First, let's put aside our personal analysis of where we think the world has gone wrong. For the poor, for women, for minorities (race, ethnic group, sexual preference, age, the disabled), we know that specific power structures and policies are to blame for their dilemma. Theoretically, at least in democratic societies, these can be reformed or changed.
But this does not address the root causes of human conflicts. We are all only members of subgroups: tribes, communities, nation-states and continents. The single super-group we belong to is the human species, which itself is really only a subgroup of all living species. The things that have gone wrong everywhere are in fact the result of quite similar assumptions and belief systems in all cultures because evolution has endowed all humans with very similar challenges and even responses, notwithstanding ecological and cultural differences. By examining these a priori, evolution-based beliefs, we will not be far off the mark in extrapolating them to all peoples and societies.
As an example, let's compare Arab and Muslim oppression and enslavement of women. One of the earliest challenges was that to a male in determining whether his wife's children were actually his. The over-reaction in the middle east was to put women in some kind of purdah to prevent contact with nonrelated men. A later more civilized (but imperfect system) was the institution of marriage, reinforced by a religious ceremony involving promises of fidelity. This institution probably came about earlier because, unlike nonhuman females, human female ovulation was concealed so it was advantageous to men to have a permanent sexual partner available on a continual basis. The relegation of women to an inferior role where she lacked economic power (insured by depriving her of an education and property rights or the means to be independent) continued as the norm down through the 20th century. Those who didn't marry became nuns, prostitutes or nannies and if they became pregnant they usually abandoned the child.
Patriarchy and "ownership" of women, reinforced by religion and the state, insured that few women could survive without the protection and support of a spouse or male protector, hence the appearance of the professional courtesan and mistress. Overall, this meant that most men knew that their wives' children were also theirs. Every culture and society had its own means of meeting the same challenges presented by Nature. Incest, the most basic taboo, was insured in early human times by outbreeding, usually through invasion of other tribes and abduction of women. All cultures, in their efforts to understand the universe, created deities and forces, usually based on cosmic bodies like the sun, on animals, or on gods and goddesses of various realms. Today many seemingly inexplicable conflicts arise from the persistence of these early belief systems which are no longer adaptive.
Almost without exception these links between cultures boil down to two major categories: the role of women and the relationship of humans to nonhuman nature and the efforts to utilize or overcome natural forces and ecological challenges. Almost all conflicts today among ethnic groups boil down to competition for land and natural resources, under pressure from severe overpopulation and overexploitation. Under such stresses, whether in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Iraq or the USA, demagoguery and scapegoating, playing one group off against another, become easy and inevitable.
The Israel-Palestinian conflict is probably the leading example of this today. Arab grievances against Israel pre-date the existence of Israel by centuries, having been initiated by Mohammed himself and backed up by the qu-ran which he claims he received from Allah. While Islamic hatred for and murder of nonMuslims across the Mediterranean and into Europe is historic fact, the harshest blow to their campaign to re-establish a global Muslim caliphate after its end in the 1920s in Turkey came with the birth of a Jewish state in the mid- 20th century. Surrounded by Muslim nations seething with booming Arab refugee populations that they themselves created and which, wisely, they will not accommodate as citizens, Israel is a daily visual insult and barrier to creating a middle east and eventual global Muslim umma.
While Christians are routinely persecuted in all Arab nations, as the plight of Egyptian Copts illustrates, the Arabs have decided to focus mainly on Israel and the Jews as a unifying theme because the existence of Israel can be used as a constant reminder to Muslims of the strongest barrier to their own religious objectives. After they destroy Israel - for they have no intention of allowing a two-state solution since this would legitimize the existence of a Jewish state in their midst - they will then move on to Christianity. In fact, they have already started this campaign in western Europe and the USA, with the former being especially vulnerable. No Christian churches outside of Egypt are allowed, and those in Egypt are burned down routinely. In this country, Saudi money to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars has created university studies departments to promote Islam and Arab culture and polish its image so as to counteract the terrorism the Saudis continue to fund elsewhere.
