Actually, I think it's funny! And it's my hobby to detect these guys.
Posted on 01/12/2005 10:50:54 AM PST by mikeharris65
Scientists think that our species, Homo sapiens, emerged about 100,000 years ago somewhere in Africa. Imagine that back at the time, scientists in another galaxy had been searching the cosmos for life and discovered our solar system and Earth. So they park their spaceship above the Rift Valley in Africa and gaze at the vast expanse of lush forests, plains teeming with wildebeest, zebras, elephants and gazelles and rivers filled with hippos, crocs and flamingoes.
Those extragalactic scientists would no doubt notice small family groups of a two-legged, upright, furless ape but I doubt that anyone would point to them and say, "Watch that one. That's the creature of destiny!" After all, we weren't that impressive in size, speed, sensory acuity, strength or beauty.
But if they watched our behaviour, they would realize that our advantage wasn't visible from the outside. We seemed to be acting deliberately - preparing shelter, seeking food, avoiding predators. We made up for our physical deficits with the two-kilogram organ locked in our skulls.
The human brain was the key to our survival. It endowed us with curiosity, inventiveness and a massive memory. The French Nobel laureate, Francois Jacob, says the human brain has an inbuilt need for order. We find chaos frightening and there is an innate tendency to try to organize our observations and speculations so it all makes sense. We recognized patterns, cycles and rhythms in nature - day and night, seasons, tides, lunar cycles, movement of stars, animal migration, plant succession - and that knowledge gave us some predictive capacity that was useful.
The human brain invented an amazing concept - a future. Because we had a notion of future, we (I believe uniquely among all animals) recognized that we could deliberately choose a path into the future. We understood causal relations ("If I do this, this will happen, if I don't do that, something else might occur.") and deliberately chose, from a number of options, the kind of future we were heading for. And it worked. It got us to where we are.
All people since the earliest times integrated their observations, speculations, insights, superstitions into worldviews, the sum total of their culture, in which nothing existed in isolation or apart - everything was connected to everything else. In such a world, everything we do has repercussions and therefore, every act carries responsibilities lest order be disrupted.
Even today, traditional and aboriginal people constantly remind us who they are and where they belong on this earth. They tell their stories, sing their songs and offer their prayers to thank their Creator for nature's generosity and abundance, acknowledge they are part of nature and therefore have responsibilities, and promise to act properly to keep everything in order. That's just the way it has always been.
Until now. Today, most of us live in a shattered world. A world of disconnected bits and pieces, so it is no longer easy to recognize our place. And when we can't see the connections, we fail to recognize causal relationships and therefore feel no responsibility.
When we shop at GAP, NIKE or ROOTS, we don't usually ask where the cotton, wool, rubber or leather came from, the working conditions and pay of the workers who harvested the raw materials and whether pesticides and other pollutants were used. We just want a garment to wear.
Similarly, upon purchase of an IBM computer, SONY television or GM car, we don't wonder about the dozens of different metals in the components or the consequences of mining, manufacturing, transporting and using the product. We just want to watch TV or get around.
In the middle of winter, we seldom wonder as we buy fresh papayas, lettuce or bananas where they were grown or how they got here. Yet every purchase and every use of a purchase has consequences that reverberate around the world. We just aren't seeing them. And that's the problem.
Time to reinvent our future (Part II)
Last time, I suggested that human beings have almost always lived within a worldview in which everything is interconnected and where we knew we had responsibilities to act in certain ways to ensure nature's generosity and abundance would continue. But suddenly in the past century we've become blind to those interconnections and therefore have lost our sense of responsibility - and now it's putting our future at risk.
So how have we come to this state? I believe it has been the sudden confluence of a number of factors that have had the collective effect of shattering the world we perceive.
The most obvious factor is population. Human numbers have exploded in the past century, rising from a billion and a half people in 1900 to more than six billion by 2000. When populations grow so rapidly, it means the average age declines. Most people on Earth today were born after 1950. They have lived their entire lives in an absolutely unprecedented and totally unsustainable period of growth and change. But because that is all they've ever known, it seems the norm and must be maintained.
Likewise, most scientists who have ever lived are alive and practicing today. Scientists focus on a part of nature, separate that part, control everything impinging on it and measure everything within it, thereby acquiring insights into that part of nature. But in the process of focusing, we lose sight of the context - the rhythms, patterns and cycles - within which that fragment exists and functions. So we fragment the whole into isolated bits and pieces.
