Reposted from YES! Magazine.

Economies for Life

David C. Korten

The language of economic dysfunction has become so common that when I use the term ìthe global suicide economy” in my talks, I rarely need to elaborate. Most people are now aware that rule by global corporations and financial speculators engaged in the single-minded pursuit of money is destroying communities, cultures, and natural systems everywhere on the planet. Until recently, however, most people responded with polite but resigned skepticism to my message that economic transformation is possible.

Now, with the revelations of high-profile corporate fraud and corruption, I sense a dramatic change. While the political power brokers talk of new rules and penalties to restore confidence in financial markets, members of religious orders and congregations, community groups, city officials, business people, and young activists are talking about the possibility of far greater changes–of creating truly new economies. They speak of real wealth as a sense of belonging, contribution, beauty, joy, relationship, and spiritual connection. They share their dreams of a world of locally rooted living economies that meet the material needs of all people everywhere, while providing meaning, building community, and connecting us to a place on the Earth.

Many are acting to make their dreams a reality. In late 2001, the Social Ventures Network, an alliance of socially committed entrepreneurs, responded to this upsurge in civic innovation by launching a new nationwide initiative–the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies–to encourage, strengthen, and facilitate the interlinking of these initiatives with the aim of creating a cohesive national movement. (www.livingeconomies.org)

The suicide economy is a product of human choices motivated by a love of money. It is within our means to make different choices motivated by a love of life. We have created a suicide economy based on absentee ownership, monopoly, and the concentration of power delinked from obligations to people or place. Now we must create living economies based on locally rooted ownership and deeply held American ideals of equity, democracy, markets, and personal responsibility.

In the place of a suicide economy devoted to maximizing returns to money, we can create living economies devoted to meeting the basic needs of people. In the place of a suicide economy in which the powerful reap the profits and the rest bear the cost, we can create a system of living economies in which decisions are made by those who will bear the consequences.

In the place of the suicide economy´s global trading system designed to allow the wealthy few to control the resources and dominate the markets of the many, we can create living economy trade through which each community exchanges those things it produces in surplus for those it cannot reasonably produce at home on terms that support living wage jobs and high environmental standards everywhere.

Under a system of relatively self-reliant local living economies, communities and nations will not find themselves pitted against one another for jobs, markets, and resources. In the absence of such competition, the free sharing of information, knowledge, and technology will become natural, to the mutual benefit of all.

Locally owned, human-scale enterprises

Living economies are made up of human-scale enterprises locally owned by people who have a direct stake in the many impacts associated with the enterprise. A firm owned by workers, community members, customers, and/or suppliers who directly bear the consequences of its actions is more likely to provide:

ï Employees with safe, meaningful, family-wage jobs.
ï Customers with useful, safe, high-quality products.
ï Suppliers with steady markets and fair dealing.
ï Communities with a healthy social and natural environment.

One of my favorite prototypes of a living economy enterprise is Philadelphia´s White Dog Cafe. (See YES! Spring 2001.) Founder, owner, and proprietor Judy Wicks buys most of her food from local organic farmers, serves only meat from humanely raised animals, pays her workers a living wage, devotes 10 percent of profits to local charity, and has mobilized other Philadelphia restaurants to join in rebuilding the local food production and distribution system. Wicks is also former board chair of the Social Ventures Network and a founder of the newly formed Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.

Living economy enterprises may be organized as partnerships; individual- or family-owned businesses; consumer- or producer-owned cooperatives; community corporations; or companies privately owned by
workers, other community members, or social investors. They may be for-profit or nonprofit. There is no place in living economies, however, for publicly traded, limited liability corporations, the organizational centerpiece of the suicide economy. This corporate form is legally structured to allow virtually unlimited concentration of power to the exclusive financial benefit of absentee shareholders who have no knowledge of, or liability for, the social and environmental consequences of the actions taken on their behalf. It is a legally sanctioned invitation to benefit from behavior that otherwise would be considered sociopathic–even criminal.

Life-serving rules

In the suicide economy, the success of an enterprise is measured by the financial return to its investors. The corporate media cheer when stock prices rise, increasing investor wealth, but sound the alarm when wages rise. Information on the price of a corporation´s stock is available on a minute-by-minute basis, but information on its social and environmental impacts is rarely disclosed.

Rule-making in the suicide economy focuses on enforcing contracts, providing incentives for investors, and protecting the rights of property owners. Government intervention to protect workers, the environment, and consumers is denounced by corporate elites as an infringement of market freedom. Trade agreements like NAFTA and institutions like the World Trade Organization open countries to unbridled competition for investment and jobs that creates a race to the bottom in terms of labor, health, social, and environmental standards.

When Mr. Bush spoke to Wall Street bankers on July 9 on the subject of corporate accountability, his remarks centered on restoring investor confidence by increasing financial integrity and transparency. He made no mention of corporate accountability to workers, communities, the environment, or any other larger public interest. Follow closely the policy debates between Republicans and Democrats on financial fraud, and you will find they center on the competing private financial interests of managers and shareholders–with Republicans generally favoring the corporate managers and Democrats favoring the Wall Street financiers.

The primary purpose of a true market economy, however, is not to make money for the rich and powerful. When Adam Smith conceptualized the idea of the market economy in his classic The Wealth of Nations, he had in mind economies that allocate human and material resources justly and sustainably to meet the self-defined needs of people and community.

In order to allocate justly and sustainably, a market economy requires enforceable rules. Because markets respond only to the needs of those with money to pay, there must be rules to assure an equitable distribution of income. Because markets respond to prices, a just and sustainable allocation of resources depends on public regulation and user fees to assure that market prices internalize the true cost of a product or service–including the social and environmental costs otherwise borne by the public. Public oversight is also needed to assure that common heritage resources essential to the survival and well-being of all–like land and water–are protected and equitably shared.

When enterprises are locally rooted, human-scale, owned by stakeholders, and held accountable to the rule of law by democratically elected governments, there is a natural incentive for all concerned to take human and community needs and interests into account. When income and ownership are equitably distributed, justice is served and political democracy is strong. When workers are owners, the conflict between labor and capital disappears. When needs are met locally by locally owned enterprises, people have greater control over their lives, money is recycled in the community rather than leaking off into the global financial casino, jobs are more secure, economies are more stable, and there are the means and the incentives to protect the environment and to build the relationships of mutual trust and responsibility that are the foundation of community.

Quality of life

Our quality of life would be stunningly different if we based economic decisions on life values rather than purely financial values–a natural choice if owners had to live with the non-financial consequences of their decisions.

Full-cost pricing of energy, materials, and land use could expose the real inefficiencies of factory farming, conventional construction, and urban sprawl and make life-serving alternatives comparatively cost-effective. Much of our food could be grown fresh on local family farms without toxic chemicals, and processed nearby. Organic wastes could be composted and recycled back into the soil. Environmentally efficient buildings designed for their specific micro environment and constructed of local materials could radically reduce energy consumption. Much of our remaining energy needs could be supplied locally from wind and solar sources. Local wastes could be recycled to provide materials and energy for other local businesses.

Compact communities could bring work, shopping, and recreation nearer to our residences–thus saving energy and commuting time, reducing CO2 emissions and dependence on imported oil, and freeing time for family and community activities. Land now devoted to roads and parking could be converted to bike lanes, trails, and parks.

By reducing waste and unnecessary use of energy and other resources, we in America could reduce our need to expropriate the resources of other countries. We could quit allocating a major portion of our national treasure to the large military required to secure our access to those resources. The world´s poor would regain access to the resources that are rightfully theirs to improve their own lives–and the threat of terrorism would be greatly reduced. The elimination of global corporations with their massive overhead, inflated executive compensation packages, and myopic focus on short-term profits would free still more resources. Together these savings could provide workers with family wages and finance first-rate education, health care, and community services for all.

We would expect to see the effects of living economy institutions ripple out across the social landscape. With ample living wage jobs, educational opportunities, and essential services, crime rates would drop, and prison and other criminal justice costs would fall.

An economy that responds to rather than creates demand diverts fewer resources to advertising. Fewer ads mean less visual pollution and wasteful consumerism, an improved sense of self-worth, and still more resources freed up to be converted into shorter work weeks and more leisure time. We would work less and live more. Our lives would be freer and richer. Our environment would be cleaner and healthier. A world no longer divided between obscenely rich and desperately poor would know more peace and less violence, more love and less hate, more hope and less fear. The Earth could heal and provide a home for our children for generations to come.

Awakening majority

The ideal of a living economy might seem an impossible dream, except for the fact that so many of its elements are already in place. There are millions of for- and not-for-profit enterprises and public initiatives around the world aligned with the values and organizational principles of living economies. They include local independent businesses of all sorts from bookstores to bakeries, land trusts, local organic farms, farmers´ markets, community-supported agriculture initiatives, restaurants specializing in locally grown organic produce, community banks, local currencies, buy-local campaigns, suppliers of fair-traded coffee, independent media, and many more. Indeed, independent, human-scale businesses are by far the majority of all businesses, provide most jobs, create nearly all new jobs, and are the source of most innovation.

It is clear that living economies are a viable alternative to the suicide economy. Nonetheless, the suicide economy continues to dominate our economic, political, social, and cultural lives. So how do we get from a few million living enterprises that are struggling to survive at the fringes of the global suicide economy to a healthy planetary system of thriving living economies? The answer is, ìWe grow it into being.”

No one planned the suicide economy. It is what organizational consultant Margaret Wheatley calls an ìemergent system.” Those responsible for corporate interests grew it into being through their day-to-day effort to increase profits and market share. Step by step over the last several hundred years, they reshaped politics, the legal system, and modern culture to create the interlocking systems of interests and mutual obligations of what has become a suicide economy.

The complex, self-reinforcing dynamics of an emergent system make it virtually impossible to transform from within. Those who attempt to do so are almost invariably marginalized or expelled. When environmental writer Carl Frankel set out to write the book In Earth´s Company on corporate environmentalism, he looked for true environmental champions within the corporate world. He found three. By the time his book was published, all three had been fired.

An emergent system that no longer serves can be displaced only by a more powerful emergent system. According to Wheatley, ìThis means that the work of change is to start over, to organize new local efforts, connect them to each other, and know that their values and practices can emerge as something even stronger.”

