

# HOLISTIC UNIVERSE

by

TJ McLaughlin

#

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 TJ McLaughlin

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# TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 KNOWLEDGE

1.2 ATTRACTIVE AND REPULSIVE IDEAS

1.3 EVIDENCE AND TRUTH

1.4 PRECISION AND INEVITABILITY

1.5 SOMETHING AND NOTHING

1.6 CONCEPTS OF INFINITY

1.7 MANIFESTATIONS OF EXISTENCE

1.8 THRESHOLDS AND THE ATTRACT/REPEL DYNAMIC

2.1 A THEORY OF EVERYTHING

2.2 NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE

3.1 A THEORY OF EVERYTHING ELSE

3.2 SCIENCE AND RELIGION

3.3 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION

3.4 EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

3.5 EVOLUTION AND MORALITY

3.6 OBJECTIVE ORDERING IN NATURE

3.7 NATURE VS NURTURE

3.8 SOCIAL ORGANISMS

3.9 THE ELECTORATE AND THE ELECTED

3.10 EXTREMES OF A POWER ELITE

3.11 FAITH, REASON AND WORLDVIEWS

3.12 SOCIAL AND ANATOMICAL BODIES

3.13 IMMUNE SYSTEMS COMPROMISED

3.14 SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

3.15 SOCIAL ORDER

4.1 GOD AND THE NATURE OF THINGS

5.1 ENVISIONING A FUTURE

5.2 VALUES

# PREFACE

Holistic Universe as you might imagine covers a lot of territory. Or, perhaps I should say, a lot of spacetime. It spans the entire universe from the so-called big bang to the present, from the quantum world of miniscule particles to the classical world of massive objects, from the formation of galaxies to the formation of living cells, from prehistoric groups and tribes to the overly complex societies of today.

The book is primarily concerned with a naturalistic vision of things that encompasses philosophy, science, government, social systems and religion. It connects all the dots to form a consistent synergistic universal holism that posits a universe wherein life is an integral part of its narrative. In all aspects, Holistic Universe, is a revolutionary work.

Revolution is the order of the day. Government and religion are archaic bureaucratized dinosaurs that are in desperate denial of their obsolescence. Politics is dominated by ideological politicians who retreat from a world they cannot comprehend and seek refuge in the monolithic structures of prefabricated belief systems that provide them and their devoted constituencies with an illusive certainty. Traditional religion has been thoroughly gutted by science, while, Norman Bates-like, religious fundamentalists truss up the corpse and put her on display as if she were still alive and kicking. In the realm of philosophy, genuinely relevant philosophical thought is nowhere to be found. Science has been politicized and bastardized by a cadre of pseudo-scientists and anti-intellectuals to the point where it has become a joke in the popular mind, while bona fide scientists have failed to present a coherent worldview that people are able to appreciate and adopt.

Holistic Universe is a radical departure from the norm. Some may find that troubling. But the norm at present is a polarized fractured world driven by ignorance, superstition, greed and extremists of all stripes. The norm is represented by corrupt regimes, greedy banks and corporations and that is a norm that demands radical revolutionary vision.

There is a great universal reluctance on the part of governments and other institutions to accept and adapt to how the world has changed in recent decades. In their desperation to hold on to their vested interests and the status quo they ignore and/or misrepresent real world knowledge and misuse and abuse the technology of the electronic/information age. Technology has provided the hardware, software and light speed avenues of communication that allow individuals to regard themselves as centers of power and to act as such. The Arab Spring happened with the aid of this technology and the computer age has also brought about the era of the whistleblower. Thus, there is great tension between the state and the individual over control of information. The likes of individuals such as Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden from their perspective as centers of power have leveled the playing field between government and citizen. And government seeks to prosecute them for exposing its shenanigans to the world.

So, as we see, governments must be held accountable and it is for citizens to decide the scope and range of that accountability. Holistic Universe calls for radical systemic change for our social systems whereby government will serve at the behest of the people. Welcoming as that may seem, the vision herein will be extremely challenging for most people to readily accept for its foundation is not that of any ideology. I don't expect it to be immediately or enthusiastically embraced but, at the very least, it can serve to extricate us from the notion that we are necessarily stuck with what we have and have no choice but to remain helpless victims of systems that are clearly floundering and incapable of charting a sensible productive course for establishing the best of all possible worlds.

# INTRODUCTION

So far the twenty-first century has generally been one of enormous turmoil. We have seen and continue to see horrendous natural and environmental disasters, societies in revolt, dictators being ousted while others refused to yield, nations overburdened with debt, financial institutions behaving recklessly and extreme ideological fanaticism all wreaking havoc around the world in their own ways.

Given such a convoluted series of events this century has not, as yet, lent itself to one overall characterization. It's difficult to sort out one overall aspect that would be likely to hold sway as it unfolds. Perhaps it's too soon. But even before its inception there were some attempts to forecast this century's determinant factor.

Samuel Huntington gave it a shot. In 1999 the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University spoke at Armstrong Theatre and had this to say, "The twentieth century was the century of ideology, of the competition of socialism, communism, liberalism, authoritarianism, fascism, democracy. Now, while we have not had the end of history, we have arrived, at least for the moment, at the end of ideology. The twenty-first century is at least beginning as the century of culture, with the differences, interactions, and conflicts among cultures taking center stage. This has become manifest, among other ways, in the extent to which scholars, politicians, economic development officials, soldiers, and strategists are all turning to culture as a central factor in explaining human social, political, and economic behavior. In short, culture counts, with consequences for both good and evil.

"Two central elements of culture are language and religion, and these obviously differ greatly among societies. Scholars have also measured societies along a number of other cultural dimensions and classified them in terms of individualism and collectivism, egalitarianism and hierarchy, pluralism and monism, activism and fatalism, tolerance and intolerance, trust and suspicion, shame and guilt, instrumental and consummatory, and a variety of other ways.

"In recent years, however, many people have argued that we are seeing the emergence of a universal worldwide culture. They may have various things in mind. First, global culture can refer to a set of economic, social and political ideas, assumptions, and values now widely held among elites throughout the world. This is what I have called the Davos Culture, after the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum that brings together hundreds of government officials, bankers, businessmen, politicians, academics, intellectuals, and journalists from all over the world. Almost all these people hold university degrees in the physical sciences, social sciences, business, or law; work with words and/or numbers; speak reasonably fluent English; are employed by governments, corporations, and academic institutions with extensive international involvements; and travel frequently outside their own country. They generally share beliefs in individualism, market economies, and political democracy, which are also common among people in Western civilization. Davos people control virtually all international institutions, many of the world's governments, and the bulk of the world's economic and military capabilities. The Davos Culture hence is tremendously important. Worldwide, however, only a small portion of the world's population shares in this culture. It is far from a universal culture, and the leaders who share in it do not necessarily have a secure grip on power in their own societies. It is nonetheless one immensely significant consequence of the globalization of economic activity that has occurred in recent decades."

So, in other words, this hardly makes the case for a "universal worldwide culture".

What we should be after is not a universal culture but a universal worldview. One that takes into account the whole picture, connects all the dots, puts everything in place and is all inclusive. A universally accepted worldview might result in a universal culture or it might just serve to create the means by which various cultures can coexist and cooperate to promote and foster the one universal priority - survival, on a planetary basis.

A universal worldview, it should be noted, is not unprecedented.

Before the ideologically driven twentieth century there was the nineteenth century that was anything but ideologically driven. Nations of the nineteenth century were concerned with such things as striking a balance of power. This might be characterized as a rational, orderly approach to world affairs.

Could it be that statesmen of that era were operating under the influence of the widely accepted Newtonian worldview that depicted the universe as rational and orderly?

All that changed with the start of the twentieth century when a new view of the universe was introduced. It was an irrational, chaotic view and the rationale for a balance of power gave way to the concept of mutually assured destruction. Without the rational umbrella of the Newtonian worldview, under which everyone could operate from one common perspective, a variety of seemingly incompatible ideologies took over along with an irrational, chaotic competition for ideological dominance.

Such is still the case both between and within cultures. To think that some culturally contrived worldview could somehow come to the fore and provide a worldwide unifying influence is just not realistic. No particular culture is ever going to have universal acceptance.

A knowledge-based worldview, however, could provide the framework whereby different cultures could see a way to coexist and be more concerned about balance than domination, about working together rather than seeking their own advantage at the expense of others. This is not a utopian dream. It was an emerging reality during the nineteenth century.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century we live in a world that is fraught with intractable warring factions as ideologically based quasi-worldviews vie for domination. What is needed is a genuine worldview that puts everything in perspective. And such will be presented here.

Particular ideologies such as communism and capitalism, Islam and Christianity, liberalism and conservatism, try as they might cannot qualify as genuine worldviews because none are in and of themselves all-inclusive. They are merely specialized views of the world that include their adherents to the exclusion of everyone else.

Also, the ideologues who promote these ideologies eschew knowledge of the nature of things. Real world knowledge is anathema to them because the real world cannot reflect the image that they seek to impose on it. Ideologues seek to create a secure and special place for their pet isms in defiance of the nature of things. They ignore and reject the knowledge that science has to offer. That is, they ignore and reject the real world that we all live in and a genuine worldview cannot do that.

The idea that nature is antithetical to human culture and values is one that ideologues of whatever stripe embrace. However, it is an idea that needs to be re-examined. As it will be here. A genuine worldview must take everything into account, and it must, like gravity, hold everything together and apply to everyone. It must incorporate the whole body of knowledge about the nature of things and human nature from particle physics to star systems, from genes to social systems and present a cohesive coherent worldview that is relevant to one and all.

# 1.1 KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge is generally deemed a good thing. But what it tells us is not always welcome. Knowledge can sometimes provide us with information that we do not like. A knowledgeable prescription for a healthful diet, for instance, does not always comply with how we like to eat. Knowledge can also provide us with basic concepts of ourselves that do not comply with how we like to see ourselves. As with food, knowledge tells us that we cannot always pick and choose our self-images merely by what we like. Knowledge tells us that our self-perceptions need to be amended with respect to its findings. However, giving up our favorite concepts of ourselves is just as difficult as it is to give up our favorite foods, if not more so.

This analogy breaks down when we try to assess which foods and which concepts might be better for us. With food it is relatively easy to determine what really is good for us and what is not. Fruit and vegetables are better than Twinkies and puddings. As for images of ourselves it is somewhat trickier. Traditional self-perceptions are replete with deep and abiding interests that can make knowledge seem like an enemy to all that is human when it contradicts those self-perceptions - special creations of God versus just another product of evolution, for instance.

Knowledge is certainly vital and valuable to us in a material sense but we find it lacking the wherewithal to fulfill our psychic needs. This has created a divide between Science and the Humanities that seems to be ever widening. It cannot be closed by knowledge alone or by stubbornly adhering to those self-images we find to be so alluring. It is not a matter of one side winning over the other but of finding a resolution that can dissolve the differences. That's a tall order but one that should be possible, unless, perhaps, the people comprising the two sides represent an unbridgeable division between an old and emergent species of human being.

To begin with we examine two opposing ideas of ourselves. One is generally attractive, the other repellent. We will see that neither is totally destructive to the other and there can even be a meeting of the ways between the two. We will also see how the forces of attraction and repulsion factor into the very fabric of all that exists. They are the prime movers in the material universe as well as the universe of ideas.

# 1.2 ATTRACTIVE AND REPULSIVE IDEAS

That the existence of human beings has been eternally ordained as absolutely necessary is an attractive idea. That human beings merely came about as an unplanned coincidence of random natural events is a repulsive idea.

The former idea is attractive because it gives us a sense that we are, were and will always be necessary. The universe exists for the sole purpose of producing human beings. We are exalted by the attractive idea. It bestows on us membership in a higher supernatural world. The specific events of the natural world, the births and deaths, triumphs and defeats, joys and sufferings are trivial matters compared to the overall condition of our immortal souls. The divine realm is our true reality and one in which we can exist happily ever after.

The latter idea is repulsive because it gives to the human species no more importance than that of bacteria. It suggests that there is no greater meaning or purpose to the lives of human beings than that of mere survival here on Earth. We are completely defined by our biological systems and when they fail, our death is an eternal finality. The natural world is our only world.

In the main, the evidence overwhelmingly supports the repulsive idea. But, in the court of popular opinion evidence is of questionable value. The attractive idea does not rely on evidence for it to be fully embraced by those attracted to it. All that matters is its attraction. People can become slaves to the seductive power of a belief system and be willing to accept any fabricated evidence in support of it.

As for the repulsive idea, there really is no reason to accept it except for the preponderance of evidence in its favor. Evidence that supporters of the attractive idea take pains to distort. Some have even claimed that the repulsive idea is a manufactured concoction created by atheist scientists who want to undermine belief. To think that anyone would make up such a thing as evolution is preposterous. That anyone would accept it out of ignorance or on faith alone is even more so. The repulsive idea is the result of an attraction toward knowledge. The attractive idea came about through lack of knowledge.

# 1.3 EVIDENCE AND TRUTH

Of course, the evidence for the repulsive idea can only go so far. It cannot offer proof that human beings are entirely subject to the chance occurrences of the natural world. Although the case for evolution is solid we have not been able to account for the origin of life itself. There is, as yet, no cogent description of how replicating cells could have come about in the first place, since proteins are needed in order for DNA to code for proteins that are essential in the replication process.

The seductive power of the attractive idea can shine through such shortcomings with a blinding light, severely compromising the vision of those it seduces. That human beings are eternally, supernaturally ordained wins the beauty pageant of ideas. Whether it is wise to judge ideas based on appearance alone is something to ponder. Without clear and convincing proof of our utter contingency upon the nature of things, however, one cannot marvel at the domination of the attractive idea. Even if such clear and convincing proof was to be revealed it still might not be enough to outshine the attractive brilliance of traditional concepts that can be so irresistibly seductive.

The attractive idea also purports to have ultimate truth on its side no matter what amount of evidence might favor the repulsive idea. Ultimate truth by definition is immune to evidence one way or the other. We can only have evidence of things pertaining to this world. So, when it comes to ideas about our ultimate origins and fate, relying on what we find attractive is really all there is.

The debate rages on with varying degrees of intensity. The most vociferous proponents of attractive ideas rely heavily on people's lack of in-depth knowledge with respect to the unattractive, repulsive facts of life. Defenders of the attractive idea know all the weak spots in the body of knowledge and exploit them to the fullest. Obfuscation, distortion and outright lies are tactics they regularly and unabashedly employ. Proponents of the repulsive facts of life, on the other hand, find it difficult to fully explain their perspective to people who are generally less and less educated.

There are also those who throw up their hands and try to sidestep the debate, suggesting that both sides are right in their respective arenas and the two should remain separate with no discourse between them. The attractive ideas have to do with conventional metaphysical concepts that are associated with wisdom, while ugly facts of life have to do with a knowledge-based science. These are just different realms that have distinct purposes, they say, and any traffic between them merely serves to create a cultural gridlock.

That hardly seems a tenable position. Knowledge about the nature of things, unattractive as it might be, can directly contradict some attractive ideas and, so, like it or not, such knowledge cannot be kept sealed off from beliefs only to be used in laboratory experiments, pharmaceutical development, creating new gadgets, etc. Knowledge permeates throughout the whole picture. There is a vital connection between wisdom and knowledge that cannot be ignored and must be kept vital. Wisdom depends on knowledge to guide its concepts. Knowledge depends on wisdom to put it into perspective.

It's difficult, if not impossible, to get wisdom and knowledge working together when they are posing as combatants in an intellectual blood sport. The challenges that knowledge inadvertently levels at certain attractive ideas are taken, by defenders of those ideas, to be threats against the very notion of ultimate truth. If one merely questions the veracity of a particular belief of a particular religion one is accused of attacking God, of demeaning the very idea of God. This hardly creates a suitable atmosphere for informed dialogue.

The argument, however, is not between knowledge and ultimate truth. Rather, it is between knowledge and specific beliefs which, when proven to be erroneous, must go the way of other such obsolete beliefs, like the  geocentric solar system, for instance. Knowledge does, of course, have some bearing on our notion of ultimate truth, but if such truth exists, nothing could possibly be a threat to it.

Some might consider this argument to be between the institutions of science and religion. An all out, no-holds-barred, winner-take-all warfare of the one against the other. That is an extremely myopic and wrongheaded view. Again, the argument is between particular facts presented in scientific findings and how they inadvertently have an impact on particular religious beliefs. Science and religion are here to stay and we must strive toward visions that bring them together, or at least assign them there proper roles, rather than promote misrepresentations that catastrophically drive them apart.

It's interesting that some religious figures find it necessary to employ scientific methodology in an attempt to prove their particular beliefs. From some of the religiously inspired diatribes against the evils of science one might suppose that those religious figures who pose as scientists to prove matters of faith, such as Creation, Intelligent Design or the existence of God, are tinkering in Satan's workshop. Attempting to use science to validate one's beliefs demeans one's faith. Isn't it enough that one knows in one's heart that God exists? Faith in God would seem to be all that is required for religious purposes. But no, there are those who feel the need to scientifically prove that God exists. This is, of course, as foolhardy as trying to scientifically prove that God does not exist.

Faith is the destroyer of faith, not science.

# 1.4 PRECISION AND INEVITABILITY

One arguing point in proving the existence of God is the precision found in certain microscopic life forms. This was latched onto by the Intelligent Design camp, claiming that such precision belies chance and posits a Creator. The precision found in micro-organisms must be the result of an intelligent design, they say, and that must be evidence of an ultimate designer. Intelligent Design, however, is nothing more than a byproduct of the pseudoscientific and thoroughly debunked Creation Science, and is just as bogus.

Michael Behe, a microbiologist and one of the original proponents of intelligent design, wrote a book, Darwin's Black Box, which attempted to make the case for God as intelligent designer by illustrating the meticulous workmanship on the molecular scale of life. All the tiny components that fit so well together and display such exquisite functionality could not have come about all by themselves. They just had to have been the work of a divine designer.

That Behe lacked scientific integrity and wrote Darwin's Black Box with a biased perspective was evident in the absence of any mention in his book of the spontaneous construction on the molecular level, that physicist, turned microbiologist, Jacques Monod, writes about in his book, Chance and Necessity. Monod illustrates how molecular structures take shape with respect to their specific chemical properties alone and are in no way in need of a designer. He explains how it is possible to take a molecular structure apart, a protein, for instance, without damaging it. "In this state," he goes on to say, "the protein will in general have lost all its functional properties, catalytic or regulatory. However - and this is the important point - if the initial "normal" conditions are restored (by eliminating the dissociating agent), the subunits will ordinarily reassemble spontaneously, reforming the original 'native' state of the aggregate: The same number of protomers in the same geometrical arrangement, accompanied by the same functional properties as before." Furthermore, "...ribosomes which are the essential components of the mechanism that translates the genetic code, that is, of the protein-synthesizing machinery. These particles, whose molecular weight attains 10,000,000, are made up by the assembly of some thirty thousand distinct proteins plus three different types of nucleic acids (See graphic below)...it has been found that, in vitro, the dissociated constituents of ribosomes spontaneously reassemble themselves into particles having the same composition, the same molecular weight, the same functional activity as the original 'native' material.

_Illustration 1:_ _RIBOSOME_ _Does it look like intelligent design?_

"However, the most spectacular example...of the spontaneous construction of complex molecular edifices is without doubt that of certain bacteriophages (viruses that attack bacteria). The complicated and very precise structure of the T4 bacteriophage corresponds to this particle's function, which is not only to protect the genome of the virus, but also to attach itself to the wall of the host cell in order to inject into it, syringe-like, its DNA content. The different parts of this microscopic precision machinery can be obtained separately from different mutants of the virus. Mixed together in vitro they assemble themselves spontaneously to reconstitute particles identical to normal ones and fully capable of exercising their DNA-injecting function."

So, "...complex structures possessing functional properties develop from the stereospecific, spontaneous assembling of their protein constituents. Order, structural differentiation, acquisition of functions - all these appear out of a random mixture of molecules individually devoid of any activity, any intrinsic functional capacity other than that of recognizing the partners with which they will build the structure. The structure of the assembled molecules itself constitutes the source of 'information' for the construction of the whole."

To omit these findings from a book about molecular biology is, at best, disingenuous. Behe purports to be a microbiologist but does not engage us with authentic discourse in his writings on the subject. He is trafficking in dogma, a cleric in scientific clothing.

Another such masquerading cleric is intelligent design proponent, George Gilder, who says things like, "Just as quantum theory overthrew Newtonian theory the theory of information is going to overthrow biology." Now, to begin with, there was no overthrowing by quantum theory with respect to Newtonian theory. It was Einstein's theory of relativity that showed Newtonian physics was not relevant to the cosmos on a large scale. However, Newton's formulas were discovered in reference to our little corner of the universe and they are just as viable in that respect today as they were when an apple first fell to the ground. Furthermore, Newtonian physics has to do with what physicists call the classical world, the familiar world of objects that we live in, while the physics of quantum world particles is entirely different. To state that the latter overthrew the other is like saying apples overthrew oranges. Also, even if the one theory did overthrow the other theory how does that equate with a particular theory, information theory, overthrowing a whole body of knowledge, biology? That statement by Gilder is nonsensical however one may care to parse it.

Another ridiculous statement this self-proclaimed scientist came up with was, "Assume a book...Finding life in traces of protein is like trying to find the contents of a book by a chemical and physical analysis of the paper and ink on which it's produced."

I find that whole statement to be absolute gobbledegook. But, okay, let's assume a book, a cook book to be precise. The book's recipes printed on its pages do not produce the food stuffs they refer to. However, DNA, the letters that make up the book of life, does produce the stuff of life. So, to compare a book to protein biosynthesis seems, at best, a bit clumsy.

The book metaphor is shaky and the confused language indicates, perhaps, the shaky ground Gilder felt himself to be on. For example, "Finding life in traces of protein is like trying to find the contents of a book...", doesn't make sense. How does "Finding" something relate to "trying to find" something. He doesn't say - trying to find life in traces of protein is like trying to find... Also there's the phrase "Finding life"? What is that supposed to mean? What life is he referring to?

DNA is the language of life. It is all physical, there is no content, no information that needs to preexist the physical material. As Monod noted above, "The structure of the assembled molecules itself constitutes the source of "information"...".

So, there is no need for a designer. There is no need for an idea to precede the process. We can posit that need, we can posit a designer if we so desire, but the self-contained process does not necessitate one.

George Gilder, like the Intelligent Design proponent he is, desperately wants things to be the way he thinks they should be according to his religious beliefs. He does not rigorously examine what he is actually saying but merely judges whether it appears to conform to his ideology, and whether or not it will sound convincing enough to those who don't know any better. His perverse think tank is called The Discovery Institute; its mission is to employ chop logic, obfuscation and misinformation in order to distort scientific knowledge and sell a specious concept to the public as the genuine article. Gilder wants his baloney to be thought of as prime rib. For that he needed to hire a public relations firm, CRC, to assist in his deceptive campaign.

Gilder and his ilk are exactly who Monod is talking about when he says, "They owe their...moral weakness to those value systems, devastated by knowledge itself, to which they still try to refer."

In pointing to the complexity found in living organisms Gilder and Behe claim that that is proof of an intelligent designer. However, when I look at a tRNA molecule, a ribosome, for example, I see a complexity that is more chaotic than not. (Figure 1.1)

It seems excessively complex to be the workmanship of an intelligent designer. In as much as there is order there It appears to be the result of the order that can spontaneously bubble up out of chaos as detailed in Stuart Kaufman's Origins of Order.

Gilder calls evolutionists "reactionaries" because he says they think that proteins came first in the origin of life. How that makes them reactionaries I don't know. Again, Gilder is giving erroneous information. The protein-came-first idea is only one theory that has been posited by evolutionists. There are a couple of others. Calling evolutionists reactionaries is Gilder's way of saying that he's a revolutionary. But he is not. All he is doing is dressing old dogma in new ideas - intelligent designer as God. According to Gilder it is information that came first. Information is the source of life. What information is he referring to? The information in DNA? But there is no information in DNA without its relation to proteins. Even an intelligent designer would had to have had proteins in mind first and then put together the DNA to code for them. According to an intelligent designer, then, proteins would have come first.

This designer argument is not only supported by religious figures and renegade microbiologists, there are some legitimate scientists who see merit in it. Some physicists, for instance, marvel at the precise measure of fundamental forces that seem to be necessary for the universe to have evolved in just the way it has. They have no scientific explanation for it and, so, there are scientists who are inclined to accept the intelligent design concept. The universe, they claim, must have been planned out in advance and humankind must have been an inevitable part of that plan. Anything exhibiting such precision could not have come about by chance.

In retrospect, however, anything and everything that happens is a consequence of a precise set of factors. All the parameters of a given event must be ordered and fulfilled in just the particular way necessary for the event to occur in exactly the way that it does occur. Take a car accident, for example. Two cars collide at an intersection. The timing involved for that event to take place must be perfectly exact. Before leaving in his car the one driver had to go back into his house because he forgot something. The other driver stopped for a cup of coffee where he had to wait on line for a certain amount of time. A dog running across the road had to be momentarily braked for. A changing traffic light caused one of the drivers to speed up to try to make it through before the light changed to red.

When we look at all the factors involved in bringing the two cars together at the same point in time we might feel that it was somehow predestined. Things could have conspired together to bring about any number of different outcomes. However, the way things actually did happen could only have resulted in the accident taking place just as it did. But that doesn't mean it had to have happened in just the way it did. On the other hand the collision did have to happen just the way it did because of the particular events leading up to it.

Now, what about all the close calls? What about all the times where accidents seem to be about to happen but don't? Were they predestined not to occur? Does "fate" predetermine what does not happen as well as what does? Of course, things can only happen in a positive sense, as in moving forward in time and taking one step after another in negotiating through a particular environment.

When we say that something didn't happen it is something that might have happened if a succession of particular unrelated circumstances had had a different orientation. We can imagine a different set of circumstances that could have led to other scenarios. In reality, however, the event could only have happened the way it did because of the elements involved.

Anyone who drives a car has witnessed many close calls on the streets that seemed to be accidents in the making. Those non-accidents, however, required the same exact timing to happen just as they did, the same exact timing as is required for any collision to occur just as it does. Of course, we can also marvel at the exact timing required for close calls and ponder some miraculous intervention that prevented a collision. But, even if the cars in the above collision had crossed the intersection a whole five minutes apart the timing for that would have to have been just as precise as it was for the accident. There would, however, be no reason for anyone to marvel at that precision.

When there appears to be a reason to marvel at the precision required for a particular event to happen it does not necessarily follow that the event was inevitable, that it was somehow arranged beforehand. That we humans are here to marvel at the construction of the universe is inconsequential. Our existence does not have any bearing on how the universe came about. The universe came about and evolved in a precise manner according to the elements involved. Galaxies, solar systems and at least one planet able to generate and support life were produced according to the interaction of those elements. Various species were created on this planet. Each and every one was created due to the precise way in which life was constructed and the way in which it interacted with variable unpredictable environmental conditions. Neither life, nor environments, were designed for the creation and continual survival of any particular species.

Every event is specifically characterized by the special combination of factors that coincidentally contribute to its taking place. The particular shape of a cloud in the sky, for example, is a product of random forces exacting a specific configuration of atmospheric conditions according to the precise activity of those forces. If we see a cloud in a shape that brings to mind a turtle, then that was an inevitable result of the precise way in which the random forces that created it just so happened to coalesce. When we do see a cloud in the sky in the shape of a turtle we don't, as a rule, believe it was something that was planned in advance. However, if we could calculate all the elements that went into the making of a turtle cloud we would certainly marvel at the precision necessary for that event to take place and may even wonder whether or not there was some knowing manipulation of the factors involved to bring about that particular shape at that particular time. We might take notice that if the humidity was slightly higher or lower, if the updraft was a bit stronger or weaker, if the vaporization from the bodies of water the cloud was formed from was just a little more or a little less the turtle would not have materialized. On the other hand there could be no other shape possible given the way in which all the elements came together.

We find a turtle cloud interesting but not miraculous or eternally predestined. We see a myriad of other clouds in all manner of various shapes and conclude that a turtle cloud, although it must be the result of a precise combination of cloud making factors, is but one possible shape among many. Every cloud is the product of a precise combination of random factors. And every car that crosses an intersection does so at a particular time that has been precisely determined by prior events that were randomly orchestrated.

If we saw a cloud in the shape of a perfect sphere or cube then we could certainly figure something else beside random forces at work. If two cars meeting at an intersection were to pass through each other unscathed and go on their merry way we might infer some miracle worker intended that to happen. But to surmise intent from precision alone is overreaching. For a turtle cloud, a car accident or a universe to come about in just the way it did the contributing factors had to have evolved just the way they did, but that doesn't mean it had to be exactly the way it turned out before anything happened to make it that way. If this universe hadn't happened in precisely the way it did another universe might have happened in some other way with just as much precision.

What we are talking about regarding intention and inevitability is, of course, our own existence. Without sentient beings like ourselves there would be no such discussion. Our entry onto the scene, however, has no bearing on actual intention or inevitability. Our ability to contemplate such things as preordained intention and inevitability does not necessarily make the case for them.

With clouds and cars, of course, there are a myriad of shapes and events that can take place at any given time. The possibilities are virtually endless and, therefore, any particular cloud formation or order in which cars go through intersections cannot, in that respect, be considered remarkable. But what about our universe? How can we account for its exact precision if it is the only one? Of course, some theorists have posited a myriad of universes in existence, which makes any universe possible. Others are of a mind that no other universe besides this one would be possible. If gravity, for instance, were just a fraction more or less deviant from what it is in our universe then no universe would be possible.

If this universe is merely one of a myriad of other unplanned universes then its precision is no mystery. On the other hand, if a universe could not exist unless it complied with the exact specifications of this one then its precision is a mystery - If restricted to such an exacting formula how could it be an unplanned occurrence emerging out of nothing? It must have been planned by a Creator. But how could God be so restricted in creating a universe? Restrictions on God could only be imposed by God. But why would God put restrictions on himself and become less of a God?

All we know is that the material that comprises the universe must behave the way it does because of the material involved. Where the material comes from is really the primary question.

# 1.5 SOMETHING AND NOTHING

Does the fact that there is a material universe necessarily require the existence of some ultimate being? Some would answer with a resounding "yes". Leibniz sought to prove the existence of God by posing the question - Why is there something instead of nothing? This is supposed to lead us straight to the conclusion that there, indeed, must be a God. Otherwise there would be nothing. However, a lawyer might say that the question assumes facts not in evidence. The question assumes that we know, for a fact, that there is indeed "something instead of nothing" when there just may not be any alternative to "something". For - how can there be nothing? - the lawyer might ask and add - first show me how nothing is possible and then ask your question. All we really know is that there is something because there is something. If you want to claim that there is something because there is a God, that's fine if that's what you believe. But there is no proof of that in the question you pose.

An examination of our understanding of the terms nothing and something might be useful here. When we ordinarily use the term nothing it is in reference to the relative lack of something in particular. "I have nothing to wear!" "There's nothing to do!", "The score is ten to nothing.", "We have nothing in the fridge." "I have nothing in my wallet." But "nothing", in the absolute sense inferred by Leibniz' question, is very difficult if not impossible to imagine. There isn't anything specific to refer it to. Nothing is not a dark empty vacuum. Nothing has no qualities whatsoever. No size, no shape, no color, no texture, no weight, no temperature, no darkness, no dimension. Nothing.

So, "nothing" in the absolute sense is not the opposite of "something". Nothing is the opposite of everything. Nothing equals the absence of everything. That must exclude even the possibility of something. The absence of everything would not allow for the existence of anything ever. Something could never be. We know, of course, that there is something. Something does exist. If something does exist, then, that excludes the possibility of the absence of everything. So, if "nothing" is not possible then "something' must exist by default. God or no God.

Parsing the question another way, however, we can come to a different conclusion. If nothing, as the absence of everything, is not possible then something must always have existed. Something that had no beginning. Something eternal. What could that something be but God?

# 1.6 CONCEPTS OF INFINITY

Infinity is just as difficult to imagine as absolute nothingness and the two are somewhat similar. Our ideas of the infinite can be somewhat lacking in regard to a definite image just as our idea of nothing can. For instance, we might have an idea about an infinite succession of numbers but we cannot really grasp the actuality of infinite numbers. Indeed, there really is no such thing as an infinite succession of numbers. This is so not only because we are, of course, dealing with pure abstraction, but also because such infinity could never be achieved. At any given point in an ongoing succession of numbers there would always be a finite number no matter how many gazillions there were in the succession. It would take an infinity to realize an infinite succession of numbers. Infinity can never be reached, the succession would always be finite and, so, we could never be certain that we were actually dealing with an infinite succession.

The image of an infinite space is also problematic. It could not be a space that was becoming infinite because, as with a succession of numbers, it would always be a finite space as it progressed from point to point toward an imagined infinity. Therefore, infinite space would have to be a static space eternally infinite. It would have to be a space without any height, width or length because they denote measurement and there would be no way to measure an infinite space from one point to another. One could say the space would be infinitely high, long and wide but how would one establish those dimensions? Ideas of up, down and across would have no orientation. Every point would be at the center. Every point would be equally surrounded by infinite space. The idea of moving from one point to another would be meaningless. Infinite space would be pointless. There would be no direction, no dimension whatsoever.

Paralleling our concept of nothing, infinite space would have to be absolutely empty. A complete and utter void. If there were any finite objects in an infinite space they would compromise its infinity. Finite objects would create boundaries and displace that which is supposed to be infinite and render it finite. We would be able to go from this point to that point and the space would have to have finite dimensions. On the other hand a static infinite empty space would have nothing to define it. Such a space would cancel out the existence of everything (Like our concept of nothing). Infinite space would be everywhere but could not specifically be anywhere.

Time, of course, is no longer thought of as separate from space and it did surreptitiously factor into our above contemplation of infinite space. Looking at infinity from the perspective of time alone we see that time, as a succession of moments, could never be infinite for the same reason that a succession of numbers could never be infinite. At any given time the succession would forever be finite. An ongoing passage of time could never reach infinity and there would be no way to establish with certainty that it would actually continue on infinitely.

If time had a beginning it would always be finite. If time had no beginning there could be no progression of time because there would be no point in time from where it could progress. If time had no beginning it could never have begun. If the past is infinite there could be no passage of time because, of course, there cannot be more than an infinite amount of time. If there could be a particular time along with an infinite past it would always be the same time because there would always be an infinity of time that had passed at any particular time. Any attempt at a progression of time would be stymied by an infinite past. The past would never end. Infinite time would have to be past and future at once and any particular time would always be stuck between the two. Again, it would always be the same time. Or, to put it another way, there could be no time at all.

From this, the idea of eternity comes into question. An entity, one God or another, that always was and always will be suggests the existence of eternity. One can believe in that eternity as a matter of faith, but as for reason one must see that an eternal passage of time is not actually realizable. As long as we have one point in time progressing from another point in time we can never have an eternity of time. We might consider eternity as one single moment that always persists. But how would it persist? Through time? Eternity must be composed of an unchanging timelessness. It is the absence of time. But, like infinite empty space and nothingness, eternity precludes the existence of anything.

# 1.7 MANIFESTATIONS OF EXISTENCE

In reviewing this discussion, it seems that "nothing", as the absence of everything, cannot ever be. That means there must be "something" that always was, or that always is. Something that just IS. However, the way I have reasoned it out eternity is antithetical to the existence of anything. Infinity and nothingness seem to have an affinity. Neither can have size, shape, color, weight, time, location or any dimension or quality at all. Neither infinity or nothingness can be.

So, where does that leave us? With only the finite? Only the finite can exist? But how could something finite begin without something causing it to begin? A finite universe without a cause seems as impossible as one caused by something eternal. We can't really comprehend either. All we can manage are arguments against them both. Arguments in favor of either are not based on reason but on faith. Like the question - Why is there something instead of nothing? For that to prove the existence of God to anyone seems to require a preexisting need to believe in the existence of God.

Contentious arguments and ideas like these have been around for a long time and are based on a comparatively limited knowledge of the world. Today our scientific knowledge, although still limited, presents us with a very different picture of the world than that which we have had in the past.

By examining that knowledge without undue conventional influence one is able to glean new perspectives on things like ultimate causation, the big bang, time and even things like ideology, religion and social systems.

There are those, however, who adamantly believe that science should have nothing to do with the realm of the humanities. They claim that one's worldview should be a matter of ideology alone - one's preferred ideology should supersede any view of the world offered by science. This is at best a naïve sentiment. If our ideologies are kept separate from a demonstrable view of the world how can one's worldview be relevant? One's worldview cannot have real value unless it is viable with the way things are. Knowledge of the world must influence our worldview for it to be at all relevant.

The worldview that will be presented here constitutes a departure from just about everything now in place. From the model of the universe that physicists are using in the quest for the Grand Unified Theory GUT to the model of human nature espoused by most social scientists and philosophers to the ideological models for the formation of social systems. It is, nonetheless, a worldview that is grounded in science and draws on the works of established scholars in various fields.

# 1.8 THRESHOLDS AND THE ATTRACT/REPEL DYNAMIC

We start with the universe. It's not something we give any thought to while we go about our day to day existence but without it we would have no existence at all. Yet, we seem to feel that it has no interest in us, or any connection with us whatsoever. Our existence does not seem to be necessitated in the design of the universe. Only by chance have we come to be. And our planet could pop out of existence today and the pulse of the universe would not skip a beat.

The change would indeed be minuscule and would not really matter in the slightest. The reason it would not matter, however, is not that we are some insignificant anomalous event unregistered in the vastness of space. It's because in essence nothing would have changed. In essence we would still be part of the universe even after we had ceased to exist. Because the planet earth and all the living creatures that ever existed would still be possible. The universe could never be what it is without, at least, the possibility of an earth-like planet resplendent with life. So, we are, in that sense, an integral part on the universe.

We know that because we exist now and our existence must have always been possible. Otherwise it would have been impossible and we know that to be false. How probable our existence is at any given time is not knowable. Long before this planet ever existed, however, it existed as a possibility. So, this planet and all of its life forms will always be possible. In that way we are a necessary part of the very fabric of the universe whether we actually exist or not. One might think of our actual existence as a materialization of the spiritual possibility, which is eternal. Of course, it is only our actual existence that we are interested in, here and now on this planet. The universe does not reflect that existential interest of ours and we feel estranged from it.

Be that as it may, there are, as we shall see, solid reasons to view ourselves as an integral part of the universe. Reasons that are grounded in science. That is, grounded in what we know about the universe and about ourselves. However, it is a view that is not derived from current scientific models.

The scientific model of the universe now in play consists of four fundamental forces \- the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism and gravity. However, it seems that we can pare down those four to just two fundamental forces. Namely, attraction and repulsion. The four forces that are now considered to be fundamental are composed of either attraction or repulsion or a combination of the two.

Gravity is, of course, an attractive force operating on the cosmic scale. On the quantum level, the strong force is also attractive, acting on quarks and nucleons. The weak force, responsible for radioactive decay of the beta type, drives sub-atomic particles apart. The weak force, then, is a repulsive force. Electromagnetism constitutes a combination of the two forces and can be thought of as a medium in which both attraction and repulsion are activated. Particles draw on electromagnetism to produce either force in relation to their charges. Since 1989 we also have dark energy to contend with, which is the repulsive force responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe. So, we see that the underlying universal forces are indeed those of A/R.

Gravity and dark energy operate on the grand scale of things. Their field of operation is the macrocosm, the classical world. The other three forces, gluons, the weak force and electromagnetism occupy the microcosm, the quantum world. A great disparity separates the classical world, the familiar world where we reside and the quantum world of infinitesimal particles.

The goal to somehow merge the classical and the quantum worlds in a GUT whereby both worlds will be expressed by the same mathematics is the holy grail of physics. No one can know for sure, however, whether such a prospect is possible. There are a few theories that are in the process of being worked on, such as string theory, loop quantum gravity and twistor theory. The proponents of string theory claim that they have the GUT all but wrapped up. It's just a matter of time, they say, before it will all come together.

Be that as it may, all the theories remain shrouded in a problematic fog where experimentation is not as yet, perhaps never will be, able to clear the air. There are extraordinary complexities to be dealt with. String theory, for example, posits extra dimensions at the tiniest scale of the universe. There are at minimum seven extra dimensions posited and they are all curled up in a complex convoluted Calabi-Yau space of which there are an infinite variety that somehow need to be sorted through to find just the right one.

This all seems hopelessly complicated, especially when we look to science to reduce things to simpler elements. Strings are simple elements but they are all wound up with complex phenomena. It is as though we are forced to take a detour in our quest for knowledge as we approach smaller and smaller scales and/or get closer and closer to the big bang. Unable to go beyond a certain point, science, which tends toward reductionism and simplifying things, goes off in more complicated directions that are mathematically contrived.

There is also the disparity between the classical and the quantum world that remains inexplicable.

In Shadows of the Mind, Roger Penrose expresses his consternation regarding this state of affairs. He writes, "Quantum theory provides a superb description of physical reality on a small scale, yet it contains many mysteries. Without doubt, it is hard to come to terms with the workings of this theory, and it is particularly difficult to make sense of the kind of 'physical reality' - or lack of it - that it seems to imply for our world. Taken at its face value, the theory seems to lead to a philosophical standpoint that many find deeply unsatisfying. At best, and taking its description at their most literal, it provides us with a very strange view of the world indeed. At worst, and taking literally the proclamations of some of its most famous protagonists, it provides us with no view of the world at all."

Mr. Penrose goes on to ponder the fact that there are no mathematical formulas to account for the inconsistencies that arise between the behavior of the objects in our world and those in the quantum world. The objects in our world do not behave like the quantum particles of which they are constructed. For one example, particles occupy many locations at once but objects like golf balls do not. Penrose writes, "We have seen that a particle's state can involve superpositions of two or more different locations. (Recall the discussion in which a photon's state is such that it can be located in two different beams simultaneously after it encounters a half-silvered mirror.) Such superpositions could apply also to any other kind of particle \- simple or composite - like an electron, a proton, an atom, or a molecule. Moreover, there is nothing in the formalism of quantum theory that says that large objects such as golf balls cannot also find themselves in such confused states of location."

In a subsequent book, The Road to Reality, Penrose speculates that gravity might account for the difference between the two worlds. At the quantum level gravity's effect is inconsequential but on the larger objects of the classical world its force is much more influential. And it is the exertion of that force which might account for the more uniform behavior of classical world objects.

Such a proposition agrees with the basic theme of this book wherein A/R plays a vital role at all levels of phenomena.

# 2.1 A THEORY OF EVERYTHING

The idea that there are just two fundamental forces in the universe, attraction and repulsion, is one that is not in keeping with conventional physics and neither is the theory that is about to unfold here. It is, however, in keeping with the general body of knowledge that physicists have presented so far and it is certainly valid to focus on the role that A/R plays throughout the universe and extrapolate from that a theory of everything.

To begin with, everything is energy. We do not, however, know what energy itself actually is. In order to be energy, however, it must be energetic. If energy is all there is its energetic activity must be self-generated. That energetic activity could be the result of an inherent attraction/repulsion dynamic. Energy, then, is attracted to itself while at the same time repelled by itself. A particular manifestation of this energy was the progenitor of the so-called big bang.

Before the big bang, then, every point of the one energy was continually attracted to and repelled by every other point simultaneously, causing minuscule energetic vibrations that kept a virtually infinite energy in check. The attractive/repulsive points were very close together and the enormous energy of the whole was contained by the constant and minuscule energetic transfer from attraction to repulsion and vice versa. A little glitch at any one point, however, could unleash a massive amount of energy. Such was the beginning of our universe.

The initial decoupling of A/R released the radiant energy of the big bang. This was not a chaotic explosion but, rather, an orderly progression under the direction of the forces of attraction and repulsion. A portion of the one energy, then, was in effect pealed open by the initial separation of its A/R dynamic transforming its minute attractive and repulsive exchange into less restrictive configurations and, thus, creating the phenomenon of electromagnetism along with the strong and weak forces and the various particles of matter. The formation of the particles of force and matter, then, were informed and instructed by the structure of energy from whence they came. The particles were configured in a precise manner according to the information they contained relative to their attractive and repulsive properties and the ratio of the one to the other with respect to the initial decoupling.

To imagine that the parceling out of quarks and gluons to the exact specifications that can be found in each and every nucleon somehow occurred by chance from an amorphous blob of energy is to stretch the imagination to infinite proportions.

The big bang eruption is viewed by us to be one of enormously high energy that was extremely hot. And so it was. However, the energy of the eruption from the controlled orderly exchange of A/R was, from the git go, much less concentrated and energetic than its source. Initially this decrease in the concentration of energy prevented the newly unleashed forces of attraction and repulsion from interacting, allowing them to go their own separate ways and stake out their own territory. The repulsive force of dark energy, repellent to itself, expanded. Its inherent repulsion allowed it to exponentially increase its forcefulness on its own. The attractive force of gravity, attracted to itself, draws into itself. Its attraction to itself limits its growth and forcefulness and it is dependent on mass to increase its power. Dark energy's cosmic influence is universally realized through its inherent and ubiquitous repulsiveness while gravity radiates throughout the universe seeking to satisfy its insatiable need for mass.

Dark energy had to be the first force out of the energetic gate since its repulsive force is expansive. Initially it jumped out of the gate at a rate that was already faster than the speed of light. The flash of light at the time of the big bang was energy released from the fissure caused by the initial separation of attractive and repulsive forces. It was energy that was released in a form of its original energetic duality. Light, electromagnetism is, after all, a fusion of the forces of attraction and repulsion. The A/R dynamic of electromagnetism, like the A/R dynamic of quarks and gluons, was not a fluke but a consequence of the interchange of the forces of attraction and repulsion in the one energy from whence it came.

In the early stages of the universe the attractive force was somewhat scattered throughout the repulsive force. Its attraction to itself, however, prevented it from being totally overwhelmed by the ever expanding dark energy. So, gravity's attraction to itself began to form gravitational pools. They were attracted to one another and huddled together in relatively near proximity where some merged to form larger more powerful pools increasing their power to stave off the rate of expansion between them. This growing concentrated force of attraction put the breaks on the expansion to some extent and prevented the hydrogen gas from being scattered away by the dark energy. The attractive force of the gravitational pools corralled the gas and began the development of galaxies as depicted in this video. The irregular chaotic straws, channels or veins through which gravity was able to suck the gas into itself could have been developed by the expanding dark energy interlaced with gravitational fields.

A galaxy forms by force of attraction at its center. That force, of course, diminishes as the galactic radius grows and there comes a point where it has to define itself as separate from the repulsive force of dark energy. Now, dark energy is not considered to be a significant force and that is certainly true within galaxies where it is held in check by the dominant force of gravity. But outside galaxies it is significant enough to push those monstrosities apart and if a galaxy was laid open to the vast momentum of that repulsive force it would not be able to hold its formation as it does. What separates galaxies from dark energy is the galactic halo that surrounds them. Perhaps, at the edges of galactic formations the attractive and repulsive forces entered into a tug of war. Although the attractive force and the repulsive force of gravity and dark energy could not interact as they did when part of the one energy, they could become, in a way, entwined. The attractive force squeezes the repulsive force together as the repulsive force resists just enough to keep the two opposing forces at bay. Out of this stalemate galactic haloes formed. The haloes act as a protective shield preventing the repulsive force from interfering with galactic formation.

Now, what about time? Time is dependent on energetic activity. If there is no transfer of energy from one state to another there is no time. So, the constant attraction and repulsion of energy to itself prior to the big bang was an exchange of energy from one state to another which amounted to a measure of time. We can see directions in time in the dual forces of energy. The repulsive force, the dark energy is future oriented and gravity is oriented toward the past. One might say that the two forces are pursuing infinity in their respective directions. Gravity goes off in the direction of the past bringing everything it can with it. A black hole reduces molecular structures to the particles that preceded them at the dawn of the universe. It is indeed a journey back in time.Its one way direction however constitutes a nihilistic rush into nothingness. Dark energy is fixated on a relentless pursuit toward an infinite future which is as equally futile as gravity's pursuit of an infinite past. Dark energies quixotic quest is most robust along the outer regions of the universe where there are no obstacles to impede its ever accelerating charge into a future that is always the same. A galaxy is poised between those two virtual infinities of past and future.

The idea that the big bang was propelled out of nothing, that nothing existed before that event, could have some validity here. Energy's inherent attraction/repulsion being equal overall would at a state of absolute equilibrium cancel itself out. That would be its eternal state. As far as eternity is concerned nothing exists. Eternity cannot be arrived at. It always is, always was and always will be. Within that eternity, however, all manner of various configurations of A/R are possible. Eternity would, in effect, comprise all possible states including, of course, the one where A/R is perfectly equal. The equal state where energy cancels itself out is the actual eternal state because it is the only one that never changes. Any particular temporal manifestation of energy is nonexistent as far as the eternal state is concerned.

Think of the attractive force as negative and the repulsive force as positive and relate them to negative and positive numbers. There are always as many negative numbers as positive numbers and, therefore, the numbers cancel themselves out leaving only zero, or nothing, forever in their stead. But the numbers still persist.

So, to answer the question posed by Leibniz, "Why is there something instead of nothing?" we say there is something _and_ nothing. Something exists with respect to certain manifestations of energy in which the A/R dynamic does not comply with the overall perfect balance where nothing exists.

How can this be? How can energy exist and not exist? How can there be an eternal state of nothingness as well as temporal states of something?

Well, we see in the universe certain threshold events where things exist as they are while at the same time they manifest themselves as something entirely different. The familiar objects of the classical world are produced from quantum particles but the classical world is very different from the quantum world. And as far as the quantum world is concerned the classical world doesn't exist.

Protons are something entirely different from the quark/gluon imbroglio they are formed from. And it would seem that as far quarks are concerned there are no such things as protons. Other threshold events include individual anatomical cells creating particular organs. Neurons, for instance, coalescing at some point to produce a working brain and then, as a result of another threshold event, the brain goes on to produce a conscious mind. How the brain goes about producing the phenomenon of consciousness is as mysterious as how protons are produced from the quark/gluon dynamic. All we can say is that some kind of threshold event triggers a kind of metamorphoses and one may wonder if all the various threshold events in the universe are informed and instructed by the exact same elemental influence that must in some sense be vitally connected to the primal force of nature. But if various forms of existence do not register as such with preceding forms then it's likely that as far as the primal source of nature is concerned nothing else exists beyond itself. That's not to say the universe doesn't really exist. For just as the classical world doesn't exist for quantum particles the universe doesn't exist according to that which it is created from. As far as energy is concerned nothing exists except energy and in its eternal state nothing at all exists.

Here is a list of various threshold manifestations of existence:

ENERGY <> PARTICLES

PARTICLES <> ATOMS

ATOMS <> MOLECULES

MOLECULES <> INORGANIC MATERIAL

INORGANIC MATERIAL <> ORGANIC MATERIAL

ORGANIC MATERIAL<>CELLS

CELLS <> ORGANISMS

ORGANISMS <> CONSCIOUSNESS

Each stage in the right hand column represents an apparent departure from its partner on the left. Each stage in the left hand column remains unchanged throughout all subsequent stages. Each stage is unique unto itself while each and every stage is a result of the previous stage. From the perspective of quantum particles, for instance, the world that we inhabit is nonexistent even though it is those very particles that inform the objects that inhabit our world - the classical world. Chemicals such as cytosine and thymine, which form one of the base pairs of DNA, are not in and of themselves organic, but they are, in combination with other chemicals, useful in developing the organic chemistry responsible for life.

Brain cells are not transformed in bringing about consciousness; they are not transformed into consciousness. Our consciousness is something other than the neurons that make it possible. Neurons are not part of our conscious mind.

Individual chemicals inside a living cell have no more life in them than they would outside of a cell. The quantum world does not change as it composes the classical world. Energy does not change in composing particles. From the perspective of energy nothing else exists except energy. While from the perspective of its eternal state nothing exists.

Generally speaking, with respect to each manifestation of existence, a threshold is reached and something happens to extract one stage of existence from another. Individual brain cells reach a particular threshold at which point they become a functioning brain and another threshold is reached where consciousness is produced, as some threshold is reached to produce the classical world from the quantum world.

What is behind these thresholds, what mechanism, what force, what influence? Could such thresholds be determined by some ultimate source? The origin of all things, perhaps, that must be omnipresent in a deep and abiding way at every event throughout existence.

Fundamentally the universe is composed by energy. Energy is what empowers the whole universe. It is energy that configures the universe with material objects. Spacetime itself has to do with the transformation of energy from one state to another.

The whole universe, and all that comprises it, is derivative of one energy. This might be why all of the various fundamental particles of force and matter are identical to each one of their kind. Each photon is identical to every other as are electrons, positrons, protons, etc. And the fact that particles constantly vibrate could be the result of the innate A/R dynamic of the energy they are part of.

