A Feminine Vision of an Achievable Better World:  Anima Should Reign!

                                                                 An Earth Manifesto publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain  

                                                                                                                       November 21, 2010

My name is Tiffany Twain.  I am the philosophical great granddaughter of the estimable Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his nom de plume, Mark Twain.  It has been 100 years since Mark Twain’s death on April 21, 1910, and the global challenges collectively facing humanity today are much larger in magnitude than the ones which affected the world during the great author’s life.  The perspectives of Mark Twain are being reincarnated and reinvigorated in the Earth Manifesto to be brought to bear upon the global economic, social, environmental and political problems of modern times.  An in-depth understanding is provided of Mark Twain’s incisive ideas and entertaining points of view and relevant understandings in the Part One essay A Quite Curious and Illuminating Biography of Mark Twain.

A feminine vision of a practical and achievable greater good in the world is presented herein as a valuable way for our societies to earnestly and intelligently address the daunting existential predicaments we collectively face.  One of the underlying ideas of all understandings in the Earth Manifesto is that, for humanity to survive and prosper, it will be necessary for us to create societies that are fairer, more peaceable, more environmentally responsible and more sustainable.  To accomplish this overarching goal, we must embrace accurate and revolutionarily open-minded and enlightened understandings about reality.  And we must demand that the dysfunctionality of our economic and political systems be seriously reformed.

   “The status quo has many guardians, but the future is an orphan.”

                               --- Timothy E. Wirth, United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund

The desperate needs and compelling desires of the almost 7 billion people alive today must be balanced with those of the estimated 14 billion people who will be born in the next 100 years.  Our collective needs must also be balanced with the countless people who will follow, if we are somehow able to manage to leave a planet that is habitable enough to support them.  We can no longer afford to shackle ourselves to a status quo that is primarily oriented to protecting the interests of bankers, insiders and the wealthy few.  We must stop encouraging profit-making on wasteful uses of natural resources like fossil fuels.  And we should find ways to shift our economies to healthier and more sustainable activities than profligate consumption, wars, predatory banking, gambling, alcohol, drugs, and unhealthy fast foods.

The Earth Manifesto contains wide-ranging and far-reaching ideas about how to improve our societies.  These ideas are summarized in specific detailed plans for a better future in Part Four.  The implementation of sensible ideas like these would help ensure that human civilizations act more intelligently and sustainably, rather than continuing to have deleterious and inimical impacts on the prospects of future generations. 

My intuition tells me that a more “feminine” approach of sensible collaboration and fair-minded compromise would be the most propitious way to address growing global problems, and a better way than continuing to encourage the perpetuation of the macho status quo of ruthless competition, extreme political partisanship, increasing inegalitarianism, exacerbated conflicts, religious intolerance, repressive rule, uncompromising aggression, militarism and terrorist opposition.  Enough yang!  More yin!!

Essential and vitally important perspectives are contained in this Feminine Vision.  My hope is that millions of people will eventually stumble upon these ideas and contentions, and carefully consider their implications.

 “To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like

     wandering about in a great library without touching the books.”

                                                                                 --- The Secret Teachings of All Ages

Cosmic Facts

Ancient peoples were much more attuned to the natural world than we are today.  They were aware, for instance, that every star in the night sky always appears to revolve around the North Star.  It turns out, of course, that there is a very good explanation for this phenomenon.  The Earth spins around its rotational axis once every 24 hours, so the North Star, which happens to be located in a nearly direct line with the Earth’s axis above the North Pole, appears to be stationary, and all the other stars maintain a stately positional relationship with each other as they seemingly revolve around the North Star every night.  Scientists call the North Star Polaris.  It is a star 2,500 times more luminous than the Sun.  Its great distance of 430 light years from the Earth makes it only a relatively bright star, though it is the brightest star in the region of the sky where it is located.

Ancient peoples saw patterns of stars in the sky and named these constellations by projecting a Zodiac of mythological deities and creatures upon them.  My favorite constellation is Cassiopeia.  This is a group of five bright stars that forms a skewed W-shape in the night sky which is visible from everywhere in the northern hemisphere.  It is a constellation that can be seen on a dark and starry night standing out from a wide swath of dense background luminosity that extends across the heavens, which is the millions of stars in the plane of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.  The bottom three stars in Cassiopeia form a triangle which can be used to point directly across the sky to locate the North Star.  The Big Dipper is the main constellation that is traditionally used to locate the North Star, and when the Big Dipper is descending toward the horizon, Cassiopeia is conveniently rising and comes to the rescue of navigators and others who seek directional guidance. 

In Greek Mythology, Cassiopeia was a beautiful and vain queen of Ethiopia, and Poseidon, the ruling god of the sea, was said to have placed Cassiopeia in the heavens as punishment for having boasted that she and her mortal daughter Andromeda were more beautiful than the purportedly lovely divine sea nymphs, the Nereids.  Vanity and obtuseness sure can enmesh one in troubles!

Trust me;  the issue of guidance is vital to humanity.  We collectively could use better guidance than we have gotten from our leaders over the past century.  Bad guidance seems to rule the day almost everywhere.  This appears to be due to the fact that our societies are driven by hyper-competitive, domineering, macho, exploitive, nature-defiling, materialistic, destructive, oppressive, patriarchal, misogynistic, and militaristic masculine forces.  It is time that feminine forces are empowered that give greater respect to accurate understandings and cooperative problem-solving and collaborative efforts to honestly and more fairly address the escalating global problems that face humanity today. 

The propitiousness of guidance physically found in the night skies points to this broader need for a better and more ecologically sane guidance for each of us individually and all of us collectively, in the face of daunting existential challenges.  We are like lost lambs, a flock of insecure and needy and delusional animals that are being exploited by ruthlessly powerful people to satisfy their greed and lust for greater wealth and privileges.  Our shy bleating voices are ignored, and shrewd players manipulate us for their own narrow benefit in our capitalist economic systems. 

A Call for a Bill of Rights for Future Generations

Thomas Paine wrote 234 years ago in Common Sense that, with the growth in the number of people living together in modern societies, it is necessary to design a system of representation that modifies simple democracy into a form of governance that is capable of “embracing and confederating all the various interests” that compete for advantages and privileges and wealth and ascendancy.  We must find better ways of doing this, and in particular, we must avoid disenfranchising people who are too young to vote and betraying the potential well-being of all those in future generations.  To do this, we should responsibly create a Bill of Rights for Future Generations, as advocated by the Cousteau Society and the Home Page of the Earth Manifesto.

Many things are desirable from the standpoint of society as a whole, like a strong national defense, strong protections of citizens by police and firefighters, a fair system of laws and justice and courts and prisons, well-run government agencies to protect citizens from abuses, well-maintained roads and water systems and power grids and other physical infrastructure, good public schools, emergency disaster relief programs, protected public lands and National Parks, and an affordable social safety net for the aged and homeless and extremely poor.  Since these things are vitally important for a healthy modern society, it makes sense to have them financed by the populace in general. 

But we collectively seem to want “to eat our cake and have it too”;  we want these social goods, but we do not want to pay for them.  So in recent decades we have expediently indulged in fiscally irresponsible deficit spending, foisting costs onto taxpayers in the future by running large deficits and borrowing large sums of money. 

Ironically, conservatives have been the ones who have been responsible for ramping up the national debt the most radically.  During Ronald Reagan’s eight years as President, the national debt increased 208%.  During the four years of the administration of George H. Bush, the debt increased 56%;  during George W. Bush’s administration, the debt increased 77%.  In contrast, during the eight years of the Presidency of Bill Clinton, the federal deficit increased just 40%.  It is curious that, despite deceptive rhetoric by Republicans in opposition to big government, federal spending under the last five Republican Presidents since the 1960’s increased by an average of 22%, while it increased by an average of 11% under Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. 

It is only the discipline of the right-wing messaging machine that convinces us it is Democrats rather than Republicans who are the most profligate with the public’s money and borrowings!

Deficit spending is a highly undisciplined course of action which is feasible only because all Americans under the age of 18, and all those yet to be born, have no voice in our political system.  This is an egregious and reprehensible form of taxation without representation.  This is one reason that the Cousteau Society calls for a Bill of Rights for Future Generations to prevent such rash tyranny.  Deficit spending is a fiscal indignity that mortgages the future, adding to many other serious affronts to our heirs in the form of our profligate wasting of resources, the dumping of pollutants and toxins and greenhouse gases into the commons, the myopic damaging of ecosystems, and the assaults, both intentional and inadvertent, on the biological diversity of life on Earth.

Obstacles in the Path of Social Improvement

The three dominant categories of social institutions in modern human civilizations are churches and corporations and governments.  All three of these kinds of institutions are failing us today in times of increasingly desperate need.  All of them are subject to a variety of influences that pervert and corrupt their purposes.  Money and power are the most distinct of these influences. 

Money buys politicians and influence, just as it did in Mark Twain's day when he observed that "We have the best government that money can buy."  Make no mistake about it, Twain was being cynical;  we did not have good government in his day, and the extent to which Big Money buys our representatives and dictates our policies today ensures that we will not have populist good government as long as Big Money is allowed to play such a dominant role in influencing our attitudes and determining our national and state and local policies.  Hopes for political solutions to the overarching problems that we face in the world seem to be diminishing as a result of extreme partisanship and vested interest dominance and uncompromising political intransigence in the United States.  This is another reason we need far-reaching reforms of our dysfunctional political system and the institutional bribery that drives it.

An “ethical rot” has been taking place in Washington D.C. in recent decades due to the enormous amount of money that is being spent on lobbying activities to get our representatives to give vested interests what they want.  This has contributed to many federal government failings.  Robert Kaiser writes provocatively about this in his book, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government.  We should find better ways to limit the influence of lobbyists and the role that Big Money plays in financing election campaigns and bending our representatives to narrowly-focused goals.

Eleven score and fourteen years ago, revolutionary issues stirred the American colonies.  The desire for independence from monarchial mercantilist Britain was strong, and so was anger at taxation without representation.  Let us pause and reflect as July 4, 2010 recedes into history (the date these words were originally written), and as the issues of today percolate in the interstices of our minds.  Much must be done!

   “It is time to gather the women and save the world.”

                                               --- Urgent Message from Mother, Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D.

On Freedom

One of the most profound aspects of the great American experiment in freedom and democracy is that it resonates with the human heart and spirit, and encompasses deep human desires to be able to think and act without undue restriction or repression.  Freedom is arguably America’s most important idea;  it is humanity’s “magnetic true north.”  People love to be able to do what they want to do, and to go where they want to go, and to buy what they need and desire.  Even more deeply, they want to be free from financial insecurity and from worries about medical care when they need it and from fears associated with the challenging and stressful struggle to make an adequate living.  Obviously, those who inherit a lot of money or who make and save a lot of money have much greater financial freedom than others. 

Freedom has curiously become a hotly contested idea, corrupted by radical conservatives to mean things that are antithetical to the idea of simple freedom.  In Whose Freedom? -- The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea, cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff explores the stark contrast between the idea of freedom that progressives hold and the idea of freedom held by radical conservatives.  Using deep psychological framing, the concept of freedom can be transmuted through misinformation and repetitive assertions into narrow rationalizations that are socially irresponsible, cold-hearted, aggressively manipulative, anarchic, slavishly doctrinaire, anti-tax, anti-government, and ecologically disastrous.

A clear and far-seeing progressive narrative is needed to combat this distortion of values.  Ideas matter.  Ideas have consequences.  Ideas are transformed into policies and actions that deeply affect people’s lives.  Modern freedoms are unprecedented in the extent to which they include expanded work and travel opportunities and higher standards of living.  These freedoms allow us to acquire better knowledge and more accurate understandings, and they extend our horizons and perspectives.  But at the same time, wider choices create heightened insecurities and daunting new uncertainties and greater psychological challenges in dealing with increasing complexity and rapid change.  A multitude of conflicting worldviews and vested interests strive to persuade us of their own version of "truths", and these contentions often obfuscate truths that resonate more closely with our personal experiences. 