This insight is critical to the work ahead. The most promising approach to ridding our societies of the pathological culture and institutions of the suicide economy is to displace them–an idea that at first seems hopelessly naive. Consider, however, that the institutions of the suicide economy are animated by our life energy. They have only the power that we each yield to them. Each time we choose where we shop, work, and invest, we can redirect our life energy from the suicide economy to the emergent living economy.

Choosing living economy enterprises may appear more expensive. Organic produce may cost more than non-organic; a bar of soap may cost more at a local store than at a big chain. That greater expense disappears, however, when we factor in such benefits of the living economy as improved health, caring communities, shorter commutes, meaningful work, cleaner air and water, free time, economic security, and hope for our children´s future. Employment in a smaller enterprise may pay less, but be more secure.

When top mutual funds were returning 20 to 50 percent a year, putting money in a community bank that pays 4 or 5 percent seemed an expensive choice. In a period of market decline, however, an insured CD with a community bank that makes loans to local businesses begins to look like a smart, as well as ethical, choice.

Making it happen

Those interested in helping to grow a living economy in their own community might start with a few simple questions. What do local people and businesses regularly buy that is or could be supplied locally by socially and environmentally responsible independent enterprises? Which existing local businesses are trying to practice living economy values? In what sectors are they clustered? Are there collaborative efforts aligned with living economy values already underway? The answers will point to promising opportunities.

Food is often a logical place to start. Everyone needs and cares about food, and food can be grown almost everywhere, is freshest and most wholesome when local, and is our most intimate connection to the land. In many communities, a farmers´ market or a restaurant serving locally produced organic foods provides a focal point for organizing. In some communities, clusters of businesses devoted to energy conservation, environmental construction, and the local production of solar, wind, and mini-hydro power are forming
living economy webs devoted to advancing local energy independence.

Many groups are working to create the financial infrastructure for living economies. Some are creating interest-free local currencies that encourage and facilitate transactions among local people and enterprises. Others are establishing community banks dedicated to financing local enterprises. The ShoreBank is one of my favorite examples of a living-economy financial institution. The bank is privately owned by a number of individual investors, foundations, and nonprofit organizations dedicated to its social and environmental mission. It finances enterprises and projects that provide jobs, contribute to environmental health, upgrade low- and moderate-income rental housing units, create affordable home ownership opportunities, and develop and staff day-care centers and job-training programs. (See ìA Founder of the Next Economy,” YES! Fall 1999.)

A number of groups are developing a ìfair trade” infrastructure that seeks to improve the conditions of low-income producers of coffee, handicrafts, and other goods. Still others are mobilizing political action to eliminate public subsidies, tax rebates, sweetheart contracts, regulatory exemptions, and giveaways of public resources on which the profits of otherwise inefficient corporate monoliths often depend, and to put in place new rules that favor local independent businesses, stakeholder ownership, living-wage employers, and environmental responsibility. (See the ìNew Rules Project” of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, www.ilsr.org.)

Countless local living-economy initiatives are being launched all across America and around the world, including some by former corporate employees who have chosen to walk away from the suicide economy to start new businesses aligned with their values. The greater the number and diversity of such initiatives, the more rapidly the web of an emergent planetary system of local living economies can grow, and the more readily each of us can redirect our life energy toward living economies in our shopping, employment, and investment choices.

Corporate scandals, a faltering economy, and stock- market declines have dealt a serious blow to the legitimacy of the suicide economy and the big corporations that dominate our lives. Thousands of people are already spreading the message that there is a life-serving alternative that we can grow into being. As suggested by the case examples from Appalachia and Argentina presented in this issue of YES!, living economy initiatives flourish most readily under the conditions of economic adversity that dramatically expose the suicide economy´s false promises of instant, effortless wealth. The United States may be entering such a period. While the ruling elites occupy themselves with seeking to restore faith in the pathological institutions on which their power and privilege were built, the rest of us can embrace this moment of economic failure as an historic opportunity. Through our individual and collective choices, we can grow into being the economic institutions, relationships, and culture of a just, sustainable, and compassionate world of living economies that work for all.

Reposted from YES! Magazine.

Humanity has been plagued by war, crime, and poverty throughout recorded history, and somehow we have muddled through and managed to survive. I think ”muddle” is the word that best describes our nation’s current effort to make us safe from terrorism. This morning I looked back and re-read this essay written in October of 2001. Reposted from Common Dreams. 

This Isn’t the Speech I Expected to Give Today…

Bill Moyers

This isn’t the speech I expected to give today. I intended something else. For the last several years I’ve been taking every possible opportunity to talk about the soul of democracy. ‘Something is deeply wrong with politics today,’ I told anyone who would listen. And I wasn’t referring to the partisan mudslinging, or the negative TV ads, the excessive polling or the empty campaigns. I was talking about something deeper, something troubling at the core of politics. The soul of democracy-the essence of the word itself-is government of, by, and for the people. And the soul of democracy has been dying, drowning in a rising tide of big money contributed by a narrow, unrepresentative elite that has betrayed the faith of citizens in self-government.

This wasn’t something I came to casually, by the way. It’s the big political story of the last quarter century, and I started reporting it as a journalist in the late 70s with the first television documentary about political action committees. More recently, at the Florence and John Schumann Foundation, working with my colleague and son, John Moyers, we saw how environmental causes were being overwhelmed by the private funding of elections that gives big donors unequal and undeserved political influence. That’s why over the past five years the Schumann brothers-Robert and Ford and our board have poured both income and principle into political reform through the Clean Money Initiative-the public funding of elections. I intended to talk about this-about the soul of democracy-and then connect it to my television efforts and your environmental work. That was my intention. That’s the speech I was working on six weeks ago.

But I’m not the same man I was six weeks ago. And you’re not the same audience for whom I was preparing those remarks. We’ve all been changed by what happened on September 11. My friend, Thomas Hearne, the president of Wake Forest University, reminded me recently that while the clock and the calendar make it seem as if our lives unfold hour by hour, day by day, our passage is marked by events-of celebration and crisis. We share those in common. They create the memories which make of us a history, and make of us a people, a nation. Pearl Harbor was that event for my parents’ generation. It changed their world, and it changed them. They never forgot the moment when the news reached them. For my generation it was the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, the dogs and fire hose in Alabama. Those events broke our hearts. We healed, but scars remain.

For this generation, that moment will be September 11th, 2001-the worst act of terrorism in our nation’s history. It has changed the country. It has changed us. That’s what terrorists intend. Terrorists don’t want to own our land, wealth, monuments, buildings, fields, or streams. They’re not after tangible property. Sure, they aim to annihilate the targets they strike. But their real goal is to get inside our heads, our psyche, and to deprive us-the survivors-of peace of mind, of trust, of faith; they aim to prevent us from believing again in a world of mercy, justice, and love, or working to bring that better world to pass.

This is their real target, to turn our imaginations into Afghanistans, where they can rule by fear. Once they possess us, they are hard to exorcise.

This summer our daughter and son-in-law adopted a baby boy. On September 11th our son-in-law passed through the shadow of the World Trade Center to his office up the block. He got there in time to see the eruption of fire and smoke. He saw the falling bodies. He saw the people jumping to their deaths. His building was evacuated and for long awful moments he couldn’t reach his wife, our daughter, to say he was okay. She was in agony until he finally got through-and even then he couldn’t get home to his family until the next morning. It took him several days fully to get his legs back. Now, in a matter-of-fact voice, our daughter tells us how she often lies awake at night, wondering where and when it might happen again, going to the computer at three in the morning-her baby asleep in the next room-to check out what she can about bioterrorism, germ warfare, anthrax, and the vulnerability of children. Beyond the carnage left by the sneak attack terrorists create another kind of havoc, invading and despoiling a new mother’s deepest space, holding her imagination hostage to the most dreadful possibilities.

None of us is spared. The building where my wife and I produce our television programs is in midtown Manhattan, just over a mile from ground zero. It was evacuated immediately after the disaster although the two of us remained with other colleagues to help keep the station on the air. Our building was evacuated again late in the evening a day later because of a bomb scare at the Empire State building nearby. We had just ended a live broadcast for PBS when the security officers swept through and ordered everyone out of the building. As we were making our way down the stairs I took Judith’s arm and was suddenly struck by the thought: is this the last time I’ll touch her? Could our marriage of almost fifty years end here, on this dim and bare staircase? I ejected the thought forcibly from my mind, like a bouncer removing a rude intruder; I shoved it out of my consciousness by sheer force of will. But in the first hours of morning, it crept back.

Returning from Washington on the train last week, I looked up and for the first time in days saw a plane in the sky. And then another, and another-not nearly as many as I used to on that same journey. But so help me, every plane I saw, and every plane I see today, invokes unwelcome images and terrifying thoughts. Unwelcome images, terrifying thoughts: time bombs planted in our heads by terrorists, our own private Afghanistans.

I wish I could find the wisdom in this. Then our time together this morning might have been more profitable for you. But wisdom is a very elusive thing. Someone told me once that we often have the experience but miss the wisdom. Wisdom comes, if at all, slowly, painfully, and only after deep reflection. Perhaps when we gather next year the wisdom will have arranged itself like the beautiful colors of a stilled kaleidoscope, and we will look back on September 11 and see it differently.

But I haven’t been ready for reflection. I have wanted to stay busy, on the go, or on the run, perhaps, from the need to cope with the reality that just a few subway stops south of where I get off at Penn Station in midtown Manhattan, five thousand people died in a matter of minutes. One minute they’re pulling off their jackets, shaking Sweet ‘n Low into their coffee, adjusting the picture of a child or sweetheart or spouse in a frame on their desk, booting up their computer-and in the next, it’s all over for them. I’ve been collecting obituaries of the victims. Practically every day the New York Times runs compelling little profiles of the dead and missing, and I’ve been keeping them. Not out of some macabre desire to stare at death, but to see if I might recognize a face, a name, some old acquaintance, a former colleague, even a stranger I might have seen occasionally on the subway or street. That was my original purpose.

