Behavioral Toxicity

Metaphor: We spend inordinate amounts of time detailing and arguing over the nutritional content, both real and imagined, of the several items on our plate... and none to the arsenic being sprinkled over the whole mess. We must, first as the thinkers and evaluators among us and then as a whole community, begin to recognize and seriously respond to the social and behavioral toxicities with which we presently live. But, like a water well poisoned with cholera, the toxicity is carried in forms vital for our needs and has only a probability of terminally infecting each drinker.

In the case of the cholera infected well, the biological toxicity can be exacerbated by the social ‘toxicity’ of the well being ‘owned,’ especially so if the wellbeing (apology) of the ‘owner’ depends of the water there-in-contained being used by the community. This is the basic form of one large category of social toxicity: a required activity carries a toxic element or addition and some segment of the community is committed to the activity’s perpetuation in its exact present and toxic form.

There are many things that we humans do very well, but backing off – slowing down – is not one of them. In fact, in the whole of human recorded history, and apparently beyond, humans have only slowed down when forced by epidemic disease and climatic or geologic process. We have, in almost every moment, increased in number, in consumption, in distribution and in impact on the world around us; albeit very slowly in the beginning but recently with rates of speed that are clearly toxic – at least clearly to an observer with a modicum of historical and biological perspective. It is classic biological understanding that any material in sufficient excess is a poison, i.e., the life sustaining stability of homeostatic order is defeated with dysfunction or death as a consequence. The immense capacity of humans to adapt becomes toxic when our adaptations snowball into adapting to adapting as a necessary part of social design.

This is a second category of behavioral toxicity. Our original adaptation prowess was applied to the environment so that we could reduce its dangers and increase our consumption of its possibilities. In a terrible distortion of that original and “biologically sensible” design, we today all but ignore the holistic presentation of the environment and apply our capacities to the great writhing mass of our previous creations as though the immediately perceptible were reality. I think of occasions when I would visit a great city dump and the accumulations of the discarded made the very ‘land’ upon which to walk – the random collections of lamps, tires, toasters, chairs, mops and other thousands of identifiable and unidentifiable things formed together to make a composite picture of a highly local ‘reality.’ We live on the surface of our dump and call its random presentation an ordered world. The consequence is the toxification of the adaptation process – a process with no capacity for discrimination, a capacity that can only respond as though what it receives is real.

These two forms of behavior toxicity are poisoning our relationship with each other and with the biophysical reality; that is, the fundamental substrate of all life and consciousness. That both forms of toxicity are major parts of the designs of our behavior make them no less devastatingly poisonous to our present and future wellbeing, and only indicates the degree of dedication and effort required to detoxify our actions and beliefs.

This is not a trivial matter that we can ignore or do a ‘work-around.’ These are true toxicities just as damaging to human life and ecological integration on the earth as pneumonic plague or cyanide are toxic to individuals. The latency is longer – more like lead or the AIDS virus – and so are more difficult to see as dangerous: Remember ‘sugar of lead’, a popular Roman beverage?

The political, economic, social and epidemiological events of our world are all either the direct result of these behavioral toxicities or exacerbated by them. The remarkable recalcitrance of what now passes, in the US, for conservatism and Republicanism – anti-science, anti-intellectualism, even anti-thought – puts power over the multitude in the hands of real societal insanity (see Robert Altemeyer’s work on authoritarianism).

So called liberals and progressives, while they take in a greater dose of The Real – incorporating some science and logical reasoning into their process – still form the core of their actions and beliefs from perceptions and experiences marinated in the toxicities of ungrounded adaptation and self-interest emptied of community-interest: ultimately as insane as conservatives (that is, just as free of any clear association with Reality).

The world’s billions are fixed in their trajectory, as are each nation’s millions, but individuals, especially small carefully formed communities [1], can avoid at least some toxic input. This is modeled well by the fact that a dedicated few can eat carefully grown foods, but the vast multitudes must eat what they can get regardless of potential harm.

The key is grounded adaptation, grounded in some source of The Real outside of social product and process – and present religious form is not it [2]. There is only biophysical Reality to perform this role in our experience: it always has and ultimately always will. Not to make this relationship central in the process of adaptation is insanity.

[1] This is a very tricky matter. ‘Change’ communities are almost always driven by the social system from which they devolve and function on some single-purpose principles. There is no growing relationship with Reality in their structure, and thus, no reduction in toxicity.

