www.UsHumans.net: Chapter 23

Chapter 23

Concluding remarks

This has been a brief description of how we got here, what we are, and where we are today. We have discussed some aspects of nature and the nature of a human, including the origins of our species, emotions, behaviors, morals, families, social communities, language, and culture and we have discussed the origin, history, and current ways of our neighborhoods, religion, government, science, technology, and business. We see that nature is understandable, that our own nature is understandable, and that our history is understandable. We have found that we are parenting mammals, social primates, and cultural humans. Just as each of us has already known about ourselves, we first of all strive for happy and healthy children, families, and communities. In fact, we live for our children (www.peterlanger.com/Countries/Middleast/Iraq/pages/IQHTV024.htm). If you asked persons from each of ten thousand different places in world, they would all agree that we live for our children. We see that it is a comprehensible fortune to be a certain collection of atoms, with certain ways, for a few decades. We're a lucky bunch of atoms. Since other bunches of atoms merely form rocks and such, we want to make the most of the decades we have in life or we might as well be rocks. Understanding our own nature along with something about the flow of civilization helps us form a more clear idea of our place in the universe and helps us to together choose where next to take our civilization by choosing goals that best match our own nature. What priorities and goals do you have for your own life and for your community, nation, and planet-wide civilization and how do you gauge success in life?

    It is hoped that you want to know more about our own story and will seek additional details by reading other books such as those that served as the main sources here along with some others listed in the chapter bibliographies. To understand humans and human history, the books by Poole, Frans De Waal, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Basso, Nissen and others, Fried and others, Stockton, Gernet, the Gies, Licht, Larkin, Barnet and Cavanagh, Diamond, Smith, Kotlowitz, and the Miringoffs should be the next books you read. That set of books describes the natural history and the social history of humans and the current ways of business and government, too. To better understand the inner, molecular workings of a human, you might like to read books about physics, chemistry, and biology–for example, The Sciences, an Integrated Approach by James Trefil and Robert M Hazen. The richness of human existence is learned by reading many cultural anthropology books. Our various cultures and religions are best comprehended by experience but each of us has time for only a few and can fully comprehend only our own.

    The world seems mysterious only until we learn something about it. Through high school and college, our general education typically covers just a portion of the most important elements of our own story; the omitted portions leave parts of our world still seeming mysterious. When we get a glimpse of the main elements of the human world all at once in a single, general overview, then the world begins to seem less complicated, its pieces seem less disconnected, its fundamental basis begins to be more evident, and we see that we are in fact controlling the operation of our civilization and its destiny. Everything you see–including roads, vehicles, tools, homes, stores, palaces, and temples–and every institution and policy on the planet were imagined and built by our own efforts. When we were children we thought these things came into existence on their own or that they were made by the mysterious “them” and that we had no control over our government and policies. Our society consists of billions of very similar persons pursuing life and contributing their efforts to the operations of our civilization. (I wish I had begun ninth grade with just such a general overview and then spent my remaining school years learning some of the additional and never ending details.)

    This book’s cover art, created by Megan Gill, contains our own history in one snapshot. We know that the Sun is a star that formed a while after the Big Bang occurred, that energy from our Sun powers the life processes occurring on the Earth, and that stars manufacture the heavy atomic elements, including those found within our own bodies. Physics, chemistry, and biology are closely related. The current location of the oceans, continents, and coastlines are due to the process of plate tectonics that also results in gradual changes in climate and in plant and animal species on each continent. A portion of the sequence of plant and animal species that developed on the Earth are seen in the picture, including trees, grass, fish, frogs, mammals, and primates. Each of these species are what results when its DNA duplicates itself and directs the growth and operation of the individual. The instructions contained within our DNA have been accumulating through four billion years of evolutionary responses to changes in the environment of food, predators, and climate. A family of humans is seen pursuing life. As population levels required it, we humans domesticated certain plants and animals and have consequently developed a civilization of cities, science, technology, factories, churches, and government–as seen in the picture. In addition, the picture is art, which is another thing humans enjoy making and experiencing.

    We saw that the Big Bang occurred some twelve to fourteen billion years ago and was soon followed by atoms and molecules, stars and planets, plants and animals, primates and humans, culture and civilization. You might like to stop and read the summary of our story contained in the introduction. The Tufts University website has a ten-minute video summary taking us from the Big Bang to today. You might like to view the clip Cosmic Origins on their website www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/cosmic_evolution/docs/fr_1/fr_1_mov.html. Nature has but a few fundamental aspects, but these result in an endless variety of phenomenon, including us humans. Electric charges and their interactions are one of the most fundamental aspects of nature. We saw that molecules–including the molecules of life–are electrically bound conglomerates of atoms. Life occurs naturally as collections of electrically bound atoms become self-duplicating, self-growing, and self-operating. Through the first couple billion years of the Earth’s history, the biological atom that became DNA grew in length at an average rate of about one atom per year. Bacteria were the first life form that could be considered to be alive; already, a few trillion generations of bacteria have occurred on the Earth. About four billion years after the formation of the Earth, its life had grown to a visible size.

    The DNA inside your own cells consists of a few billion atoms and has a four-billion-year ancestry: you have a four-billion-year ancestry. In addition, the energy contained within your body is part of the energy of the Big Bang that occurred some thirteen billion years ago. Many of your atoms have been around for as long as that, while others were formed inside later stars and stellar explosions. Some of your atoms are second generation star material.

    The DNA molecule plays the central role in living organisms. This molecule naturally duplicates itself–with many changes and errors, some of which turn out to be useful. DNA chemically directs the operation of an individual and also directs the formation of a sequence of molecules to build an entire individual from surrounding and ingested chemicals. This happens, for example, when you place the seed of a rose bush into the ground. Each individual plant or animal occurs as its DNA-containing seed unfolds through that sequence of millions of chemical reactions specified within its DNA. When certain chemicals are in contact with each other within and around that seed, the entire series will replay–just as naturally and surely as an object will fall when dropped. Change the sequence or add to it and a different individual results, some of which are better matched to their environment. The DNA molecule is a record of both the order in which this sequence occurs and the number of steps in that sequence. The sequence and number of steps have been accumulating through time in a trial-and-error manner. Replaying the sequence within the next seed results in the growth, operation, and duplication of that individual. The series of produced chemicals results in the various types of tissue and organ systems found within our bodies, including our skin, heart, lungs, and liver and also our arms and legs and such.

    The nervous system and its brain are of special importance to us because it is beneficial in life for an organism to be able to notice and to predict cause and effect relationships. To do this, input from our external sensory system is compared with stored memories and processed by the pattern recognition and prediction (learning and reasoning) functions of our nervous system. Victor Johnston found that we mentally weigh our feelings of good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, for each pondered action and that the memory of each action taken during life’s situations include our assessment of the relative good or bad experienced during those moments. We repeat those actions found to be pleasant and avoid the others. Pleasure is experienced in a specific region of the brain. Sensory input and our thoughts are both able to illicit a pleasant feeling, as occurs when we view or ponder a colorful sunset. The simultaneous processes of sense, memory, reasoning, and feeling combine to produce our thoughts. Susan Greenfield measures thoughts as growing regions of coordinated neuronal activity. Since we are parenting mammals, social primates, and human beings, most every thought we have and most every action we take involves love and children, family and friends, community and justice–and little else.

    We saw how we humans are distinguished from nonprimate mammals by our more-complex social systems of cooperating, extended families and that we are distinguished from the other primates by our increased intelligence, language, and culture. Throughout our past, each of these three things became more pronounced in an interrelated manner. We saw that our culture consists of our recipes for how to do everything in life. Previous chapters discussed the following points about society, intelligence, and language. Being a social species means that we live together in a group that pools efforts, that we “do what we expect others to do,” that we require the result to be mutually beneficial, and that we cooperate with others on those tasks deemed larger than a single person can do alone. Our increased intelligence enabled us to survive in environments for which our biological heritage had not prepared us physically. De Waal says that once its importance was evident, there may have been evolutionary pressure to increase intelligence simply to avoid being outsmarted by our own brainy little cohorts. Our increased language ability is constantly heard as we incessantly talk about the most important things in life. We compose the sounds of language by using our lips, tongue, and throat to alter puffs of air. We agree upon the sounds made to communicate thoughts about items, actions, and emotions common to all of us.

    The largest elements of our naturally evolved heritage are most apparent while doing those activities found to be the most effortless to do–and so are also those activities being the most taken for granted, from breathing and chewing to the production and comprehension of speech. (While traveling in foreign countries, I’m amazed at the rapid rate in which one person produces strange sounds and another person comprehends them.) We don’t have to learn these things from others: they come naturally to us. You might like to list those things that you find are effortlessly accomplished. We effortlessly notice social incidents, including things like the sudden increase in time that two particular persons are spending together or simply the simultaneous absence of two particular individuals. Without any mental concentration, such as that needed to divide two numbers arithmetically, you know which members of your group are related to which others and you know which persons are the friends of which others. We know which persons will be the first ones to come to the aid of each particular member of our group, and we know far each member of your extended family and group will go for you, how far you will go for each of them, and how much each person will let you get away with. While you and another person are interacting as a pair of individuals, we know how the presence of any third person will change that interaction and how that change differs for each specific third person. We readily notice when we are in danger of being socially swindled by other persons. We effortlessly recognize a face or learn a new geographic layout. We observe the details of the natural world around us, including such things as plant cycles and animal behaviors. Beginning a few million years ago, our intelligence enabled us to be successful gatherer-hunters. While other animals hunt with their feet and teeth, we hunt by finding exploitable behaviors in our prey. We don’t hunt by simply wandering a field while carrying a club and hoping to come across an animal. In the example of the animal harvesting tactics of the Amahuaca hunter in Chapter 8, we saw how our brains have evolved to readily notice the exploitable behaviors of other animals. It takes considerable knowledge of plants for farmers to successfully live off cultivated crops.