But as the file has grown I realize what an amazing montage it is of life, an unforgettable portrait of the America those terrorists wanted to shatter. I study each little story for its contribution to the mosaic of my country, its particular revelation about the nature of democracy, the people with whom we share it.

Luis Bautista was one. It was his birthday, and he had the day off from Windows on the World, the restaurant high atop the World Trade Center. But back home in Peru his family depended on Luis for the money he had been sending them since he arrived in New York two years ago speaking only Spanish, and there was the tuition he would soon be paying to study at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. So on the eleventh of September Luis Bautista was putting in overtime. He was 24.

William Steckman was 56. For thirty five of those years he took care of NBC’s transmitter at One World Trade Center, working the night shift because it let him spend time during the day with his five children and to fix things up around the house. His shift ended at six a.m. but this morning his boss asked him to stay on to help install some new equipment, and William Steckman said sure.

Elizabeth Holmes lived in Harlem with her son and jogged every morning around Central Park where I often go walking, and I have been wondering if Elizabeth Holmes and I perhaps crossed paths some morning. I figure we were kindred souls. She too, was a Baptist, and sang in the choir at the Canaan Baptist church. She was expecting a ring from her fiancÈ at Christmas.

Linda Luzzicone and Ralph Gerhardt were planning their wedding, too. They had both sets of parents come to New York in August to meet for the first time and talk about the plans. They had discovered each other in nearby cubicles on the 104th floor of One World Trade Center and fell in love. They were working there when the terrorists struck.

Mon Jahn-bul-lie came here from Albania. Because his name was hard to pronounce his friends called him by the Cajun “Jambalay” and he grew to like it. He lived with his three sons in the Bronx and was supposed to have retired when he turned 65 last year, but he was so attached to the building and so enjoyed the company of the other janitors that he often showed up an hour before work just to shoot the bull. In my mind’s eye I can see him that morning, horsing around with his buddies.

Fred Scheffold liked his job, too-Chief of the 12th battalion in Harlem. He loved going into fires and he loved his men. But he never told his daughters in the suburbs about the bad stuff in all the fires he had fought over the years. He didn’t want to worry them. This morning, his shift had just ended and he was starting home when the alarm rang. He jumped into the truck with the others and at One World Trade Center he pushed through the crowds to the staircase heading for the top. The last time anyone saw him alive he was heading for the top. While hundreds poured past him going down through the flames and smoke, Fred Scheffold just kept going up.

Now you know why I can’t give the speech I was working on.

Talking about my work in television would be too parochial. And what’s happened since the attacks would seem to put the lie to my fears about the soul of democracy. Americans have rallied together in a way that I cannot remember since World War Two. In real and instinctive ways we have felt touched? singed — by the fires that brought down those buildings, even those of us who did not directly lose a loved one. Great and low alike, we have been humbled by a renewed sense of our common mortality. Those planes the terrorists turned into suicide bombers cut through a complete cross-section of America-stockbrokers and dishwashers, bankers and secretaries, lawyers and janitors, Hollywood producers and new immigrants, urbanites and suburbanites alike. One community near where I live in New Jersey lost twenty-three residents. A single church near our home lost eleven members of the congregation. Eighty nations are represented among the dead. This catastrophe has reminded us of a basic truth at the heart of our democracy: no matter our wealth or status or faith, we are all equal before the law, in the voting booth, and when death rains down from the sky.

We have also been reminded that despite years of scandals and political corruption, despite the stream of stories of personal greed and pirates in Gucci’s scamming the treasury, despite the retreat from the public sphere and the turn toward private privilege, despite squalor for the poor and gated communities for the rich, we have been reminded that the great mass of Americans have not yet given up on the idea of ‘We, the People.’ And they have refused to accept the notion, promoted so diligently by our friends at the Heritage Foundation and by Grover Norquist and his right-wing ilk, that government-the public service- should be shrunk to a size where they can drown it in the bathtub (that’s what Norquist said is their goal.) These right-wingers at Heritage and elsewhere, by the way, earlier this year teamed up with the deep-pocket bankers who finance them, to stop the United States from cracking down on terrorist money havens. As TIME Magazine reports, thirty industrial nations were ready to tighten the screws on offshore financial centers whose banks have the potential to hide and often help launder billions of dollars for drug cartels, global crime syndicates-and groups like Osama bin Laden’s Al-Quaeda organization. Not all off-shore money is linked to crime or terrorism; much of it comes from wealthy people who are hiding money to avoid taxation. And right-wingers believe in nothing if not in avoiding taxation. So they and the bankers’ lobbyists went to work to stop the American government from participating in the crackdown on dirty money, arguing that closing down tax havens in effect leads to higher taxes on the poor people trying to hide their money. I am not kidding; it’s all on the record. The president of the Heritage Foundation spent an hour, according to the New York Times, with Treasury Secretary O’Neill, and Texas bankers pulled their strings at the White House, and presto, the Bush administration folded and pulled out of the international campaign against tax havens.

How about that for patriotism? Better terrorists get their dirty money than tax cheaters be prevented from hiding their money. And that from people who wrap themselves in the flag and sing the Star Spangled Banner with gusto. These true believers in the god of the market would leave us to the ruthless cruelty of unfettered monopolistic capital where even the law of the jungle breaks down.

But listen: today’s heroes are public servants. The twenty-year-old dot.com instant millionaires and the pugnacious pundits of tabloid television and the crafty celebrity stock pickers on the cable channels have all been exposed for what they are-barnacles on the hulk of the great ship of state. In their stead we have those brave firefighters and policemen and Port Authority workers and emergency rescue personnel, public employees all, most of them drawing a modest middle-class income for extremely dangerous work. They have caught our imaginations not only for their heroic deeds but because we know so many people like them, people we took for granted. For once, our TV screens have been filled with the modest declarations of average Americans coming to each other’s aid.

I find this good, and thrilling, and sobering. It could offer a new beginning, a renewal of civil values that could leave our society stronger and more together than ever, working on common goals for the public good.

The playwright Tony Kushner wrote more than a decade ago: ‘There are moments in history when the fabric of everyday life unravels, and there is this unstable dynamism that allows for incredible social change in short periods of time. People and the world they’re living in can be utterly transformed, either for the good or the bad, or some mixture of the two.’

He’s right. This could go either way. Here’s one sighting: in the wake of September 11th; there’s been a heartening change in how Americans view their government. For the first time in more than thirty years a majority of people say we trust the Federal Government to do the right thing ‘just about always’ or at least ‘most of the time.’ It’s as if the clock has been rolled back to the early sixties, before Vietnam and Watergate took such a toll on the gross national psychology. This newfound hope for public collaboration is based in part on how people view what the government has done in response to the attacks. I have to say that overall, President Bush has acted with commendable resolve and restraint. But this is a case where yet again the people are ahead of the politicians. They’re expressing greater faith in government right now because the long-standing gap between our ruling elites and ordinary citizens has seemingly disappeared. To most Americans, government right now doesn’t mean a faceless bureaucrat or a politician auctioning access to the highest bidder. It means a courageous rescuer or brave soldier. Instead of representatives spending their evenings clinking glasses with fat cats, they are out walking among the wounded. In Washington it seemed momentarily possible that the political class had been jolted out of old habits. Some old partisan rivalries and arguments fell by the wayside as our representatives acted decisively on a forty billion dollar fund to rebuild New York. Adversaries like Dennis Hastert and Dick Gephardt were linking arms. There was even a ten-day moratorium on political fundraisers. I was beginning to be optimistic that the mercenary culture of Washington might finally be on its knees.

But I once asked a friend on Wall Street what he thought about the market. “I’m optimistic,” he said. “Then why do you look so worried?” And he answered: “Because I’m not sure my optimism is justified.”

I’m not, either. There are, alas, other sightings to report. It didn’t take long for the wartime opportunists-the mercenaries of Washington, the lobbyists, lawyers, and political fundraisers-to crawl out of their offices on K Street determined to grab what they can for their clients. While in New York we are still attending memorial services for firemen and police, while everywhere Americans’ cheeks are still stained with tears, while the President calls for patriotism, prayers and piety, the predators of Washington are up to their old tricks in the pursuit of private plunder at public expense. In the wake of this awful tragedy wrought by terrorism, they are cashing in.

Would you like to know the memorial they would offer the almost six thousand people who died in the attacks? Or the legacy they would provide the ten thousand children who lost a parent in the horror? How do they propose to fight the long and costly war on terrorism America must now undertake?

Why, restore the three-martini lunch-that will surely strike fear in the heart of Osama bin Laden. You think I’m kidding, but bringing back the deductible lunch is one of the proposals on the table in Washington right now. There are members of Congress who believe you should sacrifice in this time of crisis by paying for lobbyists’ long lunches. And cut capital gains for the wealthy, naturally-that’s America’s patriotic duty, too. And while we’re at it, don’t forget to eliminate the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, enacted fifteen years ago to prevent corporations from taking so many credits and deductions that they owed little if any taxes. But don’t just repeal their minimum tax; give those corporations a refund for all the minimum tax they have ever been assessed.

You look incredulous. But that’s taking place in Washington even as we meet here in Brainerd this morning. What else can America do to strike at the terrorists? Why, slip in a special tax break for poor General Electric, and slip inside the Environmental Protection Agency while everyone’s distracted and torpedo the recent order to clean the Hudson River of PCBs. Don’t worry about NBC, CNBC, or MSNBC reporting it; they’re all in the GE family.

It’s time for Churchillian courage, we’re told. So how would this crowd assure that future generations will look back and say ‘This was their finest hour’? That’s easy. Give those coal producers freedom to pollute. And shovel generous tax breaks to those giant energy companies; and open the Alaskan wilderness to drilling-that’s something to remember the 11th of September for. And while the red, white and blue wave at half-mast over the land of the free and the home of the brave-why, give the President the power to discard democratic debate and the rule-of-law concerning controversial trade agreements, and set up secret tribunals to run roughshod over local communities trying to protect their environment and their health. It’s happening as we meet. It’s happening right now.