Ideas from science are applied as technology, which can be extremely powerful, but furthers the disconnect between us and our world and fosters the illusion that it is technology and not nature that provides us with what we need to survive. As an unexpected side-effect, rather than freeing us from work and responsibility to give more leisure, it has sped up time, allowing us to jam more and more things to do into a shorter period and rewarding us with a river of new toys and stuff, instead of free time to enjoy life.
In my experience in television, the rapid growth in available channels has resulted in shorter, more sensational reports that contain less and less information or context and more and more factoids or visual images. When a radio or TV announcer says, "And now for an in-depth report," it may be two minutes long. So information, as typified by the news, is increasingly chopped into short soundbites that fail to include the context, history, or suggestions as to what can be done, thereby again shattering the world we are seeing.
The twentieth century also brought about a stunning shift in the way humans live. In 1900, most people lived in rural villages - we were an agrarian species. Only a hundred years later, most of us live in large cities as urbanites. This transformation has severed our connection with nature, leading us to assume that the "economy" is the source of everything, as if it exists independent of the world around us.
Urban children today don't recognize that wieners and hamburgers are the muscles of an animal. They don't know where water and electricity comes from or where the toilet flushes to or garbage ends up. Too often, urban children are warned not to touch something because "it might bite" or "it's dirty" or simply "Yuk. That's disgusting." We teach our children to fear nature and fail to make connections with the natural world.
We in developed countries are lucky because most of us don't have to worry about day-to-day survival. With 80 per cent of us in cities, our world is largely of concrete and steel, and all the amenities we could ever want are at our disposal 24 hours a day. The goods we need come in on trucks and our wastes go out on trucks or through pipes. We don't have to think about these things.
Or do we? We are now paying the price for our disconnect from the natural world. Global warming, species extinction and a gradual erosion of our quality of life are all symptoms of the problem. But there is a way out. We can reinvent our future and choose a new path to sustainability.
IP check on aisle 5
"Enjoy the pizza - how many teats were painfully squeezed for that cheese?
"
And those poor cows...with their necks squeezed while they were being milked. And what of their calves, sent to slaughter as veal.
It's just horrible, I tell you, horrible!
mikeharris65 and future are not words that go together.
From a earth-preservation cultist no less. Man is what he is because God made him so. Huge changes in society and population can't have that much of a drastic effect on our brain development or we would all put Michaelangelo and Da Vinci to shame...
Why? Did your slip on something and break your sense of humor there?
What motivation could you have ? It's just that it seems like a waste of time to me.
Actually, I think it's funny! And it's my hobby to detect these guys.
Guess what Mike?
In the good old USA, luck had nothing to do with our success, it was our Chrisitan hertiage, our form of government Democratic REPUBLIC and our own American brand of hard work and ingenuity that "developed" this country
These are the "Metrosexuals" ... these are the 'progressives' ... these are the homosexual-rights advocates, because after all, what is more unnatural than homosexuality being seen as equal to the heterosexual design that has brought all life to the planet ... these are the doofuses who actually believe, probably like the author of this article, that 'global warming' is caused by evil Republican SUVs and is not a natural cycle of the planet.
These are the future voters for socialist policies that kill whatever is left of inventiveness and originality. They have already slayed morals and values because they are so disconnected from the natural order that produced our concepts of morals and values.
David Suzuki is on the far left of several issues with global warming the biggest example. That being said, sustainable development has some very good ideas. Use less water and electricity to do the same task results in a cost savings and an improved efficiency. Cut down on the waste you produce saves money up from by having to spend less on disposal and less waste means you have a more efficeint process. Long term, less waste means you don't have to worry as much about lawsuits or environmental cleanup years down the road. It also means taking a more analytical approach to how a company does business which usually indicates management is looking for better and more effective ways of doing business. This isn't some druid inspired envirowacko idea. It does have practical applications that help a company be more efficient (reduced costs) and more profitable as a result.
Aren't you named after the former conservative Premier of Ontario - the one that cut the testing of municipal water testing, which then lead to a breakout of E. Coli in the drinking water of a small town, and then resulted in several deaths. All because the government wanted to cut what it though were unnecessary, expensive environmental regulations?
His last thread (IBM and the Holocaust), on which you gave him the sniff test, got pulled.
He's getting much the same welcome here.
Dead troll.
****************
Uh. Was?
Aw, gee. Gone already?
Thank you for the ping. I shall now spend the remainder of the afternoon feeling smug.
Ha! My troll sniffer works! :^)
"Human numbers have exploded in the past century"
I predict an explosion in your online future. Soon after that, All Your Base Belong To Us. And Dam Ties, too.
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