Make no mistake about it, more extensive knowledge is available to humankind today than ever before in human history.  This knowledge is widely disseminated in schools, books, newspapers, magazines, films, and the Internet, but it requires critical thinking skills that allow us to more clearly interpret and understand reality.  It is time for us to use this awareness to effect salubrious changes in our societies to ensure a greater probability of well-being and health and the sustainability and survival of our species.

Radical conservatives speak of freedom as meaning paying less taxes, striving for security by having a strong and aggressive military, being allowed unrestricted rights to own guns for self-protection, and being able to pursue self-interest with minimal restrictions and to exploit natural resources and engage in development without government interference.  They also tend to believe freedom is best assured by having a retributive justice system that harshly punishes those who do wrong, and having a minimum of regulations which govern business competition and property ownership.

In contrast, progressive-minded people believe in different ways of ensuring freedom.  They believe that freedom is best achieved by guaranteeing equal rights to women and men;  by ensuring fairness of opportunity and legal justice and good public education for all;  by enforcing rules that make competition fair and that protect consumers from monopoly practices;  by focusing the economic system on healthy communities and general prosperity and the common good rather than the privileges of the wealthy;  by protecting workers from corporate abuses and workplace hazards and environmental degradation;  by establishing a progressive tax structure which ensures the common wealth and helps build a solid infrastructure from which individual freedoms are maximized;  by taking effective steps to prevent the economic and political systems from being jerry-rigged in ways that increasingly concentrate wealth and power and influence in the hands of the few;  by maintaining an affordable social safety net for all that assures adequate medical care and prevents dire poverty in old age;  by having a fair legal system that protects people from injustice and discrimination and hate;  by having a political system that demands honesty and openness and cooperative problem-solving and fair representation;  by ensuring that “tragedy of the commons” outcomes are prevented through the protection from degradation of parks, public lands, open spaces, national forests, wilderness areas, streams, oceans, fisheries, public beaches, aquifers, and the atmosphere;  and by requiring that the interests of future generations be protected from pollution, resource depletion, habitat destruction, environmental harm, widespread species extinctions, disruptions of the economic system and enormous public debt.

In the progressive vision of freedom, there must be an effective separation of church and state, so that every person has religious freedom, but no one can impose their beliefs on anyone else who happens to believe in a different God, or no God at all.  In the conservative view, there is only one true God, and social conservatives and religious fundamentalists want the guaranteed right to try to convert others to believing in their God by having prayer in public schools and the Ten Commandments posted in public buildings.  They want the government to let “faith-based initiatives” determine how poverty and charity are handled and they want to deny women the ability to decide how to plan their families and to make reproductive choices in their lives.  I strongly believe that progressive attitudes are most important, and that reactionary conservatism is the wrong approach to healthier societies.

I also believe that we must reject the narrow orthodoxy of established worldviews that say we should embrace unfettered capitalism and believe in a jealous God who will punish us and our descendents to the third and fourth generation for believing in any truths that are broader and more modern and more ecumenical and more honest and more ecologically wholesome than the ones adduced in various holy books.  We must reject racism, discriminatory biases, nationalistic aggression, hatred and religion-stoked conflicts, and begin to pour our energies into an epic effort to improve the quality of life of the majority today, while at the same time protecting the prospects of future generations. 

Why Anima Should Reign

Each and every person has both male and female aspects of their true inner selves.  These natural aspects of our beings are complementary, and they have dark sides as well as bright sides.  Our cultures too often either suppress feminine sensibilities or dismiss them as something impractical or irrelevant or shameful or harmful.

The masculine and feminine natures of our subconscious minds are influenced by hormones and genetic predispositions, as well as by the learned roles we all have internalized as fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters.  These important aspects of our collective unconscious were first described by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who said that every male has within his unconscious mind a feminine inner personality, or anima.  He also said that every female correspondingly has within her unconscious mind a male inner personality, or animus.  Borrowing these terms, anima is used herein to represent the feminine psychological aspects of the conscious and unconscious mind of all people, male and female, and animus is used to represent the masculine aspects of our minds. 

Both the anima and the animus within us have noble and ignoble characteristics.  Our masculine aspects are noble in their loyalty and heroism and protectiveness, while their darker side is characterized by violence and bullying and cruelty.  Our feminine aspects are noble in their empathy and compassion and generous-heartedness and sensitivity and love, while their shadow side is displayed in their manipulative cunning, masochism, and passive-aggressive qualities. 

Faced with the mounting challenges of modern times and the mess that men have made with their domineering aggression and lack of empathy, I feel strongly that it is time we “think outside the box” and let our repressed inner anima’s rule.  Our inner animuses must yield their obsessions with dominion and control, and we must all cultivate a better balance between the feminine and masculine in our psyches! 

Feminine ways of being in the world are generally more receptive and nurturing than traditional male modes of acting.  This is why it is my conviction that we need a much better balance between feminine wisdom and exploitive masculine dominance in our patriarchal world.

The best leadership is arguably one that emphasizes teamwork rather than authoritarian command and control, and which strives to work together toward common goals.  Dr. Alice Eagly, a scholar on gender and leadership, recently stated that her studies show that women are more likely than men to possess the leadership qualities associated with success.  She noted that women are more inspirational and transformational leaders than men, that they often listen better, that they tend to stimulate their employees to think "outside the box", and that they care more about developing their followers.  She also pointed out that women are generally more ethical than male leaders.  

Leaders are truly transformational when they increase awareness of what is right, good and important, and when they help elevate followers’ needs for achievement and self-actualization, and when they move followers to go beyond their self-interests for the good of their group or organization or society.  Professor Bernard Bass, who has written books about transformational leadership, predicts that in the future women leaders will be more successful simply because they are better suited than men to the best practices of modern management and leadership. 

Larger Purposes and Breaking Through

The unique capability of human beings to have foresight allows us to control our destinies better than any other creature ever in existence on Earth.  This ability has also collectively given us greater control than any other animal ever in existence over the biotic destiny of our home planet, for better or for worse.  One would think that foresight would result in better stewardship of resources and Earth’s biodiversity, but it appears that this is often not the case due to the shortsightedness of our drives and compulsions and the dysfunctional and selfishly opportunistic “tragedy of the commons” nature of our economic and political systems.

The time has come today for courageous and transformative action to actually solve the epic challenges facing humanity.  It is time for us to honestly and boldly and intelligently use our foresight to achieve what John Steinbeck called “breaking through” on a wide front of the most important problems that confront us.  NOW is the time to transcend political intransigence and vested interest opposition, and to begin to embrace better practices and make wiser plans.  NOW is the time to adopt saner ideas for a sustainable future. 

The time has come to reject the status quo of wasteful consumerism and increasing inequities.  We must stop allowing corporations to externalize costs onto society and the environment.  We must take bold steps to end our risky and polluting addiction to fossil fuels.  We must cease indulging in intergenerational exploitation and rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul Ponzi schemes.  We must strive to prevent violent conflicts.  And we must take courageous steps to make contraceptives and sensible family planning measures available to all people who want them.

The search for meaning, for true self, is what mythologist Joseph Campbell referred to as the hero’s journey.  Campbell believed in the importance of a muse that leads the mythic hero toward his or her poetic destiny.  In this mythic dimension, the hero makes a spiritual quest toward self-realization, and pushes the horizons of his or her vision to ever larger vistas.  We each make our own hero’s journey of coping and survival and creativity and self-expression.  The time has come today for everyone to become a little bit more of a hero in their own communities by striving to help make the world a better place.

Joseph Campbell had a similar belief to Carl Jung, who felt that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals.  Jung believed that our main task in life is to discover and fulfill our deep innate potential, much as an acorn strives to attain its potential of becoming a mature, majestic oak tree.  Based on his study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and other religious traditions, Jung perceived that this journey of transformation, which he called individuation, is at the mystical heart of all religions.  This journey to meet the self is a dynamic spiritual experience that he regarded as essential to our well-being.  The fullest realization of this personal development, like Abraham Maslow’s highest state of self-actualization in his pyramid of human needs, is a complete integration of conscious awareness and wisdom and creativity and intuitive sensitivity and inner integrity.  To become better citizens and to act in ways that are saner and more holistic, I believe that every person must begin to embrace healthier ecological perspectives in our search for purpose and meaning.

I delve in this Feminine Vision into fascinating aspects of relationships between men and women and the underlying masculine and feminine impulses of our beings.  But one topic has risen like butter in churned milk toward the top of these thoughts, and that is the issue of military conflicts and their relationship to the domination of politics by men in nations and churches worldwide.  Remain alert for the very interesting insights that follow this important digression into the counterproductive nature of American militarism and empire-building.

Reigning versus Ruling, or the Carrot versus the Stick

Plato was one of the earliest philosophers in written history.  More than 2,400 years ago he wrote a number of philosophical speculations, including his famous book The Republic, in which he investigated the nature of justice and opined that rule by a benevolent “philosopher king” would be the best way to govern a nation.  Plato had seen the shortcomings of control by elite oligarchs and alternating episodes of democratic rule in his native Greece, so he disdained both of those types of governments.  He was no doubt correct that wise and benevolent philosophers could theoretically provide the best guidance for good governance, but history has shown that such kinds of people are exceedingly hard to find, and they rarely rise to power. 

In the French language, the queen is “la reine”.  Adopting a meaning of reigning as being a benevolent form of rule by a sovereign who is dedicated to a feminine anima wisdom, I assert that reigning would be better than ruling to achieve social justice and peaceful coexistence.

Reigning is better than ruling because it embraces a reasonable modicum of social justice and gives higher value to domestic priorities than foreign interventionism in guns-versus-butter arguments.  It also honors incentives and disincentives rather than the use of force and harsh punishments.  Ruling generally requires repressively authoritarian governance in order to enforce its defense of inegalitarianism and associated increases in the disparities of power and privileges and prerogatives between the fortunate few and the vast majority.  Greed, hubris, nationalistic fervor, and Machiavellian manipulation of the fears of the masses keep us in costly arms races and endless wars, partially because ruling tends to be oriented toward endless war and militaristic empire-building.  This is stupid!

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.  Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

                                                                                --- Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

Let’s create a strong Pro-Peace movement, and subject the military-industrial complex to tighter control and less extravagant spending.  Let me make one thing perfectly clear:  it was distinctly unfortunate that the anti-war movement of the Sixties and Seventies was shrewdly eviscerated by the authorities when they eliminated mandatory conscription into the armed services.  The dastardly, fateful and dreaded military draft was fairer than the current system because it required all men to serve their country, not just ones with no better opportunities.  The creation of “all-volunteer” armed forces made it much easier for our nation to get involved in wars because only an economic underclass risks their lives in combat, and this minority has little voice or political power. 

The military-industrial-Congressional-media complex is strengthened when there is no draft.  This endangers our liberties and democratic processes, as war hero Dwight Eisenhower pointed out in his provocative 1961 warning to the nation about the military-industrial complex.  We should strive, as Ike said, to ensure that “security and liberty may prosper together.”

The anti-war movement during the Vietnam War gained much of its power on campuses and in cities because of the intense interest in self-preservation that affected young men of that era.  We crow about freedom, but tend to turn a blind eye to the terribly disproportionate disparity between classes of people in the amount of freedom they have to choose NOT to fight in wars.  Morally and ethically, this all-volunteer militarism is clearly an odd proposition in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Why We Must Strive to Achieve Peaceful Coexistence rather than Warring Dominance

  “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”

                                                            --- Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

War can be a psychological and economic addiction that facilitates the use of violence as a means of addressing problems.  But wars should be used only as a defensive last resort.  Powerful forces in our society unfortunately tend to inject us into costly wars for a variety of motives, many of which are deeply unethical.