If I sound a little bitter about this, I am; the President rightly appeals every day for sacrifice. But to these mercenaries sacrifice is for suckers. So I am bitter, yes, and sad. Our business and political class owes us better than this. After all, it was they who declared class war twenty years ago and it was they who won. They’re on top. If ever they were going to put patriotism over profits, if ever they were going to practice the magnanimity of winners, this was the moment. To hide now behind the flag while ripping off a country in crisis fatally – fatally! -separates them from the common course of American life.

Some things just don’t change. Once again the Republican Party has lived down to Harry Truman’s description of the GOP as guardians of privilege. And as for Truman’s Democratic Party-the party of the New Deal and the Fair Deal-well, it breaks my heart to report that the Democratic National Committee has used the terrorist attacks to call for widening the soft money loophole in our election laws. How about that for a patriotic response to terrorism?

Mencken got it right-the journalist H. L. Mencken, who said that when you hear some men talk about their love of country, it’s a sign they expect to be paid for it.

Understandably, in the hours after the attacks many environmental organizations stepped down from aggressively pressing their issues. Greenpeace canceled its 30th anniversary celebration. The Sierra Club stopped all advertising, phone banks and mailing. The Environmental Working Group and the PIRGs postponed a national report on chlorination in drinking water. That was the proper way to observe a period of mourning.

Furthermore, in work like this you have to read and respect the mood of a country in crisis, or a misspoken word, even a modest misstep, could lose you the public’s ear for years to come. But the polluters and their political cronies accepted no such constraints. Just one day after the attack, one day into the maelstrom of horror, loss, and grief, Republican senators called for prompt consideration of the President’s proposal to subsidize the country’s largest and richest energy companies. While America was mourning they were marauding. One congressman even suggested that eco-terrorists might be behind the attacks. And with that smear he and his kind went on the offensive in Congress, attempting to attach to a defense bill massive subsidies for the oil, coal, gas and nuclear companies. To a defense bill! What a shameless insult to patriotism! What a slander on the sacrifice of our armed forces! To pile corporate welfare totaling billions of dollars onto a defense bill in an emergency like this is repugnant to the nostrils and a scandal against democracy!

But this is their game. They’re counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They’re counting on you to be standing at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket!

Let’s face it: they present citizens with no options but to climb back in the ring. We are in what educators call “a teachable moment.” And we’ll lose it if we roll over and shut up. What’s at stake is democracy. Democracy wasn’t cancelled on the 11th of September, but democracy won’t survive if citizens turn into lemmings. Yes, the President is our Commander-in-chief, and in hunting down and destroying the terrorists who are trying to destroy us, we are “all the President’s men”-as Henry Kissinger put it after the bombing of Cambodia. But we are not the President’s minions. If in the name of the war on terrorism President Bush hands the state over to the energy industry, it’s every patriot’s duty to join the local opposition. Even in war, politics is about who gets what and who doesn’t. If the mercenaries in Washington try to exploit the emergency and America’s good faith to grab what they wouldn’t get through open debate in peace time, the disloyalty will not be in our dissent but in our subservience. The greatest sedition would be our silence.

Yes, there’s a fight going on-against terrorists around the globe, but just as certainly there’s a fight going on here at home, to decide the kind of country this will be during and after the war on terrorism. To the Irishman’s question-’Is this a private fight or can anyone get in it?” the answer has to be: “Come on in. It’s our economy, our environment, our country, and our future. If we don’t fight, who will?”

What should our strategy be? Here are a couple of suggestions. During two trips to Washington in the last ten days I heard people talking mostly about two big issues of policy: economic stimulus and the national security. How do we renew our economy and safeguard our nation? Guess what? Those are your issues, and you are uniquely equipped to address them with powerful language and persuasive argument.

For example: if you want to fight for the environment, don’t hug a tree; hug an economist. Hug the economist who tells you that fossil fuels are not only the third most heavily subsidized economic sector after road transportation and agriculture-they also promote vast inefficiencies. Hug the economist who tells you that the most efficient investment of a dollar is not in fossil fuels but in renewable energy sources that not only provide new jobs but cost less over time. Hug the economist who tells you that the price system matters; it’s potentially the most potent tool of all for creating social change. Look what California did this summer in responding to its recent energy crisis with a price structure that rewards those who conserve and punishes those who don’t. Californians cut their electric consumption by up to 15%.

Do we want to send the terrorists a message? Go for conservation. Go for clean, home-grown energy. And go for public health. If we reduce emissions from fossil fuel, we will cut the rate of asthma among children. Healthier children and a healthier economy-how about that as a response to terrorism?

As for national security, well, it’s time to expose the energy plan before Congress for the dinosaur it is. Everyone knows America needs to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel. But this energy plan is more of the same: more subsidies for the rich, more pollution, more waste, more inefficiency. Let’s get the message out.

Start with John Adams’ wakeup call. The head of NRDC says the terrorist attacks spell out in frightful terms that America’s unchecked consumption of oil has become our Achilles heel. It constrains our military options in the face of terror. It leaves our economy dangerously vulnerable to price shocks. It invites environmental degradation, ecological disasters, and potentially catastrophic climate change. Go to Tompaine.com and you will find the two simple facts we need to get to the American people: first, the money we pay at the gasoline pump helps prop up oil-rich sponsors of terrorism like Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-Quaddifi. Second, a big reason we spend so much money policing the Middle East-$30 billion every year, by one reckoning-has to do with our dependence on the oil there. So John Adams got it right-the single most important thing environmentalists can do to ensure America’s national security is to fight to reduce our nation’s dependence on oil, whether imported or domestic.

But don’t stop there.

Before the 11th of September the nuclear power industry was salivating at the prospect of the government giving it limited liability for the risks of the meltdown or other nuclear accident. We were told by Vice President Cheney that nuclear power was a “safe technology” that could help alleviate energy shortages and not contribute to greenhouse gases.

But when Dick Cheney invited the energy companies and their lobbyists to write his energy plan, he didn’t reckon on terrorism or the advice of Harvey Wassermann. Harvey Wassermann has spent years studying these issues and writing about America’s experience with atomic radiation. He tells us that one or both planes that crashed into the World Trade Center could easily have obliterated the two atomic reactors now operating at Indian Point, about 40 miles up the Hudson River. Regulations put out by the nuclear regulatory commission regarding plant safety don’t address that sort of event, and neither plant was designed to withstand such crashes. Until now Harvey Wassermann’s scenario was unthinkable. Had one or both of those jets hit one or both of the operating reactors at Indian Point, the ensuing cloud of radiation would have dwarfed the ones at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. At the very least the massive impact and hellish jet fuel fire would destroy the human ability to control the plants’ functions. Vital cooling systems, back-up power generators and communications networks would crumble. The assault would not require a large jet. The safety systems are extremely complex and virtually indefensible. One or more could be wiped out with a wide range of easily deployed small aircraft, ground-based weapons, truck bombs or even chemical/biological assaults aimed at the operating work force. Dozens of US reactors have repeatedly failed even modest security tests over the years. And even heightened wartime standards cannot guarantee protection of the vast, supremely sensitive controls required for reactor safety. Without continuous monitoring and guaranteed water flow, the thousands of tons of radioactive rods in the cores and the thousands more stored in those fragile pools would rapidly melt into super-hot radioactive balls of lava that would burn into the ground and the water table and, ultimately, the Hudson. Striking water, they would blast gigantic billows of horribly radioactive steam into the atmosphere. The radioactive clouds would then enshroud New York, New Jersey, New England, and carry deep into the Atlantic and up into Canada and across to Europe and around the globe again and again. The immediate damage would render thousands of the world’s most populous and expensive square miles permanently uninhabitable. All five boroughs of New York City would be an apocalyptic wasteland. All real estate and economic value would be poisonously radioactive throughout the entire region. Who knows how many people would die? As at Three Mile Island, where thousands of farm and wild animals died in heaps, and as at Chernobyl, where soil, water and plant life have been hopelessly irradiated, natural ecosystems on which human and all other life depends would be permanently and irrevocably destroyed; spiritually, psychologically, financially, ecologically, our nation would never recover.

This is what we missed by a mere forty miles near New York City on September 11th. And remember-there are 103 of these potential bombs of the apocalypse now operating in the United States. 103.

I know you see the magnitude of the challenge. I know you see what we’re up against. I know you get it-the work that we must do. It’s why you mustn’t lose heart. Your adversaries will call you unpatriotic for speaking the truth when conformity reigns. Ideologues will smear you for challenging the official view of reality. Mainstream media will ignore you, and those gasbags on cable TV and the radio talk shows will ridicule and vilify you. But I urge you to hold to these words: “In the course of fighting the present fire, we must not abandon our efforts to create fire-resistant structures of the future.” Those words were written by my friend Randy Kehler more than ten years ago, as America geared up to fight the Gulf War. They ring as true today. Those fire-resistant structures must include an electoral system that is no longer dominated by big money, where the voices and problems of average people are attended on a fair and equal basis. They must include an energy system that is more sustainable, and less dangerous. And they must include a media that takes its responsibility to inform us as seriously as its interest in entertaining us.

My own personal response to Osama bin Laden is not grand, or rousing, or dramatic. All I know to do is to keep doing as best I can the craft that has been my calling now for most of my adult life. My colleagues and I have rededicated ourselves to the production of several environmental reports that were in progress before September 11. As a result of our two specials this year-Trade Secrets and Earth on Edge-PBS is asking all of public television’s production teams to focus on the environment for two weeks around Earth Day next April. Our documentaries will anchor that endeavor. One will report on how an obscure provision in the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) can turn the rule of law upside down and undermine a community’s health and environment. Our four-part series on America’s First River looks at how the Hudson River shaped America’s conservation movement a century ago and, more recently, the modern environmental movement. We’re producing another documentary on the search for alternative energy sources, another on children and the environment the questions scientists, researchers and pediatricians are asking about children’s vulnerability to hazards in the environment-and we are also making a stab at updating the health of the global environment that we launched last June with Earth on Edge.

What does Osama bin Laden have to do with these? He has given me not one but five thousand and more reasons for journalism to signify on issues that matter. I began this talk with the names of some of them- the victims who died on the 11th of September. I did so because I never want to forget the humanity lost in the horror. I never want to forget the e-mail Forrester Church told me about-sent by a doomed employee in the World Trade Center who, just before his life was over, wrote: “Thank you for being such a great friend.” I never want to forget the man and woman holding hands as they leap together to their death. I never want to forget those firemen who just kept going up; they just kept going up. And I never want to forget what Forrester said of this disaster-that the very worst of which human beings are capable can bring out the very best.