To say, however, that particles exist in the energy that they are formed from would be somewhat misleading. Particles as we know them do not actually exist in energy anymore than a particular life form actually exists in genetic code, though it can be said that all possible life forms are contained in genetic code. The genetic code bears no resemblance to that which it creates. Life forms are completely different from that which produces them. The world of quantum particles remain oblivious and fundamentally unchanged by the macroscopic worlds that they compose. The macroscopic worlds are completely different from that which produces them. So too, energy exists as it is, in and of itself, with seemingly no connection whatsoever to anything else. Energy is, however, everything that exists. Energy also remains as one thing, in and of itself, while at the same time it gives form to all the various particles of force and matter. Energy is everything that exists and everything is composed by virtue of energy though it is completely different from it. Everything it seems is composed of that which it is completely different from.

How do these threshold events come about? How are they decided upon? The quark/gluon interaction is what forms a proton. But how did that exact arrangement for proton forming quarks materialize? It was somehow arrived at from an amorphous plasma of quarks and gluons? The precise formula for the formation of protons was randomly arrived at from a free for all of particles? How can that be? The odds are just too enormous for that.

Perhaps it has to do with information. As we have seen, a microscopic life form can be taken apart in a petri dish where it will spontaneously reassemble itself, retain all of its functionality and go about its business as if its parts were never separated. This is because all the information required for its construction is inherent in its parts. Could this be the case with the formation of the universe?

Might energy be pure information managed by the binary of its A/R dynamic that, when released via the big bang, conspired to inform particular structures orchestrated by the binary of A/R which went on to produce a universe according to a cascading ad hoc program designated by conditions at the release, like the ratio of A to R.

The particular ratio of the forces of A/R could be the key to a formula for other threshold events. Consciousness could be the result of the various attractions and repulsions of a complex nervous system informing it to create a window, as it were, to manage them in an orderly fashion. One might imagine lines of the two forces of the A/R dynamic extending from the universal energy and working the universe and everything in it like the binary code of a computer program.

All is a manifestation of the attraction/repulsion dynamic of the one energy. And it is to that one energy that all seek to return. Energized quantum particles display a marked tendency to recombine into the whole energy from whence they appeared - like the virtual particles that percolate out of the vacuum energy and just as soon recombine back into it.

The forces of attraction and repulsion that wrestle around with quarks perform a Sisyphean like activity of perpetually coming together and pushing apart. This is, perhaps, a good illustration of how energy itself behaves in its constant and continual attraction and repulsion to itself. Quarks with the same charge constantly repel one another by virtue of an electromagnetic field while the attractive force of gluons continually reels them in. Out of this chaotic contest the A/R forces and the quarks somehow combine, or conspire, to create a stable unity in the form of a proton or a neutron. Negatively charged electrons are attracted to positively charged protons, as they would be to their antiparticle positron, with which they would annihilate into a pure form of energy. The proton, then, is like a decoy positron to the electron, which attracts it like a positron only to hold it in perpetual abeyance and, thus, an atom is formed. Atoms, in close proximity to one another, create forces of attraction and repulsion between themselves through which they are able to congregate while maintaining a certain distance whereby electrons are able to bind atoms together and produce molecules.

Hydrogen atoms with the assistance of the attractive force of gravity formed galaxies. The black hole at the center of a galaxy is a massive attempt by gravity to return to the prior state of oneness. A greater majority of the hydrogen atoms in protogalaxies, however, got caught up in less massive gravitational fields and produced the fusion reactors known as stars.

From the forces of A/R we can derive all the characteristics of the universe that stand in opposition to one another. In terms of the one energy they can be seen as absolutes and our universe exists by virtue of a dialogue between them.

absolute unity <> absolute diversity

absolute uniformity <> absolute disparity

absolute stability <> absolute instability

absolute order <> absolute chaos

absolute contraction <> absolute expansion

absolute constancy <> absolute change

absolute attraction <> absolute repulsion

Our universe is characterized by such dualities and might be said to be caught between a dialogue of these absolutes in various ratios.

The absolutes that make up each column are interchangeable with one another. Unity, uniformity, stability, order, contraction, constancy, attraction are all intimately related to one another as their opposites are to one another. The one common denominator in all of these absolute pairings is attraction/repulsion because they qualify as forces; forces whose cooperative contention all of the other dualities can be seen to be an effect of.

At one extreme we have super giant stars that violently push outward against themselves producing an overwhelming force of repulsion that seems bent on tearing their bodies apart as quickly as possible. This objective is achieved soon enough in a massive explosion as the star's constituent parts all go their own separate ways jettisoned into outer space. This nearly absolute repulsive force can also be characterized as approaching absolute diversity, disparity, instability, chaos, expansion and change.

Something approaching absolute uniformity can be seen as a neutron star, or a black hole, where the force of attraction, gravity, acts as a cosmic vacuum cleaner sucking everything around it into its super monolithic density. This nearly absolute uniformity brought about by a nearly absolute attraction can also be considered as absolute unity, order, stability, contraction and constancy.

We see that the attraction/repulsion dynamic factors into every facet of existence from the beginning of the universe to the present. Everything is holding together and pushing apart, attracting/repelling. It seems that this dynamic is the primal mover behind all that exists. Spacetime itself is drawn out, as it were, between the attraction/repulsion dynamic. The expansive force of the universe, the force of repulsion, pushes outward from the force of attraction making room, as it were, for all that follows. The attract/repel dynamic is ubiquitous throughout the universe. This dynamic duo is responsible for the revelation of all the various phenomena in accordance with varying ratios of itself. Attraction and repulsion comprise the binary language of the computer and of the program we know as the universe. The universe is at once the hardware and the software. It is an information processing system that produces and processes its own information.

Quantum particles are formed and instructed by the forces of attraction and repulsion that permeate their existence. Life itself is characterized by the attraction/repulsion dynamic in various ways. Some of which are: The expansion and contraction of our lungs due to our organic attraction to oxygen molecules and a repulsion to the waste products that are exhaled. The constant expansion and contraction of our brains, hearts and intestines due to some internal attractive/repulsive dynamic of their own. The folding of proteins due to the attraction and repulsion of amino acids with respect to the alignment of their specific charges and also to hydrophobia, the repulsion to water, by the non-polar amino acids.

This dynamic is also manifested in the behavior of organisms. Primitive one-celled creatures swimming in primordial tidal pools functioned by employing such a dynamic. They were attracted to food and repelled by toxins. Here we have the beginnings of conscious intelligence where informed choices are made. In the case of more evolved animals the interplay of attraction/repulsion becomes more complex. For instance, in a PBS nature documentary, a female cheetah with cubs is faced with a dilemma. For days she has been staying close to her cubs to protect them from lurking predators. But her growing hunger is telling her its time to hunt before she becomes to weak. The thought of food is attractive. The thought of protecting her cubs is also attractive. The thought of leaving her cubs alone is repulsive. The thought of becoming weak with hunger is also repulsive. She is reluctant to leave her cubs but she knows she has to. Her cubs might be okay on their own for a while but without food neither they nor she could survive. So, finally, off she goes to hunt. Further along the evolutionary track we have human beings who can reflect about what they are attracted to and repelled by and can philosophize about it in grand style.

Consciousness, then, is a product of a complex nervous system processing a whole series of things to be attracted to and repelled by all at once on a continuous basis. A 'window' was needed in which to sort things out. Attraction/repulsion is the dynamic that is truly universal and permeates everything from the microcosm to the macrocosm.

Attraction/repulsion of energy itself is the élan vital that makes all things possible. It is difficult to think of any phenomenon where they are not present in tandem, from the holding together of an ever-expanding universe to the deciding factors in human relationships. It is the duality of attraction and repulsion, a coming together and a pushing away that makes the universe possible. The one thing that this duality is part of is something we call energy. All is one as the philosophers of old used to say. All is indeed one. Everything is a product of the one and same energy. And with the creation of life, energy has found a way of experiencing itself.

A/R is what is responsible for the controlled expansion of outer space, the sprinkling of galaxies in the overwhelming vastness and it's what started the universe in motion paving the way for the eruption of light that we see as the big bang.

# 2.2 NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE

So, the universe is a manifestation of the forces of attraction and repulsion that characterizes energy itself.

We see that the universe at large is composed of the force of repulsion in the form of dark energy on the one hand and the force of attraction known as gravity on the other.

It is interesting to note that the macro scale of dark energy/gravity and the micro scale of the weak/strong forces constitute the flip side of one another. The strong force is attractive but is exponentially more powerful than gravity. Its influence, however, extends over extremely short distances, whereas the weaker force of gravity extends throughout the universe. On the small scale the weak repulsive force is much less powerful than dark energy and the former's range is atomically confined while the latter's is cosmic.

What are we to make of this?

For one thing, where there is one force there is also the other, where there is attraction there is repulsion. On the cosmic as well as the quantum level.

Attraction and repulsion form the one fundamental dynamic that all levels of existence must conform to and be formed by. Energy, characterized by these two forces, constitutes all there is. The presence of the Attraction/Repulsion dynamic throughout the universe must be a result of the deep and abiding influence of energy itself. For it stands to reason that the behavior of the universe must always be informed and instructed by its progenitor.

We might imagine that energy is perfectly poised in its own absolute attraction and repulsion with slight irregularities occurring which for the most part are instantaneously corrected. In that balancing act there are an infinite variety of possible ratios that could effect the revelation of one universe or another. We might say that a universe exists merely as a possibility with respect to energy. The actuality of this universe, or any other universe, is a result of that possibility although no universe exists at all as far as energy itself is concerned.

How can this be?

Again, looking at the behavior of quantum world particles, we can get a better understanding of how energy can give rise to something without actually doing so. It all has to do with counterfactual measurements where something can be, as it were, falsely true. Actual experiments with electrons conducted by Herman Batelaan, based on Richard Feynman's split screen thought experiment, confirm that a quantum particle can travel on two different paths at once. Roger Penrose describes a similar experiment in his book Shadows of the Mind where a single photon, after being directed through a half-silvered mirror travels along two different paths. So, the one photon can pass straight through, taking the lower path while also being reflected along the upper path. Other full-silvered mirrors are set up in such a way as to have the upper and lower paths of the one photon create a square so that the photon will meet itself at a specific point that completes the square where another half-silvered mirror is placed. View an example.

Again, upon its encounter with the first half-silvered mirror a single photon can travel through the mirror while also being reflected by it. Thus traveling on two separate paths at once. It's important to note that the photon does not split into two parts. One photon can take both paths. The photon goes straight through the half-silvered mirror and also goes off in a path perpendicular to itself. When the photon encounters the full-silvered mirrors equidistant from the starting point a 90 degree change of direction puts the photon on a collision course with itself. The photon meets up with itself at the next corner where the square is completed and where it encounters the other half-silvered mirror. This mirror is set up so that the photon on the upper path could again take two paths perpendicular to one another as it passes straight through it and is reflected by it. Detectors D and C are set up to on those two paths to determine what happens. The photon traveling on both paths comes to interfere with itself and results in its arrival only at detector D. Because of its interference with itself the photon does not go on to pass through the final half-silvered mirror while also being reflected by it as it did with the first half-silvered mirror. If there is no interference, however, the photon can be both reflected and transmitted through as it was with the first half-silvered mirror and be detected at either D or C. But not both. Because the observation by the detectors serve to force the photon to be detected by only one of them.

Now let's say we arrange to have the system determine the condition of particular sensing devices. A series of sensing devices will be placed one at a time at the lower corner of the square. If a device is in good condition it will register the photon's impact by a slight inward movement and a click will be heard. This will delay the photon's meeting up with itself at the final corner and allow it to pass through the half-silvered mirror and also be reflected by it so it will be detected by either detector D or C. If a device is not in good condition it will be rigid and the photon will immediately bounce off and meet up with and interfere with itself so that it will only be detected at point D.

So, either D or C will register the arrival of the photon after a click is heard which signals that a device is in good condition. But here's the interesting thing, the detector at C, which can only register detection of a photon if the device is good, will sometimes register the arrival of the photon even if a click is not heard. The photon, then, did not have to travel both paths for the outcome to register that it did so and, thus, confirm that the sensing device in place at the time was in fact in good condition.

Something that did not actually occur effected results as if it did occur. That is what is called a counterfactual measurement, something that results from something that did not take place, something that is, as it were, falsely true. A photon was there = false; a photon was not there = false. Both are also true.

Energy itself can be no less capable and one would suppose it to be capable of behavior that is even more strange. So, the universe is happening the way in which we perceive it to be happening merely because it can happen that way. Just the fact that it can happen, that it is possible, is enough for it to actually happen. That is, as far as energy itself is concerned. But, again, the universe is not really happening with respect to energy even though the universe is composed of it.

A useful analogy can be found in a mirror. The image of a room, for instance, that we see reflected in a mirror is not imaged by the mirror. A mirror has no capacity to concoct an image from the lightwaves it reflects. If there were no one or no camera in front of the mirror to receive the photon output and process it as information then there would be no image in the mirror. The room and its objects would be right where they were but their image would not be realized in the mirror itself and the room would not exist there as an image. Without classical-world life forms one might say that only the quantum world could really exist. Not that we create the reality of the classical world, we realize it by processing information that is provided by the quantum world. The quantum world makes our world possible, realizable, but it does not realize our world. We realize our world. On the quantum level the various objects of our macroscopic classical world exist as various concentrations of energetic particles. A particular set of those concentrations has created creatures, Homo sapiens among them, capable of rendering the particular arrangements of those concentrations as realizable objects.

This image-in-the-mirror question is a visual rendition of the old question - If a tree falls in a deserted forest does it make a sound? The answer is, no. The falling tree only transmits vibrations through the air as a result of its fall but if there are no ears or listening devices around to pick up those vibrations and translate them into sounds then all you have are silent vibrations.

The universe in its actual state bears no resemblance to the way in which we perceive it, just like a DVD disc bears no resemblance to the sights and sounds that appear on the monitor of a DVD player. The information on the DVD has been encoded in such a way to enable it to be read and transformed into a motion picture by a DVD player that is equipped to read and process the information encoded on the disc. Without the DVD player the information stored on the DVD is pure potential, the disc itself remains unfulfilled. The idea that led to the invention of the DVD is like the energy that creates the universe. The idea itself is not evident as part of the physical product and will remain forever unseen.

The world of quantum particles is like the DVD - it needs something to read its information in order to reveal that which we know as the classical world. In this case, however, the quantum world creates its own readers in the form of living things to decipher the information. We are readers and our consciousness is the monitor.

Our nervous system transforms the world around us into useful perceptions. Raw data is received at an unconscious microscopic level and processed to create sensations that become meaningful in our conscious minds. Sight, sound, smell, touch, taste are all reasonable facsimiles of the world around us although they exist exclusively in our minds. Some of these sensations we find attractive and some we find repellent.

There is a school of thought which posits that everything is an illusion. This might seem to be what I'm saying also. But it's not. Color, for instance, is no illusion. Color pertains to distinguishing particular lightwaves from one another. Our sense of color preceded our knowledge of this. By naming colors we were labeling lightwaves which we had no awareness of. That which is beyond our senses is what informs our senses. There is no color per se out there but what is out there is the reality that color corresponds to. Both are part and parcel of the real world. Photons that we are not at all aware of are unconsciously processed in our brains to form conscious images.

Also, the idea that everything is an illusion contains its own contradiction. Because if everything is an illusion then it must be an illusion that everything is an illusion and, therefore, nothing is an illusion except the illusion that everything is an illusion.

We tend to think in broad all encompassing blanket statements, like "everything is an illusion". Blanket statements, however, are all too often self-contradictory. "There are exceptions to every rule", for another example. If there are exceptions to that rule then there must be some rules that have no exceptions.

There are some broad concepts, however, that do hold up. For example, instead of "everything is an illusion" we state that "everything is real". There is nothing contradictory about that statement and it is universally valid, even for illusions. An illusion, after all, must be a real illusion.

Or we might say, "everything is true" and again there would be no contradiction in that statement. But what about false statements, one may protest, they aren't true. No, they are false. However, it must be true that they are false in order for them to be truly false. We judge things by what is true not by what is false. Our standard is truth. If something is true it would be absurd to ask if it is falsely true (except, of course, when dealing with quantum particles). If something is true it is true. If something is false it is true that it is false. If something is true it cannot be false that it is true.

If we did say, "everything is false", that would obviously contradict itself. Even if we extended the statement to be, "everything is false except this statement", we run into contradictions. If everything is false, then when someone says, "I love you," it must be taken as a false statement. If it is a false statement then one might ask - What are that person's true feelings? This person might then say, "I have no feelings for you." But that statement would have to be false and it would be true that the person has some feelings for you. So, in that false statement "I have no feelings for you," there is contained a true statement that is its opposite.

If we say, "everything is true", we don't have these kinds of problems. Under that rubric if someone says they love you we can think of the statement as being true one way or the other. Either it's true, or it is true that it is false.

Our thinking, the way our minds work, seems to lean towards the positive side where what is real and true determine our judgments. Much of our philosophy, however, has been biased toward the negative side, toward illusion and falsehood. Ideal worlds are the only real and true worlds while the world we live in is all illusion and falsity. Such a bias is part of the attractive idea of our being not totally defined and confined by the natural world. We are above it all, something separate. Our reality is something other, some inviolate being-ness that is not subject to the insults and injuries of a temporal life.

Kant's "thing-in-itself" and Nietzsche's statement that, "the apparent world is the only world" was once an argument between idealist and materialist. Today there really is no argument between those views. They are both right and wrong. Today we can posit that the thing-in-itself is energy, which is actually everything-in-itself. There is no specific exclusive thing-in-itself for each and every object. There are specific molecular arrangements for individual objects but they do not qualify as the essence of those objects. What is essential is energy. Everything-in-itself is energy.

As for Nietzsche's statement, I would say, the apparent world is not the only world. For our ordinary everyday purposes, however, it is the only world. The apparent world is, of course, the classical world, or the material world. But the material world now includes the particles of matter, like atoms, that were once thought to be things-in-themselves. Of course, those particles are not part of our ordinary experience but they are of a world that exists on its own terms. It is a world that is very different from our familiar world but nonetheless it is a real world. So, we might amend Nietzsche's statement to read - The apparent world is the only world that is consciously significant to us although the apparent world is an effect of another world that is made up of quantum particles that are essentially energy which is, perhaps, the thing-in-itself. I think Kant and Nietzsche could both agree with that statement.

To put it in terms of our individual existence we might say that we are an ensemble of quantum world particles capable of processing those particles in such a way as to effect the realization of classical world objects. The processing all takes place at the microscopic level. Optic nerve cells, for example, receive photons as raw data which is processed into information with which our brains produce an image of the world that does not exist for photons. Photons are absorbed and/or reflected by the molecular structures they come in contact with and we perceive them as objects according to the photons that are reflected. Our sense of smell is similar. Chemical components interact with receptor cells in our noses to produce a sensation of odor that exists only in our heads as a consequence of various chemicals. All our senses operate at the quantum level. Our central nervous systems process the data provided to us by photons, chemical components, particle vibrations and electromagnetic fields. The images, tastes, smells, sounds and feel of the world that we experience are sensations developed inside our heads with respect to phenomena that we are not consciously aware of. So, for example, the conscious image we have of our surroundings is an accurate rendition of the behavior of photons resulting from their interactions with the molecular structures that we produce images from. The image corresponds exactly to the reality of the molecular structures and the reflected photons but the image is special to our conscious minds. Our reality is based on the reality of the quantum world which informs us on how we must relate to what is really out there at the quantum level. The apparent world is presented to us by a world that is not apparent to us. So, to the question - Is our world merely a creation of our sense perceptions? I would answer, yes and no.

The apparent world is not created a priori in relation to some ideal thing-in-itself, which was Nietzsche's point, but neither is it the only world. Kant was right that something other, something more essential than the perceived world does exist but not as the ideal thing-in-itself he posited. Energy might be considered the ideal universal substance but it does not necessitate the world as we know it. It makes it possible but not necessary. Our world is not inexorably part of, nor inexorably traceable to, nor inexorably reflected in the energy that composes it. Our world doesn't really exist for quantum particles nor does the universe exist as far as energy is concerned.

Energy represents possibility. The attraction/repulsion dynamic of energy is necessary for its existence. The forces and particles that effect our world are perhaps an inevitable product of the tug and pull of the energy that comprises energy itself and, thus, our universe. The specific ways in which atoms interact, that is, attract and repel one another, are necessitated by their individual configurations. The microcosm is a rather precise affair. The formation of the macrocosm, however, is a crap shoot that depends on the cooperation of disparate parameters to come together in just such a way for any given object of the classical world to take shape.

Galaxies and stars might also be a necessary result of universal forces but a particular solar system is not produced out of necessity. How a particular solar system is configured is a cosmic game of roulette. The various formation of planets, wherever they might be possible, is also a matter of chance. Moreover, the emergence of a planet capable of producing life and remaining a safe haven for its evolution over billions of years is an astronomical rarity where the odds might be only one in a universe. That such a planet would go one to produce creatures like ourselves is another crap shoot. Now that we do exist, however, the likelihood of our extinction seems to be much more of a sure thing.

This is not a very satisfying prospect when looking at the universe from our point of view - looking to satisfy our existential yearnings for an eternal stamp of approval. But it has become apparent that all the precision necessary to develop the universe does not necessarily lead to our existence. That it did happen in the way it did doesn't mean it had to happen that way, even though, in hindsight, it had to happen the way it did because of the way it happened. Nothing that happens could have happened in any way other than the way in which it happened. That doesn't mean it _had_ to have happened in just that way.

The substance out of which quantum particles appeared could not have been any different from what it was. And the behavior, formations and interactions of those particles that appeared out of the primal substance has to do with somehow remaining true to the consistency of that substance. That is, all the parts in relation to each other would need to preserve the integrity of the whole prior state in the way ice retains the integrity of its liquid state to which when melted it returns. That initial state, initial oneness, the wholeness, has not been and cannot be violated. The behavior of quantum particles is determined by how the combinations of their particularizations relate to the whole from which they originated.

An atom is the end result of that necessary behavior. Once that result is satisfied things begin to get more chancy. Various types of galaxies form with various types of stars which produce a variety of other types of atoms. How those atoms combine with one another is determined by their particular configuration. What particular complex molecular structures they form is determined by the chance perturbations of the environments they find themselves in.

We could say that the initial stage of our universe was necessary to develop the conditions that eventually gave rise to the existence of human beings. But just because we humans exist does not mean we were always destined to materialize. The way in which a particular star of a particular solar system is created is not directly related to the initial creation of the universe. That all the disparate ingredients and events necessary for the formation and subsequent evolution of life will eventually come together in just such a way as to make life a reality are not prescribed by the creation of a universe wherein life is a foregone conclusion. The matter necessary for the creation of life is processed by particular stars. In general stars were prescribed by the initial stages of the universe. But the structure of any particular star was not. Whether or not star stuff ever happens to form a solar system capable of producing life is a matter of sheer numbers. Nearly an infinite variety of configurations of matter has gone into the development of life in this universe. The chance of hitting upon the particular configuration that produces life is perhaps a matter of virtually one in a universe. Not very good odds unless billions of star systems in billions of galaxies are in the process of configuring every combination of universal elements in every planetary formation possible.

A solar system capable of initiating life is conditioned upon the particular star itself. For planets to be able to form depends upon the strength of the star's gravitational field. If too strong the gravitational field would pull all the matter swirling around it into itself at too great a rate for any planets to form. If too weak the surrounding matter would not be able to pull together enough to form the significant configurations necessary for the formation of planets.

If the formation of a solar system is invariably dependent upon the attributes of a particular star then we see that out of billions of stars in billions of galaxies the chances are good that solar systems will occasionally happen. Now let's say on average that out of the billions of stars in a galaxy only x number would be capable of engineering a solar system. In the entire universe then the number of solar systems would be x times the billions of galaxies. Now, taking into account that the elements necessary for the creation of life are quite common throughout the universe, we must now calculate the chances for those elements to come together, in just the right measure, on a planet where the conditions are just right for those elements to interact in just such a way that the spark of life would ignite and begin the process of evolution and be able to continue that evolution for the billions of years necessary to develop the species known as Homo sapiens or one of equivalent or superior intelligence.

We know that it happened at least once. So the question is what are the chances of it happening more than once? As I see it the chances for life as we know it happening more than once sky rocket to more than astronomical proportions that, in comparison, make the possibility of life happening once a relative certainty.

The universe as we know it would still be the universe without life but it would not be the universe as we know it without the possibility of life. Without us it could still be the universe as we know it. But without the possibility of us it couldn't be.

To create billions upon billions of stars and billions of planets in order for life to appear on one of them seems to lack specific intention to create life. Specific intention was tenable when we believed the whole universe consisted only of our solar system and our planet was the very centerpiece of all creation.

As it is the stuff of life is universally available and it would seem that the universe needs to be so vast with so many galaxies and stars in order for just the right combination of things to happen to bring about life. This would hardly seem the work of a purposeful Creator. Now that we are here it was an inevitable consequence of the way things happened. We could not have happened any other way even though we could have not happened. We are an accident in the sense that the order which brought us about, the ordering of the factors that brought us about had to be just right but the exact ordering of those factors was not necessary. We were the inevitable result of the way things happened. We were not inevitable.

Physicists sometimes ponder what they see as extraneous quantum world particles for which nature seems to have no purpose. This, of course, assumes that the particles that are relevant to our existence do have a purpose. But hydrogen atoms were not produced for the purpose of forming stars. Carbon atoms were not produced for the purpose of creating life. Groupings of hydrogen and oxygen atoms are not formed for the purpose of producing water. Hydrogen and oxygen come together in the way they do because of their particular configurations. Water is a particular way of perceiving H2O.

The microcosm of the quantum world puts itself together as a result of the interactions of its particulates according to their inherent properties. The macrocosm is not a purposeful creation of the microcosm but neither is it a meaningless accident. All particle and chemical interactions are meaningful. Their specific configurations provide the recipe for the formation of all matter, all life. The recipe was and always will be possible but not inevitable. In our minds we see meaning everywhere. Meaning is the realization, the consciousness of vital connections. Water is meaningful to our lives. The air we breathe is meaningful. The reproduction of life is meaningful. Our survival is meaningful. What we are attracted to and repelled by is meaningful. Our sense of right and wrong is meaningful.

Our existence is a reality but it was not a certainty ordained by a God for divine purposes. Our continued existence is in our hands alone. This is what science is telling us and some people find that message to be abhorrent, unattractive, repulsive. We want things to be other than how science reveals them to be. We want human beings to be purely cultural or spiritual entities, demigods for whom the natural world is a subservient support system. We want to think of ourselves as free of nature's confinement and able to live our lives without the intrusion of environmental concerns. We become peevish at the thought of such concerns inhibiting our lavish habits of consumption. Such habits, of course, are attributable to a common natural instinct of life to exploit the environment for one's own benefit. But we cloak that natural instinct in divine raiment. We claim that human beings operate on a higher level, our extravagant life styles (provided by science and technology) are a testament to our divine origins. We find it necessary to distinguish ourselves from the natural world in whatever way we can. Even if it means destroying that world in the process.

This state of affairs needs to be altered if we are to continue as a species. We have to admit that things have changed. Knowledge has changed our world and our view of it. Thus, our worldview must change accordingly. Our perspectives, belief systems, images of ourselves and our images of Gods need to be informed and instructed by knowledge. Religion has used and manipulated our basic instincts for millennia. Our instinct for survival, for instance, has been used to temper our immediate existence with a concern for our future survival in an eternal afterlife. Now, however, one's immediate existence must be tempered by a concern for the future of life in this world even after one's life is over.

# 3.1 A THEORY OF EVERYTHING ELSE

Extending our concern for our own future into concern for the future of life as a whole constitutes a drastic change in our thinking. Knowledge of ourselves, our ecosystems and how we impact those systems have given us insights about how we might go about changing our thinking and our behavior in order to arrest the environmental deterioration we are responsible for. Changing our thinking must obviously precede changing our ways. Of course, some cataclysmic event or other could force us to change our ways, which, in turn, would change our thinking. That's usually the way it works. But haven't there been enough environmental disasters to cause us to drastically amend our traditionally cavalier attitude with regard to the natural environment? Haven't we compromised water resources, fisheries, arable land, etc., enough? Haven't there been enough lives severely compromised for us all to realize that ecological concern is also concern for our own future? Haven't there been enough indications that we are paving the way for our own extinction, that we are turning Mother Nature against us? As it is now, we take the ongoing existence of our species pretty much for granted. It is something about which we seldom concern ourselves on a conscious level. We need to take it for granted because the alternative is much too horrendous to contemplate. Only when faced with certain extinction would we consciously realize how vital the idea of our open ended existence is to our fundamental sense of well being. It's like not knowing, or ignoring, what we need to know about what we have till it's gone.

What we don't know can hurt us.

What we certainly do know is that our survival is absolutely dependent on the survival of our planet's ecosystems. If we wait until it becomes unmistakably apparent to one and all that the Earth's network of ecosystems has indeed been irreparably compromised it will be too late to install effective measures with which to undo hazardous environmental conditions contributing to the Earth's demise or at least our own demise. We are in the habit of putting the guardrail up after the fatal accident to prevent such accidents in the future. That would, of course, be an exercise in futility when it may finally become evident to us that no future is possible.

Even if human activity is not unduly harming the Earth's environment it would be wise to seriously curtail whatever harm we are causing in order to maintain ecological conditions that are as close to optimum levels as possible. There are ways of measuring such levels in the amount of free oxygen in the atmosphere, the quantity of potable water relative to population, ozone layer depletion, the acreage of arable land, global warming, deforestation, desertification, depletion of fisheries and, perhaps, even current bee populations.

Deforestation takes away from our oxygen supply. A shortage of potable water may already be a problem. A severely depleted ozone layer would make the sun an enemy to life. We are losing more and more valuable farmland to developers and erosion and desertification every year. Although it is true that we can now grow more crops on a given acre of land than we used to, concentrating farmland into fewer and fewer areas does not take into account changes in overall climate that could very well select against those few areas and favor other areas that have been sacrificed to one kind of development project or another. Such overall changes in climate could be precipitated by global warming whether man-made or not.

There is nothing more important to anyone than having an environment that is friendly to life. All other issues and causes become absolutely irrelevant on a planet whose life support system is being threatened. This is an issue that requires us, one and all, to settle and/or put our differences aside and focus our collective attention on allowing the planet to become and remain as ecologically sound as possible. Or we can continue to be embroiled in our ethnic conflicts and our ideological wars, overwhelmed by corporate exploitation and governmental ineptitude until one day we look up and notice that there is nothing more to fight over or exploit because our life support system has become damaged beyond repair. That may seem farfetched to some, perhaps to most people, but as a possibility it cannot be ruled out. That dire possibility should be enough to amend our thinking.

In some ways our thinking has changed. How could it not in the face of all the changes that we have been subjected to in our lifetimes? The question is - has our thinking changed for the better? Perhaps, our thinking has changed into more of a nonthinking. As in the "dumbing down" that has been much talked about in recent years. Perhaps there's just too much to think about, too much to wrap our minds around. Perhaps we can't quite figure out how to connect things. Wherever we look there is heated controversy with opposing sides stubbornly determined not to budge from their prefabricated positions no matter what. All the talking heads on TV, mainly occupied with fighting culture wars, side with one opposing faction or another, subscribe to whatever half-baked argument favors their side while systematically ignoring the big picture that we are all part of.

Francis Fukuyama, in his book, The Great Disruption, points out that the vast majority of people are not engaged in culture wars, that these conflicts are a matter for activist ideologues only and everyone else goes about their daily routines unaffected. Well, people can ignore the culture wars but that doesn't mean they are necessarily unaffected by those conflicts. As political and cultural infighting becomes more insular and isolated the threat to democratic institutions becomes more prevalent. That is a threat to us all, whether we know it or not. What we don't know can hurt us. Also, if the majority of people have a more objective view of things, i.e., are not shackled by a fixed idea, then their input would seem to me to be a much needed ingredient in the debate. Not only do we pollute and threaten the natural environment but we pollute and threaten the cultural environment with cockeyed, ideologically biased views. We need to take measures to clean up both environments. Perhaps one must soar above all the ideological smog in order to fashion a cogent worldview that integrates all our differences into a salubrious whole.

Of all the factions vying for ascendancy in the culture wars, the battle between science and traditional belief systems is probably the most crucial. This battle has been going on since Galileo and has been considerably escalated by, among other things, the advance of Darwinian theory. The battle lines in this conflict have been purposefully blurred by some defenders of religious beliefs. In an attempt to enfeeble science, religious authorities accuse it of being just another faith. On the other hand, religious authorities also claim that science can prove their beliefs to be a reality. This flip-flopping not only erodes the concept of faith itself but also lessens our ability to form as truthful a picture of the world as we otherwise might through the development of a clear understanding between faith and reason.

Trying to accommodate contradictory positions as mutually viable is a no win situation. But that is the insidious nowhere land our psyches have been inhabiting in recent times. As a result religious and scientific views are both rendered less than meaningful and neither can present a fully cogent vision. What we need to do is examine religion in an objective manner and identify its roots in the natural world. Placing religion squarely within the nature of things could serve, perhaps, to put humankind in a more appropriate perspective.

That scientific findings run contrary to some of our traditional beliefs can, of course, be a cause for anxiety in people. Those beliefs form the very foundation for the structures of meaning that house our vulnerable psyches and they have passed as factual knowledge for millennia. Then science comes along and reduces some fundamental beliefs to that of myth and fantasy. A catastrophic conflict is created between what we want to believe and what science reveals as fact. Movements such as Creation Science are a desperate attempt to merge faith and reason to favor religious beliefs. But such confusion of terms like Creation Science merely fills the gap between science and religion with nonsense. The gap between what science is telling us and what we want to believe can best be dealt with through a better understanding of what science is actually saying and realizing what it has to offer in the way of human values.

It is believed, however, that science can have nothing whatsoever to offer in terms of human value systems. Science can elucidate theories about the human need for value systems and meaning in life over and above a merely natural existence but science cannot provide for that meaning. It is thought that science can only undermine what is meaningful. It is true that this has been an inadvertent aspect of science since its inception but it need not be a permanent condition. In extrapolating values from science some of our preferred scenarios, inspired by religious faiths, must, of course, fall by the wayside. The relationship of science and values will be fully elucidated in a later chapter. For now it is important to keep in mind that altering our beliefs to accord with knowledge does not mean the end of religious concepts altogether.

Our unwillingness to relinquish our preferred scenarios of the world runs deep and presents a formidable stumbling block to establishing values based on anything other than obsolete scenarios. The human penchant for preferring fantasy over reality is well documented and can even be an occasion for enthusiastic applause.

The play, M. Butterfly, produced on Broadway in 1988, is a case in point. It dramatizes the story of a married man, Rene Gallimard, who falls in love with someone he believes to be a woman but who is actually a man posing as a woman. Gallimard believes the object of his desire is a woman all through their initial platonic encounters and, quite remarkably goes on believing it throughout a long and intimate relationship.

The female impersonator is able to sustain the illusion of being a woman by, for one thing, claiming an extraordinary modesty and never disrobing in Gallimard's presence. Even so, one may ask - how could this be? How could a man not be capable of discerning the difference between having sex with a male as opposed to a female? This is not just an academic question about a playwright's invention, for M. Butterfly is based on a true story. One might suspect that the man in question was, at the very least, a semi-consciously willing participant in the ongoing illusion and found the relationship with the person he was in love with as all to gratifying to be disturbed by whatever tactile differences he may have been tenuously aware of during their intimate encounters.

Be that as it may, the audiences of M. Butterfly, during its Broadway incarnation, seemed to relate to the lead character's peculiar situation with a strong sense of empathy. But why? It is, after all, not a typical experience for people to find themselves in love with someone pretending to be a member of the opposite sex. So, what was it about this play's bizarre relationship that struck a chord in its audiences? It is certainly a more common experience to be attracted to and have a relationship with someone only to find out they were not the person you thought they were. This may have been the connection with the play and its audience. But even after being presented with the naked truth about his lover's gender Gallimard refused to acknowledge that "she" was in fact a "he" and created his own inverted version of the fantasy he had been inadvertently involved with for so many years.

Interestingly enough, this stubborn refusal to accept reality did not dissuade the audience from its empathy for the play's protagonist but rather seemed to intensify it. One would think, on the face of it, that such obstinate behavior would not serve to illicit anyone's applause. Nevertheless, there it was.

So, what was it that caused the outpouring of empathy demonstrated in the audiences' reaction? What was there to identify with so strongly?

Perhaps what audiences found to applaud in this provocative drama was the universal compulsion to believe what we want, or need to believe, even though such beliefs may fly in the face of reality. The audiences' empathy might have consisted of a spontaneous recognition of the age old conflict between our precious illusions, the reality which continually encroaches upon them and our stubborn insistence on holding on to our illusions as long as we can by willfully denying whatever facts might threaten them.

Indeed, what we want to believe about our world and ourselves doesn't always mesh with reality and when presented with evidence that our beliefs are contrary to the facts, either we accept the reality that our illusions have been shattered or we turn away from the facts and become fanatical about believing in our illusions. Threats to our illusions can, of course, cause grave conflicts within ourselves, as threats to belief systems in general can cause grave conflicts within and between institutions. Religion, for instance, has been wrangling with the disillusioning aspect of science for centuries.

# 3.2 SCIENCE AND RELIGION

When Galileo was able to demonstrate that the Earth was not at the center of all things, the Church, no longer able to disavow Copernicus' heliocentric view of the solar system, branded Galileo a heretic and sentenced him to be imprisoned in his home. The Church's reaction was, of course, perfectly understandable. Such knowledge severely challenged the whole concept of God and Man. Human beings were, according to Church doctrine, the central purpose of God's design. This doctrine also included the belief that mankind's home, the Earth, occupied the very center of the universe. Displacing the Earth from that eminent position threatened the very foundation of the Church's teachings and, thus, its unquestionable authority over its subjects. So, like Gallimard in M. Butterfly, the Church refused to accept the naked truth it was presented with and chose to continue to believe in its version of things even though that version had clearly been shown to be false.

Eventually, of course, the Church had to accept the heliocentric reality of our solar system. However, if it could have found a way to continue to live in ignorance of that reality it seems more than likely it would have done so as evidenced by the Church's long refusal to accept humankind's place in the evolution of all living things.

Resistance and skepticism regarding new perspectives that challenge the status quo do serve a purpose. They create a demanding screening process through which all claims to scientific discoveries must pass. But when new ideas are bolstered by an overwhelming body of evidence in their favor, such resistance becomes absurd.

For the traditional believer, however, such willful resistance to evidence is second nature since one has been so accustomed to accepting on faith things that are antithetical to reason. Evidence that contradicts religious beliefs can even serve as a spur to go on believing. As Tertullian, an early Christian, said about believing in all the things in his particular faith which challenged one's sense of reality, "I believe because it is absurd." A sentiment that can be useful for any number of strange beliefs - that a man is actually a woman, for instance.

One might be better off in stating that one believes in creation and other fantastic biblical events because they are absurd, or even though they seem absurd, instead of emphatically insisting that they are scientific and/or historical facts. Such a statement of faith would be made in clear distinction to the scientific view of things. It would serve to keep the two camps separate and facilitate making lucid judgments about them. But lucid judgments seem to be what many religious authorities are attempting to forestall. They prefer to deal in distortion, obfuscation and misinformation rather than dealing squarely and honestly with the challenges thrown their way. This only serves to thwart rational thinking and does a disservice to everyone. We need to examine religious views in a forthright manner with the knowledge that the demise of a particular set of those views will not necessarily spell the demise of religion itself, nor of the religious spirit.

On the question of abortion and the status of an embryo a religion can, of course, take any stance it believes is the correct one. Kept within its confines a particular religion's beliefs are unassailable. It is when religious officials venture forth and lobby in the public arena for their beliefs to be held up as the law of the land that they become fair game. A believer takes religious views as self-evident truths and will accept, without rigorous scrutiny, most any less-than-cogent argument that supports those views. To someone with a more objective perspective, however, such arguments can be highly questionable. For instance, when duly investigated, the notion that abortion amounts to the murder of a human being is not found to be based on traditional church doctrine. The idea that an embryo is a human being was suggested after Roe v Wade and was a product of political maneuvering, not one of religious teaching. Indeed, it was a politician, Senator John East of North Carolina, who first introduced that idea to the American public on national television. There is no church doctrine to be found prior to Roe v Wade indicating human status for an embryo.

Indeed, it must be noted that in the Catholic Church a miscarried fetus is not given the same status as a newborn infant that dies before being baptized. The fate of the dead newborn was a matter of concern for the church but nowhere does it demonstrate the same concern for a miscarried fetus. Also, at the time of Roe v Wade there was no immediate outrage equating abortion with murder. There was never any official teaching about abortion being murder. That's because the fetus was never officially considered to be anything more than a potential human. Even a newborn infant does not amount to much in the eyes of the Catholic Church. According to traditional doctrine an infant who dies without being baptized is not allowed entry into heaven.

The modern right-to-life point of view was a political ploy to create a fictional moral high ground for Conservatives from where they could ambush the Liberals on a very emotional issue. Senator East emphatically told the nation on prime time TV that a zygote was a full-fledged, soul bearing, card-carrying human being as if that had always been the case. But if that had always been the case it would not have been possible for the court to decide Roe v Wade as it did.

If the moment of conception is of such solemn significance then surely there should have been explicit religious dogma pertaining to that fact from the beginning. However, a Southern Baptist pamphlet distributed during the nineties stated, "In a historical survey of Catholic and Baptist positions on abortion done in 1975, McLeod Bryan could find no prominent Baptist ethicist who had contributed significantly on behalf of the pro-life position." Indeed, in 1971 the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in St. Louis passed its first resolution on abortion, it called for the liberalizing and legalizing of abortion. In the 80's a pro-life position was adopted by the Baptists. However, such vacillation could not have occurred if there had been explicit doctrine on the subject stating in no uncertain terms that a fetus was in fact a human being.

Some people claim that we were lacking in knowledge about fetal development before Roe v Wade and that prevented us from appreciating the newly concocted pro-life position. Is religious teaching, then, dependent on convenient interpretations of scientific findings for its dogma? Did the Christian Church take its instruction from God, or not? The same people who point to a lack of prior knowledge about conception, cite passages from the bible that they claim have always supported the modern pro-life view. This is a blatant contradiction. On the one hand they claim the bible had always taught that a human life began at conception and, on the other hand, they claim that the whole idea was revealed by science. If the bible does proclaim that a zygote is a human being why was abortion not considered to be an act of murder all along? Why was it left to a "scurvy politician" to introduce that idea?

It's interesting to note that the people who use and abuse science to support particular religious views are the same people who pillory science when it cannot be used to support those views.

Clearly orthodox religious leaders are blindly grasping for straws in these matters. They no longer have a convincing overview for their beliefs and use whatever bits and pieces they can to prop them up. This does not, however, matter very much in a world that has no sense of continuity, that lacks a cogent view of itself and is dominated by noisy images of the moment. In such a world the protectors of traditional beliefs feel confident that they can put forth the flimsiest of arguments in support of their beliefs and have them readily accepted by the rank and file of their congregations without question.

One such argument came from a teacher in a Christian high school in Chicago who was featured in a PBS documentary that examined how the theory of evolution was being dealt with in various institutions. This particular teacher was lecturing in support of the biblically inspired idea that the earth is a mere ten thousand years old. In doing so he declared that dinosaurs and humans did indeed coexist. He then went on to explain the sudden disappearance of the dinosaur in this way - they became extinct as a result of the great flood. So, this religious teacher, this man of the bible took it upon himself to alter the sacred text he so revered as the absolute literal word of God. He had the gall to rewrite the word of God. The bible says that Noah took on to the ark two of every species. Period. It did not say two of every species except the dinosaur. Some people are so singleminded in their pursuit to preserve their beliefs they sometimes trash them in the process.

Those in the oxymoronic Creation Science camp perpetrated an outright fraud in an attempt to have their point of view validated. They have claimed on more than one occasion that they had found the fossilized footprints of a dinosaur and a human side by side. Upon investigation these claims were found to be fraudulent. In at least a couple of the cases it was found that the footprints claimed to be human had been tampered with in an effort to make them appear that way. One wonders what the perpetrators of such a foolhardy act could have been thinking. Did they really think they could get away with such a hoax? Did they believe such a hoax to be within the moral code of their religion? Did they think such a hoax was justified because they thought it to be in the service of some higher truth?

The supporters of creation science are much more sophisticated today and rely on the complexity of evolutionary science and the general public's incomplete knowledge of the subject to mislead them into thinking that evolution is not a valid science. There are, of course, things yet to be explained regarding the theory of evolution, but to use what we don't know about the evolutionary process in order to dismiss it in its entirety is tantamount to dismissing the concept of religion because of its own inherent mysteries. Be that as it may, the proponents of creation science are engaging in the dissemination of misinformation and outright falsehoods to disparage evolutionary science in an attempt to make creationism the more credible scenario.

The religious leaders who indulge in such nefarious tactics on behalf of their beliefs do a disservice to those they seek to educate to moral values. Telling lies in order to lend support to a religion that regards the telling of lies as a sin is, to put it mildly, unconscionable. Those who do so, however, seem to be blind to the moral dilemma that they're mired in because they are drunk with the desire to preserve their traditional beliefs without any change whatsoever. To alter one iota of their belief systems is absolutely unthinkable to them. That would be to impugn their God and without their deity judging them from an eternal supernatural realm they believe all that is left is temporal nature. There would be nothing to tame their heathen instincts. Without a divine connection they'd become sordid beasts of the earth with nothing before them but the dark foreboding abyss of despair and eternal death. But do they really think lying in defense of their beliefs will save them? Another reason for preserving traditional religions in tact is the vested interest of clergy - their religion is how they make a living.

We must come to terms with the fact that the edifice of traditional religion has been irrevocably compromised. A skyscraper of enormous proportions it teeters on the verge of total collapse. The one and only support beam of its very foundation has been removed and it is now crumbling under the gravity of its own infinite weight. Its desperate inhabitants scurry about like ants to shore it up with fabricated scraps of insubstantial material. But it is a colossal Humpty Dumpty and there is nothing to be done.

That support beam is, of course, creation. The creation myth of any religion is what it all flows from. It is the one singular cause of all religious effects. Without Eden, for instance, there is no Fall of Man, hence, no need for the redemptive saga of a messiah. Remove creation as reality and all that had followed from it is reduced to a fictional narrative. Further on I will offer my theory on what the story of the Genesis actually depicts.

The displacement of creation by evolution is an undeniable crisis of enormous magnitude for traditional religious beliefs. We have been wrestling with it for over a hundred years and seem no closer to a resolution than we were when the Darwinian revolution split the world in two with the publication of The Origin of Species. Darwin's ideas were anathema to religious dogma. They were heresy of the first order. They still are. For unlike other scientific findings evolution cannot be accommodated in the traditional religious view as others could. The heliocentric solar system, that Galileo was branded a heretic for discovering, was eventually accepted by the Church. As was the Newtonian worldview of a clockwork universe in which God did not seem to play a part. But for the Church to accept evolution would be tantamount to ringing its own death knell. On 22 October 1996, in a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences plenary session at the Vatican, Pope John Paul II recognized "...the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.", accepting it, "...as an effectively proven fact." The Pope still held that man was created in the image of God and stated, "If the human body has its origin in living material which pre-exists it, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God." Even so, the Pope's comments created a furor among the ranks of the clergy because to accept evolution is to undermine Genesis. His comments were immediately talked down and around by the Vatican's theological spin-doctors and the once "infallible" Pope was adamantly discouraged from pursuing that dangerous line of thought any further.

This exemplifies the untenable state of mind that presides over much of our thinking today. The willful denial of that which we know is true because it does not match our traditional luggage. The Pope's advisors must have been aware, as the Pope himself was, of the integrity and reality of evolution. Their protestations were too much, methinks, for it to be otherwise. In some sense they know evolution to be a fact of life but they have to exist in a state of denial. Their religious belief demands it.

Many of us can identify with this state of mind. We think that evolution is probably a fact of life but we refrain from a full acceptance of it because it is so diametrically opposed to how we want to believe things to be.

Our beliefs have a tenacious hold on our psyches. We find it difficult and even impossible to free ourselves from their hold even in light of evidence that contradicts them. Our beliefs provide gratifying answers to otherwise unanswerable questions. Questions that taunted us for answers from the time we were able to ask them. Questions that we had no answers to. So we had to fill in the blanks with inventive and imaginative beliefs.

The questions are - Where did we come from? Why are we here? What happens to us when we die? These questions serve as the foundation for belief systems in all cultures. There was never any reason to doubt the answers our imaginations gave us until science came on the scene. Science has now answered the first question quite convincingly. Evolution's continual intense resistance by religions is one way to judge how thoroughly convincing and factual it is.

By answering the first question science has removed the possibility of any particular Creation scenario being a reality. In doing so it has cast doubt on the religiously inspired answers to the second and third questions. According to science the answer to the second question might be - We are here to survive, procreate and bequeath a viable and verdant world to future generations. The answer to the third question might be - as far as we know when we die we just die.

These answers are hardly satisfactory to human beings who have been conditioned to believe that their existence amounts to more than what a mere earthly confinement has to offer. Of course, there is no way of proving the answers that science suggests for the third question. That is still a matter of belief. Without exclusive rights to the first question, however, religious authority becomes a lot less relevant.

It's difficult for us to let go of the belief in our immortality, in our connection to an eternal realm that provides a reason for our existence over and above life itself. In order to hold on to those beliefs, however, we must continue to believe in a Creation scenario that has been rendered insubstantial. So we compartmentalize and, in a sense, keep the two sides of our brain from fully communicating with one another. The left side of our brain understands that evolution accounts for the origin and development of all life while on the brain's right side we prefer to believe in Creation. Thus, we cannot fully embrace either concept and our view of the world as a whole is severely compromised. We lack a comprehensive overview that incorporates the rational and irrational aspects of ourselves into one integral vision. Without such a vision we find it difficult to justify a moral authority. We find it difficult to muster the conviction necessary to impart traditional values onto our youngsters. That is not to say that these things are not being done but it's more difficult to ignore the facts of life that challenge the source of those values. This is why Christian fundamentalists have chosen to separate themselves from the world at large, teach their children at home and attempt to exist, as it were, in a bubble out of time. And why, along with the Creationists and Intelligent Design camp they need to preserve their view of things through subterfuge, obfuscation and outright falsification. Neither the fundamentalists, Creationists nor the Intelligent Design camp are dealing forthrightly with the real world.

The religious right appears to be nothing more than politicians posturing self-righteously for photo ops. They can pillory others for sinning so long as they can hide their own sins. Referring back to the Clinton presidency, the message sent by Senator Henry Hyde and Representative Bob Livingston, two leading proponents of Bill Clinton's impeachment, was that it's not the sin but getting caught that matters. They both chided President Clinton about his relations with Monica Lewinsky while knowing they had indulged in such behavior themselves. When their own extramarital affairs were revealed to the public Hyde graciously excused his dalliances as youthful indiscretions (he was in his forties at the time of those indiscretions - the same age as Clinton at the time of his). Bob Livingston resigned as the newly elected Speaker of the House after his dalliances were revealed and his rightwing colleagues pretentiously proclaimed him to be a man of conviction for doing so. By concealing their "sins" from the public, however, Hyde and Livingston were as guilty of lying about their affairs as Bill Clinton was about his. They were living a lie by posing as righteous condemners of the President.

The moral climate is not enhanced by this kind of moral posturing, which is more the rule than the exception. The self-proclaimed righteous purveyors of traditional values and belief systems leave those values and belief systems in a cloud of dust as they vaingloriously attempt to scamper up to and solely occupy some illusive moral high ground that exists only in their deluded minds. Such ignominious conduct is not lost on people, especially the young, no matter how it is glossed over, covered up or denied. One wonders about the students of that aforementioned high school teacher who rewrote biblical text to explain the disappearance of the dinosaur by claiming they drowned in the great flood. If the bible is saying one thing and biblical instructors are saying another how does that equate to any sort of moral teaching? It just adds to the morass of confusion that already abounds throughout society regarding such matters. And who has moral authority in the Catholic Church when its once infallible leader is prevented from expressing his honest views about a controversial subject? The Pope was right. There is more to evolution than just a theory. It's a fact of life. We need to confront that reality forthrightly so that we can at least begin to pull our heads above the purposefully muddied waters that now confound us all.

This state of affairs was commented on by Jacques Monod in Chance and Necessity way back in 1970. He wrote, "Modern societies, woven together by science, living from its products, have become as dependent upon it as an addict on his drug. They owe their material wherewithal to this fundamental ethic upon which knowledge is based, and their moral weakness to those value systems, devastated by knowledge itself, to which they still try to refer. The contradiction is deadly. It is what is digging the pit we see opening under our feet. The ethic of knowledge that created the modern world is the only ethic compatible with it, the only one capable, once understood and accepted, of guiding its evolution."

But what is one to do? If traditional religious beliefs are in fact devastated where is one to turn for moral instruction, for meaning, value and eternal rewards? If there is no God with a plan for each and every one us then where does that leave us? If Science is the dominant factor in defining our world and describing who and what we are, how can our human cultural institutions survive? What is there left for us but scurrying around like mindless, soulless animals with mere earthly survival as our only reason for being?