President Harry Truman called profiteering on war a form of treason.  Ah, the good old days of “the buck stops here” straight-forward honesty!  That was long before the military-industrial-congressional-media complex turned war profiteering into a central economic and political organizing principle of our nation. 

When the Cold War ended, the military-industrial complex and its shadow contingent of facilitators needed a new enemy to sustain its power.  With communism effectively emasculated as an oppositional force around which to organize fear and mistrust and hate, a new enemy was needed to distract the public from domestic inequities and to ensure the growth of power and profits in armaments and war services industries.  This new enemy was ‘conveniently’ found in terrorism and in Islam, a religion that competes worldwide with Christian sects for power and influence. 

Many Islamic peoples have had their lands occupied by foreigners for decades, and severe economic sanctions have been used against them time and again.  These sources of guaranteed friction promise a long and endless instigation of conflict.  We must stop overlooking the deep cultural differences that exist between the United States and the Islamic Middle East.  In the United States, the influence of Western religions’ concept of “original sin” infuses our culture with a historical tradition of individual and collective guilt.  Islamic cultures do not have this guilt-trip mentality, but instead are highly sensitive to shame at what others regard as weaknesses or humiliations or failures to fulfill expectations.  Guilt-cultures and shame-cultures have quite different moral values and social mores.  This is one reason we Westerners cannot understand the bizarre motives behind “honor killings” and the harsh, women-oppressive provisions underlying Islamic Shariah laws.

I have a premise that the pen, upon occasion, can be figuratively far more impactful than the sword.  I hope that the effective use of this potential power of written expression will help control international impulses toward wasteful and destructive militarism and underhanded intrigue and the blowback terrorism that it engenders.  This is a primary motive for the time I have spent writing the Earth Manifesto.

The 9/11 attacks gave the cowboy-mentality president George W. Bush (“you’re either with us or against us”) a convenient pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.  In doing so, our nation inadvertently stumbled into a hornet’s nest of conflict that will make international strife worse for decades.  It will also make terrorist blowback more dangerous and significantly more likely for generations.  Historians point out that the Islamic world has already felt a deep sense of humiliation and shame at being dominated and exploited by Western nations in the past century.  History indicates that our hubris-filled meddling in the affairs of nations in the Middle East has been extensive, from actions in World War I and World War II to the 1953 overthrow of the Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran in a coup d’etat supported by the CIA that brought the Shah and his repressive dictatorship to power.  Mossadegh had been democratically elected, so this puts the hypocrisy of subsequent rationalizations about bringing democracy to the Middle East in a clearer and more suspect perspective.  This meddling has continued with severe economic sanctions and wars and epic military occupations of nations in the Middle East by the U.S. in the past two decades.

We would be wise to develop more enlightened foreign policies.  Check out Reflections on War in Part Three of the Earth Manifesto for incisive insights into the historic motives and consequences of war and aggression and militarism and empire building.  A safer and saner world can be achieved, in my opinion, not by demonizing others and dividing people, but in finding ways to work together for the common good.  Making religious enemies is a pathetic and counterproductive way to try to achieve this!

There is obviously great potential danger in demonizing a religion that has more than a billion adherents worldwide.  Such efforts are destined to strengthen what they oppose.  So instead of being able to unite people in effectively addressing vitally important and growing global problems, conflicts over religious differences force us to waste enormous amounts of energy and time and money.  Terrorism is accurately seen as a tactic of the weak and the poor, while aggressive warfare is a terror-inducing tactic of the rich that is designed to reinforce the power and prerogatives of the wealthy.

Religion and war often seem to go hand in hand.  Religion is like a drug, a feel-good drug of belonging and shared community.  But this drug is laced with opiates that appeal to the masses because they idolize duty and serve to numb our awareness.  Religion is a seductive and addictive drug that strives to stave off existential fears and insecurities by offering compensatory hopes of a better life-after-death as a reward for docilely accepting the harsh inequities in this life.  The fact that religious leaders often support political leaders who work to increase social inequalities should give us pause, and should dispose us to doubt that religious establishments have primarily ethical and moral influences.

It is deeply ironic that one of the main reasons that we cast our hopes so desperately to the heavens is that on Earth the powerful and ruthless guardians of the status quo adamantly refuse to allow our economic and social systems to be transformed into fairer systems in which people’s real needs today are more propitiously satisfied. 

“Throughout my fifty years of activism, both inside and outside the system, one hard

   lesson has become clear to me from experience:  Domestic progress has been continually

    derailed by dubious wars.”

                           --- Tom Hayden, The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama

The Establishments of both religions and political parties manipulate people’s emotions and exploit fear and guilt and shame for their own narrow purposes.  When religious leaders offer people hope of an afterlife in Heaven, one goal of this doctrine is to ensure that the faithful continue to work hard and keep their minds on a hypothetical next life, rather than on things like insurrection (or on a place like George Orwell’s ‘Sugarcandy Mountain’ in his biting satire Animal Farm).  Established religions espouse such implausible fabrications in order to help them maintain the status quo of their power and influence.  They thus often collaborate with Machiavellian interests and political authorities to prevent people from demanding fairer policies in the here-and-now, or from rejecting authority and war, or from demanding real and significant change today.  Let’s really give peace a chance! 

Economic and Environmental Justice Now

Let us also strive to create greater social justice in our societies.  One of the most vitally important aspects of social justice is environmental justice.  There is an extensive extent to which economic good fortune insulates the fortunate from environmental hazards like toxic wastes, polluted air, pesticides, food poisoning, and inadequate supplies or poor quality of fresh drinking water.  Poor people are frequently subject to greater risks than others of ill health, poor nutrition, neighborhood degradation, workplace hazards, stresses related to economic insecurity, environmental harm and natural disasters. 

Because of the integral aspects of “location, location, location” in home and real estate priorities, and due to the associated consequences of NIMBY zoning (“Not in My Back Yard”), the more money a person has, the safer they tend to be from environmental risks, as well as from dangers of accidental injury or death due to exposure, crime, addiction to hard drugs, medical errors, and emergency room inadequacies.  Should we not pledge allegiance to a nation that truly offers liberty and justice, more equally, for all?

The primary instruments of economic justice are progressive taxation, fair-minded rules of law, smart regulations, and social justice initiatives.  Economic security and equality of opportunity have been worsening in the past three decades, primarily because the public instruments for promoting opportunity and redressing inequality have all been weakened, and because unions in the private sector have largely been emasculated.  Unions helped build a vibrant middle class between World War II and the retrogressive Reagan Revolution, and they are potentially the most effective grassroots means for achieving economic justice. 

Economic injustices persist and have gotten worse partially because of the lop-sided power of financial and economic elites in our nation.  An energized grassroots social movement is needed to pressure President Obama and Congress to respect the pocketbook needs of regular citizens.  Otherwise, vested interests corrupt our national decision-making.  A boldly persuasive narrative is needed to drive progressive and socially-advantageous change and to displace powerful CEOs and Wall Street insiders from their dominating position that allows them to gather benefits for themselves at the expense of the majority of Americans.

“Rarely has there been a contrast between two back-to-back presidents who are more different than George W. Bush and Barack Obama.  Hardly ever has there been a severe economic crisis that more thoroughly discredited a failed economic order (in this case, the prevailing conservative ideologies of deregulation, bubble economics, hyped-up risk-taking, leveraged speculation and corrupt crony capitalism).  But remarkably, when it came to financial policy and extreme deference to Wall Street at the expense of the American people on Main Street, seldom has there been more policy continuity between the outgoing administration and its successor, as represented by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the Chairman of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers.”

         --- Robert Kuttner (paraphrased), A Presidency in Peril, The Inside Story of Obama’s

               Promise, Wall Street’s Power, and the Struggle to Control Our Economic Future

In the hard-fought struggle between capital and labor during the Industrial Era, capital has generally had the upper hand.  In the past 30 years, an ideological resurgence of ruthless laissez-faire capitalism has led to crushing defeats for collective bargaining in almost every sector of the economy, other than in government.  This contrast is extreme, for in government there is not an overweening dog-eat-dog strife for bottom-line profits;  instead, in fact, government is much more egalitarian and generous with taxpayer money, so the goals of government are almost contrary to getting maximum productivity from workers, or rigorously controlling costs, or minimizing employee headcount.  We need fairer and more sensible ways of doing business in both the private and public sectors!

Life Out of Balance

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to make truly transformative changes in order to address extreme injustices or deal with a desperate crisis or remedy either pathological conditions or systemic failures, we must honestly and courageously come to grips with the real nature of the problem in its broadest context and see what the causes are, not just the symptoms.  We must comprehend the alternatives as well as the probable consequences of various courses of action. 

Knowledge and understanding are called for, not ignorance and denial.  Resilience and flexibility and open-mindedness are needed rather than fanatical dogmatism and stubborn intransigence and blind reaction.  The global challenges facing humanity are far-reaching and unprecedented in scope.  We are failing to manage our economies in ways that prevent overarching systemic risks;  injustices and inequalities are becoming extreme;  intergenerational inequities of debt and externalized costs are unsustainable;  non-renewable resources are being rapidly depleted and many other resources are being over-harvested;  the environment is being damaged;  global climate disruptions are becoming more critical as we spew billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year;  and we are driving untold numbers of species of life to extinction through habitat destruction, undermining the healthy ecological balance upon which the survival and flourishing of our civilizations depend.

In our sound-bite-driven politics, the American people often fail to understand the complexity of our society.  The retrogressive Tea Party, for instance, criticizes taxes and spending and budget deficits, but they have no good proposals for where to cut government spending and how to best ensure full employment and manage the whole economy.  Their mantra is to cut taxes, but this dogma has been tried, and it has been a failure.  During the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, large tax cuts resulted in great benefits for the wealthiest Americans but more than a trillion dollars in additional debt.  Simultaneously the number of people living below the poverty level increased to 44 million, the highest number ever recorded by the Census Bureau since they began tracking this statistic 51 years ago.  The inegalitarian policies which have led to this outcome are an outrage, so the structural underpinnings of poverty must be addressed.  As Albert Einstein is attributed to have stated, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” 

Having had a cocktail and being in a generous and heartily egalitarian mood at a fun dinner party not long ago, it came as a surprise to me to stumble into a conversation with a smirky self-styled conservative woman who spouted venom at Democratic politicians and extolled her admiration of Ayn Rand and Sarah Palin.  She summarily professed beliefs that were diametrically opposed to almost everything my experience tells me is true.  When I mentioned that I felt strongly that a greater modicum of social justice and less inequality in our societies would make all Americans more secure, her attitude said, “I spit on social justice”, as if it were some sort of communist wrongheadedness that was somehow fascist at the same time. 

We live in a bizarre world indeed, with so much of what passes for political discourse in America resembling closed-mindedness and intellectual dishonesty and involving self-righteousness and anger and goading others and personal attacks and arguing off the point and an excess of emotional irrationality.  No wonder we fail to find common ground, when so many seek to demonize others and to deny the validity and importance of ecological and social truths. 

Amongst the marvelous diversity of the millions of species of life in existence today, Homo sapiens have been successful in part because of our cultural evolution and our ability to use insight and forethought and education to utilize fire and tools and clothing and shelter and agriculture and animal husbandry and technological innovation to survive and prosper.  It is instructive to realize that this cultural evolution has been the result of a dynamic balance between preserved knowledge and tradition, on the one hand, and flexibility, open-mindedness, innovation and willingness to try new things, on the other.  Today, the strife between change-averse conservatives and progressive-minded people is intense and unsettling, and entrenched interests are using doctrinal arguments and the power of their dominating influence to oppose all change, even that which is ecologically intelligent and fairer and most likely to lead to reforms and sustainable survival advantages for our species as a whole.