I’ve learned a few things in my 67 years. One thing I’ve learned that the kingdom of the human heart is large. In addition to hate, it contains courage, in response to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, my parents’ generation waged and won a great war, then came home to establish a more prosperous and just America. I inherited the benefits of their courage. So did you. The ordeal was great but prevail they did.

We will, too, if we rise to the spiritual and moral challenge of survival. Michael Berenbaum has defined that challenge for me. As President of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, he worked with people who escaped the Holocaust. Here’s what he says: “The question is what to do with the very fact of survival. Over time survivors will be able to answer that question not by a statement about the past but by what they do with the future. Because they have faced death, many will have learned what is more important: Life itself, love, family, community. The simple things we have all taken for granted will bear witness to that reality. The survivors will not be defined by the lives they have led until now but by the lives that they will lead from now on. For the experience of near death to have ultimate meaning, it must take shape in how one rebuilds from the ashes. Such for the individual; so, too, for the nation.”

We’re survivors, you and I. We will be defined not by the lives we led until the 11th of September, but by the lives we will lead from now on. So go home-make the best grants you’ve ever made. And the biggest-we have too little time to pinch pennies. Back the committed and courageous people in the field-and back them with media to spread their message. Stick your own neck out. Let your work be charged with passion, and your life with a sense of mission. For when all is said and done, the most important grant you’ll ever make is the gift of yourself, to the work at hand.

This morning, I have another offering from John Brand. He lives in Texas and I grew up in Oklahoma, so his introduction rings true for me. Originally posted at The Yellow Times.

Psych 101: Singing Hymns in the Hot Tub

John Brand, D.Min., J.D.

Some friends of mine told me of a wonderful weekend they spent at a Bed and Breakfast in the Texas Hill Country. They took advantage of the available hot tub. Now they did not tell me that they enjoyed this little escapade “au naturel.” But let’s just assume they did – it certainly adds a little spice to our imagination. They did confide that they had a good bottle of wine which they thoroughly enjoyed emptying. Then in the midst of this Bacchanalian venture they started singing Southern Baptist hymns.

Now there can be nothing more incongruous than singing Southern Baptist hymns while drinking wine in a hot tub. The participants don’t even have to be in their birthday suits to highlight the polarity of this scene. Those readers unfamiliar with Southern Baptist mores need to know that good Southern Baptists do not imbibe and cavort around in hot tubs. It just ain’t done! To be in this sinful state and sing hymns is the height of contradiction.

Does it take too much of an imagination that my friends in this joyous state of abandonment were entertaining further thoughts of personal physical intimacy? Not in my book it doesn’t. While their minds were anticipating earthly pleasures, their voices sang hallelujahs to God. I submit to you this a parable of the schizoid condition of present-day America. I am not saying that enjoyment of life and spirituality are mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact, when enjoying a beautiful sunset or a Rubens painting, Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto or moments of intimacy with my wife, I experience a profound sense of spirituality. I am saying that cavorting around and singing Baptist hymns are two totally incompatible activities.

I am suggesting that much of present-day America finds itself in such a schizoid state. We fly flags everywhere to evidence our patriotism. With sincere feelings we recite the Pledge of Allegiance. We proclaim with pride “Öwith liberty and justice for all.” But then we say, “Whoa, we don’t want liberty and justice for those who criticize the President.” As a matter of fact, several administration officials have stated that censure of any of President Bush’s plans, pronouncements, executive orders, edicts, decisions and determinations is just downright unpatriotic. So, what does the phrase “Liberty for all” mean when we can’t disagree with our leader? Are we singing a hymn and then cavorting around in a hot tub?

We proclaim that there is justice for all in the land of the free and the brave! But it seems to me there is more justice for some than there is for others. With one wave of the hand, the most insidious Act ever passed in the entire history of the United States, the USA Patriot Act, withdraws justice from anyone who appears to intimidate or coerce a civilian population. Now what for heaven’s sake does it mean that someone “appears” to intimidate civilians?

Appearance does not require that I hold a Colt .45 to your head and threaten to kill you. No, if my activities just appear to be intimidating, then I am guilty of having violated the Patriot Act. Who or what is this nebulous “civilian population” that feels intimidated by my acts? Do my columns criticizing some of the Administration’s policies appear to be intimidating? Well, to someone who believes in the Bill of Rights, they are just an invitation for possible discussion. To truly patriotic individuals they are just food for thought. To a super-patriot, “them there is intimidating words.” Then such an emotionally charged self-defined defender of American values might just accuse me of being a terrorist. What is the distance between someone who actually brandishes a weapon terrorizing someone and the individual whose speech appears to be threatening to someone who wouldn’t know the difference between the Magna Carta and Joseph Stalin? I submit to you that in our schizoid state, that distance is becoming shorter and shorter all the time.

While we are singing hymns to our Founding Fathers, Congress at the urging of the President, gave the Attorney General the right to decide who is a suspected terrorist. All the Attorney General has to do is to certify that he believes that someone is a suspected terrorist. No proof needs to be provided. The Attorney General’s word is all that is needed. No court order is needed to detain someone accused of being a suspected terrorist in jail for up to six months incrementally. That could mean a lifetime in jail, one six months detention after another. And no legal due process steps have ever to be taken. To further evidence the mental sickness of our nation even more, the Act states that the action of the Attorney General is not subject to review by any court! Boy, if that isn’t singing Baptist hymns while cavorting around in the hot tub, I don’t know what would be.

Of course, I am always much more concerned about possible underlying reasons for what we do than to describe the actual results of our folly. What in the world would cause some leaders of our nation to salute the flag and then do everything in their power to destroy the essence of what that flag symbolizes?

It seems strange that the answer might be found in an episode that took place some years ago on a farm in Upstate New York. Paul M. MacLean, M.D., the eminent researcher of the evolutionary development of the human brain, kept a flock of ducks on his summer place. One evening he noted one duck being attacked by other members of the flock. When he went to see what the commotion was all about, he noticed that the animal being assaulted had a bloody spot on its head. The other ducks kept pecking away at that blemish. The following day, MacLean painted a red spot on the head of another duck. Sure enough, the scene of the previous day repeated itself. The flock again attacked the duck with the blemish.

Any chicken or turkey farmer has seen similar episodes many times. Members of the flock will attack a chicken or a turkey that happens to be injured and bleeding. MacLean postulates that deep within a very primitive part of the brain is a neural alarm system ringing a bell when confronted with a strange or unfamiliar situation. It can be postulated that alerting a creature in the face of the unknown is a survival mechanism. It is as though the brain was signaling, “This is strange! You don’t know what it is. You need to protect yourself against this potential danger.” Humans, no less than ducks, have a similar survival mode. In the face of the unknown we become defensive and protective.

I propose that hostility between tribes, races, or other diverse groups has its genesis in this ancient neural connection in the brain. The difference does not even have to be physical in nature, such as white skin vs. black skin. Differences arousing the defense mechanism can be conceptual, ideological, or religious in nature. Nationalistic leaders have taken advantage of this predisposition of the human brain to rouse their followers into action: Gentiles vs. Jews, Palestinians vs. Israelis, Irish Protestants vs. Irish Catholics, Capitalists vs. Social Democrats. It doesn’t take much to arouse this “blemish” factor in human beings.

At the drop of a hat, we sing patriotic hymns, wave the flag, and with almost the same breath, deny someone holding different ideas the protection of the Bill of Rights. An interesting fact is that religious wars, the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, etc., etc., were not conducted to eliminate criminal elements. They were conducted to kill those whose mere ideas were different. A lot of good people were killed just because they interpreted the idea of God in different ways. Hell, we sing Baptist hymns while cavorting around in the hot tub all the time.

One of the earliest recorded events in which a leader summoned his people into action by waving the blemish factor before them is recorded in the book of Joshua, chapter 24. Joshua seeking to rally his tribe around his Lord said, “Choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served. . . or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” The implication is that “our” Lord is far better than the gods of the Amorites. It is easy to coalesce a group into solidarity by pointing out the differences existing between it and others.

Then an interesting psychological phenomenon occurs. People holding a particular point of view achieve their sense of selfhood by comparing themselves to others rather than deriving their self-worth from within their own essence. The sense of personal identification is derived through stressing and emphasizing seeming differences. It is these differences rather than an individualistic sense of integrity that validates such a person’s selfhood. We, who serve the god of our ancestors, are better than the Amorites. Never mind that some who serve the god of the ancestors may take advantage of members of their own tribe. Never mind that some Amorites have a very high sense of personal morality. The assumption is that they are Amorites and therefore they are full of blemishes. We are Israelites therefore we are o.k.

As tribes become successful states, the blemish factor applies to differences of opinions among various groups within the state. Capitalists see blemishes in labor and labor sees blemishes in capitalists. Once the blemish factor is established, it is very difficult for these groups to work with each other. Deep emotions are attached to our preferences and prevent productive co-operation. Both sides fail to realize that each one needs the other to make a whole. Capital without labor is simply an idea. Labor without capital cannot make a living. The reality of mutual needs is blotted out by some stupid subconscious assumption generated in brain tissues dating its origin millions of years ago. No wonder our country is singing hymns while frolicking around in a hot tub.

The impact of the blemish factor affects many facets of our lives. If my sense of importance arises from comparing myself to others, I will drive hard to create a deep chasm between the others and myself. If I am a corporate executive, I will seek to attain earnings that are several times as large as that of the peons who work for me. If I make 100 times as much as that hourly temp, then I am 100 times better than he is. If Bill Gates makes a bit more than Kenny Boy then Bill is a better man. But it isn’t only among the super-rich that this game is played. If I live in West Austin, I am better than all these blemish-ridden folks in East Austin. If I drive a gas-guzzler, I am a person with fewer blemishes than one who drives an economy car. Don’t tell me that I am making all this up. TV ads imply that you really are someone if you are driving a big van.

