Taking the Hero's Journey by Ramona Leiter

Kudos to Mona Leiter on her November 12, 2019 Owl & Ibis - A Confluence of Minds presentation, "Taking the Hero's Journey."

Mona's take on myths and myth-making based on Joseph Campbell's work, as templates for molding persons and as entertainment, was truly exceptional.

For those who missed it please find a PDF copy of her slideshow here, and a PDF resource file of the videos she showed at the meeting and other references here.

Again, great job!

}:> ~:)

End of Owl & Ibis Meetings

retreat: a period of time when somebody stops their usual activities and goes to a quiet place for meditation and thought.

Friends,

Beginning December 1, 2019, Owl & Ibis - A Confluence of Mind will stop holding in-person meetings. 

I need a break along the lines of the definition of a ‘retreat’ given above.

I have been allowed my full say at O&I, at other local freethinker meetings, and on my websites on a wide range of matters. I have also learned a lot from each of you. For all this I am grateful. 

The matters on which I’ve expressed my views include many of what I think are the most important issues in anthropology, the other social sciences, the natural sciences, the humanities, religion, and in current US and world affairs. Regrettably, many of these issues give me grave concern about the future of Humankind and Earth. 

It is time for me to critically examine my views on these matters and others, and change my thinking and behavior as needed.

Natural and Theological Virtues

“Hope as a Natural Virtue”

Peter J. Leithart

First Things

November 22, 2019

“Dante’s Commedia draws on the tradition of the seven virtues, four ‘natural’ (justice, prudence, temperance, fortitude) and three ‘theological’ (faith, hope, and love). ... Exceptional pagans can achieve natural virtue, but, with very few exceptions, the habits of faith, hope, and love are beyond their capacity.”

Above is a link to a short essay you might find as interesting as I do.

It addresses an existential dilemma others with far greater minds than mine were in, yet found a way out. See for example, Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis. I am currently in a similar if not the same dilemma.

The four ‘natural virtues’ given in this essay are also those of Stoicism - courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. I certainly cannot claim mastery of any or all of them. Besides, to do so would make me a saint and a sage. Either is a very rare achievement.

I do not sniff at or take sagacity or beatification and canonization lightly. However, either might well be an undesirable achievement, for would it not make one boring, predictable, and lazy from having no inner personal challenges left to face? Then again, sages and saints by definition must know how to deal with such pedestrian problems. Besides, sagacity and canonization should be honors conferred upon one by others, rather than pursued as personal achievements. All that said, I have made some progress in my pursuit of the natural virtues over the past few years through Stoic study and practice. Progress, not sage- or sainthood, is all I have sought and seek.

Still, I have not found the happiness or contentment I wrongly hoped the study and practice of Stoicism would bring me. I say ‘wrongly’ because Stoicism does not promise happiness or contentment. It simply suggests a method to respond personally, and optimally, to the vagaries of life as they arise. Stoicism does not offer, say, the relief and contentment Kierkegaard and Lewis found in the three ‘theological’ virtues of faith, hope, and love.

5G - The New Cellular Network by Steve Yothment

Kudos to Steve Yothment for his October 22, 2019 Owl & Ibis - A Confluence of Minds presentation, "5G - The New Cellular Network."

Steve took us from the first generation of cellular phone technology up to the present in a concise and clear manner. Steve, an electronics engineer, was most patient and accommodating of the attendee's many questions and concerns. Steve also showed six short videos about 5G.

Those who could not attend the meeting may view Steve's slideshow as a PDF document here. Live links to the videos shown are on the last two slides.

Other questions came to mind but there wasn't enough time to discuss them fully. Here's a sampling of thoughts Steve's presentation elicited:

• How did Humankind progress from radar and television as new and awe-inspiring technology around the time of World War II to today and the astonishing capabilities of 5G and other electronic technologies?
• Who exactly is controlling or driving the development of 5G?
• Will 5G replace real-time human interactions?
• Is 5G's promise of selling more phone units that have faster download speeds and that are cheaper a "good" thing?
• Does the world really need robotic surgery, self-driving cars, more service technologies? Shouldn't the best minds and high tech money be used for more practical human and ecological problems?
• Will 5G contribute to hastening the ever-increasing rate at which humans speak to each other, and our reading more broadly and faster, but not necessarily more deeply? And will this thereby lower our ability to understand complex matters, especially social problems and human ethical and moral questions, in more depth?
• Cyber spying and cyber warfare were touched on especially in the videos but just how concerned should Humankind be about these life-threatening, existential matters?
• Will our deepening dependence on 5G and other electronic services make us more vulnerable to personal and social crises under such conditions as power outages and natural disasters?