Religious and state institutions certainly want us to be absolutely convinced of their unquestionable necessity in demanding good behavior from us. This is becoming increasingly difficult to be convinced of, however, as so much misbehavior is revealed on the part of those institutions. Even so, we really do not need to be instructed by an overbearing religious or state apparatus as to how we must behave in order to establish and maintain cohesive social bodies. It is perfectly within the scope of human nature to recognize, make and abide by appropriate rules of behavior.

There is a natural inclination in each and everyone of us to make a decent life for ourselves and our families We also share an attraction for order and that means creating and contributing to an orderly community within which we are able to have a life. Such natural universal attractions and inclinations serve to temper individual drives and appetites with concern for a community and/or society as a whole. That is, it is naturally incumbent on us to conduct ourselves so as to ensure the kind of coherent existence that is conducive to pursuing our basic self-interests. Again, collective and self-interests go hand in hand with one another.

These natural inclinations came first, religion is an add on.

So, if religion as we've known it is no longer viable according to our new perspective of things then that means religions are a creation of a particular human perspective at a particular time in history and not direct manifestations of whatever God they may invoke for eternal legitimacy. If Religion is a product of the human creative process then science is not a threat to it. And religion can now be reinvented with respect to our knowledge of things.

But, some may ask, what possible worth can there be to a religion that is not given unto us from a divine source? The obvious answer is that religious beliefs in and of themselves must have great significance for us regardless of what their source might be. They might even be more significant as products of human nature not imposed on us from above but rather insinuated into the mix of things from within our very selves. After all, in viewing religion as something that grew out of our natural inclinations, rather than as something from another world that we must conform to in contradiction to our natures, our religious perspectives would be as significant to us as our other innate survival tools are. Do we really need the threat of eternal punishment to keep us on the straight and narrow? Or do religious institutions need such threats to intimidate followers into a blind obedience?

For an individual to become a member in good standing of a religion, or a State, which religions have traditionally served, is rather different from being a member of a primitive tribe. The latter comes naturally, the former takes a rather vigorous indoctrination. In a primitive tribe what one generally obeyed without question were the laws of survival handed down by Mother Nature. Civilized states create a buffer zone within the natural world wherein one's basic survival needs are provided for through the apparatus of the state and one must become accustomed to its artificial requirements in order to conform. It is this disconnect from the natural world and having to customize ourselves to a fabricated society that has traditionally given us the impression that we are naturally unruly and need to be disciplined by a state and/or religiously concocted morality.

To the question - If science is the dominant factor in defining our world and describing who and what we are, how can our human cultural institutions survive? - the answer is that science _is_ a human cultural institution. The ability to do science is a uniquely human attribute. Therefore, science cannot redefine Homo sapiens as anything less than human. As to the existence of God, science really has nothing to say either way. God's existence or nonexistence cannot be proven. As for human concerns merely becoming a matter of individual survival in the hands of science - I say that religion, at base, is wedded to our instinct for survival. Religion is fundamentally a means by which to extend one's survival in an eternal afterlife. Take that little carrot away and religion would instantly lose a great deal of its appeal. Life everlasting is overwhelmingly attractive to our most basic instinct, that of self-preservation. So, in a sense, human concerns with respect to religion are a matter of individual survival.

It is the instinctual lust for life that suspends our critical judgment when it comes to matters of religious belief. We don't want to scrutinize to closely that which confers eternal life upon us. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, as the saying goes. So, we tend to accept the words of the Bible, and other sacred texts, without question. When analyzed objectively, however, it is difficult not to regard Biblical story telling as a product of mortal minds alone and, therefore, open to many questions.

Take, for instance, the story of the great flood. If you take it at face value there would, of course, have to be divine intervention at work to get two of every living thing on and off an ark and keep them all alive for the duration of their confinement onboard. If the story is true, then there must be a God. But the question is; why would this God create this flood in the first place? It is God's reasoning behind the event that boggles the mind and brings into question the event itself.

God is believed to be omniscient. He knows everything. He knows whatever is going to happen before it ever happens. Those beliefs, however, are not supported by God's thoughts and actions concerning the flood. In the days before the flood God is so disgusted with the world He decides to destroy it completely. He is so angry He's going to cause it to rain for forty days and forty nights and kill all life on Earth. The fish and mammals of the sea are for some reason exempt from God's wrath. Anyway, God changes His mind about destroying everyone and everything on Earth. What? Excuse me! God changes His mind? Yes, God changes His mind! So, He must have made an error in judgment. God made an error in judgment? Well, He changes His mind doesn't He? God looks at Noah and thinks that he's a pretty good guy, a guy worth saving. So, God decides He's not going to kill everyone after all. He's going to save Noah and his family and what the heck He'll also let two of every species be saved. That way after the flood everything can start all over again.

So, here we have a God who was somehow incapable of creating the kind of world that would please Him and His solution for that is to destroy everything. But then He decides to spare one human family and one couple from every other species so the world can begin again and go on just as it had before. This is a story of an inept, indecisive God conducting an exercise in futility. This is clearly a portrayal of God made in the image of man.

An almighty God would certainly be able to create a world exactly as He intended to. And if He did, why would he suddenly want to destroy it? Also, if He wanted to change the world, why didn't He? Why did He engineer what was an ineffective remedy that allowed the world to continue in the same vein after the flood as it had before? God works in mysterious ways is a tiresome answer. His ways are not mysterious here but merely all too human.

The bible presents us with a particular people's image of God at a particular time. That's all. That's all any concept of God can be; an image based on a conscious perspective that is forged out of the intercourse between a people's intuition, knowledge and experience as referenced by their environment. When anyone says that God is dead all they mean is that a traditional image of God has become obsolete. If God exists His existence is not dependent on a particular belief system. That one's image of God changes has no effect on whatever God might really be.

However, when one's position in life depends upon sustaining a traditional belief system and a particular image of God, one will naturally tend to protect it from all perceived threats. Like the theologians of the Roman Catholic Church prohibiting the Pope from continuing with his musings on the theory of evolution. The theologians' authority and their very existence are inexorably tied to an unquestioning acceptance of Church dogma. Of course, there are other considerations the theologians could have about lending any credence to a theory diametrically opposed to their ideology. For instance, pulling a life sustaining existential prop out from under the faithful masses. What would be their fate be if the Pope, their spiritual leader, started acknowledging the perspicacity of evolution? The plight of the faithful might be a legitimate concern on for the theologians but it is also, and likely more so, a self-serving one. For if the Pope openly embraced the theory of evolution and, in effect, trashed the Biblical creation scenario it would, indeed, severely compromise the existence and authority of Catholicism.

The extreme resistance by the clergy to the theory of evolution confirms Pope John Paul's statement about its being more than just a theory. The theologians themselves know that it is more than just a theory and that is why they cannot allow evolution to be given even the slightest nod of approval. It is the same dogmatic resistance that was mounted against Galileo for legitimizing Copernicus' view of the solar system. Galileo was told to shut up by the Pope. Now, in our time a Pope is told to shut up about legitimizing Darwin's view of the world. It took one hundred years for the Church to acclimate itself to a heliocentric solar system. The Newtonian worldview was another troubling idea the Church had to finally accept and digest. Evolution, however, poses an insurmountable challenge to fundamental Church doctrine that makes assimilation absolutely impossible. The Church cannot accept the theory of evolution without giving up the holy ghost.

The Catholic Church like any other association of living beings is zealously concerned with its survival. It behaves in that sense like any organism acting on behalf of its own interests. Everyone that is part of the Church has a vital interest in its survival for various reasons. The clergy whose livelihood depends on the Church's survival are extremely vigilant concerning its vulnerability. Whatever presents a threat to the Church is a threat to their survival as well and, therefore, it is deemed bad even if it's a fact of life. Religious followers also want the Church to survive because, for one thing, they believe it assures them of life everlasting.

So, Church officials are charged with preserving Church doctrine in tact in order to preserve themselves and the idea of eternal life. Self-preservation for eternity is the attractive bait that preserves the Church's authority. People want to believe they will live forever and they will be as sheep to whatever they believe offers such a prospect. What this comes down to is vulgar intimidation. The Church in effect holds a gun to people's heads and says, "Obey or you will die." This is the modus operandi, in one respect or another, of all religions. It is, to a large extent, how they maintain their authority.

The prospect of attaining eternal life can have a powerful influence on one's state of mind. One is apt to comply with whatever guarantees one's immortality. The keepers of the keys to heaven can wield enormous power over one's conduct and thinking. With a guarantee of eternal life those in authority can even persuade people to embrace certain death. Deliberately crashing one's fighter plane into an enemy ship as the Japanese Kamikaze pilots did in the Second World War, for instance. Such conventions have primitive roots. In some Native American societies a Brave who died in battle was rewarded with eternal life in a heaven known as Valhalla. In recent times we have religiously driven terrorists engaged in suicide bombings and flying planes into buildings with a bevy of virgins awaiting their arrival in the afterlife.

The idea of living for all eternity in an afterlife plugs directly into our powerful instinct for self-preservation and can be perversely used to instigate a believer's self-destruction. One's instinct for eternal self-preservation can also serve to denigrate one's earthly existence. The highest calling for various religions is to deny this world as much as possible by, for instance, joining a cloistered convent or monastery. In Buddhist cultures standing in front of a wall for years at a time is revered as evidence of a higher calling. In India transient holy men travel naked from village to village where they are revered and fed.

All this has to do with self-control, with mastery over desire. The idea of having no desires at all is considered the holiest state. In order to have no desires, however, one must fiercely desire to have none. The one desire to have no desires can, perhaps, cancel out all others but one does not live without desire. The notion that one is living without desire is false. There is also the desire for eternal life, or nirvana at work in these matters. It is not possible to live without desire of some kind. At the very least, to remain alive one must desire to live. One's instinct to survive is one's desire to live. If one chooses not to live then one must desire to die. So, while one is alive desire, in some form, is also alive.

An ultimate mastery over desire, then, is a matter of subsuming all desires by the desire to be without desire. To be able to fast, to deny one's desire for food, one must have a burning desire to do so. To abstain from sex also requires extreme desire. And so on. There is also the phenomenon of one's resistance to sensual pleasure becoming itself a sensual pleasure. Of course, if one's appetites are inherently small one's self-control is naturally instilled. Such persons are often mistakenly regarded as role models for self-control while in reality they are not. It is quite insane, not to mention very unhealthy, for a robust person with a hearty appetite to adopt the meager menu of a milquetoast out of some misconception about controlling one's appetite.

A religion's emphasis on self-control is all about gaining control over its followers. Religion puts one in conflict with one's instincts through its relentless indoctrination that instincts are the instruments of evil. Those who abstain from pleasures of the flesh are highly regarded and talked about in glowing terms while those who indulge themselves are profligate sinners.

The natural world is to be disdained, denied in favor of an unnatural, or supernatural one. We become at odds with our own natures. We can become riddled with guilty feelings at the very thought of behaving instinctually. This can create bogus appetites. For example, one finds oneself hungry and craving a slice of pizza but desires to deny that craving for purposes of self-control. In spite of this, however, one's hunger is the stronger, one finds oneself walking into the pizza parlor, ordering a slice and hastily devouring it as if doing something wrong and afraid of getting caught. One feels like a weak hopeless failure for having given in to one's base desire and there's nothing to do but indulge those appetites even more to fill the emptiness one feels inside for being such an abject failure. The appetite becomes exaggerated because one feels a slave to it. One feels guilty merely for having an appetite. And the religion that assisted in creating those feelings of guilt advertises itself as the cure for them.

If one has not been religiously programmed for instinctual guilt one is able to satisfy one's appetite without any recriminations. Hunger is not seen as something one must have total control over at all times but as a consciously received communiqué from one's internal organs to promote one's health and well-being. One can freely choose to indulge or ignore that communiqué depending on one's particular conditions and/or circumstances without any undue grief.

Religion then gains control over one by bedeviling one's senses. The sensible world it tells us is not the real world; the insensible world is the real world, the world where one becomes immortal is the real world. And only religious authority knows about the real world, the insensible world, so one must surrender one's senses to it to achieve eternal life. To surrender one's senses to a belief system is a form of insanity that leads to some rather bizarre assessments of reality. For instance, we see stains on walls caused by leaky plumbing as miraculous images of some religious icon. We all need to have some kind of fantasy life, yes, but it's healthier to be able to distinguish between fantasies and realities. Of course, in seeing a stain on one's bathroom wall as a supernatural apparition of Christ can certainly make things more interesting. However, it might also impinge on the room's real purposes. The presence of such a sacred figure over one's toilet could serve to inhibit one's habits of bodily evacuation. The very thought of lowering one's pants to sit down and fart out a bowel movement as the Son of God watches would be enough to send any true believer scurrying out into the yard to relieve themselves behind a tree. That would be a loss of convenience for the residents of the afflicted dwelling but there are those who might benefit from the iconic stain. One's landlord, for example, who had to pay a plumber to repair the leak would be glad to hear of the leak's "miraculous" result because, in that case, he wouldn't have to pay for the bathroom wall to be repaired.

The penchant for ordering one's world with respect to fantastic images is nothing peculiar to religious belief systems. The adherents of political ideologies do it all the time. The ideal of communism was going to turn the world into a worker's paradise. The ideal of capitalism was going to make everyone rich. In reality communism and capitalism inordinately benefit communists and capitalists at or near the top of their respective pyramids. In spite of this, there are still those who have absolute faith that their favored ideology, either socialism or capitalism, is the one and only answer to social organization. That western democracies, some of the most successful countries ever, are, to one degree or another, a mixture of socialism and capitalism tells them nothing. This obvious reality escapes them as they insist upon a world where either ism must annihilate the other and reign supreme.

Ideologues see the world according to however their particular ideology, their particular belief system dictates. This can, and does, lead to supreme folly. A good example is the Lysenko Affair where a particular article of faith among Soviet Communists was imposed on the nature of things with disastrous results. We have this need, desire, tendency for the world to reflect whatever it is we think about it. Whatever we believe it should be. We seek to possess, by virtue of our minds alone, the key to it all, the one key that fits all the locks on all of nature's mystery boxes. We want our logical constructs, that can make so much sense to us, to be exactly mirrored by the real world. However, science keeps telling us that the world never complies with how we want to see it.

There are many variations on the theme of our wanting to see the world as we imagine it should be and the conflicts that arise therein. In Galileo's time it was the heliocentric controversy that sent religious institutions reeling while today it is, among other things, evolution. Demonstrating that the sun is at the center of our solar system, however, was a much simpler proposition than elucidating the step by step process of evolutionary progression over billions of years.

For this reason the opponents of evolution find it easier to be in denial and to use all kinds of nonsensical arguments in support of their position. For all the evidence supporting the process of evolution, especially in the field of molecular biology, absurd comments, from those who vehemently oppose the idea, can make perfect sense to those unwilling or unable to accept their natural origins. The fact that human beings owe their existence exclusively to natural phenomena is anathema to those insistent about holding on to traditional beliefs. And they will grasp on to any commentary which supports their view no matter how insubstantial it is: Barry Farber, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative radio talk show host, once made a comment about evolution on one of his programs saying, Solomon like, "I've never seen a chimpanzee turn into a man!" as if with one salient burst of reason he discredited the whole theory of evolution once and for all.

For people in Mr. Farber's camp, equally opposed to the very idea of evolution as he, and equally uninformed about the subject, such statements, no doubt, resonate as perfectly sound arguments. The Barry Farbers of Galileo's time accused the scientist of somehow rigging his telescope to make it appear as though the earth revolved around the sun. But the enhanced ocular evidence seen through the telescope eventually overrode the illusion of the sun revolving around the earth and the Church had to find a way of existing with that reality.

Today the ocular evidence on a macroscopic level tells us that the differences between humans and chimps are astronomical. On a microscopic level, however, the differences are infinitesimal. However, the microscopic details of genetic code does not produce the same demonstrative power regarding evolutionary processes as the telescopic view of heavenly bodies did regarding the make-up of our solar system. Looking at charts and slides representing genes and chromosomes of a chimp and a human and noting their similarities has little or no bearing on the enormous differences that are obvious to our senses. And such demonstrations do not begin to demonstrate anything about how the actual process of evolution works. A process which still eludes a full understanding by evolutionists themselves. So, it is very difficult for us to appreciate the relationship between the processes of life on a micro level and the resulting life forms on a macro level. Which, again, for those who categorically dismiss the very notion of our evolutionary emergence, makes it very easy to discredit.

Even familiarity of a subject doesn't necessarily mean one is of a mind to fully accept all of its findings. Albert Einstein himself couldn't accept all of what his own calculations revealed. He found it difficult to come to grips with the predominate role of chance in the make-up of things. "God does not play dice," was his emotional response to his intellectual perspectives. That, in a nutshell, is the conflict between science and religion.

We don't want to accept on an emotional level what our minds tell us is so. And if an Einstein is not able to fully reconcile himself to certain ramifications of his own scientific conclusions what can we expect from those who do not or cannot have as great an understanding of physics and/or evolution and who have, at least, as much of a stake in holding on to their emotionally gratifying beliefs as Einstein did?

Yes, chance is the bitter pill the traditional believer in us refuses to swallow. It is the role of chance in the nature of things which makes the idea of evolution so unpalatable. That we are descendants of apes would not, perhaps, be so intolerable if the progression from ape to human could be seen following a definite and inevitable plan. The fact that our coming into being was no more special than the atomic formation of any other physical structure is difficult for us to accept. As Jacques Monod put it in his book, Chance and Necessity, which deals with the relationship between physics, biology and philosophy - "In my view the biosphere is unpredictable for the very reason - neither more nor less - that the particular configuration of atoms constituting this pebble I have in my hand is unpredictable... This object...is under no obligation to exist; but it has the right to.

"That is enough for us as concerns the pebble, but not as concerns ourselves. We would like to think ourselves necessary, inevitable, ordained from all eternity. All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contingency."

And we continue in the same vein, like the incredible shrinking man, fighting all that threatens to diminish our anthropocentric belief systems. We would, it seems, rather believe anything than to give up the idea of our being the center of a God's world or, at the very least, the final objective, the crowning glory of universal evolution. It's almost as if we believe that we are the reason for the existence of God, for existence itself. However, that a God exists or does not exist is most likely not contingent upon anything and existence itself could get along just fine without our presence on the scene. Even better, actually.

The eternal battle between science and religion is dealt with in Edward O. Wilson's On Human Nature, the last book of his trilogy on sociobiology where he writes - "Reduction is the traditional instrument of scientific analysis, but it is feared and resented. If human behavior can be reduced and determined to any considerable degree by the laws of biology, then mankind might appear to be less than unique and to that extent dehumanized.

"It is all too easy to be seduced by the view that science is competent to generate only a few classes of information, that its cold, clear Apollonian method will never be relevant to the full Dionysian life of the mind, that single minded devotion to science is dehumanizing. Theodore Roszak) suggested a map of the mind 'as a spectrum of possibilities, all of which properly blend into one another... At one end, we have the hard, bright lights of science; here we find information. In the center we have the sensuous hues of art; here we find the aesthetic shape of the world. At the far end, we have the dark, shadowy hues of religious experience, shading off into wave lengths beyond all perception; here we have meaning.'

"No, here we have obscurantism! And a curious underestimate of what the mind can accomplish. The sensuous hues and dark tones have been produced by the genetic evolution of our nervous and sensory tissues; to treat them as other than objects of biological inquiry is simply to aim too low."

Both Mr. Wilson and Mr. Monod did not shrink away from the precipice their scientific endeavors led them to. They began building bridges. They believed by identifying our true place in the nature of things we might begin to form better societies free from ideological distortions. Nor was humankind diminished in their eyes by the evidence of a predominant biological orientation but rather it gained more stature in its naked humanity than having it all trussed up in the illusory finery of cultural fantasies.

Regarding the benefits of recognizing our primal identity Mr. Wilson wrote, "To chart our destiny means that we must shift from automatic control based on our biological properties to precise steering based on biological knowledge." Through biological knowledge, then, we must identify the biological properties that need to be amended through cultural implementation. Human beings are a life form operating as life has been in the habit of operating for the billions of years of its existence. For instance, every life form is in the habit of employing all its given power without reservation in the cause of its own survival. In this vein it is the habit of herd animals, elephants, hippos, rhinos and the like to come into a jungle area lush with life only to devour and trample it all to death. Then, with apparently blind faith that they will go off to find sustenance elsewhere, they move on to repeat the process over and over.

The social animal Homo sapiens is doing the same thing on a planetary basis but with nowhere else to go after the destruction is complete. This automatic behavior based on biological properties was for the most part acceptable in the past where it had merely meant the occasional demise of isolated civilizations. Now, however, the mindless continuance of such behavior could eventually mean the demise of all humanity. And it is through knowledge of our biologically determined behavior that we can begin to redirect that behavior and manage our relationship to the environment, of this our one and only planet, in a more enlightened manner.

On a biological level the preservation of any species is ensured instinctively. All immediate activities are prompted by instincts with respect to immediate needs and that moment to moment existence leads not only to individual survival but to the survival of a species as well through reproduction. This has also been the case regarding our own species. Immediate, instinctually guided survival regimens among primitive tribal peoples ensured the ongoing existence of their tribes and so our species. Today we know the survival activities of our civilizations can be a menace to environmental factors that we depend on for survival. Now the question is - Is it possible to redirect at a conscious level something as basic as a survival mechanism?

Biological knowledge can be a positive cultural device for instructing us on how we need to change and how best to implement those changes through cultural means. Ignorance of how we are biologically determined, in deciding cultural matters, can only lead to fiasco. If we don't know what we are we cannot manage to become what we want to be. If we try to form cultural structures without reference to how we are biologically determined our efforts will be in vain. We might as well try to construct buildings without reference to gravity. We cannot pretend that the forces of nature do not exist nor wish them to be other than they are. Biological determinism must be given its due or we will continue to be enslaved by it.

The problem is, advocates of nurture-over-nature (those who hold that we are culturally determined) are disdainful of the implications of biological determinism. They believe it dehumanizes us to claim we are biologically determined. However, if biological determinism is not given its due then biologically determined behavior will not be able to be intelligently modified and that in the end may prove to be more dehumanizing than acknowledging ourselves as biologically determined.

In some areas this has already been shown to be the case. Health and Human Services, for instance, better known as the welfare agency which was formed during FDR's administration to help people in need. The idea was well intentioned, but in the hands of the agency created to fulfill it the idea was perverted. This is because any group made up of human beings will behave like a biologically determined living organism, because that's what it is, and will tend to act in its own self-interest. As a living organism the welfare agency was naturally interested in its ongoing survival, growth and prosperity. So, it proceeded to make regulations which served those interests. Recipients of welfare could not have a job, could not be married and could not have a bank account. In other words they must be totally dependent on the agency and be denied opportunities to become self-reliant. Such an arrangement benefits the agency in securing a client base for itself. As long as there were people totally dependent on welfare the agency's existence would be justified. The agency was also interested in widening its net to bring more people under its control and, so, eligibility requirements were relaxed. It also sought to ensnare future generations by allowing females who were on the welfare roles to have children. These women could not be married, except to the Welfare agency from who they received extra money to breed new Welfare clients.

Of course, the Welfare officials had no idea that they were serving their own interests rather than those of their clients. A living organism does not, as a rule, scrutinize its means of survival. They had no doubt that they were acting in the best interest of those in need. If you pointed out that they were operating under the direction of biological determinism, over and above concern for the indigent, they would have been appalled and looked upon you with serious disdain, inquiring, perhaps, as to what mental asylum you had just escaped from.

So, there you have it, an example of being controlled by biological properties for lack of biological knowledge. The welfare agency behaved as a living organism seeking its own advantage while believing it was acting on behalf of others.

A welfare agency enlightened by knowledge would have been better able to appreciate what its role was and fashion itself accordingly. It would have realized that its true objective would be to lessen the need for a welfare agency rather than to increase it.

Imagine that! Imagine an organization conducting itself in a way that would stunt its growth or undermine its chances for survival! That goes against the grain of biological determinism - to actively pursue one's own survival.

Of course, there are individuals who engage in self-destructive behavior. But they do so out of the perverse manipulation of physiological functions that civilizations can subject them to. For example, using addictive chemicals that target pleasure centers of the brain without regard to their proper biological function, which is to promote one's survival.

We need to develop a conscious intelligent appreciation of biological determinism and figure out how we must direct it with respect to our present circumstances in order to conduct ourselves in ways that can better contribute to bringing about optimal social conditions.

Such conditions cannot be mandated by cultural constructs alone. Biological knowledge must be given its due. That's a tall order considering the prevalent bias in favor of cultural influences holding sway over everything. Because, again, we have the notion that the view of ourselves as anything but culturally determined would be dehumanizing.

However, it was probably a dehumanizing experience for women suffering with PMS to be told by their doctors, who were operating under a cultural view concerning female hysteria, that their pain and depression was all in their minds. Biological knowledge has now made it clear that PMS is a real physical problem which can be treated. This bit of news, however, was not readily welcomed by the Gloria Steinem's of the world partly because they thought the male establishment would use it as a legitimate reason to discriminate against women in the work place and because it favored a nature over nurture approach to things. Steinem feminists would have preferred the agonies of PMS to be symptomatic of the oppression of women in a male dominated society and, thus, a cultural phenomenon. Both the male dominated medical profession and the feminists were prompted by cultural conceits which discounted biological reality. This kind of mind set continues to operate in reference to many other things and, as with the PMS problem, viewing ourselves primarily as creatures of culture can only lead us astray.

The way things are doesn't always jibe with how we want things to be. Opponents of sociobiology, like opponents of evolution, don't want things to be biologically determined. This is the prejudicial outlook from which they argue against such a prospect. It puts limits on cultural development, they say, and robs us of free will, erodes morality along with law and order.

To come to the realization that one is biologically determined, however, doesn't transform one into an antisocial monster. Because the eating of food is a biological necessity doesn't impinge upon cultural creations of culinary art nor does it lessen our freedom to choose what we eat. Furthermore, categorizing the eating of food as merely a biological exercise does not justify or condone the practice of cannibalism.

Accepting our biological determinism changes our perceptions of things but it would not change what we are. We would still have whatever free will we now possess. And how would the erosion of morality follow from the fact that moral sensibilities are, as we shall see, rooted in our biological nature?

We cannot keep wishing for science to go away and stop interfering with traditional beliefs. We cannot keep ignoring the challenges biological knowledge throws our way. We need to rethink and reevaluate all of our belief systems. "The ancient covenant is in pieces," as Jacques Monod said. And all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put it together again. We cannot afford to go on pretending that that covenant is still in tact. We need new perspectives and ideas pertaining to the human condition as it relates to the eternal mystery of the cosmos. We need to use our knowledge to form social organisms which necessitate more individual involvement, greater moral responsibility and which, in turn, will provide a more cogent destiny for the human species than that which presently looms before it. A blueprint for such a social organism will be offered later on in this book.

All science really does is extend our senses by, for instance, seeing the world microscopically and telescopically. The microscopic realm of genetics describes a very different world from the one we had imagined through our ordinary sense perceptions. Our telescopic view of the cosmos has dramatically altered our naked-eye view of the heavens. This is the nub of our aversion to science. It won't allow our "God given senses" to rule the roost. We perceive with our sense of sight a world of difference between ourselves and chimpanzees but this is not reflected in scientific findings, that is, when one takes a closer look. The differences between humans and chimps are of degree rather than kind and the degree of differences is rather more minuscule then our everyday senses can support.

Our sense of things is addled at every turn, in almost every aspect of our lives. Our traditional sense of how businesses work is constantly being challenged. How the present day economy behaves is quite a departure from traditional concepts. We consider science and technology a boon to our existence while at the same time we feel threatened by them. A chess-playing computer beats the grand master of them all. Another computer provides a proof for a mathematical theorem that had stumped the brightest mathematicians for sixty years. And evolution undermines the very foundation of classical religions. Nothing is safe, it's too much too deal with, I'll go bury my head in a book, like the bible, and just believe whatever it says and be done with it.

There was a time, a primitive time, when the information we received through our senses was indisputable. We perceived ourselves clearly as something very special, a life form that was definitely removed from every other. What was right and wrong had to do with aspects of our immediate survival. Change was slow and tradition was strong. We felt in touch with the nature of things and directly subject to its dictates. The natural world was the authority that we had to be cognizant of and in tune with. We worshipped the sun, rivers and mountains and saw our fate in the configuration of the stars. Our choice of gods and our connection to them was taken to be unquestionably true. Our visions of worlds beyond were sensibly imagined through the knowledge and experience of our particular environments. Belief in our visions was supported by simple logic, we were different, superior and therefore otherworldly. This was how it was through the better part of our existence. What was processed through our normal sense perceptions was sacrosanct. So, many of our cherished beliefs became ingrained in our minds over the many millennia of our prescientific existence. The beliefs were predicated on how we saw the natural world. It was evident that the sole purpose of the universe was the creation of human beings. Earth occupied the center of the universe because humankind was the universal objective. It appeared that the sun revolved around the earth and we took it as evidence of the anthropocentric nature of things.

Anthropocentrism is a concept we find difficult to give up. We want to continue to believe that the universe is all about our existence. We want to believe that all our struggles, failures, triumphs, thoughts, feelings, all that we are, all that we do, has meaning above and beyond our earthly confines. We want our presence in the universe to have been ordained from the beginning of time as the ultimate reason for existence itself. The idea that our emergence from oblivion was not inevitable but was merely a product of chance is nearly incomprehensible to us. We feel that the scope and breadth of our conscious minds could not have been the result of some purposeless interaction of organic molecules and fortuitous environmental conditions. Yet our minds now have reason to believe otherwise. The brain that has discovered evidence of our ultimate contingency is the same brain that insists upon our ultimate necessity.

This is a dilemma. We're in a quandary and don't know what to do about it. All our laws, our cultures, beliefs, literary affectations are predicated on the assumption that human beings occupy a spiritual realm that is beyond the natural realm. If that assumption is wrong what basis is there then for authority in matters of law, morality and ethics? If the whole apparatus that is the guarantor of immortality becomes undone what hold can authority figures have over their subjects? How can people be motivated to behave themselves without the belief in an all-knowing God who is everywhere, constantly watching us and who will preside over our ultimate fate on Judgment Day? To find out the answers to these questions we need to go back and retrace the steps that led up to the sentiments they are based on. We need to understand how totally self-interested individuals were able to form cohesive communities obedient to a common ethos before elaborate cultural institutions took center stage.

# 3.3 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION

As we all know there are things we are all attracted to and things we are all repelled by. Some attractions and repulsions are obvious to us while others may be more subtle. Those that we all have in common are related to survival, self-preservation.

We all want to survive, to live, to preserve ourselves, for as long as we can. That survival instinct causes us to be attracted to whatever benefits our survival and be repelled by whatever is a threat to it. The things that benefit my survival also benefit yours and everyone else's. This is also true of threats to our survival. And that leads us to share common attractions and repulsions.

Such attractions and repulsions are at the root of our concepts of good and evil. In our primitive existence in the wild we had the same attractions and repulsions regarding survival. We were attracted to the things that benefitted our survival and they were deemed to be good and the things that threatened survival repelled us and were bad. Today it's no different. In 2001 George W. Bush called al Qaida evil because of the threat they posed to the United States. Members of al Qaida regard the US as evil because they see it as a threat to the Muslim world.

Food, water and one's tribe were naturally considered good because they benefitted survival, while predators and enemy tribes were considered to be bad for the threat they posed to survival. The same holds true for us today. Whatever sustains us we consider good and what threatens us is bad. Whatever tribe one is attracted to, be it a political party, religion, group, club, gang, etc., are deemed to be good while other tribes with differing agendas are deemed to be evil, or at the very least, not as good.

One common denominator that we are all attracted to is money and we are all repelled at the thought of being without it. That is because money benefits our survival. Its attraction is exceedingly powerful and can be overwhelming. Money is food, drink, shelter, clothing, health care, recreation, transportation, sex and power. It is, in short, all the necessities and accoutrements of what benefits one's survival.

It seems that one cannot have enough money. However much one has one feels the need for more. Winners of large lottery jackpots will continue to buy lottery tickets. Investment bankers worth billions will continue scheming for more. Money plugs into our instinct for survival - and how does one quantify survival? How can one have enough survival? Our visceral connection to money can lead us to become miserly and greedy because of its connection with our survival instinct.

Of course, some of us squander our money, spending it like the proverbial drunken sailor. Survival mechanisms can be perverted in various ways in our civilized settings. Still, even the most prodigal among us are just as interested in getting their hands on as much money as possible, as any greedy investment banker is.

The attraction to money is universal as is the instinct to survive and they are, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable. Some people will balk at this contending that we freely choose to pursue the acquisition of money because it makes sense to do so. I wonder if we could freely choose not to have anything to do with money? Certainly one could choose to spend ones life in a monastery or convent without a care about money. However, such institutions could not survive without financial support of some kind. One may not be directly involved with making money but one is still the beneficiary of some money making activity on the part of someone, for there are always bills to pay for our survival needs no matter how modest they might be. All of us who dwell within the realm of civilization are dependent on money for survival purposes.

We might want to believe that our behavior, our actions are a product of individual free will alone and that if we choose to do something that everyone else chooses to do it's only because it makes sense to do so. That is the more attractive idea than the alternative. The attraction to that idea has to do with the attraction to the image of ourselves as being somehow separate from the nature of things which leads to the attractive idea of life everlasting.

Another thing that we all have an attraction to is food. Again, one can claim that one eats food because it makes sense to do so and one chooses to eat out of ones own free will. But, as in the case of money, would you choose not to eat. Or better yet, could you choose not to? No, you could not unless for some reason your instinct to survive was somehow compromised or co-opted by other considerations. One can, for example, choose to go on a hunger strike in the name of some cause or other. That, however, goes against our visceral programming that has already made the choice for us to eat. So, in the normal course of events we eat food because we have to not because we want to. Or, we want to because we have to. It is an inexorable and universal attraction that cannot be denied. Of course, it does make sense to eat. Everything we do to further our existence makes sense to us, but again, just because something makes sense to us doesn't mean that's why we do it as a matter of free will.

Yet another asset to our ongoing survival is order. We need to have and maintain at least a modicum of order in our communities, our social bodies to ensure a viable existence for ourselves.

An orderly existence is something we are attracted to. But again, one might say that an orderly existence makes sense and it is for that reason we tend to choose order over disorder. And, yes, our fundamental attractions do make sense. But we make the conscious judgment that they make sense after the fact.

Take the aforementioned cheetah, for instance. We can't be sure if she reasoned things out in her mind before deciding to go off for food but whether she did or not it was the sensible thing to do. If the cheetah had the mind of a human she would most probably feel that she had consciously reasoned out all the pros and cons and freely decided upon the most logical course of action. In actuality, however, her mind was made up by the more powerful attraction to food and off she went to hunt. Her instinct chose the most logical course of action.

Likewise, our attraction to an orderly existence precedes the conclusion on our part that it makes sense. Taking a look at how we feel about a disorderly state as opposed to an orderly one can be instructive here. Because of our repulsion to disorder we don't actively pursue a disorderly state, therefore, no conscious choices need be made in not pursuing it. So, our repulsion to disorder is more apparent as an inherent reaction. We do, however, act on our attraction to order and do make conscious choices on behalf of that attraction in our pursuit of maintaining an orderly state. The conscious pursuit of an unconscious attraction is what gives us the illusion that we are acting freely on behalf of a logical choice. Our consciousness and our unconscious are working in unison and we get the idea that our conscious minds are in charge and leading the way.

But, one may ask - if we are all so repulsed by a disorderly state then how can something like the Beirut of the 80's happen or Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 90's? Such extremely chaotic states are brought about by severe differences regarding the kind of order that should prevail according to various factions.

Also, causing disorder in opposition to an oppressive totalitarian state is done so with the hope of installing a more acceptable order.

So, fundamentally, we all have an attraction to order.

The idea that we are all alike in fundamental ways is anathema to those who like to think that we are more individually unique than not. Some can go to extraordinary lengths to promote the idea of our uniqueness.

For example, on a Thanksgiving Day NPR program called Here and Now there was a segment about the foods people choose to eat for comfort. People from all over called in to register their choices. Pasta and dairy were involved in most all of them. Macaroni and cheese was a popular dish indulged in for comfort sake. There were some minor differences in individual preferences about how to prepare it. For instance, one person liked it with breadcrumbs on top and another with chopped olives. And that minor difference was the focus of the final comment of the segment with the host opining that those differences in peoples' choices proved that we are all totally unique individuals.

The somewhat popular bias toward the notion of our absolute uniqueness, seemingly to the point of denying or ignoring any commonality whatsoever, leaves one to wonder how human beings manage to communicate at all. One might also wonder how we come to hold such a common belief in our uniqueness since total uniqueness would prohibit the holding of anything in common.

The closing comment on Here and Now reveals the bias as it focused on a trivial ingredient while totally ignoring the whole pie. The overwhelming common denominator was that people seek comfort in the same types of food.

As another example of our penchant for regarding ourselves as absolutely unique individuals, a man was interviewed on a BBC program about the loss of his child and he emphatically stated that there could be no shared expression of grief between he and his wife over the tragedy because what each of them was going through was totally different from the other. Their separate grief for the loss of their child was an absolutely unique experience. Their feelings were totally disparate. The BBC interviewer readily agreed with that assessment. Of course, there can be differences in the way grief is manifested between two individuals but to have the idea that there is nothing in common with respect to that, or any other emotion is, to say the least, totally ridiculous.

The strong bias supporting human uniqueness seems to be a defensive mechanism against our being a product of nature where each and everyone of us is informed and instructed from a common template. Total uniqueness cancels out any notion of uniform natural influences.

The universality of particular traits, however, does not rule out uniqueness. There are, for instance, differences in the degree of orderliness to which we are attracted. Some are attracted to a strictly ordered state, others to a loosely ordered one while most of us lie somewhere in between. But whether strict, loose or somewhere in between we are all basically attracted to order and repulsed by disorder. That is the norm that we all have in common. And this attraction/repulsion dynamic factors into other social manifestations, such as, religion.

# 3.4 EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

Ideologies of religion and politics are closely related. They are perceived to be derived from divine inspiration or as products of pure mind. However, as we shall see, they are all abstractions distilled out of the nature of things, out of our experience and familiarity with the workings of the natural world, recorded, saved and stored in the memory banks of our minds and subsequently unconsciously referred to in relation to our more sophisticated cultural matrices. The change from a natural matrix to a cultural one is a matter of degree, not kind.

For one thing, the way in which civilizations attempt to influence behavior is a mockup of the the way in which the natural world influenced behavior during our primitive existence.

The change from primitive to civilized cultures was, as we know, not as drastic as the one suggested by Hobbes, who imagined that "without a common power to keep them all in awe" men would be locked in a constantly competitive struggle for survival, "every man against every man", "and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." According to Hobbes, men are in need of a leviathan in the form of an autocratic authority to forcefully impose law and order on their natural savagery.

Hobbes was, of course, correct in his assessment of human actions being motivated from self-interest but he was incorrect about how that condition manifested itself regarding primitive people.

If we didn't know anything about our prehistoric existence one might conclude, like Hobbes, that, without the authority of a state apparatus to oversee and control our inherent "selfishness", we would all be engaged in a continuous brutal free-for-all. If that were the case, however, how could such authority ever be established? Regarding one another as mortal enemies in the wild we could never have made the transition to aggregate states. Such a notion could never occur to naturally determined isolated individuals.

Actually, contrary to the Hobbesian view, it was the advent of civilization that required the control and manipulation of individual self-interest by a state sponsored law enforcement apparatus. In a civilized setting individuals are cordoned off to occupy separate spaces they need to fill with accomplishment of one kind or another and thus attain as much wealth, power and prestige as possible. Individuals are spurred on to out do other individuals in pursuit of their own desires and ambitions. This, as we see, can easily lead to selfishness and greed.

In primitive times individual self-interest was managed quite nicely by the strictures imposed on individuals by the state of nature. The self-interest that serves to set us apart in the civilized world was the very thing that brought us together to form collectives in our primitive existence. One's chances of survival were increased exponentially by being part of a group. Survival in the wild on one's own was not a viable prospect. So, collectives were formed out of the self-interest of every individual.

The natural world was the omnipotent authority that all were subject to. It was nature that informed and instructed human behavior inside and out through genetic programming in relation to the overwhelming presence of the natural world. Each member of a group felt compelled to contribute to the group's cohesiveness in order to ensure their own survival. Every member of the group was in the survival game together with very other member. Every member played a vital role in the group's survival. The natural world demanded group cohesion. Demanded that individuals pool their resources as required and regard other group members with deference. The objective of their subjective needs was the collective existence of the tribe. Each individual's survival and the group's survival were seamlessly joined. This is not to depict a world of perfect harmony but one where, out of necessity, group cohesion won the day.

Putting the survival of the group above oneself, as we see, was not an act of altruism. One's interest in the group itself was inseparable from one's self-preservation. This natural conditioning in individuals to be subordinate to one's group extends into sacrificing oneself for the group's benefit. For one knows that as long as one's group is in tact one can fulfill one's needs and live life in the way one has become accustomed to. If, however, an enemy were allowed to overtake one's group then one's life would be drastically circumscribed as one would become totally subjected to an alien power and live or die at its whim. So, when one's group is threatened one feels one's own back is to the wall and risking one's life in battle is a matter of personal survival. This is at the root of our feelings of patriotism, which, of course, depend on how closely one identifies with one's society.

As creatures of the natural world it was our instinct for survival under which all our other instincts were managed. Our survival was dependent on the group and we behaved as subjects of that dependency. Our appetites and passions were tamed by our survival instinct which our other instincts were fashioned to serve. We must eat to survive, we must have shelter to survive, we must have sex to survive but, above all else, we must belong to a cohesive group to survive. The need for group cohesiveness, then, subordinated individual drives and appetites with respect to maintaining an orderly collective existence. With the advent of civilization the state apparatus and religion stepped in to provide the mortar for maintaing a cohesive state. Religion, for instance, attempts to tame our appetites and passions, as they were in the wild, through our survival instinct by attaching that powerful instinct to a concern for survival in an eternal afterlife. If you want to live forever abide by the rules of religion.

Civilized religious institutions are a substitute for the conditioning power of the natural world that we were once directly subjected to. Religion is an outgrowth of the awe we felt at the power of the natural world and an extension of the tribal rituals that elevate survival mechanisms. At base, morality, in a primitive or civilized state, is a survival manual to keep a people fit, healthy and loyal to each other and their group. As we became separated from our direct relationship with the natural world, consciously, as well as physically, the source for proper behavior became separated from that world as well.

Of course, survival mechanisms and stratagems in an impersonally organized civilized society were different from a primitive tribe where there was a direct correspondence between one's nature and the natural world. In a civilized society one was no longer an integral part of a group that was communally engaged in basic survival but rather one became a nonessential automaton in service to a city or nation state. The person of the king/god was the law and to survive one had to obey his autocratic laws. Much different from being obedient to the demands of the natural world where one's instincts formed a seamless congruous whole with one's immediate environment.

From another standpoint, however, it was not that different at all. One was overwhelmed by the colossal majesty of the king/god's power as one was once overwhelmed by the colossal majesty of the natural world. In that sense the change from tribal culture to civilized state was virtually nil. Religions plug into the respect for the overwhelming presence of the state of nature that has always been part of the human condition. That, at base, is what state and religious authority is built on.

With our survival instinct plugged directly into the natural world we were informed and instructed on how to properly configure our individual drives and appetites with respect to optimum group survival. Religions attach themselves to our survival instinct, with a promise of immortality, and inform and instruct us on how to control ourselves in order to conform to a particular culture and eventually realize survival for eternity. Religion speaks to our primal natures as nothing else can. It connects to our instinct for survival like a leech. Sacrifice all you have to the Church, it says, and you can live forever. This is directly traceable back to the bond formed between individuals and their tribe, which was live for the tribe and you can go on living. Religions that piggyback onto such primal bonding create inexorable associations that are difficult if not impossible to alter. The Soviet Union enlisted all of its totalitarian power in an effort to eradicate religious beliefs. But it failed to do so. Lenin as God and living for the future of communism could not quite measure up to the notion of a supernatural God and life everlasting.

The basic question of life is; What do I have to do to survive in an immediate sense? Religion steps in and answers; We'll tell you what you have to do to survive forever. That gets one's attention with the seductive power that a water mirage has for someone dying of thirst. We all have an unquenchable thirst for life. We all want to live as long as possible. Religion makes us an offer we can't refuse with its promise of life everlasting. All we have to do is obey its precepts instructing us on how to behave toward authority in general and each other in particular. This is what is supposed to bind a people together as the natural environment once did.

Religion serves as the de facto natural environment, a substitute for a natural environment that once presided over social organization and, which, in concert with natural internal directives common to every individual, provided the catalyst for holding individuals together in cohesive groups. The Christian doctrine of "Love your neighbor as yourself," is a case in point, instructing people on how to get along as if they were members of a close knit tribe. The Old Testament of Judaism is concerned with one's responsibility to God and community. The religion of Islam is rooted in concern about social justice. Overall, religion creates an environment where individual survival in the afterlife is the goal and it provides the guidebook on how to achieve it in this life.

The whole moral drama of the forces of good and evil impacting on immortal souls can be seen as a conditioning substitute for the forces of life and death that impacted on mortal bodies in primitive times and served to keep our earliest ancestors on "the straight and narrow path". It was once necessary for us to follow certain rules to protect ourselves from beasts of prey. Later we became Satan's prey and only proper moral conduct could save us.

There are many examples of morality as a direct extension of an instinctual survival mechanism. The incest taboo, for instance, is an ancient morality that was an instinctive law long before it was ever spoken of as a formal law. It is in our nature to be sexually attracted to those who are not members of our immediate family. That there are exceptions to this rule is no objection. Chimpanzees are naturally subject to this taboo also and it is no less a law in their case for being unspoken. Good personal hygiene contributes to one's survival and so we have "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." Also, and again, the promise of a moral life leading to one's immortality is an infinite extension of our instinct for self-preservation.

Religious practices such as fasting can also be traced back to life in the wild. Fasting is, of course, control of one's appetite and this had a survival value for members of primitive tribes. In times of scarcity, for instance, everyone was required to make do with less food so that all could be minimally fed. Hunters must keep their appetites in check as they stalk their prey. They must control their eagerness for a meal to be able to choose the right moment to make their move. There is a physiological threshold for the optimum marshaling and focusing of one's energy that is approached as one's stomach gradually empties of food. On a full stomach one is not motivated to do much of anything except lounge around, as the body is preoccupied with digestion. Predators of all species hunt when they are, to one degree or another, hungry. It is then when a physiological state of alertness, readiness and high kinetic energy kicks in. All of one's energy becomes consciously unified toward a singular objective. One feels totally alive. All of one's senses combine to transform the world around one into high-resolution imagery. It's as though one is plugged into and energized by the cosmic energy fields around one and one becomes completely committed to stalking one's prey whatever that might be. In a religious ritual of fasting, where God is in effect the prey that one is pursuing, this state becomes a spiritual experience. The state in which we once preyed in we now pray in.

In the natural world, mastery of our appetites was required for survival. We survived as part of a group. Our drives were channeled into maintaining overall harmony within the group. A prospect that was facilitated by the homogenized nature of a given group. The genetic types that were able to survive in the wild with its extremely high mortality rate had much more in common with one another than the more disparate genetic types allowed to survive in civilized societies. That, along with the necessarily common goal of survival, made it somewhat easier for a primitive group to achieve ongoing cohesion than a modern mind might imagine. However, the need to pull together can be experienced by most any disparate group of people today who are suddenly thrust into some life or death situation. All their differences are put aside as they band together in obeisance to the common goal of survival. Indeed, one might imagine all the various warring factions on this planet uniting together to fend off an attack from an alien civilization threatening the whole earth.

A religion provides a common enemy for its followers in the guise of one form of Satan or another. It also provides the means with which to combat this enemy that entail prescriptions for self-control and group cohesion. A religion's belief in God provides a focal point for the values that one must put above one's self in order to maintain a cohesive society. A society of disparate individuals competing with each other for survival requires some catalyst that can provide the means for group cohesion. The birth of Islam among the Bedouin tribes serves as an excellent example.

As Karen Armstrong describes it in A History of God: "...Muhammad was acutely aware of a worrying malaise in Mecca, despite its recent spectacular success. Only two generations earlier the Quraysh (A Meccan tribe) had lived a harsh nomadic life in the Arabian steppes, like the other Bedouin tribes: each day had required a grim struggle for survival. During the last years of the sixth century, however, they had become extremely successful in trade and made Mecca the most important settlement in Arabia. They were now rich beyond their wildest dreams. Yet their drastically altered lifestyle meant that the old tribal values had been superseded by a rampant and ruthless capitalism. People felt obscurely disoriented and lost. Muhammad was aware that the Quraysh were making a religion out of money...They felt they were the masters of their own fate, and some even seem to have believed that their wealth would give them a certain immortality. But Muhammad believed that this new cult of self-sufficiency would mean the disintegration of the tribe. In the old nomadic days the tribe had to come first and the individual second: each one of its members knew that they all depended upon one another for survival...Now individualism had replaced the communal ideal and competition had become the norm...family groups of the tribe fought one another for a share of the wealth of Mecca...unless they learned to put another transcendent value at the center of their lives and overcome their egoism and greed, his (Muhammad's) tribe would tear itself apart morally and politically in internecine strife."

It was the disintegration of another kind that, perhaps, led to the idea of one God. The God's of the city of Ur who were supposed to provide for its welfare did not hold true to their promises of ongoing prosperity. A series of crop failures brought about an economic collapse of such magnitude there was nothing that could be done to remedy it. The Gods that the people of Ur had relied on to hold things together had utterly failed them. There was nothing left for them to do but leave the city and hope to settle elsewhere.

Among the fleeing people of Ur was Abraham who is credited with conceiving the idea of one God. Jews, Christians and Muslims alike speak of the God of Abraham as the wellspring of their religions. This new vision of one God appeared to Abraham out of his disillusionment with the many Gods of Ur who were no longer worthy of one's faith.

The idea of one God could have developed along these lines: On the disheartened journey away from his collapsing world Abraham felt that he alone was now responsible for the health and well being of his family. Everyone relied on him while he had no one to rely on but himself. Charged with this greater sense of responsibility (a God-like position in regard to his family) and an eagerness to fill the gap left by the disillusion of his former Gods, Abraham envisioned God in an image created out of his own situation. One God. God as the Father, with people as His children.

Abraham was stripped of all the material wealth that his civilization had provided and hence his new God did not have an interest in such things. Abraham was on a journey, a long and arduous journey, without a certain plan or destination. Where was one to go after one's world had collapsed? And if one's whole world could collapse what was the point of earthly existence? Again, the vision of his new God provided answers to his questions. Life itself was merely a temporary journey one had to make in order to gain a permanent life in the beyond, in God's world. God's world was the important one. The only one that mattered. That seemed quite obvious. Since the many Gods of Ur were unable to secure things in this world, one God could certainly be relied upon to secure things in His own world. A world where all God's children would be welcome to live after completing their particular journeys on earth.

This must have been a great relief to Abraham as well as an invigorating stimulus to his floundering spirit. He now had a God whose efficacy was not connected to the impermanence of this world and one's faith could be preserved regardless of earthly disasters. He now had a God who judged one not by material success but by spiritual worth i.e., how one behaved on the journey. He now had a God who gave him a purpose beyond the outcome of any particular earthly journey. The real journey he was on was connected to another world that was assured by the vision of his new God. This was a vision of God eternally durable. Nothing on Earth could affect it. Its permanence was preserved in a world beyond.

All this, of course, is an imagined scenario but it is compatible with the kind of God that was eventually chosen by the people of Israel. Worship of traditional Gods like Baal, Marduk and Dagon persisted with the people of Canaan long after Abraham envisioned the one God, Yahweh. The prophets Isaiah, Amos and Hosea, as instruments of Yahweh, sought to establish Him as the one and only God among the people of Israel who resisted their message as late as the eighth century BC. The prophets saw that Yahweh's people had strayed from the covenant and they warned them of the dire consequences to come. Isaiah railed against the old pagan practices of animal sacrifice, fertility rites and other rituals. Amos was a champion of social justice and compassion. Hosea sought to bring home the importance of the inner experience of God, to know God within oneself. Their common objective was to install Yahweh as the one true God and to impress upon people the importance of making religion part of daily living. The three prophets saw that the social fabric of their respective cities was being eroded just as Mecca's was in Muhammad's time, by greed and corruption individuals put their own welfare above that of the entire community. This, again, was symptomatic of emergent civilized societies that were no longer directly impacted by the exigencies of the natural world.

Karen Armstrong writes in A History of God: "The period 800-200 BCE has been termed the Axial Age. In all the main regions of the civilized world, people created new ideologies that have continued to be crucial and informative. The new religious systems reflected the changed economic and social conditions. For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area). There was a new prosperity that led to the rise of a merchant class. Power was shifting from king and priest, temple and palace, to the marketplace. The new wealth led to intellectual and cultural florescence and also to the development of the individual conscience. Inequality and exploitation became more apparent as the pace of change accelerated in the cities and people began to realize that their own behavior could affect the fate of future generations. Each region developed a distinctive ideology to address these problems and concerns: Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India and philosophical rationalism in Europe. The Middle East did not produce a uniform solution, but in Iran and Israel, Zoroaster and the Hebrew prophets respectively evolved different versions of monotheism. Strange as it may seem, the idea of "God", like other great religious insights of the period, developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism."

