Humankind Advancing, Vol.2, No.1 January 1991
Theme: The Danger of Losing Confidence in Humankind.
CONTENTS
Editorial -- (incl. quote by Thomas Hardy)
The Danger of Hope for the End of the World
Gordon Kaufman (short excerpt)
Hal Lindsey -- [The Late Great Planet Earth; discussion]
R.H. Popkin (short excerpt)
Quote from Campbell
Quotes from Bradley, Sartre, and Benjamin
The Danger of Hope for the End of our Species
Discussion (ref. to Vonnegut [Falk])
David Lavery
[Reflections on Extinction and Human Destiny; discussion]
Quote from Bateson
The Danger of Accepting Defeat
The "Cosmic Principle of Self-Destruction"
Quote from Wicken
In Search of Alternatives
Quote from Burhoe
Roger Sperry (short excerpt)
Rita Levi-Montalcini (short excerpt)
W. Basil McDermott -- My Grandfather's Question
Quote from Walford
Thought in Pre-History
Jared Diamond -- [The Great Leap Forward; discussion]
Thought in Action
Designing New Civilizations [Leon Vickman]
Acknowledgments
Reflections
References
Editorial
The Danger of Acquiescience to Self-Destruction
"If a way to the better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst."
Thomas Hardy
A research project "In Search of Values for Human Survival," conducted by the author of this editorial, revealed three major threats to our species: (1) nuclear warfare; (2) destruction of our life support system through unrestrained population increase and increase of want; (3) loss of confidence in humankind: the belief that we cannot adjust to the requirements of a new situation or even that our species does not deserve to survive.
The first two dangers are receiving adequate attention. The third danger -- the greatest of all -- is hardly known. In fact, it is widely believed not to exist. For instance, when I mentioned this threat to a Nobel Laureate in Medicine, an outstanding and influential person, his response was: "Whoever would think like that? Name one!"
In answer to his question this issue will provide evidence for the spread of an attitude that is dangerous, unrecognized, unexplored, and unrestrained -- or at least insufficiently recognized and inadequately attended to in comparison to that of the first-named two dangers.
It is an attitude that is carried through our society by different ways of thinking: (a) belief in the apocalypse, the end of the world and all evil in it, during which the faithful will be carried off into heaven; (b) the perception of humankind as a beast of prey, or a parasite, from which pristine nature has to be liberated; (c) the conviction that the complexity of our problems far outweighs the ability of the human nervous system to handle them, and that further increases of complexity in the future will invariably lead to more and more irrational and counterproductive responses.
The call for increased maturity of thinking, to which this journal is dedicated, embodies the hope that humankind will be able to overcome the paralizing threat of the third danger. -- But first its existence will be documented.
THE DANGER OF HOPE FOR THE END OF THE WORLD
Gordon Kaufman
Some fundamentalists on the far religious right, following out the implications of the biblical apocalyptic imagery of an earthly holocaust as the ultimate expression of God's sovereignty over history are apparently willing to go so far as to suggest that a nuclear disaster, if it ever comes, could only be an expression of the purposes of God; hence any who work to prevent such a climax to human history are in fact guilty of opposing God's will. (5) -- Along with such convictions, as one might expect, goes the demand that the Western nations arm themselves to the teeth in preparation for the coming Armageddon. But surely to take such a position is an ultimate evasion of our responsibility as human beings in this whole matter; indeed, it is demonically to invoke the divine will as a justification for that very evasion.
(5) See the Boston Globe, 2 May 1982, p. A-1, for a survey of some contemporary opinions of this sort. For a widely read detailed elaboration of such a position, see Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth, (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1970).
- - -
Quoted from Theology for a Nuclear Age, p.8.
Gordon Kaufman is a Professor of Divinity at Harward Divinity School.
* * * * *
Hal Lindsey
The author of The Late Great Planet Earth takes all predictions in the Bible literally, especially the prediction that our civilization will end in a devastating holocaust, the war of Armageddon, to be fought on the plains of Israel. Numerable passages from the Bible are cited to prove that prophets who lived thousands of years ago had definite knowledge about the future development of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the immense damage they would cause.