[2] Religion as hominid process, as a functional part of consciousness order, has been poisoned by being co-opted by adaptations to social process. Religion, in its original form, gave motivational force and duration to complex environmental adaptations and was part of maintaining the practical and spiritual connection to place.

Oh My God! Not Another Poet

I don’t often present these little indulgences, but this one so fit my present mood and mode.

(circa 1976)

GARDENING IN THE FAMILY PLOT

1

I seek no special inspiration

from love or pain or mystery;

only.... Still I seek it.

Language harbors language, words harbor words,

action harbors life, and life harbors poetry.

A polemic: sad as standing on one leg before a city.

Experience, great teacher--my fool --

cuts, then heals

as an aggravated and enraged soul climbing

-- a great candle lighted shadow--

up from my dim past

comes to split my body and the world

like rolls of soft bread

readying them for the sweet cow's butter of love.

Do I need it?

The word harbors the word, and the word harbors

the action, and the action harbors life....

2

My poetry has been lost--shut out--

eaten through my skull and, light as it is,

sprung into the brain of a hummingbird, or

an ostrich;

sent the poor weak brain to dim ancient urgings

for flying, for nesting in trees,

for even having teeth or, as with me,

to be amphibian, fish and worm.

I see it all now: Poor weak worm in the dry of veldt

surrounded by surprised vultures, an unhistoried ostrich

killed to the undeath of original planet dust,

unable to fight off my escaped poetry.

3

I will not seek poetry in language.

Still it is a pretty thing;

waves moving pebbles on the shore.

But even great seventh or forty ninth waves,

striking with the force of inexorable logic

are spent by the beach--it is its nature.

Not the wave, but time is the master of pebbles.

Slap language around as you would an unfaithful mistress,

if that is what you do, or

cry with her and make love some new way

using puppets and #3 wash tubs.

She is still your mistress and you love her.

You only hurt her if you take your love away,

run wild in the land fucking oak stumps and

piles of used bricks;

trying to fuck life into the dead

while letting the living die.

This is why I will not seek poetry in language.

Language harbors words, words harbor action,

action harbors life, life harbors poetry.

4

My many fathers and many mothers

reached out through the dark sky to the moon

and in through the dark womb to the soul.

They strung poetry between shells and bear claws,

wore it in their hair,

and roasted it next to the bodies of small birds.

I've tried praying to soup cans,

gluing feathers on a crew cut,

and making necklaces from

bottle caps and condoms:

It hasn't worked yet.

We Have Lost!

We have lost the struggle for democracy – of, by and for the people -- and equity. We have lost the struggle for social justice. We have even lost not only almost all of the battles, but the war for the future of ecological integrity on our little planet. But that is no reason to quit! It will, however, be much better for us personally to proceed with more reasonable expectations.

We have lost not so much because, in an alignment of opposing forces, some groups and ideas succeeded while others have not. This is more a matter of everyone losing – all ‘sides’ – because the real terms of the struggle were never recognized. As trite as it may seem Pogo pegged it: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” But with that the trivial appearance ends and the truly difficult begins.

All of life depends on physiological homeostatic systems to mediate and regulate the volumes and speeds of chemical reactions so that the right amount of a substance exists at each step of any process: too much acts as a poison and too little starves the process [1]. This same principle applies to ecological relationships and structures. Organisms and biophysical conditions feedback through exchanges of materials and energies resulting in ecological stabilities; environments that, when unperturbed by uncommon dramatic events, change at the typical rates of evolution, i.e., more slowly than generational turnover of constituent organisms.

Humans have been on a 50 to 70 thousand year rampage through the ecologically stabilities. Our nearest hominid relatives began to develop not just tools, but a new way of bringing order to the collecting/selecting of information, to the storing of that information and to the implementing of both directly stored and, even more interestingly, modified information. Homo sapiens has carried this process to the level of a completely new system of ordering information, new to the universe.

I am calling this the Consciousness System of Order (CSO). It creates a new probability structure for what might exist in the world; and thus creates a new world. But the new world of the CSO is still dependent on the Living System of Order and the Physical System of Order. It is just that it is ‘possible’ for the CSO to create the idea that it is not. And so Pogo’s prescience.