Ideas to Live By

In Greek mythology, the god Apollo was a son of Zeus, the ruler of the universe.  Apollo was said to embody spiritual clarity and moral discipline in ancient Greece.  Two wise maxims were carved in stone in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess”.  This is wise advice!  A trip to Delphi was, for many centuries, a spiritual experience that offered hope of enlightening revelation.  Say, maybe we could use more of that today!

Jesus taught the Golden Rule, which is the essential basis for the modern concept of human rights.  Emblazoned in the ethics of the Golden Rule, or the “ethic of reciprocity”, is the notion that we should treat others the way we ourselves would like to be treated.  Live and let live!

“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion.  It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology.  Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity.  Buddhism answers this description.  If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.  If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”

                                                                                                             --- Albert Einstein

A voice spoke to me from within, urging that the religion of the future must embrace positive moral visions of the collective good, not just for believers and a narrow-minded “in group”, but for all of humanity and the natural ecosystems upon which our well-being depends.  This new religion must be oriented toward unity, ecumenism, spiritual honesty, expansiveness, fairness, and a respect for ecological interconnectedness and interdependence, and NOT on divisiveness, parochialism, preposterous myths, archaic misconceptions, patriarchal domination, wasteful dissipation, reactionary traditionalism, myopia, fundamentalism, absolutism, discrimination, bigotry or hate masquerading as love.  See the Earth Manifesto’s Revelations of a Modern Prophet for further insights, and Comprehensive Global Perspective:  An Illuminating Worldview.

Introducing a Great Gal and Her Perspectives

Tiffany Shlain is a filmmaker and founder of the annual Webby Awards which recognize and honor the world’s best websites on the Internet.  She is working on the completion of her new film Connected: A Declaration of Interdependence, which has strong parallels to the ideas in the Comprehensive Global Perspective. 

In this year’s Commencement Speech at UC Berkeley on May 17, 2010, Ms. Shlain provided graduates with a number of wise observations and ideas.  One of them was essentially this:  Have moxie in the face of difficulties, but also remember to not take yourself so seriously that you are unable to occasionally laugh at yourself!  The gist of her message to graduating students dovetails with the basic thrust of the ideas in the Earth Manifesto.  We need creative and energetic young people to boldly step forward to help make the world a better place.  There is much that urgently needs to be accomplished!

Tiffany Shlain is a philosophical soul mate and champion of those who embrace bold activism, saying that to make our lives and the world better, we need to “invoke a little moxie”.  She said that to accomplish great things, a salubrious combination is needed of farsighted vision and bold commitments and persistence.  She honors Goethe’s famous quote, "Whatever you think or dream you can do, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power and magic to it." 

One of the most successful businesswomen of the nineteenth century, Barbe-Nicole Cliquot Ponsardin (the widow, or veuve, Cliquot) once wrote to her great-granddaughter in the last years of her long life:  “The world is in perpetual motion, and we must invent the things of tomorrow.  One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence direct your life.  Act with audacity.”

The gauntlet has been thrown.  “Let’s roll”, as they say!  Note, parenthetically, that Ms. Shlain is the daughter of the late surgeon and insightful polymath Dr. Leonard Shlain, whose compelling ideas are central to a clearer conception of who we are as human beings, and how we got to be this way.  Dr. Shlain’s important ideas about the biological and social and ecological implications of our existence and behaviors are explored in detail below.

Think for a moment about the nature of our societies and women’s roles in them.  Mark Twain wrote in his Notebook in 1895:

“We easily perceive that the peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart -- and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.  But we are so stupid that we can’t see that we thus plainly admit that no civilization can be perfect until exact equality between man and woman is included.”

Maybe Samuel Clemens really did transcend some of the biggest prejudices of his times, and surely his legacy lives on in my great granddaughterly perspectives, as a testament to a fairer idea whose time is in the process of arriving!

Introspection into the Relations between “Guys and Dolls”

“When you see a guy reach for stars in the sky
  You can bet that he's doing it for some doll.”

…
  “When a lazy slob takes a goody steady job,
    And he smells from Vitalis and Barbasol.
     Call it dumb, call it clever
      Ah, but you can get odds forever
      That the guy's only doing it for some doll.”

       --- Lyrics sung by the character Nicely-Nicely Johnson in the musical Guys and Dolls

“Guys” and “dolls” exhibit some fascinating and quite curious characteristics.  Each of us, being immersed in the deep interpersonal and cultural well of human interactions, usually tends to see this remarkable ‘dance of selves in relationship’ as just “the same old story, the fight for love and glory.”  But one might wonder how all these behavioral propensities actually came to be.  The exploration of this question leads to an investigation into why the physiology of our bodies, and the drives of our hormones and neurochemicals, and the transcendent thoughts and obsessions of our brains, have developed as they have.

Leonard Shlain provocatively explores these topics in his fascinating book, Sex, Time, and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution.  He ambitiously proposed to present “a scenario for how the kaleidoscopic, maddening, exciting, enchanting, and baffling man-woman dance, more commonly known as ‘a relationship’, evolved.”  At the very advent of our species and the dawn of our existence, human females were faced with an ultimate existential challenge, known as the “obstetrical dilemma”.  Babies were being born with ever-bigger heads through very tight birth canals.  This created grave mortal dangers for mothers during difficult labor and deliveries.  An evolutionary savior was needed for our survival, and Natural Selection stumbled upon it in a trade-off compromise:  women gave birth to what are essentially more and more premature and helpless babies.  This resulted in children that were dependent on their parents for their safety and nourishment and development for an unusually prolonged period of time.  It became necessary for biological and social and cultural traits to evolve that ensured the flourishing of mothers and children.  What developed was a new kind of bonding between males and females in which the hunters and gatherers accepted highly specialized roles and a mutual interdependence on each other to ensure the survival and propagation of their offspring and our species.

People who study the extraordinary intricacies of evolutionary biology find adaptations that are specific to every species.  These adaptations are consistent with varying environments and conditions.  Closely related species, for instance, have distinct differences, like the famous finches of the various Galapagos Islands whose contrasting beaks were described by Charles Darwin after the second voyage of HMS Beagle in the 1830’s.  A far, far more interesting instance is at hand, however:  human beings!  We humans differ from our antecedent ancestors in a number of striking ways, as elucidated by Dr. Leonard Shlain in Sex, Time and Power.

Dr. Shlain cultivated a lively interest in matters related to our species and other life forms, and in the changes which have evolved in various species in general.  In Sex, Time and Power, Shlain delves into the curious interrelationships between Homo sapiens and Gyna sapiens, the males and females of our species.  He focuses on the biological adaptations that distinguish us from all other mammalian primates, as well as unusual physiological, sexual and behavioral characteristics of human beings.  He takes an insightful look into the implications of our walking upright, our big brains, our developing opposable thumbs, the difficulties of birth due to the growth in size of human babies’ heads, and our vocal structures that enable us to speak and communicate in an amazing variety of words and meaningful vocalizations.  He looks into all the odd contrasts of the characteristics of human females compared to females of our closest evolutionary relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos and other primates.  These unique human characteristics include sexy breasts, concealed fertility, risky monthly bleeding, helpless babies, long dependent childhoods, and the unusual sexual interest of males all the time rather than just when females are “in heat.”

Dr. Shlain speculated that long ago human females began to recognize the connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy, and when they did so, they became reluctant to engage in sex without considerable consideration of the potential commitment of the prospective mate to the support of the family and the children he might help conceive.  As a result, women began to be significantly more discerning about finding a good provider and an upstanding character, not just a man with good health and physique.  This attitude made verbal communication more important, and it significantly altered the relations between the genders.  It also led to a curious kind of literal as well as figurative “meat for sex” barter, and a negotiation in which sex was offered in exchange for security.  These ancient motives seem to underlie many of the modern behavioral interactions between men and women.  The intricate reasons for this are compelling.

To understand why these developments took place, it is necessary to realize that iron is a crucially important element in the elementary processes of oxygen delivery to the brain and to all other cells in the body.  Iron is critical for metabolism and proper cellular functioning.  Iron is the main constituent of hemoglobin in red blood cells.  Hemoglobin is an iron-rich protein that is uniquely suited to picking up oxygen from the lungs and releasing it to cells after the heart has pumped the blood to cells throughout the body.  The loss of iron by females during their monthly menses, together with the long-term requirements of women to care for their children, made it increasingly important for females to subvert the natural male impulse to spread his seed far and wide by getting him to bond with her and commit to the support and nurturance of her and her family.  Iron sufficiency is best guaranteed by eating meat, and in hunter-gatherer societies it was important for females to be able to procure meat from hunters by getting a male to commit to helping provide for her and her children.

Leonard Shlain’s sociobiological conceptions of human gender relations are a sophisticated update on the intriguing ideas of the zoologist Dr. Desmond Morris, as promulgated in his stunning 1967 book, The Naked Ape.  Morris speculated, for instance, that human females had developed alluring breasts to get males to approach females face to face rather than to just perfunctorily mount them from behind.  This required them to woo and cajole and negotiate.  This type of evolutionary development is a reflection of what Leonard Shlain calls Original Choice, in which women first began to barter for more commitment than females of most other species of life in the vital game of feeding and mating and rearing young.  Allure, permission, negotiation and obligation are surely all balled up together … Ah, love, what art thou?

John Gray is a psychologist who is highly sensitive to his inner anima.  He is famous for his groundbreaking exploration of communication and relationships between men and women in such books as Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.  Gray has recently published a new book titled Women on Fire, Men on Ice, in which he looks into modern scientific understandings of the roles that hormones play in human moods and feelings and relationships.  He points out that testosterone and oxytocin deeply affect people, and they have different effects in men than in women.  The hormone testosterone is associated with sexual aggression, arousal and lust in men, but in women it has a tendency to create more stress.  Oxytocin, the “cuddle hormone”, is associated with impulses in women toward tenderness and attachment and caregiving and reproduction, but in men it seems to create more stress.  John Gray claims that understanding the influences of hormones in relationships can help us manage stress and improve relationships.  He gives readers some ideas about how good nutrition and “superfoods” are needed to replenish vital hormones.  It seems likely to me that it would be healthful if we collectively understood genetic and hormonal influences of human behaviors in wider societal and ecological contexts.

Brain scientists have learned a lot in recent years about how genetic and hormonal influences affect our perceptions.  In addition, those who study human behavior have found fascinating influences in our unique individual experiences and in our social conditioning.  Studies of twins separated from each other at birth, for instance, have shed light in particularly interesting ways on the primacy of genes in forming our characters and our habits and our perceptions. 

In understanding human nature, we should not overlook the powerful affects of hormones on the brain in utero, in childhood, in adolescence, and in menopause and aging.  The provocative perspectives of Dr. Louann Brizendine on hormonal influences in human behaviors are valuable; check out her two books, The Female Brain and The Male Brain.  A good understanding of the motives behind people’s behaviors helps us to see why we need to redesign our economic systems and social security initiatives and environmental rules to create more effective incentives and disincentives that will clearly focus our national priorities on healthier communities and greater good goals and long-term sustainability.

Speaking of Evolution

We find ourselves here, now, aware, on a planet that majestically revolves around its axis once every 24 hours while it orbits around a star that is the center of a solar system which is spiraling around a vast conglomeration of stars known as the Milky Way Galaxy.  This galaxy is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies that are comprised of vast expanses of empty space interspersed with clumps of burning matter and orbiting planets that are hurtling together across the heavens.  It appears that all of these galaxies are being propelled away from some colossal explosion that must have taken place at the beginning of time.  Everything in the Universe is in continuous motion, from the atomic and microscopic level to the macrocosmic.  Everything, in other words, is changing all the time. 

