Tag Archives: human society

Warmth of Light Beyond Words

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Warmth of Light Beyond Words

Today, I saw the early dawn sky over the ridge on the far side of my canyon lighten from deep dark to softening grey, through the freshly rained-on forest standing on my downslope. Then the sky diffused into soft blue. A burst of brilliance on the east point of the ridge-cusp signaled the emergence of the Sun. That sharp white light streamed out to me skimming the glistening green of the forest floor below me making the new sprouts carpeting the ground radiate their green glow and igniting the uncountable number of droplets in the forest to sparkle. The clarity of the cool air made every surface that light fell on crystalline sharp down to vanishing detail, and the warmth of that light penetrated into me and everything as I watched it pass the coiling swirls of my breath’s evaporating condensation rising slowly into the advancing day.

The sound of dawn was a scattered chorus of birdsong, some distant and some quite close, like the hummingbirds twizzling and twittering as they buzzed boring through the air and sending me their acknowledgments for the sugarwater I hang from the eave of the house in glass feeders. My cat, who is a fluffy splotch of night, fixed his knowing yellow searchlight eyes on me as a brother of the dawn outside the house then looked up to a hummingbird he knew he could never reach and with a flick of his tail walked off into his jungle. To have a true knowing connection with an animal it is necessary to always show them a consistency of kindness that gives them complete freedom. The same is true of making a true knowing connection with another human, but humans are less reliable in their behavior than are other animals.

If someone asked me for an understanding of the human world by dividing it into just two categories, I would have to give them as: those who are suffering, and those who relieve suffering. We each spend parts of our lives in each category, and sometimes in both at once. If I were then tasked to state just one rule that each person was supposed to follow, as the purpose of individual life, it would be: spend as little time as possible causing suffering.

Our human world is steadily and unevenly dying because we resist allowing ourselves to fashion societies and their governments that are designed entirely to relieve suffering. Were that so, I cannot see how Nature would not favor us with environments that were paradises despite their majestic ferocity.

I came back into the house to spend some hours writing this while looking out my large window at the expanding morning, and just as I was finishing my cat nosed his way past the door of my room, jumped up on the bed next to me, and I stopped writing to very slowly and gently stroke his lush black sheen just as he likes for quite a while, as he arched his back into my hand and then gradually coiled up laying down. He moves as smoothly as an eddy of smoke in still air. He would look into my eyes and bob his head, and I knew he wanted me to run my dull claws across the back of his neck and back along the line of his lips, as he began the deep internal vibration we call purring. His inner eyelids closed as his eyes rolled back while his outer lids closed, and he smoothed down his shiny fur with his rasping tongue before resting into an elegant quiet stillness.

It is all here wherever you are: to see, to know, to feel, and to be. That is my one wish for everybody.

17 December 2021

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The Five Allegiances

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The Five Allegiances

“We be of one blood, ye and I” — Mowgli, in The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling

The hierarchy of the five allegiances is: nepotism, tribalism, classism, nationalism, humanism.

Family connection is the emblem of conformity with nepotism.

Group identity is the emblem of conformity with tribalism. That emblem can be: race, religion, language, ethnicity, cult bondage.

Money wealth is the emblem of conformity with classism.

National identity is the emblem of conformity with nationalism.

Species-wide identification as homo sapiens is the emblem of conformity with humanism.

Each allegiance is a strategy to gain competitive advantage over other human beings. That competitiveness decreases from extremely intense with nepotism, to absent with pure humanism.

For each allegiance, those above it are barriers to its complete success. Humanism, being the least competitive relationship between humans, is also the most stymied by the combination of: nationalism, classism, tribalism and nepotism. We see this reflected in the inhumanity of homo sapiens world society, for which deprivation there is no compelling physical nor sociological reason.