Genetic evidence and geological inference suggests that our species has gone from only a few thousand members following the devastation of the Toba volcano in Indonesia about 70,000 years ago to our present world population of 7 billion, about a millionfold increase. We have gone from a negligible impact on the ecology to using about half of the earth’s total photosynthetic production. The consequences of our actions, intended and unintended, are changing many long-standing, primary and stabilizing biophysical cycles and extinguishing species faster than any time other than major extinction events, of which there have only been 5 in the last 640 million years.

Our “problem” is not global climate change; it is global human impact. While the insanity of excess can be blamed in proportion to the excess, still our impact ultimately comes down to the human organism needing 1500 calories (Kcals) everyday to sit around and 3000, up to 5000, calories to do physical work; plus anywhere from a few thousand calories to several hundred thousand calories of energy per day for our tools and comforts. Simply and devastatingly put: it cannot be sustained.

Part of our political trouble today may come from the denial of these realities: “We will get to these ‘long-term’ issues later, but right now Gov. Sanford is screwing an Argentine reporter.” I do the same thing – not the Argentine part. Facing a difficult situation, I will clean corners that I had forgotten existed; amazing how important getting those dust bunnies from under the fridge becomes when I have to go through 5 years of tax records. Amazing how important (and comforting) those tax records become when I have to truly consider changing my whole way of life.

And yet that is where we are. All of humanity, every last one of us will have to change how we live if we are to adapt through the next few decades. The option is to take down the biophysical structures of the biosphere in a convulsive collapse of unprecedented horror. It must have been awful to be a dinosaur in the marshes of New Mexico when the shock wave blew across the mid-latitudes. And it must have been worse to be in the fires in China or part of the starvations that followed, but these were not creatures that had destroyed themselves by their own aware actions.

The arguments that fill our media and our minds are finally distractions from these larger concerns: dust bunnies under the fridge. Of course, we must deal with health care, torture, economic and justice equity, bribery in government, spread of weapons, racism and the thousands of other issues that form our actions everyday. But, and this is a prodigious but, every one of those deliberations must begin to put the maintenance of environmental stability and biodiversity at the front end of consideration. We are quite literally doing the laundry while the muddy floodwaters are rising up fill the washer.

I have wondered out loud if the economic elite might be considering a way to kill off about 5 or 6 billion people as a solution. But, I think that even a well-planned and powerful biological attack on the Great Many would so devastate both the ecological and economic order that such an attempt would prematurely precipitate the kind of convulsive biophysical collapse that is inevitable without great change in how we live. So, we really are ‘all in this together’ to whatever end it is that we either attempt or allow.

I must admit to occasionally being discouraged. In this moment our world is being run by gangs of criminals and madmen (generic term – madwomen happily included). Just listen to the leaders of corporations, churches, government, think (sic) tanks, media and universities! They are like looters trying to grab up ‘everything’, but before the disaster happens. The sophistry is as thick as the shit on an industrial hog farm.

But the Great Many are beginning to understand even as they are being propagandized by multimillion dollar disinformation campaigns. A recent NY Times poll, as much as they tried to spin the public as confused, gave these results:

-92% favor "requiring car manufacturers to produce cars that are more energy efficient"

-75% are "willing ... to pay more for electricity if it were generated by renewable sources like solar or wind energy"

-64% would "pay higher taxes on gasoline and other fuels if the money was used for research into renewable sources like solar and wind energy"

-69% approve of more coal-power plants "if the plants used a new method of burning coal, which would cost more but produce less air pollution." (Otherwise, support for coal was at 41%.)

Similar findings have been made for single-payer health care: when people know what it is, majorities prefer it. For war and peace: people reject gratuitous war. For personal freedom, safety and privacy: people reject institutional spying and support the protections of the Bill of Rights.

So, as an acquaintance maddeningly used to begin almost every thought, ‘Here is the deal:’ We have lost. Just look at the situation. Seven billion. Insane criminals running things. If we can’t work together we are screwed. Asking people to do things that they have historically not done well. The apparent need for vast resources. The opposition of the most powerful forces in society. It does not look good – that is why we have lost.

But if we have lost, then there is no reason not to kick butt. It is becoming more and more clear that the truly crazy people, who for example are letting the insurance companies deny the whole population the only functional design that can deliver the knowledge and practice of medicine to the people in a cost effective way, are willing to let thousands and millions suffer terribly so that they can have a seat in a big wood-paneled room. It is becoming clear that, since we have lost, in not all that many years those who are left will be digging roots to chew on and straining water through their t-shirts.