Although we did not get to cover all of the above questions and concerns, readers are invited to comment on them below and continue the discussion.

Thanks again, Steve. Great job!

}:> ~:)

Going Local, Again: Escaping the Lonely, Destructive Wilderness of Modernity

For over 200,000 years Humankind has made every effort it can to escape its “primitivity” and thereby flourish. These efforts include choosing:

·       Food production over hunting and gathering;

·       Metal over stone tools;

·       Vehicular conveyance over foot travel;

·       Cities over movable campsites;

·       Surplus wealth accumulation over subsistence economics;

·       Tribal state politics over small band egalitarianism;

·       Science and reason over myth and religion;

·       Hydro-power and fossil fuels over human and draught animals;

·       Democracy over autocracy;

·       Nationalism over empire:

·       Globalism over nationalism; and

·       Capitalism over socialism and communism (ongoing).

Now, with the West in a state of full-fledged modernity, many non-Western nations on the verge of joining them, and all the others working hard and dreaming to follow and enjoy the fruits of modernity, there is a big problem.

The West, swaddled in all its financial and material wealth, is suffering from angst, anomie, and xenophobia. Capitalism has led to unsustainable economic inequality and ecological decline tipping points that many believe are immune to reform and amelioration. Many of these points have been reached or surpassed in some parts of the world.

Non-Western nations on the verge of or beginning to solidify their own modernity, as well as the poorest nations envious and hopeful of some day following the more-developed ones, are beginning to see the White Western Way for what it really is – neo-colonial; imperial; self-serving; rigged against them; hypocritical; morally hollow; and ecocidal.

The solution almost all nations are just now seriously beginning to call for is reform while ameliorating the decline and crash of capitalism and its lethal poisoning and climatological disturbance of the environment.

How should Humankind reform and ameliorate its impact on itself and the planet? There are many good ideas out there, some of which are being successfully implemented. But no-one knows if they will work. Regardless, we are right to make the efforts anyway on the slight chance that Humankind and the environment can retain some level of humaneness and livability.

This extended essay is a look at some things to consider as we approach and suffer through the coming collapse; and during which we are forced to peer out from our houses at our neighbors and ask: What must I, we, do to survive?

First, I will present which collapse of all the possibilities I think is preferable and most likely to occur. Then I will look at going local socially, and finally at the personal aspects of the rebuilding and resetting our “modern” psyches that collapse recovery will require. That is, a change in our psyches that have been consumerized, depersonalized, and morally calcified by religion or economic theory, or morally hollowed out by secular modernity. If you’ve ever felt like a shell of a person, you will understand what I’m getting at here.

As reforms and ameliorations pick up pace and kick in, it is becoming clear that if they work, and that is a big if, they will not allow Humankind to return to near unrestricted crony consumer capitalism. Nor will they allow us to continue to live and think of our individual lives within the dreamy, progressive panorama of savagely competitive nationalism; or allow us to return to our hip, chic lives besotted by the myths of consumer abundance and personal exceptionalism pumped through to us by our computer and TV screens.

Humankind will have to revert to thinking of “being” human as something local, very local. Race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and political and economic ideology cannot be jettisoned. They will have to be “shrunk” to what can be accommodated locally and individually, and into something that will work in our forging relations with other local groups.

Along the way there will come those who want to, through persuasion or force, consolidate groups along the lines of those old familiar divisions – race, nation, etc. - that helped propel modernity. Such occurrences will not be inherently bad. What will be telling is if we return to complex consolidated societies, will we do so based on what we learned from the errors of the ways and means of our first go at modernization.

However, for now, let us consider collapse and the preemptive going local that has already begun.

Brave New World, 1984, or The Handmaid’s Tale?

Which is the greater future Americans should fear, asks Andrew Postman in the Guardian essay cited below: “an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state” as depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 published in 1949; or “a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble” as described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932? Let us also throw in for consideration Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale published in 1985, another dystopian novel set in a near-future totalitarian theocracy or theonomy that overthrows the U.S. government.