Nationalism is stymied by the combination of classist greed, tribalist bigotry and family-linked corruption; and it is slightly diluted by expansive humanist cosmic consciousness. The managers of national governments, who are too often motivated by the three higher ranked allegiances, may at times try to unite a multicultural national population with the imagery of democracy, equality, inclusion and diversity. This is particularly so when armies have to be raised for wars of national defense and foreign conquest.

Nationalism is most successful when applied through a lush and expansive economy providing a high standard of living for all. In providing secure and fulfilling jobs with good pay, and which ease the existential anxieties of individuals and gives them roles they can adopt as emblems of self worth, economic nationalism in essence pays people off to relinquish their reliance on classism, tribalism and nepotism. As the equitable economics of any nation withers, so does its mass appeal to national allegiance, and deepens its fragmentation by classist greed, tribalist bigotry and nepotistic corruption.

Homo sapiens world society is devolving through a planetary sustainability crisis, of which global warming climate change is one compelling symptom. That crisis is driven by classism — economic greed — which is exacerbated by the other allegiances except humanism. The solution for overcoming that crisis is well-known: humanism applied with reverence for Nature and All Life, and in perpetuity.

Merely stating that solution illuminates all the barriers to its implementation. Besides being structural and non-personal in the sense of nationalistic competitions and economic exclusivities, such barriers are also weaves of egotistical personal attitudes and failures of moral character dominated by selfishness and bigotry.

It is clear, from looking at the aggregate of homo sapiens world society today, that the prospects for reversing that devolutionary planetary crisis are very dim indeed. For too many people, the idea of eliminating all the old socio-economic structures along with all their personal prejudices, and replacing them with a planetary humanism of species-wide solidarity to fashion a sustainable human-with-Nature world and truly radiant civilization, is just too fearful to even imagine let alone seriously consider. Certain death inequitably distributed by relentless impoverishment is by far preferred, even though most people suffer from it. The tragedy of human existence is that most people prefer to live out their lives and die without changing their ideas even when those ideas are harmful to them.

Frustrated humanists can easily imagine a worldwide French Revolution breaking out in defiance of that tragedy, with the decapitation of the nepotistic, tribalist and classist national managements, and with the eruption of a liberating world socialist nirvana. This is like the aspirational dream of Christianity held by the millions of slaves in the Roman Empire.

But in the sad reality of our present world, could any violent outburst by the impoverished and oppressed be motivated by a globalist liberating humanism, instead of merely reactionary survivalism for family, tribe and class? What few revolutions of this type not quashed in their embryonic stages by the economic and national managers, would soon recycle the same poisonous exclusivities of former times but with a new cast of leading characters.

To transcend this pernicious eddy and actually evolve humanity out of its present decaying stagnation would require a universal enlightenment of human attitudes and consciousness. And that is an unrealistically utopian thought indeed. But incredibly, it is neither a logical nor physical impossibility, just an extreme improbability.

Is it possible for us as individuals to increase that probability? Based on a realistic view of the long arc of human history the clear answer is “no,” despite the numerous temporary blooms of localized enlightened society that have occurred during the lifetime of our homo sapiens species. But it is depressing and dispiriting to live with that “no” dominating one’s thinking. The mere fact of having been born entitles you and every other human being with the right to enjoy a fulfilling life with a liberated consciousness, the right to seek achieving your full human potential.

One can seek that fulfillment along the simultaneous parallel paths of supporting a family of whatever kind, caring for others through both personal and societal means, creative immersion in arts, sciences and craftsmanship, and championing global socialist humanism by both intellectual allegiance to it and personal engagement with it in the political and societal arenas you are a part of, at whatever level. Ultimately, the course and fate of humanity is the sum total of the courses and fates of the individual lives comprising it, and the greatest impact we each can have on helping to steer that great stream is made by the quality of the choices we each make regarding the conduct of our own personal lives.

Achieving a morally enlightened personal fulfillment in no way guarantees the morally enlightened success of any subgroup the homo sapiens species — your family, your tribe, your class, your nation — and least of all of humanity as a whole; but it helps! And living with that as personal experience is very satisfying indeed.

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