The geophysical evolution of the Earth, as evidenced by erosion, landslides, floods, glacial activity, earth tremors, volcanic eruptions and a million other detectable daily changes, is merely a miniscule subset of this infinitely grander evolution of the Universe.  Life on Earth can be seen to have adapted over time to the physically changing conditions on the planet.  All species of life either succeed in adapting, or they become extinct.  More than 99% of all species of life ever in existence are now extinct due to the almost eternally endless challenges of the struggle to survive through normal competitive times as well as through a succession of catastrophic extinction events throughout the unfathomably long span of geological time.

   “Stop with that sharp articulation!”

                                                 --- Twain

Recent surveys curiously indicate that about 40% of Americans do not believe that life has evolved.  This is startling because, as Richard Dawkins has written, “Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun …”.

Most of those who disbelieve that life has evolved on Earth hold this view because they cling to religious dogmas that say humans have always existed in their present form, since a relatively recent beginning of Creation.  This is a denial of overwhelming evidence of biological change, and it also essentially denies the fact that geophysical change takes place continuously and that biological adaptation to changing climatic and ecological conditions over the eons is the only sensible way to explain the existence of so many forms of life almost perfectly adapted to current conditions.  The denial of such evidence of cumulative change is so bizarrely astonishing that one must resort to studies of psychology to explain such perversely pigheaded foolishness.  Mark Twain satirically ridiculed such incredible foolishness and the hypocrisies of humankind. 

Embraces of denial and self-delusion are truly startling in light of the growing urgency for us to better understand the world and our role in it, in order that our race will have better prospects of surviving and prospering.  We should all feel free to cling to whatever beliefs we like, and perhaps it does not matter if we are right or wrong about beliefs concerning evolution or Creationism.  There are, however, matters in which erroneous beliefs can be either personally or socially disastrous.  In such instances, it is vitally important to understand reality in accurate ways.  When stubbornly dogmatic beliefs have highly negative consequences for people’s welfare or the well-being of others, or for the future of our species, it is important to clearly and insightfully comprehend the way things really are.  In such instances, narrow convictions of absolute certainties relating to doctrinaire propaganda and myths and superstitions and cultivated confusion can be dangerous.  

   “Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see …”

                --- Lyrics from Strawberry Fields Forever by John Lennon of the Beatles

Misunderstanding arguably DOES matter a lot to all of us collectively.  Misunderstandings can lead to personal conflicts and social strife and wars and ecological devastation.

Thinking about Rainbows

Our minds are like the Internet.  They consist of billions of specialized cells called neurons that are networked together via miniscule electrical charges that pass over tiny synapses between cells.  Neurotransmitter chemicals and hormones convey messages between various parts of the brain and from other organs of the body.  The vast array of contents on the Internet actually provides a good Big Picture map of the total contents of our conscious and unconscious minds.  Our conscious thoughts are only “the tip of the iceberg” of all that goes on in our brains.  The Internet reflects a wide-ranging set of thoughts and feelings that is as diverse as philosophy and science and literature and art and music and videos and information and blogged perceptions and social networking communications and sex and pornography --- and far more.

Think about the ways our understandings are naturally limited.  Visible light, for instance, is only a narrow part of the full spectrum of all frequencies of electromagnetic radiation which extends from short wavelengths like microwaves and ultraviolet radiation to long wavelengths like infrared and X-rays and gamma rays.  A rainbow is refracted visible light that shows the colors in the optical part of the electromagnetic spectrum.  If they were visible to us, infrared would appear just beyond the red end of the rainbow and ultraviolet would appear just beyond the violet end.  It is natural that our perceptions are distinctly limited by the limitations of the senses with which we see the world, and that self-referential subjectivity is so profoundly affecting.  Recognizing this, we should be more open-minded to differing ways of seeing things.

Our biases and the inadequate breadth of our perceptions distort the way that we see the world and the way we interpret the events we experience.  Recognizing this truth, we should be more willing to be open-minded to new ways of seeing and understanding things, and to accepting other ideas and people who are different from us.  Live and let live!  And we should also be more open to ecologically true perspectives of our roles and impacts in the world.

On Theories and Evidence

A variety of explanations for any phenomenon can be posited.  A study of the evidence can shed light onto which explanations are most probable.  Consider, for instance, a deep mudflow that covered a broad section of a road near the National Forest campground just north of Redstone, Colorado in early July 2010.  In September, one could still see the muddy mess, and I naturally figured that a mudslide in the mountains above this flow must have been the proximate cause.  I hiked up along the dried-mud gash in the landscape for more than an hour, climbing up a dry watershed whose banks had been overflowed with mud and rocks and fair-sized boulders and devastated vegetation.  I reached a juncture where two equally disrupted stream beds joined, and following one, I ascended to another similar juncture.  This contradicted my expectations of a single source of the mud flow.  Finally, further up the watercourse, there was convincing evidence of what had actually taken place earlier in the summer.  Abnormally heavy flows of water, like a flash flood, had poured down off the towering red cliffs from the mountains above, and a 30-foot wide, 10-foot deep wall of roiling water had ripped deep into the steep vegetation-covered talus slopes, tearing soil and plants and rocks asunder and propelling them in a copious cascade of riparian materials downward, forcefully cutting and overflowing the stream banks until it played out widely in the less steep areas near the campground below.  A Google search even indicates that heavy rains and mudslides had temporarily closed Highway 133 between Redstone and Carbondale.  My excursion had confirmed that the best understanding of any phenomena is best attained by a close inspection of the evidence!

    “Nothing is so rewarding as a stubborn examination of the obvious.”

                                                                                            --- Oliver Wendell Holmes

In the Beginning

The roots of humanity’s nature and behaviors lie deep in our prehistoric hunting and gathering past, long before the economic and cultural revolutions of far-reaching technological innovations in industry and agriculture.  To properly understand the full scope of these ideas, let’s start by imagining back in prehistory when our species’ existence first diverged from our predecessors.  The origins of Homo sapiens can be traced roughly to an era between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago when our remote ancestors appear in the fossil record as a species distinct from earlier Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis and other ancestral hominids.  After surviving and proliferating for many millennia, our species faced a near-extinction event about 75,000 years ago.  It is fascinating and instructive to think about this episode, which is discussed below.

Every so often in geologic history, a planet-wide catastrophe takes place that is caused by a geophysical event like the impact of a fiery meteorite or the violent eruption of a supervolcano.  Such an event throws so much debris into the atmosphere that a ‘global winter’ ensues for years on end.  Particulate matter and acidic pollution ejected into the atmosphere block sunlight and disrupt the photosynthetic process upon which all forms of life in the food chain are dependent.  Such interruptions in the arrival of life-enabling sunshine cause widespread population crashes for almost every species of plant and animal alive at the time. 

The most famous of such geophysical events took place 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs and more than half of all other species of life on Earth became extinct.  Some scientists believe that this massive extinction event was caused by a long series of volcanic eruptions in the Deccan Traps area of present day India, where almost 200,000 square miles of land are still covered more than 6,000 feet deep with igneous flood basalt.  Most scientists, however, now agree with physicist Luis Walter Alvarez, who came up with a different theory in 1980 that was startling at the time, but has since gained rather widespread acceptance.  This theory holds that the Cretaceous Extinction which took place 65 million years ago was caused by a large asteroid that hurtled through the atmosphere and slammed into the Earth.  The Chicxulub Crater, a 15 mile deep crater that is about 350 miles in circumference, has subsequently been identified as the place that an asteroid roughly ten miles in diameter struck the Earth so long ago.  This crater is found on the Yucatan Peninsula, overlapping into the southern Gulf of Mexico.

The proverbial ‘smoking gun’ confirmation of this theory is provided by a thin layer of iridium that is found in sedimentary rocks formed worldwide during that distant era.  Iridium is an element that is abundant in comets and asteroids.  A fallout of iridium following a colossal meteorite impact is the most sensible explanation for this unusual layer, which can be found in rocks formed right at the boundary between the Mesozoic Era (the “Age of Reptiles”) and the Cenozoic Era (the “Age of Mammals”), about sixty-five million years ago.

The Genetic Bottleneck of the Toba Tuff

The most notable instance of a ‘volcanic winter’ in more recent times was caused by a geologic event known as the Toba Tuff cataclysm.  Scientists find extensive evidence of this volcanic eruption, which took place 75,000 years ago on the island of Sumatra in present-day Indonesia.  This eruption caused the most severe biotic disaster on Earth in the last 25 million years.  The Toba Supervolcano spewed so much volcanic ash and gases and sulfuric acid into the atmosphere that it caused a volcanic winter that stressed life to an extreme degree and carried the human race right to the point of extinction.  The population of human beings was reduced to a few thousand on the entire planet, and all of the survivors lived near the equator on the continent of Africa.  Every person alive today is descended from this small population base. 

This explains the extraordinary lack of genetic diversity found between all members of our species.  There is less than one-tenth of a percent difference between the gene structure of any one human and another, despite the obvious varieties in skin pigmentation, eye color, body shapes, facial features, and hair types that characterize people around the world.  As Leonard Shlain points out in Sex, Time, and Power, “The genes of chimpanzee communities inhabiting ranges only a few thousand yards apart have more genetic diversity than those of humans separated by oceans.”

In 1977, I just happened to visit Ground Zero of this Toba ecological cataclysm.  I flew from the island of Java to the southern tip of Sumatra, the sixth biggest island in the world.  Then I took a rough bus ride north for 24 hours to an inland body of water known as Lake Toba.  This is a beautiful lake which is the largest volcanic lake in the world, 50 miles long and 15 miles wide.  Lake Toba has a large island in the middle, named Samosir Island.  Boats that took locals and a few foreign travelers out to the idyllic island were so dilapidated in the 1970’s that the crew would bail out the 200-passenger ferries during the entire trip across the lake.  This journey was quite the adventure! 

Lake Toba is an ancient volcanic caldera filled with water.  In this regard, it is similar to Crater Lake in the Cascade Range in southern Oregon.  The caldera of Crater Lake was also formed by the climactic eruption of a volcano, this one known as Mt. Mazama.  This eruption took place about 7,700 years ago, and spewed out about 12 cubic miles of magma.  The mountain then collapsed into the emptied magma chamber, and when the crater eventually filled with water, the lake became the deepest in North America, with a crater rim that is a dramatic 33 miles in circumference.  For perspective, the most violent volcanic eruption in modern history was that of Krakatoa in August 1883, which is estimated to have ejected about 6 cubic miles of material.  The impressive explosion of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ejected only about 1 cubic mile of material. 

Geologists say that the Toba caldera is the remnant of a series of Toba Tuff explosions, and that the last eruption 75,000 years ago ejected an estimated 670 cubic miles of pumice and ash into the atmosphere.  One can imagine the effects that this had on the patterns of the world’s weather in the years following that eruption, considering that the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 sent less than 1% of the volume of debris into the atmosphere and yet the Krakatoa eruption had very significant adverse effects on agriculture worldwide in 1883 and the years that immediately followed.