This country is just about ready to turn the devastation of losing into the desperation of losing. We are the numbers. It is time for the millions upon millions of the losers to speak up forcefully. I suggest the battle cry: “Remember Missionary Ridge!” But any that you like will do [2].

Does this mean that we still might win? Not a chance [3]. But we can be an active part of the adaptation process to whatever it is we will be after and not some stupid lump of protoplasm ground to a pulp by crazy people. We can at least fight to be members of the honorable human species to the very end.

[1] There are many thousands of enzymes. Each one controls the rate of chemical reactions, speeding those that would go too slow in the environment of the living thing and slowing those that would go too fast – by just the amounts needed.

[2] The Union forces were in a valley below Missionary Ridge. The Confederate forces were on the ridge top pouring fire, rifle and cannon, into the valley. The Union troops were in an impossible position with no retreat and only withering fire coming from the ridgeline that they could not possibly assault. No order came from the leaders. In almost spontaneous movement the Union soldiers ran up the ridge. Since they had lost the battle, they did this with no strategic purpose other than to stop the rain of ball and canister on their heads. The character of the war in the south was shifted to the Union advantage.

[3] Creating the belief that you can win is what the crazy people use to take the effectiveness out of your action. If you know that you can’t win, then you can. But if you think that you can, then you are screwed because you get suckered into playing the crazy game.

Seven Deadly Sins – Revisited

(Special thanks to Michael Rohner for permission to use his mixed-media image)

The human animal may be, individually, capable of some subtlety, but collective action tends to be pushed along by broad-stroke principles functioning in the weeds of daily detail. Faced with a specific decision, the direction of action can be most often surmised from the general principles upon which the society sees itself as being based. Thus the attachment to lists of such principles: The Ten Commandments, The Bill of Rights, The Seven Deadly Sins, the 12 steps and a number of other shorthand prescriptions for both action and remediation.

If we examine these lists closely, we find internal contradiction, limits of application and other exceptions to strict adherence, but we don’t really understand these devices as absolute anyway, but rather as guides. Even those that have the force of law, like the Bill of Rights, must be adjudicated in specific situations since a few words can do no more than offer direction for a journey, not prescribe its every turn.

It is in this spirit that I offer this list of the Real Seven Deadly Sins. The limits and contradictions may seem especially glaring, but this is only because we are not use to them – and I will deal with some of the exceptions.

The “original” Seven Deadly Sins have a long history, quite a variety of inclusions and have been 5, 7, 10 and more sins at different turns. A society picks its sins; they are adaptive.

We have come to a time when we desperately need a new list. This is not to say that the list that evolved from Dante (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride) has become acceptable, although fashion has certainly changed for several; in fact, if we had been more serious about these, we might not be in such a present pickle. But we need to refocus on those activities and, especially, the principles that have morphed from sin to saw [1].

These are the New Sins:

1) Progress

2) Economic growth

3) Property

4) Excess

5) Censorship

6) Repression

7) Religion

One of the first things that you might note from the new list is that it is easily adaptable to collective action, where as the Dante list is more easily seen as the unfortunate qualities of individuals. For this and other reasons, we might best keep those seven available for personal use. The new list is, in some cases, the “originals” writ large.

It is, today, our institutions that are dominating human action, and human institutions are not just the summing up of individual human behavior, but are, under the Consciousness System of Order, developing into new entities with new properties for which new guidance is needed.

1) Progress:

This is the most insidious sin and one from which some others receive their motive force. We have come to see this greatest source of devastation as the essential positive value – and we rarely question it; taking the assertion, “It is progress,” as a substantive and often final argument.

Progress is change that arises from some previous condition, change that is judged by some humans as an improvement. But it has come to pass that the only guiding principle for the design of change is a previous condition that formed from some even earlier progress. That this seems perfectly normal to you is a measure of just how insidious this sin is.

Living things “progress” by adapting to the biophysical realities of the living space. Of course, they begin with what they have, but the changes occur in a universal context of long scale forces and processes . In humans, progress has come to mean changes that modify some existing condition arising in the human context, a condition that came to exist with the last round of progress. The speed of adaptation and the power to discover and use specific bits of information about how the biophysical world functions has allowed humans to ‘defeat’ certain biophysical rules. By bringing enough energy to bear and using mechanical physics, heavier than air machines can fly. By concentrating specific chemical species a concentrated consequence can be made to happen: poison, acid, lighter than air balloons, metals, etc. There are millions of examples. These things we call progress.

