Robert Dalling
Tour of human nature, the social history of human beings, and the flow of civilization.
Human nature,
the social history of human beings,
and the flow of civilization
Most every thought or action of a human being involves love and family, or community and justice. That’s about all there is to a human being.
The universe is some 13 billion years old.
Galaxy http://iaaa.org/pulsar/pictures/mayjun02/ring-galaxy-j-tuccr.jpg
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old.
earth http://rst.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sect16/full-20earth2.jpg
The electrical force binds atoms and molecules, including the molecules of life.
carbon http://serc.carleton.edu/images/usingdata/nasaimages/carbon_atom.gif
There are about one hundred types of atoms in nature. Nearly all of the these form cubic structures when numerous atoms are combined. Carbon is an exception in that it forms into convoluted rings of rings that are biological structures. Non-living matter mostly has simple, cubical grid-like structure while living matter has convoluted structure. The size and shape of each type of molecule is electrically set because like charges repel and unlike charges attract. If ten atoms are added each year to an initial carbon ring, then in 100 million years the resulting molecule will have one billion atoms, as does the self-replicating and self-directing DNA molecule. DNA molecules electrically direct the formation of amino acids into linear proteins that are wound back and forth and then folded into 3D shapes, as shown in the inset. Proteins form cells, tissues, organs, brains, bones, and behaviors. For example, Oxytocin is a molecule that floods our brains when we are falling in love or during the moments after childbirth, cementing a life-long bond of love between parent and offspring.
http://static.newworldencyclopedia.org/thumb/0/0f/Oxytocin.jpg/250px-Oxytocin.jpg
A fern is an ancient type of plant. http://www.naturespressed.com/assets/images/products/large/leather_leaf_fern_c_2015.gif
Single celled life first occurred on the Earth around two billion years ago. A paramecium is an ancient, single-celled life form. http://www.biology-resources.com/images/paramecium-big.jpg
Flowers are a modified leaf that developed some 50 million years ago. There were no flowers when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It is human nature to marvel at the beauty of flowers and to wonder what is it that enables a flower or bush to just grow out of the ground where before there was only dirt. Here is one of Steven Pinker’s orchid photographs. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/photos/santa_barbara_california/images/yellow%20orchids.jpg
Flatworms are more ancient than are fish. A few genetic changes rolls the body of a flatworm into a round worm, a filter feeding fish-like worm, a multi-legged insect, or a winged insect.
http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/700s/reef0198.jpg
Fish occur soon after the development of multicellular life forms some 750 million years ago.
http://www.wallpaperbase.com/wallpapers/animals/fish/fish_5.jpg
Amphibians live both on land and in the water and are the link between fish and reptiles.
http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/frog-1.jpg
Amphibians led to reptiles, which in turn, led to mammals and birds. Here are a Blue Footed Booby and a Galapagos iguana.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3308/3307514029_a26d5bd25a.jpg
Here is a collection of mammals. Mammals differ from most other animals in that they have a parenting strategy in which they feed, teach, protect, and nurture their young until they in turn are old enough to have their own offspring. We human beings are parenting mammals.
http://www.jigcardgallery.com/JigCard/icaPuzStore/Mammals2Part1.jpg
In fact, we live for our children.
Iraqi mom http://www.peterlanger.com/People/Iraqis/images/IQNIHTV00021.jpg
and dad http://www.peterlanger.com/People/Iraqis/pages/IQNIHTV00047.htm
This deer is a parenting mammal.
http://k53.pbase.com/o4/59/628959/1/62580400.SZ6RpppO.MuleDeerdoeandfawn1.jpg
or
http://www.windstar.org/eMagazines/eMagazine137/312.jpg
or
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/87/250906678_88f80e5bf1.jpg?v=0
Here is a parenting person. Nurturing parenthood is a large part of human nature.
http://blogs.iwcc.edu/tolivealife/files/2009/01/mother-and-child-1a.jpg
Love is a large part of human nature.
http://www.wellnessbeyond.com/images/HoldingHands.jpg
A mouse lemur is a primate. Primates have fingers to better grasp and climb trees. http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Shared/StaticFiles/animals/images/primary/mouse-lemur.jpg
Primates differ from other mammals in that each extended family cooperates as a unit and that the group’s social hierarchy consists of the relations between extended families. Bonobos are social primates, as are we human beings. The extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grand parents form a large part of human nature. http://e-nimals.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/el-sexo-en-los-bonobos.jpg
Here is a neanderthal family.
http://i.livescience.com/images/071018-neanderthals-02.jpg
Here is a modern-day family. The nuclear family is a large part of human nature.
http://www.ora.ucr.edu/images/pictures/centers/FamilyStudies.jpg
Art first appears on the Earth with Homo sapiens sapiens. Here is an example of Lascaux Cave art. From then on, we have left few things, from bowls to an automobiles, undecorated. Alice Walker says that our body needs food to live but our minds and soul need beauty to survive. Artists experience and communicate our emotions and nature, and fill our lives with beauty and inspiration.
http://www.alifetimeofcolor.com/study/images/cave_painting_l.jpg
Human beings enjoy beauty, such as that of the Himalayas. http://www.yourasianvacations.com/images/himalayas.jpg
We are born, and begin life with no knowledge. We exert a few hundred hours of effort to learn large tasks such as walking, talking, throwing, catching, dancing, and reading and to do arithmetic and algebra and such. As we mentally struggle to understand a new topic, we are building neuronal connections within our brain.
newborn http://www.dsf.health.state.pa.us/health/lib/health/familyhealth/newborn1.jpg
We learn, and education changes us. With each new thing you learn or accomplish, you become a fuller person, a more-engaged citizen, and are yet more able to contribute to the progress of humankind. Education also decreases economic misery and increases opportunities and choices in life, but the economic benefit of education makes for trite bait compared with the rewards that come from knowledge and knowledgeable citizens. It is often said in Confucianism that people have a small concern for material possessions but a great concern for ideas. As we study ideas, we lose interest in material possessions. Education gives you the knowledge obtained through the experiences of billions of persons through thousands of years. Without this, you would have to invent everything for yourself within your own lifetime.
lsmsa http://www.lsmsa.edu/Images/lsmsa_c_photo.jpg
LSU http://farm1.static.flickr.com/40/92637014_12c4793bc7.jpg
photo of hugging graduates
www.historylines.net/Taiwan/Friends/Amida_Jasmine_hug.jpg
We marry,
http://www.centralpark.com/pages/activities/wedding.jpg
and we die.
The motivation behind most every thought or action of every human being involves 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. The utmost concerns of parenting and social humans, who recognize their extended family and social group, are love and children, family and friends, community and justice. We know that these concerns are common to each of us because we share a common humanness. These few things comprise human existence, explain the world of us humans and our myriad of activities, and are the priorities of our civilization. It is no accident that these are the topics of most every conversation and of most every artwork. Our arts express and communicate these cares and emotions. Our religions emphasize these most-important aspects of ourselves and society, and our governments legally define and defend them. This means that religion, government, and science all agree about the most important aspects of a human and of human society. 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. 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 and its justice.