Concerning Catastrophes and Cooperation

A provocative article written by Emily Spence about the Toba Tuff eruption and related topics can be found by googling Emily Spence Toba Tuff.  Ms. Spence notes in this article, titled “Concerning Catastrophes and Cooperation”, that all of the human survivors of the Toba explosion lived within 200 miles of the Rift Valley in modern-day Kenya.  She speculates that obsidian tools which are found in abundance in the Rift Valley were instrumental in allowing the early humans living in the region to be successful in hunting the reduced populations of animals found there.  These tools allowed them to survive the extreme hardships posed by the global ecological calamity.  Ms. Spence also speculates that tribes probably died off if they chose to violently conflict over resources, while those who survived were the ones who cooperatively traded and coexisted peacefully.  “As a result,” she writes, “our ancestors, all of them for everyone on Earth, likely came from these small bands of people, and we all inherited a genetic foundation imbued with a propensity towards accommodation, sharing and cooperation!”

I like Ms. Spence’s attitude.  Today, we are divided and distracted from seeing vital bigger picture perspectives by extreme political partisanship and ideological intransigence and animosity and greed and the denial of scientific understandings and macho American militarism and political obstructionism.  Larger perspectives reveal that our human activities are causing a wide variety of detrimental impacts which are harmful to the ecological commons of our home planet.  These actions, in aggregate, are endangering the Earth's capacity to provide for future generations of many species of life, including our own.  The most serious of these impacts are global warming and related changes in climate and weather patterns in almost every habitat around the planet.

These developments make it clear that we must find ways to give greater priority to the things that are the most important to life and to our collective well-being.  We must find ways to reduce the power and stubborn opposition of those who defend the status quo and who fight only for narrow short-term goals.  Proposals to achieve greater respect for the natural world and a needed radical reorientation and restructuring of our activities and priorities are elaborated below.

Richard Dawkins provided a counterpoint to Emily Spence’s ideas in his book The Selfish Gene.  He contended that the nature of our biological inheritance may provide little help in building societies wherein individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly toward common good goals.  He may be right that in the context of DNA and genetic influences, things like universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that are inconsistent with the processes that drive natural selection.  But this probable fact makes it even more vital that our cultures adapt, and that we design institutions in such ways that the planet’s resources are not overexploited and its ecosystems are not damaged beyond habitability as our civilizations grow.

Hunting and Gathering and Associated Behavioral Propensities

Emily Spence’s observations that all human beings alive today are descended from a single area in sub-Saharan Africa are confirmed by extensive genetic studies that have been done in recent years.  It is valuable to note that, throughout the entire span of time from our earliest origins until the past 10,000 years, our ancestors survived by hunting animals and gathering fruits and nuts and plants and herbs for food and medicine. 

Human males generally tended to be the hunters in early human clans, and females were the gatherers.  The eons-long biological and cultural evolution of humanity has encouraged different traits in men and women.  Men had to be more aggressive in the hunt, so they tended to be more ruthless in competition and more prone to physical aggression and violence.  Women tended to collaborate and cooperate together to raise children and prepare meals and do the other chores required for domestic survival, so they accorded greater value to relationships and they forged connections better and solved problems in ways that were more oriented around community and good communication and peaceful coexistence.  Studies of the brains of females and males show that the influence of the main human sex hormones, estrogen and testosterone, play significant roles in creating these gender differences by helping to shape neuronal circuits and behavior patterns during embryonic stages of development and early childhood and puberty.

Each of us naturally has an intensely solipsistic and self-absorbed mental world.  We think we are so sophisticated, and we scarcely admit that we are actually animals living on Earth.  But despite our introspections and conceits and spiritual pursuits, our drives are rooted in basic biological imperatives like getting enough to eat and finding a secure place to live and courting and mating and reproducing.

The respective roles of men and women changed significantly 10,000 years ago in the transition from hunter-gatherer clans to agricultural societies.  Nomadic peoples settled down.  Another epic transformation began when the Industrial Revolution started in the eighteenth century as people began to move from farms to cities in growing numbers.  The twentieth century saw economic forces which propelled most women into the payday work force, and it witnessed sociological changes that were stimulated by the widespread availability of birth control measures, and once again the relations between males and females were dramatically altered.

Today, we are faced with the fact that our human impacts on Earth’s ecosystems will likely lead to far-reaching and potentially devastating consequences.  It would thus be propitious if we were to make new transformative efforts to empower the cooperative and collaborative aspects of our natures, and to weaken the aggressive and exploitive and conflict-oriented mentality that dominates the world political scene.  In other words, it is time for us to give more power to women who embody the empathetic and nurturing constellation of feminine values, and at the same time to reduce the domineering influence of ‘strict father’ attitudes and the retrogressive traditionalist elements of human societies.

This is a generality with plenty of exceptions.  I believe that women are the key to sparking a new respectful worldview that will be in better harmony with nature, even though obviously not every individual woman is on the same page.  There are female politicians like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann who are so affected by embraces of religious fundamentalism and sycophantic extreme conservatism that they pathetically pander to vested interests and deny scientific knowledge and oppose vitally important ecological understandings.  Some women can obviously be as uncompromising, myopic, ideologically extreme, reckless, irrational, idiotic, and manipulative as the worst of men.  But regardless of whether any specific woman offers better ideas for a sane future, a far better balance is needed in aggregate between the collaborative constellation of Nurturing Mother sensibilities and the contrasting constellation of worldviews that characterize Strict Father values, as identified by the famous linguist George Lakoff.  The values that are generally associated with feminine worldviews are distinctly needed to balance out the rash, domineering, and ruthlessly competitive values that are generally associated with masculine worldviews. 

It seems clear that, in light of our growing knowledge, we should take steps to educate and empower girls and women in our societies today, and to provide them with fairer opportunities.  By doing this, we would likely be able to improve cooperation on the world stage and make our societies and world fairer and more collaborative and peaceful.  This would be one salubrious form of ecological intelligence!

It would also be socially desirable to create a cease-fire in the war between the sexes.  To do so, it would be valuable to understand the sociobiological exigencies which have led to misogyny and the repression of women and patriarchal domination.  Leonard Shlain points out that the struggle between the sexes is comprehensible in that a part of every male is resentful toward females for preventing him from following the “evolutionary imperative adhered to by 99.9 percent of male creatures -- to spread his seed far, wide, and often.”  Females, for their parts, are frequently angered by the male gender’s failure to live up to their expectations, so they harbor a deep resentment toward the male sex.  “This mutual rancor abets the war between the sexes and renews itself in every generation,” notes Shlain.

John Gray, the bestselling relationship author in history, offers his own brand of advice on how to improve relationships and create lifelong passion and lead healthier lives.  Can we do it?  All together now;  one, two, three, four, can I have a little more!

The time has come today for collaboration and consensus-seeking to move our nation forward.  The principal vision in these words is that feminine sensibilities and intuitions and practicality and collaborative spirit may be the key to improving our prospects for needed reform.  Let’s work to enable this transformation!

Whether or not this strongly-held conviction is completely valid -- that a greater respect for women’s perspectives would help us in successfully addressing the overarching issues we face -- we must not delay in boldly and fairly addressing at least some of the dysfunctionality and inequities presented by today’s social challenges.  NOW is the time to act! 

The Changing Roles of Men and Women in Our Societies

To find win/win solutions to problems, it would be helpful to establish a new collaborative dynamic and a culture that is more willing to cooperate, and less inclined to aggressively conflict.  A new wave of female empowerment may be the best answer.

The first wave of feminism in the United States waged a struggle for many decades in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to secure property rights for women and the right to vote.  As the twentieth century progressed, epic changes took place in the roles of men and women.  When millions of men were fighting in World War II, women were encouraged to get jobs to help win the war.  The media encouraged and empowered women by using songs and magazine ads and films and posters that heralded strong women.  The cultural icon “Rosie the Riveter”, for instance, was made famous by a 1942 song and popular promotional posters. 

After the war ended, millions of men returned home and society needed to incorporate them back into the work force, so the media shifted the propaganda dramatically to encourage women to get married and stay at home and have babies and do domestic chores and support their families and be sexy to please their husbands.  For further insights on the effect this had on changing societal roles, see the DVD Commentary titled “Birth of an Independent Woman” in the ‘extra features’ on Season Two discs of the drama TV series Mad Men (which is available on Netflix).  This Commentary provides a compelling perspective on the somewhat rigid roles of men and women in the 1950’s, and by juxtaposition, their evolving respective roles today. 

In 1953, the famous Kinsey Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was published.  This report had an incendiary impact on society by exposing the fact that it was not just men, but women as well who can have strong sexual drives.  Conformity and role rigidity and repressed sexuality were dealt further blows in the 1960’s when Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published.  The invention and widespread use of oral contraceptives -- the Pill -- allowed women greater control in their sex lives and in their own personal decisions about when to get pregnant, and by whom.  These developments led to a wave of feminist movements that targeted gender inequalities and biases in our laws and in our cultures. 

This “feminization” trend has continued, and it characterizes cultural changes in many societies around the globe today.  Some religious authorities say this trend is a threat to marriage and the family, but these authorities and their fundamentalist religious devotees are really principally opposed to any infringement on the power wielded in the status quo of patriarchal churches.  For instance, at preservingthebible.org, religious spin-meisters write about getting a proper perspective “as to how invasive and overwhelming this feminizing Jezebel spirit really is.  This evil force is perhaps the most malignant and hostile enemy the church has ever faced.”  Well, excuse me!  (A 2009 Bumper Sticker: “Hate is not a family value!”).

It is my conviction that the best legacy for a more propitious future for our descendents would be found in ensuring a greater emphasis on our noble aspects and collaborative instincts, and in discouraging the violent and vindictive and punitive approaches of our patriarchal societies.

Catholicism, for instance, and modern society are woefully misaligned in seven primary areas, harming our hopes for a mindful, far-sighted and sustainable existence.  These seven areas are:  (1) the Vatican’s opposition to birth control and women’s rights to control their own destinies;  (2) the lowly status of women in the church;  (3) the Vatican’s political affiliation with retrogressive conservatism;  (4) the Vatican’s opposition to divorce and remarriage;  (5) the Vatican’s position that condemns homosexuality;  (6) the Church’s ineffectiveness in responding to the sex abuse scandal and pedophilia crisis by allowing priests to marry;  and (7) the Vatican’s failure to emphasize good stewardship and protection of the environment in its currying favor with capitalist elites.

Mythological and Religious Perspectives

Ancient Greeks and Romans believed in what we regard today as mythological goddesses and gods.  A study of the imagined characters of these deities reveals that they represent distinct patterns of human nature.  These patterns are essentially what Carl Jung called archetypes of human attributes in our collective unconscious which were projected onto “divine beings”.  These archetypes are aspects of our human natures that are operative in our unconscious minds like integral aspects of our brains.  These archetypes are augmented and modified by cultural stereotypes that together help define our being and our selves.  We may conform to these defining influences, or alternatively choose to conflict with them, but either way they powerfully influence our behaviors.

Psychologist Jean Shinoda Bolen has provided a fascinating and practical blueprint for studies of this topic by analyzing the archetypes represented by Greek mythological deities in her two books Goddesses in Everywoman and Gods in Everyman.  Powerful Zeus, for instance, epitomized the domineering philanderer male, and Hera, the goddess of women and marriage, was the epitome of the long-suffering jealous and vindictive wife. 

Myths are symbolically important because of the ring of deep truth in them about shared human experience.  The qualities of mythological deities represent instinctual forces in our psyches.  As Jean Shinoda Bolen points out, “Myths evoke feeling and imagination, and touch on themes that are part of the human collective inheritance.”

It is curious that when the idea of monotheism caught on in Western religions, a crucial part of its genesis was the biblical story of a male God who created mankind without any female participation.  This myth was an outrage against previous belief systems which honored Mother Earth and the divine feminine.  Monotheistic religions were essentially founded on ideas that devalued previous feminine concepts of spiritual understanding.  It is not surprising that this diminution of the divine feminine contributed to harsh written laws like Hammurabi’s code and violence against women, as well as an obtuse disregard for the well-being of Earth’s ecosystems. 