The Self is Not an Illusion in Any Meaningful, Useful Sense

“The Consciousness Illusion”

“Phenomenal consciousness is a fiction written by our brains to help us track the impact that the world makes on us.”

by

Keith Frankish

September 26, 2019

The above is a worthless, self-contradictory essay from Aeon, an otherwise good source of information and ideas.

The essay’s argument is an example of thinking that continues to undermine the social sciences and mislead the public, and gives an off ramp and free pass to those who wish to absolve individuals and society of moral responsibility for individual behavior and group action.

This line of thinking goes something like this: “We really can’t help ourselves. What we think and do is determined primarily and at bottom by our genes and physiology, over which we have little to no conscious, volitional control. We need an evolutionary biology of human behavior because religion, secular moral philosophy, and the social sciences have failed to deliver an exact, predictive science of human behavior as physics and chemistry have for matter. As we continue to tease out and get to the real roots of the biological bases of our behavior, that is, in our nerves and brains, and metaphorically in the so-called ‘moral foundations’ of our deep prehistory, let’s turn to medication to fix or ameliorate these material substrates that are the causes of our moral and behavioral failings.”

The British author of the essay in question, Keith Frankish, repeatedly uses the pronouns ‘we, us, I, you’ in his essay, yet blows right by and never directly addresses arguments for the reality of an embodied self as described by the following thinkers, to list only a few:

Africa and China - 'When China Met Africa'

My sincere thanks to those who attended the September 24, 2019 Owl & Ibis – A Confluence of Minds meeting where we viewed and discussed the 2010 documentary, When China Met Africa. For those who have not viewed this film, it may be downloaded free on Tubi TV here.

This 75-minute film followed the activities of three people residing and working in Zambia between 2007 and 2009: a Chinese private farm owner; a Chinese private company road construction engineer; and Zambia’s Minister for Commerce, Trade, and Industry.

The documentary covered multi-faceted Chinese-Zambian social interactions in the areas of commercial farming, road building, and bilateral international development relations.

Among the concerns expressed during the O&I discussion of the film was whether China’s so-called ‘debt trap diplomacy’ was intentional or not.

The O&I gathering also voiced concern over the climate change, inequality, and potential global economic collapse consequences of the further spread of capitalist modernization within the lesser developed regions of the world. That is, the consequences of modernity being rapidly spread through public and private sector ‘international development’ via investment, trade and aid from China and the West.

The O&I group wondered:

Africa and China

A sincere thanks to those who attended Owl & Ibis - A Confluence of Minds on Tuesday evening, September 10, 2019. At the meeting yours truly presented a slideshow on the relationship between Africa and China from ancient times to the present. The discussion, questions, and comments were excellent!

A PDF of the presentation slideshow may be found here: Africa and China.

This short, 25-slide presentation has eight slides containing links to the latest videos or websites on China's plans and actions in Africa, and significant mention of China's intentions and efforts in other regions. The pluses and minuses of China's activities, as well as push back from the U.S. and others, are also covered.

These links are identified on the slides with these characters ***. If the links are not active on the PDF, one can easily access the videos and websites by typing in the title of the link given on the slide and searching for it on any Internet browser.

On Tuesday, September 24, O&I will air the award-winning documentary When China Met Africa as Part 2 of 2 of this presentation.

All are welcome!

}:> ~:)

Why I Write

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.... It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent. – Harper Lee

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us…. Humans are caught — in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too — in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. – John Steinbeck

Some of you complain that my blog essays are too long, too esoteric, use too many big words unnecessarily, and/or are too flowery.

The same readers claim that I could reach more people, be more effective in getting my ideas across, and be more persuasive with my points of view if I wrote shorter essays, used simpler less intellectual language, and got to my point more quickly and directly.

I welcome this criticism and agree that my writing could use some improvement. Concerning the readability of my essays, you may not agree but I honestly think that with a little time and effort anyone can read and understand them. Anyone. I am happy when people take the time to go through and study my essays. I’m even happier when they point out the flaws in them and shortcomings in my thinking. To those readers who have no complaints and who write to me supportively, thank you. 