    We create a tool for every need, and each newly invented tool means that our way of life changes a little. Our first tools were sticks and stones, as they are for many species. Later on, we modified rocks to cut, poke, and scrape. Since then, farming and industrialization have been our two most life-altering tools. We saw that it took a few thousand years for farming to spread around the planet and that it has taken the last two hundred and fifty years for industrialization to spread throughout much of the planet. The knowledge and use of each newly invented tool quickly spreads around the planet to everyone else experiencing a need for that solution. Today’s technology is the combined sum of all the tools and procedures ever invented by anyone throughout the planet, as explained in Ralph Linton’s essay about the diffusion of inventions quoted in Chapter 9. Which future tool will be next to significantly alter our lives? Will it be genetic engineering, fusion power, quark-based machinery, the colonization of other planets, or something as unimaginable as were electronic computers 150 years ago when Maxwell finalized the equations describing electricity?

    Beginning about 10,000 years ago we learned to farm, build cities, and to build social structures larger than our innate band of a few extended families. We have grouped ourselves into increasingly larger social units, from tribes and chiefdoms to states. Today, our primate society of a few extended families is growing to include everyone on the planet in a single interacting group or unit. We are now beginning to see ourselves as a planet-wide species with mutual concerns, interests, efforts, and futures. Civilization is the mutual tool of our many cultures and has become global in extent.

    We have seen that, at any time or in any place around the planet, whenever hundreds of us humans get together to form a tribe or chiefdom, we will build structures like earthen mounds, irrigation systems, and stone monuments. One of the first things such a group of people will do is to try to find how big a rock they can carve or move or how large a mound of earth they can create. Whenever tens of thousands of us get together, we build temples, palaces, cities, and city-states. The earth and rock structures we build express our inner drives and our inner view of the world. During construction, each person within the group typically spends one week per month working on these structures. After finishing these structures we all stand back and admire our mutual accomplishment. What can billions of us build? Make a list. Discuss your list with others. Our mutual efforts can build anything that any of us can imagine, and we can make our civilization into any form we want. What are we now building?

    Our monuments are also works of art, from the Art Deco of the Hoover Dam (see http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~twp/architecture/artdeco/artdeco6.jpg) to the Taj Mahal (see http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/252 and www.pbs.org/treasuresoftheworld/taj_mahal/tmain.html). In fact, most every tool we make, from a bowl to an automobile, is also a work of art. We leave few things undecorated. Alice Walker says that our body needs food to live but our minds and soul need beauty to survive.

    By combining efforts in our mutual civilization, which we operate for our mutual benefit, today’s six billion, see http://jersey.uoregon.edu/population/Population.html, of us can build anything we can imagine. In fact, we can do much more than the simple task of ensuring our basic needs for food, sanitation, clean water, shelter, health, sustainable resources, and the pursuit of happiness for ourselves, our families, and our communities. We can ensure that all persons have the full and unconstrained opportunity to pursue the limits of their individual and combined scientific, artistic, technological and other intellectual talents, interests, and goals. We can then spend our lifetimes using our personality and talents to improve ourselves and our civilization. With each new thing we learn or accomplish, we become a fuller person. We all agree that each newborn child is equally important to our society and is equally deserving and capable of a full life, not to mention a happy and healthy life. Our mutual society suffers when we create constraints that keep some of our members from contributing all their talents.

    We have the feelings and emotions to go with our animal, mammal, primate, and human heritage simply because they comprise our biological heritage. Nearly all of our behaviors are common to all mammals or to all primates. One could simultaneously view one hundred mammalian–or primate–species and find each of them doing the same set of behaviors. We are mammals with a monogamous parenting strategy and a nuclear family who live for our children. We are social primates who care first for our extended family and then for the other members of our society, and we care for our society. We are happiest when our family and group members are happiest; just seeing our child smile is enough to make us happy. In fact, we feel happy when simply seeing any other human smile. We strive to be a valued and contributing member of our community and we feel a happy feeling flood within ourselves when we have their approval. (We are also uplifted when singing at the top of our lungs.) What makes us happy? Each of us simply wants to laugh and joke with our family and friends, pursue life, and raise children. Most of us feel that success in life is measured in terms of happy and healthy children and communities.

    We form social groups because of the unspoken certainty we have that combining our efforts in a mutually beneficial exchange of help makes for a better life than going it alone. This certainty is unspoken because it is innate. The exchange of help in a just manner–to do as the other did and to expect the other to do what you did–is the glue that creates our society, and our society is re-created by this glue with each new generation. Society and this just exchange are synonymous in that neither occurs–or even begins–without the other. We had not been parents for thousands of generations before suddenly developing parental love and we had not been members of a social group for thousands of generations before suddenly adding our Golden Rule. Parenting developed simultaneously with parenting emotions–our love for our children–and society developed simultaneously with our Golden Rule.

    Our ideas of right and wrong stem from our innate capacities for empathy, sympathy, altruism, and our capacity to form a social community that we require to be just in every respect. We have seen that having the capacity to feel empathy means being able to take the perspective of another individual. Sympathy means caring about another individual's predicament because you can see yourself in their place and imagine the same thing happening to you. Empathy and sympathy are as old as the first mother–without these there would be no parenting mammals. My friend Burky points out that much more can be built when beginning with these two caring emotions. De Waal says that the first hint of moral obligation and indebtedness occurred when a social species began to "do as the other did, and expect the other to do what you did."

    Whenever we have a feeling that we are doing something wrong, our actions are involving other persons. We have an innate feeling that "It isn't right for me if it's wrong for someone else." This feeling is exactly as old as the first social system. Today, those of us who are Christians say "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Those of us who are Buddhists say "Treat everyone as if they are you" and that "The group is important, not one individual." Islam teaches one to "Love for your brother what you would love for yourself," and Confucianists say "Before you act you should apply the personal test: how would you feel yourself? You can find the answer in yourself." If you simultaneously asked persons from each of our world religions to state our guiding principle, they would answer “The Golden Rule” in unison.

    The previous chapters gave a glimpse of the types and numbers of help-exchanges that occur among social primates, gatherer-hunters, village farmers, and the wage-earning citizens of today's nations. We see that in the culture of the moment, we exchange help in those tasks that are larger than a single individual can accomplish alone: this exchange builds societies. We are adept at figuring out which tasks qualify for such an exchange, and we know in which situations the favor of our help will likely be returned in the future. We have seen that for our biological ancestors, simply watching for predators was such a task. We saw that the members of farming communities of the northeastern U.S. around the year 1800 exchanged help on many tasks. We saw that Yoruba farmers formed groups to work the farmlands of the group members and that Early European farmers worked the land of the community as a group. We saw that those of us humans who are Amish prefer to exchange help in a group effort than to use certain "labor-saving" machines alone.

    In the big city today, we have few daily tasks which are larger than can be handled by a single individual–except for the daily operation of our civilization. Our civilization exists only through the combined efforts of each and every one of us as we go about our jobs and daily activities. As in Howard Cutler’s example, some of the daily jobs we do include the farming and processing of cotton into clothing, or metal mining and its processing into machinery–including the machinery used to harvest cotton and process it into clothing. Some of us are clothing designers, distributers, or retailers while others are machinery builders, operators, or repairers. Many of us work to feed, house, transport, cure, and govern other persons, including those working in occupations resulting in such things as cotton clothing. Since each of our tools, utensils, and decorations have similarly intertwined backgrounds, we see that it takes a combination of the efforts of all of us to operate today’s civilization. The pooling of our efforts is visible as the resulting civilization–and as the simple traffic that occurs as everyone goes about their daily business. The next time you sit in your car cursing the stop lights and traffic and looking at a thousand or so other atom-filled persons doing the same thing, you might amuse yourself by considering the hundreds of occupations being performed that day by those visible persons. In addition, the primate and mammalian ancestry of each of those persons is also plainly evident. In North America, we can also ponder the differing national origins of the last two to twenty grandparents of each visible person.

    You might also consider that each of those persons seen in traffic are nearly identical copies of yourself because they differ only in personalty and in personal tastes. Each person you see has had an entire life before passing you at that moment in time, and each of them looks forward to a pleasant future. During the few minutes that elapsed before you encountered each of those persons, each of them had thoughts about spouse, family, and society–just as you did. Since each person is so similar, you can imagine that the traffic consists of nothing but copies of yourself. You might even imagine that the entire population of your home town consists of nothing but copies of yourself. That is, another “you” lives next door on the left and yet another “you” lives at each of the other homes in town. During your lifetime, your could have taken one hundred different jobs, friends, and even spouses. For example, you once passed up a particular job that happens now to be the occupation of a person living three houses down from you. Since your personality is partly molded by the friends you happen to have had, you can believe that you would be a slightly different person if you had become friends with different persons in the past. Equivalently, you might consider the one hundred persons living near you to be yourself taken each of one hundred possible paths through life. In fact, you might imagine the planet filled with six billion copies of yourself because they nearly are yourself. You can walk up to any person on the planet and ask how is the family and community and you will get an answer because that is about all any one thinks about. As people go through the day, we might ask them to hold up one finger while thinking of their children, two fingers if thinking of their spouse, three if thinking of their extended family, four when thinking of the community, and five for any other thought. Throughout the day, all six billion of us would usually be holding up one to four fingers. That is how similar we are to each other. Chat and interact with all persons as if they are yourself because they nearly are yourself.