We enjoy the colors of the setting sun.
sunset https://academics.skidmore.edu/weblogs/students/awells/sunset.jpg
Many stars die–or transform–in a supernova explosion that creates the atoms heavier than iron. Only the lightest atoms, which are hydrogen and helium, formed after the Big Bang. Steller fusion creates heavier atoms, but only up to iron. The atoms that comprise your body formed in the cooling material of the Big Bang, in stellar fusion, and in supernova explosions. You are made of the material of former stars.
M57 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/M57_The_Ring_Nebula.JPG
Debris from exploded stars coalesces due to mutual gravity and forms new stars.
www.nasa.gov/images/content/166824main_Hubble-Pillars-browse.jpg
Changes in climate and population density first forced human beings to switch to full-time farming some 10,000 years ago. Still today, wheat, maize, and rice comprise two-thirds of our food supply. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Wheatfield_in_South_Africa2.jpg
Friendship is a large part of human nature.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v195/cmccormick13/hugging_friends_4.jpg
and http://www.globalexchange.org/images/ChinaWomenHug.jpg
By chance, agriculture was the key to abundance. For 5,000 years, the populations of farming villages grew from hundreds to hundreds-of-thousands. Cahokia near modern-day Saint Louis, Illinois, had a population of 20,000 in the year 1200 bc. http://people.ucls.uchicago.edu/~pdoyle/template/cahokiapainting.jpg
Religious figures from Asmar. http://www.utexas.edu/courses/classicalarch/images1/asmarfigs.jpg
Before we invented civilization, some gatherer-hunter peoples engaged in annual raids that sometimes resulted in a handful of deaths but never dozens, hundreds, or thousands. Through the first 5,000 years of Mesopotamian civilization, farming villages grew in peace without knowing of wars of mass murder. These first wars occurred when the populations of our city-states had grown to be about 100,000 persons and began to overlap. Only after cities had grown to such population levels did we invent empires, militaries, and wars of mass murder in which our first emperor somehow convinced his people to go kill hundreds or thousands of persons in another city. Imagine what would have been your reaction to news of the first-ever massacre of so many persons. It is no coincidence that our most important spiritual leaders–including Buddha, Jesus, Confucius, and Mohammed–emerged soon after the development of empires and wars of mass murder. Through the last 5,000 years of civilization, war has always been the idea of our leaders who tell us that it will somehow be glorious for ordinary people to go kill other humans and to be killed by them. We see that we are not yet fully in control of our political leaders when they continue their 5,000 year-old habit of going to war on a whim as they hope to expand their own wealth and power. War is not glorious; it is being killed and killing by tearing away arms, legs, and heads, often from family members who are sitting at the dinner table. War causes terrible deaths. The next time your leader suggests going to war, simply tell him “no” because it will not benefit anyone, not even him. Notice that war is always the idea of our leaders and that it benefits nobody. When your leaders talk of war, just tell them no. War of mass murder is not inherent to our species and it will not be a permanent aspect of our civilization. War benefits nobody. It has never once in history worked to bully another group of people. No bully has ever been able to understand that it has never once worked to be a bully. Notice that 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?
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 and take guns away from every leader and his or her military–they will be less dangerous that way. What purpose do armies 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–to protect us from aliens or from ourselves? If we do not need to take guns and bombs with us to Mars then do we need them here?
Human civilization knew of no such war for its first 5,000 years, but through the last 5,000 years, our leaders have repeatedly tricked us participating in mass murder. War of mass murder is not inherent to our species and it will not be a permanent aspect of our civilization. It will continue only for as long as we go along with our leaders.
Ishtar Gate http://atlantis.haktanir.org/gate.jpg
Normandy graveyard
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_326Hr1tKKFQ/RwAhboCi9ZI/AAAAAAAACGM/4-1SBydfSKY/normandie+019.jpg
It is no accident that the time of our first wars of mass murder is also the time in which our religions turn to morals and an emphasis of our innate Golden Rule. Islamic mosque
Chartres spires http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cathedral_of_Chartres,_western_spires.JPG
Budhha http://www.great-buddha-statue.com/great_buddha_statue.jpg
Jesus http://rosemck1.tripod.com/jesus-and-child.gif
Confucius http://islaminchina.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/confucius.jpg
Ancient Athens had a democracy in which every detail of the city’s operation was chosen by a show of hands in town meetings. Citizens were selected for short-term office by lottery and served as judges and jury members. Democracy today consists of professional politicians elected to make decisions for the citizens. Democracy is more than free speech and civil rights. It is a blending of views that partially satisfies every person and group. The people of a nation conduct either compromise or civil war. When civil war occurs, it lasts until people tire of daily death and destruction and decide that compromise isn’t so bad after all. Citizens of a democratic culture have a tolerance for different views and lifestyles and believe in the right of dissent. While the citizens of a stable monarchy have a confidence in benevolent kings and queens, the members of a stable democracy must have trust in the motives and intelligence of fellow citizens and a distrust of power. Citizens within a democracy keep their eye on authority and do not blindly follow it nor adopt a fatalistic acceptance of its actions, and these citizens believe that the state is responsive to their requests. Citizens must voice their requests to gauge the responsiveness of their system. The more involved are the citizens, the stronger will be their democracy. U.S. democracy limits power by spreading and balancing it among the three branches of government comprised of about 500 persons. This also means that the views, priorities, and agenda of no single person or group can monopolize the actions of the government. Since no legislation occurs without the support of enough persons, much of daily politicking consists of the attempt to persuade a sufficient number of persons that a specific action should be taken by the nation. Notice that politicians and political issues are marketed to us using the same test-audience tactics as is done for oatmeal and other such products.
Democracy is most appropriate and durable in a nation whose citizens have a working level knowledge in politics, participate in political affairs, consider education for all to be beneficial to the nation as a whole, desire economic development, have political beliefs and attitudes rather than apathy toward everything political, have a belief in the legitimacy of the state, have interpersonal trust for the other members, do not view government as a caring and trusted parent or as an institution that has the divine right to rule, have goals for the nation, reject revolutionary change and instead use the existing system to make changes, want to cooperate and compromise rather than suffer civil war, and have trust in their mutually beneficial system and gain enough personal satisfaction from its existence to support it while it is temporarily performing poorly–for example, during an economic recession. It is undemocratic behavior for citizens to feel that they can demand their own way, be uncompromising, and require that everyone be just like them or else. Here is the Acropolis at Athens. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Acropolis_of_Athens_01361.JPG
We learned the hard way that power must be spread and balanced among the heads of state, elected legislators, and judges. No policy or action occurs without the consensus of a great enough number of persons. Much of daily politicking, included speeches, news briefs, and issue ads, is the attempt to persuade enough persons to agree to a desired policy or action. In the U.S. today, power is spread among about 500 persons and two political parties.
