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Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
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L I F E and my brother (2)
"Once apparently the chief concern and masterpiece of the gods, the human
race now begins to bear the aspect of an accidental by-product of their
vast, inscrutable and probably nonsensical operations." (H.L. Mencken -
1922)
"How can we speed our understanding of ways to organzie a more just and
sustainable society in order to catch up with our escalating technological
capacity to harm one another and our life-supporting environment?
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman succinctly satated the basic problem of
quarter center ago: "The increase in man's power over his environmetn has
not been accompanied by a concomitant improvement of his ability to make
rational use of that power." (Paul R. Ehrlich, Human Natures, 2000)
If we are going to do anything at all, we better do something soon. There
has been a tripling of the population of the planet in less than a hundred
years and that is a staggering number of people with which we have to
share this third rock from the Sun.
The human predicament is problematic for every living organism.
Humans are animals like other primates which have a capacity to think
about these things. We have the ability to understand the damage we do. To
ignore it is not only making our own Freudian "death wish" real, it is
sharing the consequences with over a million other species who share the
planet with us and that is the real tragedy of human existence.
"human activities are now undermining society's life-support systems--the
systems, for instance, that maintain the quality of the atmosphere and, by
controlling the cycling of critical gases and nutrients, make it possible
for people to grow crops. The human predicament is causing extreme concern
among scientists, and an appreciation of its evolutionary roots can only
increase our chances of creating a sustainable society. An understanding
of the evolution of our perceptual systems makes clear one part of our
difficulty in coming to grips with environmental issues--we simply didn't
evolve senses capable of detecting some of the most serious problems
unaided. Knowledge of that, in turn, suggests directions in which
solutions might be found." (ibid)
There is also a hunger for prosperity as much as there is a hunger for
food. Because we have a brain we can't help but think about these things.
Perhaps that is what makes us "human?"
The more educated minds we have in the world, especially the Third
World which are rich with resources but impoverished because of
unemployment and underemployment and countries that grow lots of food,
but the local people can't afford to buy it because the food isn't
grown for local consumption and international corporations own the
means of production and exploit the local labor for their insatiable
hunger for more and more profit.
Hunger of desire is beginning to match hunger of the body as more
people become aware of the great disparities that exist between
impoverished people in the Third World and rich developed countries.
Every so often this kind of dissatisfaction causes an eruption.
Rioting in France which has now spread to Germany and Belgium is also
a manifestation of the great economic disparities which exist between
rich and poor in those countries.
Hank Roth
To Be Continued
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