The Old Testament slaughter of conquered Canaanites by the Israelites was one of the first instances in history of an entire people being killed because of deep prejudices stoked by religious zeal.  Tellingly, according to the polymath Dr. Leonard Shlain, this conflict was one in which those who worshipped God through the medium of written words triumphed over those who worshipped their gods through images.  This is why the Ten Commandments start with daunting warnings about the worship of ‘idols’.  It occurs to me that maybe it wasn’t Pharaoh’s heart that was hardened by God in the Bible before the Exodus;  maybe this story was a metaphor for male authoritarianism and mankind’s left-brain thinking insisting on its dominating prerogatives!

A Consideration

After reading parts of the Earth Manifesto, a friend said that my writings are clearly a love being expressed.  A surely feminine part of me is expressed in these words, with compassion and sensitivity and caring.  But my overriding passionate ecological sense of human sanity stems from somewhat different primary motives, all of them within a context of a cogent subjective exploration of being and self and society.  My creative drive to express deeply-felt convictions underlies all, and I have an objective rationality with aspirations to a reasonable degree of Buddha-like detachment.  I also have a compelling curiosity, idealism, and enthusiasm for life, plus a passionate sense of justice and of the importance of the long-term greater good. 

Love, to me, is a bit like “God”.  It is an emotional projection of spiritual cravings of our deepest inner selves.  Both love and God are nebulous, mysterious, inexplicable, ethereal, elusive, deeply personal, marvelous, potentially sublime and often tragically disappointing.  Many people are intrigued by mythic stories and poetic conceptions in which feelings of love and the worship of deities play a large role.  Obsessions with love and God have deep psychological underpinnings that are reflected in established religious doctrines and other spiritual pursuits, and they are revealed in personality assessments and character typologies like those of the Enneagram. 

We all share archetypal human characteristics in our collective unconscious.  These exist as aspects of both our genetic inheritance and the influence of our personal experiences.  Each of us is partially formed by genetic predispositions and by the stereotypes and socializing forces of our culture that generally encourage conformity.  Our beliefs in love and God are defining facets of our deep needs for connection and belonging and affirming relationship and even salvation.  As such, they are complex expressions of profound aspects of our inner selves.

Far-Out Insights

We have many different kinds of cells in our bodies, like bone cells and muscle cells and nerve cells, which have an amazing variety of functions and a surprisingly wide range of sizes.  Bill Bryson wrote in A Short History of Nearly Everything that the most striking contrast in cellular size is at the moment of conception, “when a single beating sperm confronts an egg eighty-five thousand times bigger than it (which rather puts the notion of male conquest into perspective.)”  Ha!  Come hither to make a valiant conquest, you little squiggly competitive one!

Evolutionary explanations can generally be found for almost every inherited characteristic.  New adaptations can be traced to the pressures and influences of natural selection in favoring particular outcomes and developments.  Leonard Shlain notes that four unique human traits appear in any given Homo sapiens population in a proportion of about one-twelfth of all people.  These four traits are left-handedness, color-blindness, baldness, and homosexuality.  Shlain developed a thesis that he calls the “Theory of Eights” (one twelfth is about 8%);  in this theory, he provides a provocative explanation for how “these four traits taken together represent a constellation of genetic adaptations that enhanced the success of the original human male hunting band.”  Check out Chapter 16 and 17 of Sex, Time, and Power for a provocative understanding of how these traits may have contributed to our evolutionary success during the time that our hominid ancestors were evolving larger brains and more complex hunting and mating behaviors.

Any organism which does not reproduce is, in a sense, an evolutionary dead end.  I myself, Tiffany Twain, have not yet reproduced, and it is pretty darned likely that I never will.  My personal unique genes will apparently not be a part of the evolutionary stream of humanity in the future.  Note, however, that with the development of sophisticated cultures, new ways have become possible to pass things on to future generations that are independent of the genetic legacy of our DNA.  The fact of the matter is that the transfer of information through non-genetic channels has become more important than ever for our biological success and survival.  Today these cultural legacies are likely to be far more important than anything programmed in DNA in ensuring our successful adaptation to rapid changes in social and ecological conditions. 

Biological evolution is a process that is simply too slow to save us from the rapidly gathering threats that are being caused by our species’ extraordinary reproductive success and the impacts of our growing numbers.  Since there are now nearly seven billion human beings on Earth, the day is rapidly approaching that the carrying capacity of the Earth’s ecosystems will prove inadequate to supply our far-reaching collective needs and desires.  The recognition of this fact is critical in motivating us to choose saner and safer ways forward than merely following our animal instincts to reproduce with abandon.

Cultural evolution is potentially the most propitious way for us to ensure better hopes for our species’ survival and prosperity.  Perhaps my legacy in this Earth Manifesto will make a highly positive impact on our collective success, whereas adding ever more people to the planet surely exacerbates the challenges facing us.  This is, in any case, a splendid rationalization for my not having had children!  And take it from me, it is possible to have a wonderful and adventurous life that is filled with enjoyment and purpose and variety without having had children -- and without having incurred the heavy concomitant costs and obligations that are attendant to child rearing!

Every person is born and eventually dies, but there is an enduring strain of humanity that survives.  This genetic and cultural continuity evolves along with our species.  An aspect of this essence that is crucially important for the survival of our species is our collective conscience.  This is the part of us that feels a sense of responsibility for others and for those in future generations.  Each of us is definitely selfish in our motives, but I believe that we all have a deeper aspect of our beings that resonates with the greater good.  Just as people have a profound impulse to help their own families and relatives as a part of the biological imperative of striving to ensure that our own genes survive, we all have a deeper impulse to do the right thing to help ensure that our own species survives.

Today, the recognition is growing that humanity’s survival is dependent on the protection of the diversity and well-being of other species, and even upon the health of entire ecosystems.  This realization is finding a powerful expression in the “blessed unrest” of many movements like deep ecology, environmentalism, ecological protectionism, open space initiatives, wilderness and national park protections, and spiritual enlightenment.

More Perspectives of Dr. Leonard Shlain

I challenge readers to check out Dr. Leonard Shlain’s surprising theories about the prehistoric overthrow of feminine deities in favor of the worship of male gods, as compellingly articulated in his provocative book, The Alphabet versus the Goddess.  Dr. Shlain noted that a revolutionary change took place immediately after the invention of the alphabet, a societal change that was accompanied by changes in belief systems like the overthrow of the primordial mother goddess Tiamat by the male god Marduk in the ancient Babylon pantheon.  Dr. Shlain contended that the innovative creation of alphabets and writing caused wide-ranging shifts in our ways of perceiving and interpreting the world. 

The late Dr. Shlain postulated that a shift in consciousness occurred when the word-oriented left hemisphere of the brain became dominant over the image-oriented right hemisphere.  He says this was essentially a “rewiring” of the brain that contributed not only to the subjugation of the feminine divine in mankind’s belief systems, but to the very real repression of women in early civilizations.  Hammurabi’s Code, for instance, was one of the first codes of law to be written in an alphabetic language, and it was not only harsh (“an eye for an eye”), but also distinctly repressive of women and their rights. 

The advent of alphabets in early civilizations facilitated literacy for the masses and encouraged abstract thinking.  A correlated shift in consciousness allowed people to more easily categorize knowledge.  It also facilitated a more systematic investigation of the workings of nature.  The advent of written expression was thus like a radical advance in weaponry during a long war, one which causes an abrupt change in the tides of fortune.  But this development has been not only a blessing that has provided humanity with great good, but also a curse that has involved grave hardships.

It is time that a fairer balance is established between the roles of men and women in our modern patriarchal societies.  It would behoove us to have a simpler but truer and more comprehensive understanding of issues.  At the same time, we must always try to maintain a spacious mindfulness in our lives.  We live in a deeply complex world in which appearances and reality are relative, and simplistic explanations have profound exceptions.  To be resilient and to cope well, we must remain open-minded and flexible.

   “I used to be somebody, but now I’m somebody else.”

                                                                        --- Song from the film Crazy Heart

Leonard Shlain was a pioneer in the development of techniques for minimally-invasive procedures of laparoscopic surgery.  He was also a remarkably insightful observer and author.  He pointed out that, for sophisticated neurolinguistic reasons, all forms of writing produce subtle changes in cognition that have the effect of redirecting human thinking.  The advent of the written word increased the left brain’s dominance over the right, so this had the effect of strengthening left-brain masculine values and at the same time emasculating right-brain feminine values.  As a consequence, human societies became more dominated by men and more ruthlessly competitive and increasingly repressive of women, and they became more oriented toward war rather than peaceful coexistence. 

It is my strong feeling that we must now once again find a way to embrace feminine values, and to strive to cooperate together to achieve a more enlightened and holistic way of apprehending and honoring other people and the natural world upon which we depend.  We need a smarter and more practical and more sensitive self-understanding and a better balance that will enable us to embrace more empathetic and statesman-like ways of relating with other people.  This is particularly critical on the international stage, where global issues are playing out writ large, with profound significance and disturbing implications.

Male-dominated societies can be made more humane by infusing them with a sense of shared community and other feminine sensibilities.  Today the need is arguably stronger than ever for us to build bridges rather than walls.  Feminine sensibilities are much more apt to strive to heal and reconcile and forgive than macho male attitudes.  Men tend to be more logical, and women more intuitive.  We should value our intuitions as well as our logic.  Women value relationships over the goal of domination or violently conquering others, and they place a high value on the creation of community.  Since they often listen better than men, they are generally somewhat more willing to pay attention to other points of view.

Women everywhere should be empowered by ensuring that they have fair access to a good public education.  They should be guaranteed equal civil rights and property rights so that they will have more economic power.  Help with financing and with microfinancing for poor women, like that provided by Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank, have been shown to have dramatically salubrious effects on societies at an extremely low cost.  We should therefore invest more in such things, and less in bailing out mega-banks with hundreds of billions of dollars when the gambles go awry that are facilitated by deregulation and insider influence and “casino capitalism”.

Leonard Shlain provides great hope that image-rich mediums like television and film will spark a powerful cultural revolution, just in time, by once again shifting our brain’s hemispheric balance.  Watch Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s great aerial images in the provocative film Home (google it!), and let me know if you notice any salubrious effects!  It is an extraordinary film.  We sure could use a positive revolution that would facilitate a collaborative, nature-honoring, feminine-principle-embracing, healthier balance in our societies, one that is oriented toward the greater well-being of people alive today, as well as toward the security and prosperity of those in the future.

I like psychologist Jean Shinoda Bolen’s job description for what may be required to ensure that we will succeed in helping to save ourselves and a habitable Earth:

"HELP WANTED:  Everywoman.  Home keepers for Earth.  Must keep premises safe for all.  Have a concern for children's needs and development, ability to manage resources, resolve conflicts, work collaboratively, ask questions, listen, and learn from the experience of others, be empathetic, and act with compassion for the benefit of all, including the generations to come."

Introducing Another Great Gal and Her Perspectives

Adversities sometimes inspire in us a greater sense of empathy and compassion for others.  Hardships make us clearly and cogently recognize the challenges others face in their own setbacks.  Think, for instance, about a woman named Carla Zilbersmith. 

Carla Zilbersmith was a 47-year-old woman who died recently after a three-year struggle with Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS.  Zilbersmith was spunky and courageous, and she handled her terrible adversity with admirable aplomb.  She decided to leave the world laughing, so she wrote her own humorous obituary, which included the line, “Friend to an amazing group of caring, creative and competent friends, and lover to several very lucky and largely undeserving men.”  Ha!  Her obituary continued:  "Although ALS is a fatal and incurable illness, Carla never gave up hope that one day her death would be surrounded by a cloud of controversy and speculation.  Her final words, spoken through a clenched jaw were 'oil can.'  The memorial is tentatively planned for the afternoon of Saturday, June 5.  It is guaranteed to be the funniest funeral that you have ever attended or your flowers back.  Costumes encouraged but optional."