http://www.knowledgerush.com/wiki_image/7/76/State_of_the_Union.jpg
Aristotle and Plato thought about reality, nature, and morality. http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/medieval/images/arist.jpg
City gate in China http://ed101.bu.edu/StudentDoc/Archives/ED101sp06/vkrauser/pycitygate.jpg
The Great Zimbabwe civilization was the center of a collection of two hundred towns, and it was at its peak between the years 1000 AD and 1500 AD. The Wall at Great Zimbabwe is ten meters or yards in height and three hundred meters or yards long. Can you see the person standing at the wall?
http://www.questconnect.org/images/gzim_walls.jpg
In the year 1495 ad, the residents of Timbuktu dug a twelve-mile-long canal connecting their city to the port of Kabara. Timbuktu is located in western Sudan and was an educational and Islamic center, and it was a cloth center. http://www.dorlingkindersley-uk.co.uk/static/html/features/where_to_go/images/10Oct/07_timbuktu.jpg
In the year 1279 ad., the population of Paris was a few hundred persons and the population of Hangzhou was one million persons. Here is the recreational West Lake.
www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2003-10/13/xinsrc_a5a86d5172614028a6c74832f5459677_1.jpg
Our innate social structure is a band of a few extended families. We invented tribes, chiefdoms, and states to coordinate groups of people larger than our innate band structure. Bands are egalitarian. Economic inequality has increased ever since they were replaced with larger units. In medieval Europe, peasants spent one-third of their days working for the village lord. Here is a typical manor house.
http://www.cotswoldcountrymanor.co.uk/index_files/image002.jpg
Peasants lived in a thatched home.
http://www.wagscreen.co.uk/site/images/content/chicken.jpg
Here is a village scene.
http://www.wagscreen.co.uk/site/images/content/cosmeston_2.jpg
or www.flickr.com/photos/69864550@N00/44956157/in/set-1118019/
The king and queen lived in complete luxury. Here is Louis XVI. http://faculty.ucc.edu/egh-damerow/Louis_XIV.jpg
Art and architecture express our inner drives and our inner view of the world. Here are two examples of the art of Medieval China http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/painting/4pmtxiag.jpg
or
and
http://academic.reed.edu/chinese/chin-hum/LandscapePaintings/020793.html
The Book of Kells
http://www.snake.net/people/paul/kells/image/kell1bmp
Rembrandt’s Nightwatch. http://www.apollogallery.ie/images/news/235_rembrandt%20nightwatch.JPG
We human beings create wonderful music, art, theater, literature, and monuments. Two of the best things that a small group of us human beings do with our mutual efforts is to perform theatrical plays and make music. Here is the Globe Theater, where the plays of Shakespeare were first performed.
http://www.davidmichaelconner.com/Shakespeare_Globe_Theatre.jpg
Here is the Bournemouth symphony orchestra.
Here is Michelangelo’s David. http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/michelangelo/michelangelo.david.jpg
Here is a Balinesian Kecak Dance. http://www.yogaworldtours.com/images/Bali-Kecak_Dance.jpg
This alley in Prague exhibits many, artistic geometrical shapes.
Our connection to previous generations is everywhere visible. Governmental buildings still build the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns that were first created by the people of ancient Greece. Here is the Vienna parliament building http://www.planetware.com/i/photo/parliament-building-vienna-vnparl2.jpg
When an injustly treated people, such as the medieval European peasants, feel a lessening of injustice, they quickly demand more freedoms and begin to question everything in society. This atmosphere of questioning led to the European Renaissance and to the scientific method that gives facts and understandings, along with some useful machines and medicines, from repeatable measurements. Here is Dalton and his periodic table of the elements.
www.chemheritage.org/classroom/chemach/images/lgfotos/04periodic/dalton2.jpg
Biologist have made billions of repeatable measurements, and all of them are explained by Darwin’s principle of evolution. Darwin’s principle states that of the range in characteristics of the members of a species, those creatures who are well-matched to their changing environment of climate, predators, and food will more often live long enough to have children. In turn, those children have the characteristics of their parents. Shifts in the range are compounded through the generations.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Charles_Darwin_seated.jpg
The trunk of this cactus in the Galapagos evolved through the generations to be taller than the reach of turtles. Photo by Brenda.
The bonobo Kanzi understands several hundred spoken words. Kanzi shows that we human beings share much in common with other animals. Kanzi is seen here between Dalton and Darwin.
http://fmrecerca.blogia.com/upload/20070504091557-0001-1206.jpg
or
http://www.greatapetrust.org/bonobo/meet/kanzi/kanzi_img09b.jpg
Galileo studied motion and lived in the early 17th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Galileo.arp.300pix.jpg
About one million persons in the last four centuries spent their lifetimes studying millions of natural phenomena. At first, these numerous phenomena seemed to be unrelated, but through our combined efforts we figured out that each of these is simply a different aspect of a mere handful of fundamental phenomena. While people such as Napoleon temporarily rearranged borders, the inventors of the steam engine, antibiotics, computers, and phones and such have changed our daily way of life. Our global civilization is the sum of all the techniques, procedures, and understandings that all of us have contributed. Human progress occurs as techniques and understandings bounce from one person to another, each taking what was known and adding something to it. Scientists have made billions of repeatable measurements of millions of natural phenomena involving heat, light, motion, electromagnetism, gravity, and energy. All of these are explained by a handful of fundamental laws of nature, including Newton’s motion equation, which was deduced in the year 1687 a.d. and states that if you push on an object then its speed will change. The push occurs by applying a force. Surprisingly, scientists found that nature has only five forces, and that each of these are likely to be different aspects of a single force. Newton’s single equation describes all motion, including the motion of cars, spinning skaters, the flow of air around airplane wings that lifts the ship into the air, space flight to Pluto, and the orbits of planets around the sun. In the year 1687, nobody could believe that a mere human being could find an equation that even the heavens obeyed. Heat phenomena and heat engines are also described by Newton’s equation because heat is due to the motion of the atoms comprising a material. Nobody in the year 1687 could imagine the endless uses of this equation. It is a fundamental truth of nature that will be useful for every person on the planet for all generations to come. Today, Newton’s equation is written in a relativistic, quantum mechanical form that also explains atomic and nuclear phenomena. We human beings are pretty clever for having been able to figure this out in just four centuries, which is about twenty generations, by pooling the efforts of about one million scientists. Here is Isaac Newton.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GodfreyKneller-IsaacNewton-1689.jpg
Einstein deduced the merger of space-time, contributed to quantum mechanics, rewrote Newton’s equation of gravity, and began the view that all of physics might be combined into a single equation.
http://www.humboldt1.com/~gralsto/einstein/pictures/newyork.jpg
In the year 1864, James Maxwell collected the five equations of electricity and magnetism, made them symmetric, and showed that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon. Some colors of light that we don’t see include x-ray, infrared, microwave, radar, and ultraviolet wavelengths, and Maxwell’s equations describe them all. Maxwell ’s equations of electricity describe every electrical machine, from circuits to computers, cell phones, and MRI scanners, and every light device, from cameras to fiber optics, that has ever or will ever be made.