    Our innate urge to form a mutually beneficial community through the exchange of assistance is accompanied by an innate ability to detect potentially unequal or one-sided exchanges. We expect our society to be mutually beneficial for all of us and we react against any unfairness or injustice in any interaction within our community. Many things are seen to be our reaction to injustice. Each time we get angry it is in response to what we believe to have been an unjust treatment by another person: we get angry for no other reason. (Do non-social animals feel anger?) We sometimes feel that our society is not being just and mutually beneficial because of unequal wealth and opportunity. We sometimes go to war over injustice. We sometimes feel that a mere business transaction wasn't mutually beneficial.

    We see that the largest part of human thoughts and actions involve our love for our children, spouse, friends, and extended family along with our concern for our community and for the just exchanges that create our community. Our existence consists of our concern for children, spouse, family, friends, and society and its justice, and that's it. In a single sentence, these few things describe a human and the nature of a human. It is no accident that these are the topics of most every conversation–and of most every literary plot, too. Our arts express and communicate these cares and emotions. Our religions emphasize these most-important aspects of ourselves and of our society. The main tenets of democratic government concern equality, well-being, and freedom from injustice in society (and it operates through a mixing of views and priorities). It is no accident that these things form the main tenets of our religions and governments. These concerns are what we are. These few things explain the world of us humans and our myriad of activities and are bound to become the priorities of our civilization as we begin to ask each of us what our priorities should be–as we now have the technology to do.

    Each of us knows and agrees that the most important elements in our lives are our children, spouse, family, and society. We know these concerns are common to each of us because we share a common humanness. Our religions stress them and our governments legally define and defend them. Our science is just beginning to feel confident that repeatable experiments can be done that study behaviors, emotions, and mental states. Some scientists have come to the conclusion that we have been right all along about our own nature and that our religions and governments have also been right all along. This means that religion, government, and science all agree about the most important aspects of a human and of human society. (In Einstein and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings, Thomas McFarlane shows how scientists and religious leaders say the same thing but in different ways.) It could not occur that these three activities of humans would each come to different conclusions, just as it could not possibly occur that our culture, religion, government, or civilization are unrelated to our nature.

    For a human, life is not lived alone. Our goals and priorities in life involve more than ourselves. How do you gauge our progress during the last ten thousand years in building a civilization that matches our innate nature to care for our children, spouse, extended family, friends, and society and to pursue our own and combined talents, interests, and lives free from injustice? How do you compare the capacity of our past ages with that of today's in enabling such things as our health, well-being, education, use of talent, happiness, community ties, social and economic opportunity and equality, and hope for the future? We see that our scientific and technological understandings have recently made life easier and less-often shortened during infancy or by a simple illness or accident–for some but not all of us. At the same time our Industrial Revolution has also brought increased inequality and injustice, lessened social ties, and a mechanical ability to kill people by the millions during war.

    We see that we are not yet fully in control of our leaders when they continue their 5,000 year-old habit of going to war on a whim. (We saw that the first farming villages of Mesopotamia, which emerged about 10,000 years ago, grew and lived in peace for 5,000 years and that the mass murder of war between city-states did not exist until 5,000 years ago.) War is always the idea of our leaders who tell us that it will somehow be glorious for ordinary people to go kill other humans and be killed by them. Your leader is lying when he tells you that war will be glorious. War benefits nobody–not even the leader who promoted it for some imagined gain–and results in terrible deaths and people having their limbs blown off, even while eating with the family at the dinner table. The next time your leader suggests going to war, simply tell him “no” because it will not benefit anyone, not even him. Do you know how to end war today? Fill the television with images of people screaming and crying because their arms have been blown off and their child’s legs have been severed by flying fragments of the dinner table. Do you know how to keep a war going once it has started? Keep these images off the television. The price of such a terrible lie is a terrible death for innocent people. Let’s follow the advice of the Dalai Lama, see www.tibet.com/DL, and take guns away from every leader and his or her military–they will be less dangerous that way. What purpose do guns serve today? Mostly, they needlessly prolong injustice. (As the first group of 10,000 of us head to colonize Mars, will we have to take guns and bombs with us? For what purpose?)

    Such injustice will occur only for as long as we let our leaders pursue goals that benefit mostly themselves or only the wealthiest of us–and for as long as we go along with them. For a human, life is first about healthy and happy children, families, and communities. As the concerns and goals of our civilization move from national and individual power and wealth toward our children and mutual society we will attain a more just character for our society. This will make our society once again be as mutually beneficial at is had been while we were social hominids of nuclear families having monogamous relationships. Actually, we see that is exactly what we still are today. We have simply added to our culture the mutual tool that is our civilization.

    A quantitative measure of the injustice of our civilization is given by the percentage of us who live in poverty or are constrained from pursuing the limits of our talents and capabilities and by the percentage of us who are imprisoned or are employed in military and police forces or have our lives upset by war. (Typically, around the world there are dozens of wars and millions of war refugees but little of this is discussed in the U.S. news.) Some of today’s injustice crosses national borders and creates international tensions and crimes. We don’t fight crime by continually increasing the size of our armies and police forces. We truly fight both individual and international crime and "antisocial behaviors" by striving to minimize hopelessness, the unequal access to the benefits of our civilization, and social and economic injustice because these things are the sources of misery and the resulting crime. (It has been observed that, through the centuries, crime increases whenever the economy slows and that crime decreases whenever the economy improves.) Together we will look carefully at the unjust causes of poverty and despair and use the strength of our human character striving to create a more just civilization for all of us. As we begin to measure the success of our attempts at governing ourselves, we will find the approach that minimizes hopelessness and injustice. The increasingly just society requires that every policy and action prove to reduce measured social and economic injustice.

    One measure of economic injustice is given by the number of workers who contribute their lifetime’s effort to our civilization but are paid the minimum wage. In the U.S., the federally mandated minimum wage is $5.15 per hour, which is $10,712 per year. Some states, see www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/america.htm, have a higher minimum wage but only Oregon and Washington (whose rate is now $7.63 per hour) annually increase the minimum wage to keep up with inflation. When adjusted for inflation, the 2005 minimum wage is nearly identical to its 1950 value, see www.epi.org/issueguides/minwage/figure1.gif, which means that those of us earning minimum wage have not had a raise since 1950. To see the minimum wage compared to the poverty level of income, visit www.epi.org/issueguides/minwage/figure4.gif. After two decades with little increase, the federally mandated minimum wage of $5.15 per hour is scheduled to increase to $7.25. This will give a long-awaited raise to 15 million out of the 126 million-person workforce in the U.S. (12% of all workers) earning below or near that wage, see www.epi.org/issueguides/minwage/table1.gif. After a few decades of wages below the poverty line, this is actually a raise up to–but not over–the poverty line for a family of three. The resulting increase in consumer spending will increase factory production. This is a trickle-up approach to the economy. For more information, see www.epi.org/content.cfm/issueguides_minwage_minwage.

    Some of the biggest "secrets" in the U.S. today include the facts described in the following paragraphs. One in five of our children live in a home whose income falls below the poverty line, half of our single mothers have an income that is below the poverty line, and every person earning the federally mandated minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has an income below the poverty line ($7.25 per hour corresponds to an annual wage of $15,080, which is still below the poverty line for a family of three). The 2004 American Community Survey of the Census Bureau found that 37 of 290 million persons (13% of us) in the U.S. live below the poverty line, see Table 6 at www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/cps2004/tabFG2-all.csv. Having so many of us living below the poverty line indicates a widespread inequality of wealth. In fact, the inequality is global in scope and causing social unrest. Despite the mantra, it is a fact that very, very few of us are going to become millionaires. When a person’s income is so low that phone, car, antibiotics, and health care are unaffordable, then that person is being forced to live a medieval lifestyle while being surrounded by twenty-first century benefits. How would you compare life for 13^th- and 21^st-century economic serfs? About one-quarter of men and one-half of women living in the U.S. have an annual income below $15,000. Such an income barely allows a person to pay rent and buy food. As for the most common annual income, 40% of men and 70% of women earn below $25,000 (see www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/p54.html for the numbers of persons falling in each income bracket). What is life like at $8.00 per hour ($16,640 per year)? It means affording only an annual night out to a restaurant or movie theater and it means that consumer items priced over $200 are beyond easy reach. On payday, the family of three might have $12 left over that has to last until the next payday. (The Economic Policy Institute, see www.epi.org/content.cfm/datazone_fambud_budget, has determined basic family budgets for four hundred different cities. Also, the U.S. Census Bureau has a table of worker counts by income at www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/cps2004/tabFG2-all.csv.) Since those of us living with an income below the poverty line are contributing our life’s efforts to our mutual civilization, this is an injustice. We can do better with our mutual efforts.

    As a condition for employment, many employers today check your credit report, criminal background, medical history, driving record, require a medical checkup, ask if you have ever filed a Workman’s Compensation claim for being injured on the job, require that you not be in default on student loans and that you have registered for the draft, test you for drug use, test you for tobacco use, demand that you legally account for periods of unemployment, and give you a 200-question psychological test, asking questions such as “Does it make you mad when arrested criminals get away free on legal technicalities?” (To see this, go to the website of any retail store chain and click the button marked “apply for a job.”) None of this occurred a couple decades ago. Our corporations are beginning to use credit reports as a weapon of control. Even your car insurance rate depends on your credit rating, for some reason.