"Strange" may not be the adjective for this particular phenomenon. Interesting to be sure, but where else could one turn to remedy the inequality, exploitation and social chaos of the time other than to an omnipotent power that all must be beholden to. That omnipotent power had once been nature itself. That was where Gods resided in primitive times. Nature was what kept the members of a tribe together as one. Then, in the civilized world, as people became separated from the natural world, they also became separated from the idea of their gods. The many gods of old were associated with specific aspects of life, like fertility and hunting, or specific aspects of nature, like rivers and the sun, while the supremacy of nature itself provided the unifying social glue. When that supremacy abated in people's everyday lives the old gods were relegated to less than meaningful tokens. But people continued paying homage to them out of habit until they began to see the relevance of the one supernatural God in their lives.

The one God was a supernatural God but it was also a continuation, a metamorphosis perhaps, of the unifying force that nature once provided for primitive tribal societies and welded individual self-interest together to form a tribal union, a collective-interest. It is, of course, true that people are basically out for themselves. That is a fact of life. Nature creates individuals with an intense fundamental concern for their own self-interest. In the natural world this serves to bind members of a group together because each member realizes one's absolute dependency on belonging to a group for one's own survival. But in the new market economies of the nascent civilizations of Isaiah's time self-interested survival became a divisive factor for lack of a unifying force. The one God was a means by which self-interest could once again be used to bring a people together. A means to put universal values above one's own personal gain and provide a perspective through which they might come to see and appreciate the big picture.

At the time of Isaiah, God was needed as a way for people to face certain troubling aspects that were part of an overall reality that went unnoticed in their new way of life. As primitive people living in the natural world the overall reality of their situation was present on a daily basis and together they had to find ways of dealing with it. In the cultural environments of the civilized world people could develop a false sense of security and believe that they could behave in any way they pleased without consequence. Or they were overwhelmed by the demands of the dog-eat-dog world they existed in and were blind to its dangers. The catalyst of having direct contact with the reality of nature was missing and had to be substituted for via a supernatural God who demanded that people behave in ways that had been demanded of them by the necessity of eking out a living in a natural environment.

Isaiah's unpopular message to his people was that Yahweh would turn against them if they continued in their selfish and wicked ways. The prophet warned them that their material concerns, their callous indifference to the unfortunate among them and the worship of other gods would cause Yahweh to bring catastrophe upon their heads. Isaiah's warnings came to pass with a vengeance. Israel and Judah were invaded and conquered by Assyria. As a vanquished and exiled people the Israelites and Judaeans began to consider that perhaps Yahweh really was the one true God. After all, what had been prophesied in His name had come about. Still, this Yahweh was a difficult God to accept. He was not merely acting on behalf of His people as provider and protector but He made them painfully aware of the error of their ways and would make them pay the price when His laws and warnings were not heeded.

As mentioned above these events were mirrored in various regions around the globe at the same time and for the same reasons. In each region the new gods, ideologies and philosophies were all culturally spawned in the shape and color of their specific flowering as a consequence of particular environmental conditions. At base they were concepts that grew out of certain individual natures in contrast to the cultural status quo. These were individuals who stood apart from their cultures and possessed an intense awareness of the big picture. They had, as it were, a god's eye view of things. Their holistic vision could be said to be a carryover from the kind of perspective one had to have had as an aboriginal in the natural realm. It was a vision that manifested itself in various ways within the different civilizations but was consistent in reacquainting people with the awe and mystery found in the nature of things that had been obscured by those civilizations. Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism all reached inside people by bringing them outside themselves through the invocation of something greater than themselves yet was immanently part of their individual lives. These visions were not from another world but from an earlier time in this world. They were not divine inspiration visited upon human nature, but were divined by human nature in response to cultural inadequacies. The cultural inadequacies all had to do with the lack of a binding power within cultures and the solutions were similar in various cultures because religion had evolved from the awe of nature and the strictures nature imposed upon primitive people as they went about the business of survival.

Civilization transformed religion from being grounded in natural phenomena into that which became informed by abstract concepts and gods. As these abstractions evolved they claimed more and more psychic territory for themselves and conspired to further distance people from the natural realm. Religion and morality are not alone in this. As we shall see, the seemingly disparate ideas of cooperation and competition, liberal and conservative, communism and capitalism were all co-opted and distilled out of the all-encompassing fabric of nature just as religion and morality were. They are all abstractions derived from our natures, the structure of the natural world and the interactions between them. Cultural roots are natural.

# 3.5 THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY

Evolution tells us that what we are has something to do with what we were even before we were. Does this also apply to moral values? Are there traces of human moral attributes to be found in other species? Or is morality purely the product of a mind that is absolutely separate from biological imperatives? Are human moral values strictly confined to Homo sapiens? It's difficult to say they are. Or, rather, it's easy to say they are but it's difficult to answer yes to such questions when objectively adjudging the rest of the animal kingdom in terms of our notions of morality. For instance, we put a high moral value on the sanctity of the family and this virtue is certainly manifested in other species. Many types of birds, for instance, are wholly committed, one might say, religiously devoted to family life.

There is even evidence of rather sophisticated moral systems comparable to our own to be found in more complex species. Such has been revealed in the marvelously detailed study of the organization and behavior of chimpanzees conducted over a lifetime by Jane Goodall.

Chimpanzees occasionally indulge in cannibalism, intermittently killing and feeding on chimps in communities other than their own. Goodall and her team, however, witnessed a case of serial cannibalism within the community of chimps they were studying.

These peculiar acts of intramural cannibalism were all initiated by one particular chimp and were written about in Ms. Goodall's book, The Chimpanzees of Gombe. In a chapter entitled "Communication" she writes, "One female, Passion, and her daughter, Pom, began to kill and eat the babies of other community females... They were only seen to do this when the mothers of the victims were with dependent young only. There is no firm evidence that any individuals other than the mothers who were attacked ever knew about the bizarre behavior. On the other hand, the mothers were, it seems, able to communicate at least their fear and/or dislike of Passion to some other community members. When Gilka (who had already lost one infant to the killer) screamed as Passion approached to stare at her newborn, two adult males, one after the other, rushed over and attacked Passion. In fact, Passion's behavior led to one extremely interesting communication sequence. This involved Miff, a female who had saved her baby from Passion but who remained extremely fearful of and hostile toward Passion for many months after the attack. When the infant was still very tiny, Miff encountered Passion and at once fled, screaming, until she met two adult males, some hundred meters away. Miff then turned back toward Passion, her screams became aggressive waa barks, and glancing over her shoulder at the males, she started back the way she had come. The males, responding to her solicitation for help, followed. When they reached Passion, the males displayed (made threatening gestures) and Passion fled."

This is an extremely interesting scenario for many reasons besides communication. Indeed, if one were to imagine what would happen in a chimp community regarding intramural cannibalism without having any actual knowledge of it one would no doubt come up with quite a different scenario. One might expect the mothers to defend their infants from the initial attack, as indeed they did, but one might also assume that the matter would go no further than that. "That's life in the jungle among savage apes," one might say, "You lose your kid to someone stronger than you that's just the way it is and that's the end of it." After all, what recourse would chimps have to do anything about it after the initial incidents had occurred?

Such assumptions serve to keep the chimps at a comfortable distance from ourselves. They are savage beasts living in a monkey-eat-monkey world and are incapable of making the kinds of judgments about behavior that we as human beings are capable of making. However, such assumptions, based on a broad and widely held view of life in the jungle, are by virtue of Ms. Goodall's studies proven to be mistaken.

Here are some things to consider: First of all, Passion carried out her nefarious deeds only when a mother and infant were found in isolation far away from other members of the community, and that would certainly suggest she was aware that what she was doing was wrong and would be met with condemnation by the community at large.

Secondly, even though the mothers of Passion's victims were the only ones who knew about the incidents they were somehow able to communicate this aberrant behavior to other members of the community. This indicates that the victimized chimps felt they did have recourse to further discourage that behavior apart from their initial attempts to fend off the attacks. There was a judgment made by the chimps that Passion's behavior was wrong and a sporadic but nonetheless concerted effort, contingent on potential or actual incidents, was mounted to prevent Passion from carrying out her "evil" doings.

Thirdly, what could the mothers have communicated to the other chimps regarding their experiences with Passion? The two adult males, for instance, who were summoned by Miff - did they know before coming upon Passion that she was what Miff was so upset about? Or were they following her with no idea about what the trouble was? And when they did come upon Passion was it a complete surprise? Were they expecting, perhaps, to find some invaders from another community causing a disturbance? The two males didn't act surprised at the sight of Passion but immediately threatened and chased her away. So, either they knew who to expect as the cause of Miff's upset from what Miff communicated to them or upon the sight of Passion they immediately connected her with the information previously conveyed to them by other mothers. But whatever the case may be the two males availed themselves to Miff's vehement alarm without hesitation and dealt with Passion in no uncertain terms as soon as they saw her. It was as though they were perfectly tuned into the situation at the outset.

Also, how did Miff know that the two adult males she came upon while fleeing from Passion would respond as they did to something they were not directly involved in? Miff must have known that the two males knew about Passion and knew they would comply with her urgent request to admonish Passion for her unacceptable behavior even though there was no immediate threat in evidence.

One may wonder here why Miff didn't summon other mothers whose infants had been victimized by Passion's peculiar dining habits and tear her from limb to limb? For one thing the mothers were not moved to aggression toward Passion unless in defense of their own young. But they could somehow ignite male aggression toward Passion even though the males were not directly affected by her abnormal appetite. So, the males' interest in all this, one could say, was purely one of law enforcement. Again, we don't know exactly what the males in question knew about Passion's intolerable behavior. Something was definitely communicated to them, however, which resulted in their admonition of the culprit. And whatever was communicated to them stemmed from the cannibalistic incidents and it was that specific behavior the chimps' conspired to censure. So, we have here a kind of crude department of justice at work. The citizenry brought their complaint to the proper authorities in order to have the matter resolved.

Furthermore, why such a todo about a behavior which all chimps indulge in, albeit, normally in regard to chimps of other communities? Of course, a mother is going to do all she can to save her infant from any kind of attack, but why wouldn't that be enough? Why did Miff feel it necessary to send Passion a message via the two males after she had saved her infant? A judgment of some kind was made that Passion's particular type of cannibalism was wrong over and above Miff's personal experience with it. There were "rules" about such things and Passion was disobeying them and she needed to be taught a lesson.

There is another interesting angle here which brings up the question of moral choice. If all chimps are cannibals what is it that keeps them, as a rule, from preying upon members of their own communities? We say such behavior is abnormal for a chimp? So, why would one chimp in a community indulge in that behavior? If such behavior is possible in one chimp could it be potentially possible in all chimps? Could any chimp sometimes see one of his fellow chimps as a convenient meal and then have that impulse overridden by an innate and socially developed regard for those of one's own community? Chimpanzees do appear to have an innate feeling of community that is socially strengthened through the conditioning process of the community as evidenced by the long and thorough research conducted by Ms. Goodall and her team.

As a chimp one begins to learn at a very early age what is and is not socially acceptable behavior, including the degree and kind of aggression one is allowed to indulge in with regard to other members of one's community. It is a very strong conditioning process aimed at preserving the bonds which hold the community together as a unit. But, for whatever reason, the bonds of fellowship in Passion were weak. The impulse for a convenient meal overrode the bonds of communal fellowship and her weakness caused outrage in other members of the community. Could we say moral weakness, moral outrage? If we think of morality as a natural conditioning property necessary to the survival of a group, then, yes. If, on the other hand we think of morality as a divine decree over and above natural phenomena, then, perhaps not.

The similarity between chimps and humans that is, perhaps, most striking here is that of distinguishing between when a certain behavior is right and when it is wrong, allowing it in one instance but not in another. For us, killing is wrong and against the law but we allow it in self-defense, state executions and war. Even cannibalism is allowed when it is a matter of survival. We say these are moral judgments. But how are monkeys able to make similar judgments?

In whatever way one tries to explain away these judgments on the part of chimps, "It's merely their instinct for survival at work," for instance, the same explanations can be applied to such human judgments as well. Of course, one might say here that chimpanzees are incapable of universally outlawing cannibalism as humans have and this is a huge and incomparable difference. But the leap from outlawing cannibalism within one's community to declaring a universal ban is relative to the leap from eating termites with the aid of a twig (which chimps do) to eating sushi with the aid of chopsticks. Again, it is a difference of degree rather than kind.

Regarding these incidents with Passion we see that the chimps were struggling to maintain an orderly, cohesive community and demonstrated a distinct sense of what is proper conduct and what is not, i.e., a moral sensibility. This can hardly be seen as projecting human terms onto the chimps. Especially regarding the action taken by the two adult males responding to Miff's solicitations. They were, in fact, acting as peace officers in a heated dispute between community members, thus exhibiting a basic purpose of a moral system which is to maintain a necessary social cohesion.

Something on the order of this basic moral sense must have been operating in the evolution of more developed primates. In primitive times of early humankind, before the concept of morality needed to be developed, the social cohesion of a tribe was naturally maintained, similar to a group of chimps, as a necessary condition for survival. The cohesion for a group of hunter/gatherer/scavengers was provided for among themselves through their relationship with the natural environment. Their drives and appetites were in tune with the natural world and the relationships among the group members were tempered by their dependence on one another for their survival. One's survival was inexorably knotted in the ties to one's group and later to one's tribe and this, in turn, was what circumscribed one's behavior.

As civilizations progressed the bond that was formed within primitive groups by the exigencies of their everyday existence became subject to erosion. The transition, from deriving one's living as nature provided it, to settling into a controlled economy of farming and ranching allowed for the creation of individual identities apart from one's tribe. Thus, conflicts could arise between these newly created individuals which were not otherwise experienced by those with a more collective identity.

This bit of prehistory is dramatically illustrated in the biblical story of Adam and Eve/Cain and Abel with Adam and Eve representing hunter/gatherers and Cain and Abel the next step in their cultural evolution, farming and ranching. In the Garden of Eden everything was provided for by God/Nature. Food was there for the taking and Man and Woman lived in harmony as one with the world around them. When Eve eats from the Tree of Knowledge she presumably figures out the connection between the fruit and its seeds. She brings this to the attention of Adam, they experiment and discover they can grow things themselves and cultivate their own food sources. Thus, Eden ends. Along comes Cain and Abel and instead of God/Nature providing for the tribe they become the providers and are held accountable as individuals for what they contribute. One is a shepherd and the other a farmer. Abel is successful while Cain is a failure. Abel is held in esteem while Cain is not. Cain feels himself isolated, severed from his clan and through this perceived ostracism Abel is seen as the cause of his alienation and suffering. Abel becomes his enemy and Cain's killer instinct, previously reserved for the hunt and foreign tribes, is allowed to lash out at his own brother. Cain kills Abel.

This is not to say there was never any animosity between siblings prior to civilization but only that the manner in which such things used to be handled were no longer valid. A convenient example of this was illustrated in a film of a primitive tribe which was shown on public television. A particular family in the tribe had one young son of six to eight years of age and another child on the way. When the new child was born the son became moody and sullen. The father asked him what was the matter and his son indicated it was the new member of the family. The father inquired about this further and the young boy said he wanted to kill the baby. The parents were amused by this and the father took the boy into his charge and bonded with him in their tribal way allowing his son to gain a better perspective on the newborn. Once the boy realized the infant posed no threat to his position in the family he felt secure enough to express affection for his sibling. However, the new competition between Cain and Abel alienated the brothers and exacerbated their sibling rivalry in ways that were not previously experienced.

The end of Eden and Pandora's Box are points of departure from natural habitats to the onset of civilization. As various tribes were absorbed by large conglomerations people became a society of separate individuals, isolated by specific identities and divided into classes. One no longer felt a vital part of a close knit group. Or if one did, it was no longer the ultimate value in life. One was a redundant, dispensable object of an impersonal social order where disparate individuals were advantaged or disadvantaged by great divides in wealth, status and power. This, in turn, created the seven deadly sins of envy, greed, gluttony, sloth, lust, anger and pride. So, something was needed to forge a group identity. Morality, law and order, stem from the natural regard one has for those of one's tribe that civilization usurps and corrupts. It is a supplement for the loss of a natural cohesion and is used to provide for cohesion in societies of estranged individuals. The law against murder was derived as an intra-communal edict created by the subjective needs of social organisms and not from divine inspiration as an absolute universal edict. All laws made by nascent civilizations dealt with the new relationships formed between individuals who now had separate identities and distinctions in wealth, power and class. Such laws were necessary to keep the various classes as part of a whole. All people identified with and were ostensibly subject to one law and this was necessary for the survival of the new form of civilized society.

There are, to continue, many examples of morality as an expression of an instinctive survival mechanism. Again, the incest taboo is an ancient morality and is a direct expression of our survival instinct. This does not have to do with individual survival but has to do with the integrity of the gene pool and the ongoing survival of a group, tribe or a species. It is part of our nature to be sexually attracted to those that are not members of our immediate family. Chimpanzees are naturally subject to this taboo also. Personal hygiene also has to do with one's chances for survival and so we have "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." And the promise of a moral life leading to eternal life is the ultimate extension of our instinct for self-preservation. Moreover, as was noted earlier, the whole moral drama of the forces of good and evil impacting on immortal souls can be seen as a conditioning substitute for the forces of life and death that impacted on mortal bodies in primitive times and served to keep our earliest ancestors on the "straight and narrow path". It was once necessary for us to follow certain rules to protect us from beasts of prey. Later we became Satan's prey and only proper moral conduct could save us.

Freud felt that civilized society, with its strict moral codes, was much more repressive than, say, a primitive tribe. In a sense that is true. The drives and appetites of a primitive people didn't need to be held in check by austere measures administered by puritanical authority figures because their natural environment made the rules by which they had to live and their interdependency upon each other wove for them a cohesive social fabric which comfortably included everyone. In this way primitive groups tend to be tightly knit conservative groups affording little room for any kind of deviant behavior from the norm. Their drives and appetites fit perfectly into the contours of the natural/social environment they were part of. This is not to say they were living in paradise but neither were they wild beasts indulging themselves in all manner of depraved sensuality whenever they pleased until the idea of civilization somehow appeared on the scene to tame them, i.e., repress them into proper Bostonians. The lives of primitive people revolved around a basic regimen of survival, providing food and shelter for the entire tribe, and in that sense they enjoyed a simpler more harmonious existence as a whole than a modern complex society is capable of engendering for all of its members.

Also, modern civilization creates its own special brand of psychoses which it has to somehow deal with. The modern world can accommodate a much broader spectrum of people which allows for many an exotic mutation to occur expressing all sorts of fanciful delusions and strange appetites. Also, civilization broadens and relaxes the strictures of survival naturally found in the wilds of the jungle. Civilization creates perverse temptations and allows for weakness and sickness that would not be possible in a primitive setting. Look at what modern civilization does with cocaine compared to the traditional use of coca leaves in primitive cultures. In the latter it is used as a tonic to enhance the life of the community while in modern societies it is a corrosive influence. Appetites and desires of all kinds are allowed to get out of control in civilized society which creates the need for excessive censure and repression.

If other species were able to develop a civilization like ours they too could be beset by similar problems. Elephants, for instance, like to get drunk. There is a particular tree from which they eat that puts them in a state of intoxication. The drunken rampages they indulge in as a result are few and far between due to the intoxicant's scarcity. However, were it always available to them in a pachyderm package store it would no doubt produce some chronically drunk elephants which would become a threat to the survival of all elephants and they, like ourselves, would need moral strictures as a means of curtailing that behavior.

We also have to look at the relation between the micro and macro levels of morality concerning its role in the nature of things. On the micro level within a particular tribe morality binds its members together, provides healthful diets and motivates them to be strong and brave in order to conquer and/or defend against other tribes. Tribes went to great lengths to distinguish themselves from other tribes with, for instance, different kinds of body art. And their were differences in particular beliefs. One tribe might worship the moon, while another, the sun. On the macro level the different beliefs between different tribes create conflict out of which wars can erupt. So, morality as an instrument of life serves as a means of giving expression to the different perspectives of various peoples, keeping them separate and determining who is the strongest among them and, therefore, morality operates as a mechanism for the survival of the fittest.

Moral imperative has always been concerned with the preservation and furtherance of life, which is, of course, the concern of all living things. That imperative is, and has always been, insular and only pertinent to oneself and ones relevant groupings or specific tribal affiliation. The idea that one and all should be concerned about the furtherance of life as a whole is very difficult if not impossible to put into practice because the furtherance of life as a whole is actually accomplished through life forms seeking to further their own existence at the expense of others. I and those like me must survive, everyone else be damned. This is how we are biologically determined and how everyone behaves in their own milieu to one degree or another, from al Qeada to the New York Yankees, from political parties to street gangs, from investment bankers to drug dealers, from nation states to businesses. One and all are out to seek their own advantage and will do their best to defeat or destroy whatever stands in opposition to their designs.

# 3.6 OBJECTIVE ORDERING IN NATURE

We believe, for the most part, that moral systems require an objective ordering of people's behavior that cannot be elicited from the natural realm alone. Some inspired vision from another world, an eye in the sky, as it were, must be necessary to reveal such objectivity. For how can unruly subjective natures come anywhere close to achieving objective order for themselves.

The answer is- It is the nature of things to arrive at objective arrangements through a mix of subjective entities. This is the case on all levels from the microcosm to the macrocosm in regard to everything that is. It is the case with subatomic particles, atoms, molecular structures, the language of life itself and the way in which living things organize themselves.

Our concept of morality is a direct result of the capacity for objective ordering that is found throughout nature. Life forms also exhibit objective ordering from the microcosm of DNA to all the macro organisms it creates. Just as the structure of individual atoms decides the ordering of molecules so it is with the building blocks of life. The ordering of the genetic code is decided by the individual structure of the substances involved. As a result the four nucleotides that make up the genetic code correspond with one another via exclusive pairings. Cytosine and guanine link only with each other as do thymine and adenine. And all the elements comprising a living cell combine together step by minuscule step with no other purpose than to indulge their individual chemistries. What we see as the objective ordering of a cell is a serendipitous outgrowth of subjective chemical entities interacting in their own particular ways which are all bound together in a symbiotic compatibility incidentally resulting in the objective orchestration of life.

For an example of this kind of objective ordering operating on a macro level we can look at how songbirds arrive at their particular melody. Without knowing any better one might conjecture that angels from heaven taught the birds their melodies. That flying down from above, upon God's instruction, they perched upon trees with their harps and the various melodies they played were miraculously transported into different kinds of birds who joyously began to sing. And from this one would assume that nestling songbirds learn their particular melody by imitating the performances of their elders after repeatedly listening to them.

However, this is not the case. It is not merely by imitation that a young songbird learns its melody. For, in a scientific experiment, conducted to discover just how a bird goes about learning a particular song, a songbird was hatched and raised in isolation so that it never heard the song of its kind, nor of any other kind, for that matter. Upon reaching the age when it was normal for the bird to begin singing it did so out of its own self. The song, however, did not quite sound like it was suppose to. A sound graph was made of the isolated bird's song and it was compared to one made from a bird who had been exposed to the song all its life. The isolated bird's version of the song fit into the graphic patterns of the other bird's song, the communal version, but fell short in its fullness and range.

So, each bird is genetically programmed to produce varying skeletal arrangements of the same song and the group version, or the objective ordering, is arrived at through a compendium of individual subjective versions working upon one another to create an agreeable arrangement. A group of individuals, each with their own subjective discordance, interact to form objective harmony.

Human language was once thought to be a pure invention of the mind, a gift from the Gods, but we now know it to be a result of our brain's programming in the same way as the songs of birds are part of their programming. And, it just so happens, there was an inadvertent experiment performed on human beings that was similar to the one performed on the songbird which showed that the impetus to create language is innate.

Decades ago on the NBC Evening News an extremely interesting story aired about twin sisters who were found in an old abandon mining town in California. From infancy they lived with deaf and dumb guardians and at the time they were discovered the two girls were teenagers and had setup house in a shack of their own. Never having heard language of any kind they had managed between themselves to create a basic language which enabled them to communicate enough for their own curtailed purposes. It was a language the like of which no one had ever heard before but it was a specific simplistic rendering of complex language in general. So, out of the interaction of their subjective compulsion to verbally communicate the two girls arrived at an objective language that was mutually communicable.

Objective moral order can be seen as developing in much the same way.

Basically morality is concerned with self-control over our drives and appetites. To overindulge one's appetite for food, for instance, is considered a bad thing. Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. For one thing it can be unhealthy and one's morality should direct one to develop good habits for the sake of one's health. Individual appetites, of course, naturally differ. So, how are we to judge when one is overindulging? Those with naturally smaller appetites are not morally superior to those with larger appetites. Some people need to eat more than others. And there are biologically determined appetite controls such that when one has eaten enough to satisfy one's hunger a signal is sent to one's brain to inhibit one's appetite. In a few people that signal is nonexistent and thus they have no control over their appetite. We can say they lack self-control which they do but in those cases it is not a moral failing but a biological one. Imagine trying to control your appetite when you are constantly prodded to eat by a continually rapacious hunger. So. we see that "morality" can be circumscribed by biological mechanisms.

Linking morality with biology in any way, shape or form can send defenders of any faith into a tizzy but doing so is not at all a threat to moral order. For example, at Gombe we might say that Passion was lacking the kind of inborn directive in chimps that channeled their cannibalistic appetite toward chimps in communities other than their own. All the other chimps had it and that shared subjective property established an objective law for the whole community. That Passion lacked the necessary genetic programming that would have confined her cannibalistic appetite to communities other than her own, however, does not excuse her behavior. What she did was wrong and immoral and was judged as such by the community at large which had every right to censure her behavior as it did.

In humans there are biological mechanisms that stimulate and inhibit our sex drive as well as our appetite for food. One's sexual desire can well up suddenly and intensely and seem to be overwhelming as our awareness is totally focused on an object of our desire. For the instant that we are totally focused and consumed by that object, our desire is momentarily unrestrained. But as we become aware of our situation, a public place, perhaps, or a workplace, the sexual urge will normally subside. This inhibition is not a result of exercising a pure mentally inspired control over ourselves. But, rather, the awareness of the whole picture triggers naturally installed inhibitors of the sexual urge, just as focusing solely on the object of desire triggers innate stimulation.

Imbedded in our physical constitutions is the parasympathetic nervous system. It is composed of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nerve. The sympathetic nerve supports stimulation - as in aiding in the delivery of blood to one's genitals when one is sexually stimulated. The parasympathetic nerve cancels that delivery as one is reminded of one's surroundings where sexual advances would not be appropriate. Lacking such innate inhibitors one would be helpless to control one's sexuality as would control of one's appetite for food be impossible without the brain getting the message that one's appetite has been satisfied.

We need to be motivated by strong appetites and drives but not be overwhelmed by them. We need to be able to control ourselves, to keep our appetites in abeyance in order to be able to successfully satisfy them. And that is accomplished by innate urges and controls. This is true for life in the jungle as well as in a civilized existence. It is true for other animals as well as human beings.

In the wild a young lioness has to learn to control her eagerness for a meal in order to be able to patiently stalk her prey and choose just the right moment to make her move and go in for the kill. Proper control of one's appetite leads to the reward of a meal. Human beings, of course, once had to develop that same discipline for the same purpose. We had to learn to discipline our hunger in order to hunt properly. One would think that such an important survival technique must have become quite ingrained into the human character. This discipline now continues in civilizations of over abundance where many kinds of dietary controls are recommended for the purpose of gaining something of value such as fitness, health, self-respect, a lover, etc., i.e., how to survive better. The control of one's appetite is also a basic attribute of the world's religions. And extreme control of one's appetite puts one in line for the ultimate reward. Fast in this life, feast in the next, is the modus operandi.

With respect to another aspect of maintaining law and order, we receive information from the world around us about how and when to compete or cooperate, how and when to be aggressive or docile in order to successfully fulfill ourselves. What we learn depends on our individual constitution in conjunction with the configuration of available instruction and information in our environment. Moral order is established through the exercise of individuals wrangling with one another's particular ordering of innate drives and controls and forging out of this imbroglio a suitable objective arrangement in which everyone can find, at least, some gratification in the place they forge for themselves within the social matrix. Subjective inclinations negotiate to form objective harmony. There are, as I have mentioned, certain inclinations that everyone shares, like the attraction to an orderly existence, which form the basis for negotiation. Individuals whose idea of order might be very strict, very loose or somewhere in between freely contesting with one another are able to find an appropriate measure providing for a stable existence for all. In primitive groups of hunter/gatherer/scavengers the acceptable level of order was provided for by the demands of the natural world along with each individuals knowledge that their self-interest in survival was best served by being part of a collective. As the buffer zone of civilization removed us from that natural symbiosis certain authoritative structures became prominent in the form of moral systems presided over by powerful rulers that forcefully bound people together and manipulated them for the benefit of the state.

So, from the microcosm to the macrocosm we can see a continuum. From the objective ordering of a cell to the arrangement of particular melodies to the creation of complex social systems. It's all one.

# 3.7 NATURE v NURTURE

It is certainly true that human beings are basically biological creatures. There is no argument about that. But there are differences of opinion about the degree to which human beings are rooted in the natural world.

Reason tells us that either we are exclusively biological creatures or we are not. If we are exclusively biological creatures how can we hope to be able to change our behavior in order to meet the unprecedented challenges we presently face? If we are not, to what extent are we other than biological creatures? How much of our behavior can be managed solely on a cultural level? To what extent can we behave without reference to biological elements?

Those who believe we are something other than a marvelous mutation of the genetic code look to religious and cultural institutions to solve all the problems of the world. They contend that the soul of humankind, or our consciousness, exists over and above biological reality. Creationists and the nurture-over-nature lobby are of the same mind here. Though some of the latter group are evolutionists, both groups feel the need to keep human beings as separate from the nature of things as their particular theology or ideology warrants.

It is true, of course, that, as a life form, human beings are unique from any other life form. But every life form is also, in some sense, unique from every other life form, so perhaps we shouldn't make too much out of our own uniqueness. However, the ability to make too much out of our uniqueness is part of our uniqueness. Our heightened self-consciousness, superior intelligence and imagination can magnify our differences way out of proportion. And many of the things we've pointed to as distinguishing ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom have been based not on knowledge but on ignorance. Just as it was ignorance of our cosmos which allowed us to believe in a geocentric universe.

We were once thought to be the only creature capable of building an arch until it was discovered termites construct them just as well to buttress their own high-rise dwellings. That "Beasts reason not," was thought to be an obvious and unchallengeable truth. But we now know this to be just another flattering assumption on our part.

Among the many well documented examples of the reasoning power of animals other than human beings there is one which seems to be especially interesting. It involves an octopus, a creature whose brain size is not very large, faced with a problem which, it is safe to say, no octopus had ever come across before. A particular fish, which octopi are in the habit of preying upon, was placed inside of a plugged up fish bowl filled with water. A diver put the fish bowl on the ocean floor in an area the octopus frequented and a camera was set up to record what happened. The octopus came by and immediately went for its prey only to discover it was somehow unattainable. The octopus then proceeded to study the problem of how to get at its prey for about an hour before wrapping one of its tentacles around the plug, twisting it off and taking its reward.

Now, not only is it impressive that an octopus was able to figure out how to extricate its prey from the fish bowl but for it to stick with the problem for so long is even more so. A problem with which it had no prior experience! One would suppose that such behavior, such perseverance and problem solving capability could not be possible in such a small brained animal. Did the octopus enjoy the challenge of a new problem? Did he somehow know he could eventually figure it out? Was the removal of the plug finally equated in his mind with the moving of a rock in order to dislodge prey hiding in a crevice? Whatever the case there was certainly a good deal of reasoning power manifested in the animal's problem solving ability. And this from a creature we perceive to be solely determined by its biology. So, the fact of being biologically determined does not necessarily imply strict limitations. If not for an octopus than certainly not for a human being.

What in the human condition belongs to culture and what belongs to biology? To what extent can we separate the two? How can we sort it all out when so much of our evolution is veiled in mystery? There are some points and counterpoints between social scientists and sociobiologists which, rather than proving or disproving either case, serve to elucidate how biology and culture work in conjunction with one another.

For instance, social scientists have challenged the implication of claims by sociobiologists that ascribe cross-cultural social attributes to universal biological properties. Fire use, the social scientists say, is a cross-cultural phenomena but could not possibly be due to a biological trait because, of course, the fear of fire is instinctual. So, fire use had to be acquired culturally. We somehow had to learn to overcome our instinctual fear by dint of some abstract notion that we should.

Perhaps early humans established a MINISTRY FOR THE USES OF FIRE to study the possibilities, report back to the president and instruct the rest of the tribe on their findings. A silly idea but the nurture-over-nature camp seem to suggest in some of their arguments that culture has a way of arriving on the scene before the event.

However, before the mastery of fire became a cultural institution it had to be arrived at by biological creatures. But how could this be? Biologically we are instructed to be afraid of fire not to control it. True, there is no gene that tells us we should cook our food. So how could genetics be at all involved with a mastery of fire? Well, the only thing strong enough to overcome a powerful instinct is another instinct just as powerful, if not more so. The most powerful instinct is, of course, survival. Somewhere along the line the idea of fire use was connected to our instinct for survival. Something in our biological make-up allowed us to perceive a connection between fire and survival and enabled our consequent desire to overcome the fear of fire to evolve into its mastery. Several possible scenarios of this evolution come to mind involving a combination of observation and serendipity.

Forest and brush fires naturally occur in the wild and from a safe distance they could be observed by our primal ancestors who figured out they could take advantage of the animals bolting from the blaze and pick off a few of the distracted prey as they rushed for safety. Thus, fire came to be seen as benefitting our survival. Or, looking at a wildfire in the cold and dark of night one primitive "Einstein" with neurons firing in his brain might have turned to his companion to express what was then a profound idea, "Daylight at night." From this a way to alleviate the fear of darkness was arrived at along with a way to keep warm and to keep predators at bay. All advantageous to survival. Add to this mix the serendipitous discovery of how to make a fire from hitting stone upon stone to shape a tool. Sparks fly off and ignite a dry leaf nearby. All these various events and perceptions are culturally reinforced and expanded into the eventual control of fire as it becomes increasingly connected to the instinct for survival. From there the mastery of fire becomes institutionalized and is generated through cultural means.

That fire use is a universal phenomenon seems to speak more to a biological connection as a survival tool than to its being a purely cultural event, whereas, the invention of the wheel, which was culture specific and not universally attractive as a survival tool, can be viewed more in terms of cultural phenomena.

First, we were biological creatures out of which our various cultures were formed. When someone claims that culture is the dominant influence in shaping human beings it would be valid to ask - What in our biological nature would make this possible? The same claim about biology would not elicit the same question concerning culture. To ask - what in our cultures makes it possible for biological influence? - would be absurd.

Though the chicken and egg question does not apply to the nurture vs nature controversy it does seem at times that some of the nurture lobby believe culture was a preexisting entity awaiting the arrival of a primate it could mold to its specifications.

In The End Of Science John Horgan) discusses the debate between cultural determinism and evolutionary psychology. He quotes Noam Chomsky as saying, "Darwinian theory is so loose it can incorporate anything [scientists] discover."

Evolutionary psychologists may at times overreach in their assessment of human behavior as an expression of genetic manipulation. One study claimed that middle-aged men danced badly, at weddings, for instance, to advertise themselves to women as bad choices for reproductive purposes. Now, given that young women who are looking for a mate for reproductive purposes would as a rule be attracted to men that are closer to their own age than a middle-aged man would be, the dancing-badly syndrome does not seem necessary. And how many opportunities would any woman have to observe middle-aged men dancing to make it a viable evolutionary device. Also, I wonder if it was part of the study to establish whether the men observed were ever, at any time in their lives, good dancers?

Chomsky was long a skeptic about the science of evolution but eventually did come around to accept its relevance. But there are many other scholars who continue to believe that culture is paramount in determining human behavior.

Cultural determinists, Horgan says, point to the enormous variety of behavior exhibited in a variety of cultures to make their case that "culture rather than genetic endowment is the major molder of human behavior." The question is, how did the variety of cultures about in the first place?

Was the behavior of Homo sapiens molded to the specifications of preexisting cultures in various geographical locations? Ridiculous, of course, but that does seem to be what the cultural determinists are suggesting.

Cultures are a product of the uniform biological directives of Homo sapiens responding to different environmental influences.

This is not hard to understand when one looks at the enormous variety of life forms that an enormously invariant genetic structure is responsible for. Just so, it is not hard to understand how a complex species, such as Homo sapiens, with a common genetic endowment could blossom into a variety of cultural flowerings in response to variously different environmental conditions. There was no Eskimo or Tahitian culture awaiting the arrival of the first inhabitants to the Northern regions or South Pacific so as to mold them into an appropriate mode of behavior. The culture of those particular places was developed by the people who chose to live there. Culture is an outgrowth of human behavior not the other way around. It is the result of a common human-behavior-template adapting to different geographical locations.

In as much as a culture does mold behavior it does so in accord with biological directives.

But some of the behavior on the part of humans seems to be "nonadaptive" say the cultural determinists. Why, for instance, as Horgan brings up, do people obey religious tenets that curb their sexuality or why do they fight in wars when, as individuals, they often have little to gain and much to lose?

In response to the first part of the question I would say that, generally speaking, religious tenets have not curbed our sexuality any more than our being subject to a natural environment once did. We have been conditioned by nature to having our appetites circumscribed to one degree or another with respect to group survival and the vagaries of a day-to-day existence in the wild. As we have seen, religion is an extension of, a substitute for, that natural conditioning. It is not the case that primitive tribal individuals indulged in an absolutely unrestrained sexuality until religion came along to instill self-control. Rather, primitive sexual behavior was regulated by its use as a survival mechanism and was bundled up with awareness of one's dependency on the group for one's own survival. Environmental conditions also came into play. A harsh environment deep in the jungles of the Amazon demanded tribal conservatism in all aspects of life while more liberal behavior was allowed for the tribes of Hawaii. Rampant unfettered voracious sexual behavior is a product of civilized societies and so is the need to tame it. If the methods employed for that purpose are effective it is because we are biologically endowed with the ability to have our appetites and drives conform to the constraints or leniency of a particular environment whether it be a natural one or a cultural extension of a natural one.

As for the practice of celibacy that is found in some religions we can only wonder how many of a particular celibate order really do abstain from sex altogether. But those who are able to adhere to a strict celibate lifestyle stand apart from the rest of us and can be a cause for an awe inspiring admiration. Then again, a lack of sexual potency or drive could very well be a factor in a given celibate's abstinence. Also, and again, there is always the matter of self-interest to consider in the eternal reward of life everlasting in return for denying the pleasures of this life and how that connects with our basic instinct for self-preservation.

Feelings of guilt are thought to be a purely religious sensibility that can have a strong influence on our behavior. Guilt is regarded as something visited upon us by some spiritual court from which we cannot hide our sins. However, guilt is basically a fear of exile that has been part of our psyches throughout our existence. In tribal groups one did not want to do anything to provoke the wrath of the tribe and risk being exiled. To be banished from one's tribe for some egregious transgression was the worst possible fate that one could suffer. In order to impose their tenets on people some religions, Catholicism, for instance, uses the threat of excommunication and eternal damnation to exploit the deep-rooted fear of exile that most everyone is subject to.

Our basic appetites can be associated with guilt. Living as a creature of the "jungle", as we once did, one is at risk while engaging in sex. One is off one's guard and, therefore, vulnerable to predators. So, certain "negative" feelings became associated with sexual activity in our primitive selves that could certainly be exploited by burgeoning introspective religious institutions as civilizations mushroomed. Again sex was not something one could indulge in willy-nilly until religion came along. One had to choose wisely as to where and when to have sex, even in the wild.

Hunger also results in risky behavior in a "jungle" existence. A rabbit must come out of the safety of its hutch to obtain nourishment. As it nibbles away on some scrumptious clover it nervously scans its surroundings like a thief in the night, constantly on the lookout for any sign of approaching danger. And so it was with early humans. If we became too engrossed, for instance, in scavenging a carcass, stalking prey or gathering berries we would be easy pickings for a predator. And so, like the rabbit, we sought to satisfy our hunger in a state of alarm, "afraid of being caught", as it were. Certainly one can see how, in a civilized existence, guilt about drives and appetites could arise out of the danger that had accompanied the gratification of our most urgent needs for the greater part of our existence.

To say that individuals have "little to gain" in fighting in wars, as Horgan does, is a rather flippant notion that discounts the intense identity one can have with the group or society one belongs to. If the survival of one's group is threatened by another then any given individual in that group is also threatened and one is spurred on to fight for one's very own survival as well one's family and society. Also, and again, the prospect of eternal life comes into play here. There are beliefs that to die in battle brings immortality in an afterlife. This gives one's instinct for survival an eternal guarantee. One might feel there was something to gain in that.

In Systems of Survival Jane Jacobs asserts that loyalty is solely imposed on our nature through cultural conditioning properties alone. But such conditioning is needed only as a means of awakening what is naturally within us. That is, having our individual identities subsumed by the group one belongs to. The absolute unquestioning knowledge, that had been inculcated into us on a daily basis as members of primitive groups, that our very survival was inexorably bound up with the survival of our group must be reinvigorated in societies where day-to-day survival is virtually guaranteed. The whole idea behind a military boot camp, for example, is to challenge one to survive it. The way to survive it is to totally subjugate oneself to the commands of one's superiors. Individual identity is minimized in favor of group identity through rigorous conformity. Constant and extreme pressure is put on each and every individual, both psychologically and physically, to test one's mettle and ignite one's visceral determination to endure, overcome and triumph over adversity. One evaluates oneself with respect to one's group. Recruits are placed in groups which compete with one another to achieve the highest overall rating in all the basic training exercises they participate in. One contributes to the group through one's individual performance and one's group inspires one to strive to do one's best for the group. Thus, a group identity is further solidified. A strong sense of belonging to a group is what loyalty is all about.

Whatever effect cultural constructs have on human behavior is due to their connection to the nature of things. Morality, law, patriotism cannot have significant influence unless there is some visceral connection that has its roots in the ancient covenant forged between humankind and nature as we eked out a survival in the wild. If, in a civilized society, one recognizes a need for sexual control then that recognition is well rooted in our genetic programming in association with past experience in the natural world. The success of a cultural construct depends on how well it corresponds to the nature of things. Civilization is rife with exercises in futility in regard to strenuous efforts to impose a particular cultural construct that lacks a primal connection. Feminism, for instance, in it's attempt to negate gender. Also capitalism or communism as stand alone social operating systems do not in and of themselves provide for a primal connection. As a synthesis, however, they do. See Mondragon.

There is certainly a dynamic link between biology and culture. And, though the boundary between the two is not always so clear, we must always keep in mind that biology precedes culture and provides the stuff for its formations. Certain cultural aspects can seem to take on a life of their own over and above biological considerations, but they really don't.

Some culturalists, as Carl N. Degler points out in his book, In Search of Human Nature, like to think that culture is a matter of mind and since we can change our minds at will it is easier to change things culturally than it is biologically. Mr. Degler goes on to point out, however, that a culture can indeed be a very difficult thing to change and it can also be a very limiting element upon the human condition. And, I might add, it is important to know when in the process of changing cultural institutions that the changes will be user friendly to the biological creatures they encompass. As Edward O. Wilson has said about one of the major cultural changes of the twentieth century, "Socialism is sociobiology without the biology."

# 3.8 SOCIAL ORGANISMS

Every human society, whatever its clams to high-minded, abstract or sacred principles, is at base a living organism subject to all the natural parameters within which every living thing is filtered. The Soviet Union was, for instance, selected against. Ancient Greece grew old and frail and was easy pickings for an upstart Rome, which also grew old and was overtaken by predators and a new ideology. The Soviet Union, because of internal failures and external pressures, was selected against, as was Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. In the competition for a place in the sun they lost out. Other organisms are able to adapt. Communist China, for example, saw the need for change in its strictly Marxist approach to things and continues to survive. Throughout history there have also been instances of civilizations being selected against because of natural disasters or environmental mismanagement. That is, for one reason or another, nature selected against them.

The evolution of human societies is not a purposeful one working to produce an ideal. It is as fortuitous as it is for the appearance and disappearance of particular species throughout the billions of years of life's existence. One will survive as long as it has the wherewithal to do so. The whole process of evolution from time immemorial was not somehow engineered for the sole purpose of inventing human beings as its crowning achievement, nor is social evolution inevitably leading to a state of perfection. There is, however, direction in evolution, namely, from the simple to the complex. That same evolutionary direction is also true for societies. How the complexity succeeds or fails is a matter for the roulette wheel of favorable conditions to decide.

We may posit an ideal for societies to strive for but we must all realize by now that we will always fall short. Visions for ideal societies never work because they don't take into account a social body's natural underpinnings. They seek to impose a notion of what a social body ought to be rather than working with what it really is.

Geography is relevant to the way in which social complexity develops. As Jared Diamond points out in Guns, Germs and Steel, "The America's span a much greater distance north-south than east-west... The same is also true...for Africa. In contrast, the major axis of Eurasia is east-west... Axis orientations affected the rate of the spread of crops and livestock, and possibly also of writing, wheels, and other inventions." An east-west orientation, Diamond explains, provides for similar growing conditions and forges a common ground upon which to increase development over a wide ranging area. Obstacles to such development occur with a north-south orientation because of the variation in climate from one region to another. Our societies, then, are products of the nature of things as are the flora and fauna of various regions.

Societies must also take into account how technologies affect them. We now live in an electronic world of information processing. It seems that all of existence has to do with the processing of information in one form or another. And this is how a body politic, a social system, should be perceived, as a processor of information. "After all," writes Tom Peters in a section of his book Liberation Management, "it's not much of a stretch to suggest that the human body, the corporation and the economy are 'nothing but' information processing machines." It is no stretch at all to add to that list, social systems. The human body as information processing system is, as we shall see, an excellent model for a social system.

We have identified our societies with living organisms for centuries. Hegel is a notable case in point. Plato too. He explained how a society should pull together in times of need describing how the body reacts to a wound. It rallies to the injury, providing all the resources necessary to begin the healing process and continue it until the wound is fully mended. Plato noted that this is how a social body should react when any part of it has been somehow compromised.

Today we use all kinds of anatomical analogies and metaphors to elucidate social phenomena. Crime, for instance, as a cancer eating away at the social fabric. The federal government as the brain trust of the body politic. One financial maven once referred to credit as the oxygen of an economic body. These comparisons have been isolated, piecemeal curiosities but, nonetheless, useful. As Robert Wright) puts it in his book, Non Zero, "Analogies between societies and organisms go back to the beginning of cultural evolutionism. A state bureaucracy is a bit like a brain, and Aztec runners, sending commands to military outposts or distant farmers, are a bit like nerve impulses. That these analogies are easy doesn't mean they're worthless." Now, with our greater understanding of how anatomical structures and social systems function as information processing systems, modeling societies with respect to anatomical design and organization, can prove to be a worthwhile enterprise.

In this vein one can readily see that any group of human beings will manifest all the characteristics of a living organism. The group will act in its own self-interest and seek to create the means for it to grow and prosper. It will, in other words, operate with its own survival in mind and use whatever it can to ensure its continuance, as any life form would.

The welfare bureaucracy in the United States is one good example of the survival instinct taking charge of a particular group. As I explained earlier, it is a living organism naturally driven to seek its own interests, even at the expense of those it was entrusted to benefit.

The body's immune system offers another comparison between biological behavior and the operation of a social system. A society, a social organism, must have confidence in its ability to correctly identify and effectively rid itself of any and all threats to its well-being. It must, in effect, deploy a well informed, judgmentally sound immune system as is found within a healthy body.

An efficient anatomical immune system actually strikes a balance between liberalism and conservatism in order to achieve its ongoing objective of keeping the body free of disease. The T-cells of the immune system patrol through the bloodstream on the lookout for invading organisms. They must be able to distinguish between organisms which do and do not belong to the body they are protecting. Once a threat is identified a signal is sent to the B-cells to produce the appropriate antibodies with which to destroy the threatening germs. The T-cells also call off the attack once they recognize the threat is eliminated.

The activities of T-cells are, again, carried out within liberal and conservative margins. For instance, they can be too liberal in identifying what belongs in one's body and allow for any number of illnesses to take hold of one. Or, as in autoimmune diseases, they can be too conservative in their assessment in what does not belong and identify organs for destruction that are vital to one's health.

Similar judgments must be made by the body politic concerning what is and is not harmful to a social organism. A Stalin, McCarthy or Pol Pot are examples of overly conservative assessors of what is and is not socially acceptable behavior. They, and others like them, see all those who deviate from their view of society as threats and seek to destroy all those who do not conform to it. On the other hand, too liberal an outlook allows for harmful deviations to become acceptable. For it to be accurate, a social body's assessment of what is and is not harmful must be contained and balanced within the bounds of conservative and liberal margins. That is a law of nature.

Our technologies can also be seen as extensions of our bodies. Scholars in various disciplines have commented on this phenomenon. But it seems rather obvious that we are, in effect, replicating our anatomy in much of our hardware. Pumps, valves and pipes are part of our bodies. The action of a piston within a cylinder brings to mind a physical activity human beings are fond of engaging in. Our eyes are extended in telescopes, microscopes and cameras. Listening devices are extensions of our ears. We see electronic communications and sensing devices as extensions of our nervous system. The wheel is an extension of our feet and computers of our brain. In short, as Marshal McLuhan has said, "We have furnished the world around us with transplants of ourselves from foot to head."

We can make these comparisons on the microscopic level as well. Sagan and Druyan describe in detail the inner workings of a cell and how "...protein machine tools...control the life of the cell...These machine tools...proceed on their own to strip other molecules down, to build up new ones, to help communicate molecular or electrical messages to other cells...at the molecular level life was tool-using and tool-making from the start." Jacques Monod compares these, "...elementary control operations...handled by specialized proteins acting as detectors and transducers of chemical information..., to electronic relay systems like those employed in automation circuitry." Francis Crick describes cellular activity in this way, "The cell is thus a minute factory, bustling with rapid, organized chemical activity. Under suitable molecular controls, enzymes busily synthesize lengths of messenger RNA. A ribosome will jump onto each messenger RNA molecule, moving along it, reading off its base-sequence and stringing together amino acids (carried to it by TRNA molecules) to make a polypeptide chain which, when finished, will fold on itself and become a protein. Nature invented the assembly line some billions of years before Henry Ford."

Much has been written about the computer in comparison to the brain. But it might be more accurate to compare the computer to the operation of the whole body on a microscopic level. The computer operates according to which switches in its circuitry are either turned on or not turned on. A particular cell in one's body operates according to which of its genes are either turned on or not turned on. The whole body can now be seen as an information processing system, encoding data, transmitting signals, sending and receiving messages, networking between appropriate terminals, etc. No matter what we do or produce there seems to be a precedent for it on a biological level. This evident self-replication of ours, most obvious in the field of robotics, is a basic activity of life itself. The very cells of which we are made continually replicate themselves. From inner space to outer space a continuity extends.

There is a confluence here of electronic/information age technologies, knowledge of ourselves and the nature of things, how things work as information processing systems and how each of these things can draw on one another to provide for useful innovations for all aspects of our societies.

We must also note here how a particular technology can instruct mindsets and form institutions. During the machine age, for example, governments and businesses were all about creating separate levels of bureaucracies where individuals would perform the isolated routine jobs they were assigned while having no, or very little discourse with anyone in any other department - all very mechanical. A carburetor does what it does and a piston what it does without any interaction between them.

My brother in law worked as a salesman for a big chemical company many years ago. At one point he began to get feedback from his customers about the decline in quality of the product he was selling. Remarkably, however, he felt he could not say anything to the quality control guys because that was a separate department. He also thought it necessary that they should know what the customers were saying. So, he approached a quality control manager about the problem and was emphatically told, "Look, you do your job and I'll do mine."

Tom Peters wrote about the structure of bureaucratic labyrinths that were so prevalent in traditional machine age companies. In one such company an engineer's request for a new mechanical pencil had to be processed by fifteen different departments.

Then, along comes the computer and the idea of information sharing takes center stage.

By way of illustrating how things changed regarding the transformation of machine age to information age thinking we have the example of Boeing engineers and assembly line workers before and after. In the machine age the engineers designed aircraft and the assembly line workers put the parts together. The engineers would inspect an assembled component for flaws. If any were found they would go back to the drawing board and redesign the part. The new design was then put together on the assembly line and again inspected for flaws by the engineers after it was all assembled. And so on and so forth.

The manager who oversaw the building of Boeing's 777 in the early 1990s, however, got the bright idea to change that system by allowing assembly line workers to halt the whole process of assembly if any one of them spotted a flaw. After doing so such a worker would then call an engineer to come and have a look. Information sharing in real time instituted by a "mere" assembly line worker. Imagine, a lowly assembly line worker actually summoning an engineer about a possible flaw in their design! Something that could never have happened under the influence of machine age thinking.