Erwin Schrodinger. In the year 1926, Schrodinger extended Newton’s motion equation to describe matter on atomic and sub-nuclear scales. His equation describes lasers and the solid-state devices that comprise today’s electronics.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Erwin_Schrödinger.jpg
At the time of their discovery, nobody could imagine the endless uses of these equations that enable today’s high-tech devices–and will continue to produce future devices. These things benefit everyone. Scientists, engineers, and architects build understanding, techniques, procedures, and machines that change our world. Such major steps in our understanding of nature are built from many smaller understandings. Scientists work for the thrill of being the first person to understand a new aspect of nature and to be the first person to think of something that has never before been thought. Engineers enjoy making new machines. Just as the people of previous decades and centuries could not imagine the machines that would result from the equations of Newton, Maxwell, and Schrodinger, nobody today can imagine the machines that will soon result from knowledge gained in the experiments now being conducted in elementary particle accelerators.
http://www.dailycal.org/photos/20080914/102609-9.15.collider.courtesy-01.jpg
This painting of “Mother and Child” was done by Picasso around one hundred years ago. http://kapirasongkritika.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/pablo-picasso-mother-and-child.jpg
Poverty Point was built around the year 1,500 b.c., in today’s Louisiana. It has the shape of a flying bird and is 20 meters or yards high and has a base that is 200 by 200 meters or yards in area. When our distant grandparents stood on top of the mound, the tree tops could have been seen from the vantage point of a flying bird. Before the arrival of the Europeans killed half of them, millions of persons lived in the Americas, practiced agriculture, and built many chiefdoms and cities.
http://www.crt.state.la.us/archaeology/poverpoi/images/site.jpg
Machu Picchu was constructed around the year 1450 a.d. by the people of the Inca Empire. Most of its residents were soon killed by smallpox brought by Eurpoeans.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Vista_de_Machu_Picchu.jpg
Cortez meets Moctezuma in the year 1520.
The people of the Americas farmed many of the world’s most important crops–including maize, tomatoes, tobacco, and potatoes–that were not available in the Old World. Before the fifteenth century exchanges, there were no Italian tomato dishes and no Irish potatoes.
corn stalk www.qualitysilks.com/images/products/artificial-corn-stalk.jpg
The slaughter of American cultures and peoples is one of humanities greatest injustices. You feel angry whenever you believe that you have been treated injustly. Surprisingly, we get angry for no other reason. If you recall the last few times you have been angry, you will also remember the injustice dealt to you that caused your anger. We expect our mutual society to be mutually beneficial to all. We react to anything less as an injustice that naturally makes us angry. Anger is a social emotion that is part of human nature. By the way, Radhakrishnan pointed out that around the year 100 b.c., the leaders of Ancient Rome laughed at the “bearskin-dressed, backwards, Northern Europeans.” But just five hundred years later, the Northern Europeans sacked a falling Rome.
http://www.tonyareiman.com/assets/graphics/anger.jpg
We human beings have an innate predisposition to pool efforts in a mutually beneficial society. We are social creatures guided by the Social Rule. 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 human beings who are Christians say "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Those of us human beings 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." This Rule is innate to our species and it creates our societies through a mutual pooling of efforts. For our distant, biological ancestors, the first beneficial pooling of efforts involved our search for bundles of food and watching for predators.
One of the first things that a group of hundreds or thousands of people do soon after forming a chiefdom is to see how tall a mound of earth they can create or how big a rock they can move, as in this megalith.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Paulnabrone.jpg/800px-Paulnabrone.jpg
We innately combine efforts on every task larger than can be handled by a lone person. We are experts at gauging which tasks qualify. Beginning with sedentary peoples in traditional bands of extended families and continuing until the last century, we typically pool efforts to build homes, as in this barn raising. http://amishamerica.typepad.com/amish_america/images/2007/12/03/nebraska_amish_barn_raising.jpg
In each of the world’s farming villages, many neighbors pool efforts to process a harvested crop, such as occurred in this corn husking event.
www.nw.wnyric.org/tuscarora/tuscaroraschool/Corn_husking_jpeg.jpg
The entire farming village typically works together to plant and harvest crops. Here is a photo from the year 1900 of the people of an entire Welsh village pooling efforts to cut a hay crop on the singly best day that it should be cut.
http://www.hayinart.org/images/3176.jpg
One of the top priorities of today’s mutual pooling of efforts should be to ensure our mutual health.
http://repairstemcell.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/doctor-default-image.jpg
What should be the priorities for the mutual efforts that produce today’s society and civilization of seven billion persons?
http://www.painetworks.com/photos/07/070383.JPG
Can we ensure clean water, sanitation, food, and shelter? Can we do more?
water well http://www.charlesandhudson.com/archives/water-well.jpg
Before the Industrialization Revolution that began around the year 1760 a.d., each family grew its own food and each family’s home contained but twenty or so tools and decorations that were hand made and expensive. We used tree stumps for chairs and clam shells for spoons. We might own one mirror. Here is a typical home in the year 1700 as seen at pioneer village. http://www.salemweb.com/tales/images/pv5.jpg
Twenty items, including a single bed and chair, are typical home possessions before Industrialization.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2082/2307927518_1ec991264b.jpg?v=0
We churn butter.
www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=3422
We run the spinning wheel.
www.wagscreen.co.uk/site/images/content/spinning_1.jpg
The Industrial Revolution resulted from the chance gathering into a single building of all the persons and materials needed to make cloth. The water wheel could then provide concentrated power.
http://www.ecostruction.com.au/images/water_wheel.JPG
After industrialization, community members both manufacture and purchase inexpensive goods. We both work in the factory and purchase the products of factories. The homes of the most wealthy of us changed little during the 16th - 19th centuries, but the homes of the rest of us came to be filled with hundreds of tools and decorations.