For Lindsey, however, that is no reason for despair. On the contrary, it is a reason for happy anticipation, because Jesus will come at this time (in Lindsey's interpretation already before the greatest terrors start) and take all faithful believers literally and bodily up into the heaven with him. That is the time of the rapture, the greatest joy that can be imagined.
The point of view of an insignificant minority? I wish it were! -- Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth, first published in 1970, has had 62 reprintings and sold more than 18 million copies worldwide until 1981. With two other books on the bestseller list at the same time (he wrote 6 books on the same subject up to 1981) Hal Lindsey has been named the bestselling author of the decade.
Nor does he restrict himself to writing. This author, who is convinced that those who oppose the Nuclear Holocaust oppose God's will, was speaking (between 1973 and 1981) to tens of thousands of students on major university campuses throughout the United States.
How much influence does Lindsey and other promoters of his fundamentalist point of view have on the intellectuals of the U.S.? How does this conviction affect the choice of the persons voted into power?
* * * * *
R.H. Popkin.
That question is answered in R.H. Popkin's article "The Triumphant Apocalypse and the Catastrophic Apocalypse" (1986), which traces the influence of the hope for the destruction of the world into the highest positions. Popkin warns that "militant anti-Communism joined to the reading of the Book of Revelation as an account of present and near-future developments in the Middle East may be the most dangerous recipe now available for the total destruction of human existence....The [leaders of individual nations] probably only want to fight with all their destructive resources if they are fairly sure they will win. The [preachers happily anticipating the Triumphant Apocalypse ] `know' they will win because of their reading of the texts about providential history, and hence will probably not be restrained by normal considerations." (Pp.145/146)
* * * * *
Some of the most serious of the present doomsday predictions are due not to the undermining of old social norms but, rather, to the continued strength of old counter hedonic social adaptations...
Clearly, the capacity to mobilize for war is a successful product of past social evolution curbing human cowardness and selfishness, and yet it is one which is a major threat to our survival this day.
Donald Campbell, 1975
* * * * *
"There is nothing to indicate that man deserves to survive....The human mind is its own chief limitation."
Response of a Harvard medical professor to a questionnaire-survey on values needed for human survival, conducted by the publisher between 1984 and 1987, (Erdmann, 1987, 1989).
* * * * *
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about killing than we do about living.
Omar Bradley,
General, U.S.Army
* * * * *
Man is a useless passion.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness.
* * * * *
Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
Walter Benjamin
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
THE DANGER OF HOPE FOR THE END OF OUR SPECIES
The hope for the end of the evil of our time through a fatal catastrophy is expressed not only by excesses in literal belief in Bible prophecy, it is also expressed by ecological fanatics. "We are pollution" Kurt Vonnegut says, who is "appalled by all that an insane humanity may yet survive to do." (Falk, 1979). Vonnegut's son, a medical student, writes "We're destroying the planet, there's not a damn thing that can be done about it. It's going to be very slow, drawn out and ugly or so fast it doesn't make any difference." (Ibid.)
Similar thoughts occur in many ecologically conscious writings. Thomas M. Dunn, the editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring 1985, a special issue titled Science and the Human Image writes "The considerable space given to the darkest aspects of Science and the Human Image -- the possible extinction of our species by nuclear warfare or other means -- reflect the great quantity of manuscripts submitted by scientists and non-scientists alike on this timely subject."
One of these, the contribution by Lavery, traces the disillusionment with human nature and its ingenuity from the time of the enlightenment to its present depth. (Unfortunately, the article does not contain a reference list.)
- - -
David Lavery
The Audition of History and the Vocation of Man: Reflections on Extinction and Human Destiny.
The stage for the article's content is set by its epigraph: "Humans lived here once; it became sacred only when they went away," (Adrienne Rich).
This attitude, however, is not Lavery's own conviction. He identifies himself with the thoughts of the poet Wendell Berry, who does not want to eliminate man, but rather bring him into a much closer relationship with the earth -- recommending that our way of life be modeled after that of "the woodcock and the quail and the mole, creatures almost indistinguishable in their feathers and coats from their surroundings." Human beings should "blend in with the world [and] no longer concern [themselves] with standing out."