The Boeing manager, feeling there might be a bit of a turf problem, was concerned about how his new idea would play out among the engineers. To his relief he found that they had no problem with the set up and as it turned out the new system worked extremely well.

That such a worthwhile innovation did not occur to anyone at Boeing before must have been due entirely to the influence of seeing things in terms of mechanical systems. Seeing things in terms of information processing systems allowed the manager to arrive at the new set up which, of course, turned out to be a time and money saving innovation. Also, since the engineers readily agreed to the new system the previously separate universes of engineers and assembly line workers was not, in this instance, a product of a pecking order but more of a mechanically oriented mindset.

There are even more striking differences between the work place of today and that of the past. In days gone by everyone newly hired by a company was given a specific job to do. Today someone newly hired might, on their first day at a company, be shown to a cubicle with a desk and a computer and left there without a word of instruction about what they are supposed to do. They are not given a job but, rather, they are expected to create a role for themselves by figuring out how they can contribute to the company by utilizing all the information about the company's operation found at their finger tips on the computer, observing what other employees are doing and picking their brains. Such a prospect was unheard of years ago and has come about as a direct result of electronic/information age technologies.

Such technologies have utterly transformed the private sector while the public sector remains tied to old and obsolete ways of operation and organization as if it existed in a magic bubble out of time. And that's fine with almost everyone because we want to view our cultural institutions as separate from the exigencies of a changing world. We want to see them as being generally impervious to external influences. We want our forms of government to be sacrosanct and eternal. (Also, of course, our religions and ideologies.) We want to believe in them as otherworldly, as existing above and beyond the ever shifting sands of time and we look to them to provide a sense of certainty in an uncertain world

This speaks to an awesome need in the human psyche to have something unconditional to align itself with. Such a need stems from being painfully aware of our temporal existence on this earth. In primitive tribes one's unconditional devotion and commitment to the ongoing survivability of the tribe was the best guarantee of one's own survival. The existing tribe was part of a continuum consisting of revered ancestors and those yet to be born. One believed that the tribe's existence was unconditional. Although its living members were constantly coming and going the tribe itself was for all time. That one grew old and died did not effect one's membership in the tribe. That membership was eternal. As a member of a tribe one had the sense that one's contributions to the tribe was for all time. When one died one would become part of the pantheon of revered ancestors forever.

One is hard pressed to feel any sense of membership these days in an all-encompassing social body of a nation state. Societies are becoming increasingly factionalized. Traditional belief systems of all kinds have been and are being severely challenged and it has traditionally been a shared, intact belief system that held a society together. In traditional Islam, for example, one achieved membership in one's whole society through membership in one's mosque. Islam is now going through internal struggles of its own as to how it should adapt to the specter of the modern world encroaching on its territory via globalization. Churches in the West have also traditionally acted as a catalyst to form a fervent bond between individuals and the state. Now, however, membership in particular belief systems, whether religious or political, supersede one's sense of membership in society as a whole. In the United States divisive issues within the body politic, within religions themselves and between church and state have served to erode one's sense of membership in an all-encompassing social body. One's membership in a particular religion, political party or subsets thereof is stronger felt.

Fanatical subsets of religions and political parties are the order of the day. Traditional belief systems that claim to represent ultimate truth break into pieces because they can no longer provide a seamless connection with what are now known to be the facts of life. Fundamentalists know this and seek to distort those facts to create the comforting illusion that there actually is a seamless connection. Or, Taliban like, they just shut themselves off from the world of knowledge. Those who oppose radical fundamentalism find it difficult to express a strong enough objection to it because they traffic in the same outmoded vocabulary, ascribing their political ideologies to divine inspiration. Indeed, we are all generally stuck in old mindsets and social templates that do not jibe with the world as it is now informed and instructed. Our traditional ways of thinking and of seeing the world are no longer valid with respect to real world knowledge and the changes wrought by modern technologies.

Clearly, capitalism and socialism have been shown to be absolutely deficient as stand alone operating systems for a society. Neither one has been able create a holistic social organism beneficial to one and all. The only way either could possibly be installed as a society's sole operating system is by force. That fact alone should serve as enough of an objection to either one of them running things. In a free society neither could ever be chosen to reign supreme. The same holds true for conservatism and liberalism. A social organism, like a living organism, exists by virtue of the nature of things not in spite of it. And the nature of things, as we see, requires organisms to operate within the context of a conservative/liberal capitalist/socialist dynamic.

The fate of the Soviet Union can be instructive in this regard. In the late 1980s, after nearly three-quarters of a century of horrific malpractice, communism was finally forced to take a hard look at itself. In retrospect one may ask - What took it so long to come to grips with its glaring debilities? This, however, would be a flippant question considering the long proven ability of a body, social or individual, to become and remain crazy-glued to a particular vision of things in spite of any hardships it thereby inflicts on itself. One's mind can become, and continue to be, transfixed while one's body is sacrificed. For example, we have the drug addict, the religious aesthetic, the revolutionary and the ideological state.

The mind of the Soviet Union, represented by the elite of the Communist Party, reveled in the Party Line, in its precepts, its dogma and the belief in its future ascendancy, all bolstered by the life of luxury the top officials afforded themselves, while the body of the Soviet Union was inflicted with brutal torture and neglect, including mass purges and starvation. The Soviet Union was like a hapless junkie whose hallucinatory mind allowed for the wholesale deterioration of its body and when the need for rehabilitation could no longer be ignored it cried out for total change.

Does the failure of the Soviet Union mean the demise of Communism itself? Could a Communist State be successful if it was administered differently? Not likely. For whatever social, political, and economic forces contributed to the collapse of communism there was one underlying principle working against it from day one. Namely, it is the nature of things to evolve out of a communist state into one that is more individually oriented. In the United States, for instance, the communal society of Amana evolved freely from within itself into a community of private individuals. This is, of course, exactly opposite to Marxian theory of social evolution inevitably progressing toward a Communist State.

The tendency toward individuality is not only evident in the macro world of societies, where we see how social evolution has progressed from primitive communal tribes into societies of private individuals, but also in the micro world of life itself where eukaryotes evolved out of prokaryotes. The latter is a form of bacteria whose cells do not contain a nucleus and exist in a blob of total equality where each individual bacterium is exactly the same as every other one. Prokaryotes were around long before eukaryotes made their appearance on the scene. The cells of eukaryotes do have a nucleus which enable them to create various species characterized by unique, separate individual life forms. So, the communist theory concerning the evolutionary processes of social organisms flies is contrary to the natural progression of things.

However, this is not to say that Communism does not have its place in the world, in the nature of things. The unique life forms created by eukaryotes are not totally independent entities. For life as a whole is a single organism within which all individual life forms are interdependent. And however diverse life becomes it will always be one entity existing as a communist ecosystem wherein all participants cooperate to promote the sum of what they are part of, life itself.

Separate individual creatures, then, arise out of a communal state but are never entirely dissociated from it, are never entirely free from participating in cooperative activities. (An advisory to Homo sapiens - A species that exploits environments without participating in their enrichment in some equally significant way had better be a species with zero population growth.)

It is the nature of life to be communally and individually oriented. Is it any wonder, then, that socialism and capitalism have become the major ideologies in the world? Or that their natural holistic dynamism is attested to in human societies and, also, most dramatically in the aforementioned Mondragon Corporation?

Life forms and societies, then, exist as bicameral entities wherein unique individuality is supported by common interdependence. So, perhaps, it was not only that the Soviet Union was going against evolution which proved to be its undoing but that it also chronically, pathologically overemphasized a single aspect of the nature of things, commonality. Of course, individuality can also be overemphasized. What works is the ability to adapt to change without prejudice to a particular point of view. Thus, allowing modifications in prevailing ideologies to occur in recognition of their inherent shortcomings, as demonstrated over the years by China and the United States, for example, seems to be what works.

Depending on one's predilection one can abstract from the nature of things a Communist or a Capitalist point of view.

For instance, all life on Earth is food for other life. From a communist perspective this can be seen as a cooperative self-sustaining mechanism of life itself. Vegetation generously provides itself as food for the taking while prey provides food for the predator. That prey try to avoid being eaten is no exception to their inclination to provide themselves as food. Prey must try to go on living in order to reproduce more of their kind to be preyed upon. Any life form that is not killed and eaten as prey will eventually provide food for the scavengers, like vultures and worms. Life's just one big cooperative.

Of course, it's not that prey willingly provide themselves as food for predators, it's just that that is what life itself has devised as a way for life to exist.

Looked at from the other perspective, predator and prey can take on a capitalistic character of individual initiative where the strong exploit the weak.

There are other ways of seeing Capitalism and Communism in nature: In a capitalistic version of the natural world a fruit bearing tree develops and produces its product. When the fruit is ripe it advertises itself, with color and aroma, to potential consumers who partake of its nutrition and then deposit the seed back on the earth as an investment in the future. If conditions are favorable the seed will eventually take root and build new structures to produce new products and the process continues.

The Communist view of this would be: No one owns the means of production, the product is free and the whole process is provided for by the State - the State of Nature.

One supposed feather in the cap of capitalism is the idea of a pin factory that Adam Smith made so much of in The Wealth of Nations.

However, that idea was around long before humankind ever appeared on the planet. The definition of a pin factory is - an organism dedicated to the production of multiple units of a single product.

A berry bush is an organism dedicated to the production of multiple units of a single product. All the berry bush's different parts, from its roots to the tips of its branches have a job to do in producing its product.

Also, of course, there's the honey producing factory known as the beehive to consider.

Capitalism and Communism are special ways of looking at the nature of things but neither is, in and of itself, complete. Neither can exist as a separate entity unto itself. In nature they are of the same fabric.

This has been clearly demonstrated by the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation founded in the Basque Country of Span. It is a highly successful enterprise that combines socialism and capitalism in an extremely effective synthesis producing goods and services over a wide range of industries.

But, in the main, we seem bent on choosing one aspect of the nature of things over the other and holding it up as the be-all and end-all of social propriety. In the abstraction of our minds we can become mesmerized by what we perceive to be THE TRUTH according to our particular disposition. We abstract from the nature of things as we see fit. We take things apart, section them off into vacuum sealed categories and create the ideas of Socialism and Capitalism along with the illusion they are totally separate entities.

Looking at this on a more basic level we've come to see competition and cooperation as two distinct things. We have separate definitions for them and view them as opposites when in reality they are inseparably blended together into the natural make-up of things. Even in competitive sports it is cooperative teamwork that wins the game. Competition/cooperation form a dynamic that we choose to ignore and by emphasizing the one over the other in our social agendas we forfeit the possibility of engineering a working relationship between the two that could be more compatible with the nature of things, the nature of societies and our own natures as well.

What is also involved here is the view of ourselves as separate from the nature of things. The belief that we occupy a place somewhat, if not altogether, removed from the natural world. This leads us to believe we should be free to impose our denatured concepts on ourselves and the world and have them work as we imagine they should.

We are obviously not as free as we think we are, able to work our will on things however we please. The collapse of the Soviet Union has shown us once again that we cannot impose our abstractions onto the formation of a society as we so choose. The concept of Communism is part of the nature of things. It has its place in life. Human beings cannot assign it a different place, a dominant place.

The same applies to Capitalism. Or any other Ism. We cannot do other than what is possible within the nature of things. We cannot totally separate competition and cooperation to form a society characterized by only one of those inseparable elements.

Whatever we may think about ourselves, whatever utopias we might wish to create we are defined, confined and determined by life itself. We cannot have a totally objective control over it. We cannot manipulate things as we fancy they should be. We have to learn to live within the nature of things instead of trying to force things to fit into our abstracted molds. This is not to say we exist in a biologically determined straight jacket, for nature provides us with the flexibility to adapt ourselves to changing conditions as long as we are able to intelligently recognize such changes and choose suitable ways to adapt to them.

There are other mindsets which illustrate our penchant for viewing ourselves as separate from this world. We talk of someday "conquering nature" as if nature was something totally alien to us. And it is this which goes to the very heart of the modern dilemma: how we perceive ourselves in relation to the natural world and, as an adjunct to that, how we can best facilitate a more suitable alignment between the natural world and our institutions, between the biosphere and the body politic.

The prospects before us are more fundamental and profound than we may care to admit. They challenge the very essence of the most cherished ideas we have of ourselves. We can run from taking that challenge but we can't hide. We need to find new ways of adapting to all the cataclysmic changes in the world precipitated out of the light-speed convolution of new technologies, perspectives and ideas. This necessary adaptation may be found in a holistic unifying concept of the biosphere and the body politic.

# 3.9 THE ELECTORATE AND THE ELECTED

In his book, The Way The World Works, Jude Wanniski writes, "The (political) model thus has neither a 'liberal' nor a 'conservative' bias as we currently understand those labels. It holds, rather, that both general impulses are legitimate, but that the electorate itself does not choose one bundle of ideas assembled by one group of politicians or philosophers over another bundle of ideas assembled by a competing group. Because it is forced to choose from a narrow menu of political alternatives the electorate does its best to assemble its own bundle in a liberal/conservative consensus that always falls short of the ideal."

Yes, the electorate, at least those not chronically welded to either liberal or conservative factions, the independents, the swing voters do attempt to right the ship of state when either party takes it too far off course in one direction or the other - thus, we have the so-called swinging of the pendulum.

But as Mr. Wanniski points out voters can only choose from what is offered by the two parties, and the menu of political alternatives becomes increasingly conflicted as the parties become increasingly polarized.

It's the variations on the themes and hybrids of political perspectives that create menus with variety and have the best chance of providing platforms that relate and are relevant to real world conditions because they are not wholly driven by ideology.

Mr. Wanniski used the ostensibly liberal state of Massachusetts as an example of the wisdom of the electorate in deciding issues without bias to a particular ideology. The only state that voted for ultraliberal George McGovern has taken conservative stands on several of its referenda. Mr. Wanniski lists some of them, "By a two to one margin the voters supported the principal of a refinery and deepwater port for Massachusetts. They opposed a ban on hand guns. They opposed a state power authority. They rejected a constitutional amendment that would have permitted a graduated state income tax..."

If this kind of unfettered judgment is the desired thing wouldn't it be prudent to have it somehow extend throughout the body politic itself as much as possible. Not a bipartisan but a supra-partisan vision characterizing government. Could we then, perhaps, begin to arrive at solutions which address problems in a truly forthright manner? Is it not possible, for instance, for industries to be regulated properly? Is their not some objective criteria with which to establish fair and purposeful guidelines which do not burden industry with stifling regulations on the one hand or allow wholesale abuses to occur through under-regulation on the other? Is such a prospect beyond human intelligence? One thing for sure, such a prospect does not seem possible to achieve under the present system, with partisanship controlling the game.

If that kind rational thinking is at all possible one is not going to arrive at it through a stubborn allegiance to a particular point of view or ideology. Such allegiances tend to encourage irrational thinking of the most egregious kind. One of the reasons ideologies can lead us so far astray is they become merged with religious faiths, or are substituted for them, and these faiths are allowed to play the tyrant over reason. These mergers are capable of causing catastrophic abuses when the powers-that-be implement them for their own purposes.

# 3.10 EXTREMES OF THE POWER ELITE

For example, in the Soviet Union, where Communism was a Religion masquerading as Scientific Socialism, part of the ideological dogma was to believe that the environment was the dominant force in the origin of species. That is, it was a particular environment alone that determined the kinds of species that could thrive within its domain. From this, Lysenko, a Secretary of Agriculture under Stalin, was able to convince the powers that be that wheat plants would produce seeds of rye if planted in an appropriate environment. A full scale planting of wheat took place based on that idea and the results were devastating. The doomed and costly experiment caused massive food shortages resulting in the starvation of millions of people.

This unfortunate foisting of ideological dogma upon reality is, of course, found in other cultures as well. In the U.S., for example, Andrew Carnegie, operating under the influence of a Capitalist/Christian ethos superimposed the idea of heaven and hell onto an earthly economic system of haves and have-nots to justify amassing enormous wealth at the expense of other people's suffering. He was in heaven, they were in hell and that was the will of God.

# 3.11 FAITH, REASON AND WORLDVIEWS

Lysenko and Carnegie, both influenced by their culture and position, adopted a view of things that conformed to their interests. As a rule we all want to believe in things that are convenient for us, that serve our preferred images, that benefit us and make us feel good, no matter that common sense might tell us differently. So, one's faith must ignore what one's reason knows to be contradictions to one's faith. This makes it difficult for one to keep faith and reason in proper perspective just as it is for the body politic to bring about a distinct separation of Church and State. A disciplined separation of Church and State in the body politic depends on a rigorous scrutiny of the interplay between faith and reason in oneself.

The struggle between faith and reason has, of course, been going on for centuries. Basically, the conflict, again, is one of humankind's anthropocentrism pitted against scientific discoveries which severely challenge the idea of a human centered universe. We once believed that the earth was the center of the universe, that we were totally separate from all other life forms, that we were consciously in control of everything we did. However, scientific discoveries have shown these things not to be as we once believed and, as we know, such disillusionments are not taken lightly. They can cause severe anguish as we become unhinged from a strongly held belief. This is true for individuals as well as bodies politic and the results can be devastating.

Science has also played a role in fostering perceptions about things that were subsequently challenged by new scientific findings. The Newtonian worldview of a rational, orderly and predictable universe was influential in the age of enlightenment which emphasized reason and rationality over superstition and mythology. This view of things was universally accepted and during its tenure it seems to have had a palpable effect on the affairs of the day. "In those years (the latter half of the nineteenth century)," writes R.K. Webb in The Columbia History of the World, "more and more western Europeans came to know prosperity and security. Despite the intensification of nationalistic feelings and the competition implied by increasingly protectionist national economies, Europe built up a practical internationalism. The gold standard was universal. It was possible to travel from one end of Europe to the other without a passport. And the industrial diplomacy of the giant firms that came to dominate the national economies evolved a system of agreements it's tempting to say treaties as conducive to peace as any creation of the foreign offices. The Hague conference of 1899 and 1907 successfully codified the laws of war and gave birth to the idea of an international court." Also, Nations were talking with one another about establishing a balance of power.

At the turn of the century Einstein's view blew that world apart. In his essay, Views of Holland, Aldous Huxely, a contemporary of Einstein, wrote, "We have learned that nothing is simple and rational except what we ourselves have invented: that God thinks neither in terms of Euclid or Riemann; that science has explained nothing; that the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness."

The universe became a foreboding finite mass of chance occurrences, unpredictability and wholesale uncertainties. Whatever social and political stability there was in the world was also blown apart. All hell broke loose. The world was at war with a ferocity the like of which had never been seen before. A ferocity made possible by the modern weaponry provided by the very scientific discoveries which so rudely unhinged us from our orderly existence.

So, science delivers a knockout punch to our image of ourselves as a central player in a purposeful universe while giving us enormous physical power in exchange. Thus, our metaphysical disillusionment at the hands of science can be compensated for in the drunkenness of wielding the power science creates. And now, at a time when cherished ideas are most threatened, we have potentially enough power in nuclear weaponry to completely destroy the hated reality that so thoroughly undermines our anthropocentric ideas.

We now live in a universe that is no longer comprehensible to us, that no longer provides us with a central role and has us careening through dark empty space in a fragile blue bubble with no grand design or purpose to be seen anywhere. The friendly canopy of order and stability of the Newtonian world was torn apart and we found ourselves stranded in an indifferent world of chaos. So we grabbed on to whatever ragged pieces of the shredded canopy we could and fashioned ideological security blankets for ourselves in order to believe in something, absolutely, no matter what distortions therein lie.

All isms have moral absoluteness as their core element. Socialism and Capitalism lay claim to occupying the moral high ground. The two major political parties in the U.S. also indulge in such declarations. The liberals hold that only their ideas have true moral worth while the conservatives maintain the same opinion about their ideas. They both cannot be right about such assertions. But they can both be wrong. And, indeed, they are.

The claims to supremacy are merely claims. Claims that anyone or any group can make. There seems to be no lack of indiscretion out there in making such righteous self-serving proclamations. We have heard them loud and clear over the years from the likes of staid religious based political groups like Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Ralph Reed's Christian Coalition and Jessie Jackson's Rainbow Push to volatile activist groups like Act Up, Greenpeace, Aryan Nation, the Ku Klux Klan, the Tea Party and the Occupy movement. But, far from establishing any real moral worth, all the hyperbolic posturing of absolutists, of whatever ilk, merely elucidates, again, the awesome need in the human animal to have something unconditional in its life which transforms one's tenuous, questionable existence into the dense monolithic realm of absolute certainty.

Now, what we need to do is take a hard look at these unconditional belief systems in light of scientific knowledge, as we have been doing, to see how they connect to, and are expressions of, our basic instincts. We need to look further into the origins of morality as a process of evolution. We may not want to but we need to. And what if you came to the conclusion that moral values are nothing more than a natural phenomenon? Would you think less of morality or more highly of our natures? By establishing a realistic perspective of our moral nature might we begin to promote a clearer view of things and be able to confidently distinguish between what is truly harmful to us and what is not, make better judgments as to how and when to use power, and better accept our rightful place within the nature of things?

Human beings are, after all, a product of nature. Exclusively. Nothing establishes this fact better than the evidence presented to us by the findings in molecular biology. As Jacques Monod has written, "Today we know that from bacterium to man the chemical machinery is essentially the same, in both its structure and its functioning." Sagan and Druyan in, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, illustrate this fact in several ways. As an example, they write, "When ACGT sequences that are mainly active genes are examined, a 99.6% identity is found between human and chimp. At the level of the working genes, only about 0.4% of the DNA of humans is different from the DNA of chimps." Such percentages have been amended since the writing of that book. After the human and chimp genomes were sequenced and compared in 2005 a 96% similarity was found. There are different ways of comparing genetic material that can yield somewhat varying results but what they all agree on is that chimps are more closely related to humans than they are to any other primate.

The slight difference between humans and chimps on the genetic level translates into quite substantial differences in the macroscopic manifestation of the two species. Our intelligence, for instance, is exponentially greater than theirs. But even with the great superiority we have over chimps we can only wonder whether we have any greater ability to conduct our social affairs than they do theirs.

We have learned a great deal from chimps and continue to do so. One of the most important lessons might be that we, like them, are nothing more, nor less, than earthlings. So, the task at hand is to view every facet of the human condition in terms of the natural world and except it as fact that all we create is a product of our natural selves. Everything. Our laws, morals, technologies, everything.

Also, as we have seen, a continuity exists with respect to technology, biological systems and social systems.

The formation of political bodies is part of this continuity. The different political perspectives between the Left and the Right can be instructive here with the former having a big-government/socialist orientation and the latter a minimal-government/capitalist mode. This equates to different perceptions about social justice and how to manage the degrees of difference between the haves and have-nots, between the powerful and the powerless. The Left, of course, takes the view of the government having a very active role in pursuing equality in social and material welfare. The other view is to let everyone fend for themselves with the government taking a back seat.

Are these two different views something one freely chooses? Or is there some sort of predisposition to one or the other in those anatomical features which create perception and personality? One's experience may, of course, be a factor in choosing the one perspective over the other but we cannot say it is the prime factor. One's experience growing up poor, for instance, could lead one to embrace capitalism as well as socialism. One individual might think that one needs a free market in which one can exercise one's own initiative to overcome poverty while another might see the need for government programs to redistribute the wealth as the way to deal with the problem.

These are both valid views and in some kind of idealized world one or the other might be a viable concept on it's own. But this is not an either/or world we live in that is suitable to ideals. Each view has its own virtues and its own flaws. Adherents of either view tend only to see the virtues in their preferred ideology. It is impossible to objectively choose one over the other as the absolute be-all and end-all simply because neither can fit that bill. So, one must have some visceral bias at work here in choosing one view to the exclusion of the other.

Now it has been shown that specific areas of the brain are assigned to carry out specific tasks. Among these tasks are (1) spatial perception, that is, the perception of how things are arranged in space and (2) the ability to focus in on a goal in order to achieve it. Even if there were no knowledge about brain function and the separate areas that handle these two perceptions one can still readily see how such an arrangement is necessary. At times one must be able to focus completely on a particular objective while at other times more of a spatial view might be required. It makes sense, then, that the ability to switch from one mode to the other must be predicated upon having each perception manifested in separate areas of the brain.

This, of course, is not to say the two areas of the brain assigned to these perceptions operate unilaterally. Obviously, the two perceptions must interact with one another. This interaction would probably not be perfectly balanced. Nor would the imbalance be the same in every individual. In one individual the balance might tilt toward spatial perception while in another object-focusing might be the more favored one. This could in turn influence how one perceives the social landscape. With those who favor a spatial view tending to be more concerned with the distribution of wealth throughout society. While those with a more object oriented view would tend to be inclined toward achieving specific goals like increasing the GDP and letting the chips fall where they may.

This is, perhaps, an oversimplification of a more complex matter but these complexities would not be something residing outside of the complexity of the human brain. We do not see things as we choose to from a menu of infinite possibilities. There are certain innate conceptual patterns preprogrammed in our brains which influence the way we think, the way we process the information we receive and the way we see the world. The programs vary within the parameters of the brain's purview. So, from the same information different opinions can be formed by different people. One cannot perceive things other than the way in which one's brain represents them.

What we need to learn from this, especially in the absence of objective criteria for choosing one ideology over another, is that our ideological preferences are, perhaps, more given than chosen. Although, this may diminish their value as stand alone belief systems, their value as viable perspectives is not at all compromised. Each perspective needs to be presented in its own right, but, at the same time, it must be acknowledged that in reality the different perspectives must be coordinated.

We can see this in the relationship between competition and cooperation. In competition we are focused on specific goals. Cooperation requires consideration of one's place in a total system for the purpose of furthering that system. That one can "believe" in one as opposed to the other is a result of the brain's ability to distinguish between them. We can view them as separate factors. However, in every aspect of life competition and cooperation are inexorably entwined with one another. The value in separately identifying the two is the ability to judge when a particular situation is too one sided in either direction and in taking measures to correct the imbalance. This is where real independent judgment comes into play - prescribing what is needed with respect to a particular situation in reference to the correct play of the competitive/cooperative dynamic rather than just operating under a given bias toward one or the other. There will still be differing opinions about what the correct play of the dynamic should be but such differences would be less acute and, thus, less strident and more productive for being focused on the interplay of the two perspectives rather than vouching for the one's wholesale superiority over the other.

There is a critical faculty in our brains which is usually reserved for those who disagree with our views. If, however, one's critical faculty was employed with respect to one's own view of things, and not only in the sense of refining and polishing one's favored outlook, but to really taking it apart with as objective an eye as possible, then one might get a better perspective on how seemingly opposing views need to work in a synergistic manner. Such self-criticism is, of course, a difficult process, it goes against one's instinct for self-preservation to stake out a territory for oneself, defend it and expand it. Our survival, however, seems dependent on cultivating a view of how things can work together within a healthier competitive/cooperative, conservative/liberal dynamic than is presently the case.

Now, returning to our discussion of spatial and object perception and how they need to work together while at the same time providing separate perspectives, one needs, for instance, to be able to walk to the door without bumping into the furniture. So, with the objective of going to the door in mind one refers to the spatial arrangement of the furniture in reaching that objective. If one operated solely on the basis of only one perception or the other one could reach objectives at the expense of one's environment i.e., knocking over the furniture to get to the door, or one could get completely lost in spatial arrangements and never get to the door at all.

This biologically oriented state of affairs can be extended to the operation of governments. Leftist governments, whose mandate is material and social equality, have difficulty providing incentives for individual initiative and, thus, establishing a flourishing economy. They, in effect, get too wrapped up in how things are arranged throughout the social space and their intrusive micromanagement interferes with opportunities for individuals to choose, focus on and pursue their own initiatives. Governments on the Right extreme can build strong economies by rewarding individual initiative, as in "captains of industry", while consigning the labor force to slavery. Both extremes have one thing in common, they disregard the proper arrangement of social dynamics, and thus, biological reality.

Politicians on the right and the left exhibit differences not only on issues but in matters of style. Conservatives tend to focus on chosen objectives while diminishing the view of the larger picture. Those of the liberal persuasion tend to make adjustments regarding the larger picture and sometimes find it difficult to get a fix on particular objectives. The first time Benjamin Netanyahu took over as Prime Minister of Israel one of the first things he did was to open up an extension to tunnels in Jerusalem. Attempts to do so before had been the cause of intense protests by Palestinians because the extensions infringed on their holy land in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. There were also some security issues involved. Netanyahu's "tunnel vision", however, precluded consideration of anything that might deter him from realizing his objective. The tunnel extension was opened and the Palestinians, not surprisingly, reacted with violent protests.

When President Clinton, a liberal, took office he too enacted a policy in spite of intense protests as if he had Netanyahu-like tunnel vision and was interested only in achieving his narrow objectives. But his "Don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding gays in the military was conceived in response to a perceived injustice regarding the larger picture. Indeed, if one listens to politicians expound their views a liberal will generally express concern for all the minutia involved in a given issue and try to tailor policies to deal with every detail while a Reagan or a George W. Bush will champion a narrow range of specific objectives as answers to a whole array of different issues.

In democracies like the U.S., where Right and Left factions continually vie for domination, social imbalances generally seesaw from one era to the next. An era being that period of time necessary for the dominant political party of the moment to again prove that its one-sidedness cannot provide the coherent vision required to maintain a healthful balance of social and/or economic conditions. Depending on circumstances either the Left or the Right point of view is generally favored and those who identify with the prevailing view are riding high on the political pendulum absolutely convinced of the correctness of their position, while those with the opposing view wait for the pendulum to swing back their way so they can once again hitch a ride on the upswing. And when back on top they take it as proof positive that they were absolutely correct in their convictions all the time. And so on and so forth.

Of course, things do change and it's good to be able to adjust from liberal to conservative policies, and vice versa, as conditions warrant. However, with the system in its present state is, the separate factions contribute more to the drastic swings of the pendulum than to affecting greater stability. They both vie for the seat of power in order to install a predominance of their particular policies. Any so-called bipartisanship amounts to compromises which have more to do with insular political maneuvering than with fashioning a balanced vision of things for the purpose of forming a more cohesive society.

Political history complies with the nature of things regarding the workings of the liberal/conservative dynamic. So, we see that politics is not purely a cultural event. We did not freely choose to channel political perspectives between liberal and conservative borders. We cannot freely choose not to. The liberal/conservative dynamic in politics is a manifestation of the natural forces that we have been fashioned by, not something we have fashioned for ourselves out of whole cloth.

Liberals and conservatives are always the main competitors in political bodies everywhere with each side contending that it alone has, at any given time, all the solutions to all the existing social problems. But what are the factions of liberal and conservative all about? Where does this demarcation of political viewpoints originate? Is it an a priori systemization, a product of the mind, of pure logic, installed for reasons of convenience and definition? Or is the liberal/conservative formulation an intrinsic characteristic of the material world that has been co-opted by civilized minds as a pure intellectual invention? I submit that it is the latter case. I will show that liberal and conservative concepts are dynamic properties of the natural world and it is not by free choice that we assign them their place in our political arenas.

The dictionary definition of liberal is; not bound by orthodox tenets or established forms, more permissive, a letting go, allowing for deviation from the norm. Conservative is defined as; strict adherence to established forms, low tolerance for change, defending the status quo.

We define liberal and conservative as opposites and confine them to separate insular categories while losing sight of the fact that the one could not exist without the other. Indeed, looking at the nature of things it seems that nothing at all could exist without the ongoing interaction of this dynamic duo.

The liberal/conservative dynamic is not unique to politics. Its tension is universally pervasive from microbial to galactic systems. From the infinitesimal particles of quantum physics to the gargantuan galaxies of the universe itself. Everything is characterized by simultaneous tendencies for continuity and change, or operates between conservative and liberal guidelines.

From its inception, the evolution of the universe has been prescribed by the forces of attraction and repulsion. The repulsive force is responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe. The attractive force is resistant to that expansion. The repulsive force is a force for liberal change that pushes things apart while the gravitational force is a force for conservative constancy that seeks to hold things together.

The repulsive force known as dark energy has been found to comprise over 66% of the universe.

Indeed, for a universe to happen, only the repulsive force could so dominate. If gravity were dominant things would have remained totally conservative and unchanging. The dominance of gravity would not provide a meaningful role for the repulsive force. A dominant repulsive force, however, allows room for things to happen, allows for change and allows gravity a partnership in the revelation of what we know as our universe.

The same holds true for the political field, as well. An ultra-conservative government, like a dominant force of gravity, would not allow for change and any sign of liberalism would be crushed.

Governments based on the free play of contesting ideologies allow for periodic dominance of either the liberal or conservative tendency. The liberal tendency seems to be generally dominant in free societies as it allows room for what is seen as necessary change.

Of course, it should be noted here, that an ultra-liberal system alone allowing change for change sake cannot work. It would lack the necessary continuity to hold itself together and would not be able to form cohesive communities. Some of the Occupy movements campsites, for example.

So, like the formation of our universe, our political realm is defined by a liberal/conservative, expansive/gravitational dynamic. And, again, such a dynamic is found throughout the nature of things.

Galaxies, for example, began as a liberal free-for-all of hydrogen and helium atoms that became trapped in pockets of conservative gravity. The action of the gravitational force within this liberality defined a particular galaxy and formed its individual stars.

Stars themselves are masses of chaotic liberal change held in place by the force of conservative gravity. A star is formed when an enormous amount of hydrogen gas collapses in on itself around a particular center of attraction. As it contracts the gas heats up and becomes a force for expansion. A balance between expansion and contraction is arrived at and the result is a controlled ongoing nuclear explosion. A star, in a sense, is in a liberal rush to change into something other than what it is. It seems hell bent on burning out as fast as possible in a wholesale letting go of itself while its gravitational force serves to conserve it as a nuclear furnace through time. Also, extremely liberal formations of new atoms are created in a star which could not take place without its conservative gravitational force holding it all together.

In a dying star the liberal and conservative forces go their separate ways. The star explodes and some of its matter, freed from the conservative restraints of the core, is jettisoned into space. The core of the star can then become an ultraconservative neutron star, or black hole. Through its enormous gravitational pull a black hole reduces all the matter to fundamental particles. It's as if it were trying to take things back to conditions that existed at the time of the big bang. That is as reactionary as anything can get.

The material world is made up of particles that are also formed by a conservative/liberal dynamic. For example, what goes on inside a proton, a particle in the nucleus of an atom, is totally chaotic. Its constituent quarks and gluons are in a constant frenzy of motion while exchanging identities with one another. All through this liberal change, however, particle identities are conserved. As an example, label three particles A, B and C. Particle A becomes B, B becomes C and C becomes A so that A, B and C are persistently represented. Thus, a liberal/conservative dynamic is in force.

The liberal free-for-all comprising quarks and gluons conspires somehow to form the extremely stable, conservative particles found in atomic nuclei. A proton's stability has been calculated to continue for ten million million million million million years.

Also, individual atoms adhere to a very conservative make-up. Each one of a particular kind is absolutely identical to any other of that kind. The rules that govern the linking of atoms to one another are also very conservative. The resulting molecular structures, however, amount to a very liberal array of material forms. Everything that exists, then, is a result of a dialogue between conservative and liberal tendencies.

DNA and the proteins they code for are highly conservative in structure and performance while the resultant biosphere is highly liberal in its resplendent variety. The overall integrity of living mechanisms is maintained between liberal and conservative elements, as in agents that favor mutation and those that favor invariance. A workable balance between the two elements must be maintained in order for life to endure and evolve.

If agents in favor of invariance were too conservative life could not have evolved passed the cellular colony stage. If the liberal elements, the agents for mutation, had held sway, every cell reproduced would have been so radically different from the previous one that no agreeable constitution could have been arrived at in order to produce a coherent life form beyond those of individual cells.

The same holds true for social organisms. If the tribes, the social cells, of our primitive ancestors were overly conservative in their ways, not allowing for any changes whatsoever in the way things were done, we could not have evolved out of the Hunter/Gatherer/Scavenger stage. Or, if the tribes were overly liberal and allowed every one of their members to continually change things according to whatever whimsy they concocted then cohesive units could not have been formed and, again, social evolution would not have been possible.

Our freedom lies in using our intelligence to determine how the liberal/conservative dynamic can best be configured at any given time. That is, constantly evaluating where we need to be conservative and where a liberal approach is called for. This could be achieved by tempering our perspectives with the knowledge that neither liberalism alone nor conservatism alone qualifies as a stand alone societal operating system. Such a regimen would serve to eliminate the extraneous noise in the political arena due to unwarranted claims of absolute righteousness from either side of the aisle. It would also encourage a more realistic overview of political organization and its relationship to society as a whole.

Political perspectives are not objective. They will always and forever fall short of the claims attributed to them by their adherents. They cannot in and of themselves show us the way to an optimum social organization. No particular ism is above the social landscape. They are part of it. No ism is capable of molding a viable society according to its precepts alone. History has demonstrated this fact time and again but it's a lesson we seem incapable of learning. That's one reason why history seems to be stuck in a vicious cycle.

Isms are not solely a priori intellectual inventions. They are a distillation and elaboration of the natural scope of things. We can no more effectively rule our societies by employing a particular ism than we can effectively rule ourselves by employing only selected areas of our brain. In our social organisms we are all too often, as it were, pitting one side of our brain against the other. This results in a no win situation for us all.

We are caught up in a power game. Politicians seek power to impose a one-sided view on society rather than to use their power to benefit the society as a whole. Presently we are too factionalized, too much at war with ourselves while wielding particular isms like clubs to clobber those of different isms. We need to be able to see how isms can work together. Like the Mondragon corporation has. That is where the real power lies. Continuing our comparisons of social and anatomical organization can be instructive here.

# 3.12 SOCIAL AND ANATOMICAL BODIES

Social bodies are complex entities, difficult and in some cases seemingly impossible to manage efficiently. On the other hand, our anatomies are even more complex and they are organized and managed in exemplary fashion. Of course, our anatomies are not perfect, things can go wrong with them, but for the most part they work quite well and the way in which things are managed anatomically can in some ways be instructive to social organization.

The reason our bodies work so well is due to the regulation by, and within, trillions of autonomous cells which design, build and maintain our anatomical existence from conception to death. Embryonic cells are identical to one another. Then, as the cells continue to multiply, they form a network through which particular identities are assigned to particular cells as they begin to form the various organs of the developing fetus. From within each and every cell the constitution of the whole body is created and maintained. It is not something imposed on them from a central power source. Cells, then, are subordinate to nothing but their own internal chemistry which is naturally geared to the needs of the whole body that they continually form and reform. The whole body's existence is part and parcel of the internal processes of its cells. When each and every cell is in good working order the entire organism they incorporate is assured a healthy life.

So, the enormous complexity of the human body is meticulously orchestrated from the microcosm in adherence to a shared constitution. This is accomplished from within cells where, again, as in the body politic, liberal and conservative elements are present.

When cells divide their objective is to reproduce identical copies of themselves by arranging all the genetic letters comprising all the rungs of the double helix of DNA to conform to its established code. This feat is accomplished between conservative regulatory agents concerned with reproductive invariance and a liberal free-for-all of "ideas" about how to form a new cell. So, on the one hand, we have conservative elements, enforcers of invariance, seeing to it that established codes are strictly adhered to and constitutional imperatives are preserved. On the other hand, we have an alphabet soup of genes virtually infinite in possible combinations, having no regard for established codes and tending to create all kinds of mutations which threaten the ongoing necessary cohesion from cell to cell.

Some mutation does, of course, manage to work its way into the system, otherwise life could not evolve. So, a workable balance between liberal and conservative elements had to be struck in order for cells to create and support coherent life forms while also allowing for some mutations to occur.

If, at the time of the creation of the first cells, conservative regulatory agents were able to dominate totally, life could not have evolved. The same would be true if the liberal elements had held sway. Every cell reproduced would have been so radically different from the previous one that no agreeable constitution could have been arrived at in order to form a coherent life form beyond those of individual cells. A mix of the two allows for conservation and change to operate synergistically so as to create the panoply of life forms we see today.

This kind of liberal/conservative dynamic can be seen at work in the evolution of modern social organisms, although not, perhaps, as synergistically. In the U.S. during the Great Depression and World War II the nation rallied around a common cause and the need for conformity was seen as paramount in the social order. This conformity gathered momentum and continued through the postwar economic boom and peaked with McCarthy's "witch hunt", after which the strict regimen to conform began to be seen as a mindless exercise.

Around this time mutations began to appear in the form of beatniks and sentiments for change began to gather momentum. Rock and roll came on the scene, beatniks evolved into hippies and yippies and in the sixties a prodigious number of mutants gathered together to severely challenge the established code of invariance and attempt to create a different society. The establishment's enforcers of invariance could not tolerate such a prospect and sought to eradicate the mutants who were considered nothing but threats to the American way of life. The mutants persisted, however, and eventually were able to make their mark and radically alter the course of conservative social institutions. And, though the two factions were conspiring together in carrying out a natural function of life which serves to introduce enough change into a system to ensure its prosperity, the two sides saw themselves as adversaries. One wonders whether the changes brought about by the mutants might have been more intelligently chosen had the situation been managed in a more enlightened manner, that is, with an objective overview which sees how the forces for change and those of invariance are mutually beneficial to one another and to the whole social organism for which they share common ground and goals.

The perception held by the enforcers of invariance that mutations are categorically harmful and the same perception on the part of mutants regarding the establishment can allow that which is truly harmful to gain advantage. This happens because there is no government overview with which to engineer a meaningful confluence of the two perceptions. Without such an overview we are often unable to recognize what is harmful and what is not as liberal and conservative factions become blind overheated adversaries.

The events and conditions which allowed for the spread of the AIDS virus in New York City, especially regarding the homosexual community, can be instructive here.

# 3.13 IMMUNE SYSTEMS COMPROMISED

In the Sixties, appropriate to the decade of "Do your own thing," "Let it all hang out," and "If it feels good do it," homosexuals sought to remove what they considered to be too many restrictions imposed upon them by society-at-large.Some of their number responded to the cause in, what one might say, was an excessively liberal fashion by introducing gay-sex-bars. This hard-core proposal came about as a result of the Stonewall incident when fringe homosexuals emerged from the nether regions to inspire a radical movement for gay rights. Stonewall was not known for allowing sexual activity on the premises but let's just say it was not wholly discouraged either.

The clientele of bars like Stonewall were made up of fringe homosexuals like drag queens, transexuals, male prostitutes, transvestite prostitutes and young homeless gays. Such bars did not have liquor licenses and were operated under the auspices of organized crime who had an arrangement with the police so they could stay in business. Nevertheless such bars were regularly raided by the police. Why? Perhaps it was a way of at least containing what police perceived to be unsavory behaviors that, if given free rein, might pose a threat to society.

Now, at the time of the Stonewall incident their were other gay bars in Manhattan that were operated within conventional specifications where police harassment did not occur. However, in the torrid climate prevailing in the Sixties, hotly contesting any sort of discrimination, such neat distinctions were not made and the Stonewall incident was hyped as representing the persecution of homosexuals in general. The gay-sex-bar contingency won out and their establishments were allowed to mushroom throughout the city in the name of human rights and they became a prime breeding ground for the AIDS virus, which is spread by the exchange of bodily fluids.

This deadly disease could be construed as nature's police action in response to a blatant disregard of the delicate balance between her creative and destructive forces (this is not to indict homosexuality per se but merely the pathological promiscuity some homosexuals insisted upon pursuing) as the Stonewall police action was enacted in response to a blatant disregard for social propriety. The official reason for the raid was lack of a liquor license but, as we all know, official reasons are not always the real or complete basis for carrying out a specific action. The police action in this case can be seen as an expression of society's immune system sensing the potentially destructive germ in unrestricted sexual conduct.

Of course, giving license to police state tactics can be just as destructive to society as AIDS. The point is, we shouldn't have to be pushed into such extremes. However, there was no governing perspective presiding over liberal and conservative factions which might have been able to resolve the matter in a salubrious manner. A government represented and controlled by politicians chronically aligned with one side or other of the political spectrum allows for burdensome imbalances to occur and stigmatizes the clear sightedness which is needed to recognize and prevent true threats from gaining advantage. Liberal and conservative factions which are mainly interested in seeking a dominant position for themselves in the body politic forego the possibility of developing the kind of clear vision necessary to identify real problems and enact the correct measures to deal with them. Thus, our social organisms, can suffer from an immune deficiency, a kind of AIDS, unable to protect themselves against the spread of illnesses like poverty, crime, corruption, pollution, etc. Only the proper alignment of liberal and conservative elements can create a society which is confident in its ability to accurately identify that which is truly harmful to it and that which is benign, or even invigorating. Only through such proper alignment can a society design effective measures to ensure its stability, prosperity and coherence. One needs to be able to judge what is and is not a real threat to the health and well being of a society without bias to a liberal or conservative perspective.

# 3.14 SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

A social organism is comprised of people forming associations for the purpose of conducting the necessary business of life in, one would suppose, the most salubrious fashion possible. Somehow, though, things always seem to get fouled up. And it always seems to be the people at the top who are to blame. Corporate types fouling up the environment, price gouging, price fixing, buying legislators, exploiting workers, etc. Politicians who pander to the moneyed interests while posing as champions of the people and who keep promising solutions for the problems caused by the "solutions" politicians had installed in the past. Law enforcement officials planting and/or mishandling evidence, using excessive force, being on the take, etc. But whatever suspicions one may have regarding the machinations of the powers-that-be and their intentions toward the society at large, one must allow that, under the present system, the possibility for the proper coordination of social dynamics required to conduct our affairs in the most salubrious fashion possible is sorely missing. That is, a proper cybernetic network with which to create a synergistic confluence of all the organs of society so that there is more symbiosis between them with less conflict and exploitation.

As it is now, the prevalent social dynamic is one in which members of particular associations tend to regard their group's survival as paramount over recognizing and maintaining their proper place within the overall scheme of things. Examples of such behavior are rampant and indulged in by whatever kind of association one can think of be it a government agency, a business, an investment bank, a political party, a street gang, etc. We have quasi-religious groups, either godly or secular, tearing at each others throats to secure the high moral ground as their exclusive territory. Right-to-life v pro-choice, for instance. And political parties who contend that their ideology provides the only worthwhile perspective and, thus, we forego the possibility of forging the super-vision necessary for more effective governance. We have bureaucracies like Health and Human Services, better known as Welfare, which exacerbated the very conditions it was formed to alleviate so as to ensure its survival at the expense of those it was supposed to serve. We have street gangs like the crips and bloods which are, perhaps, the most brutal manifestations of this pathologically insular mindset. We can single them out for condemnation but they are merely conforming to the behavior of the society at large, i.e., their associations are the only ones that matter. And we have the media providing the asylum where all this pathology becomes institutionalized.

Competing factions, such as right-to-rife v pro-choice, the crips v the bloods, liberals v conservatives and such, can serve to check one another so that neither side will become all powerful but what cannot be checked is the continuing deterioration of the social fabric these contentious groups cause.

It seems like all of our institutions lack a sense of propriety in managing themselves in relation to other institutions and to the overall social organism to which they belong. Without this holistic sense of things it is, of course, impossible to create and maintain a wholesome social/political system wherein all organs can achieve their proper goals while at the same time contribute to the health and well being of the whole society as they go about their business. With a sense of social propriety, a symbiotic confluence of all participating entities can be created that promotes particular and overall conditions of synergistic vitality. This is what all groups and individuals need to be interested in promoting in spite of their differences. This would make it possible for everyone to contribute to the integrity of the whole social organism while at the same time serving their own self-interests as well.

Is this an unrealistic ideal?

Not at all.

The merging of self-interest and collective-interest is not, as we have seen, some abstract alien idea which needs to be artificially imposed upon people, it is in our natures to be so oriented. The individual members of primitive tribes are concerned for the welfare of the tribe because it is vitally connected to their own self-interest. In our more advanced societies we have individuals working for the collective-interest of various associations, or "tribes", which are extensions of their self-interest, be it a business, a political party, a religion, etc. And one may believe that one is working for the betterment of the whole society through one's associations, but this does not always prove to be the case. A business can provide products and jobs but be harmful to the environment. Political parties in seeking their own advantage can interfere with establishing and promoting optimum social, political and economic conditions. Religious leaders who insist that their beliefs should be the law of the land create conflicts in society which threaten the ongoing cohesion of the overall community to which they belong and which is based upon religious freedom. We can lose sight of the larger picture as we become obsessed with our own peephole view of the world. The question for society is how to manage and contain all its various groups in a coherent manner.

Soviet communism attempted this through coercion from the top. The State had absolute power to create the perfect society and, not surprisingly, it botched the job. Attempting to micromanage a society from the top down is a flagrant violation of the nature of things. A macrocosm cannot create and manage the microcosm. The microcosm creates and manages the macrocosm. This is the natural condition of things and applicable to social organisms as well as any other structure. Trying to form a society the other way, from the top down, makes for unwieldy top heavy structures which are impossible to balance and eventually must fall apart for that very reason. The social structure of the United States is much too top heavy and seems to be losing the battle in its continual struggle to maintain a pragmatic balance. There is a lot of checking and finger pointing going on but nothing much to promote balance.

Proportion and symmetry are part and parcel of the concept of balance and these three elements might serve us better as societal goals than do the concepts of justice, equality and liberty. Of course, balance, proportion and symmetry do not have the seductive power of the concepts of justice, equality and liberty but without the former principles in view the latter ones are mere mirages that torment us with continual disillusionment. But, again, balance, proportion and symmetry can only be achieved by allowing the microcosm to form the macrocosm as in the balance, proportion and symmetry achieved through the cellular networks of anatomical organization.

Again, comparing the dynamics of the human anatomy to the social organism can serve to shed some light on the subject. Imagining the body politic of the United States as a human body the federal government would be its brain. As such, it is seen to be an enormous monstrosity, grotesquely out of proportion to the social body that struggles to support it. It is a brain riddled with tumorous bureaucracies, all swollen out in cancerous profusion that consider themselves to be the whole purpose of the society they feed upon. They consider their existence to be vitally important. More so than the vitality of the whole organism. Nothing should happen unless it is first processed through their corridors. This would be comparable to an individual, who, through some weird genetic program, designed a brain to micromanage every detail of every bodily organ, or even every cell in the body and, so, interfering with much of the body's necessary autonomous activity in the process.

The role of the brain in one's body is to coordinate, synchronize and modify certain bodily conditions by being constantly alert and immediately and accurately responsive to them via the body's nervous system. The messages to, from and within the brain must be handled swiftly and efficiently in order to maintain a healthy condition throughout the body. If, however, as it is with bureaucratized government, communications are forced to slither around cancerous labyrinths oozing out ineffectual, contradictory, counterproductive signals then the condition is one of ill health. The brain is at odds with itself and is unable to function as a coordinated coordinating unit.

Now, this is not a prelude to a conservative harangue about the need for less government. No. Arguments for more or less government tend to obscure and distract from the rationale of establishing and maintaining a government proportionate to the body it is part of. Which must now and always be the desired objective.

For this objective to be realized the government, of course, must change. Not just in the perennial transition of power, which is a meaningless exercise for entrenched bureaucracies and ongoing corporate power. Not just in terms of cosmetic change but in terms of a complete dismantling and recreation of all the organs of the body politic whenever necessary. That is, continually, periodically taking our institutions apart and putting them back together again, forming and reforming them, as needed, in ways best suited to deal with the ever changing social configurations that have been consistently outmaneuvering our misshapen, overweight bodies politic for decades.

Changes need to be made in government similar to those which have been and are being made in business. Namely, the transformation of linear, hierarchical bureaucratic dinosaurs into spatial arrangements of small, discrete, fleet of foot components able to respond and transform themselves as volatile social, economic and environmental conditions require.

As we have seen, it is the natural order of things to develop the macrocosm from the microcosm. Indeed, everything is formed in like manner. The complex intricacy of the human body is formed and maintained through the autonomous networking of individual cells. So, a system of small integrated components is what we should be looking at for the re-creation of the social organism. That is, a society made up of a network of autonomous localities forming from within themselves all the political, social and economic organs needed for their own particular situations while at the same time creating out of themselves the larger body politic in which they would all be incorporated.

Communities, then, would function as centers unto themselves with respect to their associations with other communities and to the society at large as well. The localities would form out of themselves, say, a county government made up of an individual representative from each locality. This process would be repeated at the county terminal with counties networking to form a state apparatus, and so on and so forth for regional and national terminals of government. The microcosm forms the macrocosm congruous to the contours of the microcosm and therefore prevents the macrocosm from becoming something alien to the microcosm.

A social organism must also be formed in congruity with its natural environment and so we must look at bio-regions in designating borders.

All terminals of government, in realtime communication with one another, must contribute what timely input each has to offer from their particular vantage point in regard to a given situation and decide among themselves how best to handle it. Generally speaking, it would be incumbent upon local terminals to resolve their own problems. When this would not be possible, however, the matter would be relegated to the next terminal and so on until some satisfactory solution was formulated. Lines of authority would not be altogether fixed but would be commensurate to the value of the input one had to offer in an ongoing process of checks and balances throughout the system.