An evolutionary system would have to integrate every consequence that occurs within evolution’s time frame. Consciousness Order system time frames are so much more rapid than biophysical time frames that we have avoided the consequences of our behaviors. This we call progress.

Progress is building dikes to keep the waters out – both literally and figuratively; and then building buildings behind and on the dikes, and then building more and better pumps to remove the water that seeps through, and then, and then… The reality is that the water level is higher that the land level. Think for a moment on this from a position of sanity.

The sin of progress is to act outside of the context of the biophysical time frame, to make changes in response to existing conditions in such a way that the biophysical costs are deferred to other humans, other species and the future. Our societies today are dependent on billions of jobs that are the products of progress and all but a handful are made from the overcoming of the overcoming. We now have to keep trying to overcome the very fabric of universal reality to continue to ‘make progress.’ Such is the depth of our depravity.

And so Progress is a sin. Rather than seek it, we must make appeal to attempt it; must be able to demonstrate that the proposed changes enhance integration into biophysical reality, not attempt to defeat reality with some slight of hand. We would continue to change, to learn and to use the living and physical worlds, but at a pace to which all living and physical process on earth could adapt; a pace that will not create the dramatic synergies of a convulsive rejection of living things as the consequence of our progress.

2) Economic Growth:

The sinfulness of growth is more obvious than the sin of progress. One need only think for a moment of the concept of the exponent. And it needs to be clear that human capacity has created a new model for growth; it is not the same process as growth of biological systems – just the same word. Biological growth is replenishment with the capacity to exceed its bounds, but fully inhibited by homeostatic feedback so that ecosystems are no-growth, sustaining systems.

Economic growth means an increase in the volume and speed of transactions of exchange. Transactions of exchange are the trading of one thing for another. Since there are basically three kinds of things (material/energy, behaviors and abstract tokens of exchange) there are a variety of forms that exchange can take, but ultimately increasing amounts of real stuff must be extracted, moved, modified and consumed as an economy grows. To some extent the need to actually raise crops, dig in mines and cut forests brings perspective to our economic growth, but…

economic growth can occur, so long as participants believe that tokens of exchange represent real things, as a result of trading those tokens – really betting on how many of a particular token will be required to trade for a particular real thing at a particular moment. This allows ‘not real things’ to increase in amount without limit. If the tokens are in a demand relationship with real things, then it is possible for there to be more ‘real stuff’ represented by tokens than there is or ever can be. The result is that demands are made of the earth’s capacities that cannot be met; the reality of the effort and limits of extraction is overcome in the perception. This is a sin.

A component of economic growth is investment: I loan you a hatchet to cut firewood and you return the hatchet plus a bit of cut wood, or I could loan you tokens to trade for a hatchet and you give me back the tokens plus a few extra. Either way you have to cut more wood than you require. The amount of material or behavior traded becomes more and more dependent on the obligation and less and less on the actual state of need. Economic growth mutates into increasing states of obligation.

If there is not a constantly increasing need or obligation, then there can be no more than momentary or situational occasions for investment. And so – placing the cart squarely in front of the horse – our economic system sustains the investment model without regard to the relationship of human economics to the natural biophysical economy. This is a sin.

3) Property:

Property once seemed so simple; I learned it at my father’s knee: It is mine, you may not use it or touch it without my permission. I hold it by a force as close to a divine right as such things get. And yet, my ball (hat, toy or _____ ) could be taken and tossed around and eventually tossed onto a roof in the age old game of ‘humble the property owner’, AKA ‘keep away.’

I have discovered that humans come with a great variety of respect for property. Some have arm’s length rules and others will take even useless things. Different groups of people define property in different ways – what can be property, degrees of holding property, what must be done to identify property.

“Keep away” offered this instruction: property and force are intimately related. Property is mine so long as I am willing and capable to use sufficient force to keep it. A powerful man in my town lived at the end of a long road; the sign at his gate, “If you trespass, you will be shot.” This was not at his front door – his house could not be seen – but was at the most easily approached edge of the 30 or 40 acre mountain valley to which he lay claim. Records show that his family drove out the previous inhabitants with legal trickery and one punctuating dynamite explosion.

There are 3 ways that we can view property: 1) that which is, 2) that which is ours (or theirs) and 3) that which is mine (or his or hers).