Lavery advocates the exchange of the conception of the human as Lord of the earth for that of "a privileged listener and respondent to existence" involved in an audition -- a trial performance on earth -- which demands "extreme responsibility [and] custodianship" to be passed.
Nevertheless, his fascination with advocators of specicide is such that even his students generally misunderstand him. His article is introduced with a report about a book, titled "After Man: A Zoology of the Future" (by Dougal Dixon), in which man's demise -- caused by over-development, exhaustion of natural resources and lack of consideration of the demands of evolution -- is taken for granted without any regret or elaboration, and only the relief and blossoming forth of the remainder of earth's fauna is described.
The theme is continued throughout Lavery's work. At one point he quotes a beautiful poem by Sara Teasdale (1920):
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, whether bird or tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
"To Teasdale," Lavery concludes, "it seems only natural to `dream of this place without us', to allow the Earth in all its noumenal splendor to endure `untroubled about us'."
More typical of the contemporary spread of disgust with humanity is the voice of Jeffers, which called humankind "the contagion of consciousness that infects this corner of space" and who believed that "a day will come when the earth will scratch herself and smile and rub off humanity." In "The Truce and the Peace" (1918) Jeffers, too, dreams of a tranquil earth after liberation from the blight of humankind.
Lavery then moves on to the work of anthropologist Jacquette Hawkes, concentrating on her fable "A woman as Great as the World." This woman is the world. She brings forth human beings, "ugly little momments who walk clumsily on two legs," which torment her like parasites. Of course, she soon eliminates them. -- "To accept Hawkin's message," Lavary says, "requires us to view the destruction of the species as merely a phase in an evolution vaster than man can comprehend, in which he is denied actual participation. And her voice is only one in a swelling comtemporary chorus."
Gregory Bateson, called "perhaps the first full-fledged theoretician of human extinction" by Lavery, sees the earth as healing itself not only from the wounds inflicted upon it by one exceptional species, but considers life itself, and the consciousness that periodically emerges from it, as intrinsic aberrations of "the quiescence of the inorganic world." None of these aberrations will, can, or should be lasting. Man deserves to disappear; the cause for his demise is rooted in his own attitudes and assumptions. Bateson compares the human "likelihood of survival" to that of "a snow-ball in hell" and believes that individuals will die either "of the toxic byproducts of [their] own hate" or, "simply of overpopulation and overgrazing." (Steps to an Ecology of Mind)
Lavery refers to Heidegger and Levi-Strauss as only two of many other influential modern thinkers who consider humanism an "historical aberration and overvaluation" in which much of present-day insanity is rooted. It cannot last, and human beings (as we know them) will disappear with it. Man, in this passage, is seen as the "murderer" of God. -- In the next one, Loren Eiseley calls him the "world eater" (The Invisible Pyramid) and fears that even human extinction would not be enough. Our fossil record itself may still be "contagiously harmful."
These examples, depressing as they are, do not by far exhaust Lavery's collection of evidence for the widespread wish and hope that our species may perish. To be ashamed of our species, Lavery agrees with Berry, is "the responsibility of an honest person."
* * * * *
It's only us that wants us to survive; no doubt the rest of the world would give a sigh of relief to see us go. A few tapeworms might say, `Oh, my God, what will we do now?' But the rest of the world would settle into a new equilibrium."
GregoryBateson, Anthropologist, in a 1980 interview.
THE DANGER OF ACCEPTING DEFEAT
The Cosmic Principle of Self-Destruction.
Though depressing, the previous examples of hope for the end of our species and our world may be shrugged off as passing fads. Far more serious is the argument that ongoing evolution makes increasing complexity inevitable, and that the point in time is close at hand in which that complexity will outstrip the capability of our nervous systems to handle it. -- That argument is valid; it is crucially important, and it demands the concentration of all wisdom that can be found on earth -- if even that is enough.