So, if a problem was irreconcilable at a local terminal authority would be given to the next one to impose a solution. However, if and when the parties involved at the local terminal agreed to abide by a different solution arrived at among themselves, which they found preferable to the one imposed upon them by the county or other terminal of government, then the imposed solution could be overturned in favor of the local agreement.

This kind of system would give localities better representation and allow for programs and policies to be as fine tuned as possible to particular situations.

For example, the gay-sex-bar situation, previously discussed, could have been handled much better by the social system herein suggested. As it was, a local problem was absorbed into a heated national debate concerning discrimination against minorities. Homosexuals became a cause to champion and the gay movement was able to get a decision handed down from remote power structures which allowed excessive demands to shape policy at the local terminal. Gay-sex-bars were deemed to have a right to exist and particular localities had to abide by that decision.

Now, it is all well and good to be able to plead one's case to government agencies removed from one's community but after the decision is handed down communities should be afforded the opportunity to work the problem through to, what all the local parties involved might consider among themselves to be, a more conciliatory solution for all concerned. Such a solution might be a customization of the decision handed down to them from the county or state.

For instance, in light of the sex-bar decision a community which had been discriminating against homosexuals in certain ways might want to take another look at the situation and come up with a more reasonable plan to solve the problem. Community leaders could devise a course of action that would satisfy the legitimate concerns of their homosexual population in more moderate and more constructive ways. The one side ceases discriminatory practices in housing, employment, etc., while the other forgoes the sex-bar idea. If a minority truly wants to be part of a community it is not going to insist upon something which would upset that community if the community is forthright in its policies of accommodation.

Through this kind of networking it would be possible to establish an integrated system that forms social bonds which allow for differences while not tolerating contamination. Bonds that define how we are individually oriented, how we fit into the overall scheme and how we can all find ways of making things work more harmoniously than is now the case.

A community must be able to decide for itself what policies and programs it needs to engender to keep itself fit and healthy. In extreme cases it might have to temporarily impose extreme measures on itself to achieve a healthy condition. Communities rife with crime, for instance, might choose to declare martial law to get things under control. Such a police state enacted from within rather than imposed from without and enforced by members of the community would be much more tolerable, would not threaten the law of the land with such extremism and could easily evolve into normalcy as soon as conditions warranted.

Some such communities have taken matters into their own hands with superb results. Citizens of a project in East St. Louis that had been under siege with theft, violence and drugs formed a committee with the power to decide who could, and who could not, take up residence within their borders. They were successful in cleaning things up by applying a policy of strict discrimination based on bad behavior in reference to who would or would not be allowed to be their neighbors. Such discrimination could not have been imposed by the government agency in charge of the project because it would be seen as intrusive but administered by the people of the community upon their own it was an acceptable policy.

Government agencies residing in remote power centers which have no real interest in the communities under their purview cannot accurately prescribe the correct measures particular communities need to improve their conditions. The people living in the community know better than anyone what prescriptions to administer for the ailments they are inflicted with and no outside agency should be able to override the mandates they decide upon. They would, of course, be monitored, guided and influenced by the society at large.

People need to have a direct input with respect to their immediate surroundings so that they can effectively manage their environment. Being manipulated by remote centralized power structures distract and abstract us from immediate associations. Big business, big government, big media and big religion do more to distort people's perception than to promote reason, balance and clear vision.

Within each of us resides a complex system of scales by which we weigh the appropriateness of what is going on around us. It is to everyone's benefit that these individual systems be allowed to fully develop through their vigorous interaction with other individual systems to form and reform the social milieu within which the individuals reside. Being instructed and enveloped by remote power structures promoting a broad clinical socialization of society for their own interests weakens the necessary discriminatory apparatus of individuals which in turn erodes social cohesion.

One's individual system of scales must be, first and foremost, fine tuned to one's immediate environment in order to be able to weigh individual elements against each other, what is known about them, how they fit into the overall scheme, how one is effected by them, how one effects them and so on and so forth and through this process arrive at what action if any should be taken to deal with particular instances.

So, we have subjective views interacting with other subjective views to form objective harmony through which one feels one's subjectivity vital and elevated in the social organism one is instrumental in forming. We see social order as growing out from ourselves rather than something to be imposed upon us. This conforms to the nature of things progressing from the microcosm to the macrocosm. If everyone as an autonomous arbiter of what is and is not conducive to a harmonious environment is not allowed to act as such then license is given, through the manipulation of centralized power structures, to those whose sense of harmony might be cacophonous.

For example, we have an instance in a crowded subway car in New York City in 1986. The people aren't packed in like sardines but all the seats are taken and several passengers are standing. One of the occupants of a seat, an individual of an ethnic minority, sits complacently smug behind what he seems to consider an impregnable wall of noise thundering out from his stereophonic "boom box" on the floor in front of him. The other people on the train are obviously annoyed and/or severely stressed and even feel threatened by the anti-social behavior but no one does anything about it. They're all paralyzed. Totally helpless to do anything. Their power to act, to form the social organism from among themselves in that locality is usurped by forces from remote power structures. If a group of white people approach the person, racism comes into play. Someone of his own ethnicity might be reluctant to do anything out of concern for showing one of his own up in front of a bunch of white people. Other things come into play such as people's conditioning by officialdom that such situations are matters for the authorities to handle. In this case the transit police. The guy might be dangerous he might have a knife or a gun. After all he is a minority youth who as we have been programmed to assume is armed and dangerous.

So, the controlling factor of this microcosm is not the individuals who comprise it but rather irrelevant issues, fears and images perpetrated by remote power centers such as the government and the media. The guy with the radio knows he has those powers behind him supporting his behavior and uses it for his own purposes. He knows that people are conditioned to regard young minorities as being vicious violent creatures who can't be reasoned with. He knows the total reliance on official authority we've been conditioned to embrace, and being a minor he knows he's beyond the reach of official authority. He has also been conditioned to believe he's a victim of a society which is out to thwart his every move and if he can't do whatever he wants whenever he wants he feels the society is to blame in oppressing him. To choose not to do what he feels like doing would be a capitulation to social propriety i.e., the enemy. All these factors were at work in that subway car preventing the people involved from creating a harmonious social organism that they could all feel part of in a constructive manner. In this microcosm we see the viral contagion that can be spread through the social body virtually unchecked because it is officially mandated. So, a wholesome self-discipline, a consideration of others, a perspective of one's place in the total picture is egregiously distorted by, again, remote centers of power.

David Dinkins, while Mayor of New York City, said in a speech something to the effect that the police force is the only line of defense against the epidemic of crime. If that's true then surely we're doomed as a society. In a healthy society the law and its enforcement are the last resort. The law is like a backstop for when things might occasionally get out of control. Foremost in a social organism are the conditioning properties which form a mind-set in people whereby they are in control of the law rather than the other way around. That is, their personal views on what is and is not appropriate behavior continually form and shape their communities with respect to creating a microcosm wherein everyone's voice can become part of an overall harmony.

The way to achieve this is to have communities as autonomous centers of power with individuals acting as autonomous arbiters of their immediate surroundings who are able to freely contest with one another to create vital and meaningful associations within which to thrive. Some might say that such autonomy is the road to anarchy or others might say it would allow Nazis and other such extremists to take control of communities and spread their power through the whole society. However, it is the lack of social cohesion, more often than not the result of the disintegration of a society's ruling entity, that fosters the emergence of extremists. This is, of course, how Hitler was able to take power.

When a body is held together from the top, when only one community, a ruling entity, is responsible for the fitness of every community the failure of that one community means the whole organism is at risk. But such a risk would be virtually eliminated if autonomous communities were predominantly responsible for the creation of society and were directly involved in forming the entity which possessed whatever centralized power the autonomous communities deemed necessary to ensure their general well being.

The whole measure of a society can be taken by how it effects, and is effected by, the individual. In the United States individuals are primarily thought of as consumers to be cajoled, conned and/or compelled to buy any number of nicely packaged products from kitty litter to political platforms. Individuals are seen as quarry to be captured through the clever use of advertising techniques which operate on the irrational, the sensational, the unconscious level of our psyches. Hit them below the belt is the modus operandi. Or as one ardent member of a political faction once said, "When you've got them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow."

We are continuously barraged with messages, images, signals, aimed at manipulating us in the crudest way possible. Appealing to our higher faculties would, one might suppose, be less democratic than appealing to the lowest common denominator. We are jerked around this way and that way by government, business, media and a variety of crusading cults without any recourse for individuals to correspond in a mindful manner. The prevailing attitude of almost every social, political, economic set and subset is "you are either for us or against us".

One would think that perhaps the Media might be the place to provide a forum that would serve to find common ground between the various factions. However, the Media is merely a multi-ringed circus of personalities and events presenting the most salacious and titillating aspects of the social/political scene to garner the highest rating-share possible. Media stars pose as the guardians of reason and rationality while merely serving to highlight the scenes of mayhem and madness they're only to eager to broadcast. They are dutifully serving their master's monstrous appetite for ratings.

Back in 1991 the tape recording of the Rodney King beating is a case in point. It was shown over and over and over again because of its great drawing power. How much could a network charge an advertiser for the commercial space that immediately preceded an airing of the beating? Big bucks to be sure. There was little effort on the part of news people to put the incident in a somewhat broader perspective than the peephole view offered on the tape.

In the trial of the policemen involved in the arrest of Rodney King the jury viewed an enhanced version of the video tape in slow motion and they saw a somewhat different version of the event than was seen by TV viewers.

Then, after the trial, instead of showing the tape as the jury saw it the media paints the white, middle class jury as out of touch, racist, law and order freaks and fascist. They do not bother to show the tape of the beating in the enhanced way that it was presented during the trial. No, that would be boring, of no interest, put people to sleep. It would be of no intrinsic value to the networks to engender clear-eyed perceptions of the world. Images with impact and emotion that's what keeps people tuning in. Rodney King was beaten. That's all. End of story. Gotta keep it simple. Black and white. Good copy. High ratings.

The individual, then, is seen as an object to be manipulated by the powers-that-be for their own purposes. We are encouraged to take sides in virtually every aspect of the social arena. Either we're politically correct or we're not. Demagogues are everywhere crusading for their pet ism and stridently arguing with the opposition. Viewers are bullied into making a choice. Either you're for or against the one or the other. There's no room in the discussions for a reasonable assessment of particular issues. You love them or you hate them but you can't ignore them. And the Media loves them. They give good bytes.

If we think of electronic media as our collective nervous system, which in fact it is, we see that it is in a constant state of turmoil, anguish and extreme tension. It depicts the world we live in as coming apart. Our institutions are failing us. Business is ripping us off. The police, the clergy, politicians, corporations are all abusing their powers. We're all feeling victimized in one way or another by all the corruption and crime running rampant throughout society, and there is seemingly nothing anyone can do about it. No wonder the nerves of individuals are raw, edgy, brittle and needing little provocation in some cases to be pushed over the edge.

As an illustration of how the picture of the world we get from the media effects us we can compare people's behavior during two New York City blackouts twelve years apart, one in 1965 the other in 1977. The blackout in '65 happened on a weekday, in the evening, as people were leaving work and it was an occasion for pulling together, an almost welcomed break from the routine and if one wasn't stuck on an elevator or in a subway there was a feeling of celebration in the air. People stood in intersections and directed traffic, candlelight in the widows of restaurants and apartments glowed softly and warmly giving off an aura of peace and calm reassurance. The message was clear to everyone that if all else fails we can depend on each other. A few scattered and minor incidents of looting amounted to insignificant aberrations in the overall spirit of cooperation.

Twelve years later during the blackout of '77 it was quite a different story. It was a time fraught with tension and distrust. It was a time of opportunism. A time of wholesale looting and destruction.

Why such a difference in people's behavior in the span of twelve years? How could the same situation in '77 illicit such a dramatically different response from the one in '65?

Our collective psyche, our sensibilities of individual and social propriety, had been severely damaged in the interim years as our institutions, which are extensions of ourselves, were being displayed as intrinsically corrupt. Government, corporations, the pentagon, law enforcement were all out to get what they could for themselves no matter what they had to do or who they had to hurt to get it. We had Watergate, Vietnam, assassinations with suspicions of government involvement, the Democratic convention in Chicago, Serpico, etc. This unraveling of our social institutions is experienced through electronic communication as the unraveling of our own sense of order.

Those things did happen as reported but what was implicit as we watched the reports on TV is that there was nothing that we the viewers could do about any of it. And all the pent up frustration let loose during the blackout. People took matters into their own hands as the opportunity presented itself.

For another example of how the electronic media, acting as our collective nervous system, effects group behavior we have the 1993 L.A. riots.

Again, the Rodney King affair as presented on television stripped us of the possibility of any objectivity whatsoever about the incident. It was obviously a clear cut case of vicious police brutality and that must be the only verdict possible for any jury anywhere. One could sense the violent pressure on the legal proceedings to bring about this verdict which was already decided on in the streets and arrived at through highly questionable perceptions received via our electronic nervous system.

When the jury in the trial of the policemen involved in Mr. King's arrest reached its not guilty verdict the riots which ensued had been instigated by the images our collective nervous system had presented us with. So thorough was the influence of this electronic medium that government officials from the congress to the president were forced to submit. Some even went so far as to condone the rioting. The Bush administration brought charges of violating Mr. King's civil rights against the arresting officers and they were retried and found guilty on that basis. Perhaps that should have been the basis for the first trial. It was certainly a more sensible charge than the one of premeditated assault lodged by an excessively ambitious prosecutor.

The possibility that the first trial's not-guilty verdict was, perhaps, a victory of jurisprudence over a greedy prosecution was never considered by the media. Prompted by what seemed to be an open and shut case, because of the video tape and opinion polls, the prosecutor charged the officers with premeditation in their treatment of Mr. King. In other words, the officer's actions regarding the suspect had no relation to the legitimate arrest but was a result of their wanting to beat up on a black guy. If the prosecution had been content with a charge more in keeping with the actual event, like aggravated assault or excessive force in making an arrest, the jury might have seen things their way.

The prosecution thought they could get away with an inappropriate charge since they believed like everyone else that everyone's mind was already made up. Did they forget that juries are not supposed to make up their minds until all the evidence can be intelligently viewed and reflected upon in a deliberate manner in a safe sane atmosphere protected from the unbalanced sway of media manipulations? The jurors seemed to focus their deliberations on what would be an appropriate verdict given the inappropriate charges against the defendants.

In the trial of the L.A. Rioters the situation was very different. Leniency and understanding for them and their crimes were the order of the day and a protected sealed atmosphere could not be created for the jury sitting on that case. It seems that some of the jurors not only felt responsible for deliberating the case but also for the effect their decision might have upon the society's collective nervous system. The media, which had a distorting effect on both trials, is becoming the ultimate judge and jury. A judicial system based on Nielsen ratings.

Some people may not think electronic media has the powerful effect that has been proffered here. TV has been gradually developing over the last fifty years and slowly, but steadily, increasing its sway over our perceptions, the magnitude of its impact on the collective psyche can be difficult to appreciate. But if you could go back in time one hundred years or so and tell someone living in the 1890s that you had the means of feeding fabricated images directly into people's brains twenty-four hours a day that person might surmise you had somehow managed to bring the art of hypnosis to its ultimate power.

In watching television, as under hypnosis, we're giving over control of our nervous system, the configuration of perceptions received from the world around us, to others who do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. It's difficult to focus in on a confident propriety, a balanced ordering of things, for oneself and one's surroundings when one is constantly presented with distorted images that are designed to incite one's temperament to one degree or other for the purpose of persuading one to buy or buy into some material or ideological product.

In realizing that television media operates as society's nervous system we might become more concerned about who's controlling the data we're receiving, how it is being presented and what's being said compared to the images being shown. We might want to consider the intentions behind a newscast. Is the packaging of a news program geared to furthering an agenda or to providing an accurate representation of a particular events? Are the piecemeal impressions of the world that we get from a particular broadcast reliable? Is it rumor, speculation, opinion, fact or fiction? Are we buying into the spin?

We should take into account how our perceptions are colored with respect to who and where we are. Imagine how a black person in Watts would react to a video tape, like that of the Rodney King arrest, compared to a white person in Beverly Hills. As with all we see and hear in the news, and anywhere else for that matter, we need to ask whether the impression we get from a particular report is one that we put stock in because we want to believe it or one that we disdain because we don't want to believe it. What can we really determine as entirely factual is always a good question to ask about information of any kind? This is a lot to ask of any individual educated or not because everyone wants what they want to believe to be the truth. But it's a discipline we all need to cultivate.

Of course, the Rodney King tape was in essence a portrayal of the police state that many blacks in neighborhoods like Watts feel that they are subjected to on a daily basis. And, here, finally was unmistakable proof for the whole world to see firsthand what black people all too frequently endured at the hands of law enforcement officials. Here was an opportunity for police officers to be held accountable for all the wrongs that black communities have suffered over too many years. The trial of the arresting officers in the Rodney King case was perceived by many to be a showcase for the mistreatment of blacks in general. In reality, of course, the officers in question were only to be tried for the specific charges put forth by the prosecution and the crimes of others had no bearing on their guilt or innocence as far as a jury was concerned. That fine distinction was, however, understandably nonexistent for those who expected the trial's all but guaranteed outcome to be a vindication for their ongoing abuse. So, the onus of presenting as accurate a view as possible of events rests on the shoulders of the media.

There is definitely a problem with remote centers of power presiding over every community. Our very homes have been taken over by electronic media centers and we exist in their insane asylum twenty-four hours a day. Television rules over the home while it should be under the control of the people who live there. We need to take back our homes, our neighborhoods, our communities and install a society which corresponds to the balanced view of things that every individual must be encouraged to acquire in order to successfully negotiate through the world in which we all live. What is needed is a society emanating from individuals freely grappling with one another to form the necessary associations that will serve to foster the vital connections between individuals, their communities and the rest of the world. This would be a society which remains true to the contours of the individual from the microcosm to the macrocosm just as a living organism remains true to its cellular components while the cellular components remain true to the organism as a whole.

The judgments individuals make regarding social propriety are extended into law but in that extension we should not forfeit the ability to have our immediate individual judgments hold sway in creating all of our social environments. Total reliance on officialdom to bring those judgments to bear is surrendering the soul of society to bureaucratic fossilization. It goes against the sensibilities of most people to be subjected to a stereophonic radio being played full blast in a subway car. This sentiment is extended into law. It's against the law to play radios on the subway. We cannot, however, rely totally on the law. We have to know that people who are freely interacting with one another, to establish, re-establish and maintain a healthy mix of sociability, create law and order. The people in the subway car knew the individual with the radio was not behaving in compliance with propriety. But what good was that? What difference does it make what the law is if people become paralyzed to offer their particular judgments about immediate situations? Or that the one who is breaking the law feels justified by the powers-that-be in doing so? What difference does it make if we know how things should be in any given situation but do not have the wherewithal to directly contribute to the quality of that situation?

Now, if we allow that the electronic media is an extension of individual nervous systems and acts as the collective nervous system of the society we must be able to respond to the information we receive from it as one responds to information received via one's own nervous system as one goes about one's everyday business. That is, we get a picture of the world, size it up in relation to our position and take immediate action according to our purposes. But more often than not the information we receive via electronic media tends to be that which may affect us but which we have little or no recourse to take immediate action in response to. We witness a lot of nightmarish things on the TV screen and as in a dream state we're helpless to stop them. And the nightmare doesn't go away when the TV is turned off. The homelessness, the corruption, the violent crime, the pollution are a continuing reality but there doesn't seem to be anything anyone can do to effectively turn things around.

All the information we receive about these things is of no use, except as a torment, if we are incapable of taking direct action ourselves in response. We see in a nightly news report something threatening to us and yet we're helpless to deal effectively with it. This creates a disconnect between us and our immediate environs. It's like being unable to react to the stimuli our nervous system processes in reference to a speeding truck we are about to be hit by. Being plugged into the electronic media you have stuff coming at you from all directions at once along with contradictory messages and incomplete pictures making it difficult to know how to react or which way to turn. So there's a lot of nervous energy being generated without proper coordination regarding its deployment.

For example, an inner city area that is rife with poverty and crime becomes the target of many agencies and programs prodding and tugging young people to go in this or that direction, to behave in this or that particular way. This along with the messages on the tube and those emanating from the streets causes the intensity of stress on one's nervous system to be dramatically increased;

"It's all your fault."

"It's society's fault."

"We're here to help you because you are helpless."

"We're here to help you to help yourself."

"Crime pays."

"Crime doesn't pay."

"Youth is everything."

"You have no future."

"You can be anything you want to be."

"You don't have a chance."

"Your feelings don't matter."

"Your feelings are all that matters."

The original break dancing frequently witnessed on the streets of New York City in the 1970s was a product of the inner city and seemed to express the intense inundation of stimuli one was subjected to and for which one was at a loss to properly coordinate. The version of break dancing that made its way onto TV shows was slick and refined and processed into an amusing oddity. It turned a raw, powerful art form into mush. The dancers on the streets were using their bodies to express how the insanities they were subjected to on a daily basis affected them. In so doing they became a microcosm of the society in general as it is jerked around from one shocking or catastrophic event to another with apparently no mind with which to effectively govern itself. The break dancer isolates parts of his body in sharp jerky movements giving off a spasmodically rippling effect as though he was incapable of governing himself in a coordinated manner. One wonders whether his body was somehow short circuited or was being torturously manipulated through remote control devices operated by sadistic fiends competing to take power over him. The dancer would occasionally move, gliding effortlessly hither and thither, as if, again, through the manipulation of some external force beyond his control. All this culminated into the beleaguered dancer spinning around and around on his back in an exasperated subjugation to the madness that was consuming him.

This is the dance we've been dancing, from individuals to institutions, as it has become increasingly difficult to control ourselves and our society. And it will continue to get worse as long as people are incapable of responding to their environment directly and immediately with regard to information they receive about their situation, whatever the source. Responding as the people in the East St. Louis project did where a committee was set up by the community to take control and be responsible for itself. This kind of action needs to be taken in every community and in every home. We need to engage ourselves in applying our individual sensibilities about what is and is not appropriate behavior, mixing it up with those same judgments from other individuals and creating the kind of homes and communities in which we all feel a sense of belonging and a sense of embodiment. Again, some communities might find it necessary to initially install something like martial law to be instituted and conducted by the citizens of those communities until they find themselves able to return to a less restricted regimentation.

Such extreme measures would not, of course, be taken in isolation. They would be initiated and conducted in concert with neighboring communities, appropriate agencies from all levels of government and conscientious monitoring by all forms of our collective nervous system. A community must, of course, be receptive to input from those outside itself but must also reserve the right to decide, with the full participation of all of its citizens, what is appropriate and what is not within its own borders.

Currently there are extreme conditions found in all facets of our society. Individuals and special interest groups are going off in extreme directions on their own. They are encouraged toward extremes through the dynamics of our institutions. In government, for instance, it's not what's right or what's best for society that matters but rather whose side is winning the power game. In the judicial hearings concerned with the appointment of Judge Rehnquist to the Supreme Court one member of the party opposing the appointment was responsible for getting a quote out to the press which was supposedly a statement made by the appointee. So, it became widely reported that Judge Rehnquist said, "I am not for an integrated society."

For the most part the press corps and electronic media, whose only interest, it seems, was in supporting the anti-Rehnquist faction, didn't bother to check the quote and the only way the real story got out to the general public was during the Senate hearings, which aired on C-SPAN, where Orin Hatch held up a particular newspaper which had printed the quote in full and set the record straight. The quote was indeed spoken by Judge Rehnquist but it was only a slanderous part of his full statement which was, "I am not for an integrated society, nor am I for a segregated society, I am for a just society." This is, of course, a healthy judicious perspective. As a judge he is not directly responsible for policy matters that are instrumental in fashioning the particulars of the society's structure but is merely concerned with adjudging laws on the basis of their constitutionality. The senator responsible for the dissemination of the partial quote, whose name is not worth the mention, would have done well to take notice of the judge's full statement, of which he was well aware. Instead, he chose to put his political interests above the interests of social propriety and indulge in the fashionable, crass political sport of irresponsibly, denigrating those in the opposing party in seeking to advantage one's own party.

Well, one might say, this is all fun and games, but when the fun and games escalate to the kind of behind-the-scenes machinations in the Judge Thomas affair, largely conducted by the same senator involved in the Rehnquist slander, it becomes more like, as Judge Thomas said, a lynching.

So, again, as with the Rodney King tape, our collective nervous system was presented with a mesmerizing media event which sent it into spasms of ill informed reactions. People vociferously spouted out there convictions favoring the one combatant over the other while posing as if they actually knew what they were talking about. It was all reflexive nonsense really. The Anita Hill v Clarence Thomas bout, craftily stage managed by the senators in charge of political skullduggery, provided a forum where an already splintered social consciousness could only become more fragmented. We were forced to choose between two political gladiators according to our pre-programmed agendas which had nothing to do with Anita Hill or Clarence Thomas and whatever their relationship might have been. They were objects through which the polarization of society was aggravated. Grist for the mill one was already invested in. And that's how one decided which of the two was lying and which was telling the truth as if anyone could know for sure. The truth exists in a larger universe than that of a politically sponsored television spectacle, but it was all too provocative not to be exploited for one's own purposes. All too viscerally exciting for one not to get charged up about and root for one of the participants over the other. We'll never know the truth about the relationship between Thomas and Hill but it was riveting television, as was the Rodney King tape. Perhaps, at this point, that's all that matters.

These types of media events add to the polarization of an already overly polarized and fragmented society. We are conditioned to be partisan players, we are encouraged to become fanatical about endorsing one side of an issue over the other and force that point of view onto others. Groups of all kinds, believing in the absolute goodness of their causes, feel they have the right to destroy people's property, block the flow of traffic on busy city streets and even shoot other people dead as zealots from the right-to-life camp were so fond of doing, shooting those who were somehow connected to women's health clinics. This rabid enthusiasm about one's cause is endemic in our society and is as corrosive to the social fabric as is the drug problem. Indeed, the intense commitment one experiences through one's involvement with fanatical groups is like a powerful drug and should, perhaps, be treated like a harmful addiction.

Take the case of one particular right-to-lifer, super charged by his claim to absolute moral authority, who victimized a family's tragedy in a most despicable way. As a result of injuries sustained in an auto accident a pregnant woman was hospitalized in a coma. Her doctor recommended that she have an abortion because in her weakened condition her system could not support the life of the fetus along with her own. So, neither mother nor child would survive. For the woman's family it was, as one might imagine, an agonizing decision to have to make even though the situation left no alternative.

A so-called right-to-life group seized upon this opportunity to demonstrate their mindless fanaticism. One of their adherents attempted, through legal proceedings, to gain custody of the comatose woman in order to make the crucial decision himself and, thereby, prevent the abortion from taking place.

The man was obviously intoxicated with belief in his absolute moral certitude and in no condition to make rational judgments. No one under the influence of absolute dogma is capable of making such judgments. They believe that some divine right gives them license to act as if nothing else exists, nothing else is real, except their dogma. A dogma which they are certain, beyond any doubt whatsoever, everyone should be subject to, without exception. So, such people have no compunction at all about exploiting a family in the throes of a horrendous catastrophe in order to force their assumptions upon them. And this, in total disregard of anyone's right to life.

The case went to court and the judge, known for his conservative outlook, found no basis for the woman in question to be in the custody of anyone but her own family. The abortion was performed and the woman survived. So, the whole affair merely served to exasperate a family's anguish and to elucidate the abject lust for domination lurking under the crusading cloak of absolute moralists.

There's something about this society, or these times, which unleashes people's irrationality and neglects to develop a way to rationally contain the irrational in us. We want to do the hard core thing with drugs, violence, sex and ideologies according to our particular inclinations while rationality is marginalized.

Presidents, congressmen, governors all take sides on issues like abortion and exacerbate an already volatile situation instead of using their office to effectively contain disparate groups and impress upon them the necessity of putting the cohesion of the whole social organism before indulging in vehement expressions of extreme convictions.

The government should be rational enough to realize that everything cannot be solved through legislation. Some things are best left up to the individual to decide. Problems arise when overzealous "cause" groups can have, and believe they need to have, their particular point of view legitimized by the legislature and wage an all out war to gain political advantage for that very purpose.

However, all these various groups represent micro-centers of power which are displacing the old macro centers of power in this day and age of technological decentralization. And this is the debilitating condition which must be effectively addressed. It is this phenomenon which contributes to people acting out their irrational impulses with such alacrity. The center cannot hold. What is needed is a change in the structure of our institutions so that these newly created micro-centers can all be reasonably incorporated into one constitutionally sound body.

At present it is a chaotic situation as micro-centers of power vie with each other for macro center control when they don't really need to. They don't need to be legitimized by centralized power organizations such as the federal or state government. They are in and of themselves complete spheres of influence as powerful as any government agency. Whether or not a group like Right-to-life has its point of view made into law is inconsequential. Its real power is in its ability to instantly disseminate its message throughout society without restriction. Laws may come and go as political whimsy decrees but the right to get one's message out loud and clear is, and must continue to be, guaranteed in perpetuity.

Centralized power structures, like federal and state governments, cannot be vacillating between the poles of micro-centers of power according to the personal beliefs of those who happen to be in control of centralized power at any given time. We cannot be legislating one moral point of view over another, now this one, now that, as fashion dictates and expect a coherent social body to be the result. We need to have a governing perspective over fractious factions which does not take sides and is instrumental in facilitating their coexistence. They need to be contained within an overall structure which does not allow for the wholesale erosion of the social fabric they are now capable of causing. The government should act as referee in such matters as the abortion debate making sure that groups such as Right-to-life and Pro-choice play within the rules, see to it that each has equal opportunity to air their particular point of view and let individuals decide the issue for themselves.

We might need some quasi-government organization acting as adjunct or ombudsmen or combination of both to take such groups to task and perhaps even find common ground for them to join forces around. For instance, one might say to the Right-to-life group that their belief that life begins at the moment of conception and, therefore, that abortion is murder, is an article of faith on their part and one which was conveniently concocted specifically for the political battleground. Traditionally, Christianity had no such regard for the fetus, or the zygote. Again, there is not even a high regard for a newborn infant in the Catholic Church because until baptized a newborn cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. At any rate this article of faith the right-to-lifers purport to hold so dear should not be legally imposed on others who do not share that belief. The moment of conception when sperm enters the egg cell is one event in a series of events which may or may not lead to the birth of a child. To isolate the moment of conception and hold it up as something miraculous or sacred as a sign that God is now in the process of creating another human being but was not instrumental in any of the other steps leading up to the conception is to take a very curious view of God's involvement in our affairs. One could certainly take the position that God's signal to us that He wants to create another human being is the sexual arousal that may occur between any man and any woman at any time and if this arousal is not acted upon until a child is conceived it is an act of murder. Crazy? Yes. But so is limiting God's role in the human reproductive process to the moment a sperm penetrates an egg cell. And, given that a large percentage of embryos under God's care are spontaneously aborted, are we to suppose that God is an abortionist?

The other side of the issue has its share of inanities as well. Abortion, they say, has to do with control of a woman's body. To have an abortion is merely a woman exercising control over her own body. Indeed, a woman should have control over her own body and should exercise that control prior to the need for an abortion. If a woman really has control over her own body she won't have unwanted pregnancies. Of course, some such pregnancies will occur no matter what and women must be free to choose how to handle that condition.

So, the two groups fight each other for their irrational points of view with government officials taking sides and exacerbating the conflict. The separate factions are not governed at all in the sense of being directed toward a way of handling their differences in less abrasive ways and, perhaps, even to finding common ground. For common ground does exist.

For instance, both sides should have an interest in lessening the number of abortions in the US. The Right-to-life side would like to see zero abortions but that is, of course, totally unrealistic. Legally or illegally there will always be a certain amount of abortions performed. As for the Pro-choice side, one would expect that they are not interested in promoting the idea of abortion in and of itself or attempting to increase the number of abortions performed as a sign of their power and influence. One would expect that they would also be concerned about the high number of abortions performed in this country and would, in the interest of women's health, be in favor of decreasing that number as much as possible. Most people, I'm sure, would consider it better that a woman not have to undergo such an operation. If those on both sides of the issue could agree to funnel their energies together into the prevention of unwanted pregnancies it might be a healthier situation for all concerned.

As it is now the only thing both sides agree to is that the fetus is nothing more than a political football used by politicians to try and score points with their constituents. That is not a healthy situation. It is indeed a rather pathetically sick one. And it is this kind of situation that is exacerbated by the continual media blitz of individuals representing a particular agenda arguing with each other in a dog fight to the death.

All kinds of talking heads from intellectuals to the members of street gangs appear on TV shows and emphatically demonstrate the glory in living by one's convictions alone without regard to holistic umbrellas. This is not to suggest there is anything necessarily wrong with having convictions. It's only when they get so distorted as to block the use of common sense, prevent the development of an integrated sensibility and contribute to the erosion of the social fabric that we have a problem.

Its like everyone is a loose cannon. So much is fed into us about taking sides as the only way to get involved, feeding into our visceral positions and pushing us to extreme expressions in order to count for something. Even Sesame Street presents characters who are fixated on doing their own thing and TV commercials constantly implant the message that it's worth interrupting whatever you might be doing to indulge in consuming the product being advertised, or taking any measure whatsoever to get it. There is nothing in place to encourage a more temperate assessment of one's penchant for reveling in whatever idiosyncratic behavior turns one on. Nothing on how to manage strong beliefs within a harmonious social organism. Or sublimating basic drives and appetites into creative, spiritual endeavors.

All we see are people latching onto one peephole view of the whole picture and constructing irrational frameworks for what they believe are perfectly rational premises. We see and hear people agreeing to disagree with their minds made up to ignore whatever common ground is available to them. And, again, we see a lot of things on television which might affect us in an immediate sense but for which we have no recourse to do anything about. Indeed, we see things which no one seems able to effectively deal with in situations like the AIDS epidemic, environmental deterioration, the Middle East, or whatever the latest imbroglio might be. One also sees in one's own society deplorable conditions with no palpable solutions in sight. Corruption, crime, etc. We see these things and cannot act upon much of what we see in an effective way. People hide in their apartments in crime ridden neighborhoods and get all the information they need about the latest horror across the street but feel powerless to do anything about what goes on in their own community.

Were we to install a process whereby we were able to think globally and act locally we could begin to be able to better digest and incorporate information coming at us from all directions in a more salubrious manner. With each community responsible for its own condition, able to conduct its affairs in whatever way it deems necessary, having access to sufficient resources, it could gather information from near and far that resonates meaning within the context of a particular community's situation to arrive at the most effective way of dealing with its circumstances.

We need to have more of an objective ordering of all the various facets of the social organism. We need to know what songs we have to sing as a society and those which are meant for special groups or individuals. That is, in a free pluralistic society the one song that everyone must sing together in harmony is the one whose lyrics acknowledge the right of others to hold different views from one's self while admonishing those who attempt to impose their views on to others. Everyone is, of course, free to put their views forth in the public arena without restriction so that individuals can consider them on their own merits. So, you have different and various tunes which particular people can engage themselves in but there is one tune which is universal and supersedes all other tunes. That is, one is free to enjoy whatever kind of music one wants to but one is not free to impose that music on other people, i.e., no boom boxes on subway cars, and no Muzak on elevators and other public places, no attempts to force one's beliefs on to others, etc. The universal tune should be learned through a vigorous conditioning process present in all aspects of social intercourse.

# 3.15 SOCIAL ORDER

We tend to look upon human societies as creations that are set apart from the nature of things. This is, of course, due to the fact that we tend to look at ourselves as set apart from the nature of things to one extent or another. We seek to distance ourselves as much as possible from the natural world. We want to be exempt from all of its dictates. Our very civilizations are a testament to that sentiment. Civilizations that see nature as subservient to their existence. Civilizations that use and abuse the natural world to feed its voracious appetites. Civilizations that believe they are the purpose of all existence. Civilizations with promises of an eternal afterlife that search for fountains of youth in this life and believe in amazing super heroes and prescriptions for the perfect society...all testify to our penchant for imagining that we occupy a special realm apart from nature. This looking away from ourselves, away from our reality, may not be the best way to approach the formation of social order because it tends to distort the human scale of things way out of proportion.

Isolated social cells, like primitive tribes, work best in keeping things at a human scale only because they remain, perforce, in tune with the nature of things. The civilized nation states that evolved out of tribal cells sought to align themselves with divine authority and dwarfed the human condition with works of immense grandeur. However, the human toil and sacrifice expended in such efforts, like the building of the pyramids, is the stark and overwhelming reality which dwarfs the delusion of grandeur that they represent, that along with their natural erosion over time.

The heads of these civilized nation states, the pharos, king/gods, emperors, etc., declared themselves to be immortal and they formed hierarchies that were "out of this world", i.e., unnatural. Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, et al. came along to confer immortality on everyone and anyone who followed their teachings. This established the notion of spiritual equality but did nothing to alter the hierarchical power of the state. In the eighteenth century, England was ruled by kings who had absolute authority that was claimed to be divinely ordained. The American revolutionaries established a government that dispersed authority throughout the body of its people and held the rulers accountable to the people's sovereign judgment. In diffusing power into the microcosm the designers of this revolutionary government created a social body that coincided more with an anatomical one where the head is there to serve the self-interest of the body as a whole.

Our brains do not rule over our bodies autocratically but, rather, they respond to internal and external information and decide how best to proceed. It is the congress of cellular networks that form and rule one's body. The brain itself is a congress of cells. The framers of the United States Constitution were not, I'm sure, aware of the correspondence between the form of government they espoused and the workings of the human body. Nonetheless, the idea of different communities of people creating one body politic out of themselves, with the microcosm forming and informing the macrocosm, like cells of the body, could very well have been an inspiration acquired in a school of anatomy. With the instantaneous realtime communications that is now shaping the world the time has come to go further in the direction that the forefathers of the United States have charted for us.

I think it stands to reason that what must instruct, inform and shape our perspective on all human endeavors is what we know about ourselves and the world around us. We all sense that the world has changed and is changing in drastic ways from what we had known it to be. There are those who cannot under any circumstance accept those changes. Ultraconservatives, religious fundamentalists and regressive revolutionaries, in general, are fiercely opposed to anything that they perceive to be a threat to their traditional views. Some feel justified in demonstrating their displeasure through acts of violence. The Unabomber is a case in point. Eric Rudolph is another. We have also had the various terrorist atrocities of Osama bin Laden culminating in the attacks of 9/11/01. Also the Bush invasion of Iraq. Fanatics who take it upon themselves to decide how everyone and everything should be and seek to force their views on people through violent means believe in no uncertain terms that authority is bestowed upon them by their godly convictions which they hold to be absolute.

Fanaticism is usually associated with an ideology of one type or another. A fact-based fanaticism is perhaps nonexistent because one feels that facts are there for everyone to see. The fact that the sun is at the center of our solar system isn't something that one feels the need to force on people. It is there for all to see with the aid of telescopes and space flights. We can also see the similarity throughout the biosphere with respect to the genetic code, which helps solidify Darwinian evolution as a fact of life. Those who refuse to accept this evidence must resist the facts of life and must become fanatical about doing so. They must resort to violence in one form or another because their insubstantial beliefs require blind conviction and force is the only means with which to deal with opposition. A scientist who knows that evolution is a fact of life uses reasonable argument and illustrative demonstration in an attempt to educate people. Creationists, on the other hand, rely on people's ignorance to malign evolutionary science and seek to ban the teaching of it through political manipulation of legislatures. Adorning themselves as they do in scientific garb in order to substantiate their claims of biblical rectitude creationists and the intelligent design crowd merely demonstrate their utter state of confusion and lack of faith in what they say they believe.

Such is the case with political ideologies as well. One cannot prove that a particular political ideology is absolutely superior over any other. We saw how communism failed as a social system. And capitalism could not sustain a healthy social organism while it reigned supreme in the United States from the industrial revolution on through to the twentieth century. Social systems where ideologies are allowed to compete with one another for the voter's confidence work best. As long as a society is not split in two by ideological fanaticism.

That political campaigns are often fraught with mud slinging and behind the scene skullduggery is, again, a testament to the subjective nature of political perspectives and the unspoken realization that ideologies, in and of themselves, do not have a leg to stand on. They must be continually propped up with timely slogans, jargon and outright con jobs. A particular party needs to capitalize on the current societal situation and appear to the voter to be the perfect solution to all the problems of the society, which they will claim were all caused by the other party. The longer a particular party is in power, however, the easier it is for the other party or parties to show themselves as the more attractive alternative. This is further testimony to the improbability of the notion that any one party could ever be the be all and end all of reliable governance.

That we refer to democracies as the least worst system indicates that there is a lot of room for improvement. Attempting to hash out effective legislation, programs and policies from among conflicting perspectives, party agendas and powerfully influential special interest groups that are not necessarily concerned with the big picture seems an unreliable way to arrive at an ongoing healthy society. Things could be much better served if the power and responsibility for maintaining social well being was more dispersed throughout social, economic and political systems so that input at local levels was exponentially more substantial than it is now.

Local level perspective may not necessarily have a concern for the big picture either but in exercising the wherewithal to maintain itself as socially, economically and environmentally sound the local level can contribute to the creation of the big picture in a much more responsible, effective and manageable way than a centralized government apparatus can with its practice of remote-control micromanagement. The microcosm forms the macrocosm. In its formation of the macrocosm, however, the microcosm must network with its component parts so that each locality of the microcosm is configured and situated in such a way as to function in the most salubrious way possible with respect to the localized macrocosm it creates and to that of the whole society. By having society formed from the microcosm of its localities each macrocosmic organ will be created as needed by the microcosm and serve exactly in response to microcosmic needs in relation to the whole social organism. This state of affairs would create a federal apparatus that could better fulfill the streamlined societal role assigned to it by the microcosm and also its concomitant role in attending to foreign relations. Such social organization conforms to the natural ordering of things and would for that very reason, create the best of all possible worlds.

We need to be cognizant of the process of the natural ordering of things in deciding how we can best organize ourselves into social units. We cannot a priori shape things exactly as we might imagine they should be. Religions, political ideologies and social philosophies generally tend to form less than holistic visions for social organization. They attempt a makeover of human nature instead of using the basic attributes of human nature as part of their blueprint. I think we might do better trying to design society to fit human nature rather than trying to fit human nature into abstract designs.

The starting point is self-interest. The recognition that we are all basically out for ourselves must be the principle by which a social organism is formed and operated. Some might think that this would be a formula for total chaos with everyone jockeying around looking for their own advantage without any regard for anyone else. But how would one's self-interest be served in such a state of chaos? The answer is it would be served very poorly, if at all, and therefore chaotic states are not naturally ordained. We do not need state and religious authority to impose order on us but to validate our innate appreciation and desire for it. Such authority is an artifact of our natural proclivity for order that becomes skewed in civilized settings.

What if we could instantly dissolve all our morals, laws and codes of behavior? Suddenly there are no legislators, no police, no courts, no jails, no religions, no mores, no customs, no legal or moral authority whatsoever. And what if after they were all dissolved there was no memory of them at all in any one of us and we found ourselves stranded in the natural world? What would happen? We would begin the whole process anew and establish tribes, morality and law much like we had before because that is how we are programmed and each of us would see that it was in our own self-interest to do so. And then, of course, we'd go on to produce civilizations where self-interest is misrepresented, perverted and demonized.

Our traditional institutions have to one extent or another been dissolved due to the enormous changes in perspective and infrastructure brought about by the innovations of science and technology in the twentieth century. Government, Religion and Business have been stripped of much of their veneer.

Because these institutions are no longer in complete control of information and, therefore, less capable of controlling how they are perceived by the public their true nature is revealed.

The three institutions, as we now see, have their own special view of self-interest:

Government is comprised of self-interested parties that compete to define what the self-interest on the part of every individual should be so as to manipulate that self-interest for the benefit of the parties themselves.

Religious organizations are comprised of self-interested parties that condemn individual self-interest and promote self-sacrifice so as to benefit the self-interest of the religious organizations themselves.

Business is comprised of self-interested parties that compete or collude with one another in order to benefit their own self-interest by exploiting the self-interest of others.

What all three have in common is what all living organisms have in common - a self-interest in their own survival and growth. Any given society and all of its institutions are nothing more nor less than living breathing life forms seeking their own advantage in their cultural and natural environments. In viewing societies and their institutions in this way, we must reevaluate our notions of self-interest and redesign societies based on that reevaluation with respect to the living organisms that social institutions actually are.

We have touched on some similarities between living organisms and social institutions in prior sections of this book and there are others yet to come. But before we get to those we need to examine and explore self-interest as the basic element from which to form a social organism.

As infants, self-interest is a simple affair. A comfortable crib, warm blanket and suckling at your mother's breast pretty much takes care of it. At around the age of two things begin to get more complicated. We begin to realize that we are not the center of all things and the instant gratification of all our desires is not the sole purpose of the universe. We have to learn to take other things into account. Perhaps, our mother now attends more than she had been to her older child whose status as only child had been taken away and who might have been feeling somewhat neglected what with all the attention lavished on the newest arrival. We can no longer expect mommy to always be at our beck and call. We also discover other desires and find out that we can't have them all fulfilled. We can't have every toy we see on TV. We can't have all the candy we see in the store. And we can no longer get what we want by throwing a tantrum.

So, we have to begin to learn social skills. We have to learn to get along, to make choices, to suspend our needs and desires until some other time and even to do without certain things indefinitely. Along with this new and somewhat disquieting awareness of our selves in relation to our expanding universe there is a great desire to learn about the world around us. Our minds are like dry sponges in a deluge of information absorbing every drop they are conscious of. This great ability and desire to learn provides the ways and means with which to deal with our growing pains. We can learn how to remain an object of our mother's love while pursuing a growing array of self-interests at the same time.

We learn to negotiate through the larger environment that we are becoming conscious of. We see that our mother is someone separate from us and in that separation our own self begins to emerge and become defined according to our innate personality, intelligence and disposition. Our self-interest now becomes something within ourselves that is not always met with an immediate and favorable response. We learn that some things we desire or desire to do may not be in our self-interest. We learn that our mother and father have control over our self-interest. We learn that we might have to control our expression for something we want in order to have a chance of getting it. We see that our mother is not an extension of ourselves. She sometimes seems inattentive or downright opposed to what we want. Other times it is just like it used to be. She is totally attentive and giving and we once again feel immanently connected to her. So, we try to figure out how to regain or preserve the feeling of closeness we had with her as an infant while at the same time establishing our own separate identity. Things are getting complicated but we seem to have all the time in the world to sort them out.

And so it goes over the next few years as we discover how to negotiate our self-interests in a world that is not always sympathetic to them. If we're lucky our parents will not convey the idea that self-interest is bad in and of itself. Rather they will guide our self-interest through a sometimes perplexing world and teach us how to decide what is truly in our self-interest and what is not and allow us to fully pursue the interests of our better natures with their enthusiastic encouragement and approval.

We discover that the world we live in can play with our natural inclinations in tormenting ways. We are, for example, naturally inclined to seek out sweet smelling and sweet tasting foods. Fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, meats and fish all have a sweetness about them when they are most edible. One rubric for the ingesting of food might be - the sweeter the better. Primitive tribesman suffer stinging swarms of bees for some honey for the tribe. Our appetite for sweet foods, especially as youngsters, can be insatiable. But the candy that children are constantly tempted by perverts a healthful natural inclination into an unhealthy habit. We even have candy posing as cereal.

It is very difficult to come to understand that something that makes so much sense to us, that seems so right, like eating sweet foods, can be so wrong. It needs to be made perfectly clear to us that our inclination toward eating sweet foods is not wrong at all. The problem is not inside us with what we want to eat but outside us with the products offered. We are not wrong but they, the products, can be wrong. We can't blame ourselves for wanting to eat sweet foods, it's only natural. So, while it is in our self-interest to eat foods that are sweet we need to learn to direct that self-interest toward healthful foods.

That seems needless to say and, to be redundant, obvious. But we often do tend to blame ourselves because, perhaps, we were told, or somehow got the idea, that our appetite for sweets was to blame. And when we blame ourselves, when we think that we are wrong, it becomes much more difficult to redirect our habits because we're trying to change ourselves, our inborn inclinations, instead of our habits. It is impossible to overcome our desire for sweets. If we try to and find that we can't we feel like a failure and tend to indulge ourselves even more. "What's the use?" we say, "I'm hopeless. Might as well just gorge."

So, it's very important that a child be made to understand as soon as possible that a desire for sweets is not a bad thing but there can be things that appeal to that desire that are not good for us. The fault is not in our appetites but in those products that exploit and pervert those appetites.

Our innate inclination for sweet tasting food and the civilized-created-temptations that cater to it is a good basic example of the convoluted situation our self-interested natures generally find themselves regarding the refinements of civilization. Certain cultural refinements can turn our natural appetites into unruly torments. In this convolution we tend to find fault with our natures. We get the idea that we don't know what's good for us.

Money exacerbates the situation. Money explodes communities into a compendium of individuals competing in a zero sum game where self-interest can manifest itself as greed. Money becomes the focus of all our appetites. With money we can have whatever we want. Without it we have nothing. We devise ways of getting as much money as possible. Everything that was once useful in creating an integrated tribal community becomes a particular commodity in a civilized setting. Sex, aggression, beauty, cooperation, competition, craftsmanship, knowledge, information, all have a price. They were all, at one time, interlocking parts of a whole working tribe. With money they become disassociated objects that one seeks to sell to the highest bidder. That's the law of survival where money calls the shots.

Being greedy for money is a result of one's natural self-interest becoming individualized, isolated and distended by the matrix of civilization. It is not wrong to be greedy in an environment where one's survival is solely dependent on getting money. Instinctually driven to provide shelters that protect us as much as possible from the exigencies of the natural world we have invented civilizations where our instincts, appetites and drives focus on money. A proper catalyst to temper individual self-interest is not provided for in our civilizations as it once was in the survival game of the natural world.

Religion attempts to act as that catalyst by declaring war on our instincts. We are taught that our instincts, appetites and drives are bad. Greed is bad. Self-interest is bad. Sexual desire is bad. Our appetite for food is bad. While vows of poverty, self-sacrifice, celibacy, and fasting are good. The world belongs to demons who want to destroy our souls by tempting our evil instincts. Only by denying ourselves the pleasures of the flesh can we survive for eternity. Just as we had to abide by rules and rituals for physical survival in the wild we have to abide by the rules and rituals of religion for the eternal survival of our souls.

Religion's great appeal is that it engages us in a game of survival. In the wild it is good to physically survive and all our instincts are employed for that purpose. In civilization basic physical survival is not an overriding concern and our instincts become separate venues for self-gratification. Religion creates another world which it declares to be the real world where spiritual survival is good and we must deny the physical world along with our instincts to achieve eternal survival. Of course, religious institutions don't always practice what they preach as they cozy up to the rich and powerful, for instance, for their own physical benefit, their own self-interest.

In civilized societies there is a need for a catalyst to mold our instincts into a positive creative force. Declaring those instincts evil is perhaps no longer the way to accomplish that. If it ever was. But traditional religions were born in ignorance. They didn't know any better. Basically, our instincts are good but they need to have a vigorous conditioning process through which they are channeled into enriching endeavors. We don't need to change ourselves we need to change how our civilizations are configured. We need to change the way in which our instincts are channeled through the social matrix. We need to change things with respect to present day knowledge rather than seek to go on and on with respect to the ignorance of the past.

To begin with we all need to develop a very strong sense that each and every one of us is the source of social order. That law, order and morality are concepts that have arisen and arise from within our very selves. That the social order we are subject to is of our own making and not something that needs to be imposed on us authoritatively. Authority is a necessary presence assigned to deal with the occasional conflicts that might become unmanageable by people themselves. Authority is not a necessary presence for imposing social order on naturally unruly human beings. Authorities sometimes delude themselves into thinking, a la Big Brother, that they alone know what's best.

It is in school or preschool that we are introduced to official authority in the person of a teacher or caretaker. Until then, at home, our parents were the authority. They, however, do not have the impact that the imposing figure of an unfamiliar adult has in the strange new environment of the classroom, kindergarten or preschool.

At home we were learning about the give and take between our parents and our siblings. We had familiar surroundings in which to grow and to discover and rediscover a place for ourselves within our family's environment.

Then we come to school and find out that there is such a thing as impersonal official authority. A teacher instructs us about the rules of conduct in the classroom, informs us that we are to obey those rules and the teacher is the sole authority with respect to enforcing those rules. We find that we are less participants in this new environment and more subjects of officialdom. This fosters a disconnect in our own selves and the world around us. The message is that we have no sense whatsoever about how to behave and must be totally reliant on an authority figure to provide us with rules and regulations. This creates a distorted view of things. It's an Alice in Wonderland hallucination where the authority figure takes on immense proportions and we shrink in comparison. In order to feel more substantial, we either have to become a sycophant to authority, challenge it or phase out and daydream that we are somewhere else doing other things on our own.

A teacher as central authority figure dictating rules and regulations on to students who, it is assumed, have absolutely no idea about how to behave is no way to prepare them for a participatory democracy. Students should participate directly in creating the decorum of the classroom from day one. Allow them to be instrumental in making the rules and in settling conflicts and disputes that may arise between them. In this way the law and order in the classroom will be seen by the students as an extension of their own sense of things rather than a necessary imposition on, what is perceived to be, their lack of sense.