In the Muslim world, and that of traditional African countries ruled by merciless patriarchy, the enslavement and physical abuse of women has not abated. Forced child marriage, genital mutilation, honor killing, refusal to educate women, etc., have been routine since the beginning of time. Only those countries that underwent the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution of the 18th century came to understand the overriding importance of freedom of inquiry, dissent and expression in bringing about social, political and economic progress. This is why western civilization has triumphed. This is "Why the West is Best", as Ibn Warraq's book title states.
Today in the Muslim and Arab world, with the exception of Iran, one-third of all men and half of all women are illiterate. Censorship of media and speech is the rule. Hatred of other religions is preached constantly.These countries teach their students (all men) only the qu-ran. Consequently they contribute nothing whatsoever to modern day commerce, education, technology, the arts, science or philosophy. They reject evolution and promote "Islamic" science which mirrors creationism and fundamentalist Christianity in all respects. Almost no foreign publications, whether literature, philosophy, science or the arts, are translated into Arabic or even sold. (In fact few Arabs can read the Arabic of the qu-ran at all and memorize it by rote, accepting its tenets and mandates as interpreted by their mullahs). The simple fact is that the Arab and Muslim worlds are mired in medieval barbarism, and given the strictures of their religion, no "Arab spring" is likely to turn those countries into tolerant, democratic open societies.
Outside of the Arab world, most African nations still enslave, rape, abuse and deprive women of their rights, freedom and dignity, whether they are Muslim or not....that is, when they are not slaughtering their own minorities in order to control land and resource wealth such as oil, diamonds and minerals. DRC, Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Mauritania, the list of tyrants and domestic genocide grows longer each day. It is fair to conclude that no country that keeps the female half of its population illiterate and powerless will ever join the civilized world or develop a stable economy that anyone would want to trade with.
So now let us move on to the civilized west, which has granted full rights to women and minorities. What it hasn't done, however, is grant nonhuman nature and ecosystems THEIR rights. The slaughter of whales, dolphins, raptors, the clearcutting of old growth forests, the vacuuming of the ocean's fisheries to the point of depletion, the filling of wetlands, the diversion and damming of rivers, the poisoning of the soil by pesticides, the dispersion of radionuclides from nuclear reactors and weapons testing, the reconfiguration of DNA, Nature's building blocks, and the deadly destruction of biodiversity, are witness to an immoral depredation on Nature equivalent to the oppression of Muslim women and ethnic genocide.
Why are countries blessed with civil liberties, a free press, the rule of law, equality, good education systems, scientific accomplishment and free enterprise so busy destroying the physical and biological foundations of human society? What are the belief systems, philosophies and ideologies that have led us into this mess? Not religious ideology (yet); not the oppression of women and minorities. It is our conception of humanity's role in the biosphere. And this conception has several components.
1.Irrationality. This is arguably the default condition of the human mind, overcome only through education and science but never destroyed. Citizens unread in science, witness to technological disasters like Fukushima, unwilling victims of pesticides, suspicious of Big Pharma, are ready to embrace all manner of conspiracy theories. Anything that casts doubt on the power structure of government or corporations, whether well founded or not, allows the individual imagination to run wild with fears and wild theories. The influence of the New Age movement is discernible; gurus with exotic names, costumes and skin color appear more trustworthy than the men in white lab coats or university professors. They are friendlier, more welcoming, less judgmental. Why believe your doctor when he prescribes an antibiotic, when your guru can prescribe something cheaper that seems more "natural"?
2.Postmodernism. This is the twin of irrationality, pronouncing the death of the notions of facts, truth, and external reality. For the postmodernists, who took over the social sciences in the 1960s, science is "socially constructed". Empiricism, evidence, observation, testing, replication: none of the protocols of the scientific method have validity in their view. Science becomes nothing but another form of bias and repression. Radical feminists and Marxists have spread this infectious ideology freely and in so doing have discredited the sciences and ecology in the public eye. In so doing, they bear much responsibility for the indifference or hostility to environmental causes.