For not only is increasing complexity an ineliminable part of advancing evolution, it is also widely believed, especially among intellectuals, that therefore the promotion of this trend becomes a moral command, dictated directly by nature. Especially sophisticated efforts to define -- and to make accessible to exact mathematical calculations -- our concepts of "the highest good" or "the highest value" have led to the widely accepted notion of "complexity" as a rather uncontested contender. Does not evolution clearly proceed from the less to the more complex, and is not the human brain with its ability to generate entire new worlds the most marvellous and also the most complex phenomenon ever evolved (as far as we know)?
Anyone who feels uncomfortable with this identification of complexity as the highest good for which we ought to strive may find solace in the theory that the drive toward complexity may run out of control and lead to self-destruction. A "cosmic principle of self-destruction" is projected that operates -- not only here on earth but on any planet that has brought forth intellectual life -- through an accelerating rate of change beyond the ability for even the best brains to cope with (Chaisson, 1988).
Therefore, it is clearly not complexity itself that ought to be promoted, but the right kind of it: thought and behavior that would lead to the most desirable results.
For instance, Robert Axelrod, whose book The Evolution of Cooperation will be discussed in the next issue, uses an entire subchapter to warn of too much cleverness in a perceived vacuum -- that is, without considering the change it will engender in a prospective partner.
Intelligence has even been called "the most dangerous product of evolution" -- and that by an eminent professor of chemical physics -- because it will destroy our world through the ruthless competition of which it is a product (Kupperman, 1987).
Neither of the believers in the "cosmic principle of self-destruction" hopes for the end of our world or our civilization; it is simply considered unavoidable. All efforts to search for the kind of wisdom we need to go beyond our present concept of intelligence are thought far too naive to be taken serious. (Obviously, the elimination of intelligence would be the worst solution.) Therefore, though it may be a relief to know that there is something wrong with the obligation to strive for increasing complexity, the cosmic principle of self-destruc-tion implies helpless acceptance of defeat. Perhaps, Kupperman suggests, some other civilization on some other planet may have discovered the secret we need, but unless we find that civilization -- and spend all our intelligence and resources on that task -- there is no hope.
* * * * *
Human meaning comes from orienting the self to that which is in some sense greater. To suppose certainty with regard to that "greater" is to reduce it to categories of the apprehendable. (Pp. 159/160)
Jeffrey S. Wicken, Professor of Biochemistry
IN SEARCH OF ALTERNATIVES
"We need fear only our failure to keep searching for that which reality (we could translate this as nature or God) will require for continuing life."
Burhoe, R.W. (Recipient of Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion) "War, Peace, and Religion's Biocultural Evolution" (1986).
Roger Sperry
In the context of today's mounting global problems, the relative demand for medical, educational, and related social benefits that derive from the neurosciences is diminished. At the same time the human value spin-offs of brain research and related sciences are thrust into a strategic position of top concern because of their key role as criteria for policy priorities and decision-making guidelines. Recent conceptual developments in the mind-brain sciences rejecting reductionism and mechanistic determinism on the one side and dualism on the other clear the way for a rational and realistic approach to the theory and prescription of values and to a natural fusion of science with ethics and religion. Science can be upheld as the best route to an increased understanding and rapport with the forces that made and move the universe and created humanity. The outlines of a global ethic emerge that include reverent respect for nature and the evolving quality of the biosphere, which, if imple-mented, would set in motion the kind of change needed to lead us out of the vicious spirals of increasing population, pollution, poverty, energy demands, and so on. The strategic importance of neuroscience and the central role of prevailing concepts of the mind-brain relation to all of the foregoing remain evident throughout, as does also the direct relevance of efforts to bring added insight and substantiation of these mind-brain concepts through further advances in brain research.
Excerpt from "Science, Values, and Survival" (pp.8/9).