Here’s why I write as I do.

After the Collapse of Modernity

Alice: How long is forever?

White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.

- Lewis Carroll

Modernity: A historical category marked by the questioning or rejection of tradition; the prioritization of individualism, freedom and formal equality; faith in inevitable social, scientific and technological progress, rationalization and professionalization; a movement from feudalism (or agrarianism) toward capitalism and the market economy, industrialization, urbanization and secularization; the development of the nation-state, representative democracy, public education, etc. - From Wikipedia based on Michel Foucault 1977

This is a detailed continuation of my recent lyrical essay, “The Fatal Myth of Human Progress.” It covers the connections between U.S. politics and environmental protection in the late 20^th Century. It also discusses what actions and supporting stories Humankind must come up with as we near ecological and economic collapse.

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

By Nathaniel Rich
Photographs and Videos by George Steinmet
The New York Times

August 1, 2018

The above exposé is a good late 20^th Century history of how the U.S. missed perhaps its best chance at ending its environmentally destructive ways, and leading the rest of the world to do the same before it became too late.

The Ronald Reagan and John Sununu types in power at the time, the 1980s, were not going to do that. Passing legislation containing environmental pollution restrictions on U.S. industry would go against their small government, free enterprise credo. To them, the scientifically established risks of continuing to produce ever more CO₂ to the detriment and perhaps end of Earth’s life-sustainability were worth taking. Here is what they did:

“After the election of 1980, President Ronald Reagan took office and considered plans to close the Energy Department, increase coal production on federal land, and deregulate surface coal mining. Once in office, he appointed James Watt, the president of a legal firm that fought to open public lands to mining and drilling, to run the Interior Department. ‘We’re deliriously happy,’ the president of the National Coal Association was reported to have said. Reagan preserved the E.P.A. but named as its administrator Anne Gorsuch, an anti-regulation zealot who proceeded to cut the agency’s staff and budget by about a quarter. In the midst of this carnage, the Council on Environmental Quality submitted a report to the White House warning that fossil fuels could ‘permanently and disastrously’ alter Earth’s atmosphere, leading to ‘a warming of the Earth, possibly with very serious effects.’ Reagan did not act on the council’s advice. Instead, his administration considered eliminating the council.”

…

“When the beaten delegates finally emerged from the [Noordwijk Ministerial Conference of 1989] conference room, [the Sierra Club’s Daniel] Becker and [environmentalist Rafe] Pomerance learned what happened. [Yale nuclear physicist and Science Advisor to President George H. W. Bush, D. Allen] Bromley, at the urging of John Sununu and with the acquiescence of Britain, Japan, and the Soviet Union, had forced the conference to abandon the commitment to freeze emissions. The final statement noted only that ‘many’ nations supported stabilizing emissions — but did not indicate which nations or at what emissions level. And with that, a decade of excruciating, painful, exhilarating progress turned to air.”

Sununu, White House Chief of Staff under U.S. President George H. W. Bush, had thereby prevented the signing of a 67-nation commitment to freeze carbon dioxide emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005. In doing so, he singled himself out as a force for starting coordinated efforts to bewilder the public on the topic of global warming and changing it from an urgent, non-partisan, and unimpeachable issue to a political one.

Here is what Rich’s article says happened after that:

“More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference, Nov. 7, 1989, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it. In 1990, humankind emitted more than 20 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. By 2017, the figure had risen to 32.5 billion metric tons, a record. Despite every action taken since the [1979] Charney Report* — the billions of dollars invested in research, the nonbinding treaties, the investments in renewable energy — the only number that counts, the total quantity of global greenhouse gas emitted per year, has continued its inexorable rise.

“Like the scientific story, the political story hasn’t changed greatly, except in its particulars. Even some of the nations that pushed hardest for climate policy have failed to honor their own commitments. When it comes to our own nation, which has failed to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the efforts of the fossil-fuel industries to suppress science, confuse public knowledge, and bribe politicians.”

Also interesting in the article is the claim that Exxon and others in the private sector were at one time receptive to the inevitability of some form of less carbon policy and laws. They stood ready to retool and redirect their industries away from oil, natural gas and coal if they were going to be forced to, if for no other reason than to keep their operations profitable. It seemed they simply could not deny the science, much of which they had produced, unlike the politicians of the time.