http://www.nevis1.com/Knick_Knacks_03.jpg
Imagine for a moment a world in which nothing is moving–no cars, trains, or planes in motion, not even a strolling animal or a bush blowing in the wind. Just 150 years ago–before we developed engines for trains and such–very few objects were in motion besides people and animals. Since it is only living things that can move themselves of their own accord, about the only other objects in motion were the wind, rising smoke, rivers, clouds, and falling rain. When our earliest natural philosophers pondered the nature of motion, they had only the motions of these few objects to explain. Empedocles (490 - 430 BCE) and Aristotle (384 - 322 BCE) explained these motions in terms of things “seeking their own level” in matter’s hierarchy of water, earth, air, fire, and heavens. Our first moving machinery–sailboats and grinding mills, for example–were pushed or pulled by people, animals, wind, or water. They moved only as something else pushed them. Back around the year 1850, the first time people saw a train moving under its own power they typically said that they were astonished because “It moved just like a living thing." Before the train, only living things could move under their own power. We are constantly in motion today, driving around town and flying around the continents, but just a couple centuries ago, a busy city was filled only with foot traffic and some horse- or people-drawn carts. The city contained only motionless buildings. Before the automobile, everyone walked to work. In this Wisconsin Historical Society photo, foot traffic in an otherwise motionless city is seen as people walk to work in a Chicago factory in 1886. By the way, this McCormick factory was involved in Chicago’s Haymarket riots, and the granddaughter of the factory owner, supplied the research funds that resulted in the birth control pill.
http://images.wisconsinhistory.org/700003050101/0305001845-l.jpg
or
About 10,000 years ago, which was about five hundred generations ago, agriculture began to spread around the planet at a rate of about 20 miles or kilometers per generation. A group of people will not change their way of life, which has been working for as many generations as any member can imagine, unless forced to do so because of changes in the climate and food supply or due to a cultural merger. It is not the case that every person on the planet wants to drop their “wrong” way of life and become just like you. Industrialization began in the year 1760 ad., and has spread to most of the planet in just 250 years or ten generations. The extent of industrialization today is seen in this photo of the surface of the Earth in which the nighttime lights of the electrified cities are visible.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights_dmsp.jpg
Industrialization always increases economic and social injustice. About one in seven of us human beings today live in shanties.
http://www.capetown.dj/people/CapeFlats/IMG_1226.JPG
Lafayette and Pharoah, from Alex Kotlowitz's There are no children here, the story of two boys growing up in the other America, lived in Chicago’s Horner projects.
http://citynoise.org/upload/3872.jpg
Some of us live in mansions.
A person's condition of poverty is not merely a story of the private misfortune of one individual. It is a measure of the success or failure of our civilization as a whole. We all agree that the success or failure of a particular individual depends not only on internal talent and drive but also on many external, societal forces, obstacles, and opportunity–or its denial. We will know that we will have finished building the fully just civilization when no one is denied the opportunity to go where their talents and desires wish. It is often said that to be totally free of constraints today requires one to have been born a millionaire. Together, we can strive to reduce the obstacles we can identify. http://i.ehow.com/images/GlobalPhoto/Articles/2031974/Homeless%20cuddling%20dog%20by%20Kirsten%20Bole%20100%20dpi_Full.jpg
Globalization means that a Japanese, European, or U.S. corporation moves manufacturing to a foreign nation where labor and raw materials cost the least. The goods are not sold to their overseas makers who cannot afford, for example, $100 shoes on their $5 per day salary. Instead, the goods are taken to the U.S., Europe, and Japan where they can be sold for the highest possible price. This approach can mean that labor costs shrink from $150 per day down to $5 per day, but the retail price will not be decreased so that corporate profit is maximized. Profit is also maximized by monopolizing each industry, from sugar to dryers. It scares me to think of the global food supply being monopolized and then grown where labor is cheapest and then transported only to those nations where the price can be the highest. “Corporate” profit is the income for the most wealthy of us, who comprise the upper 1% in annual income by averaging $1 million per year. The blue line in the plot shows the income of the upper 1% of us, and the red line at the bottom shows the nearly constant income of the rest of us. The plot shows the great increase in income, obtained from corporate profit, that has resulted from the globalization of recent decades. The horizontal axis begins at the year 1910 and has ten years per division. The large rise occurs during the 1980s and 1990s. Extreme wealth is nothing but proof of your ability, or that of your recent ancestors, to overcharge other people. Except for the 1% of us greedy enough to behave this way, this makes all of us mad. By the way, the average worker’s wage in the U.S. is the same today as it was fifty years ago. Which effectively means that we have not had a raise in fifty years.
Average Income of the Top 1 percent and of Everybody Else, 1913-2002
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/piketty-saezOUP05US.pdf
Too many of our largest corporations, from Enron to AIG, have shown an unlimited greed that is willing to unravel our civilization while it tries to grab all that it can.
http://www.lindsayfincher.com/gallery/d/10159-1/houston_enron_building_2.jpg
Here are some people who inspired us, encouraged love, and have fought injustice. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the principle author of the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, which was a re-writing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence to declare the rights of women. http://www.constitutioncenter.org/timeline/flash/assets/asset_upload_file556_11985.jpg
The Dalai Lama inspires us to love everyone, even our enemies. He suggests that each evening, you might review your day’s thoughts and actions. Repeat often, those that made you happy and avoid those that did not. You will then be increasingly happy with each passing year.
http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/images/Dalai_Lama_press_conf1_01.jpg
Mahatma Gandhi inspires us to love everyone.
http://www.martin-missfeldt.de/images-pictures/speed-paintings-2/mahatma-gandhi.jpg
and http://www.ojaipost.com/images/gandhi.jpg
heart. And remember that you truly get only a few decades in life, so strive to live and love everyday as if you knew that your life was going to end tomorrow.
http://www.make-stuff.com/projects/images/heart2.gif
The greatest person from the U.S. was Martin Luther King, who fought injustice and inspired us to love everyone. http://www.writespirit.net/inspirational_talks/political/martin_luther_king_talks/martin-luther-king2.jpg
The second greatest persons from the U.S. was Louis Armstrong because of his pivotal role in the evolution of music. Music has a magical affect on us.
http://gertrudestein.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/louis-armstrong.jpg
We humans share a beautiful planet with plants and animals in an interconnected web. We find that each species has incredible features and behaviors and that we humans consist of ten thousand cultures, each an expression of our nature. We find that nature is filled with incredible phenomena, many of which involves a curious mixture of components. For example, the colors of a rainbow occur as sunlight interacts with water drops.
http://www.missouriskies.org/rainbow/rainbow_elam_2.jpg
The colors of a hot spring, such as this one in Yellowstone National Park, occur as water, bacteria, and heat from underground magma combine in one place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grand_prismatic_spring.jpg
We have an innate attraction to the beauty of waterfalls, such as Iguassu Falls in Argentina. http://grandcanyon.free.fr/images/cascade/original/Devil%27s%20Throat,%20Iguassu%20Falls,%20Argentina.jpg
We see beauty in the variety of a rain forest.
http://staffwww.fullcoll.edu/tmorris/elements_of_ecology/images/tropical_rain_forest_amazon.jpg
or
http://my.opera.com/9r33np34c3/albums/showpic.dml?album=607152&picture=8323716
The world is in our hands.