Folks in public office often derive their sense of self-hood from the mere fact of being elected. Then everyone who represents a different point-of-view is seen as a person with a blemish. These are folks who need to be eliminated. The stronger the need for deriving self-identity by comparison with others, the more intense the need to eliminate all blemished folks. If one derives one’s basic sense of being by pecking at everyone who is suspected of having a bloody spot, all those who hold different opinions have bloody spots and need to be neutralized. Having eliminated them fills the victor with a short-lived sense of accomplishment. However, because the real sense of self is lacking, soon this inner void cries out for more victims to be eliminated. Under the banner of doing away with all those who are considered unpatriotic or suspected of being terrorists, a never-ending supply of folks with blemishes is assured.

The victor sings hymns and splashes about in his little hot tub. Except this tub is filled with the proverbial blood of those whom he proclaims to be his enemies.

Of course, the blemish factor causes us to make value judgments. Whatever my particular point of view happens to be, I adjudge as right and good. Ergo, anyone differing from my position must be wrong and bad. And so, the political machinery of the potentially greatest nation on earth grinds to a standstill. Because neither side is willing to see its need for the other, much legislation is myopic and eventually self-destructive. There is no Republican America. There is no Democratic America. There is only an America based on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. To be sure, these are living documents and must be interpreted against current needs and present problems. But the solution is neither Democratic nor Republican in nature. The solution lies in the effort to be and to become humane.

But as long as we see blemishes in each other, we are cooking up a stew of mutually self-destructive agendas. The President of the United States when taking office swears to uphold its Constitution. No one can uphold our Constitution and see blemishes in everyone who has different ideas. It seems to be that our sitting President sees blemishes in anyone who begs to differ with his agenda. He sees his program as a God-given mission. Therefore anyone opposing him must be silenced by any and all means possible. That is not my understanding of what the barons fought for in 1215 at Runnymede and found a most exemplary manifestation on July 4, 1776.

It seems that the present-day power structure in politics, business and religion is singing mighty hymns of patriotism while swigging away their bottle of booze in their hot tubs.

This is the final and fourth in our series of articles by John Brand.  See: Part One,  Part Two, and Part Three. These were originally posted at The Yellow Times.

The Human Theater of the Absurd –IV

John Brand, D.Min., J.D.

This is the final in my series outlining the evolutionary development of the human brain. There will be few references to current political/economic/religious matters because the behavioral traits embedded in the prefrontal cortex are abysmally absent from our society.

The addition of the prefrontal cortex to the human brain allows our species to take the big step from merely being human to becoming humane. MacLean writes about this latest 100 cc addition to our brains, happening a mere 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, in A Mind of Three Minds, (pp.339-340):

ÖIn the progress from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon man, one sees the human forehead develop from a low brow to a high brow. Underneath that heightened brow is the prefrontal cortex. There are clinical indications that the prefrontal cortex provides foresight in planning for ourselves and others, and also helps us gain insight into the feelings of others. The prefrontal cortex is the only neocortex that looks inward to the inside world. Ö In designing for the first time a creature that shows concern for suffering of other living things, nature seems to have attempted an 180-degree turnabout from what had been a reptile-eat-reptile and a dog-eat-dog world.

It is at this point that the case for the existence of a caring God makes its strongest case. A change from a dog-eat-dog world could only come about, it might be reasoned, through divine intervention. The seeming dissimilarity between all other creatures and humans is so vast that only an intervention contravening all past history could have brought about this radical change. I used to believe that at one time in my life. Later studies changed my mind.

I am indebted to Robert Wright’s book The Moral Animal for my change of assumptions about the prefrontal cortex. On page 54, he supports the idea that more recently developed brain functions simply enable lower brain centers to operate more efficiently.

The prefrontal cortex gave our sires a “leg up” to compete more successfully. For instance, this new cortex provided the ability for long-range planning. This is something far superior to a squirrel’s mere instinct to store up acorns for the winter months. The ability to plan permitted our forebears to make complicated plans for a hunt. In its process, evolution gave Cro-Magnons a better chance at survival.

Along with the capability for long-range planning, the prefrontal cortex endowed our species with the ability to empathize. Let me give you a possibly humorous scenario for the development of the ability to sense the feeling of others.

Cartoons depict an early Cro-Magnon dragging the object of his affections into his cave. The image shows a brute male, club in hand, dragging his lady fair by her hair. Once they were in the cave, one does not need much imagination to develop the next step of this scenario. Dragging a female into a cave seems to be a hard and laborious task. There must be a better way. There was. Empathy was the key.

One day our protagonist saw his lady fair stopping to smell a flower. His developing prefrontal cortex gave him the ability to realize that she enjoyed smelling the carnations. He identified with her. In the constant battle to mate with the most desirable female, a new little gene sneaked into the male’s DNA. It had the capacity to sense the feelings of another person. It gave him an advantage in the quest to have children by her. After all, what better genes could there be to ensure perpetuation of the species than those of the precursors of Troy Aikman, physical strength and intelligence, and those of Martha Stewart, the consummate homemaker?

“Ah,” he thought, “there is an easier way to get her into my cave than to club her and drag her by her hair.” He picked a bunch of Lilies of the Valley and presented them to her. The rest is history.

She was so impressed with this seeming act of kindness, that she gladly followed him wherever he would lead. However, she was mistaken. His reason for presenting the flowers had more to do with his desire to impregnate her than with an act of kindness. The ability to sense another’s feelings was used for the evolutionary requirement to bring together two strong gene pools.

It so happened that another member of the tribe saw this little scene. “Shucks,” he said to himself. “I can do better than that.” He got a bottle of Dom Perignon and the damsels flocked to his pad. Empathy, far from finding its genesis in some idealistic divine intervention, simply was another tool to achieve propagation of the species.

The chosen one really thought that he loved her when he invited her into his cave for a candle-lit supper. Why would he go to such troubles to play her favorite music, prepare the most delicious meal and present her with a bottle of such fine champagne? Why indeed? Little did she know!

I hope I am not giving away any male trade secrets when I say that little has changed in the intervening 40,000 or so years. Empathy enables us to sense what others like in order to gain influence over them. Of course, the female of the species has also learned this lesson well. Could it be that sweet, sweet women have also learned to use their ability to empathize in the pursuit of self-centered purposes? Of course not!

Richard Dawkins further explains the matter in “the selfish gene.” His book provides the evidence that altruism is a trait given to our species in order to assist the improvement and continuation of the gene pool. On page 62 he says, “But the obvious first priority of a survival machine, (i.e. the human body) and of the brain that takes the decisions for it, are individual survival and reproductions.” This does not mean that altruism must be limited to basically self-centered motives.

Recall that manual dexterity, joining thumb and forefinger, resulted in building the Temple at Luxor and the Cathedral at Chartres. A gene designed to hold tools eventually built Gothic spires and the Manhattan skyline.

I question whether this genetic capability foresaw the building of the Pyramids or the painting of the Mona Lisa. A simple genetic change, eons ago, eventually produced great works. There was no predetermined will that the joining of thumb and forefinger would produce Rodin’s Kiss. But a genetic change to give members of our species a leg up in the struggle for survival has resulted not only in the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World but in 70,000 Wonders of the World.

So too, what began as a self-serving trait to sense the feelings of another for personal benefit can be nurtured into acts of altruism. The ability to sense the inner feelings of others provides the potential for genuine humane caring. Such concern, of course, can only result from the conscious and deliberate use of our prefrontal cortex. Just as intellect was used for purposes other than mere survival, (i.e. composing symphonies, painting, writing books) empathy can also be used for purposes other than enticing members of the fairer sex into our “caves.”

Through conscious effort we can care! Certainly, it is better to live in a world where people have some concerns for each other than to live in a “dog-eat-dog” world. The balance between the need for biological self-preservation and social concerns can only be achieved through a rational understanding of the dynamics of human existence. An overarching query presenting itself is whether our species deserves to survive should it fail to develop genuine empathy.

We take our cue from the imprints in our various brains. The essential characteristics of all brain functions enhance the chance for survival. Any other results that arise are a matter of happenstance.

We might like to think that a Guiding Hand from above determines our destiny, but all the evidence points to a contrary conclusion. Earthquakes happen in Turkey killing thousands. Tidal waves inundate Bangladesh killing hundreds upon hundreds and leaving tens of thousands homeless. Meteors or comets in the past have struck and, in the future, will strike our planet. Nature’s way leads to unexpected results. Some we deem “good” and others we deem “bad.” Although from nature’s point of view, moral judgments are non-existent. The energy driving our universe knows nothing of good and evil. Only human interpretation assigns such values to our experiences.

In an effort to explain the “bad” our sires invented the fable of Adam and Eve eating one lousy apple. To blame all the evil in the world on that act just won’t wash any more. It is intellectually far more honest to face the reality of the world. To introduce the God factor has not helped our species a great deal. Life is complicated and the unforeseen governs the cosmos.

On the most fundamental level, empathy is a survival function. Over the millennia, empathy became more refined. For us it is possible to respond to human needs with care and thoughtfulness. And I believe that by this slender threat hang all of our hopes to raise our species to a level of respectability and worthiness. When all of institutionalized religiosity will have had its day, its only enduring message echoing through the corridors of time will be its emphasis for humans to become humane.

The self-transcending traditions of the great religions are in accord on this point. It is, in my opinion, the only worthwhile gift presented to humankind by the religions of the world. At the heart of non-self-serving religions stands the admonition, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus had the consummate guts to look into the faces of the controlling alphas of his day and say, “I give you a new commandment that you love one another.” (John 13:34) He then had the courage to tell these self-appointed usurpers of authority that their neighbors included their enemies.

What brought about the crucifixion of Jesus were not his miracles, his parables, and his sermons; what nailed him to the cross was his audacity to tell the controlling power structure that the most despised and disenfranchised had a right to a decent place under the sun.

Few are the individuals who have been able to transcend themselves in the history of the world. But there have always been some! Hundreds of years before the Common Era, we find these sayings, “When you come upon your enemy’s ox or donkey going astray, you shall bring it back Ö When you see the donkey of one who hates you lying under its burden and you would hold back from setting it free, you must help to set it free Ö You shall not pervert the justice done to your poor in their lawsuits.” (Exodus 23:4,5,6)

Even long ago of earliest Old Testament times, the presence of the prefrontal cortex asserted itself. In the midst of a world much harsher than our own, the strains of humanity’s ultimate destiny became part of the ancient code. Like a silver cord, the challenge to be caring and mindful of others weaves itself throughout human history as the expression of its ultimate destiny.