So, the first day of school might go something like this;

The teacher introduces herself to the class and asks each child to do the same. I would suggest they all sit at a round table or in a circle with the teacher as part of the circle. Then the teacher might say, "So here we are. All here together. I wonder why. I wonder why we're here. I mean I do have an idea of my own about why we're here but I'd like some of you to tell me why you think we are here. Let's think about that a moment. Hmmm, why are we here in this schoolroom? That's a good question. Do any of you have an answer to that question?" Here the teacher might spy out a child who seems to be the most outgoing of the children and asks, "Linda, why do you think we're here?"

"To learn new things," Linda might say.

"Uh huh. Anyone else? Yes Pedro? Why do you think we are here?"

"To play games."

"Okay. And...Suneeta?"

"To make new friends."

"Mohammed? Why do you think we are here?"

"To be like mommy and daddy."

"What do you mean, Mohammed?"

"Like...like...when they go to work."

"Mmm, yes Marvin?"

"We're here to have fun."

"Okay then. Very good answers. And you know what? You were all right. We are here for all those reasons. To play games, have fun, to learn new things, and work and make new friends. I'm here for all those things too. I'm also here to teach you things. But I can learn things from you too. That's right, although I am older and have lots of stuff to teach you, you can teach me about stuff too. Like you might draw a picture or have an idea or find a new way to solve a problem that would teach me to see things in a new way. And now I need your help with something else. We are all meeting here for the first time and we will be sharing a lot of time together and doing a lot of activities together. But how do you think we should go about doing all that? Do you think we should have some rules about how we should behave and treat each other?"

The children express a consensus in favor of having rules.

"All right then, now the question is, what should those rules be? I have some ideas about that but I would like to hear from all of you and what you think the rules should be about how we all should behave here. Yes, Bobby?"

"We shouldn't fight."

"A very good rule. Billy?"

"We shouldn't throw things."

"Another good rule, thank you Billy. Yes, Linda."

"We should be nice."

"That's also a very good rule. Suneeta?"

"Share things."

"Good rule, Suneeta. Viola?"

"Pay attention."

"Oh yes, that's very important. Anyone else? Yes, Jack?"

"We should have ice cream and cake."

"Mm hmm, well that is an excellent start. But the ice cream and cake rule is not something we can all contribute to as we can with behaving and paying attention. So that can't really count as a rule but all the rest can. And they might be all the rules we need. Or we may find that we need to make more rules as we go along. So, we'll see how things go and any one of us can suggest a new rule at any time. And for those of us who didn't get a chance to say any of these rules, like myself, did we all pretty much think of these same rules ourselves even though we didn't speak them?" A general response in the affirmative is expressed. "Okay, so do we all like these rules?" "Yes." "Very good. And if any of us have arguments with one another we will all take part in settling them and maybe some new rule will come out of that."

The teacher would then make a sign listing the rules of the class and stating that they were all made by Mohammed, Billy, Linda, Suneeta, Viola, Pedro, etc. and were all approved and accepted by the whole class as well as the teacher Ms./Miss/Mrs./Mr. Whoever. The sign would then be prominently posted in the classroom. Thus, the whole class sees themselves as a rule making body. They do not merely feel themselves at the affect of rules dictated by an authority figure but they feel empowered to fundamentally effect the social environment they are part of. The class might sometimes need to rely on the authority figure to enforce their rules or explain how they apply in a given situation but each and every member of the class should always have the sense that the teacher, the authority figure, is always operating within the parameters set by the members of the class themselves. Authority then is not seen as something "other" but as a direct extension of ones own inner directive. Authority can have no more power over us than we allow it to have.

It seems that in some sense this state of affairs has been in the works. In a 2001 Atlantic Monthly article titled The Organizational Kid, David Brooks wrote about students at Princeton University and mentioned their seemingly passive acceptance of authority. However, this might not be a sign of merely knuckling under. The students might have, at that time, felt more in charge of things themselves than students did in the past and, hence, did not feel impinged upon or threatened by whatever authority their professors represented.

During the spring of 2001 students at Harvard University demonstrated for and succeeded in achieving living wages for all of the university's employees. This might seem to be a contradiction to the students at Princeton but the action taken by the students at Harvard did not seem to be a challenge to authority, a la the demonstrations of the Sixties. Rather, it seemed more of an effort to work with authority to install policy the students thought to be appropriate. They, like my above scenario for a kindergarten class, were participating in the rule making of their institution as they saw fit. This was an expression of the students sense of belonging to their whole environment and seeking to affect it from their perspective.

Also, unlike the student revolts of the Sixties the Harvard students weren't trying to change the whole world. They were just tending to their own little corner of it. This is precisely the way in which to go about changing the whole world with everyone participating in their own precincts to further the interests of their entire community by forming, reforming and maintaining wholesome economic, social and physical environments. In the ecology of the global village, local is global. We need to create our social organisms out of healthy, vital cellular communities. This would, of course, translate into healthy, vital societies.

The encouragement and means to participate in all aspects of one's environment must be a constant presence in students' lives throughout their schooling. The responsibility for how a class behaves should not be seen as resting solely on the teacher's shoulders but the decorum of the classroom should be understood and felt as being a result of every student's individual will in association with the collective will of the entire class. In some schools student courts were at one time initiated to judge and censure the questionable behavior of other students. The judgment of the student court was found to be much more significant to the students than if they had been merely reprimanded by an adult authority figure. This kind of student involvement serves to ameliorate the kinds of pathology that can occur in the gap between particular students and officialdom. A gap that cannot be bridged by the usual bureaucratic mechanisms and leaves students to stew in their own juices and brew their own remedies, sometimes violent.

Student courts should not only be conducted for the purposes of judging those accused of wrong doing but should also be a forum where students can air their grievances. This could go a long way to ferret out the festering resentments in particular students, allow them constructive ways to find redress and prevent them from acting out a violent vendetta. At Columbine, for instance, the "elite' of the student body systematically dealt out considerably harsh treatment to those they perceived to be "other" than themselves, like the two students who shot up the school. The faculty did nothing to correct this situation and, so, in effect, condoned it. If there had been a student court at Columbine, where harassed students could have aired their grievances openly and sought remedy for them, perhaps the shooting could have been averted. There needs to be input from all quarters in any given community to form and maintain healthy coherent social groups.

One's school experience, from kindergarten to college, then, should include direct participation on the part of every student in creating every aspect of the school's environment. Such participation should not be the anomaly it is today whereby students have to resort to sit-ins to have their views considered. Officials of a school would hold whatever authority that administrators, faculty and students deemed necessary for the purpose of facilitating the whole process of an all inclusive participatory social system. Upon graduation the students would hopefully go on to continue a participatory involvement in their workplaces and communities in order to create wholesome social institutions and maintain flourishing natural environments.

Some workplaces have broken down old bureaucratic barriers in the past couple of decades to open up lines of direct communication between all workers at all levels so that vital information can be transmitted in an expedient manner whenever necessary. Boeing, as I have mentioned, opened up the lines of communications in their workplace for the building of the 777 so that an assembly line worker could directly contact an engineer about any design flaw that made itself evident in the assembly process. Such vital communication between those doing the actual assembly and those responsible for the design would seem to be an obvious requirement for optimum efficiency. However, this was not always the case. A new way of looking at things was made possible by new technologies.

The private sector in general has been thoroughly revolutionized by the electronic/information age, as chronicled by the works of Tom Peters. Change moves swiftly through a free market where better ways of doing things can be tried and proven virtually overnight. Businesses that do not adapt to the changes are most likely to go the way of extinction.

The public sector lags behind in the kinds of innovation that the electronic/information age allows or demands. Tradition has more of a stronghold in the public sector. The brass ring of profits is not there to provide an incentive and a guide for productive innovation. Most people involved in the public sector merely become part of the sausage processed by an overbearing bureaucratic system. There have been a few mutterings from some politicians about reinventing government, which was nothing but the usual pandering to a particular mind set at a particular time but, of course, nothing ever came of it.

In the private sector innovation can spread like a mutated gene in bacteria. Instantaneously. In the public sector, however, a great inertia powers tradition. Significant social change has always been part of extreme circumstances, disasters like war, famine, oppression, depression, etc., out of which a people desperately latch on to the vision of a Pol Pot, a Lenin, a Hitler, as the way to be lifted out of their misery. But the changes wrought by those three despots, and their like, have proved to be disasters in and of themselves. So, people are right to regard visions for social change with suspicion, especially when they are a product of a one-sided ideology from the mind of one person who tells us that his view of things is the absolute truth. Particular ideologies are not complete visions for social organization. They are incomplete visions and quickly become like dinosaurs that cannot adapt to a changing world. This is a lesson of history that some of us refuse to learn, like those of us who still believe that communism or capitalism alone can form a viable society. They cannot. That is plain to see for all who have a conscious awareness of twentieth century history. The twenty-first is providing the same lesson.

Democracies with a mix of capitalism and socialism appear to be the least worst form of social organization around. Some of these democracies have more socialism than capitalism and some more capitalism than socialism. What is the correct balance of the two? There is really no one answer to that question. A correct balance of the two is certainly a desired thing for societies to achieve at any given time. So, the question becomes how can a given society arrive at the most viable interplay between capitalism and socialism providing optimum economic, environmental and cultural conditions throughout the social strata on an ongoing basis?

First of all, we need to throw out all our preconceived notions about how we think our social and cultural institutions need to be organized and focus on what our new technologies and our new body of knowledge might, in and of themselves, suggest for revolutionizing societies. We need to refer to our knowledge of how nature works in all aspects from the microcosm to the macrocosm, including self-organization in organic and inorganic systems, information processing and networking within organisms, the relation of biological systems to social systems, etc. From such references we can begin to form a vision of a new society.

# 4.1 GOD AND THE NATURE OF THINGS

The formation of the revolutionary government of the United States was for the most part a sectarian enterprise. Its founders were well aware of the dangers of giving religion official governmental status. They had been subjects of the King of England, who, as head of the government, as well as the church, invoked, through The Divine Right of Kings, the authority of God in all of his pronouncements. Thus, we have the first amendment to the US constitution ensuring freedom of religion and preventing the establishment of a religious state.

Now, the absolute best way to ensure religious freedom and prevent the establishment of a religious state is to keep those two very different institutions, church and state, separate. So, yes, the constitution does call for the separation of church and state despite the position taken by many conservatives who, through some divine right of their own, think it would be okay to enforce their religious beliefs on everyone else through legislation. They erroneously claim that there is nothing in the constitution that calls for a separation of church and state.

Creating controversy about an essential and unambiguous constitutional directive in the service of a particular ideology is nothing less than an act of sedition. It is extremely corrosive and, therefore, threatening to the fabric of a free society that depends on a shared and common understanding of its fundamental principles. Those principles must be upheld and promoted by each and every individual if a society based on individual freedom is to endure. Every individual must be vigilant about how they are aligned with the constitutional imperatives that are guarantors and safeguards to the freedoms they enjoy.

In a free society, individuals must come to see themselves as the embodiment of the whole. In this sense, the concept of the separation of Church and State is seen as the separation of faith and reason in the individual.

Keeping faith and reason clear of one another can be a tricky proposition. For, although we are naturally equipped for the exercise, we are not naturally inclined to pursue it.

In our primitive existence we did not think in terms of faith and reason. We were inclined to readily accept whatever concepts we could imagine that served to comfort such existential questions as - Where did we come from? What happens to us when we die?

In response to these questions ideas of gods and afterworlds became securely lodged in our minds as were the ideas that rocks were hard, the sky was blue and the sun revolved around the earth.

Chasms arose between faith and reason as a result of certain beliefs that were contingent upon ignorance of physical reality. These beliefs - the geocentric solar system, Creation, etc., were eventually shown to be unfounded as science became increasingly sophisticated. The Church's reaction to Galileo's heliocentric solar system was to suppress his findings as long as it could, while today those on the side of keeping their faith exactly as it is awkwardly try to bend reason to their faith by creating oxymoronic organizations like, Creation Science, in a desperate attempt to challenge the ideas of evolution. That is not the way to divine the appropriate roles for faith and reason.

A better approach would be; Where reason fails faith succeeds. Reason cannot account for the existence or non-existence of God. So that is a matter for faith to sort out. Where reason falls short faith can soar. When faith flies in the face of reason, clip its wings.

Difficult as it is we have to come to accept the lesson of history which teaches us that faith must evolve and adapt to the findings of scientific knowledge and sometimes be amended by reasonable views of the world developed through a more accurate assessment of things than that which had been in place before. For instance, it would not be acceptable today to conduct ourselves under the belief that God created a world of infinite resources for humankind to do with what it will, as we once believed. One wonders, if Abe Lincoln were alive today would he say, "God must love all the wretched starving people of the earth because he makes so many of them," as he once said of poor people? Such perspectives once rooted in faith are no longer tenable and illustrate how one's faith needs to be supervised and amended by reason. The moral argument against birth control needs to be amended by the need for control of population growth. If the purpose of morality is to preserve life then the moral point of view should realize that living things sometimes have to check their growth in order to preserve themselves.

Again, with the issue of faith and reason we are presented with a dispute that appears to be irresolvable. Those who proclaim themselves as the keepers of a traditional faith brand those who seek to change it as heretics or instruments of Satan. They see faith as something unchangeable, absolute. If it is subject to change it becomes worthless in their eyes. They contend that sanctions against birth control are the immutable word of God. However, one could, without much stretch of the imagination, envision a world in which such an absolute morality could not exist. In fact, a world in which its exact opposite might become the absolute: Sometime in the future, if we are unable to halt the wholesale deterioration of the earth's environment, we may find ourselves having to live within totally enclosed spaces housed under artificial life-support systems like the ones constructed for the Biosphere I & II experiments undertaken in Arizona.

As one might imagine, space and resources in such an environment would be severely limited and able to support only a small static population. So, a policy of strict birth control would be an absolute moral imperative. That faith is blind to such a possibility is one reason why such a possibility could become a certainty.

Religious values are believed to be absolute in their inexorable connection with preserving life. Which means they are contingent upon the preservation of life. It is our interest in the preservation of our own lives that creates our value systems. That instinct is the absolute and accounts, in turn, for the preservation of the species. So, if the preservation of life depended upon rigorous population control then all methods of birth control would become morally justified.

A moral value system can advertise that it promotes the preservation of all life. All human life, that is, in most cases. In this way it attempts to extend an individual's instinct for self-preservation to the preservation of human life in general. But this is nothing special to human beings. Even in other species self-preservation is projected out to the preservation of one's progeny and that is how a species endures. And, it seems, individual self-preservation can be overridden in favor of the preservation of a species. The "martyrdom" of Lemmings, for instance.

It has, of course, been traditional lore to think of lemmings as committing suicide in mass numbers as a means, perhaps, of managing the threat of overpopulation. That is, of course, a myth. However, instances have been documented which might explain its genesis. In a book by  Dennis Chitty, - Do Lemmings Commit Suicide? - the author cites examples of lemmings being found dead on sea ice in the Canadian arctic and he writes, "Lemmings that move on to sea ice will almost certainly die from lack of food and shelter, and in a sense are committing suicide. So, it's easy to see how the myth arose. But it's harder to believe that suicide is what's on a lemming's mind. For one thing suicidal lemmings would leave fewer descendants than those that stayed home, and natural selection would put an end to so simple a solution to overpopulation."

The idea that leaving fewer descendants would eradicate "suicidal" lemmings is not necessarily valid in that homosexuals persist in the human population despite their leaving fewer descendants. More to the point, lemmings that are prompted to put themselves in a situation that will end their lives prematurely have not been eliminated from the lemming population. So, that behavior must in some sense be a vital aspect of their genetic programming. If it has the affect of culling the population then the behavior can be linked to that outcome and is probably the result of some physiological trigger activated by conditions in the lemming population and in its immediate environment.

The lemmings that engage in such life-ending behavior serve the higher purpose of group survival at their own expense. They are in a sense martyred by circumstances they find themselves. They do not intend to become martyrs but do so because of who and what they are.

On the human scale we also have martyrs. Thomas More, for example. He did not intend to become a martyr either. He became a martyr due to circumstances he found himself in because of who and what he was. I make this comparison merely to point out broad similarities, especially in the fact that one does not need to have a conscious intent to become a martyr in order to become one. To commit suicide, however, does imply a conscious intent, a decision made on one's own without reference to a higher cause. This is why I use the term martyrdom rather than suicide in reference to the mysterious behavior of lemmings, which serves a higher purpose in group survival.

Of course, one might say here, Thomas More made a conscious decision to die rather than deny his faith and that is not at all comparable to the behavior of any lowly lemming. However, one could also say, given who and what Thomas More was he really didn't have a choice in the matter. A religion may teach us to put the interest of others, or the interest of holy principles, before self-interest, but it takes a certain type of person to carry out that teaching to the extremes of a Thomas More. But More's self-interest cannot be ruled out. There is, after all, the hereafter to consider. A martyr, like Thomas More, is not going to his death but merely transitioning to an after life of eternal bliss. Now, might one have a smidgen of self-interest in that prospect? To preserve one's life for eternity? So, we're back to the instinct for self-preservation.

It's something one cannot get away from no matter what metaphysical labyrinths one constructs to try to distance oneself from such fundamental instincts. In denying self-interest in this life we see that one can infinitely increase self-interest in the next. It is the instinct for self-preservation that is the most powerful element engineering our whole outlook on the world and it is that which must be addressed realistically.

Does participating in a religion that focuses on individual behavior with respect to a life in another world take away from concern for future generations in this world? Is there, perhaps, a conflict between securing a place in an afterlife versus securing a livable planet for future generations? The martyrdom of individual lemmings contributes to the future existence of lemmings as a whole. The martyrdom of Thomas More paved the way for his own future existence in a presumed afterlife. Which would you say has more merit?

Self-preservation is the one value that unites every human being on the earth, indeed every living thing. It honors the moral compact with life to come. Human beings measure their earthly behavior so as to ensure continued life in the hereafter, but now we must come to realize how we need conduct ourselves so as to ensure the continuation of life here on earth. The instinct for self-preservation is a powerful force and must be powerfully conditioned to serve the preservation of life itself rather than merely disguising it in self-serving moral finery in preparation for various versions of an afterlife.

In our primitive existence preparing the way for the future was all taken care of naturally through the immediate actions of tribal people going about the daily exercise of satisfying their appetites, participating in tribal rituals, reproducing and caring for their young. Their future was all wrapped up in their present activities. We do not have a natural propensity to care about ecosystems. We have, like every other species, a natural propensity to exploit them for our survival. Only in perceiving our monstrous civilizations as possible threats to the natural environment have we become inclined to attempt to alter our behavior with respect to environmental concerns.

All the changes wrought by scientific inquiry and technological innovation challenge our traditional perspectives in all areas of life. The market place has generally been able to incorporate new ideas and perspectives more successfully than, say, politics or religion. Businesses have found new philosophies and new ways of structuring themselves that are total departures from the past but make total sense in this electronic age of information technologies. Government and religious organizations have been floundering precariously in recent years as they struggle to maneuver through an ever-changing landscape with their outmoded concepts, structures and policies. In the world of business there is always someone willing to try something new because one can more readily challenge conventions when operating in the market place. With politics and religion, however, conventions are sacrosanct and those institutions insist on existing in ideological bubbles sealed off from the real world.

For believers, letting go of traditional ways and beliefs of politics and religion, is concomitant with letting go of one's very self.

Unless there appears to be something else one can invest oneself in which affords one a truer alignment between faith and reason people will want to hold on to traditional ways even though they may sense certain inadequacies in them. People who had left the organized religion in which they were brought up have returned in response to their church's efforts to lure them back by becoming more conciliatory to their ex-faithful's non-traditional views. It has been, however, an uneasy, tenuous reunion that can never again be felt as the completely gratifying union of the spiritual and material realms it once was.

So, as we see, religious beliefs evolve according to a changing world. They always have and will always have to. And now, in order to be meaningful, they need to undergo a total transformation with respect to new revolutionary perspectives engendered by science and technology.

GOD IS DEAD was the cover story for an issue of TIMES during the 1960s. Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God about one hundred years earlier. Both obituaries were the result of similar context. Nietzsche lamented the transformation of God from being a reality to that of becoming a mere concept, theory or ideology. The announcement on the TIMES' cover was a result of the ascendancy of secular humanism over orthodox religious doctrine that, again, usurped the position of a reigning God with an academic refinement.

To proclaim the death of God by mere mortals seems a curious matter. God exists, and there is no way in which we could arrange the death of God. All it really means is certain perceptions of one's world, one's self and one's God have changed in such a way as to require a reassessment and realignment of one's world, one's self and one's image of God. No one has ever known God intimately. No one has ever known the very essence of God. We can only relate to God through the world we live in, how we perceive ourselves in that world and our knowledge of it.

So, perceptions of God can change though God remains the same. Some things about God are known intuitively but God, in essence, remains a mystery. It is only through this world that we can know anything at all about God and it is through our knowledge of this world that we create perceptions of God that serve as reasonable facsimiles of the reality of God. Any personal contact one feels with one's God amounts to reverberations of one's intense belief in the Godly perceptions one creates. So, it is not a question of whether God is dead or alive or even whether God exists or not. It's a question of what is the most fitting view of God that can be created through the enlightened perspectives afforded us by our knowledge of the actual world we live in.

People have become disillusioned with traditional Gods since time immemorial but they have not abandoned the idea of God they merely took into account what had happened to cause this disillusionment, what new circumstances they found themselves in, and fashioned a different view of God which corresponded to their new perceptions.

The seed for the three great religions of today's world grew in a bed of such disillusion. Abraham is credited with conceiving the idea of one God as a consequence of losing faith in the many Gods he was brought up to believe in as was depicted earlier in this book. (page 52)

Every image of God that ever was presented itself out of our experience, with relation to our intuitive sense that God(s) exist(s). Our intuitive sense, like the existence of God, is not contingent upon our experience. The particular image of God that is formed by such and such a people at such and such a time is as true a representation of God as any other. It provides as good a connection with God as there can be as long as the image of God is relevant to the perspectives of contemporary experience. To change our image of God in reference to a changing world has no effect on God whatsoever. We confuse our intuitive sense of God with our image of God. Or connect the two in a way that causes confusion. Our intuitive sense is not contingent upon experience and we believe our image of God which is partly a product of our intuitive sense should also be unaffected by experience. We feel that any challenge to our image of God is a challenge to our intuitive sense of God's existence. Our intuitive sense does not produce our image of God it just informs us that there is a God. Any challenge to an image of God is not a challenge to God or to our belief in the existence of God. It is merely what it purports to be, a challenge to an image of God. Our image of God is not GOD. It is only an adequate means of relating ourselves to God through our knowledge and experience of our world and it is subject to change as our knowledge and experience change.

All the various Gods of the macrocosm have been created from the social interaction of people within various groups in response to their particular environments. It is out of this mingling of elements that all our cultural effects have been produced. The microcosm of individual intuitive knowledge of God's existence, merging with that intuition in other individuals, develops an image of macrocosmic Gods, which gives resonate fullness to an individual's intuitive sense. Macrocosmic images of God are created from a microcosm of individuals as God creates all there is from a microcosm.

The whole universe is the unfolding of energy. God is that energy and its unfolding. God is the catalyst for the existence of all things. God is the microcosm as well as the macrocosm. God is everything there is. Everything. God is also something beside everything there is. Everything we know there is, anyway.

God is not our father. God is not a person, man or woman.

What God is in essence we cannot know. All we can say is that God must be.

About the creation of the universe all we can now imagine with our poor faculties and limited knowledge is that God set in motion certain properties, which work upon one another in certain ways, to create a myriad of phenomena, in relation to the particular conditions afforded by particular locations formed by the interaction of those properties. And although things must happen in specific ways with other things under certain conditions nothing is really planned out in advance. That life occurred on the planet we call earth was merely a matter of how our solar system just happened to be formed. Life is a possibility nothing more, nothing less. The really significant thing is that life did indeed occur. However improbable life may or may not be is beside the point. The important thing is that it is happening here and now. And it will, in one form or another, continue well into the unforeseeable future. How long our species will be around is another question. Our continuance, to some extent, is in our hands. Our hands alone. No one else's.

The universe, as a manifestation of the God force, is equated with energy. Think of the whole universe and everything in it as one energy. This one energy is a total mystery to us, yet it is all there is, all around and within us. One energy transforms itself into all phenomena while the energy itself never changes. All things are at once in constant flux and absolute permanence. Energy transformed is the very essence of spacetime. The very essence of all there is. One is all and all is one.

All things are infused with the manifestation of God. We as individuals contain that God force. We are not a God. We are not God. God is us. God lives within us and through us. One is a part of the total God force. One is comprised of subjective Gods. Gods of the microcosm. Personal Gods, which serve one's purposes well enough, but must combine or bond with the personal subjective Gods of others to create a whole objective God in which everyone's personal Gods can be subsumed and elevated. There are also minor objective Gods created, for instance, between two people. The bond between two people is the creation of an objective God wherein their subjective Gods can play, fight, love, etc. It is our objective Gods which bind us together and represent to us that which must be done, that which we must hold above ourselves in order to perpetuate ourselves.

Objective Gods fail when they cannot adapt to changing conditions or when subjective gods become confused with objective ones by the powers-that-be or when both conditions coincide. We now like to think of a God of the macrocosm who is independent of us, who has a plan for us and is judging our every thought and action. A supernatural God who created the human species in His image to be put through the gauntlet of life to see how well we perform in order to get the reward of life eternal. Kind of like rats in a maze. This might be an interesting spectacle for the Creator but He supposedly knows exactly how everything and everyone will behave. Even so, He can suddenly become angry at the world He created and threaten to destroy it and then change His mind and let it go on as it had been.

This vacillating God is one that was obviously made in our image rather than the other way around. That image of God was fine and necessary for a certain people at a certain time. Again that image of God is not God but merely a people's conception of God based upon their particular circumstance. Though God in essence does not change, our image of God does change. We may not like the change, we may prefer the old image, we may wish the world didn't have to change. We may attempt to ignore the changes in the world, deny changing perspectives, and, instead of dealing with those changes, stubbornly insist that the world must remain as it once was because we feel uncomfortable with the changes it demands.

However, change is inevitable and we now see Gods looking through us from the microcosm instead of down on us from the macrocosm. The only plan for us is that which we arrive at through the interaction of those Gods emanating from ourselves on an ongoing basis. These Gods radiate out of the one energy that endows us with the attractions and repulsions that inform our sense of law and order. One's individual sense of law and order must be developed in concert with everyone else's in order to form and reform a just and lawful social organism.

As an eternal entity, God, in essence, as energy, has no past or future but always exists in the present. What need of past and future to an eternal being? How could something that always was, always will be and never changes have a past or a future? We have concepts of past and future because they go along with the temporal realm in which we exist.

So, God has no idea of our future nor of any future. God doesn't know what's going to happen but God is what's going to happen, whatever happens. It doesn't matter to God whether we exist or not. Whether there is a planet earth or not. It matters to us. It matters to the God that is looking out at the world through us. The part of God that is us. The Gods emanating through us and throughout creation have an interest in the perpetuation of a thriving planet earth. Otherwise, God, the essence of God has no such interest. That one God exists in everything there is, as energy, unchanged, no matter what happens.

Our experience of God is a localized formation of the essence of God. All we can say about what happens after we die is that we remain as part of the existence of the one energy as all things do. What that means exactly we just don't know. Our purpose here on earth is to live according to those principles that speak to preserving the environment in which life can perpetually prosper. Assuring that virtual eternity, which must be measured and visualized through present actions, is the closest we get to the essence of God on this earth and to aligning ourselves to God's eternity.

We are but one life form on this planet. Life as a whole does not need us. Indeed, life would be faring much better without us. And it's difficult to believe that the kind of intelligent God now in place would will the creation of a being that would engage in the piecemeal destruction of one of the centerpieces of all creation. That this God works in mysterious ways is no explanation but, rather, an escape hatch for those believers who find themselves faced with uncomfortable challenges suggested by their own scenarios. They claim to know the mind of God up to the point where it is useful to them.

Life created us and life makes mistakes. It makes genetic mistakes in individuals which nature selects against. New and old species alike are constantly put to the survival test and are rendered extinct if unable to pass. Homo sapiens passed the test with flying colors. We became overachievers and now the only obstacle to our survival is ourselves. We were created out of Life's prodigious drive to survive and we have hence evolved into a means for its extinction.

Life as a whole has to deal with surviving on a planet that is at best indifferent to its existence. Life lives on life. And life, as we know it, created the atmosphere in which it could evolve. Each species, in procreating through its own survival techniques, conspires to serve in the furtherance of, not only their own kind, but that of life itself.

One can see a kind of morality at work here. No species totally lords it over any other (until human beings came along) while individuals are sacrificed for the greater good of all life, for the existence of life itself.

Life goes about seeking its own advantage in a treacherous environment, expanding its reach through the creation of life forms most capable of using, overcoming and, to some extent, changing environmental conditions. Each species, each part of life, plays a role in providing life as a whole, as a single organism, optimum opportunity for an assured existence in perpetuity by finding ways of living in all kinds of climes and nooks and crannies. In the depths of the ocean where sunlight cannot reach, thus making the process of photosynthesis impossible, life operates through a process of chemosynthesis.

Life as a whole is a cellular colony tenaciously determined to exist however, wherever, forever. Each individual life form of every species has an awareness of this tenacious drive to survive forever, to be alive eternally. A life form successfully occupying a particular niche secures a brick, as it were, in the edifice of life itself.

Through each member of each species life expresses its desire for immortality. Each life form desires to prey without being preyed upon. However, as life itself needs the predator/prey dynamic for the preservation of life as a whole individual species also need it for their own existence. The fox, for instance, enables the existence of the rabbit by preying upon individual rabbits This serves to control species growth, while enabling his own existence in the process, as well as that of his species, while rabbit and fox both play a part in the existence of life itself.

Life slowly carved out an existence for itself on a planet that provided only the possibility for the eventuality of life. Earth was not made for life. Life made the planet livable. The very things that help to create life can also be destructive to it. Sunlight, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, cold, heat, etc., can all be fatal to life. Life needs the opportunity to be able to use all those things for its own purposes. To find just the right area between the creative/destructive dynamic of the elements of its survival. Life was the architect of the ozone layer that makes the sun user-friendly to life. Indeed, life created our entire atmosphere that is, for one thing, capable of modulating temperatures that are conducive to life. So, individual species have a creative/destructive relationship with one another in the predator/prey dynamic and life itself has a creative/destructive relationship with natural elements.

The cells of all creatures have been aware of this creative/destructive relationship with the nature of things for billions of years. Cells creating individual species do so with regard to the total cellular colony which all of life is. Cellular engineering conspires to create a network of life forms with all drives, appetites and instincts of particular species regulated by singular weapons, defenses and breeding rates so that all who are selected for have an ample margin of survivability.

This synergistic network is well preserved in the oceans and is distinctly illustrated by the fact that whales who occupy the top of the food chain have low breeding rates and feed upon krill which are near the bottom and have very much higher rates of reproduction. In between these two extremes are many more such synchronized arrangements between species by which the one living organism of the sea, life itself in the sea, which each species and each individual of each species is part of, ensures its existence. This is not to say that the behavior of each individual of each species is somehow directed by the macrocosm of life itself for its own purposes, but that the entire living organism of the sea is all created and orchestrated from the microcosm of each and every individual life form which are all a product of their own microscopic cellular network. The synergistic network of life itself on the level of the macrocosm is formed out of the synergistic network of the microcosm found within each and every cell.

On land this same kind of synergistic arrangement between species and in some cases rival groups of the same species is also evident. With the development of the human species, however, the arrangement is severely challenged by the very survival techniques that so successfully brought life through its entire evolutionary process. We were endowed with a capacity for survival that has now become a threat to the survival of life itself. Our intelligence, our communication skills, have brought us to the brink of disaster and it now remains to be seen whether or not we can employ them to establish a new covenant with the nature of things beneficial to our survival and so of the entire ecosystem our survival depends on.

How do we do this? How do we go about providing the means by which we can reverse our present momentum and realign our species to conform to those elements of the biosphere that conspire to preserve and perpetuate life? Do we really have the ability to change our ways or are we a force of nature without the ability to sit in our own driver's seat and effectively maneuver ourselves toward a future of a more conscious choice than that which presently appears before us?

There are no grand old political schemes that are going to show us the way. That's for sure. Old religions that still insist that mindless procreation represents the holy will of God are not going to show us the way. There is no God above with a plan for us to follow. We're on our own. We are part of the God force as everything is. We are infused with particular manifestations of that force, which emanate through us from the microcosm, forming us as a force of nature which must combine with particular manifestations of the God force in other life forms to create a fuller more complete sense of God, of who we are and how we must conduct ourselves in this world for the sake of this world's dynamism now and in the unforeseeable future.

This world is our only link to God. All material, all matter is the manifestation of the spirit of God, the essence of God. There are not two separate realms natural and supernatural that we must divide ourselves between while not really achieving a salubrious rapport with either, or achieving it with one at the expense of the other. This world is the realm of our concern; here we exist in a moment of God's eternity. Our relationship to this earth, our relationships on this earth are one with our relationship with whatever Gods may be.

We know through our knowledge of the nature of things with reference to each other that life on this planet is something we must be responsible for. We also know that this newfound responsibility entails certain adjustments in our psyches and our living standards that we are not yet sure of. Our comfort level feels threatened. That's because it is. It is threatened one way or the other. Present conditions are not very comforting and it seems they will only get worse in the long run. So the question is whether we take effective measures now, measures that we may find uncomfortable for the time being, or continue on our present course and invite wholesale discomfort to become a permanent condition.

# 5.1 ENVISIONING A FUTURE

For a society to accurately project itself into the future and plot a sensible course on which it can set its sights requires a painstakingly honest assessment of its present condition, its inertia, its direction and what must be done to conform the social organism to a confident evolutionary track. Predictions and preparations based on sociological data are doomed to fail because they do not provide direction but merely use current trends to dictate where we're going and then, so-called, social engineers conduct studies on how to manipulate things so that they concur with the predictions. In the meantime, however, things keep changing quite unpredictably.

For example, in the 1950s the data showed that a significant percentage of urban populations in the US were developing inclinations toward living in the suburbs. It was predicted that suburbia would boom. The suburbs were touted as a paradise in the making. Government programs were installed to facilitate the migration from the cities. But, lo and behold, things didn't quite work out the way they were supposed to. Paradise never materialized and the mass movement from the cities created a vacuum in urban areas that was to be filled by, what has been generously described as, urban blight.

The data also showed that conditions in the ghettoes could be improved with better housing. Thus, the projects were conceived which, far from improving things, only made matters worse. The projects soon became the predominantly crime infested horrors that many of them are today.

Politicians for the most part aren't any better than sociologists at calculating how to bring about a better tomorrow. Politicians have their ideologies, their upbeat slogans, they can take polls and tell people what they want to hear. They can promise to be everyone's big brother, but when it comes to enunciating clear perspectives for the future they fail, miserably. Politicians are all caught up in the day-to-day process of appeasing a system virtually indifferent to any future whatsoever. A system that confidently processes politicians as it does inept programs for the sole purpose of ensuring the propagation of the system. A system that is answerable to no one. The bureaucratic paper-shuffling buck-passing system. The anonymous blob. The mass of parasitic contentment wallowing in the miasma of present illusions, self-satisfied and smug in its delusion of working in the interest of the people. An interest it views as inseparable from its own self-interest. The system has no interest in the future but only in securing itself for the present.

The future is forfeited by politicians with their focus on seizing the moment in an ongoing game of king of the hill. And we are, all of us, pretty much caught up in a moment to moment existence hoping against hope that each moment will, if your life is going well, lead to more of the same or, if things are going badly, miraculously lead to something better while we all become more and more consumed with consumerism.

Living for the moment may have its charm but without a comprehensive future in sight with which to temper our various drives, appetites and ambitions and synchronize them into a consuming commitment to posterity there will continue to be an increasing commitment to mindless consumption of the ideological as well as the materialistic kind.

When not able to confidently project a viable future, a symptom of a dire and unmanageable present, one tends to embrace absolutism, latching on to one dogma or another, as the solution to everything. Doing so can help to relieve one's anxiety about a threatening state of affairs but it contributes very little to present a clear view of things so that we may produce a sharper focus about present conditions and where we're headed and be able to decide in a pragmatic way all that needs to be done to perceive a prudent, palpable future for ourselves and our planet.

For now, the future looks bleak as we look forward to, among other things, rising deficits, overwhelming debt, increasing crime and poverty, deteriorating environments, skyrocketing medical costs, high unemployment, dysfunctional government and an over-populated planet. What's needed is a wholesale rethinking, reevaluating and restructuring of all our concepts, values and institutions in order to come to terms with our present predicament. The ideas about reinventing government that have been suggested by government officials are not nearly enough to do the job. Certainly government needs a complete transformation, but all of our problems cannot be solved by government, certainly not by big government. Each and every one of us has to be able to directly contribute to creating a society that reflects how we realistically imagine it should be. That is a society formed out of communities that work.

Individuals must look at how they would want their own future to realistically unfold, identify those things that seem to be obstacles to that future and begin to take steps to remove them. Most people would probably want a crime free community in which to live and raise children, job security, an invigorating cultural environment, a healthful physical environment and the expectation that the money one makes will not all be gobbled up in taxes to pay for the deficit spending of government. If all individuals had the wherewithal to establish such conditions within every community, and went about doing so, this would, by default, create an overall healthier and solvent body politic. With, again, the microcosm forming the macrocosm.

Such a prospect would entail the coordination, synchronization and synergization of all facets of society. Government, media, banking, business, religion, art, families and individuals would all need to participate in finding their proper roles within the social organism and seek to establish a healthful symbiosis in relation to that organism. Everyone would need to assist one another in finding and keeping one's proper place within the larger scheme of things.

This kind of arrangement would not be at all possible to engender from the top down. It could only be accomplished within autonomous local levels, interacting with each other, and with all other facets of society as well and creating a social organism to which everyone could feel vitally connected. This would, of course, require drastic changes to be made in all of our institutions.

One common denominator to which we are all vitally connected is money. It has something to do with just about everything one does and the way money is institutionalized has a great deal of influence on the overall configuration and condition of a society. The circulation of money in society can be compared to the circulation of blood in one's body. Every cell in one's body needs a supply of blood in order to function and, similarly, every community in a social organism needs a supply of money for the very same reason. However, the circulation of money in society is not nearly as efficient as that of blood in one's body.

The model for the formation of our new social body will be the anatomical organization of the human body. In preceding sections of this book I have already made the case for such a prospect and similar arguments have been put forth by other authors. Jane Jacobs' book, The Nature of Economies elucidates how economic and natural development are comparable. In Robert Wright's book Non Zero the author says, "The comparison between society and organisms should certainly be kept on a leash. For one thing, energy is less frivolous, more consistently functional, within an organism than within a society. Still, comparing organisms and societies has its payoffs." No, a social organism cannot be designed as a replica of an anatomical one and, yes, it certainly does have its payoffs.

In assessing the operation of the human body one cannot help but be struck by its unity - trillions of individual cells organize themselves in such a way so as to effect the smooth and efficient operation of the body as a unit. The various organs created by the cells do not compete with one another or try to claim that their particular contribution to the body as a whole is more important than any other. (Such a claim could be assigned to a cancerous tumor.) Each organ of the body performs its particular function as prescribed by its particular cellular constituency in conjunction with the endocrine and nervous systems monitoring and regulating, that is, governing organic activity. For the most part the cells and organs operate autonomously each providing some specific function necessary for the functioning of the body as a whole. A myriad of cells constitute a single organ. The many acting as one. Several specialized organs, then, constitute the body as a whole unit. The brain is a divided organ with a left and right hemisphere. In each hemisphere certain areas are reserved for specialized, although, integrated tasks. The two hemispheres communicate with one another via the corpus callosum and the billions of brain cells form a functioning unit.

The smooth unified operation of the body is facilitated by a circulatory system that provides the necessary nutrients to each and every cell via the blood supply. The cells take from the blood supply whatever nutrients they require to energize the work that needs to be done to maintain themselves, the organs they comprise and, thus, the body as a whole. As a body is initially formed from individual cells so is its ongoing growth and maintenance. Whatever the cells take from the body's blood supply they pay back many times over by producing energy and forming organs for waste removal, processing information, building and deploying a system of defense against harmful invaders, etc. Every organ of the body is dependent on its network of individual cells each of which must be provided the necessary resources with which to carry out their function. This circulatory system is, of course, also devised by the bodies cellular network. The microcosm engenders the macrocosm and if every cell in one's body is healthy and vigorous then one's body will also be healthy and vigorous.

Of course, this also holds true for societies. If every community in a society is vigorous and healthy then the whole society would also be vigorous and healthy. In a social body it is money that energizes the work that needs to be done in providing the goods and services a society requires to prosper and maintain itself. Things like producing energy, providing waste removal, processing information, building and deploying a system of defense against harmful invaders, etc. However, compared to the circulation of blood in the body the circulation of money in a social body is terribly inefficient.

The circulation of money in the United States, for example, is almost entirely handled by a federal apparatus. That is, the brain of the body politic. The money supply and the circulation of money is regulated by the Federal Reserve from where it finds its trickle-down way to the rest of the social body. Then a good portion of what has managed to trickle down is sent back to another part of the body politic's brain, the IRS. The money collected by the IRS is then redistributed by yet another part of the brain, Congress.

Imagine the shape of your head if the above was the anatomical model of blood circulation. If the distribution, collection and redistribution of blood was entirely handled by your brain grotesque bureaucratic tumors would be bulging out of your skull, sapping your body's strength and fouling its ability to act as an integrated, coordinated unit. Excessive amounts of blood would be commandeered by the brain itself and by those organs most closely associated with it while other bodily parts would be sorely deprived of their fair share.

That is not a pretty picture and it would be inconceivable for a living organism to be arranged so disproportionately, so out of whack. Yet, we seem to take it for granted that such an arrangement is just fine for our social organisms. Of course, a social organism is a different animal from our anatomies and an exact replication of anatomical operation cannot, of course, be transposed onto a social organism, but, as we see, a living organism can serve as a good model for societal organization to some extent.

To reconstruct our social organism we need to start from scratch as if we were building a new society from the microcosm. So, keeping our infrastructure, our communication technologies and our private sector intact, imagine that all our government institutions no longer existed.

First, we will focus on creating a system for the circulation of the money supply. Let's say we create a monetary system with no taxation of any kind. This would, of course, also mean that there would be no entitlements of any kind. No food stamps, no welfare, no unemployment insurance, no Medicaid or Medicare, no social security, no federally sponsored or State sponsored entitlement programs at all.

However, the social system envisioned here would provide the wherewithal for everyone to be able to make a life for themselves. That is what people really want.

Now, as I said, the private sector is still intact and money is being exchanged for goods and services, deposited in and withdrawn from banks, loans are being made and being paid off, etc. It would be business as usual in the new vision of things but with a few radical changes. Banks would not be solely private businesses. Banks would not be owned by any individual. The banking system would facilitate a thriving economy and act as a conduit for private and public concerns. All banks would be part of a system whose purpose would be to serve the interests of the society as a whole through the servicing of the self-interest of individuals and businesses. The banking system's infrastructure would be paid for, as it is now, from the earnings of the banks themselves. An individual bank would exist as part of the whole banking system and as an integral part of the social body. The officers of a bank would serve as guardians of the public trust as well as operating as private bankers. They would be subject to review, censure and removal by the public they serve.

Taking a look at how a local community bank would conduct its business within this system will give us an understanding about the whole operation. The bank would be the focal point of the community. Business leaders, community leaders and bankers would all get together to assess economic, social and environmental conditions and discuss targets for investment. There being no taxes they must decide what monies need to be invested in the public sector. Such monies must be seen in the long term as investments in the community's future. They must be calculated to support the activity of the private sector's profitability, i.e., not be a drain on it. Every dollar spent for government would need to have real value to the whole community in making a vital contribution to society's proficiency as a synergistic unit.

Now, it is important to note here that a community bank would have the resources of the whole society to draw from as needed. Just the way every cell in our bodies has access to the entire blood supply, so too would the whole society's entire supply of money be immediately available to each and every community for its particular usage. But all of them would feel it necessary to conduct themselves in a fiscally responsible manner because keeping the value of money at an optimum level would be in everyone's interest. So, whereas a community could depend on sufficient funds in times of need it would also be extremely conscientious about using the funds prudently in those times, and also in times of prosperity. The goal of every community would be to reinvigorate the societal money supply by contributing more to it than has been taken out, thus keeping the value of money at the highest rate possible. This is accomplished through profitable businesses, an efficient public sector and through individuals who are able to earn more money than they need to spend. Thus, with the strong incentive to save, due to lack of entitlements, a lot of money would be deposited into saving accounts. That money, along with all the liquid assets of every business, including banks, would automatically be deposited into a collective pool of money.

So, in effect, everyone's assets, from individuals to corporations, would represent a pool of money that would be available as needed to the private as well as the public sector. Everyone would contribute to this pool and, in a very real sense, have equal access to it. Presently, taxation is how we pool our resources for redistribution as government sees fit. It is, however, a costly, inefficient and unfair system. With the system herein suggested one would contribute all that one has to the general pool while having access to all that everyone else has. This would be a one for all and all for one situation where perceptions of injustice would be virtually impossible to insinuate, neediness could be taken care of immediately at the place of need and everything would be handled by the banking system. So, no extra cost for redistribution would be incurred. With this system a rising tide would indeed raise all boats.

The social contract would need to provide one entitlement with respect to this system. That entitlement would be a guaranteed job with a living wage salary for at least one adult per household. If such a contract could not be fulfilled by the private sector in a particular community then the public sector would pick up the slack. The public sector's budget would, of course, be derived from the private sector's assets, so, it would behoove the private sector to keep as many people employed as possible. Of course, businesses would not have to provide benefits to their employees as they do today thus increasing their ability to keep people employed.

This kind of system would set up a correspondence between the public and private sectors that would be beneficial to both. The private sector, along with private citizens, would determine what role the public sector would play in contributing to a smooth running, efficient social system. And again the private sector would allocate the necessary public funding out of the collective pool of money. The public sector then, freed from concerns about money and how to spend it, could concentrate on the tasks assigned to it. Those in the private sector would have an interest in keeping government at a minimal size might come to see that as incentive to self-regulate.

What about health insurance and pensions? If there is no social security, no Medicaid or Medicare and, also, no benefits provided at one's place of work how would one be able to provide for these things oneself? First, without these benefits in place one would have a strong incentive to maintain a robust savings account. And as far as employers are concerned, not having the added expense of providing benefit packages, generous salaries would be how one would attract employees. This would drive wages up and individuals would be charged with managing their own retirement funds, their own health insurance and their own lives in general. This would be a system that would tend to produce responsible adults rather than a class of spoiled children who come to expect more than any system can provide and who act out in protest against realistic cutbacks to unsustainable government programs.

Let's look at how health insurance could best be handled in such a system.

There are certain objectives that health insurance reform must be shaped by. These include lowering medical costs, providing individuals with incentive to pursue healthful life styles and universal coverage. It would also include having medical treatments decided solely by doctor and patient.

The best way to do this would be to set up an independent not-for-profit financial institution, (not to be confused with a non-profit organization) to handle medical savings accounts for individuals and families. An MSA bank with a particular charter to service such accounts.

There would be no government involvement and account holders would pay for their medical expenses themselves with checks or debit cards issued by the bank that could only be used to pay medical bills.

Interest would be earned on these accounts as the bank would make prudent investments and in that sense operate as any other bank. Being a not-for-profit institution, however, the money earned on investments would also become part of the insurance pool. Staff and management of the bank would receive relatively modest salaries.

The population of the US is over 300 million. So, with full participation by every adult and those with children providing an account for each child the amount of deposits would be enormous. An average deposit of, say, $100 a week would amount to 30 billion every week, or over 1.5 trillion every year. That plus interest on investments made by the bank equals a considerable pool of money. Interest earned for individual accounts would be higher than commercial banks could offer and serve as an incentive to maximize one's deposits. After one's account exceeds a certain amount depositors could make withdrawals, up to a certain percentage of their account, and use that money for other purposes.

Now, individuals would be responsible for paying their own medical bills but they would also be backed up by the bank. For instance, let's say I have an account of $10,000 and I have a medical procedure costing $20,000. So, $10,000 out of my account is paid to the health provider and the other $10,000 is lent to me by the bank to pay the full amount. So, my account is now overdrawn by $10,000. Now, let's say the bank picks up half of what I owe and the rest is paid off by me over time with a low interest loan. The loan is paid off by making deposits to my savings account, which would be considered as normal deposits accumulating and earning interest. If over the next ten years or so I have no major medical expenses and my account without the debt would have been $30,000 would actually amount to something less than $25,000 given the deductions over time due to my debt.

Any medical costs one incurs due to unhealthful habits like smoking, drug addiction, drinking and preventable obesity will be entirely one's own responsibility.

The same goes for elective surgeries.

Such a system would provide incentive for people to pursue healthier lifestyles than is now the case because they are using their own money to pay health care providers and the money they have in the bank that they do not need to use would be theirs to keep. So, one would be making medical payments when health care is needed rather than making insurance payments whether health care is needed or not. Having to keep paying out a lot of money to insurance firms for health care might be cause for not taking the best care of oneself. There could be some psychology at work there about "getting your money's worth". That is one just might subconsciously harbor the notion that having already paid for health care one might have a mind to cash in on those payouts.

We know that people are certainly not getting healthier with the present system.

Reducing the demand for health care due to healthier living would also be a factor in reducing medical costs.

Administrative costs for doctors would also be a lot less not having to field all the various health plans presently in place. There would also have to be serious tort reform in order to dramatically lower the cost of malpractice insurance so that doctors are not over prescribing treatment just to cover their butts.

The cost for health care would be market driven.

Another benefit of this system would be to the economy whereas businesses would no longer be paying for employees' health insurance plans. This would free up a lot of money that could be used to invigorate the economy and produce more jobs.

It might be that people who are not wealthy would be more likely to participate in such a MSA program while the wealthy, able to take care of medical bills without assistance, might opt out. However, with payments for medical treatment being strictly confined to checks or debit cards issued to account holders by the Health Facilitation Bank everyone would need to participate.

This would be a system where everyone contributes and everyone benefits. Those with sizable accounts, would be earning a hefty interest while the poor could be generously subsidized.

It's important to note that individual depositors would not be charged for anyone else's expenses. Whatever subsidies the "bank" would need to cover would be furnished from the general pool. Like any bank, one's deposits are not kept in a drawer with one's name on it, everyone's money is used for bank business while individual accounts still show the full amount deposited along with any interest earned. The "bank" would be making conservative investments, thus, earning interest on the considerable amount of money that could be used for such. The bulk of that money would increment the general pool along with paying the relatively modest salaries of staff of the non-for-profit institution.

Health insurance today is a matter of good health paying for bad. If one is healthy until the day one dies whatever one has paid into a health insurance plan was money given away. Having a MSA would rectify that inequity.

The lower the payouts to health care providers equals more money available for investment by the bank and one's money would be earning higher interest. From this it is possible for every individual to develop a sense of being directly connected to the society as a whole. One's own health and well being would have a positive influence on the health and well being of the whole social organism as well as one's own bank account. The whole society emanates directly from each and every individual.

This system would, of course, eliminate private insurance companies as we know them today. They operate on the principal of "robbing Peter to pay Paul" as the saying goes. That is, robbing healthy people to pay for unhealthy people. In the system proposed here everyone would contribute to the pool of insurance funds, everyone could draw on the fund in times of immediate need and everyone in the long run would be individually responsible to pay one's bill. This seems to me to be the much more sensible and fair system than the one it is designed to replace. It would also go long way to eliminate the fraud and abuses that are bound to occur in a government sponsored system.

Much of the insurance fraud now taking place would also be eliminated. One of the most common scams has to do with faking back problems that supposedly make it impossible for someone to work. Claiming that one's back problem is job related the injured party becomes eligible for workman's compensation. With the system herein proposed, however, there would be no worker's compensation because any ailment would be considered to be one's own responsibility. That is, one would need to provide for one's own insurance, rely on family and friends or find a job that one is able to do.

There are, however, as we all know, working conditions that can lead to harm and the social contract would require that a company work closely with its workers, heeding whatever input they had to give in order to create and maintain optimum working conditions. Companies that did not comply would be blacklisted by workers until it did.

All of this rigmarole can be avoided, however, simply by adopting the Mondragon business model.