    Political secrets include the following things. First, democracy is more than just voting; it is a blending of views that partially satisfies everyone. Citizens of a democratic culture have a tolerance for different views, priorities, and lifestyles while undemocratic citizens feel that they can demand their own way and require that everyone be just like them or else. Second, the only form of government that seems natural to people is that in which they grew, whether it is a kingdom, dictatorship, theocracy, or democracy. For this reason, it takes one or two generations for a people to believe in a new type of government–force never works. Third, the president’s cabinet includes two war departments–defense and homeland security–but no department whose sole concern is the well-being of our children. Do you think the needs of our children should be a cabinet level concern for our government? And fourth, politicians and issues are marketed to us using the same test-audience tactics as is done for oatmeal and other such products. By the way, each time an industry convinces the government to eternally and unconditionally exempt them from law suites, we can tell that our government has been purchased by that industry.

    The fear of crime is far less in most other nations; in fact, citizens of other nations stroll unlit city-streets late at night without even imagining they will be robbed or beaten. As the U.S. daily televison newscast chooses to describe each and every crime in the city, day after day for decades, it generates this fear of crime by making it seem commonplace, but I have walked past millions of persons and not one of them has ever harmed me. Such “news casts” might sell a lot of oatmeal commercials, but this fear makes people lose trust in their fellow citizens and believe that everyone is a criminal. As a result, this TV marketing approach harms our nation because democracy requires a trust in your fellow citizens. If we believe that everyone is a criminal then we might have more trust in an autocrat than in our fellow citizens. The autocrat might confiscate the TV stations.

    There has been about a 15% drop in our wages during the last few decades, and as a result, both mom and dad now have to work to earn enough money for rent and food. The average wage of the U.S. worker peaked in 1973, and by 2002, our wage had fallen to the average earned in 1963. Effectively, this means we have not had a raise in fifty years–but our business owners and operators have had their income increase several-fold during this time. Notice also that this decrease in wages also means that we were able to purchase about 15% less goods and services, thus shrinking business. Some businesses are very happy to have decreased labor costs but the benefit is temporary because workers soon purchase less. Decreasing wages by half next week would mean great profits for a few months until the resulting decrease in purchases brought on a depression. By the way, while people in the U.S. have one or two weeks paid vacation per year, many persons in Europe receive six to eight weeks. France recently adopted a 35-hour work week so that people have more time to be with their family and to pursue their individual passions.

    If a large corporation has an annual profit of one billion dollars, it is common for half that money to be distributed between a handful of executives and for the other half to be distributed mostly among the handful of major shareholders. Fifty years ago, CEO wages were typically twenty times the wage of the workers. This multiple has grown to be fifty in a few nations but it is five hundred in the U.S. today. The magnitude of the income of many of our corporate owners and executives is now billions of dollars per year, and these wages are obtained by removing competition and creating monopolies enabling them to overcharge customers. We saw that the profits of our largest corporations simply become the income of the wealthiest 1% of us. The combined income of the wealthiest 1% of us is as much as that of the lower 40% of us, and the top 20% of us receive 50% of our nation's total income while the poorest 20% receive just 4% of this total.

    Our national news is rapidly becoming owned by just a handful of large companies (these are listed at www.openairwaves.org/telecom) who are choosing news topics for us, and they often choose to broadcast those political views similar to their own, see www.fair.org, www.mediachannel.org, and www.fcc.gov. Some have sponsored political rallies promoting the views of the owner. The owners of a newspaper might terminate an investigative story revealing bad practices of a company whenever they own stock in that other company. One journalist recently described this as “There is freedom of the press today only if you own the press.”

    College education costs about ten times as much in the U.S. as it does in most any other industrialized nation–$20,000 to $50,000 compared to $500 to $3,000 per year. Our government has gone along with the bank financing scheme in which many students have to pay for college by getting $100,000 in bank loans and then, after interest is added, pay back $200,000 to the bank. By law, a person cannot declare bankruptcy on these bank loans. A nation’s progress is tied to the education of its citizens. Education is important–for everyone, for each individual, and for our mutual society. With each new thing we learn or accomplish, we become a fuller person. Food keeps us alive, love makes us live, and education enables us to grow, to better understand ourselves, and to better contribute to our community.

    Universal health care occurs in most every industrialized nation except the United States where about one in seven of us do not have any health insurance. In fact, about 20,000 of us die every year because we can not afford to go to the doctor; this is about 1% of the two million persons who die every year in the U.S. People in the U.S. spend twice as much on health care as do people in Europe and ten or twenty times as much as do the people in most every other nation, see http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/indic/indic_52_1_1.html; medical care consumes 3% of the personal budget in Japan, see http://web-japan.org/stat/stats/10LIV12.html. Since 1970, the average portion of family income spent on healthcare has increased from 2% to 20%. In 1960, the national health expenditure was $28 billion (in current dollars) but in 2004 it was $1.9 trillion; about 2% of this amount was spent on research, see www.cms.hhs.gov/NationalHealthExpendData/downloads/nhe2004.zip and www.cms.hhs.gov/NationalHealthExpendData/downloads/tables.pdf. Health care has become so expensive that increasing numbers of employers are dropping health insurance for their employees. Some are also dropping retirement pensions. As health insurance costs increased, we were required to carry automobile insurance that would pay the $100,000 hospital bills resulting from an accident. (In practice, this means that traffic no longer consists of dented cars as it did before car insurance became required. Is that beneficial?) We saw that the people of a nation pay for health care either with direct wages from their employers or from the indirect wages that come from the taxation of their employers who manage to pay insufficient wages. In either case, the money and effort comes from within our civilization. We may already have learned that the health-care industry is no place for corporate profit seeking. (Notice that the goals and operation of our police force, firefighting groups, and military and such have relatively little to do with maximizing business profits despite the fact that those of us who think that only money makes the world go cannot imagine any other solution or motivation.)

    The U.S. does not have affordable health care or affordable college education; instead, it spends its money on a really big military force. For example, where another country, say Britain, has but fifteen of a certain type of warship, the U.S. has four hundred. The U.S. did not have much of a military force at all until forced to build one in response to Hitler, and then its size never decreased. Eisenhower warned about the dangers of what he called the military-industrial complex, see http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html. The money spent today by the U.S. on its military is about the same as the total military spending of all the other nations of the world combined. What do we get out of being the only still-un-bankrupted Superpower? Do other empires send money to your home every week? Just as military spending was bankrupting the Soviet Union, it can also bankrupt the U.S.

    The U.S. might soon have trouble funding its half-trillion dollar (1% of the World’s Gross Product) per year army from citizens earning mostly minimum wage. As manufacturing moved overseas, U.S. citizens exchanged their $25 per hour manufacturing jobs for $9 per hour service-sector jobs. Engineering jobs are now moving overseas where wages are 65% less. Are CEO jobs next to move overseas? What is left for the U.S. worker? Would any of our businesses want to reap great profits for a few decades if it meant they bankrupted the nation in the process? (Remember that decreased wages are followed by decreased purchases by workers and subsequently decreased manufacturing and servicing.)

    The size of the U.S. economy will soon be exceeded by those of each of China, India, and the European Union, and this will decrease the economic position of the U.S. in the world. This decrease will likely occur long before many U.S. politicians admit that the economic importance of the nation has decreased in the world. (Today, the U.S. accounts for ten of the fifty trillion dollar Gross World Product and the annual budget of the U.S. government is three trillion dollars.) But then also, as corporate budgets come to exceed those of most of the world’s governments, we might find that the economies of each of the nations of the world are in fact functionally united long before politicians get around to more formal agreements. The trouble with mega-corporate control of the world’s economy is that its owners and operators are not elected and are concerned only about their own income and about removing competition. (Since there is little competition among the corporations within a monopolized industry, the greatest competition among corporations today occurs as each separate industry struggles to be one that obtains half of our weekly income throughout life. That is, the still-separate corporations controlling each of the food, automobile, fuel, communications, and utility industries and such each want half of our income.) It is a suicidal policy for the U.S. government to obtain 20% of its annual funds by borrowing money as it has through the last few decades. As the U.S. imports more than it exports, its economic power is decreasing. The trade deficit has grown to three-quarter trillion dollars per year.

    Our leaders have failed us by not planning for our future energy needs and energy systems and by continuing to rely solely on gasoline powered cars and trucks, and we have failed ourselves by going along with them. The number of high-profit, large-sized but low gas-mileage trucks and SUVs (which are also omitted from governmentally mandated fleet-wide fuel efficiency ratings) increases every year, while the smaller cars getting the best gas-mileage are unavailable in the U.S. For example, Daimler-Chrysler's Smart Car (see www.smartcar.com) gets 70 miles per gallon (30 km per liter) of gasoline and has been sold in Europe for many years but not in the U.S. The Zap corporation, see www.zapworld.com/cars/smartcar.asp, is now beginning to import these cars into the U.S. (You might also like to look at the Canta that is made in the Netherlands, see www.canta.nl.) You can greatly improve our gas-guzzling and Gulf-warring situation by using a car that gets more than fifty miles per gallon. When paying $2.85 per gallon of gas and driving 15,000 miles per year, the difference between a car that gets 20 mpg and one that gets 50 mpg typically amounts to $5,000 extra in fuel costs in four years. (Visit www.fueleconomy.gov for more about these figures and to compare the fuel ratings of cars sold in the U.S. Also visit www.pbs.org/now/politics/gasprices05.html for international prices and fuel company profits.) Coincidentally, the share of each U.S. family in the cost of two Gulf Wars has also been about $5,000. This means that driving a 50-mpg car during the years 1990 through 2010 would save your family $20,000 in fuel costs and $5,000 in warring costs. Many of us paid with our limbs or lives. Why do we not have one-kilowatt wind-powered generators and solar collectors on every rooftop in the nation? (Japan and Europe are doing much better at this.) Why do we continue to use water heaters that run 24-hours per day rather than only when needed, as is common in Europe? Since it bathes our rooftops with one-kilowatt per square meter, why do not make more use of sunlight in lighting and warming building interiors? Placing a thermal mass, see www.txses.org/epsea/mass.html, near the windows of your home during the winter will save money and reduce the global warming caused by the burning of coal and natural gas at our electrical power generating plants, which account for half the greenhouse gas emissions of the U.S., see www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/analysis/ghg.pdf. The absence of a U.S. energy policy–since that of President Carter–has resulted in two gulf wars and 500,000 of us humans being killed by other humans.