Zilbersmith was horribly chagrined at having gotten this terminal Lou Gehrig’s disease.  She explained:  “It sucks, because I hate baseball.”  “I’d really rather have been diagnosed with a basketball disease,” she told an audience shortly after receiving the diagnosis.  “Maybe with Wilt Chamberlain Disease.  That’s the one where you have sex 20,000 times and then you die.”  Very witty, Carla – and courageous!!

ALS is one of humankind's most dreaded ailments.  It is a neurodegenerative disorder that gradually paralyzes the body but leaves the mind intact.  Usually, patients live two to five years following diagnosis.  There is no cure and no effective treatment.  Facing the inevitable and "imagining my deathbed," Zilbersmith had resolved "to live the rest of my life with joy."

People who have such an upbeat attitude are quite admirable.  Yay for you!, Ms. Zilbersmith.  May your memory live on as a dramatic example to everyone that shows that mindfulness and a positive attitude are valuable in life, no matter what the obstacles.  It reminds me once again of Sylvia Boorstein, a Jewish grandmother Buddhist, who once wrote, “We don’t get a choice about what hand we are dealt in life.  The only choice we have is our attitude about the cards we hold and the finesse with which we play our hand.” 

This quote comes from Sylvia Boorstein’s book It’s Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness.  Boorstein also observes that everyone inevitably faces struggles and adversities, and that it behooves us all to try to manage gracefully.  I believe that in addition to managing gracefully, and even maybe to trying to maintain a quintessentially chipper attitude, everyone should strive to make a positive difference in the world in some way, as a beneficial legacy to our descendents.  By doing this, we would “pay forward” a more salubrious destiny to our descendents.

Talking to the Animals

This somewhat impressionistic line of thinking has haphazardly led me to a memory of an episode in my year-long journey around the world when the tethers had sufficiently frayed that bound me to who I was, and what I was doing.  I felt as if I was drifting like a truck driver hurtling down a mountain freeway when it is safe to “Let ‘er drift”.  Volubility seized me, and a refrain sounded in my head, “Ain’t life grand?” 

While on a three-week trek hiking around the vast Annapurna Massif in Nepal, I began to talk to the animals, even the yaks and the polliwogs and the lizards and the ravens.  I gave enthusiastic encouragement to the donkeys burdened with heavy loads that had big clanking bells around their necks.  I asked the dogs if they were so sleepy because they had barked all night long.  I gave congratulations to the spiders for the beauty of the large webs they wove.  I challenged the intellect of the water buffalo.  I taunted the bravado of the roosters (“lay low, you cocks!”).  I quizzed the lizards on their philosophical perspectives.  And I made fun of ducks on a pond as they cautiously swam toward me, hoping for a handout and yet at the same time being very wary of potential treachery.  Hope and fear, I thought parenthetically, sure do appear to be as fundamental to ducks as to human beings.

Chipper the Cow:

“I’m a glass-is-three-quarters-full kind of cow, and being confident in the fact that

   everything is all about me, I lead a cheerful and happy life.  Yay for me!”

Passion and Compassion

Mark Twain brazenly made fun of biblical absurdities in his posthumously published book, Letters from the Earth.  I can’t remember if he ever wrote about the Immaculate Conception.  I had to look up this concept on Wikipedia to understand what occurred way back when, at least according to the official story.  The Immaculate Conception is a Roman Catholic doctrine that says Mary, the mother of Jesus, was conceived in her mother’s womb free from all “stain of original sin”.  Mary, in turn, eventually gave birth to Jesus, supposedly without having had sex.  Who Mary’s mother was, I confess I cannot figure out.

Here how I think it all happened.  Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was born with divine grace, so she was free of the alleged stain of Original Sin.  To understand this we must remember that Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s edict in the Garden of Eden that they should not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil;  this disobedience when God wasn’t looking was so terrible a provocation that it unleashed God’s severe condemnation of the human race ever-thereafter to live lives of suffering and then die, and sex soon became somehow dirty and libidinous and way too promiscuous and alluring, so as a result, “virgin births” were a convenient way to posit complete virtue for the heroine figures in the religion’s dogmas.  And, Presto!  Mother Mary was born in a miraculous Immaculate Conception.  This doctrine was actually added to the Bible in 1854;  it was “solemnly defined as a dogma by Pope Pius IX”.  I can just imagine!  And there they were, just after the Gold Rush got going in another part of the world, creating a curiously implausible new doctrine in a holy book with a solemn air of newfound certainty!

Dogmas that claim an Immaculate Conception and then a virgin birth of Jesus were borrowed from pagan myths like that of Zeus, who made mortal women pregnant without the involvement of any man.  Just about as likely today as it was with Zeus in Athens in 500 B.C., I reckon!

Most conceptions of God simplistically picture ‘Him’ as an ethereal old man.  This is an absurdly anthropocentric projection of our human self-centeredness upon the Universe, and it seems to me to be crazy to anchor all the tenets of a religious establishment upon such a questionable presumption.  The Almighty God portrayed in the Bible is not much more sophisticated than Greek mythological deities, and it is pretty doggone preposterous to honestly believe that God made us in ‘His’ own image, rather than the actual fact that we have made God in our own image. 

What whoppers these stories are, like the virgin birth!  It would be ridiculous to point out that babies are born nine months after a woman’s egg is fertilized by a man’s sperm, and anyone who claims that a woman gets pregnant without a sperm being involved is making it up!  You can count on it.  The belief in a virgin birth is a throwback to antiquated times of superstition when people did not understand the nature of reproduction and biology.  Today we know better, and yet some people cling to atavistic dogmas as if they are really true.  Promulgators of doctrines should take care to make their miracles a little more plausible! 

The creators of the Garden of Eden story set forth the dogma of original sin to induce guilt and conformity and to till the soil for acceptance of punishments and suffering in life.  Doctrines that induce guilt egregiously conflate sex and sin, as they have done throughout the history of Western religions.  They do this to manipulate people to get them to obey morals as defined by the stodgy, conservative and power-obsessed churches.  Sex is portrayed as sinful despite the simple fact that sex is a vital biological function and a potentially beautiful form of human connection and communication.  Religious authorities often use sex and guilt to get people to think the sexual act is dirty and lacks virtue, but this is biologically absurd. 

The doctrine that says Jesus was miraculously begotten by God and born of Virgin Mary is what Mark Twain called a “stretcher”.  Recalling that Zeus was believed to have impregnated many mortal heroines with his divine philandering, there was not a single historian of that era who was so audacious or prissy or implausible as to formulate the idea that this robust god left the mothers in a virgin state after the deed!

Superstitious explanations of things are a peculiar form of abracadabra.  These explanations may satisfy ignorant people, but they no longer suffice in the face of modern knowledge and understandings of the physical universe in which we live.  Some things are inexplicable, it is true, but explanations that directly conflict with cause and effect are suspiciously improbable. 

I mention these controversial things because established religions have such a significant responsibility for choosing to side with regressive forces and anti-environmentalism and tragedy-of-the-commons calamities that are related to corporate shenanigans and the inadequate regulation of our laissez-faire capitalist system.  Moderates and reformers of all faiths, cast out your reactionary right-wing elements!

The Issue of Health Insurance for All Americans

I can’t let these meandering words come to a conclusion without mentioning the state of health care in the United States.  What now, in the fog of obfuscating rationalizations, are we to honestly think of rampant profiteering on health insurance policies?  These policies affect life and death decisions about medical treatments and drug prescriptions and people’s well-being.  Such profiteering through preexisting condition exclusions and treatment denials and insurance coverage denials and rapid increases in insurance premiums is a new form of exploitation and treacherous betrayal, and one insidiously directed at the most vulnerable of the American people.  In particular, this form of profiteering exploits tens of millions of the most powerless amongst us.  Oh, blackguards!  Oh, vile justifiers of an inhumane exploitive status quo!  Oh, systemic stupidity!!  How can we effect change when the dominant voices that control the system are those that are often diametrically opposed to the greater good?

One of the most powerful instincts of parents is to protect their offspring.  Sensibilities of mothers in particular are oriented toward a protective nurturing of their children.  When these feminine sensibilities conflict with more aggressive male instincts to exploit and dominate others, compassion generally loses out.  I believe that it is within these feminine sensibilities that a safer and more sustainable future is to be found. 

I will now bring this collection of observations and thoughts to a conclusion.  Thanks for reading!

An Aside to People Who Like to Eat:  Recipes, Free of Charge!

Since this is a feminine vision of a better world, perhaps it has a natural need for some good recipes.  Check out the sensational Twelve Delicious Recipes for Good Health and Gourmet Appreciation in Part Five.  Do not overlook the healthy beverage that is a great replacement for coffee in the morning:  Simmer 2 Tbls. fresh chopped ginger in 2 cups of water for 5 minutes, then put it in a big mug and add a mixture of cinnamon, turmeric, cayenne, cardamom and cumin, plus a good splash of half-and-half or vanilla soy milk and 2 Tbls. Chocolate Malt Ovaltine.  Add honey or agave nectar, if you prefer sweetened beverages.  This concoction is good for you because the ginger provides alkaline balance to the body’s acidic systems, and cayenne and cinnamon and turmeric have been used for millennia for their extensive health benefits.

An Interim Conclusion Is Reached

A very good independent film is making the rounds of the film festival circuit.  Titled Sergio: Chasing the Flame, this film is about Sergio Vieira de Mello, a great human being who worked selflessly for the greater good.  Sergio was a charismatic Brazilian who listened well and was empathetic and tried to be objective in bringing people together for positive purposes.  Sergio exhibited an honorable integrity in helping refugees when he worked for the United Nations, and he helped East Timor, the former Portuguese colony in the Indonesian archipelago, to make a transition to independence from many centuries of Portuguese rule. 

Sergio Vieira de Mello was tragically killed in Baghdad where he had been leading a mission to help the Iraqi people in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq by the U.S.  It is likely that he was targeted by al Qaeda extremists because of his efforts to help East Timor.  Islamic fundamentalists felt that East Timor should have become a part of Moslem Indonesia rather than being allowed independence.  The qualities that Sergio demonstrated are needed more than ever in the modern world, and we must find a fair way to emasculate the war-mongering and suicide-bombing forces that undermine such efforts for peace and freedom.

The primary hypothesis herein is that we need to make transcendent efforts to honor our reason and sensible intelligence and farsightedness, and at the same time to respect our honest intuitions and collaborative instincts and more feminine right-brained impulses.  We need to do this in order to achieve the greater good.  We must find ways to unite people by embracing Big Picture perspectives and the lessons of history.  We should incorporate the insights of people like ecologists and knowledgeable biologists and neuropsychologists and philosophers and honest spiritual leaders, and accept enlightened ways of looking at the world from those who think and feel deeply in order to advance a salubrious new worldview in which individuals and communities and societies and civilizations can flourish without destroying the entire biotic fabric of existence on our providential Mother Earth.

Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”  Let us join these people! 

The time has come for us today to embrace wiser and more farsighted ways of seeing and understanding the world.  Let us heed progressive calls to action to actually make our world a safer, smarter and more sustainable place!  Let the anima within you reign!

Women of the World, Unite!  (Men, Join Us!)

Thanks for your consideration of these ideas!  I hold my hands at chest level, palms together, fingers pointing up, and I figuratively look you in the eye, and say Namaste!  (“I bow with reverence to you!”)

    Truly,

       Dr. Tiffany B. Twain

           Hannibal, Missouri 

                  c/o SaveTruffulaTrees@hotmail.com