Background
The human pursuit
of power, wealth, and empire derives from a fundamental aspect of life on Earth.
It originated with life itself as a response to the need to survive and a desire
to flourish. At its birth, its coming to life, every organism grows and
exploits to the fullest every useable resource it encounters to serve its need
to survive and desire to flourish. It does so until it encounters other living
and/or physical environmental constraints. This results in that life form being
contained or killed, or its continuing to exploit all it encounters to the
point of destroying the resources and life systems that give and sustain its
life.
Humans have
been no exception. With our “sapient” emergence beginning about 300,000 years
ago we brought this fundamental drive to survive and desire to flourish with us
– something genetically inherited and behaviorally learned from all other life
forms that preceded and nourished us. What Old World primate has not
encountered a tree full of ripe figs and once fully engorged herself with sweet
fruit, not imagined encountering other such trees, perhaps an entire forest of
them, tomorrow?
It has been thus
for Homo sapiens, the wandering, searching, exploiting, dreaming primate,
from our beginning up to today. Hallmark events and periods exhibiting this have
been semi-settled agriculture after 9,000BCE and city-state collective farming
beginning 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, independent agrarian-based civilizational
empire building elsewhere in Asia, and in Europe and the Americas that followed,
and the European Age of Exploration and Colonization. In every instance we find
the pattern of pursuing power and wealth in the service of the ostensible need
to survive and the desire, the dream, of flourishing. In each context the
pattern of confronting constraints resulting in flourishing, containment, or annihilation
has also happened. Underlying it all, in every instance, has been the language
and symbols humans have created for what surviving and flourishing mean; and
the various stories and rationalizations that have been used to try and make them
manifest in the minds of others and the physical realities of Earth. An imposition
of human power in order to survive, flourish, and persevere. Words and meanings
have and continue to be woven into stories that over time and through
enculturation become lasting myths and figurative and literal institutions. Consider
nation-states and doctrines such as US Manifest Destiny.
One period and
its story that has surpassed all others in its impact on all humankind and all
of Earth’s environments has been modernity. That being dominant notions and
events in the history of Europe – the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial
Revolution, and notions of human flourishing and perfectibility as found
religiously in Christianity and secularly in the Enlightenment. In the West, modernity
had its conceptual origin in patterns of conquest and colonization begun in the
Middle East (including Egypt), and subsequently in Ancient Greece and Imperial
Rome.
By the 15th
Century European ship building, navigation, and weaponry had reached a point of
sophistication and power to allow circumnavigation of the Earth and the besiegement,
conquest, and subjugation or enslavement of most of the indigenous peoples the
Europeans encountered. The story of European conquest and enrichment was begun
and led by the wealthy and powerful. Those who felt entitled and sanctioned by
their God and the civilizing prescriptions of the Enlightenment, and rationalized
by their self-declared European cultural superiority as evidenced by their science
and technology.
The European
myths of the North American frontier - masculine heroism, personal freedom,
White privilege, and entitlement - live on. More than that, they have been resuscitated,
dusted off, and patched up from the harsh countercultural criticism they had been
taking in the US before and especially since the 1960s. That is, from ideological
and legal challenges mounted by civilizing, liberating, fair-playing-field agendas
of governments, women and minority activists, and most educated urban liberals.
The Canadian
truck blockaders of February 2022 in Ottawa, Alberta and elsewhere, no doubt thought
of themselves as heroic illiberal Hopalongs. American actor William Boyd
and his Wild West good-guy movie and TV character Hopalong Cassidy in the
mid-20th Century US were champions of certain Western virtues and
morals, including racial equality & justice. Many White Americans and
others at the time idolized Boyd and Hopalong but disagreed with and kept mum
on the actor’s liberal views, especially his anti-racism.
Not anymore.
Ultra conservative Hopalongs have become the John Waynes and Dirty Harrys of
the Proud Boys and others, such as those in the US Senate and House of
Representatives, and their racism has become open for some and thinly coded for
others. Consider the almost daily language and symbol skirmishes raging within
the US culture wars and smoldering in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. To this
confusion add that a large part of the world’s working public has insufficient
time or energy or is unwilling to think deeply about anything. During his first
presidential campaign Donald Trump declared he was the "least racist
person you'll ever meet" while at the same time courting and evoking the tribal
emotions of White supremacists, and later telling them to “stand by.” Most of his
supporters from various quarters on the right had no problem with that.
On November
9, 2016, enough of the US voting public gave assent to his agenda to put Trump in
the White House via the electoral college. On January 6, 2021, he emboldened his
followers to invade the US Capitol to nullify a democratic election he lost. In
doing so he demonstrated his willingness to subvert the Constitution, violate US
law, and undermine historically inviolable American institutions and storied
practices. All to keep himself, his minority party, and their minority point of
view and vision in power. Their goal being to end the democratic process the US
has had since it was founded. In varying degrees from place to place around the
world, populist politicians like Trump present a veneer of freedom, justice,
and flourishing for all. The truth at its core, however, is carefully hidden – a
doubling down on the story of privilege and patriarchy.
We are story-animated
animals. Stories, and the myths and legends that time and events turn them into,
are necessary. We cannot live without them. They are shorthand guides humans
use to comprehend, navigate, and survive modern life’s overwhelming,
incomprehensible complexity and at times, absurdity. They do not, as some
claim, come from and are based on a cosmic moral arc tending toward good. There
is no unequivocally convincing evidence for such a teleological universe. Stories
are invented by those living among us. Most often stories with the greatest
effect are those presented by persons and institutions having immense power and
wealth. The filters we use to learn about and critique our culture's stories
and myths, as youths and throughout our adult lives, are targeted and
manipulated by the powerful. For example, seeking higher education and engaging
in independent, skeptical thinking are denigrated by many conservative populists
as elitist, unpatriotic pursuits.
Few are
those who can step outside of such manipulation and intimidation and
objectively critique their society’s stories, myths, and institutions. Many of
the best at it teach at our universities. Far more are without credentials and
outside academia. From inherent intelligence, common sense, a strong will, and a
determination to think clearly and independently, a majority of the public can see
when their culture’s ideals are perverted to the will of nationalist, racist
populism supporting White privilege and patriarchy.
We all must
throughout our lives remain skeptical of the myths and stories we are told, the
cultural sustenance by which we can claim humaneness. We live according to
what we allow our minds to be fed and what we accept as truth. Story narratives
are necessary, but they are not sufficient for human survival and flourishing. They
must also present a moral stance, a declaration of what are good and bad
relations between people. Some stories are better at this than others.
Spinoza
Portuguese
Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) has far more to offer than his view
that God is Nature. He also proposes a model describing how humans live out their
groups’ stories, personally and socially. His “model of human nature” describes
a process of striving on the part of the individual to increase his/her power
to persevere. He called this the individual’s conatus [koh-NAH-tuhs].
This model or template, claimed Spinoza, is inherent in every individual.
It is also a story of individual freedom and virtue having a moral stance. The
following is from a 2020 book about Spinoza's moral philosophy by American
philosopher Steven Nadler.