The Fatal Myth of Human Progress

Once upon a time, long ago, in an ordinary part of space, a small but extraordinary planet gave rise to Life. Among its great variety of living things was an extraordinary animal.

This creature was not physically exceptional among its apelike cousins. But it was unique because it survived and flourished by dominating the planet’s resources. It did so by using its wits to cooperate, and by making and using tools. It was inconceivable to the planet, Earth, or to this unique creature we’ve come to call “human,” that this ape might ever pose a threat to itself and all other life forms on the planet. Humans thought little to nothing about the future. They remembered yesterday but lived in today.

Human survival skills were not always successful, especially in unpredictable weather places such as the Middle East. To avoid starvation in years of drought and food scarcity in this area humans began growing and storing food. They were successful. They also tamed cows, sheep and goats so they no longer needed to be hunted, and their meat and other products were tasty and useful. The bread humans made from the grain they grew filled their stomachs all through the year. Death from starvation seldom happened anymore.

Surplus food, mostly cereal grains, also became a highly valued commodity. That is, something of value that humans could trade with other humans for other items they needed or desired. Stored food became a prized possession that required new social structures, rules, and procedures for its protection and use. This surplus of food also became a source of conflict as a prized object of thieves and armies.

The Nile - River of Life and Death in a Time of Climate Change

Thanks to all those who attended the July 23, 2019 Owl & Ibis - A Confluence of Minds presentation, "The Nile: River of Life and Death in a Time of Climate Change, Part 2 of 2" by yours truly. Great questions and discussion!

A link to the presentation's MS Powerpoint slideshow is here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WAsyUaqeHnv_4AVDwNltbegVmwSH2xmC/view?usp=sharing

Note that there are a number of very recent videos linked on many of the slides. One is an outstanding one-hour 2019 BBC documentary on the Nile, the rest are 5-10 minutes each but very worth watching.

The links on the slides are at these symbols (a) at the bottom of selected slides. An asterisk at the upper left indicates a new slide added since Part 1 was presented on July 9, 2019.

If your slideshow viewer does not support the fonts properly, attached is a PDF copy:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w5ZC7ToCU7VOLTsWTQUFB4niypgPBxo6/view?usp=sharing

Finally, here's an excellent unlinked video from one of the slides:

Highs and lows of climate change: Nile river likely to see more extreme floods and droughts on Vimeo

}:> ~:)

An American-African at the Crossroad of Despair and Hope

UPDATE

Here's an essay that also urges having hope and taking action in the face of imminent catastrophe:

On the Cusp of the Coming 'Perfect Storm'

by

Dennis Oliver

June 27, 2019

ORIGINAL ESSAY
I live using the filters of three worldviews – that of a US white male, atheist, liberal progressive; that of an adopted Ugandan for the past 36 years; and that of an anthropologist.

I have lived and worked in rural and urban Africa off and on, for extended periods, from 1980 to the present. I have led major grassroots international development assistance programs in Swaziland, Tanzania, and Ghana. I have led refugee resettlement programs in Kenya, and from there visited and worked for extended periods in cities and deep rural areas of over twenty African countries. I have seen hope and despair firsthand in the eyes of Africa’s rural impoverished; seen hope realized and lost in African cities and suburbs; listened to African refugee stories of torturous persecution; and led young Americans in their succeeding and failing efforts to restore hope in the education and rural development sectors of Africa. A summary of my work is here.

In retirement since 2007, I read voraciously, have written an ethnography on the Bamasaaba of Uganda, and write frequently on my blogs. Of all my fellow retired, freethinking professional friends here in north central Georgia, USA I have for a long time been known as the one with the most optimism and hope for Humankind’s survival and flourishing.

Not any more. My hope has gone into a marked decline since the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in November 2016. And my descent has become more acute and my feelings hardened toward most of my fellow humans.

In fact, I’m at a point where I live in a state somewhere between despondency and despair each day that Trump and his regime take action to dismantle our institutions, undermine our laws, restrict our rights, and sow and grow racial, religious and class division in the US population. Plainly speaking, my level of hope is somewhere between an incapacity for the exercise of hope (despondency) and the utter abandonment of hope (despair).