“That which is” belongs to all and to no one. You may use it only as long as you don’t change it or deny its use to any other organism or process. “That which is ours” belongs to the commons, the community decides potential uses and what compensations and ablutions are required. “That which is mine” belongs to me; again, however, the community decides what can be personal property and often the limits of control and use – this should tell us something. The attempt to turn ‘that which is mine’ into absolute domination without regard to the rest of existence is a sin.

It is circumstance and excess that moves the sustaining to the sinful. Human progress and economic growth have driven property from balanced patterns of use, compensation and replenishment to the assumption of more and more private ownership; so that today we claim we can not only own the contents of our pockets and immediate living space, but we can own the land, the water, the air, living things, DNA, chemical processes and ideas. And we have even added a specialized instrument of private ownership called the corporate collective to own in even greater amounts and with greater force. This is sin.

4) Excess and Wealth:

Excess has almost always been a sin in almost every culture. Yet, in our present condition the application of Sins 5 and 6 (censorship and repression) have led the way in justifying excess, usually claiming envy as the reason of objecting to wealth. This is quite simply sin supporting sin.

Excess is a sin because it perpetuates the sins of property, is the product of growth and can only be justified by dishonest and coercive means. But, primarily it is a sin because it damages the human relationship to the planet and to each other.

Ultimately the excess of wealth (both private and societal) can only be extracted from the universal commons and it can only be extracted by the coercion of one human entity by another. It is difficult to say who is harmed more in the existential sense, the miner who must dig or starve, yet retains some vestige of specieshood or the owner who believes in the madness of his right of power to steal the life and labor of the miner and the product of the land. It is, of course, not difficult to see who lives in the greatest distress of the moment.

5) Censorship:

It is obvious to many that we must not speak of dangerous, harmful and distressing things. To do so would bring upset and disruption to our settled lives: speak the Devil’s words and call the Devil.

There is, as there always is, a major difficulty: How are we, or who is, to decide? We are ultimately faced with this simple choice: freedom of speech with only the most limited restrictions or speech controlled by whoever can wrest power over its methods and topics.

Control of speech is control of idea, is control of possibility. And yet we cannot live in a world without design, a world that limits and organizes possibility. The probability of glucose moving through a cell membrane is controlled by insulin, which is controlled by a dozen other conditions of the organism. We can expect nothing less for a super-organism collective like human societies. But there the analogy fails; the process by which biological evolution designs physiological function leaves out nothing. Every force and movement of the natural world gets its say without inhibition because it is exists in the total reality. Again, we can have nothing less for our collective social order.

Lying is a special form of censorship that denies access to a factual basis for action, but lying should be no more reviled than demanding that the truth of another’s understanding not be spoken.

This is an especially dangerous sin as new and powerful forms of human super-organism are demanding and receiving the power to censor speech that challenges their domination by controlling the means of speech and using that means to control the topics of speech.

6) Repression:

The rejection of one identifiable racial, ethnic, language, cultural or behavioral group by another is one of the oldest human actions. When there was space and available niches, this was less sin and more signal to spread the species around. It even served certain other useful functions by reducing the spread of disease and supplying gene pools from which vigorous crosses could test the genetic waters [2].

But today and for some many hundreds of years the repression of one group by another as been in the service of quite other forces: economic and political power. Billions of human lives have been lived out in the greatest of distress – truly painful, brutal and short because of the sin of repression.

Life has never had a guarantee – or so is my belief – but to assign beforehand that billions of lives will be lived in horror and pain is a sin. And this is a sin that is likely to continue to increase dramatically as it has over the last few thousand years. Never have so many lived such deprived and devastated lives as in today’s moment.

Two hundred years ago there were one billion people on the earth, nearly half of whom lived in deep poverty at the advancing edge of European expansion and industrialization and in islands of industrial servitude. One hundred years ago there where two billion people on the earth, nearly half of whom lived in the deepest poverty as the first world nations were converting the rest of the world into their larder. Today there are almost 7 billion, nearly half of whom live at the edge of survival. Local sustaining practices have been so damaged and demonized that even those who are not in immediate peril today are but one global economic decision away from dust.

7) Religious Piety:

Religion is one of the least understood of human behaviors. Its supporting structures and designs are deep in our origins, but it has become a chimera, a crossing with politics, economics and the institutional super-organism. Religion is a developmentally dysfunctional entity demanding the privilege of an infant while having the strength of a powerful adult.