    None of these "secrets" are discussed by Democratic or Republican presidential candidates or discussed in the speeches made by legislators. They are rarely mentioned in the daily news. These things will continue to occur only for as long as they are such secrets. By thinking only of themselves, some of our political and business leaders are unnecessarily holding us all back from more-rapid progress on the goals most meaningful to all of us, and we are unnecessarily holding ourselves back by going along with them. Our nation today has no priorities concerning our well-being. (The United Nations has many meaningful goals concerning the well-being of everyone on the planet, see http://hdr.undp.org/hd.) Our political and economic leaders are not causing a new Dark Age, but they are sometimes wasting our time making much noise about little issues that will not improve the quality of our lives–for example, the debate over the wording of the National Pledge, see www.flagday.org/Pages/PledgeHistory.html. (We can rate the importance of an issue by the number of persons whose lives are improved by it.) By the way, only one other nation–the Philippines–requires its children to recite such a daily pledge. Some meaningful and easily handled goals for our mutual efforts include our basic needs of food, shelter, clean water, toilets, health care, and education. These things go a long way in making happy and healthy children and communities.

    Our social scientists have developed hundreds of measurable indicators that portray the well-being of all the members of our entire, interrelated civilization. The economic indicators are in the daily news but concern just one aspect of our entire civilization of many mutually interacting components. By continually measuring a full-set of indicators, we can determine if our governmental policies and actions are or are not making life better for all of us. This is the only reason why we are building our mutual civilization. The science of government made possible by measuring the success of our attempts to govern ourselves will help us build a just civilization that frees our minds, spirits, and lives from the simple animal existence of collecting daily food and water so that each of us can fully pursue the limits of our human capabilities and contribute the most to our civilization.

    Physics and engineering have been fields where a young mind could hope to produce great changes in the lives of many persons. The results of biological studies are having a great and immediate impact on our lives today by maintaining our health and providing "magical" solutions to many problems. These experimental sciences have also allowed us to understand something of our own nature. Our social scientists help us direct the actions of our civilization toward the best life for all of us. If you are a young person just now beginning high school and are trying to choose a field of study, you might like to choose a field of science to attempt to find and understand a new aspect of nature or to attempt to better-understand our own nature. (For information about careers in science, visit www.careercornerstone.org.) You might choose to express and communicate our nature to others through art, see www.nea.gov and http://k-12.ccad.edu/careers.htm. If you want to help find the most-just arrangement for the interacting elements of our civilization then you might choose to become a social scientist or a political scientist. These are important sciences today because they help us obtain a more just character for our civilization.

    Science, government, and religion each express our innate requirement of a mutually beneficial society. Our religions have been telling us all along about and the need for moral behavior a just society. In fact, a couple thousand years ago, it is likely that the founding of each of today's major religions was in response to the emerging injustice of our emerging big-cities, kingdoms, and warring empires (unfortunately, at some times our religious leaders have promoted war). For example, Buddhism teaches that it is society that is important, not the individual. To discuss the similarities between the ideals of religion, government, and human nature, consider again (see Chapter 13) the following religious descriptions of society and the purpose of government.

    Islam stresses that the State guarantees the right of protection of your person, property, honor, business, travel, and education. The lot of a beggar is improved by paying him or her to accomplish a task. Justice must be impartial and blind to race, religion, wealth, social status, and governmental position. The leader has no special privileges and is accountable to God. Since the leader is not in office for his own interests but to serve the people, he must consult the people. Every group of us humans share the same concerns for life and liberty. It has been said that wherever a citizen of the U.S. would say "That behavior violates my rights" those of us who are Muslim say "That behavior is un-Islamic."

    In the fullest realization of Confucianism no laws or government would be necessary because everyone would be living in moral harmony. If you threaten people with laws and punishment then they will stay out of jail but they will have no sense of honor, only shame. If you govern people by virtue and propriety then they will have honor and respect. Propriety, respect for elders and for authority, love for other humans, and a daily practice of simple good manners will result in social and political order. Still today, this philosophy of essential human relationships is the foundation of the Chinese ethos.

    Confucius believed that the authorities should govern by example and that moral people make moral government. Since emperors are human, anyone can be an emperor. The emperor must rule by virtue not by force. The authorities must be kind and gentle, possess moral principles, love learning, be calm and at ease, have contempt for material luxuries, and be careful of their own conduct because they know that they provide an example to others. He thought that the sovereign should be a cultivated gentle person–like Plato's philosopher-king. The power of moral example is illustrated by giving money to thieves so they don't have to steal it. If the authorities choose what is good for humans then there will be general confidence and peace. Choosing what is bad for a human results in a struggle for profit, robbery, and murder. The character of the ruler determines the fate of the nation. Poverty and suffering should be avoided.

    The Hindu scholar Radhakrishnan explained that the political ideal of the world is not one empire with a homogeneous society and a single communal will; it is a fellowship of free nations that differ profoundly in life and mind. The just organization of the world's societies will be based on political equality, economic fraternity, and spiritual liberty. There is no hope for our world unless there is a fellowship of our religions. As in Hinduism, the religions of the world should seek unity in moral conduct rather than unity in sect. The world would be much poorer if one sect absorbed the rest. God wants diverse harmony not colorless uniformity. All religions curb excess and promote ethics. He is confident that Hinduism's tolerance of others is the answer to the conflict of religions. Radhakrishnan says that government was made to protect us from the overly-greedy business person but today's money making obsession has erupted into an uncontrolled greed that has never before been seen. The love of wealth is disrupting social life and suppressing the spiritual. Greed is the cause of much of the world's meanness and cruelty. (Luckily, very few of us are so greedy, but those who are, cause unnecessary hardship for the rest of us. That is, capitalism works great for the 1% of us who are greedy enough to be capitalists. We know that greed is not a common trait of humans because if it were, our societies would have dissolved a few million years ago.) Working people deserve more comfort for their role in providing both the labor and the market for the industrialists. He says that workers should receive the highest wages because their work is their only reward. Thinkers and advisors should be paid the least because these actions are reward enough.

    Radhakrishnan also warns nations not to view others as inferior. Julius Caesar had such insults for the uncivilized, animal-skin-dressed savages of Europe and then four hundred years later they sacked his capital. The political and military leadership of a region is always temporary. All peoples contribute to our thought, moral advancement, and spiritual growth. All peoples will develop to their full potential in due course. All peoples show considerable ingenuity when pressed by external forces. Today's less industrialized nations will choose to create capitalistic industries and economies whenever they have a need to do so. These things do not make people any happier, but some in the industrialized nations can't see how others can be different from the industrialists. Even in the last two hundred years, those nations claiming to be superior have performed a long list of atrocities in Asia, Africa, and America. Civilization is not the suppression of less industrialized peoples. God does not give any group the right to destroy or to enslave others. Our highest ideals require that we give every group its own future. The greatest Hindu heroes are those who tried to bring together the different peoples of India into a more just society. It is much more difficult to fight injustice than it is to fight soldiers. This is also the reason that Martin Luther King is such a hero in the United States.

    Our children should be taught about the fascinating differences in the details of the daily way of life of each group of us humans. This will increase our respect for the culture of other peoples, for our own culture, and for the differences between cultures. Our children will then know that others are not "toy people" (neither were our ancestors living at any time in the previous 200,000 years) but are other humans with the same emotions and feelings and similar desires and goals. We would see how each of us, anywhere on the planet and at anytime in the past, are the same in that we live for our children and care for our spouse, extended family, friends, and society. We simply want to laugh and joke with our spouse, family, and friends and to raise children and pursue the limits of our interests and talents. Our children would then emerge from school with a deeper understanding of our own lifeways and an increased respect for other humans. We can begin in our schools today to build this respect. It took about a generation to build an increased respect for the natural environment; there is nothing to lose in building an increased respect for humans.

    As it has been said, the best hope for humanity is a belief in humanity along with trust, mutual respect, a concern for one another’s well-being, and a belief in the fundamental good of each person. The belief in humanity is also a spiritual thing that comforts our mind and heart, gives us a sense of purpose, and inspires us to greater accomplishments. (Spirituality is that warm feeling we get in many circumstances.) Respect for our fellow humans will reduce the desire for war. The next step in the social system of us humans is going to be the development of a global view of humanity.