I’m prodded all the time by my beloved freethinker friends, here and elsewhere, to retain hope. They repeatedly try to convince me that the capitalist-ecological course we are on can be corrected and reformed through social mobilization and technology.

But I’ve seen a fair bit of the course of Western civilization’s modernity and its spread to Africa and elsewhere beyond the West. Unquestionably, there has been great improvement in material living and the reduction of hunger, locally and globally. But the cost has been high in terms of the Earth’s life-sustainability and our local and international relations. I’ve written about these up and down sides here:

Knowledge is Power?

http://jameselassiter.blogspot.com/2019/07/knowledge-is-power.html?m=1

Suffering and Injustice Revisited

http://jameselassiter.blogspot.com/2019/07/suffering-and-injustice-revisited.html?m=1

Economics - The Queen of the Social Sciences is Dead! Long Live the Queen!?

http://jameselassiter.blogspot.com/2019/06/economics-queen-of-social-sciences-is_26.html?m=1

Enlightenment Lost

http://jameselassiter.blogspot.com/2018/11/enlightenment-lost-faustian-exchange-of.html?m=1

The Dark Mountain Project

http://jameselassiter.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-dark-mountain-project-owl-ibis.html?m=1

How much more must I read, observe, think, feel, and work to spread hope yet not conclude that hope in the Western, and rapidly becoming global, capitalist-earth-exploitative system’s destruction is so far downstream that catastrophes and collapse are inevitable?

What exactly does it mean to have hope in what is an objective and near certain to be hopeless situation?

Straight Shootin’ Info: The History of US Gun Rights/Gun Control by Pam Dewey

Straight Shootin’ Info: The History of US Gun Rights/Gun Control

by

Pam Dewey

This three-part series by author, blogger and master videographer Pam Dewey explores the historical tension between gun rights and gun control in the United States. I highly recommend it. JEL

Part 1 - Setting the Stage: Pre-History of the 2nd Amendment & Early History of the NRA

https://youtu.be/jdhXap2jGVM

Part 2 - "Collision Course: 2nd Amendment, the First 2 Centuries & The NRA, the Second Century”

https://youtu.be/L9F9BHN0shQ

Part 3: "A Nation Divided: Examining the Modern Battle Lines & Looking for Common Ground”

https://youtu.be/EdhceR32tYI  

WORLD'S FAIRS EXPOSed by Pam Dewey

Illustration of the Great Exhibition, London, 1851

WORLD'S FAIRS EXPOSed

by
Pam Dewey

Episode 1 - “Fair Enough: The "Great Exhibition," London, 1851

https://youtu.be/mfwtwlfwvaU

Episode 2 - “Yankee Doodle Palace: The New York World’s Fair, 1853-1854”

https://youtu.be/D_hFbKrTI3A

Episode 3 - “The ‘Happy Birthday’ World’s Fair: Visiting the Centennial Exhibition of 1876”

https://youtu.be/mv_QmiMsSkg

Episode 4 – “1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Part 1: Uncle Sam Welcomes the World”

https://youtu.be/rXvX5QxzC2w

This four-part presentation on world fairs by author, blogger and master videographer Pam Dewey is an outstanding exposé on the visual and material display of nations and cultures. Here is Pam’s description of her production contained in the YouTube posting of Episode 1:

“This is an introductory video to a DocuCommentary series entitled "WORLD'S FAIRS EXPOSed," which focuses primarily on the World's Fairs held in the United States since 1853. The London Great Exhibition of 1851 was the first ever World's Fair, and led directly to the establishment of periodic World's Fairs as a feature of American history for the next century and more. Each video in the series first provides an informative and entertaining overview of a specific fair from the point of view of the visitors of the era. Then it explores behind the scenes, to consider how the fair both reflected, and AFFECTED, the social, cultural, economic, political, and philosophical aspects of the America of its time. It also considers what long-lasting influence what particular fairs may have had on the future of the country up to the 21st century.”

While watching each episode, in the back of my mind, I kept trying to tie fairs, of all kinds, to culture. That is, culture as an anthropological concept.

Knowledge is Power?

Humankind has allowed itself to be ‘progressed’ into a cul de sac of inhumanity and enslavement. Collectively, we have acquired lots of material stuff and knowledge, but little personal wisdom, empowerment, and contentment.