What about suits against a particular business by an employee or a consumer for injury of one kind or another? A business would, of course, also maintain a bank account for insurance purposes just as any individual would. And, just like an individual, a business would be insuring itself with its own money which would be its to keep as long as it didn't need to dip into its account. Manufacturers would find it wise to collaborate with one another in funding an independent organization charged with overseeing product reliability, safety, efficiency, etc. This would be done in the spirit of policing oneself that would be encouraged throughout society. If a fatal flaw in the design of a particular product, an automobile, for example, was found to be responsible for injury or death it would most likely be due to an honest mistake on the part of the manufacturers and the monitoring organization. It would be a hard learning experience for one and all. If, however, it was found to be the result of a known flaw that was covered up then that would be an unforgivable breach of the social contract inciting consumer ire and encouraging an all out boycott of the delinquent company that could mean its doom. The company would need to respond by getting rid of its management and replacing it with responsible individuals to have any chance at staying in business.

The matrix of the social organism would be focused on instilling good habits in one another individually as well as institutionally. A healthy social organism requires that all of its members and all of its institutions take full responsibility for all that they do. If I buy a car I would do so with the knowledge that, after due diligence in researching car companies and dealerships, I fully endorse the product, manufacturer and dealer. Of course, if something goes wrong with the car as a result of faulty design or workmanship the manufacturer must take responsibility to correct it. If an accident occurs as a result of a faulty design that the manufacturer and the monitoring agency were unable to detect there would be no grounds for a law suit against the auto maker. The auto maker would, however, be obliged to buy back all of the flawed vehicles from their owners at the amount that was paid for them at the time of the sale.

This is the kind of stand up behavior that would be encouraged and expected at all levels of society in all of its endeavors at all times. There needs to be a strictness of accountability woven into the fabric of our lives on an individual as well as an institutional basis. As it is now much of our behavior is based on the premise of getting away with as much as possible, of receiving special treatment at the expense of others and being an individual who does not have to comply with ordinary social norms. Much of these attitudes have to do with the way the society has been set up and operates which gives one the sense that one is more put upon by social requirements than benefited by them. For instance, the sense that laws are made for the benefit of the rich and powerful and only the powerless are held subject to them. And the whole apparatus of taxation can be seen as an unjust intrusion into one's personal affairs. The IRS can behave and has behaved as an all powerful potentate answerable to no one for its goon squad tactics that have at times been leveled against innocent responsible citizens. The CIA and FBI, have in some instances conducted themselves in much the same way. Law enforcement in general can be viewed as interested in racking up arrests and convictions rather than in the pursuit of justice. Businesses are also seen as out to gouge consumers, overcharging them for shoddy goods and services. And governments and political parties seek to grow while abdicating their responsibility to preside over a solvent, coherent social system. All this serves as a disconnect between individuals and the society they are ostensibly thought to belong to.

With the system herein suggested the IRS wouldn't exist. Government would be relieved of collecting taxes along with the chore of trying to figure out who to tax at what rate and how best to redistribute tax revenues. Government would be able to concentrate on facilitating the efficacious operation of the social organism in whatever way the society has authorized it to do so. Agencies like FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, would not be necessary.

Given the manner in which money would be circulated throughout the social body, as described above, the necessary funds would immediately find their way to wherever they're needed for investment, social purposes and disaster relief without government bureaucracies mucking things up. We all saw the bureaucratic mess that was created in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The maze of separate agencies and red tape that applicants for support had to endure would have been discouraging under normal circumstances but for people traumatized and weakened by suddenly losing their loved ones in such a horrifying way it was in some cases totally debilitating. Some of them just gave up.

If every bank had access to the total assets of the entire economy people in dire straits could be taken care of without the hassle of filling out excessive forms and trudging around back and forth to one agency and another. The necessary funds would be made available to the people in need immediately at their local bank. Each and every citizen would know that they were all contributing to the emergency funding through their own bank accounts that comprised the collective pool of money. Everyone would know that everyone else, including businesses, was chipping in and the burden would be spread out far and wide. We would also know that there would be no wasted or diverted funds and that all those victimized by the events would receive the exact amount of money that was required to sustain them in their particular circumstances for however long it was necessary because it would all be processed locally and transparently. Everyone would take comfort in knowing that all would be taken care of in the same way if any one of us ever found ourselves to be in a similar situation. Some might feel deprived in not being able to exercise their own charitable inclinations independently by sending a check to a particular emergency fund attached to a particular cause but one would know on an ongoing basis that every individual savings bank deposit made out of self-interest was also, in part, a contribution to the collective-interest - to all those in need at any given time. Also, one's bank balance would not be affected in the sense that deductions would not be made to the principal although interest earned could be temporarily diminished. Through this kind of arrangement one can derive a palpable sense of belonging to a social organism in which everyone contributes according to their means and is eligible for support according to their needs.

That resembles the old communist precept "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need". A nice idea but one that the communists were unable to realize. The communist reality was humorously expressed by Soviet workers when they said, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." With their topdown style of micromanagement the communists could not create an economy vigorous enough to adequately sustain either those who worked or those who were in need. The US system now in place consists of a healthy vigorous private sector supporting the public sector, with respect to things like unemployment insurance, emergency funding and welfare. So, in a sense it is a system congruent with the above communist precept with able bodied workers contributing part of what they earn to those in need. The new system would be an improvement in that chronic need would be eliminated and money for the needy would be distributed more effectively and more accurately with less expense.

This new system would be freely organized from localities out of individual initiative and self-interest. This would tend to galvanize a community's energy into creating profit making enterprises that would generously reward all those involved and which would, in turn, adequately take care of those less fortunate. So, a particular community whose members have been predominantly living off welfare and systematically held hostage by that bureaucracy would now be free to choose a better way of life for themselves. The resources that had been made available to the community via welfare checks along with the resources used to support the welfare bureaucracy would all be freed up as resources in the community bank and available for investments to community members for profit making projects in the private sector. This would be the best way for any community to go about the business of improving its lot and organizing itself in the most productive and beneficial way possible.

Law enforcement also works best when it is a direct outgrowth of one's own community, of one's own self, rather than having it seen as imposed on one by what is considered to be a "foreign" or enemy police force, e.g., racist white cops patrolling in black neighborhoods.

Law enforcement would operate within a social matrix that encourages and supports self-policing among individuals and institutions. It would not be charged with racking up as many arrests and convictions as possible but would focus on administering justice to one and all in a completely fair and objective manner. Law enforcement agencies would police themselves and each other to ensure that they were properly aligned with the values, goals and ideals of the social organism that they inhabit. Brought into this refined perspective law enforcement officials could go about their primary task of accurately identifying and effectively dealing with those people and practices that are truly harmful without being subjected to political and social pressures that might distort their perspective. Law enforcement should be mindful of the need for its services, a growing need should not be seen as an endorsement of law enforcement's importance but as a sign that the social organism was not as healthy as it should be. The rationale that a healthy organism requires a minimal effort from law enforcement agencies should tell us that the remedy for a rising crime rate is not found in more law enforcement but in alleviating the unhealthful conditions that tend to push potentially law abiding people into criminal activity.

Everyone would be seen contributing to everyone else's welfare through the very act of pursuing their own welfare, their own self-interest. And everyone would have the sense that the social organism was an outgrowth of their own sensibility that would be of benefit to them as they benefit it.

# 5.2 VALUES

Today it is science that keeps us in touch with the awe and mystery of life, nature and the universe. In the past this was primarily the purview of religion. Science is intimately involved in every aspect of our existence from the microcosm to the macrocosm. It provides the big picture as well as the closeups and it pinpoints our particular position in the whole scheme of things. That was once a religious exercise. But now it is science that brings us to our senses and puts us in our place. In the process, science inadvertently questions sacred cows and old images of god, challenges their validity and creates new vistas where new images of god may appear.

Science, however, does not challenge all the traditional teachings of religion. In many cases it supports and anchors them in the nature of things. There are human values that science brings to light along with some ancient mystical notions about the progression of the universe. As we shall see science has more in common with religious values than we have been lead to believe.

To begin with in the eleventh century we have a passage from a hymn by Symeon, Abbot of the small monastery of St. Marcas in Constantinople, that is as much the musings of a scientist as a cleric;

O Light that none can name, for it is altogether nameless.

O Light with many names, for it is at work in all things...

How do you mingle yourself with the grass?

How, while continuing unchanged, altogether inaccessible, do you preserve the nature of the grass unconsumed?

What is this but a beautifully conceived scientific inquiry in poetic form? O light, indeed, that still remains as mysterious as ever though we know it to be electromagnetism. It is composed of something called energy but we don't have any idea what energy actually is. And our experience of light is not something we can altogether grasp. Light does have many names, like, red, blue, yellow, etc., and everything we see to name is brought to our attention by light. The third and fourth lines are, of course, a reference to what we know to be photosynthesis. The whole poem ruminates on the connection between the sun and the biosphere that is still something to marvel at.

There are other parallels between religion and science. A process known as emanation factors into religious beliefs throughout history from ancient times to the present. Emanation encompasses various levels of development from relatively unknown origins to the material world.

The ancient epic poem of Babylon, Enuma Elish, depicts the unfolding of the universe in a series of emanations that, with regard to the swamp of a no-man's land that was Mesopotamia, begins with a formless mass of water from which the gods of Babylon are formed. A succession of gods emerged from the swampy morass beginning with lesser lights such as Apsu and finally culminating in the perfection of Marduk, the sun god, who went on to create humanity.

The Babylonian gods were each associated with various aspects of the natural world. Apsu, the first of the gods to appear was associated with river water and his wife Tiamat with seawater. These gods were not fully developed and were still aligned with the formless swamp from which they appeared. Other gods to follow were incrementally more developed and were associated with silt, sky, the heavens, Earth and the sun. The six biblical days of creation can be seen as a similar process of emanation engineered and supervised by Yahweh.

In the third century A.D. the Roman Plotinus envisioned ultimate reality as a primal unity that he simply called the One. (See image below) It is the source of all things and yet remains distinct from them. It is everything and nothing; it is nothing that exists while it is everything that exists. That could be a description of energy. Two of the emanations of the One according to Plotinus were mind and soul, which he considered to be divine in that they were the means by which we could contemplate the existence of god.

Illustration 2: PLOTINUS - IMAGE OF THE ONE -Could be an image of the big bang energy.

Now science has its version of emanation from the big bang to the incarnation of matter, the creation of life and the phenomenon of consciousness. The scientific version closely parallels the religious versions and one can only marvel at the prescience of the ancient visionaries who devised them. The birth and evolution of the universe according to science is seen as a succession of discrete steps from a formless chaotic plasma of virtually infinite energy to particles of light and matter and on to the objects that configure the universe and life itself. The question of what preceded the big bang science cannot definitively answer but it does suggest a primal unity (The One) of some kind from which the big bang somehow unfolded.

The efficacy of Plotinus' idea about "The One" being all that exists while being distinct from existence is demonstrated through scientific findings. The objects that inform our level of existence do not exist from a quantum perspective and yet quantum particles conspire to create those objects. The world that we inhabit exists by virtue of another world that is unaffected by the boundaries that configure that world. From this, one can extrapolate and come to the realization that the universe exists by virtue of something that is unaffected by the boundaries that configure the universe. Just as quantum particles are separate and distinct from the objects they form, the universe is separate and distinct from that which forms it. Namely, energy.

Something of this sort can also be seen in the make up of our bodies. The chemical constituents contributing to the formation and processes of a cell have a distinct existence from the organs that the cells conspire to create. The cells themselves are other than the organs they create. Neurons in our brains function as individual entities that are separate and distinct from the consciousness they produce. Neurons have no thoughts and yet are instrumental in our thinking. Our emotions are the effect of organic molecules, which have no emotion themselves. At the cellular level there is nothing but individual cells functioning as separate entities. And just as we can ask - At what point do atomic structures become the objects of the universe? We can also ask - At what point do individual cells become bodily organs? Atoms create things that are other than themselves as do living cells.

So, the emanations that science reveals begin as an unknown unity out of which the big bang appears as a formless energy that goes on to form particles that become atoms that construct molecules that create objects of inorganic and organic matter in abundant variety. It is important to note, however, that all levels of emanation and all the various particles, atoms, molecules and bodies remain as one. The unity is preserved throughout, all that exists is "The One" energy transformed. Things are simultaneously constant and in flux. The one primal energy that configures all there is radiates out from the unity that is absolutely unchanging - the absolute stuff. Energy is absolute unity in its state of absolute equilibrium where its attraction/repulsion dynamic renders it eternally nonexistent. In that nonexistent state, however, there is the potentiality of an infinite array of other states where the attraction and repulsion are not in perfect equilibrium. Such potential can be projected from the eternal state of nonexistence as kinetic energy although such states do not really exist in regard to the eternal state.

There are those who claim that science and religion are both viable in their unique and separate realms and the one should have nothing to do with the other. Science can give us real world knowledge, they say, but cannot provide us with the values and meaning that make us human - we need religion for that. Some even accuse science of being an enemy to religious principles.

Science is not, however, inimical to values nor is it a slayer of meaning - there are religious values that can actually be derived from science. If humility is a religious value, for instance, nothing could be more humbling than the pursuit and study of science. Indeed, Christian humility is an expression of pride when compared to the humility one derives from science.

In an essay on science and religion Albert Einstein wrote, "By way of understanding he (the scientist) achieves a far reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind towards the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious, in the highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life."

Science humbles us by stripping away all of our illusions and identifying us as earthlings, which is our true identity. It is a universal identity, one that unites us all - unlike our cultural identities that separate people into opposing, sometimes violently opposed camps. Also, as earthlings we become painfully aware of our utter dependency on the natural environment, while cultural conceits that place human beings above and beyond the nature of things have allowed for the development of a dangerously cavalier attitude regarding the ecosystems that sustain us.

Science tells us that the universe was not created for the sole purpose of producing human beings. We are not what the universe is about. We are about what the universe is. The planet earth was not created for us. Indeed, we are not the object of its creation. We are not the object of life. We are objects of life. Life was not created for us. We were created for life. We are not an inevitable necessity in the universal scheme of things. We are contingent upon the nature of things. We are the sun, the stars, the water, the rocks, the minerals, the electromagnetism, the chemicals, the atoms, quarks and photons. And we are, in essence, the energy behind it all. The universe was not created for us we are what created the universe. Life is a composite of universal elements through which energy flows into a conscious awareness and appreciation of those elements and of the universe itself. The power of the whole universe is around us, within us. That power is one with the power of God. There is no distinction between one existence and another, between the supernatural and the natural, for instance. All that exists is one with the energy that is God. We can't say exactly what happens to us after we die but science assures us that our energy will remain part of all that is in the energy that is God. It does not tell us that we are preserved after death as we are in life and there is no guarantee of eternal self-preservation. So, there is no appeal to our instinct for survival to live forever. All we can say is, the essence that is all there is, that every one of us is infused with, never changes and that is what our energetic selves merge with when we die.

Western democracies have certain values such as freedom, which seem to be divinely ordained. The government of the United States of America is informed and instructed by its Founders that "the Creator" has endowed human beings with "inalienable rights" such as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Politicians such as Joe Biden have stressed from time to time that the role of government is one of absolute subservience to the design of the Creator. Government must act as the earthly guarantor of those inalienable rights. It should never regard itself as the progenitor of those rights but merely as a servant that is morally obligated to align itself with the will of the Creator.

Generic terms like "Creator" and "Nature's God" found in the Declaration of Independence, written by the deist Thomas Jefferson, are purposeful in distancing government from any specific institution of religion. This is in keeping with a separation of church and state. Today, however, we can do without invoking any sort of Creator and find those inalienable rights to be endowed by nature alone.

In Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod (1970) writes, "...a living being's structure...owes almost nothing to the action of outside forces, but everything, from its overall shape down to its tiniest detail, to 'morphogenetic' interactions within the object itself. It is thus a structure giving proof of an autonomous determinism: precise, rigorous, implying a virtually total 'freedom' with respect to outside agents or conditions - which are capable, to be sure, of impeding this development, but not of governing or guiding it, not of prescribing its organizational scheme to the living object." And also, "...it is in the structure of [living] molecules that one must see the ultimate source of the autonomy, or more precisely, the self-determination that characterizes living beings in their behavior."

It is by virtue of an inherent autonomy, then, that we are endowed with self-determination. It is nature that necessitates freedom for every individual. It is from the depths of life itself that we are endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

A government, as the Founder's of the United States knew, cannot be trusted to foster those inalienable rights indefinitely and, so, government must be always at the mercy of the self-determined individuals that comprise the populace and for whom individual freedom is held to be an intrinsic value.

So, not only can we learn humility from science but, contrary to the notion that one cannot derive "what ought to be" from "what is", we have from "what is" - our innate autonomy and self-determination - to "what ought to be" - liberty for all.

There are other values that are given to us by the nature of things, among them, racial equality and human solidarity. We are products of DNA. Every human being is a creation of the genetic code. When looking at the different races on this planet from the perspective of DNA there is absolutely no justification for members of one race to regard the members of any other race as inferior in any way. Whatever genetic differences there are they are non-essential. The ideal of racial equality, traditionally espoused on purely ethical terms is now revealed as a fact of nature. Science comes along and shows us that racism has no basis in reality - from what is; genetic homogeneity - to what ought to be; racial equality.

Religions have preached about human togetherness - how we are all one, all brothers and sisters, the children of one god or another. DNA tells us that every individual human being is very nearly genetically identical to any other individual human being. So, we are in reality all members of one human family. Particular religions confine togetherness within their own numbers and regard those of other religions as heathens, infidels, mortal enemies, etc. Science, however, tells us that our oneness is a universal reality. It is not pie-in-the-sky idealism but fact. Our genetic commonality runs deep, while the things that divide us are often superficial and illusory. From what is; we are all made in the image of the one and the same genetic code - to what ought to be; humankind united.

Our genetic oneness, however, is not something that our genetic programming makes us intrinsically conscious of. Individual self-interest is the premise on which we all operate and which is basically concerned with self-preservation, survival.

From our beginnings individuals have survived by belonging to a group or tribe. Thus, the survivability of the tribe was vitally important to individual survivability. The survivability of other tribes was inconsequential, at best, and foreign tribes were certainly not worthy of the concern one had for one's own tribe. Foreign tribes could easily become candidates for annihilation with little provocation.

This natural condition is manifested in modern societies where rival groups, like political parties, vie for ascendency and even consider one another to be mortal enemies. The so-called culture wars are attributed to high-minded ideological differences when in reality they are fundamentally due to natural primitive inclinations. In keeping with a tribal mentality, one's identity with one's group and the survival of that group takes precedence over everything else.

So, we have a situation where the condition of the society as a whole takes a back seat to societal subsets that, like cancer cells, behave as if their existence was more important than the overall social body they inhabit and they threaten the body's health.

Our natural inclinations, then, can become problematical in civilized settings. By recognizing this we can, perhaps, begin to remedy the situation.

We know that our ultimate survivability depends on the condition of the earth's environment. Therefore, it is in everyone's self-interest to identify with the human tribe as a whole and focus on the survival of the planet.

Concern for the environment is not a natural inclination. Primitively it was there to sustain our existence and we, like other life forms, exploited it with impunity to the fullest extent possible for whatever we needed.

This is the mind set with which we are predominantly operating under today. We are operating more biologically than culturally and we need to learn from science how we need to rethink and redirect our momentum, rework our social systems and confront real world problems with real world solutions based on real world knowledge.

We are trying mightily to develop a universal concern for environmental conditions but unless reenforced by social systems that facilitate such development universal concerns will never come to fruition. Social systems are organisms, i.e., biological systems, that are in the business of survival. Our government officials speak of the self-interest of the society they represent, especially when it comes to shaping foreign policy. "It is in our self-interest to go to war to protect our interests," is a familiar refrain.

The conflicts between self-interested societies prevent a holistic approach to world affairs. Such an approach would serve the real self-interest of every one of every nation. Knowledge of our real self-interest can only be derived from science with its ethic of one planet earth, one human family.

Science, then, can be a source of values and, thus, what ought to be can be derived from what is.

Of course, science goes beyond validating the human family as one and some people have a problem with that. Science shows that all life shares the same basic genetic code, from bacteria to humankind. This is unacceptable for those who wish to view human beings as separate from the nature of things.

Science goes even further by demonstrating that everything in the universe both animate and inanimate is composed of the same subatomic particles. And all matter is energy. Everything is energy. All is indeed one. The idea that all is one had been a purely philosophical notion based on mystical intuition. Somehow, however, when this value is demonstrated by science as fact, it seems to become less valuable.

It is also part of conventional wisdom that science has nothing to offer humanity in the way of a meaningful existence. This is a bias based on the belief that meaning can only be imparted to us from some magical mystical source. In reality, however, the root of all meaning is to be found in nature. Science tells us that first and foremost our survival is meaningful. Indeed, all religions were fashioned with the knowledge that all that is meaningful to human beings stems from the instinct of self-preservation. That is why all religions offer a prescription for some sort of eternal life where one can survive forever. That is, however, a prescription that can deprecate the meaning of our survival in this world, about which science has a lot to say.

Science tells us that life is meaningful. Not just human life but the whole interconnected network of life itself. After all, where would we be without it? Science teaches us that it is indeed something very special, a blessing, if you will, to be alive when we consider that most of the species that ever existed have gone extinct.

Science also teaches us that whatever sustains our existence on this earth is meaningful. The air we breathe is meaningful to us as is the water we drink and the food we eat. Over and above those things themselves we can find a higher meaning in taking measures to ensure a plentiful and healthful supply of all three. Shelter and clothing are meaningful. Our relationships are meaningful. Having children is meaningful. Not having children can be even more meaningful. Contributing to one's community is meaningful. And ultimately the meaning of life in this world, here and now, is for the living to be a continuum from past to future and see to it that we bequeath a viable and sustainable planet earth to future generations.

Life is less than a minuscule part of the universe. Indeed, what we call the universe is merely that which is visible to us and that visible universe accounts for less than five percent of its entirety. Life exists as a special composite of universal elements but the particular organization of those elements that is responsible for life is not necessary to the existence of those elements. It is necessary to our existence. Energy itself is all that matters. It doesn't matter to energy, to God, what precise forms existence takes. Energy remains the same regardless. Our existence is special only to us. Is meaningful only to us. Is meaningful only in terms of life itself within the nature of things. Our escape into the eternal essence will come soon enough. While we live we owe all our obeisance to the world that gives us life. For what is beyond this life is here and now. Now is when we generate the future of this planet.

We believe our values to be special to us. What is really special is our capacity to speak of our values. There are many species of birds that mirror our belief in family values. We say that birds have no choice but to follow their instincts which prompt them to mate and instruct them in the care and feeding of their young. It is also our instincts that prompts our concern for family life and while existing in the wild those instincts were as vital and strong as any species of bird. Civilized insulation from the natural world weakens those instincts and families can fall apart. So we have cultural constructs, like religion, to get ourselves, as it were, realigned with the natural world by compelling us to do our duty to our families.

Our values and instincts have been known to cause interesting dilemmas. For example, we say that cannibalism is wrong but do not condemn those who are forced to engage in its as a matter of survival. The soccer team that was stranded in the Andes Mountains without food after their plane crashed, for example, fed on the bodies of those who had died in the accident. One priest, in commenting on the incident, went so far as to say it was their duty to survive as they did. Our law against killing also has exceptions. In a primitive sense we might say that while it is wrong to kill a member of one's own tribe to kill a member of an enemy tribe is permissible. If chimps could talk and draw up legislation they would declare that it is wrong to kill and eat a member of one's community but it is not wrong to kill and eat chimps from other communities as we saw demonstrated in the case of Passion depicted by Jane Goodall in The Chimpanzees of Gombe. The value judgments of chimps and humans are quite similar here and one must conclude that they are formed from a comparable template. They are not commandments from a supernatural God but judgments of survival from the network of a natural intelligence.

A chimp knows not to kill and eat another chimp that is a member of its own community. That is not something a chimp is taught, it is something a chimp just knows. The members of a primitive group of human hunter/gatherer/scavengers were not instructed by anything other than their own instinct and intelligence about how to best behave with respect to one another and maintain cohesiveness amongst themselves. It was something they just knew. An immutable law of existence - respect those who you depend on for your survival. Every 'thou shalt not' of the ten commandments is an admonition against that which would otherwise bring about volatile, unstable conditions among tribal or community members. Moses needed to instruct those in his charge with commandments because as newly emancipated slaves they felt no constraints on their instincts and desires in the sudden freedom that set them loose. The commandments were to serve as the catalyst that was once provided by the laws of natural survival. A catalyst to help channel unbridled energies into the constructive, respectful behavior that forms orderly, cohesive groups.

In the wild one needed to belong to a group to survive. In modern civilizations it's the same. And when environmental conditions are "junglelike" as in prison or some inner city neighborhoods survival groups will develop in the form of gangs. They are formed by individuals, out of individual need, individual recognition of how best to survive and/or thrive. There is no template in nature that corrals us into cohesive groups. All the forces of nature are at work upon and within individuals who find that they must cooperate to one degree or another with other individuals in order to get what they want to pursue their own self-interest. A group's success depends on how effectively its individuals align themselves to a common cause, like survival.

In primitive times the differences between tribal members was much less than the difference between individual members of civilizations. Those who were able to survive under primitive conditions were much more genetically alike than the great variety of types found in the modern world and their genetic closeness made group cohesion more readily achievable. Also, there were no special possessions to be had by one individual alone thereby setting one apart from all the others. So, one might say that the more ruthless natural selection is upon individuals the greater their ability to fit together as a group. As we evolved, of course, we have managed to abate the role of natural selection by virtue of our civilized states and this has allowed for the survival of many more genotypes creating the wide variety of individual types found in the modern world. The differences between people in modern times is exponentially greater and creates much more potential for conflicts. Add to that the lack of feeling dependent on others for our survival along with the drastic disparity in wealth between people and the prospect of maintaining order becomes much more challenging. Even in one's own family it becomes more of a struggle to get along as more genetic diversity is allowed to flourish. As a dramatic example, one's child or sibling might be afflicted with Down syndrome and challenge one's sensibilities to fully accept someone who is so drastically beyond the norm.

No such challenges faced our primitive ancestors. Their differences were minimized by nature's rigorous screening process which was sometimes extended by a primitive tribe's own methods of eliminating the less than fit at infancy. Whatever minor personality conflicts that might occasionally arise within a group of primitives would quickly prompt the others to restore calm and reaffirm the solidarity they knew was crucial to their individual survival. One's self-interested instinct to survive was elevated to a greater interest in group survival. One put group survival above one's own and, by doing that, assured one's own survival to the greatest degree possible. One would not hesitate to risk one's life for the group because one knew that if the group's existence was threatened one's own existence was also threatened. In modern day parlance we would say - If one's way of life is threatened one will go to war to defend it. So, genetic congruence along with a universal need to be part of one's group kept things on an even keel, engendered group loyalty and fostered cohesion within the group.

All this was accomplished via individual genetic programming working from the inside out and environmental influences working from the outside in. Primitives, having no knowledge of genetics might have believed that the natural environment along with the group culture was all that decided their behavior. The group's choices were all made in response to environmental conditions. Their food, shelter and clothing was determined by whatever was available to them in their geographical location. In times of plenty everyone was sated, in times of scarcity everyone did with less. The environment ruled over the group and the group ruled over the individual.

At every moment of a primitive's life there was instruction from the disciplinarian that was the natural environment. All one's energies were channeled by the exigencies of life in the wild. The first commandment of the law of the wild was \- Be part of a group in order to survive. The second commandment might be - Behave in such a way as to benefit the cohesion of the group. The third might be - Do not bring the wrath of the group upon oneself. The possibility of having the group turn against you was a fearful prospect. To be exiled, sent off into the wild on one's own, was a horrible sentence with certain death as a consequence. This primitive fear of exile is the root of our guilt feelings. We feel guilty about doing something that we know will bring on the disdain of others because that will set us apart from them. I recall that as a youngster the thought of excommunication from my church was something that gripped me with a feeling of awful dread. In the Catholic Church excommunication was tantamount to a death sentence just as exile was in the wild. Even so, I'm not sure how much I understood then what excommunication actually meant. All it had to do, however, was connect with the primal fear that excommunication was consciously or unconsciously designed to trigger in order to have the desired effect.

When one is pronounced guilty in a court of law one is sent to prison which is, of course, a form of exile.

In order for the threat of excommunication to be effective one must have been made to believe that Catholicism was the only true religion and if one were unfortunate enough to actually be excommunicated there would be no other place for one to go. One would be totally out of luck regarding a safe haven for one's immortal soul. If, in a jungle existence, one happened to be exiled from one's primitive group there would indeed be no other place for one to go. One would be totally out of luck regarding a safe haven for one's mortal body. Today censure from one's community, family, group, club, gang, etc., can tap into that primal fear of exile and produce the feeling we now associate with guilt.

In other species, hyenas have been known to exile a member of their pack. Sometimes, after intense groveling before the dominant hyena, the exiled animal would be allowed to return to the fold. With respect to our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, exile has not been observed. Indeed, a chimp community will tolerate the presence of a heinous miscreant among their number while condemning their wrongdoing in the strongest possible terms. The scenario of the chimp, Passion, that I described earlier, for instance, is a case in point. Her intramural cannibalism was a grave problem for the community and, yet, grave punishment was not enacted. Passion was sent very strong 'messages' that her behavior was totally unacceptable, that she must cease and desist or continually invite the wrath of the entire community upon her. Why such restraint on the part of Passion's fellow chimps in the face of so horrible and potentially destabilizing behavior? After all, these are just chimps! What restraint could possibly deter them from setting upon Passion and killing her outright and, thereby, ridding themselves once and for all of her evil doings? Certainly Passion's behavior was heinous enough to separate her from the community. To regard Passion as an alien predator in their midst and, therefore, eligible for attack with lethal intent would not be inappropriate. At the very least, they could have chased her out from their midst and barred her from ever returning. That was not, however, an option for the chimps. Removing a member of the community might be regarded as a greater threat to the community as a whole. They knew what Passion was doing was wrong, that it was a threat to community cohesion. But dealing with Passion by killing or exiling her would also be a threat to community cohesion. Passion was wrong to prey on other community members but to cease to treat Passion as other than a full-fledged community member would also be wrong. So, the chimps did all they could to dissuade Passion from her evil ways, to rehabilitate her, if you will. And, according to Jane Goodall, they were eventually successful in their efforts.

In a primitive group of primates, where all one has between oneself and a hostile jungle is one's group, the bonds that hold the group together must be sacrosanct. Passion's behavior was an aberration. Normal chimps could not turn on one of their own no matter what. Unless, of course, the breakdown was universal. In the case of Goodall's study group, of which Passion was a member, the whole community suffered such a breakdown and destroyed itself in an all out civil war. It was if they were programmed to survive or perish as a community. Even so, something snapped. A signal switched on and ordered each and every chimp to declare war on one another. Like an individual biological cell that has been compromised in some way. A signal can be switched on that instructs the cell to self-destruct as it might pose a threat to other healthy cells. Passion's aberrant behavior along with other burdensome afflictions evident in her community, like disease and prolonged adolescence, were perhaps responsible for flipping the switch to self-destruct and thereby preventing the chimp gene pool from becoming contaminated.

The chimp rule is - keep it all contained within the community cell, both the good and the bad, and survive with it or be doomed to self-destruction if and when cumulative aberrations become too much to bear. The question is - Why? Why did the chimps allow Passion to live among them while she was such a menace to the community? In a sense they did not see Passion herself as the problem. The problem was her behavior which they vigorously attempted to discourage. The problem was the killing of other community members. So, killing Passion would not be the solution to that problem. There is a certain logic there and one which partially informs the human argument against capital punishment. Then again, logically speaking, it does not make much sense to allow individual aberrations to accumulate and eventually contribute to the annihilation of the entire community. The chimps probably did not foresee such an eventuality, however, and were merely behaving in response to genetic instruction to self-destruct so as to protect the gene pool.

The question then becomes - Why are chimpanzees so instructed? Perhaps, it has to do with their habits of mating. Instructions on how chimps deal with genetic aberrations might be somehow bundled in with programming as to how they pair off for reproductive purposes. Female chimps do not mate with one specific male. When in heat they pair off with different males. Sometimes they wander off and mate with males of other communities. So, there would be no way of knowing exactly who both parents of an aberrant genetic type were. One could not identify the male involved to a necessary degree of certainty. The rule might be that communal participation in sexual activity brings about communal responsibility for the production of genetic aberrations.

If, on the other hand, a primate community manifests a strong tendency to partner male and female together in ongoing monogamous relationships, then different judgments with regard to genetic aberrations can be arrived at. If monogamously mated, a community would know where the bad genes were located. And those who were not of that lineage would be able to pass severe judgment on those who were. This would make it possible to preserve the group at the expense of individual members. Individual responsibility can come to the forefront in assessing human behavior. So human judgment is capable of singling out certain individuals for exile and destruction while preserving the integrity of the group as a whole.

Of course, the chimps of Gombe knew that Passion was a malicious deviant, a genetic aberration,(not in those terms, of course) and they could have eliminated her and her progeny from their midst and been sure that her genes could no longer be passed on. Such action, however, would have violated the chimp's code of ethics. Passion violated that code but she was an aberration. Normal chimps did not have that option. They could not single out one of their own for absolute elimination.

Also, there was no male who was directly effected by Passion's crimes. The males had no claim of fatherhood regarding a particular child. Only females knew for certain that a child was theirs. Also, a female chimp who wandered off to mate with males of another community would return to their own community to eventually give birth and raise the infant. So, Passion was spared the wrath of enraged males who could not know themselves to be the fathers of the cannibalized infants. The male chimps shared the females and their interest was not focused on a particular mate's offspring it was focused on the interest of the community as a whole which they saw in effect as one family that must hold together at all costs in order for all to survive. The chimp's bonds are communally oriented. If this were a human tribe where a male would know who his children were there would be a completely different scenario. Male aggression would be unleashed upon the offending party without reservation. A "Passion" would be eliminated with extreme prejudice. This would not upset a human community as a whole because of its family based orientation. Every family would be in agreement with the action.

In the human sphere the family unit is pivotal in a tribe and/or a society because of how we are genetically endowed. We naturally tend to form parent/children groupings as the basic unit of social organization in a community of other such families all of whom contribute to each others survival. It is natural to have an interest in the health and welfare of one's family while simultaneously having an interest in the health and welfare of the larger social organization, the network of goods, services, associations, cultural institutions, etc., that a family depends on for sustenance of all kinds, as well as protection. We live in this world as individuals, individual family units and members of a community, as well as a society at large, all of which must be integrated in the most optimum way possible.

Our minds perceive our own self-interest in conjunction with our social and natural environments. Our natural perspective is a holistic one. An absolute individualistic perspective is unnatural and unrealistic as is an absolutely communal one. Each one is, in fact, impossible for protracted social organization. Yet, we have ideologues of both stripes fantasizing about the total dominance of either individuality or community and trying to convince us that their fantasies represent reality.

So, we find ourselves in the somewhat absurd situation of arguing over whose fantasy is going to rule the roost. And it all depends on which side has the better salespeople, which side can best take advantage of societal conditions for their own benefit, which side has the most effective spin doctors, which side can make the other side look worse than they are, which side is best at finding skeletons in the closet, etc. But it would serve us much better if all this time and energy was spent on engaging in a constructive dialogue about the specific issues of the day in relation to what generally defines good government. If we think that is some impossible ideal it's probably because we've gotten suckered into the bogus claims of ideologues and have come to regard a clash of ideologies, that can only result in grudging and inefficient compromises in addressing issues, as the only possible expectation. If there is no alternative to ideological warfare in politics then we, as a species, are not as intelligent as we'd like to think we are.

It takes a certain amount of intelligence to understand an ideology, to espouse its virtues and argue effectively against those with opposing viewpoints. However, choosing to believe in one ideology over another is not an intellectual exercise. There are equally intelligent people representing different perspectives. There is no objective criteria by which one can choose between, say, a liberal or conservative persuasion. It is merely a question of what appeals to one on an unconscious level. One can give as many pretty reasons for one's ideological preference but they might be the very same reasons given by others for preferring a different ideology. Also the different perspectives are equally legitimate. We have no proof that one is any better than another. But we do have proof that none can stand alone as the solution to everything. In that sense political perspectives are all equal.

The intellectual challenge here is to see the whole picture and make judgments about how to govern things with an eye to fusing the different sectors, aspects, factions of a society together in a way that makes the most sense at any given time without prejudice for, or against a particular ideology. The left and right hemispheres of our brain do not argue about which side represents the truest perspective, just as spatial perception does not argue with object focusing as to which one should be calling the shots, both need to be employed in conjunction with each other. No particular brain function or perspective is any more valuable than the other. What is of most value is how well they all work together. Just so, we all need to become cognizant of our roles, our vital, yet limited roles as individuals and as organizations within the body politic. Government must provide the means by which all the different facets of a society are coordinated. It cannot do this if it itself is in constant turmoil about which way to turn because of misplaced ideological convictions.

The way to achieve such synergy, balance and holism is to have the society and the government formed from autonomous localities deciding for themselves their own particular timely proportion of the various ideological perspectives, what they can take care of themselves and what needs to be taken care of with respect to the perspective of other terminals - county, state, regional, national. Each locality would network with neighboring communities to form coalitions to create a county government that would have only the powers and responsibilities bestowed on them by the communities. And so on and so forth up to the national government which would concern itself, not with party politics, but with carrying out its charter given to it by the local governments and to provide an intelligent overview of the entire social landscape so that all can appreciate the particular role they are playing in contributing positively to the whole.

Government officials would not be expected to exacerbate issues by seeking to extend their personal point of view into law. Volatile issues should be assuaged as much as possible by government officials. If a government official agrees with the belief that abortion is murder, for instance, it should not become a crusade for that official to have that view made into law. In looking at such an issue the government should realize that there are legitimate opposing views among the people and figure out how best to govern the situation. Governing does not mean taking sides on every issue but in judging how best to manage opposing societal factions in the best way possible, the way in which a referee might oversee an athletic competition. Such a supervisory role would immediately lessen the tension and volatility among opposing factions since their issues would not be politicized. It would have no quarter in the political arena except as a conflict that must be refereed. The interest of the government would be to keep the peace among the two sides.

People should be free to exercise their own moral judgment about difficult matters such as abortion. Abortion is a very special case in the prominent place it holds in the beliefs of particular religions. Beliefs that have to do with souls, and when a fetus can be considered a human being. There is also the matter of class to consider in dealing with this particular issue. If abortion is again criminalized rich women could, as they did before Roe v Wade, go off to another country to have a safe legal abortion while those less well off could not. Laws must apply equally to everyone. In the past when abortion was an ordinary crime it was not fair that some women could evade the law and procure safe abortions for themselves elsewhere while those less fortunate were, in their desperation, butchered. It would be an infinitely greater injustice to have a law that singled out a particular class of women to suffer the dire consequences of that law while allowing another class of women to get away with "murder".

The primary function of government is to hold a society together by administering to everyone in the same way without favoritism in any way and to govern in a way that facilitates harmony between seemingly disparate factions, to put in place and maintain a society that works on its own like a beautifully designed organism where the microcosm forms the macrocosm. A government should, perhaps, measure its effectiveness not in how many laws it has on the books but by how few. But again, this is not a matter of size or quantity, not a matter of big government versus small government. It is a matter of incorporating a government proportionate to the society it governs.

Government should not be a place for the exercise of an individual's ambition. Politicians using social conditions for this purpose is not the best way to arrive at appropriate and effective measures with which to deal with those conditions. Also, government should not be a place to further a particular ideological belief system. And people should not look to government to solve all their problems. Domestic affairs should be taken care of almost exclusively by local, county, state and regional governments as was described in an earlier section. The federal government would then be freer to focus on the international arena. The ongoing complexities of globalization require a federal government's undivided attention. Such will be the case in the near and distant future. The federal apparatus would, of course, be informed and instructed by the social organism it represents. Like one's brain it would collect information about the external world, process it according to internal and external conditions and take appropriate action with an eye to securing national self-interest with respect to the self-interest of other nations. A federal government should apply an appropriately balanced perspective with respect to the international scene based on as objective a view as possible, i.e., free of ideological biases. That is, a view to take action not to please a particular set of ideologues but to strike just the right global posture at any given time. One must be able to be a relentless hawk or dedicated dove depending on what is warranted not whether one prefers one to the other on an ongoing basis. Like a black belt in Karate who does not seek to use his powerful skills indiscriminately but would not hesitate to employ them whenever his judgment tells him that such action is clearly necessary. Such a government might say - "We don't favor war and we don't favor peace but we are always prepared to navigate effectively in both environments. We can strive for peace, be conscientious about keeping the peace for prosperity's sake but not because we favor peace categorically anymore than we should strive for war because we favor it categorically." War and peace are names for particular circumstances that are a result of various conditions and situations of a complex nature that one does not ever have complete control over. To shape one's worldview in dedication to the one over the other is to deny the realities one is surrounded by. One must strive to be capable of surviving in real world circumstances of whatever kind.

Of course, there will always be individuals and/or groups in any society that will categorically side with one ideological perspective over all others and campaign for their biases in a vociferous manner. But the leaders, those with an eye to govern, should have a studied, developed objectivity that is informed by a realistic overview and is able to judge particular situations on their own merits, i.e., without ideological bias.

The electorate often has the effect of keeping ideologues from going too far one way or the other. After the resounding rejection of the Clinton health plan and mid-term elections that resulted in republican control of congress the President realized the will of the people was more to the right of center and proceeded to do their bidding, as a servant of the people should, and, among other things, got behind welfare reform and signed a bill into law that Reagan himself would have signed. Though, again, such corrections are often reactions to the swing of the pendulum while such things might be better attended to on a continual basis judging performance and efficacy objectively and adjusting things as needed.

This is not to champion a habitual centrist view for government either. There are particular instances that may require a strict conservatism, whereas others may benefit from a flexible liberalism. There are ways of making such objective intelligent judgments.

The two party system was an unintended consequence with respect to the original vision of the revolutionary American government. A consequence that disturbed some of the founders. George Washington, for one, who warned the new nation of the dangers of what he called "Spirit of Party" - a polite term for ideological fanaticism. Newt Gingrich likes to say that the founding fathers purposely created a very inefficient government in order to impede its ability to get things done. The idea of the checks and balances and separate branches of government, however, was not to install inefficiency but to prevent abuse of power. It was the development, evolution and institutionalization of the two party system that contributed to whatever systemic inefficiencies we are presently plagued by. The two party system increases the checks but decreases the balance. The two parties duke it out for power and the dust they kick up in the process more often then not obscures the best possible solutions to particular problems.

Washington's warning about the inherent threat to a free society posed by ideological fanaticism has materialized. The two parties have become extremely intolerant of one another to the point of political paralysis. Certainly they have always been adamantly opposed but were not always opposed to putting their differences aside and compromise in addressing various issues that needed their attention.

This intractable either-you're-for-us-or-against-us standoff affects society at every level. So much so that some people are migrating to states, communities and neighborhoods that are populated by those who are ideologically homogenous where they can participate, one would suppose, in an ongoing monologue with one another.

So, we have party politics at the national level dominated by intransigent ideologues who are lining up all their ducks in a row at every step down the line.

Such an idiotic state of affairs can be found almost anywhere in the world. An interesting example of this is given to us in the region of Palestine where the extreme rift between its two political parties, Fatah and Hamas, has caused enormous grief for the Palestinian people. Although the two parties have expressed interest in finding common ground for the betterment of the their people they have not been able to do so. Predominantly guided by conflicting ideologies the two factions continually engaged in bitter and sometimes violent clashes in their struggle for power.

In the January 2006 Palestinian elections Hamas took control of the government winning 76 out of 132 seats in the Legislative Council that had been under the control of the Fatah party for decades. The newly installed Hamas officials throughout Palestine continued the rift between the two parties by regarding all those associated with the Fatah party as persona non grata.

However, in one particular town in the West Bank it was an entirely different story.

In the town of Beita, newly elected Mayor, Al-Sharifa, of the Hamas party, did not choose to install Hamas as the sole ruling party and disenfranchise the ousted Fatah party as pariah. Rather, he sought to enlist their aid in revitalizing their town. His priority was the welfare of the town rather than pursuing an ideological or personal agenda. So, Al-Sharif formed a working coalition with the ex-mayor of the Fatah party, Wasif Mahala.

The town council consisted of six Hamas and five Fatah members. Despite seemingly insurmountable differences between the two sides they managed to form a working relationship based upon a common interest to improve Beita's economy. And so they did. New businesses were started, infrastructure improved and the town became a model of prosperity by neutralizing ideologies and focusing on the common interest of making things better for the whole town.

The mayor also came to recognize Israel's right to exist in opposition to the strident anti-Israeli position taken by the Hamas party.

Now, if the microcosm had been allowed to form the macrocosm Beita would have had the ability to infect other towns with its spirit of fulfilling socio-economic needs by putting people before politics. As it was, however, other municipalities remained adamant about conforming to the fanaticism of the ruling Hamas party and all those associated with the Fatah party were marginalized as social outcasts.

So, the tension between the two camps intensified and eventually erupted in civil war whereby Palestine was split into two separate territories with Hamas seizing control of Gaza and Fatah the West Bank.

I think it is plain to see that Beita had the right idea by rejecting ideological fanaticism and eliciting everyone's participation in contributing to the town's development. Had municipalities throughout Palestine been able to follow Betia's example it would have certainly fared much better.

But such cannot happen if the macrocosm has a strangle hold on the microcosm and prevents localities from developing as fully as they might. If it was the other way around, if the microcosm could have been able to form the macrocosm the idea of Beita could have freely spread throughout Palestine where practical pragmatic judgments about how to develop a workable society could have come to the fore.

A society that is structured to facilitate a process whereby freely networking localities would inform and instruct one another about how they might achieve optimum conditions for themselves would, from there, inform and instruct the society at large in like manner. So, Palestine would have become a state that was about people putting their differences aside and working together to create a society where everyone could make a life for themselves. Furthermore, imbuing state officials with such a modus operandi would produce a less ideological perspective in favor of a more realistic one, a less confrontational perspective in favor of a more advantageous one.

The system herein suggested would require one to accept the burden of one's existence more squarely upon one's own shoulders. This in turn would give one more of a sense of community and individual responsibility than is now the case. One would come to realize more fully how one must conduct oneself in order to preserve and enhance the social organism one needs to sustain in order to be sustained oneself.

A policy of instilling good habits in ourselves and each other through a vigorous social conditioning would be inherently encouraged. This would, among other things, act as an inhibitor to the arbitrary growth of government. As a wise man once said, "Instilling good habits in people is the surest way of preventing the encroachment of government in people's lives." Put another way, the more we police ourselves the less justification there is for establishing a police state.

The current modus operandi of government is to behave in a way which is the opposite of instilling good habits in people. Welfare is probably the most obvious example of government systematically instilling bad habits in people. Government is a living organism and as such it is vitally interested in seeking its own advantage, its own growth, and in order to do that it continually has to create more and more of a need for its expansion. So, government encourages bad habits in people and allows for horrendous social conditions to fester while passing itself off as the solution to those conditions. But when one is part of the problem, as the government is, one's solution can only exacerbate the problem. For instance, crime is a big problem the government has been trying to solve for decades. Government's habitual solutions are calling for more police, stricter sentencing and building more prisons. This usually results in the creation of more career criminals and pretty soon the revolving door of the prison system will remain as jam packed as ever.

Again, enlarging law enforcement bureaucracies is a matter of perpetuating an apparatus, an organ, that needs to manipulate the social organism it inhabits in such a way as to ensure its own survival. Is a State going to invest heavily in the creation of more prison space and not proceed to fill it to capacity as soon as possible to show that its investment paid off? How is that going to reduce crime? If the conditions which contribute to the growth of a criminal element remain in place while more criminals are being arrested and serving longer sentences then more criminals will be recruited by the criminal element. The State cannot effectively prevent crime even if it is a Police State, for that is a crime in itself. Crime prevention is a matter for a vigorous social conditioning implemented by autonomous communities who are vigilantly interested in their own welfare.

The parasitic nature of government can be most readily seen in its voracious appetite for the blood of the social organism, money. The power of taxation is a pathology of the body politic. The State collects money and uses it to create inept programs that make people increasingly dependent upon the State which in turn makes it necessary for the State to collect more and more taxes. All the organs of the social organism need to be synergistically arranged to keep them in healthful proportion to one another. With the Body politic and the entire social organism being formed and reformed from the local levels on up such a synergistic arrangement could be arrived at and maintained in a salubrious manner.

With the monetary system herein suggested a problem community, an inner city rife with crime, for example, would have all the funds it needed delivered directly to it in order for it to deal with its problems in its own way. This would not be throwing money at a problem or throwing money away through the implementation of inept programs. No, it would be an investment in a community to get its act together, to organize and maintain itself in the conscientious way reflective of the majority of its inhabitants. Such an investment would be empowerment of the first degree.

Our anatomical system reacts to injury or disease by supporting the efforts of the areas affected with all the necessary resources. The body's cells in and of themselves are equipped to repair damage and fight disease. All they need are the nutrients to energize their productivity. It's the same with a given community within a social organism. All the necessary components for promoting the health and welfare of any community can be found among the people living there. They know how things should be. They know right from wrong. They know what must be done, what they must do to put and keep things in order. All they need are the resources the social organism is able to put at their disposal. And that would be all the resources necessary for making things right.

An inner city community might have to take drastic measures to deal with its social and economic problems. Martial law might be required, an all out attack upon the criminal element. Curfews, search and seizure and ubiquitous police patrols could very well be the necessary measures to be implemented for the short term. Such measures, however, would be entirely an internal matter and carried out by community members. Of course, the community would not operate as an island unto itself totally isolated from the rest of society. Any autonomous action they decided upon would be carried out in association with and monitored by the society at large. The community's own police force, for instance, would work in conjunction with the city's police department, and community leaders would be in close contact with city hall.

In considering its economic condition such a community might decide strict socialist policies would be the best way to begin to get itself together and on the road to a healthy market economy. Such policies would be enacted under the watchful eye of all those concerned within and outside the community and be administered with a mind to the eventual evolution into a market-based economy.

The community would have to look at particular businesses and judge them according to how they contribute in balance with how they exploit. Temporary authority could be given to the community bank to take over the operation of any and all businesses, pool their combined income and distribute it according to the needs of the community. Those funds along with the ones provided by the social organism's circulatory system would be used to tackle the community's most glaring problems. Whoever and whatever is in need of rehabilitation will receive whatever attention is necessary. Everyone in the community would be involved in an intense cooperative effort to get things going in a wholesome direction.

Every community would scrutinize itself in much the same way, evaluate its condition and take whatever steps necessary to improve things using their own resources and those provided by the society at large.

Electronic Media would play a vital role in this system. Its purpose would be to give one a perspective of one's place within the larger picture while facilitating a thinking globally, acting locally view of one's situation. It would be, in effect, the nervous system of the social organism charged with delivering and receiving accurate real time information to and from all terminals. Each terminal would process the information as they see fit. In other words, instead of TV news programs selecting what will and will not be shown and how it will be presented, anyone would be able to tap into the system and retrieve whatever information is flowing through it. In any given community there would be county, state, regional and national representatives of the media who would monitor the community and alert their respective terminals of situations that may be of interest to them. On the national level a community, county, state or regional representative would alert their particular area of situations that would be of interest to their constituents. It would be like the C-SPAN network except it would not be centrally controlled. It would be configured along the lines of the Internet.

All parties would receive relevant real time information with which to enable them to occupy their particular space in a manner conducive to the synergistic confluence of all facets of the social organism. The hardware for the system would be part of the infrastructure of the social organism and paid for by everyone. No one would be censoring what was on line. Everyone would have complete access to whatever was flowing through the system including individuals on their own TV/computer terminal. Everyone would also have access to their community terminal to contribute whatever bit of information they deemed relevant.

The macrocosm of the social organism would be formed from the microcosm of communities formed from associations within the community which are formed by individuals. One's home, as well as oneself, would be a microcosm and a center of power. Such a configuration would, again, place the burden of one's existence squarely upon one's own shoulders. At the same time, however, one would be provided the opportunity to manage that burden in a manner conducive to one's well being which would also contribute to the well being of the whole society. And the well being of the whole society would in turn contribute to the individual.

All that one does to further one's existence must also be that which furthers the existence of one's social organism. Thus, again, we have the merging of self-interest with collective-interest. Such synergy between self and collective-interest is manifest in one's interest in having a job, in being healthy and maintaining healthful conditions in one's environment, in saving one's money and living within one's means, in knowing how and when to fit in and when to stand out, knowing when conformity is stupid and when nonconformity is a threat.

In this way the individual is the basis for the whole social body. Within the individual resides all the dynamics of a successful society as one discovers, through constant interaction with others, the knowledge of how to cooperate and compete with family members, friends and associates. Through the knowledge that one can fully express oneself within the structure one is part of and palpably contributes to one should be able to sense one's whole community and the whole society as projecting out from, as well as onto, oneself. The body politic would be there to ensure that such a dynamic persists because individuals require it to do so.

The overriding purpose of every individual and every social organ would be a synergistic functioning within the governing parameters they themselves create in order to bring about and maintain the integrated activity of all facets of the social organism from which everyone can benefit. This dynamic works from the individual and upon the individual, from particular associations and upon them. All with the view of having it all work together in the most harmonious way possible.

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### About the Author:

Born in NYC and now lives in Massachusetts. A new writer with more books on the way. Happy to be involved in paperless publishing

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