    We have seen that about one hundred persons form a clan, one hundred clans form a city, one hundred cities form a nation, and that one hundred nations form a world. But as each larger social unit is formed, the previous unit is mostly forgotten–after a few generations have passed. A few thousand years ago, it was a new thing on the planet to consider oneself to be a member of a city-state that included many clans. After some centuries, city-states merged into kingdoms. Just as the members of the world’s thousands of kingdoms a few centuries ago could not imagine themselves to be nationals, some of us today have trouble imagining ourselves to be global citizens and fellow humans, but it is going to happen. Just as we have trouble today imagining how we were not nationals a few centuries ago, our ancestors will soon have trouble looking back at the year 2000 and imagining how we were not global citizens. Nations and nationalism are temporary things lasting only a few centuries. (While we are on that topic, when nations have merged together in a century or so, we will still have a need for armies?) We are all in this together and are responsible for our own results. For the last 10,000 years, we have been building the civilization of our own choosing.

    The most important moments in our civilization's past occurred at the times of the development of farming, the city, government, the scientific method, the factory, and the institutionalization of our ideas of individual liberty and justice. Our civilization began–and its development became a certainty–at the time of the first farmers and food surpluses that began to develop around 10,000 years ago. Farming changed life and religion and it also changed technology from stones for survival to tools for living. As we outgrew our innate band of a few extended families, we had to invent new ways to organize increasing numbers of us: we began to form tribes and chiefdoms, often as we first built villages and cities.

    Our civilization took on new forms at the time of the first cities and city-states. The development of cities and city-states (we saw that in the case of Mesopotamia, this occurred during the years 3,500 to 2,000 bc) is synonymous with the beginnings of our political systems that would develop into nations, of business, technology, and economic matters, and of the emergence of today's moral religions. Political and economic power expanded with our invention of the city-state. Our invention of the empire was followed by a period of growing empires sloshing back and forth across the regions of the world, but once you've seen one pattern of sloshing empires, you've seen them all. Throughout this time, the main concerns of our leaders were most often the expansion their own power and territory. These concerns do not match those most important to humans. Too often our leaders have curtailed progress for all of us as they pursued an agenda benefitting only themselves. Progress is also curtailed whenever society reveres their current and “ancient” ways so much that change is nearly forbidden. Luckily, while some local societies on the planet at various times were restraining themselves into a Dark Age, there has usually been other places where progress was occurring. Each group of us humans has had Dark Age and Renaissance periods.

    The governmental form of (Western) civilization changed during the Renaissance and Enlightenment of 1400 to 1800 ad. In reaction to certain injustices, we created laws and contracts between rulers and ruled that institutionalized our ideas of justice and liberty. We won freedom from political and religious intolerance, and we won liberty of home, self, and mind. Others have described our freedom of self and mind to mean that the only thing each of us really owns is ourselves. We might have to pay taxes and get bossed around at work but nobody can dictate how we think or choose our preferences for us. Nobody can decide for someone else what will be his or her political party, religious belief, or sexual preference and such. We each get to decide who we are for ourselves. This is Liberty. It is the absence of oppression.

    During the last 5,000 years, sometimes our government performed so poorly "we had to walk miles for daily food and water." Some of our governments took too much from the people and didn't let them freely pursue life. These governments were eventually changed. Recently, much of the world has been adopting democratic governments. We have seen that democracy in Ancient Athens meant that every detail of the city's operation was chosen by a show of hands. (The ancient Athenians were also the first of us to try to explain phenomenon in terms of natural processes rather than deities and the "power in the bush.") We have also seen that democracy is more than just voting and personal liberty. It is the blending of the views, priorities, and goals of all of us, and it is a balanced sharing of power among many persons. We learned the hard way that this blending of views and spreading of power was needed to avoid having a single person dictate policy and actions for his or her own benefit. Power within the federal government of the U.S. is spread among about five hundred legislators and judges along with the president, who has the greatest opportunity to choose the agenda for the nation–except that we have an unchecked balance of power demonstrated by fifty years of presidential wars. The blending of views occurs only through a compromise that partially satisfies everyone, but many of our politicians are taking appearance advice from political marketers who tell them to be committed and uncompromising. This is actually undemocratic behavior. It is also undemocratic behavior for one group to imagine that their view should be imposed on everyone else. Democracy is a firm belief in the toleration of different views and in the right of dissent of others who offer opposing views and priorities. Democracy requires consensus building. It is undemocratic behavior to suggest that those having an opposing view are unpatriotic. Democracy ends when too many hold the view that "only my way is right and I won't compromise." When no compromised blending can be constructed then a civil war might instead occur. We have also seen that civil war ends when everyone has become so tired of daily death and suffering that compromise is seen to be not so bad after all. Democracy limits not only the pace of change but its magnitude, too.

    Since no governmental action can occur in a democracy without first having the agreement of enough persons, much of daily politicking, including daily news conferences and the issue adds we see on the television, occurs as individuals and groups of individuals try to get their way by convincing others to agree to their views. This is often done by spreading a certain perception. It is said that in politics, perception is an important and powerful reality. We have seen that the political process in the U.S. has become a science of getting one’s way.

    Lately, the attempt to get one's political way has led to the use of "emotional buttons" in which a television ad presents an emotional appeal while smoothing music is played, urging us to "tell our representatives." The emotional button is found by trying out many possible buttons on a room full of test persons. This is the same technique used to market oatmeal and such. The most rousing sentences within the speech of a politician and the daily topics of your favorite political commentator may have been selected this way. For example, a “news” show might discuss drug-addicted welfare recipients because this topic was found to enrage some consumers within a test-group. This sells a lot of oatmeal and such but is of no use in discussing social problems and in formulating solutions. The use of such "oatmeal marketing tactics" by our politicians, commentators, and special interest groups are not generally discussed publicly.

    The strengths and weaknesses of our society are not being publicly discussed. The daily news in the U.S. says nothing about a 20% drop in our income but goes into massive debates over a threatened 0.25% change in the interest rate or a 0.2% change in the Gross Domestic Product. The news discusses dozens of economic indicators as if they are unconnected to any other aspect of our entire civilization. For example, the growth in our population is also a growth in our economy, but the two are rarely considered to be related. But drops in unemployment rates and average hourly wages are truly related to divorce rates, teenage suicide rates, and to many other aspects of our society. What are the effects on our children, and on our society in turn, when both parents work forty-five hours per week? What are the effects on our children and on our society whenever half the men of a neighborhood are either killed or jailed by the age of thirty? (We saw a description of the daily life of two of our children, Lafeyette and Pharoah, who live in such a neighborhood.)

    It is guaranteed that we will not stop changing the form of our government until it allows us to simply laugh and joke with our family, friends and neighbors, to pursue life and the limits of our talents, and to raise our children. In recent centuries, the concerns of our government have been slowly changing from an expansion of power to the quality of life of citizens. We can safely predict that the characteristic of the last version of our government will be that its concerns fully match the concerns-of-life of individual humans–not wealth or power.

    For a few thousand years, we sat in our "arm chairs" trying logically to deduce how nature works. During the Renaissance and Enlightenment we matured the scientific method of gaining knowledge by making repeatable measurements and by continually refining those measurements. We were often surprised when measurements showed that nature works differently than we had imagined before making those measurements. The scientific method has allowed us to come to understand many of the details of nature and to see how the main principles of nature produce an endless variety of phenomena, and it has also enabled us to better understand our own story. We will continue to see changes that are a result of the scientific method for many centuries to come.

    We will be similarly surprised when we begin to use the existing indicators to measure the success of our attempts to govern ourselves in such a way that we all share equally in the benefits of our civilization. Until then we will only be stumbling around in the dark. Without measurements we can only imagine which actions might be beneficial or harmful to the overall quality of our lives. Once these measurements are being fully used, each successive generation will move closer to the most-just form for our civilization.

    Our first use of a manufacturing factory, around the year 1760 ad, began the Industrial Revolution that is still growing and spreading around the planet today. (The Industrial Revolution also financed an expansion of unjust, imperialistic empires that lasted until World War II.) The Industrial Revolution has been changing us from self-sufficient farmers into wage-earners who both manufacture and purchase the products of our factories. We saw that the largest effects of our Industrial Revolution have been that the number of utensils and decorations in our homes grew from twenty to two thousand and that we changed from having direct control over the continued quality of our own life to wage-dependent work which can suddenly end and cause a decrease in the quality of our lives. We went from the barter of a few home extras to the cash buying and selling of everything. Our job changed from doing work as a live-in apprentice who was fed and clothed and treated as part of the family to being live-away help who is paid in cash and pays cash rent elsewhere. Our utensils and decorations went from unique, high-cost, handcrafted items to more-plain, mass-produced and less-costly items. There was a decrease in community ties as we went from communities of farmers who exchanged food harvesting and processing help to more-independent wage-earners who have fewer reasons to exchange help because fewer tasks are larger than one person alone can handle. In the big city today, moving-day might evoke an exchange of assistance. Whenever natural disasters occur, we see public expressions of our innate predisposition to exchange assistance.

    As industrialization developed, society in the U.S. went from much-alike farming families to a more pronounced inequality of wealth. Our economic differences grew from an unequal count of things like candles and chamber pots to a pronounced inequality of wealth and income. We saw that in the year 1800, the northeastern U.S. contained much-alike farmers because the middle 2% of Europeans had migrated from their home continent. (Throughout the world today, seventy-five million people, which is about 1% of the world's population, are similarly migrating in search of a better life–and of these, only a few million are heading for the U.S.) We have also seen that much of the growth of Big Government has been a reluctant and late in coming reaction to the social consequences of our shift from living in farming communities to being factory workers. We saw that our businesses grew from neighborhood shops, which serviced the people living within ten miles (16 km) or so in the year 1800 to state-sized companies servicing a 100-mile (160 km) radius by the year 1850. By 1900, nation-sized corporations covered a 1,000 mile (1,600 km) radius, and by the year 2000 some of our businesses have become global in extant with a 10,000 mile (16,000 km) radius. Where do our businesses go next?