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/psoc/files/psoc_globe.jpg
In 250 million years, the continents will have again merged into one.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5260580518877685279
Everyone agrees that the most important thing in life is to have happy and healthy children, families, and communities. If you ask persons from each of ten thousand different times and places in world, they would all agree that we live for our children. 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 seven billion of us would be holding up one to five 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. In the last hour, you thought of the well being of yourself, of family members, and of the community. The motivation behind most every thought or action of every human being involves 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. The utmost concerns of parenting and social humans, who recognize their extended family and social group, are love and children, family and friends, community and justice. We know that these concerns are common to each of us because we share a common humanness. These few things comprise human existence, explain the world of us humans and our myriad of activities, and are the priorities of our civilization. It is no accident that these are the topics of most every conversation and of most every artwork. Our arts express and communicate these cares and emotions. Our religions emphasize these most-important aspects of ourselves and society, and our governments legally define and defend them. This means that religion, government, and science all agree about the most important aspects of a human and of human society. 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. 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 just want to laugh and joke with our family, friends, and neighbors, and raise children as we pursue life, happiness, and the limits of our individual–and combined–talents.
Katmandu
http://image55.webshots.com/55/3/35/25/524833525lSqvNh_ph.jpg
Aborigine family. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01240/6539_Aboriginal_fa_1240691c.jpg
Samoan family
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/60/165461452_bd2c1d2d6d.jpg?v=0
Eskimo children http://www.alaska-in-pictures.com/data/media/21/inupiat-eskimo-girls-in-traditional-parkas_2119.jpg
Mongolian family http://pro.corbis.com/images/DC004728.jpg?size=67&uid={0FE0E2A3-BA4C-45A3-85D0-C017284DCE92}
A family in Ecuador
http://m-a-s.110mb.com/WWE/wwe_10.jpg
A mother and child in Haiti. http://photos.igougo.com/images/p285920-Haitian_mother_and_child.jpg
A Canela village.
http://anthropology.si.edu/canela/images/daily_callingout.jpg
We human beings have built our mutual civilization using nothing but our animal minds. We built Angkor Wat about 1,000 years or fifty generations ago.
http://rlv.zcache.com/angor_wat_cambodia_postcard-p239210459736324279qibm_400.jpg
We built the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lampur in the most recent generation. Do these towers resemble those of Angkor Wat? http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/00/15/b9/fd/full-view-of-petronas.jpg
We are now making plans for the Dubai Tower. http://www.hallagulla.com/urdu/photo/data/500/ZeroEmissionDubaiTower004.jpg
The work of many scientists and engineers through two generations was combined to build our first space ships.
http://thebloatedbrain.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/space-shuttle-challenger.jpg
What will future generations build?
http://fantasyartdesign.com/3dgallery/a-digital/3D-images/0611seifer/futuristic-sci-fi-01.jpg
Fusion.
http://oz.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/1997-08-31/fusion.jpg
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? These are the things that you can help to accomplish.
http://www.masternewmedia.org/images/future-of-learning_id2728501_size390.jpg
Together, we will write the future story of humanity.
http://www.gildedquill.net/Graphics/Gilded_Quill.gif
Explore other worlds. Enceladus.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060608.html
It makes people happy just to see a happy child. It makes us happy simply to feed a child.
http://www.abroaderview.org/images/malawi/happy_child.jpg
By the way, one person has estimated the total energy in the universe to be 1068 Joules, see www.phy.syr.edu/courses/modules/ENERGY/ENERGY_POLICY/tables.html. Since your own body operates on 100 Joules per second, it means that 10-66 is your share of the energy that is our universe. Is this also your share of the love in the universe?
Some of the biggest “secrets” in the U.S. today
(See www.ushumans.net/secrets1.htm for more details.) Some of the first problems for our next generation to work on involve the following facts.
* About one in five of our children live in a home whose income falls below the poverty line.
* Our wages have decreased 15% in three decades. Since our wage today is the same as it was in 1961, it effectively means that we have not had a raise in over fifty years. About one-quarter of men and one-half of women living in the U.S. have an annual income below $15,000, which corresponds to $7.50 per hour. Such an income barely allows a person to pay rent and buy food. It means we can afford only an annual night out, we buy gas $5 at a time, we have no money for car insurance even if required by law, we can’t afford the $4 item at the fast-food restaurant, and we can’t afford to even buy fruit. As for the most common annual income, 40% of men and 70% of women earn below $25,000.
* Globalization means that a corporation moves manufacturing to a foreign nation where labor and raw materials cost the least. The goods are not sold to their overseas makers who cannot afford, for example, $100 shoes on their $5 per day salary. Instead, the goods are taken to the U.S., Europe, and Japan where they can be sold for the highest possible price. This approach can mean that labor costs shrink from $150 per day down to $5 per day, but the retail price will not be decreased because instead, corporate profit is maximized.
* 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.
In 2007, Goldman-Sachs investment bank had 30,000 employees, and paid $20 billion in all forms of compensation. Its 300 top executives get the “lions share,” including $12 billion received as executive bonuses. Those 300 executives were paid more money than the US government spends on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program serving millions of children of low-paid workers, and more than the federal government spent that year on Hurricane Katrina reconstruction and relief.
* “Corporate” profit is the income for the most wealthy of us, who comprise the upper 1% in annual income by averaging $1 million per year. In recent years, only the upper 4% of us have seen an increase in real wages. Extreme wealth is nothing but proof of your ability, or that of your recent ancestors, to overcharge other people.
* College costs from $0 to $2000 per year in Europe but $5,000 to $50,000 per year in the U.S. Graduates in Europe owe $0 in student loans but in the U.S., students often borrow $100,000 to pay for college and then, after interest fees, pay back $200,000 to the bank. College in the U.S. has become a way for banks to make much money.
* Our local and national news is rapidly becoming owned by just a handful of large companies who are choosing news topics for us, and they often choose to broadcast those political views similar to their own. Some have sponsored political rallies promoting the views of the owner. The owner of a newspaper owns stock in other companies and will tell his journalists employees to cancel an investigative story that would lower the value of his stock in that other company. One journalist recently described this as “There is freedom of the press today only if you own the press.”
* Our leaders have failed us by not planning for our future energy needs and energy systems, by omitting mass transportation, even sidewalks, and by continuing to rely solely on fossil fuels, and we have failed ourselves by going along with them. During the gas shortages of the 1970s, U.S. politicians shouted that we can never again import one-third of our oil. What has been done? Forty years later, in 2010, the U.S. imports two-thirds of its oil. We would not be in such a state today if three decades ago, we put one-kilowatt wind-powered generators and solar collectors on every rooftop in the nation. (Japan and Europe are doing much better at this.) We continue to use water heaters that run 24-hours per day rather than only when needed, as is common in Europe. Laying a water-filled hose or container for an hour in the sun produces hot water for a shower. Such passive solar systems should be on every rooftop. Sunlight can be piped inward for interior lighting. The absence of a U.S. energy policy–since that of President Carter–has accompanied two gulf wars and 500,000 of us humans being killed by other humans.
