Religions, evolution and animals that look like people

The 80/20 Rule seems to apply to many areas of life, including the return for the investment one gets from reading. 80% of the excellent ideas I read seem to result from 20% of the authors I read. The trick, then, is to choose carefully when picking up a book. Make sure that the author is a high-quality thinker/writer, and you'll end up getting a mind expanding education merely by following a few dozen authors. That is my experience, anyway. For me, one of those high-quality authors is primatologist Frans de Waal. I have just finished De Waal's most recent book, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society (2009) (here is my earlier post on this same book). De Waal makes so many compelling points in his book that I'm tempted to simply throw up my hands and urge everyone to go read this book. Truly, there is a terrific new idea or two every few pages, most of which have application to the increasingly strained modern human condition. Image by s-dmit at Dreamstime.com (with permission) Starting around page 206, De Waal makes a strong case for the emotional continuity between all animals (and especially other primates) and human animals. Yet, so many people or uncomfortable with the existence of this continuity. They would much rather believe that humans are not animals, and that humans somehow stand outside of nature, whereas all the other animals are part of nature. I have written before about the importance of recognizing that humans don't stand outside of nature, but that we are full-fledged animals. De Waal believes that this reluctance to talk about our animal emotions is caused by certain types of religious, "particularly religions that arose in isolation from animals that look like us." He explains:

With monkeys and apes around every corner, no rain forest culture has ever produced a religion that places humans outside of nature. Similarly, in the East--surrounded by native primates in India, China, and Japan--religions don't draw a sharp line between humans and other animals. Reincarnation occurs in many shapes and forms: a man may become a fish and a fish may become God. Monkey gods, such as Hanuman, are common. Only the Judeo-Christian religions place humans on a pedestal, making them the only species with a soul. It's not hard to see how desert nomads might have arrived at this view. Without animals to hold up a mirror to them, the notion that were alone came naturally to them. They saw themselves as created in God's image and as the only intelligent life on earth. Even today we're so convinced of this that we search for other of such life by training powerful telescopes on distant galaxies.
De Waal describes how shocked Westerners were when chimpanzees and monkeys started arriving at Western zoos in the 1830s. He points out that this exposure to other primates occurred relatively recently for many Westerners, "long after Western religion had spread its creed of human exceptionalism to all corners of knowledge." De Waal's idea is as powerful as it is elegant. It makes good sense too. People who are exposed to a variety of animals with various gradations of "humanness" would certainly be more comfortable with the idea of biological continuity, with his Darwinian idea that human animals are cousins with every other living thing on the planet. De Waal clarifies that we Westerners are actually inconsistent with regard to our resistance to this idea that we are continuous with all other life forms. We stack the deck:
When it comes to characteristics that we don't like about ourselves, continuity is rarely an issue. As soon as people kill, abandon, rape, or otherwise mistreat one another, we are quick to blame it on our genes. Warfare and aggression are widely recognized as biological traits, and no one thinks twice about pointing at ants or chimps for parallels. It's only with regard to noble characteristics that continuity is an issue and empathy is a case in point.
De Waal points out that many well-accomplished scientists have worked feverishly to seek "specialness" in humans. They focus their efforts on trying to find something to distinguish humans from the "animals." As De Waal suggests, they are likely to "discover" that these differences are most pronounced in the noble traits. It's time to recognize the one-sidedness of these efforts, however.
My main point, however, is not whether the proposed distinctions are real or imagined, but why all of them need to be in our favor. Aren't humans at least equally special with respect to torture, genocide, deception, exploitation, indoctrination, and environmental destruction? Why does every list of human distinctiveness need to have the flavor of a feel-good note?