    We have seen that "global business" simply means that the largest European, Japanese, and U.S. corporations obtain raw materials and labor from those nations having the lowest cost and then sell the resulting products for as high a price as possible within the U.S., Japan, and Europe; the products are not sold in the nations in which they are made. This results in the lowest cost, highest price, and highest profit, which is the income for the owners and operators of the corporations–mostly those of us in the upper 1% income bracket.

    About two-thirds of the world's population cannot afford to buy the products of our global corporations because they cost as much as one year's spare money. The product makers can not afford to buy the products they are making. Airplanes are about the only thing made in the U.S. that cost more than the workers can afford. It is also occurring that about one-third of world's population receives too little income to buy enough food everyday and so are going hungry, and about one-fourth of us do not have daily access to clean water. These are easy problems for us to eliminate. It would be shameful if our priorities were instead to expand the wealth of only the wealthiest of us before they died.

    If you ask every person on the planet, all six billion of us, what our first priorities should be, most will tell you water, food, toilets, and shelter. These things keep us alive. Such basic necessities of life are missing for way too many of us. Too often, these things are missing within a nation simply because its leaders and people are instead conducting civil war. We most-easily correct these problems with the local efforts of each group of people being directed by their national governments. Which national leader will be the first to complete this small task? After those temporary problems are corrected, our permanent, global priorities will then be our children, family, communities, and global society. Education and health care are meaningful priorities.

    We humans have solved every problem that has come our way; typically, solutions are found after some fumbling in the dark. We sometimes have trouble understanding that a group of people will not solve a problem before it has come their way. For example, the Kalapalo are gatherer-hunters today because they have never had a reason to change. We have seen that we humans do not change our way of life until forced to do so in reaction to some development. Each group of humans wants to continue following the “ancient” ways of their culture until a pressure develops to require that a change be made.

    In the last few million years, our overall way of life has changed but twice: first, as we switched from gathering to farming and again as we later changed from farming to factory work. The next such complete change will occur as we become able to harness fusion energy. The huge power that will then be available will certainly change our civilization. We saw that the sun gets its energy from the fusion of atoms and that the energy released from this process is humongous. In fact, we could power our current civilization for trillions of years by fusing the deuterium found in water. For the last fifty years, scientists and engineers have been trying to build a fusion machine; the difficulty has been that the machine needs to develop the temperatures and pressures found within the centers of stars. Within a decade or ten, we will succeed in developing this fusion machine, and it will be an important moment in our history when we do.

    It is hard to imagine the changes in our way of life that will occur but this energy source will greatly improve the quality of life of all of us humans. (Until this century, a cooking fire supplied the only energy that each of us used in our home; our homes today use as much energy as was used by thousands of homes a few centuries ago.) The amount of power available within each home will then grow from kilowatts to megawatts, and it may soon occur that each of us has as much energy available to use as is currently used by thousands of people. How will our daily life change? Will any of us work in a factory? How will our outlook on material possessions change when each of us has a kitchen appliance that changes lead into gold or produces any machine for which we have a need. I'm pretty sure that if you place a little carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and a few other chemicals into a container and then apply a few megawatts for a moment, you can make a tomato or other sorts of edible, organic chemicals. Some decades after harnessing fusion power, we will next harness the energy of elementary particles. This “quark energy” can be one million times greater than that harnessed from fusion.

    Another important future change will be our certain colonization of other planets. When and why will we move out onto other planets? Either we control our population and maintain our natural resources or one of two things will next happen: either our quality of life will decrease or we will expand onto other planets to obtain the raw materials and space needed by our population.

    Within the coming decades, our civilization will take an important step as we become able to cooperate on common goals as a single, global group of humans. This changing outlook will be complete within the next century or so because the globalization of relations will be complete by then. For some thoughts about our future, visit http://humanknowledge.net/SocialScience/Futurology/Timeline.html. A 1974 lecture by Isaac Asimov can be found at www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/future_of_humanity.html.

    We have seen that many of today's global issues cannot be addressed by the independent actions of single nations. This means that we can expect to see an increased democratic cooperation between the sovereign, democratic nations of the world in solving the health, well-being, food supply, social, economic, political, and environmental problems that involve all of us. A democracy of democratic nations will be better able to approach today's global issues and problems. (This will certainly coincide with an increased single-world view of humanity.) For example, we have seen that our businesses have always been ahead of our attempts to govern them and that today our business is global while our government is not at all. Our global businesses are rapidly merging into a single organization but the efforts of our governments are rarely coordinated. When will our global businesses be governed? This will happen when we have a global democratic assembly of individually democratic nations that also measures the well-being of all of us so that we are each equally important in the actions and goals of our government. Coordinated government among nations will require several more decades to develop; by then, our global businesses may have merged into a single corporation.

    What are the elements of life that should not be denied to any person? Isn't the purpose of our civilization to improve our mutual well-being and to allow us to pursue life? Isn’t that what we were doing when we first became farmers some 10,000 years ago? Are we all equal or do some of us deserve a fuller life and more opportunity than others by imposing disproportionate hardship on everyone else. Remember that one in ten of us poor persons has medical, engineering, and artistic talents that are among the upper 10% of us. We restrain our whole when we restrain some of us from contributing all they can. Remember also that each of us contributes our live's work to the daily operation of our civilization. Our civilization does not function without each and every one of us. If we were to remove any single occupation–for example, that receiving the lowest pay–our entire civilization would crumble.

    Recent decades have seen a worldwide resurgence in the diseases of the poor, such as diarrhea and cholera, see www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/diseases/cholera/en/, which are caused by the simple lack of clean water. The World Health Organization reports that the deaths of young people are mostly due to pneumonia, tuberculosis, diarrhoeal diseases, malaria, measles, and HIV/AIDS. Too many persons are dying each year of such easily avoided illnesses. A meaningful goal for our civilization is to ensure that we all have access to clean water and that as few of us as possible have our life unnecessarily shortened during infancy or by a simple illness or accident–as had commonly occurred until recent decades. We all agree that the fortune of life is meant for each of us. Equally. We would be missing the point of life if we were to deny this benefit from any of us for purely monetary reasons. Are we spending our efforts on something more important than life?

    You might like to list the things in life that should not be denied from any of us, in any nation, and assign priorities to each of these things. You might also like to list several ways in which we can work toward accomplishing these goals for our civilization and then discuss your list with other persons to build consensus and form priorities for our cities, governments, and civilization. Democracy works best with such public debate. Such a debate would help us to prioritize our local, national, and global projects. Our civilization will be whatever we choose to make of it. We choose goals by holding discussions among all of us and by forming a consensus. Our civilization is the sum of the concerns, views, and visions of each of us.

    Most of us feel that success in life is measured in terms of happy and healthy children and communities, but a few of us feel that success in life is obtained by the acquisition of assets equal to that of millions of other persons. Some of us who are billionaires want to arrange our civilization such that we can become trillionaires before we die by overcharging a billion people for our successfully monopolized products. These few persons try hard to arrange rules enabling the further expansion of their own wealth and create an economic dictatorship. Throughout my entire life, I have felt cheated every time the employee of a large corporation has told me “that’s the way it is.” They do business that way simply because they believe they can set the rules in their favor because they have arranged that we have no other choice. If these few persons are allowed to make the rules for all of us then the resulting rules will mostly benefit those few rule-makers–at the price of unnecessarily increased hardship for the rest of us. Either we all participate in choosing goals, priorities, and rules together or we sit back and endure the rules made by a few of us for their own benefit. The temporary, runaway train of control by the owners and operators of the mega-corporation will be brought under full control by measuring our attempts to govern ourselves for the benefit of each and every one of us.

    In the case of California’s recent electrical power fiasco, the most greedy of us have demonstrated that we'll pursue our greed even if it means the collapse of the society from which the wealth is being obtained and that we are happy to engage in a race between our gathering of money and the resulting doom. Maybe after unregulated greed unravels society we'll get around to passing some legislation to govern it. The last few decades have seen much deregulation of business. I am almost ready to remove the remaining laws constraining corporate actions so that the worst of our corporate leaders will quickly unravel the world’s economic system as they obtain all they can beforehand. In response, from the debris we would surely then put some meaningful constraints on our corporations. For example, citizens might never again grant a business license to an entity whose sole concern was its own profits, which we have seen is the income of but a few persons. Instead, we might demand that the success of every entity in our interconnected civilization, corporation owners included, be measured in terms of the quality of life of all of us.

    For the last 4,000 years, the main concerns of the leaders of many of our governments have been the long-lived concerns of those who believe that success in life means money and power. Since our leaders were most often those persons who were in control of the money and power, the main concerns of these leaders were to retain and expand their money and power. From the lives lost in our efforts to obtain freedom from injustice during the last five hundred years, we have been redirecting the main concerns of the leaders of our governments toward the concerns-of-life of individuals. For example, our governments today more often talk about health-care instead of expanding colonies. It is a safe bet that we will not stop changing the form of our government and civilization until their concerns match the concerns of us individuals. The time of selfish leaders seeking temporary and purely personal benefit–for example, by getting their citizens to attack and kill other groups of people–will end when we no longer go along with them. How many decades will it take? What good does it do any of us to make war on ourselves? Do we want armies or schools and hospitals? Who gets to choose? Which nations are leading the world in making the health and happiness of children and communities their priority? Which national governments have a War Department and which have a Children's Department?