* The annual healthcare cost per person is twice as much in the U.S. as in Europe, but Europeans live five years longer. In fact, the people of one-quarter of the world’s 200 nations have a longer average life span than occurs in the U.S. This occurs because one-in-four of us can not afford to go to the doctor.
* Since 1970, the average portion of family income spent on healthcare has increased from 2% to 20%, but the health industry wants 50%. In 1960, the national health expenditure was $28 billion (in current dollars) but in 2004 it was $2 trillion; only 2% of this amount was spent on research. While heart surgery might cost $300,000 in the U.S., it costs $5,000 in India. The average retiree in the U.S. has $100,000 in health care costs. Universal health care occurs in most every industrialized nation except the United States where about one in seven of us do not even have 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.
* The U.S. spends as much on the military as does the rest of the world combined. What do we get from that? Does every U.S. citizen get a weekly check in the mail from other people? Instead of having affordable health care and college, our leaders in the U.S. have chosen for us to have a really big military force.
* Wars of mass murder are not a part of human nature and are not a permanent part of civilization.
* The U.S. might soon have trouble funding its trillion dollar per year army from citizens earning mostly minimum wage. As manufacturing moved overseas, see http://www.bls.gov/oco/images/ocotjc05.gif, U.S. citizens exchanged their $25 per hour manufacturing jobs for $9 per hour service-sector jobs, see http://www.bls.gov/oco/images/ocotjc08.gif within the report at http://www.bls.gov/oco/oco2003.htm. U.S. companies recently reported that they plan to do 2/3 of their upcoming research overseas and leave just 1/3 to be done in the U.S. Science and 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 U.S. has had the largest economy, comprising 20% of the whole, but its is now being surpassed by those of the European Union, China, and India.
* Our society is the mutually beneficial pooling of our efforts. That is why we form social groups rather than “go it alone.” Each of us contributes our lifetime’s worth of work and expects to share equally in its benefits.
* Forty other nations, including Cuba, have a lower infant mortality rate than exists in the U.S.
* 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. (Car insurance rates are also doubled for those persons who could not afford to purchase car insurance in the previous year.)
* Democracy is a blending of views that partially satisfies everyone, while dictatorial governments have a single party with a single view of goals and priorities; this single party forces the nation down a single path by outlawing all other parties, views, and paths. Imagine that a single party was able to set policy in your country without having to answer opposing arguments from any other party. 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. The political process in the U.S. has become a science of getting one’s way. In the last twenty years, the majority party in the U.S. House and Senate has tried to limit the participation of the minority party in the legislative process. The majority hopes to get its way by taking us toward single party rule between elections.
* Democracy is more than voting and free speech. It is a blending of views that partially satisfies each person and group.
An overview
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 morality and 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.
At any time or in any place around the planet, whenever hundreds or thousands of us human beings get together to form a tribe or chiefdom, we build stone monuments and earthen mounds, such as the one at Poverty Point in Louisiana, and we build irrigation and agricultural systems that create so much food that our population doubles every few generations. 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 such as occurred in Cahokia near today’s St. Louis. 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 are billions of us now building? (For the current, global population, see http://jersey.uoregon.edu/population/Population.html or http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html) 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 should be the priorities for our mutual efforts? Everyday, stop and ask yourself what makes you happy, how do you gauge success in life, and what priorities and goals do you have for your own life and for the mutual efforts that are our community, nation, and planet-wide civilization. What do you want to contribute to our mutual efforts? Most of us feel that success in life is measured in terms of happy and healthy, children, families, and communities. What are the priorities of your political and business leaders?
For the priorities of the leaders of the U.S., see www.nationalpriorities.org. Notice that 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?
Picture a group of one hundred persons, who can easily stand in single room, and let them represent the sequence of your one hundred most-recent grandmothers who together reach back about 2,000 years ago–back to ancient Rome and Greece and about to the times of Buddha, Christ, Confucius, and Muhammad. In only one hundred generations we have progressed from that time to today. 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. Human capability is demonstrated by the rapid progress in understanding nature, 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. Theatrical plays and musical presentations are two examples of what results from the mutual efforts of a small number of us. We human beings have demonstrated tremendous talent and capabilities by making rapid progress both in our understanding of nature and in building our civilization of arts, government, religion, business, science, and technology in just ten-thousand years, which is five hundred generations, and in doing it with nothing but our animal minds.
Culture changes with each successive generation. In the last 2,000 years, we have made about one hundred such generational shifts. The people of each generation live in the culture of their time and place. The ways of their own childhood are the only ways which make sense to them. Each person makes his or her own way through life by following the ways of the group as a whole. Everyone is born, progresses though birth, childhood, and marriage and then raises children and grows old; it's just the details of our personality that distinguish us from each other. In a group of one thousand people, there are one thousand very similar copies of life histories going from birth to death and there are one thousand different personalities. In a planet filled with seven billion people, each person is similarly making their way through life and its milestones. Each person has a unique personality, each person shares humanness, and each person looks forward to a bright future. Our ten thousand cultures make differences only in the details of our ways of life and so distinguish the daily lives of the people of one group from those of the people of other groups.
It has been said that 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. Together, we will build our future. We are all in this together. 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.
About one hundred persons form a clan, one hundred clans form a city, one hundred cities form a nation, and today, two hundred nations form a world. We have already progressed politically from bands to tribes, kingdoms, and then nations. 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. A few centuries ago, the world was divided into 10,000 kingdoms. There were no nations and nobody considered themselves to be a national citizen. 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 human beings, 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. Chiefdoms, kingdoms, nations, and nationalism are temporary things lasting only a few centuries. We are now realizing that our global economic, social, food supply, and environmental problems require the coordinated efforts of all nations. Our current problems are not confined to lone, independent kingdoms or nations. That we human beings are still here shows that we have solved every problem that has arisen. Typically, a solution is found after some fumbling in the dark. Will the human beings of the world soon be sufficiently interacting to cause an additional, global level of cooperation, pooling, and government? Will this process occur in the next 50 or 100 years? Will this mean an end to national militaries and to war? We are all in this together and are responsible for our own results. For the last ten-thousand years, we have been building the civilization of our own choosing. Today, our innate, 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. Human civilization is the mutual tool of our many cultures and has become global in extent.
Our civilization functions only through the combined efforts of each and every one of us as we go about our jobs and daily activities. Some of the daily jobs that 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- and DNA-filled persons doing the same thing, you might amuse yourself by considering the hundreds of occupations being performed that day by those visible persons. Each of these persons has nearly identical DNA but differing personalities and life histories. 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 full of love and laughter. 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. While aging from 10 to 100, we realize that there is something greater than ourselves and that we are a member of a whole. That whole is the mutually beneficial pooling of efforts that comprise human society and civilization.
By combining our efforts, today’s seven billion 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, passions, and goals. We can then spend our lifetimes improving ourselves and our civilization. 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. One in one-hundred of us human beings, no matter where we live on the planet, has talent for art, engineering, or surgery and such that rates among the best 1% of all of us. Our slums contain thousands and thousands of Rembrandt’s and Einsteins who must spend their days simply searching for each day’s food. Our mutual society suffers when we create constraints that keep some of our members from contributing all of their talents.