Other religions add their voices exhorting their followers to behave in a caring manner. Hinduism’s Code of Manu reads, “Wound not others, do no one injury by thought or deed, utter no word to pain thy fellow creature.”

Lao Tzu in The Treasures taught, “I have Three Treasures. Guard them and keep the safe. The first is Love. The second is, never too much. The third is, never be first in the world.”

Buddah in The Sutta Nipata says, “As a mother, even at the risk of her own life, protects her son, her only son, so let him cultivate love without measure toward all beings. Let him cultivate towards the whole world – above, below, around – a heart of love unstinted, unmixed with a sense of differing or opposing interests.”

Not only from ancient sages comes the injunction to love. Contemporary psychiatrists add their voices to the wisdom of olden days. “Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love,” is the definition given by Erich Fromm.

Henry Stack Sullivan says, “When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as one’s own security or sense of satisfaction, then the state of love exists. So far I know, under no other circumstances is a state of love present, regardless of the popular usage of the word.”

Victor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who survived several years of Nazi concentration camps, gives us these words, “A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love.”

Then why do we love so little? Why do we care so ineffectually? Is it not because we fail to tame the reptile within? But how can we tame the reptile if we are unaware of its presence? How can we become conquerors over self when we ascribe to devils the results of our misdeeds? How can we be victorious if we believe that in God lies our hope and salvation?

For thousands of years, the plaintive cries of innocent victims have pierced the skies. The only reply was a deafening silence. The slaughters continue to this day. The blood of the innocents deepens the Red River with every passing moment. And the heavens are silent. There is no balm in Gilead. The answers come from within us.

More on Paul D. MacLean’s The Triune Brain in Evolution.

We continue with our series of articles by John Brand which began with part one on  Sunday and part two on Monday. Originally posted at The Yellow Times.

The Human Theater of the Absurd –III

John Brand, D.Min., J.D.

There is an interesting story of lust and sex in the Bible. It is really spicy stuff. Surprisingly, those who seek to censor our morality have not sought to strike that incident from the Good Book and have the author blacklisted. There cannot be much doubt that the sinfulness of this narrative far exceeds the immorality of the exposed breast of the Statue of Justice that Ashcroft commanded to be clothed. Amnon, one of King David’s sons, had an overpowering desire to seduce his half-sister Tamar. She, in turn, met his blazing passion with stony silence. With the help of a friend, Amnon found a pretext inducing Tamar to come to his private chambers. Then Amnon raped her. (2 Samuel 13)

After Amnon satisfied his lust he “was seized with a very great loathing for her; indeed, his loathing was ever greater than the lust he had felt for her.” Why hasn’t Hollywood picked up that story? Can’t you just see some sex kitten, maybe the “Playmate of the Year,” playing Tamar? I can also think of several esteemed politicians on both sides of the aisle who might portray Amnon.

Amnon’s love turned to hate with the change of circumstances. Feelings depend upon the shifting happenings in our lives. As weather is reflected in barometric changes, so our moods and emotions are images of our internal responses to life’s ups and downs. Our emotions run deep but they are changeable. Love can turn to hate. Warm feelings for friends can turn to icy rejection. Joy in the morning can turn to sadness by nightfall.

A. The origin of emotions

The hypothalamus, an integral part of the limbic system, is the impresario of our emotional behavior. The genesis of our emotions can be traced back about 180,000,000 years to the therapsids. You may recall that what we may properly call the beginning of intellect had its origin no more about 3 to 5 million years ago. Is it any wonder that our emotions are far more powerful than our intellects? You know what happens when you try to discuss a problem rationally with someone who has deep feelings about the matter. It is mostly a waste of time, is it not?

Emotions do not originate in our highest brain centers. They are primordial responses to external events. Neither gods nor devils cause our elation nor do they conspire to force us to act the brute. Our ancient brains provide the capability to either wear halos or to sprout horns. One of the critical factors to the survival as a free people depends upon our understanding the origin of our feelings.

Most of us have a tendency to accord whatever behavior happens to occur at any given moment the same degree of authenticity. We do not realize that much of our behavior stems from the evolutionary heritage of animals less sophisticated than we are. Reason, logic, and linear thinking play no roles when emotions are aroused. In all probability neither religious dogmatists nor political charlatans know much about the genesis of human emotionality. However, they sure know how to use emotions to their advantage. When reptilian instincts of territory, hierarchy, ritual and deceit merge with raw emotions, the result is a witch’s brew. Shakespeare’s “Eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog,” is but a mild tonic compared to the bitter bane forced down our throats by dogma and canon.

B. Emotions and religion

The Judeo/Christian tradition makes people feel guilty for the mere presence of emotions. In Matthew 5:27, we are told that if a man lusts after a woman, it were better for him to pluck out his eyes. The opinion is advanced that it is better to go to heaven blind than rot in hell with 20/20 vision. That is pretty stout medicine. I wonder how many men and women can pass that exam and enter the Pearly Gates?

Let’s be honest with ourselves. If we all plucked out our eyes because we felt like crawling into bed with someone who is not our own spouse, there would be an acute shortage of seeing-eye dogs. We are also told in Matthew 5:22 that anger against our brother results in judgment. It does not say we shall be condemned when we ram the guy’s car that almost took off our front fender. It says that the mere feeling of anger will result in our getting whipped by the Almighty.

Of course, most people will respond to sexual situations with emotions. Of course, most people will sense anger when in a threatened situation. The church has convinced us that those feelings are sinful in God’s sight. If we ever expect to get to heaven, then we must be purged from these awful feelings. And who will do the cleansing for us? Well, of course, the church. So the hierarchy has us where it wants us. We will feel the emotions of lust. We will experience the emotion of anger. We are made to believe that they are very, very sinful. Therefore we become enslaved to the church because it assures us that it has the way that leads to our forgiveness and to eternal life.

We are in a no win situation. Emotions arise in a very ancient part of the brain. We have little control over their arousal. Of course, we can learn to manage our emotions, but the church has convinced us that the mere presence of the emotions constitutes sin. So we are enslaved to church doctrine if we ever hope to find forgiveness. We cannot escape our emotionality – nor can we escape the church’s enslavement if we hope to find God’s mercy. It is also, of course, one heck of a way to raise money. If you are assured that an offended God will forgive your nasty feelings if you put some money in the offering tray, you may be quite willing to contribute so God will not punish you for your grubby, filthy, disgusting feelings.

Knowing that emotions arise in ancient parts of the brain, we can conclude that the arousal of lust and anger are neither good nor bad. Emotions arise in a part of the brain over which we have no control. Emotions are a fundamental quality of our lives. I draw a very sharp distinction between the presence of the emotion and our management or their mismanagement. To condemn someone for the presence of emotions differs not much from finding them guilty for their heartbeat. Pulse and emotions originate in ancient neural circuits. To be judged for their existence is to condemn life itself.

Only the active manifestation of emotions, not their mere presence, raises moral issues. If I feel like beating the hell out of you because I am angry but do not act on my impulse, the “bad” never happened. If I feel like bedding down some cute chick, but do not follow through on my feeling, the “bad” never happened.

The teachings of the church have us in a “no win” situation. Lust and anger are parts of the landscape of our lives. It is not their presence that is evil. Their presence is natural. The evil only comes when we fail to manage them. But our tradition condemns us for their mere presence. This gives the ecclesiastical establishment tremendous power over our lives. One of the most liberating moves the church could make is to clarify this issue. Maybe then Mr. Ashcroft won’t feel so threatened by the mere sight of an aluminum breast. For heaven’s sake, what would that man do in the Louvre? Go nuts?

C. Emotions and politics

Naturally politicians know what the church knows. If a people’s emotions can be aroused then intellect and logic will take a back seat. America is in the midst of an emotional binge at the present time. September 11th aroused our deepest fears. A foe attacked us on our own turf. Anger, fear, revenge, and dread flooded our senses in a way that we have not experienced before. In response to these deep feelings, we fly the Stars and Stripes at our homes, on our cars, on office buildings, and wherever we can attach a flag. We put patriotic pins on our lapels. Being true opportunistic materialists, designers made T-Shirts, sweatshirts, bandanas, and hats with the design of the flag. We swore we would get the bastards who dared to invade us.

Under the flurry of emotionalism parading for patriotism, our President was quick to see enemies in everyone who disagreed with his agenda. The Attorney General saw the presence of terrorists in every neighborhood. Inflamed by passion we little realize that we are moving towards a police state.

Civil liberties are being limited under the pretense of making us secure. Rewards to supporters who raised millions for POTUS come in the form of throwing more and more money at defense industry giants. So caught up we were in our emotions that we were willing to do anything to protect ourselves. And whenever there might have been a bit of relaxing of our fears, our newly appointed Home Security Chief would issue another warning. It has even been suggested that anyone disagreeing with the President’s program is not a patriotic American. Well, he or she might not be a docile sheep following an agenda leading into the vortex of an American dictatorship, but isn’t it carrying things a bit too far to accuse dissenters of not being patriotic Americans?

Years ago, long before there was even a thought of 9/11, the industrial psychologist Maslow wrote, “The safety needs can become very urgent on the social scene whenever there are real threats to law, to order, to the authority of society Ö A common, almost expectable reaction is the easier acceptance of dictatorship or of military rule.” Politicians take advantage of our raw emotions to perpetuate their power and the agendas of the lobbyists who funnel money into their campaigns. And the Constitution and the Bill of Rights be damned.

But the usurpation of our emotionality by politicians predates 9/11 by a long shot. In the 1950′s and even later there was a concern about making America a more just and equitable country. The Middle Class, the backbone of any democracy, was doing well. A sense of assurance was felt as Social Security and Medicare provided people with some guarantee that their retirement years would know a measure of stability. But then strange things began to happen. I am not saying that there was a cabal to destroy our freedoms. But there was an ever-growing development of materialistic opportunism. Labor Unions were disparaged. Now don’t misunderstand me, I know that some unions were fronts for Mafia-type rings, but there was a general belittling of labor unions. Businesses became ever larger and larger. As they made more money, they influenced more and more legislation favorable to their particular interests. The common good was shelved.