Nobel Laureate in medicine, Roger Sperry, discovered the fundamental importance of human values during his pursuit of mind-brain research.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
Imperfect machines...lent themselves to the game of selection just as the brain of the first vertebrate did when it appeared on our planet in the Carboniferous period between 300 and 400 million years ago. The empty vesicles of that ancestral brain, unlike the solid and compact mass of the brain of invertebrates, succumbed to the selective pressure that evolution has exerted on cerebral vesicles, giving birth to the infinite number of variations (mutations) in the brains of both living and extinct forms of vertebrate life. The most recent among these is the marvellous though far from perfect brain of Homo Sapiens. The solid, compact, and perfect brain of invertebrates, on the other hand, has not bent to such selective pressure, a fact especially true of the model that may well be considered the most successful of all: that of the insects, who have propagated and come to dominate the depths and surface of the planet. Neither a Hitler nor an Einstein will ever be descended from them (for better or worse) though their progeny will perhaps still exist hundreds of millions of years from now.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
In Praise of Imperfection, (1988, p.7)
Rita Levi-Montalcini received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
===================================
W. Basil McDermott
The following, Part II of McDermott's essay "The Golden Corkscrew and my Grandfather's Question," continues the discussion started in Vol.1, No.4. It is likewise an original contribution to this journal. Professor McDermott lectures on questions concerning our future at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Division of Interdisciplinary Studies.
My Grandfather's Question
My Grandfather had slowly come to the suspicion that both our minds and our social reality operate according to principles and habits of which we are only dimly aware and over which we exercise inade-quate control. However, my grandfather did not permit himself the pleasure and distraction of debating these heresies. Rather he tracked his doubt as carefully as he could. It appeared to him that people thought the way they did not merely through habit and desire. It was as if our minds could not work differently even if we so wished, at least not for very long and not without the proper application of different methods and... (When my grandfather reached this point in his thinking he noticed that something interfered and prevented a continuation. It was as if the thought that he sought could not be reached from where he currently stood.) and `something else'.
This underdeveloped and untrustworthy element that he called his mind was preventing him from thinking differently about himself, his past, and his future. He was a man possessed with the idea that our species had now evolved to a collective stage where we were confronted with the unsuspected need to think thoughts that we do not yet know how to think.
At first I thought he was joking. It was not usual for my grandfather to dwell on seemingly unanswerable questions. So I joked back and told him that I thought his thought was a great thought and was certainly worth thinking about. He stared through my words and remained quietly in his own thoughts. Unable to bear his silence I then carelessly asked if he believed this predicament posed the greatest challenge the human race has ever faced since ejection from the garden of Eden, an immense challenge which would surely be mastered once recognized as such, or whether it represented an unavoidable tragedy from which no decent exit was possible. He replied that my fondness for dramatic expression was but a minor manifestation of those ingrained and crude patterns of thought that he feared would be decreasingly sufficient in the future. It was on this occasion that he gave me his golden corkscrew and the question he could not answer: How can thoughts that we do not yet know how to think be created, maintained, applied, and refined?
I must now pause and offer a few words of clarification about my grandfather's question. In the first place he insisted that it was not a new question; it has been asked by others down through the corridors of time. To seek to use our minds in a different manner has been the quest of at least a few in all societies about which we have knowledge. The importance of what this question represents is something that must be created by the individual as he permits his thoughts to filter through the question's multiple levels. In the second place, he be-lieved that the ideas behind the question were perhaps more important than the question itself. He emphasized that he could not hand me these ideas in the manner he gave me the corkscrew. "You must develop alternative methods to let the ideas around which the question revolves become a part of your curiosity about how you currently think your own mind works as well as how you think various other external processes operate without becoming obsessed with the question why. There is, however, a proper time and place for the why of things. When you are in the wine cellar, you will be unable to resist asking why; when you are in the vineyard, you are obliged to ask how."
For the successful, the need to think differently is hardly apparent. For those, however, who repeat their mistakes more often than they learn from them, my grandfather's question may take up lodging in their minds. Or, rather, the question may make periodic visits like a country doctor to see how you have been.
At times I treated my grandfather's question as a metaphor; at other times I took it literally. In both instances the slender insights I temporarily gained into how my mind seemed to operate did not seem to produce durable results. Somehow I was not learning precisely what I needed to know from my experience because I did not know how to pay attention in the proper manner to different aspects within those same experiences. This was complicated, of course, by the fact that most of what I thought about how life worked on this planet had very little to do with my own experience nor could it ever have.