    During each additional generation we accumulate more ideas of society, industry, government, individual liberty and justice and we continue to develop our idea of the proper and just civilization. Today we view the just society to be that which recognizes the worth and dignity of the individual and holds that each one of us is important and equally deserving of a full life. We see that civilization is built by all of us for our common benefit and that it is a tool to make life better for each of us. Equally.

    The founding documents of many of our nation's governments state that the purpose of government is to "promote the general welfare and the pursuit of happiness." We can now further define and measure these things by stating that the purpose of our government is "to promote the general welfare and the pursuit of happiness as measured in terms of numerous citizen-selected aspects of life." (The measurements are already being made but they are not being widely used by our political leaders to gauge the success of our attempts to improve our mutual lives.) Our well-being is simply a measure of our animal needs for food, health, shelter, and a long life free from harm. But these things only keep us alive: we live for our children. Everyone agrees that the needs and happiness of our children come first. We strive to provide a certain quality for our own life–and especially for our children and family–that is above mere animal subsistence so we can then pursue the limits of our human talents. We next care for our spouse and extended family. The Miringoff's explain that we also strive to maintain the quality of our community, its cooperative spirit of give-and-take, and the satisfaction we gain from being a member. As a parenting and social species, these things form the core nature of a human.

    By combining hundreds of well-being and quality of our life indicators, we begin to measure "the general welfare and the pursuit of happiness." All of us can be involved in choosing and altering the set of indicators that are to be used. The definition of well-being and happiness comes from asking each of us the following questions. How do you rate the quality of your life? What are the most important things in your life? What do you want out of life for yourself and for your children, spouse, family, and community? What should be the priorities and goals of our community, nation, and civilization? What should we measure to gauge the success of our combined efforts to reach these goals? In striving to improve our lives and our society, business, government, and civilization, each citizen must carefully decide and discuss what should be our priorities and goals. Our answers will show a wide range of priorities but it's a safe bet that the most common goals will involve our children and community and their well-being. Our combined responses can then be publicly discussed. You might like to write down your answers to these questions and then discuss them with your family and friends. We should constantly ask our children to think carefully about what they want out of life and what they feel should be the goals of our communities and civilization. Each of us will feel we are a valued and contributing member of our community from the efforts we put into this process. Grade school provides a good place for us to learn about our role in choosing and shaping the mutual efforts of our own community and of our own local, national, and international governments. Otherwise, we might believe that we can not influence our public priorities and actions because “they” set these things without any input from us. People are naturally unhappy with such a situation.

    The general population is becoming more able to choose the goals of civilization as a whole due to the increased control over its operation acquired during the last few centuries. Today it is easy to ask each person to propose and to choose goals–and allow daily changes in each person’s input. It’s a safe bet that within a few years we will use the internet to vote “by a show of hands" for priorities for our government, to direct the daily operation of our cities and states, to choose budget sources and expenditures, and to choose which quality-of-life indicators will be used in measuring our progress toward our goals for our well-being, the quality of our lives and our unrestrained opportunity to pursue life in a just society. With each successive generation there will be a continued shift in the concerns of government and civilization toward the concerns of a human.

    Measurement of hundreds of aspects of the well-being and the quality of all of our lives will enable us to gauge the success of our attempts to govern ourselves and to build a just society. This will mean that each of us counts equally in the efforts of those of us who operate our governments–who will then be fully employed in the concerns of all of us rather than just some of us. Our policies and actions will then balance all aspects of our whole civilization of many interacting and mutually dependent parts. When we begin to measure the success of our attempts to govern ourselves, we will begin to find the arrangement that minimizes injustice by continually increasing the well-being and the quality of life for the largest possible portion of us. This science of government will help us build a just civilization that frees our lives from the simple animal existence of collecting daily food and water so that we free our minds and spirits. Each of us can then fully pursue the limits of our human capabilities.

    The fully just civilization allows all humans the unrestricted pursuit of happiness and allows each of us to be able to experience the quality of life of our own choosing. We all agree that each newborn child is equally important and deserving of a happy and healthy life. The just civilization also allows each of us the full and unconstrained opportunity to pursue the limits of our individual and combined artistic, technological, scientific, and other intellectual talents, passions, and goals so that we can spend our lifetimes improving ourselves and our civilization. Our civilization is a tool better enabling us to pursue these things. As we strive to achieve the fully just society, we are also reducing the reasons for hopelessness, crime, poverty, and escape through drug usage and are allowing people to simply laugh and joke with their family, spouse, friends, and neighbors and to pursue life and raise children. Achieving the fully just civilization is a meaningful goal for our mutual efforts. We are not there yet but we humans will not stop until this is the character of our civilization. We can safely predict that the characteristic of the last version of our government of people will be that its concerns fully match the concerns-of-life of individual persons, which are our children, spouse, family, friends, and community not wealth, money, power, or war. We will then have built the core of our civilization and be able to put our mutual efforts to full use on anything we can imagine.

    Nature made us human, and from this beginning we continue to form the culture and build the civilization of our own choosing. Our civilization is made by us humans, for us humans, and it represents us humans. Our civilization will be whatever we choose to make of it. To choose goals for our civilization that match the nature of a human, we look closely at ourselves and decide what is a human, what is important to a human, what are our own goals in life, and what life is all about.

    Through the last few centuries of scientific efforts, we have been forming an increasingly accurate notion of what is a human. In the previous chapters we saw that some of the most important elements of what a human is include the following. A human is an animal, a parenting mammal with a monogamous strategy, and a social primate who recognizes family, friends, neighbors, and strangers. A human is a member of a culture, an individual of unique talents and tastes, and an individual that contributes to our civilization's operation, achievements, and goals. A human also enjoys creative artistic, scientific, technological and other intellectual pursuits determined by the interests of each individual. In fact, we celebrate life by making and enjoying art, by doing science, by building things, and by directly experiencing all human senses and emotions. Our set of behaviors, feelings, emotions, and morals are naturally matched to our animal, parenting, and social lives. Being human means sharing mutual commitments with your spouse, children, extended family, friends, and community. It also means that one is caring, nurturing, and loving towards others–or our species would not still be here. Being human also means intellectualizing and combining efforts and is more than simply staying alive by collecting daily survival food through gathering, farming, or wage-earning. We become a fuller human with each new thing we learn or accomplish. The largest concerns of parenting and social humans, who recognize their extended family and social group, are love and children, family and friends, community and justice. These things form the motivation behind most every thought or action of every human. The nature of a human and the necessarily matched goals of human civilization are summed up as our concern for our children, families, friends, and society.

    We humans have spent the last five hundred years, which is only twenty-five generations, scientifically measuring billions of facts about nature. (We found in Chapter 1 that science is a procedure for building knowledge and understanding through repeatable measurements.) We find that nature is filled with incredible phenomena, each of which involves a curious mixture of components. For example, the colors of a rainbow occur as sunlight interacts with water drops, but the colors of a hot spring occur as water, bacteria, and heat from underground magma combine in one place, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prismatic_Spring. We humans share a beautiful planet (www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/ap11ann/kippsphotos/6550.jpg) with plants and animals in an interconnected web, see www.sanparks.org/gallery/albums.php and www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/movie/DC-8/640x/EM-0006-12.mov. We find that each species has incredible features and behaviors. We humans consist of 10,000 cultures, each an expression of our nature. The Balinesian Kecak dance, see www.birdproductions.com/quicktime/bali_small/03bali_kecak.mov, is an example of us humans moving as one (see also www.spiritofbaraka.com). We see how each field of scientific study also involves the study of ourselves. We now see that all of nature–humans included–is understandable in terms of a few fundamental rules. We also see that we humans are making our own civilization.

    We humans have shown our capabilities by making rapid progress both in our understanding of nature and in building our civilization of arts, government, business, science, and technology. Our technology is the sum of the processes that all of the peoples of the world have invented. We humans laugh and cry and are happy and sad. We create wonderful music, art, theater, literature, and monuments. We humans have earned our own respect. Our civilization has been the result of our own conscious decisions. Together, we humans build our own civilization.

    This is where we are at this moment. It is mind boggling to me that our understanding of the world has grown so rapidly. Since about half my life has occurred, I now see that I will make a very tiny contribution toward the progress of humanity. Even if I had one hundred lifetimes, my contribution would still be immeasurably tiny. But you can easily get one hundred persons into a small room that is ten feet (three meters) square. You might like to stop and picture this group of one hundred persons. If you list the sequence of your one hundred most-recent grandmothers you reach back about 2,000 years ago–back to ancient Rome and Greece and to the times of Buddha, Christ, and Muhammad. In only one hundred generations we have progressed from that time to today. In fact, we switched from being gatherer-hunters to full-time farmers just five hundred generations ago. Our scientific progress and the evolution of our arts and knowledge can be represented by a series of portraits of individuals relaying techniques through those generations. Development occurs as insight and knowledge bounces from one individual to another, with each person adding a little before passing it on. This means that we humans are progressing just fine and have demonstrated tremendous capability. Notice also that we have built human civilization in the last 10,000 years using nothing but our gatherer-hunter mind, which we see is not all that different from the minds of other mammals since the genetic makeup of a mouse differs from that of a human by only 15%. Human capability is demonstrated by the rapid progress in developing our civilization, by the buildings and institutions we construct, by the quality of daily work done by each of us, and by the incredible talents of our artists. Talent inspires us. If it were up to me, I’d fill our parks and public spaces with artists and art and fill the daily news with examples of talent.

    We have seen that culture changes with each successive generation. This means that in the last 2,000 years, we have made about one hundred such shifts. The people of each generation live in the culture of their time and place. The ways of their own childhood are th