Either by intuition or by design, the Kenneth Lay and Anderson prototypes had to fill an emotional need in the lives of America. All too many churches became unwitting participants in the destruction of righteousness and justice in America. Profound hot button issues became the order of the day. It was proclaimed from many pulpits that America has lost its way because prayers were not said in public schools, because abortions became the legal right of women, because homosexuals were given protection under the law. And all these moralistic issues, it was preached, caused God to forsake our land.

This suspended attention away from the real “front burner issues” such as health care, the elimination of the Middle Class, corporate rape of the masses, and spoliation of the environment. When Enron created an artificial energy crisis in California, costing the people billions of dollars, our President said he could not do anything about it! And all the time he and Kenny Boy were big buddies. Furthermore, POTUS claimed that Jesus was his philosopher.

So it is only natural, these purveyors of religious charlatanism would claim, that God cares more about prayer in public schools than children without medical services. We were told that God is quite angry because some women are getting abortions but we didn’t care that minimum wages did not keep up with inflation. Channeling our emotions on homosexuals, we failed to see that as tax cuts favored the wealthy, less and less money was available for public schools, for roads, and for other necessary infrastructures.

Well, I have news for America. We can say prayer in school three times a day and not another single child will get medical insurance. We can eliminate all abortions and minimum wage will not go up one red cent. We can again become homophobic and there will not be another dollar for our schools or our roads.

Politicians have turned America’s emotions away from the real issues. We should be angry that the middle class is disappearing instead of worrying about prayers in school. We should be angry that the rich get ever more and more tax benefits instead of worrying about abortions. We should be angry that rivers and the land are being polluted instead of thinking we are doing God a favor by becoming homophobic.

The emotional components of the limbic system play a significant part in our lives. Church and politicians understand that and both have done a number on America.

Popular wisdom perceives that our President has not been blessed with an over-endowment of intellectual acuity. However, there can be little doubt that some of the men around him have plenty of gray matter. Folks like John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and others probably score pretty high on a Binet, and yet their combined smarts have our society teetering on its edge. A widening gulf between the super rich and the rest of us will create social problems of unimaginable dimensions. Lack of an intelligent long-range energy program may bring about economic chaos. Shortsighted monetary and tax policies already seriously harm our country’s infrastructure. And let’s not even mention damage done to the environment. Yet, all these smart folks in D.C. don’t seem to have a clue about the long-term effects of their wheeling and dealing.

What does it take, besides smarts, to pull up the human species from its brutal, consistent practice of genocide to something resembling a humane being? I believe the answer can be found in the most recently developed part of the human brain, the prefrontal cortex. The concluding part in this series discusses this neural constellation of the triune brain.

In this column I am making some comments about the neocortex. I want to state in the very beginning that the neocortex does not provide the solution to our problems. If anything, it just complicates our existence.

The neocortex

About 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 years ago, with a sudden burst of unparalleled activity measured in cosmic time, the neomammalian brain entered the world’s stage. From these early beginnings in our forebears the neocortex evolved into the complex organ it is today. Human accomplishments resulting from this advance defy description. Where shall we start a list of our species’ triumphs? Is it the power to write? To develop mathematics? To split the atom? To compose? We must marvel no less at the grandeur of Egypt’s Pyramids than we do listening to a Beethoven symphony. Surely Shakespeare’s Othello is as majestic as the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. All of our accomplishments stem from the neural capabilities of the neocortex. It is a veritable treasure chest of past achievements and of future possibilities.

However, our species has not won the war over its own bestial nature. The major factor enslaving us to old brutal ways is our bondage to the unresolved reality of the brain’s three competing drivers. Of course, the old reptile wins most of the battles. As long as we thought our brains were one integrated whole there might be some justification to assign our benign or violent behavior to some divine/satanic cause.

Instincts to expand tribal boundaries were engulfed in the flames of passions. These profound feelings found a voice in rationalizations developed in the neocortex. The saber clashing took on the voice of God. Arrows tearing apart flesh were but expressing the will of the creator. Some God? Eh? But now we know better! We know there is a reptile in our brains that can dominate our behavior to the exclusion of any humane concerns.

The drive for territory and power is not the voice God. It is but the expression of our most primal instincts. No God or gods will stop the carnage. No amount of fervent prayer will make “the wolf live with the lamb, the leopard to lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together.” (Isaiah 11: 6) The title of the book of our lives must be changed from “A Destiny under God” to “Human Destiny.”

The neocortex enables some members of our species to compose the Titan Symphony, to paint Nude Descending a Staircase, and to understand the nature and function of DNA. At the same time, we need to accept the fact that such greatness is but one side of the neocortex.

The other side built concentration camps and Gulags, indulges in the grossest manifestation of conspicuous consumption while refusing to fund equal educational opportunities for all. It indulges in the vilest of inequities under the shameful cover of “Private Enterprise.” Of course, without tax support and special legislation, our “Private Enterprise” would not be the voracious, gluttonous beast it has become. It is the power of the neocortex that writes all this legislation favoring the rapacious alphas of our society.

We have yet to avail ourselves of the power of the neocortex to translate into reality the ideal that all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Tell some of the folks living in parts of East Austin, Texas that that is the expression of the American dream and they will laugh in your face!

We do not want to accept as fact that some essential qualities between earthworms and humans are much the same. Individual earthworms do not manifest many differences; they do not have personalities. One is pretty much like another.

The same can be said for the physiology of human beings. Gray’s Anatomy applies to all of us. The sameness of our species transcends religious, political, ethnic, and all other surface differences. We all breathe the same air and die within minutes when deprived of oxygen. None of us can long exist without water. None escapes the reality of our biological common heritage. Just below the surface of our differences, we are all pretty much alike. All Indians and all Pakistanis, all members of Al Qaeda and all CIA agents, all Republicans and all Communists, all people of all colors, religions, features and languages will “bleed when pricked and laugh when tickled, die when poisoned, and revenge when wronged.” (Thanks to the Bard.)

It is the rather insignificant differences such as skin color, religious beliefs, and ethnic background that play havoc with our species. Psychologically we tell a story that belies our essential sameness. We hate. We kill. The problem with our neocortex lies in the fact that the reptilian brain, at times, dominates it. Seeking to justify its behavior it “commands” the neocortex to produce mountains of rationalizations defending reptilian prejudices. Atrocities of kings were defended as being their “divine” right. Kenny Boy claims that what amounts to his theft of pension funds is just one aspect of “free enterprise.”

Our very intelligence is our worst enemy in the efforts to achieve a world of peace and justice. Primitive territorial instincts have been elevated to an almost sacrosanct duty to destroy our perceived enemies. The neocortex furnishes a high level of self-justification and plausible reasons for our devious behavior. In our minds we crave righteous explanations to fly our militant banners bearing the inscriptions, “Race against Race,” “Religion against Religion,” “Nation against Nation.” The reptilian brain dominates our behavior. Our country is divided into hostile factions and each passing year brings new hostilities.

What can we do, no, what must we do, to stop the insanity? As long as we thought we had one integrated brain, our behavior could be rationalized. But that “old dog won’t hunt any longer.” We know that three drivers are competing for control of our behavior. Our task in the 21st Century is to understand just how much of our primal egocentric behavior is justified by intellectually rationalizing our selfishness.

How can we direct the neocortex to deliver us from our parochial self-interests and our self-defeating submission to essentially meaningless doctrines? To set ourselves to that task, it seems to me, is far more important than to build computer chips around molecules so we can have an almost infinite amount of storage.

Will today’s dominant alphas fight to perpetuate the ignorance of the past? The battle cry of fundamentalists has ever and a day been the same. “God,” they cried 400 years ago, “ordained that the earth is at the center of the universe. Anyone teaching otherwise is a heretic and must be silenced.” Well, somewhere there could be an ignorant fringe group still believing our planet to be at the center of the universe. But most of us know that it is not so. Today’s self-styled conservatives believe that teaching the nature of Nature will bring about the wrath of God. Little do they realize that their dogmatism is a fundamental cause of much of the world’s ills. “God,” they still cry today.

Present scientific understanding negates the dogma that human beings resulted from a special divine act of creation. Of course, the church fathers shake in their boots when they are confronted with such insights. They are in deadly fear what the implementation of that reality will do to their institutions. Certainly, their resistance has nothing to do with God, with truth, or with rightness. It is just another verse of the ancient claim that kings and Popes rule by divine right. Those assumptions have proven to be wrong.

The future will prove dogmatism to be the sham that it is. Denials of profound insights into the reality of Nature based on nothing more than ancient provincial beliefs are just so much hot air. I am certainly not claiming that anyone has the final word on the subject of the nature of Nature. However, present knowledge, at the very least, presents us with significant kernels of new insights into the way Nature works. Today’s fundamentalists simply repeat the second and third stanza of the ancient folly.

The modern era was committed to the idea that knowledge will drive away ancient superstitions and myths. Certainly, investigative science has opened the door to wondrous progress. Enthusiasm created by science, resulting from the potentials residing in the neocortex caused J. Bronowski to say, “Knowledge is our destiny.” Carl Sagan concludes his insightful book, The Dragons of Eden, with that quotation. The wheels of science and discovery are churning forward and no stopping place appears in sight.

However, I take exception to the idea that mere knowledge is our destiny. The knowledge of Greek’s Golden Age was erased with human blood. The storehouse of insights developed in the Arab world between the 9th and 13th centuries did not stop human brutality. The teachings of Buddha have not eliminated the confrontations between India and Pakistan. Gandhi has turned into a footnote.

The modern Scientific Revolution coexisted with the most brutal Gulags and concentration camps. Both beauty and brutality have their genesis in the neocortex. Much more is needed than mere knowledge. Needed is the conscious will to transcend beastly powers residing in our brains with the insights of the prefrontal cortex. That will be the discussion of the final column in this series.

To Be Continued …

More on Paul D. MacLean’s The Triune Brain in Evolution.