This path was laid out for us long ago in the Middle East by our very first rich and powerful elites. That is, the kings who took power beginning when Humankind transitioned from nomadic hunting and gathering and pastoralism, to settled agriculture and urban living.

Very soon humans had wealth (food) surpluses for the first time. That contributed to a perceived need to take strong control of such wealth, and the land and people that produced it, through laws, money, and corporeal and supernatural enforcement.

This was quickly followed by the tactical and strategic use of power against neighboring lands and peoples. And this, in turn, lead to an unquenchable desire among the new ruling elites for ever more wealth, land and power. This was the beginning of actual and threatened inter-state warfare and exploitation, methods elites have relied on above all other options up to the present.

It also marked the beginning of the decline of personal freedom, equality and brother/sisterhood. The early autocratic state collectives, and their often self-proclaimed divine elites, were given our allegiance; a shifting of our focus, our primal personal bonds, away from each other. 

Thus began a tilting of the natural human balance between individualism and collectivism toward various forms of ever-stronger and irreversible state-centered collectivism. We had embarked on the road to what we would later call ‘modernity.’ Learn more about the evolution of individualism, collectivism and modernity here and here.

The European Renaissance and its successor the Enlightenment offered a lifeline to recover our surrendered humanity; that is, a vision of a sustainable balance between individualism and collectivism.

We grasped it but lost our grip because the powerful current of industrial and state-controlled living that soon followed was too strong, and later the tempting comforts of consumerism were beyond our ability to resist. For more on this see my essay "Enlightenment Lost."

The corral, the trap, where the flickering embers of our humanity, our forsaken good balance between individual freedom and collective direction, would eventually go to die was built by the controlling industrial-political elite, and stocked with the enticing addictive bait of consumer goods that flowed from the Industrial Revolution.

These early 20th Century manufactured goods were redefined, through the gushing, language-massaging mass media, from desirables for those who could afford them to necessities for the masses who would be allowed to buy them on credit. The Age of Consumerism was born.

Man, were we living then! We individuals were really something special! Thus advised Edward Bernays and the multimedia mass advertising industry he started. Why, it was only right to excel, we were told. In fact, it was ‘natural,’ to shoulder above, out-compete, outshine our fellows in terms of possessions and appearances. Darwin himself said so, we thought.

During the rest of the 20th Century the gate to that human corral was locked and the manacles of law and social expectation applied to our bodies and minds by the wealthy and powerful controllers of the military-industrial complex. We came to tolerate our neighbors but sought meaning and purpose for our daily living mostly through the elite-controlled media, consumer goods, and the elite’s myths of progress, exceptionalism and eternal life.

So here we are now, entrapped in the kraal of our corporate masters and their political cronies. Enslaved by comfortable but, for most of us, unbreakable chains - sated, filled with myths of racial-tribal supremacy, hope and prosperity, inspired by patriotism, and praying for Heavens to come; yet, when we think honestly about it, truly powerless and sadly longing for deep personal meaning, purpose and contentment in our lives, but finding little.

Suffering and Injustice Revisited

Print by Leopoldo Mendéz

Here’s something I wrote in 2014, two years before Trump was elected:

‘Suffering and Injustice - Whose Awe, Truth, and Hope Will Prevail?'

http://jameselassiter.blogspot.com/2014/06/suffering-and-injustice-whose-awe-truth.html

Trump and what has now become his Republican Party epitomize the very defiance of Humankind’s ‘cultural human nature’ I was writing about five years ago.

But, as the saying goes, the band plays on. After all, who reads, much less heeds, the run-on sentences of an agnostic-atheist philosophical ethnographer? Much less one not affiliated with a major university, think tank, or political party. An old retired guy who happily spent most of his working life in Trump’s so-called ‘shithole’ countries. A language blessed/cursed primate whose every thought and written word is not peer-reviewed or influenced by a craving for academic tenure and book deals? An unorthodox emotional guy, a sometimes loose cannon?

When politics in a society, that of the US in particular, becomes as it is now, bent irretrievably to the will of those seeking racial and religious supremacy, absolute power, and obscene wealth accumulation to such a degree that the social system is legally and morally unaccountable and unreformable, it may just be the time for unorthodoxy, emotion and letting cannons roll on decks. Arrr! Avast and stand to shipmates, the cannons may at times point at thee!