In its origin religion was the combined effect of the Stories that integrated human action within the environment and the instinctual emotional connections to environment and community. It gave strength to the adaptations that formed the basis of human success. It did not create the behaviors, but responded to them as the collected Stories that organized the behavior of a group, carrying them through space and time.

Devotion to religious story has become the central madness of our time and one of the greatest inhibitions to our survival. There were in the past many thousands of religions because there were thousands of situations in which people lived. Since religion’s function is to define a way of life, then it must be completely connected to immediate and sustaining reality – it used to be! Now religions are devoted to the remains of Stories that once had some relational meaning, but are no longer connected to reality. This makes the Stories of religion easy prey for any entity to use as devices of censorship and repression.

Summary:

These are the sins that we need to “hold in our hearts” as unacceptable. These are the sins that are devastating our world. 30 years ago drunk driving was a laughing matter (even as people were killed), but became a matter of scorn and rejection as people incorporated into their habits of thought, into their lists of sins, driving drunk. We need to see these seven sins in the same way. Just as with the original seven deadly sins a small number of people are empowered by them if allowed, but if enough people reject those behaviors, actively reject them, they will be weakened and more of us may begin to see them for what they are.

[1] It is an irony of our time that those who claim to champion individual freedom are really speaking for the institutional collective and the individual’s subservience to it, while those who are accused of socialist “collectivism” see the collective in service of the individual.

[2] Cultural habits combining with instinctual behaviors associated with incest created complex rules that often involved either males or females moving from one group to another.

Chris Hedges’ “The Man in the Mirror”

This is a brilliantly written piece drawing analogy and metaphor out of Michael Jackson’s life, death and international wake; analogy with our economy, our politics and the mealy tastelessness of our daily lives. I am left with a feeling that ‘now I understand,’ until I try to find the substance of that understanding, the elements that I can find and apply to some large perspective.

Ultimately, I find the Hedges’ model not believable. The corporate collective takes advantage of frightened and fleeing birds to cover their own noisy crashing through the undergrowth, but did not create them. Corporate CEOs are more like crocodiles – cruising under the scummy waters and bursting to the surface for a moment, returning well feed to the subsurface, the charmed and utterly inaccessible world in which they are comfortable. Flying in multimillion dollar private jets to a congressional hearing on waste, mismanagement and excess is exactly how a crocodile would arrive to explain its hunting style – it simply would not realize the incongruity.

Reading Hedges’ work I get the feeling that he thinks we are in pretty deep shit. But after describing – in enviable prose – the color and texture of our depravity I have no better sense of how to proceed than before; I just know that I am part of “another tawdry and tasteless spectacle,” that “The wild pursuit of status, wealth and fame has destroyed our souls.”

Jackson’s Memorial Service, TV spectacle, had 31.1 million viewers I am told. People from all over the world watched. Am I to conclude that 31 million out of 7 billion were sufficiently enchanted with or curious enough about Michael Jackson to watch about 3 hours of TV devoted to his life and passing? Whatever could those other 6,968.9 million people have been doing?

But to the main point of the essay: “The moral nihilism of our culture licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Education, building community, honesty, transparency and sharing are qualities that will see you, in a gross perversion of democracy and morality, ridiculed and voted off any reality show.” And I would suggest that, more than just being denied participation on a “reality (sic) show,” Hedges is suggesting that the list of ‘positive’ qualities also denies participation in the more socially valued movements and moments in American life.

I in no way disagree with detail of the analysis, but it only scratches the surface. We are royally fucked up, for sure, but do we wallow in our madness taking beautifully composed images of our accidental depravity? That is, do we only do Diane Arbus images of our world because the Ansel Adams pictures are so phony. Well, Arbus’ images are just as contrived. And I find Hedges just as contrived, in a similar way.

Less than ½ of one percent of the world’s people watched the Michael Jackson Memorial. I didn’t. I attended an accidental memorial for two dogs and a man that died 20 years ago. And meet the daughter of the man who died at about the same time as the dogs, a man who had been like a grandfather to me. She lived on the land where the dogs were buried, where someone unknown to me had put up stone and well made wooden markers for the dogs. My dogs, saved and raised by me, until I had to leave the land. The dogs and land belonged together: this was accepted by at least 3 different collections of people who took the dogs as part of place, who cared for them, loved them and buried them on the little hill where they could always lie in the winter sun, buried them with the names I had given them as puppies all those many years ago.

My moment was very different from Mr. Hedges’.