Worse yet, I had a great deal of difficulty controlling the constant flow of my thoughts and feelings. At times my mind seemed to operate according to principles beyond my awareness and control. When I confided this to my grandfather he merely said it reminded him of T.S. Eliot's comment that "only the fool, fixed in his folly, may think he can turn the wheel in which he turns." (2) This, of course, was depressing news.
At such moments my grandfather took action to interfere with my temptation to enjoy my despair and apparent failure. I wanted to answer this question so badly and yet I had failed so miserably. I was unable to find suitable methods that might lead to a reasonable exploration of this question and where it might lead us. To entertain thoughts and feelings at a range removed from my mind's conditioning and current capacity is not an activity I have even modestly accomplished. While this surely does not make me peculiar, only the perverse would take delight in such general mental lameness.
My grandfather was unimpressed with my apparent candor and said that I was abusing the dilemma it posed. "You seem to believe that nothing is worth saying unless it will lead to immediate success. You claim that no reader can take heart from a discussion that concedes failure at the outset. But all of life is a discussion of our failures; it is only human vanity and ignorance that encourages us to exaggerate the significance of our efforts and consider them solid achievements."
I was duly chastened. I took his admonition and transformed it into encouragement to pursue his question as best I could. I can still see the old winemaker looking over my shoulder at every turn; I can still hear his voice forever ringing in my ears. It was to be a joint adventure. Together we were to explore the nature of human misery and the nature of our minds. Together we were to think about the implications of this quest for the survivors of our time.
- - -
Ref.: (1) (See first part of this essay, Vol.1, No.4, p. 5, line 16) -- Idries Shah, The Sufis (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1971), p. 70.
(2) T.S. Eliot, "Murder in the Cathedral," Collected Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), P.19.
* * * * *
What is needed to keep alive is not another blueprint out of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or John Maynard Keynes. Simple reworking and extensions of older economic and political philosophies may not suffice to solve the problems of our current evolutionary stage. What we need is a jump or mutational event in the social structure, a discontinuity, an abrupt historical change in man's whole orientation toward himself and his problems.
Roy L. Walford
THOUGHT IN PRE-HISTORY
Diamond, Jared (1989). The Great Leap Forward. Discover, 10(5):50-60. (May 1989).
Diamond compares the mental attitudes of Neanderthals with those of Cro-Magnon people (as far as these can be discerned from archeological findings) and describes the nature of a fundamental advance in thinking that occurred about 35 000 years ago.
Although the Neanderthals ranged from from 130,000 years ago to 32,000 years ago in time, and from western Europe, through southern European Russia and the Near East, to Uzbekistan in Central Asia in space, no cultural differences, either in space or time, are evident, suggesting the absence of "that most human of characteristics, innovation". (P.55)
But they were human in other respects. They used fire, buried their dead, and took care of their sick and aged.
Their brain size was 10% greater than ours, yet their foreheads, over spectacular browridges, were sloping backward, and their protruding lower faces had no chins. Their muscular bodies contained strong bones, and their lower legs and forearms were comparatively short.
In contrast, a new kind of human being evolved in Africa about 100,000 years ago whose skull hardly differed from that of a modern person. -- Were the fossil remnants of these individuals accompanied by dramatic evidence of innovative differences in tool making? Did art appear? Surprisingly, that is not the case.
For the next 65,000 years, innovation was slow, timid, and hardly outstanding. Then, suddenly, 35,000 years ago, in France and Spain, the newcomers from Africa -- encountering robust Neanderthals and limits set by the Ice Age -- were faced with challenges that led to an explosive surge of innovation. Tools diversified, nets and fishhooks permitted the exploitation of new food sources, the arts were invented. -- Brains craved for stimulation; unused time became a source of dissatisfaction.
Most important, according to Diamond, was the refinement and perfection of rudimentary language. Language, he believes, turned Homo Sapiens into a truly human being. Furthermore, the life span of a Neanderthal person was about 40, few lived to 45; Cro-Magnons reached up to 60 years -- an additional advantage for the gathering and transmission of experience.
But not only in the north, in the south of Africa too ingenuity appeared. Cave excavations yield similar responses to the challenge of the Ice Age: new weapons together with bones of larger and more dangerous animals.