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Capitalism under the microscope

Annie Leonard has passionately researched and written a book she titles: The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with the Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-and a Vision for Change (2010). I haven't yet finished her book, although I'd like to post on one point she strongly makes early on, a point that is the elephant in the room regarding most discussions of the American way of life. It is a topic not far from the hearts of the many free market fundamentalists out there. The topic is whether it's time to put capitalism under the microscope. Here's what Leonard has to say:

[There is no doubt we will reach the planet's carrying capacity; we're heading in that direction now.... a big part of the problem we face today is that our dominant economic system values growth as a goal unto itself, above all else. That's why we use the gross to metric product, or GDP as a standard measure of success.... All right. Are you ready? I'm going to say it: this critique of economic growth is a critique of many aspects of capitalism as it functions in the world today. There. I said the word: "capitalism." It's the Economic-System-That-Must-Not-Be-Named. When writing the film script of The Story of Stuff, my intent was to describe what I saw in my years on the trail of trash, visiting factories and dumps and learning about how things are made, use, and thrown away around the world. I certainly didn't sit down and figure out how to explain the flaws of capitalism. It was trash, not economics, that was originally on my mind. So at first it took me by surprise that some commentators called the film "an ecological critique of capitalism" or "anti-capitalist."... it turns out that a hard look at how we make and use and throwaway Stuff reveals some pretty deep problems caused by core functions of a specific economic system called capitalism. There's no way around it: capitalism, as it currently functions, is just not sustainable.... Yet, in the United States, were still hesitant to broach this unmentionable subject, fearful of being labeled unpatriotic, unrealistic, or insane. Elsewhere in the world, there's a widespread recognition that some aspects of capitalism aren't working well for the majority of the world's people or for the planet; people talk about it openly.... Can we put capitalism on the table and talk about it with the same intellectual rigor that we welcome for other topics? Can we examine the failures of capitalism without falling into generations-old stereotypes and without being accused of being un-American? Refusing to talk about it doesn't make the problems disappear. I believe the best way to honor our country is to point out when it's going astray, instead of sitting here silently as many economic, environmental, and social indices worsen. Now would be a good time to start looking at what we could do differently, and what we could do better.... The belief that infinite economic growth is the best strategy for making a better world has become like a secular religion in which all our politicians, economists, and media participate; it is seldom debated, since everyone is supposed to just accept it as true. Why are so few people willing to challenge, or even critically discuss, an economic model that so clearly isn't serving the planet and the majority of its people. I think one reason is that the economic model is nearly invisible to us. ... [W]e tend to forget that were viewing the world through the paradigm, like it's a pair of contact lenses.... before we can change a paradigm, we need to identify it as a paradigm rather than assume it is truth. [Starting at page xviii]

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Democracy means Rule by the People

In this video of his March 4, 2010 lecture, David Cobb, a "pissed off American," presents important historical background regarding the relationship between the United States government and corporations. "Corporation" never appears in the U.S. Constitution, while "people" appears 34 times. It was traditionally a privilege to form a corporation, not a right, and corporations failing to act in the public interest could have their charters revoked. The United States is, technically speaking, a constitutional representative democracy. "Democracy" means "rule by the people." After offering this definition (that exactly matches the etymology), Cobb asked how many people in his audience believed that we currently have a functioning democracy in the United States, and the answer was overwhelmingly no. He argues that Citizens United eliminates our ability to have a functioning democracy. Unelected and unaccountable corporate CEO's are deciding how much toxic waste will be dumping into the environment and what choices we will have regarding transportation and health care. They are even deciding whether the U.S. goes to war. Thus he (along with Riki Ott, seen in the latter half of the video) are working with the Ultimate Civics and Campaign to Legalize Democracy, an effort to establish that corporations are not "persons." This group seeks systemic changes. He reminds us that many organizations that are now well-recognized as having effected important changes were disparaged and harassed when they were making those changes. It's time for the people to make dramatic change in how we run our society instead of begging "for a few less parts per billion." He argues that the abolitionists didn't tinker at the margins. They demanded substantial and immediate change. They exhibited courage. As Ott asks, "Do we care enough to make a difference?" Are we willing to take real steps to make sure that "human values count?" Here's the bottom line: Abolish corporate personhood. "Only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to Constitutional rights." Further, we need to establish that "Money is not speech, so that we can have appropriate and proper campaign finance laws" that won't allow corporations, or any other party to control the electoral process. Local communities need to be able to regain control. It is a movement from the grassroots. Cobb argues that he doesn't expect any visionary leadership to come from NGOs, because they are too wrapped up in the corporate culture. To sum up, here are the goals:

  • Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
  • Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.
  • Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate "preemption" actions by global, national, and state governments.

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