly gothic view, I have no need for hope, I am afraid. What I have instead is confidence. Confidence that our species still has a chance to learn to come to terms with our biological natures. A confidence that is fired by the news of overwhelming catastrophe that will obliterate the culture of domination and allow for new, health growth, much as a forest fire creates renewal and regeneration. And could it have worked out otherwise? I don't see how. Just as the individual must transit the perils of adolescence on her way to the flower of adulthood, culture, it seems, needs to transit this phase of self destructiveness in order to open the way to wisdom. I believe in the future, what ever form it may take, not in the past. Our biological inheritance does not mean that we must return to a condition of unconscious survival, just as the passions awakened in adolescence are not best dealt with by a return to the dependent condition of childhood. A mature, adult form of culture will recognize both our limitations as biological creatures and our potential as creative minds. The childlike elite that infest society are like parasites on a dying animal It turns out that the human animal does have a potential place in the web of life. That position is not king but caretaker. The path to it is via love and caring, not via fear and domination. It's Science.
Because we respect peoples' privacy, we do not keep records of friends' and contributors' contact information. This means we can't forward private communications between readers and writers, but we always welcome dialogue for publication. When we publish incoming emails, we usually edit out the sender's last name, email address, or anything else that would tend to uniquely identify the author (if we slip up, please let us know). But if your email is unambiguously intended only to annoy, insult, or threaten us, we'll publish all the details, and leave it on-line forever. We're especially interested in hearing and considering different perspectives. All we ask is that you conduct yourself sanely and civilly. For the most productive dialogue, it helps if you'll cite a specific article or concept we've gotten wrong. You can contact Helen & Harry at <newsuneed at yahoo.com>. If that address ever fails, our back-up email address is <unknownnews at inbox.com>. But please, don't email us unless you're really and truly, honestly, actually trying to send the publishers of News a communication you're not sending to anyone or everyone else. Please don't send attachments or other cr*p we don't want. If you're trying to reach us but getting no reply, it's probably because you've sent us cr*p we don't want, so we're filtering your emails into the trash, unopened and unread. If you'd like to have your email address unblocked, simply send a sincere apology (from an un-blocked email address).
|
|