Wherever the new African man advanced, previously unsurpassible barriers were conquered. No human being had ever set foot into the wide ranges of northern Europe, Siberia, Australia, and all of America before -- now all these regions were filled. Australia came first; already 50,000 years ago watercraft was invented capable of crossing from eastern Indonesia (60 miles). 20,000 years ago -- after the invention of needles, tailored clothing, stone lamps, houses and good fireplaces -- northen Russia and Siberia could be settled. From there, the crossover into America became possible and occurred 11,000 years before our time.
The combination of new brains and new challenges had led to a new way of thinking. Its impact changed our world. Diamond calls it "the most important innovation -- the capacity for innovation itself" and adds "To us, innovation is utterly natural. To Neanderthals it was evidently unthinkable." (P.58)
The challenges were there all the time; the brains to meet them were not. What distinguished them from those that had evolved previously? Diamond thinks it was only a 0,1 percent change in our genes -- the change that brought about the anatomical basis for spoken complex language." (P.59)
Behavioral changes did not follow immediately. Many thousands of years were needed, Diamond explains, to work out a usuable medium of understanding, and to let intercommunication affect thought. Then only, the "tens of thousands of years of cumulative development" began which led to our present cultural achievements, achievements which turned us, as Diamond puts it, into "the first species, in the history of life on Earth, capable of destroying all life." (P.60)
THOUGHT IN ACTION
Designing New Civilizations
Far from accepting the end of our world or the extinction of our species as inevitable -- or even as a blessing -- thousands of human beings all over the globe struggle toward the creation of new and more wholesome attitudes. Though concerned with human shortcomings, they have neither succombed to cynicism nor have they lost hope. They know that evolving nature and culture also create the wonderful, the miraculous, the unexpected.
One of these practical visionaries is Leon Vickman who has set himself the task to interconnect thinkers preoccupied with the aims of "Designing societies that are many times more intelligent, enlightened, loving and peaceful than the present civilization."
Their concerns include: interpersonal relations, health, advanced monetary exchange systems, supraconsciousness, village/community-level design, food, housing, `jobs' and other human needs, self reliance, self worth, self esteem (self-actualization), language/symbols/myths/knowledge system/learning/feedback systems, spirituality, "inner knowing/ancient wisdom/built-in constraints, the fundamental nature of living organisms, examining and redesigning all societal assumptions to achieve advanced world views, and "paradox as a dynamic life force."
Here dreams and practical suggestions interfertilize each other through the exchange of "M2Ms" (Many-to-Manys), that is, a letter exchange with the help of central photocopying and mailing. -- The idea is to enable a group of friends to "come together," to enjoy their mutual give and take, and to feel the warmth of a close relationship, though they live far apart, would have difficulty to afford the travel expenses, and are, in some cases, even physically handicapped. Here, they have the opportunity not only to live a fuller life, but also the deeply satisfying experience that they are productive members of our society -- working together toward a special and much needed goal.
The group is part of the "Action-Linkage-Network" of Robert Theobald and Ann Weiser, whose initiative has been discussed in Vol.1, No.1. -- Many other groups congregate around other interests.
Anyone who would like to receive more informa-tion on the topic described, please contact
Leon Vickman c/o NEW CIVILIZATION
California public benefit non-profit corporation
16255 Ventura Boulevard, Suite 605
Encino, California 91436-2354 (Tel.: 818-788-1136)
Acknowledgments: I am grateful to R. Levi-Montalcini and R. Sperry for permission to print from their work.
REFLECTIONS
Is another fundamental change of our brains and our thinking needed to prevent us from destroying all life? -- The protagonist of McDermott's discussions seems to think so. -- Are we then helplessly dependent on the occurrence of a new chance event that will affect our genes in a positive manner?
That may not be the case. In Diamond's report, the new Africans with modern features existed for thousands of years before their capacities were put to use. Likewise, could there not be among us persons with unusual abilities not previously needed -- abilities the use of which would determine the fate of our species and that of all life on earth? And if so, what would be their characteristics?
The present journal is dedicated to the exploration of these questions.
References
Axelrod, R. (1984). The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books.
Bateson, G. and Benjamin W. See Lavery Pp.353, 355.
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