Economics - The Queen of the Social Sciences is Dead! Long Live the Queen!?

“Globalization’s Wrong Turn”

Dani Rodrik

Foreign Affairs

June 11, 2019

Since the first annual award was given in 1969, 49 Nobel Prizes in Economics have been awarded to 81 individuals. (Up to three awards may be given each year. The prizes for 2019 have not yet been announced.) The official name of the prize is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

The Nobel Prize for economics is not one of the Nobel Prizes endowed in Alfred Nobel’s will. It was established in 1968 by a donation from Sweden’s central bank, the Sveriges Riksbank, to the Nobel Foundation to commemorate the bank’s 300th anniversary. Therefore, not being one of the prizes in Alfred Nobel’s will of 1895, it is not a Nobel Prize in the sense of those given in the natural sciences. In establishing the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Nobel Committee was not claiming that economics had attained the same level of explanation, prediction and techno-economic application that the natural sciences have.

Nevertheless, the nomination process, selection process and awards presentation are similar to those of the Nobel Prizes. Economic Nobel laureates receive the same monetary award as Nobel Prize winners, $864,240. Economic Laureates are announced with the natural science Nobel Prize laureates and receive the award at the same annual ceremony. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the prize “in accordance with the rules governing the award of the Nobel Prizes instituted through Alfred Nobel’s will.” That is, the prize is awarded annually to “those who … shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” Source: (Wikipedia)

Economists' Greatest Benefit to Humankind

Economics has gained stature in the latter half of the 20th Century as a science akin to the natural sciences based in large part on its connection to the Nobel Prize. However, the status of economics as a science, even among the social sciences, cannot be established based on economics having achieved the same explanatory and predictive power of the natural sciences. If it had risen to such power, and the amount of human energy and resources the world’s public and private sectors have devoted to the natural sciences and their spinoffs in health care and technology had been spent on national and international economic development, “economic science” would have made the world of work far more productive, efficient, wealthier, and more equal in terms of wealth distribution.

Or would it? As is the case with the natural sciences, it is the wealthy and politically powerful of the world that control the fruits of science, including economic science. Regrettably, the dismal science of economics, of all the social sciences, reigns supreme in the minds of the powerful and counting rooms of the wealthy. More about this below.

Major Fault Line in Jonathan Haidt's "Moral Foundation Theory" of Human Evolution

The Well-Meaning Bad Ideas Spoiling a Generation

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt on politics, morality, and the coddling of the American mind.

Brian Gallagher

Nautilus

March 7, 2019

Above is an interview of Jonathan Haidt. It’s pretty good on some things like his latest book The Coddling of the American Mind. I think he may be better on this topic than “human nature” and things such as the evolutionary emergence of human morality, values he contends we are hard-wired for and are therefore compelled to express.

The following excerpted statement of his from the interview caught my attention in that it is revealing in terms of my critique of his book, The Righteous Mind. He’s asked to account for the now Trumpian Republican Party. Haidt’s response raises this question: If his moral foundation theory is as powerful and useful as he leads us to believe in his book, how could one election and one president, Trump, in effect debunk it?

JH: “Trump has shifted a lot of things around. The Republican Party is no longer the social conservative party. I believe, in other research I’ve published with Karen Stenner, a political scientist in Australia, Trump is appealing to more authoritarian tendencies. It’s very hard to see how Donald Trump is a conservative. So the psychology that I just described a moment ago [moral foundation theory] no longer quite applies. [Italics mine.] The Republican Party, I don’t know what’s happening to it [shouldn’t his moral foundation theory provide some answers?], but it is bringing in elements that are overtly racist. It is bringing in desires for rapid change, which is not a conservative virtue, generally.”

Haidt hitching his moral foundation theory to evolutionary human nature remains a problem for me. 

Equally unsatisfactory is his claim in his The Righteous Mind that Democrats are less loyal and less patriotic than Republicans just doesn’t hold water. Since Trump’s election who, really, is proving to be the greater patriot, Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell? I’ve gone over these two main points and others here:

Critique: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

and here:

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt: Critique Postscript

I think a good theory of cultural evolution, one I’m working on, would tell us a lot more about how humans became what we are and why we behave as we do than Haidt’s moral foundation theory.