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6a The
Long Journey into Today
Below are a few notes of historic socio-political changes that
were stepping stones toward key elements of the human dilemma.
A long time ago:
Step 1: Displacement of
feminine balance: The beginning of androcentrism
Riane Eisler,
in her book, Chalice & The Blade, makes a historical review of
many sources indicating that in early human societies the female had a much
larger role than today. Going back
to the Stone Age, 30,000 years ago, nude figures
of goddesses adorned rocky cave walls.
Evidence of female leadership continued throughout the following 20,000
years, through the Neolithic era, where cooperative societies lived in
relative peaceful communities. This
lasted until about 3000 BCE when Western cultures and religions began to
emerge, dethroning the female goddesses.
Female equality has never returned although today progress is being
made in some societies.
Step 2: Making
humans external to nature
Elsabeth Sahtouris,
in her ‘2000 book, Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution,
points to another detrimental detour on the road toward our human
dilemma. Sahtouris
states that in ancient Greece,
philosophers divided into two schools of thought about the world. One was that all of nature, including
humans, was alive and a spiritual, self-creative world, much like the Gaia
model today, a view similar to that of many aboriginal societies. But the other school argued that
"real" world could be known only through pure reason, not through
direct experience, as it was God's geometric creation--permanently
mechanical. This mechanical/religious worldview superseded the older
nature-centric beliefs, and became the foundation of the whole Western
worldview and a foundation stone in today’s fatally-flawed paradigm. A principal tenet of this flawed doctrine
is to see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature.
Step 3: Removing
spirituality from nature
As the human appetite for increased throughput of Earth’s
wealth of natural resources grew, this growth paradigm demanded that the
natural human spiritual affinity toward nature had to be blunted. The International
Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture promotes
critical inquiry into the relationships among human beings and their
diverse cultures, environments and religious beliefs and practices. They recently produced an award winning, Encyclopedia
of Religion And Nature. Under the subject: “left biocentrism,
they conclude: "In order for industrial capitalism to commodify the
Earth, Earth-based spirituality had to be undermined. Left biocentrists believe that addressing this is a crucial
part of any engaged green politics in the twenty-first century."
More Recently:
Mentally separated from their
earthly roots both emotionally and spiritually, the male- dominated
societies of the world were aptly labelled, the dominator societies by Daniel Quinn, in his book Ishmael. The dominators went forth
and multiplied, explored, occupied and invented
ownership of the land. All of this
to improve the well-being of their own specific group(s), always at the
expense of other societies and/or at the expense of nature. Writer J.W.Smith,
in his book, The World’s Wasted
Wealth, states that all wars are resource wars. The dominator characteristic has fuelled many such wars in the past millennia. We are now driven by the growth
imperative to seek evermore territory and resources. But the dominator mind ignores stark
scientific evidence that human activity is far beyond Earth’s renewable
limits. Such limits are rejected by
this AbReality (human-created: see endnote) based
views.
Rapid Growth Enabler One (a
physical reality): Energy:
Using energy provided only by
the human body, by horses, wind and wood, we could never have enabled our
population to grow much more than, perhaps 500 million.
Pandora’s Box of
energy-intensive fossil fuels provided an abundant, easy-to-use energy
source to satisfy (intoxicate?) the dominators’ unrestrained growth
imperative. Rapid exponential growth
became the norm in the 20th century and the green revolution
helped the human body count zoom to today’s over 7 billion. With such extreme growth came the belief
that energy, technology and the invisible hand of economics can solve all
of humanity’s problems. But there
are problems in energy paradise - Peak-oil
and global-warming. Such blunt, limiting realities simply do
not fit today’s AbReality based capitalist-driven
growth paradigm; limits are ignored, denied, avoided and those who say
there are limits may be called heretics by our leaders.
Rapid Growth Enabler Two (an AbRreality):
Pronatalist
Religions & Cultures:
In concert with industry’s need for labour,
and with the feminine balance long suppressed, dominator influence pervaded
some influential religions and cultures. They created prohibitions against
birth control and glorified the family with many children. This is
certainly not true of all religions and cultures but applies principally to
certain segments of Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Many of these pronatalist forces, where
women are less that equal, still present significant obstacles in the
pathway toward a sustainable civilization.
(Fortunately, a few splinter branches of these religions appear to
reject gender imbalance, homophobia and prohibitions on birth control.)
Rapid Growth Enabler Three
(an AbReality): Money
Early monetary systems had
been commodity-based, whereby a physical commodity such as gold or silver
was used to back up the value of issued currency. With exponential growth in human
population and in goods and services, no physical commodity was suitable as
a value base. It the 1960s,
following the Keynesian suggestion, the world
standard US$ was disengaged from gold.
It became fiat, meaning, a command decree, or let it be. Now a mathematical number, money can be
created as debt with no limits, unlike the planetary resources that money
can still buy. Trillions of dollars
enter the global system each year, bestowing wealth and political power on
the elite top few from where the trickle down economy should theoretically
provide for all. But there are
seriously wicked problems in money paradise... irresolvable within the current paradigm.
Dominator Schools of Thought
and the rise of Neoconservativism:
The Chicago School of Economics, refers to a think-tank led by Milton
Friedman that has shaped the course of world history significantly since
the 1950s. This group shifted US
economic thinking from the Keynesian laisser-faire approach. Keynes had encouraged free markets with macro regulation by
government to assure the public best interest was served. But Friedman recommended libertarian
rules, which are basically no rules or regulation on corporations,
accompanied by the progressive deregulation and privatization of government
services and civil infrastructure.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan championed these concepts in
their respective countries - TINA, There Is No Alternative! declared
Margaret Thatcher.
Metaphorical summary of
today’s paradigm:
The prevailing political forces
that guide human civilization are now in the hands of the imaginary
dominator, a masculine, archetypal character who is greed driven, has no
feminine balance, has no spiritual affinity toward Gaia and humanity’s
roots in our natural world and is inhibited by from recognizing
limits-to-growth on a finite planet.
We are on borrowed time, far beyond sustainable limits.
<<<<<ó>>>>>
Note: AbReality – Details in Chapter
2a, described in Glossary:
Abstract
Realities. Human created systems of
beliefs and of agreed ways of doing things: constitutions, economics,
religions, corporations, etc. In his ‘79 book, Mind and Nature, Gregory
Bateson described in detail the meaning of Abstract Reality.
This applies to money, governments, laws, games, marriage,
etc.
<<<<End
of section>>>
Back to: Index
Next Chapter:
An expansion of the
discussion about Money Politics 6b-Appendix-MCP
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