3.Cultural relativism. The worst offshoot of postmodernism, and the dismissal of human rights in their entirety. In this view, the oppressed minorities of the world have a right to practice any form of oppression, lunacy, torture and discrimination, whether against women, children or those of another religion or ethnic group. They retain this right because, the reasoning goes, they have been the victims of western capitalist imperialism and colonialism. Once you have become a victim, apparently it is perfectly fine to victimize others, hence the refusal of the American left to acknowledge the oppression of Muslim women or anti-Semitism. To acknowledge their oppression would be an offense to their culture. Of course no Muslim country has been oppressed by the west; they do just fine in oppressing their own people. The Afghanis throw acid in girls's faces; the Pakistanis bury women alive or stone them to death; the Saudis chop off their hands or heads and let unveiled girls burn to death in their school. Rwanda and Congo genocides; Sudanese tyranny and slavery; Somalia war crimes......the list grows. Atrocity after atrocity follows, without cease. Yet the American left still rants about how the US is the worst criminal in the world.
4. The anthropocentrism of the social sciences. Thanks to the loony left and the anti-sociobiologists, the fact that humans are animals has not yet been fully acknowledged. The evolutionary history of our species is ignored or misunderstood and we celebrate our special status, believing that, due to our talents and technology, the laws of human nature do not apply to us. Once this view is accepted, it becomes easy to separate humanity from the rest of living nature and make our own laws that disregard Nature entirely.
5.Commodification of Nature. Privileging the now separate human species leads inexorably to the objectification of Nature and then its commodification. Nature, the unfamiliar, becomes fearful. Then Nature becomes not our progenitor nor its components our equal; it becomes our property, and private property to boot, with no regard for the global commons. Once the planet is a commodity, it can be owned, sold and re-sold, exploited, degraded, destroyed. Once upon a time human beings were bought and sold in this country (they still are in India, Haiti, Sudan, Mauritania, and elsewhere). Eventually slavery was ended. But the earth is still being sliced up to be sold and re-sold, like the phantom mortgages that have wrecked our housing market.
Note that I have not indicted capitalism or any other economic system, nor have I discussed the most serious ecological threats of our time (overpopulation, overconsumption, loss of biodiversity, climate change). These are the PROXIMATE threats to our existence, the consequences of economic growth, not the ultimate or underlying human-based causes of social injustice and collapse. Unfortunately proximate threats only spur technological solutions, whereas ultimate threats require massive socio-political, ethical and philosophical change. Such change becomes less and less likely as the proximate threats grow, especially the loss of biodiversity, the energy crisis and climate change. Social justice, human rights and ecology will get thrown to the winds when the heat hits the fan, or when there is a global depression or another Muslim terrorist attack or we are down to the bottom of the last oil well.
This is something that liberals and the left have not accounted for as they scramble to promote renewable energy and "green jobs", pretending that economic growth will eventually resume and things will revert to "normal". Of course this will never happen. Notwithstanding the photos of new skyscrapers in China and shopping malls in India, the era of economic growth is over. A graph may show ups and downs but the overall direction is down....just as global warming's direction is up. We are entering a permanent recession and contraction of the economy. The 1% may still hold most of the wealth but they are not enough to keep the consumer economy float. 70% of our national GDP depends on a renewal of middle class consumption. It isn't in sight.
American culture and learning, especially in the sciences, are at an all-time low. An obsession with social justice without regard to ecological exigency (which cannot be understood as long as the above five conditions persist) has diverted the energy of liberals into meaningless arid paths, as witness the vapid and unfocused campaign of 350.org and its leader, Bill McKibben. McKibben is like the person who witnesses a fire, shouts about it to anyone who will listen but just stands by watching it spread. He hems and haws over natural gas fracking, throwing the dice every day to see whether he should support it or oppose it.....or say nothing. This is the person who Americans consider a leader even though he has done little leading of any significance.
For western secular democracies, it is becoming imperative that they reverse their course of putting the economy first and develop a core philosophy and ethics of biocentrism based on science and rationality , in which we acknowledge our evolutionary history and where nonhuman species and ecosystems are valued equally with human endeavors. No economy, much less an ethical or political system, operates independently of Nature, of her resources, components and functions, though few establishment economists have progressed to the point of acknowledging this. Unless they do, we will continue our course towards the precipice of collapse. As someone once said: Progress is if you are standing at the edge of the cliff you take a step backward, or turn around 180 degrees and walk forward.
Lorna Salzman
(Salzman's book, Politics as if Evolution Mattered, is available through booksellers or the author herself at [email protected]. Her web site is www.lornasalzman.com and her blog is www.neoenigma.blogspot.com).
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