With each new generation, we want the priorities of our civilization to be increasingly matched to the priorities of a human. Choosing the goals of our lives and of our mutual civilization means asking what we are we, what is our nature, and what is the nature of our cooperation in life? We want to arrange our civilization such that we continually increase the well-being and the quality of life–even the happiness–for the largest possible portion of us. It will then be mutually beneficial for all of us. Why would any of us contribute our lifetime’s efforts to anything less? We all agree that anything less is an injustice.
War and injustice will occur only for as long as we let our leaders pursue goals that benefit mostly themselves or mostly the wealthiest of us–and only for as long as we go along with them. Though recent decades, the efforts of our political and business leaders in the U.S. have mostly sought to turn a handful of our billionaires into trillionaires before they die, just like the rest of us. The moment before one of our billionaires dies, he or she can shout “I am as rich as the poorest one billion persons.” Our world will be a different place when we and our leaders glorify kindness, not violence and profit. For a human, life is first about healthy and happy children, families, and communities not wealth and power. 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.
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. 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 use hundreds of social health indicators 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.
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, visions, and contributions of each of us.
We humans laugh and cry and are happy and sad. We create wonderful music, art, theater, literature, monuments, and knowledge. We humans have earned our own respect. Our civilization has been the result of our own combined, conscious decisions. Nature made us human, and from this beginning we continue to form the culture and civilization of our own choosing. Our civilization will be whatever we choose to make of it and it is limited only by our imagination and human nature. 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.
Knowing something about the nature of human beings and the flow of our civilization helps us to better choose our combined future. 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 because our mutual lives depends on its continued existence. It is not every person for themselves. That has been the case since the time of the first society. We are a members of a culture, individuals of unique talents and tastes, and individuals who contribute 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. For a human, life is not lived alone. Our goals and priorities in life involve more than ourselves. We are not creatures who live alone and independent on islands or mountain tops. We innately form societies because they are mutually beneficial to all of us members. The mutually beneficial exchange of help is the glue that creates our society, and our society is re-created by this glue with each new generation. For our distant, biological ancestors, the first beneficial pooling of efforts involved our search for bundles of food and watching for predators. Our cooperative efforts make us all more likely to live long enough to have children and then to raise them long enough that they in turn have their own children. These are some of the most important elements of what is a human.
How well do you rate our efforts through 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? Our social scientists have developed hundreds of measurable indicators that portray the well-being of all the members of our entire, interrelated civilization. Our social scientists help us direct the actions of our civilization toward the best life for all of us. If you want to help find the most-just arrangement for the interacting components of our civilization then you might choose to become a social scientist or a political scientist. These are important because they help us obtain a more just character for our civilization.
Think often about what makes you happy. Think carefully and often about our shared humanness and what are the character and goals of our mutual civilization. Choose meaningful goals and priorities for your life’s efforts and frequently ponder the meaning of life. Many persons have decided that the meaning of life includes seeking happiness, doing something meaningful with your life, and raising children. Luckily, one of the best things about life is that we all get to decide its meaning for ourselves. Be sure to do something meaningful with your life. Your contributions to the progress of humanity will continue to benefit future generations. Contribute all that you can because the more you contribute, the happier you will be. The greatest reward in life is to receive the approval of others. We are all in this together. The future of humanity is in our own hands. Now go contribute your effort to make our mutual world a better place for all of us, vote against war, and help to ensure that all of us get the opportunity to contribute all that we can so that our whole will be all that it can be. For more details, see The Story of Us Humans, From Atoms to Today's Civilization, which can be downloaded at www.ushumans.net.
What are your answers to the following questions?
1. How did we get here?
2. What are the differences between us humans and the plants and other animals?
3. What is a human? What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be an animal and a primate?
4. What is our place in the universe?
5. What is the meaning of life? Why are we here?
6. Are humans good or bad?
7. What do you want out of life? How do you measure success in life?
8. What are the purposes and goals of religion, government, business, and civilization?
9. What are the most important things to you? What are the most important things to the leaders of your government and civilization? Do they match? You can see the priorities of the government of your nation by looking at how it spends your taxes. For the case of the U.S. (see www.nationalpriorities.org) 30% is spent on the military and defense and 20% on interest on the debt while everything else comprises the other 50%. You might like to visit www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005/hist.html for historical income and expenditure reports.
10. How do you measure happiness, general welfare, and the pursuit of life for everyone on the planet? How do you measure the success of our attempts to govern ourselves?
11. What are some meaningful goals and priorities for our local, regional, national, and global efforts? What are and what should be the priorities and goals of your city, county, state, and national government? How do we measure the success of our attempts to meet these goals?
12. Should citizens use the internet to suggest and approve goals and priorities for our mutual government? Can we choose expenditures and funding sources? Has your government held an electronic town meeting?
13. Do you feel free or constrained in life?
14. Create a piece of art that portrays our human nature, history, or future, or the relationship between us and the rest of nature.
15. List your thoughts and actions that occur through the day and then decide which of these are or are not motivated by your concern for your children, spouse, extended family, or our mutually beneficial and just community (our "Golden Rule"). Do you agree that the world of humans involves little besides love and children, family and friends, community and justice?
16. In The Humanist magazine, Josua Mitteldorf asks if our ancestors from 100,000 years ago could imagine the ways of their descendants? Would they be proud of us? Can you imagine the ways of yours descendants 100,000 years from now? Can you be proud of them?
17. Can we design homes, factories, and cars and such that emit nothing into the environment? Will we decide to end pollution by requiring that our factories, homes, and cars and such emit nothing at all into the environment? This means that each factory must collect its waste products for use by other industries and that we would put one hundred kilograms (220 pounds) of fuel into our cars, drive around for a few days, and then bring back several hundred kilograms of waste products to be left at the gas station when refilling our fuel tanks (to burn each kilogram of fuel requires about fifteen kilograms of air.)
18. List some things that you want to change in our civilization. Will other people want these same changes to occur? List the steps you should do to make these changes happen. Now go change the world and make it better for all of us humans.
19. What do we do with those last slivers of soap bars?
20. Is our mind biologically different today from what it was 10,000 years ago? 100,000? One million? Has anything about human nature changed during those time periods? Have our innate abilities changed during those time periods? Have our goals in life changed during those time periods?
21. Describe the flow of civilization. Where next should we take our civilization?
22. My friend Eric Arcadia asks why does our system have unemployed carpenters at the same time that we have homeless people?
23. Did people 20,000 years ago ponder the meaning of life? What was their answer?
24. How do you rate our progress through the last 10,000 years in building a just civilization that allows us to pursue life and maximize the well-being and the quality of life for as many of us as possible?
25. What makes you happiest? When do you feel most human?
