|
|
What's going on on the Earth on a time scale that is bigger than an interval long enough to enable us to see that we are entering a Cybernetic Age, but smaller than a time scale long enough to enable us to see whether or not hominids' brains are still evolving (which we do not really know and cannot clearly see)?
No, "Armageddon" is not coming, which is why good Christian folk still plan for their children's college educations (interested parties consult your local minster today.) But there IS something on such a large - but not too large - a time scale that is materializing right before us, but many do not want to look at it honestly or do not know what to make of the "signs." It is this: a great experiment or strategy in survival that hominids (of the species Homo sapiens exclusively) undertook about 10,000 years ago or so is fast heading toward what one scientist and expert in the field (Bruce D. Smith, senior researcher, director and curator at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution) called its "endgame": the Agricultural Revolution, which produced the first city-states, the art of writing, technology, and virtually everything people go to museums to admire - foolishly perhaps.
The develpment of culture in the West is long, complex, and still unfolding, but is founded on the expansion and perfection of agricultural production. Before 8,000 BCE or so, every human on the Earth, of which there were perhaps only a few million tops, was a member of a hunter-gatherer type of society, which is exactly what bonobo apes have to this day in Africa. This means that until the dawn of the Agricultural Age, known as the Neolithic period, only about 10,000 years ago, humans fed themselves much as bonobo apes still do. There were no settled villages, no domesticated plants or animals, no ELABORATE inventions or crafts beyond simple, if starkly beautiful pottery and weaving, which remained rudimentary in some ways but was refined in others. But man's society then was still a little different from his contemporary great ape hunter-gatherer societies, which looked and functioned a lot like his, for humans had highly polished stone tools, cave paintings, a rudimentary lunar calendar, and a language. This is all that set him apart from the apes of that time. Not much. Whether humans took millions of years to laboriously and painfully climb to this status only slightly above that of ape, or whether the human hunter-gatherer societies we find evidence of before 10,000 BCE are what is left of human beings who once occupied lofty seats of high technology and civilization, only to have been smacked down to the rudiments by decay, self-destruction, or natural catastrophe, is not really known, which has left the door open to all sorts of crack-brained theories about man's origins (like those of the Temple of Set), lost civilizations, extra-terrestials guiding mankind's history, and given religionists just enough room for doubt to negotiate for their palpably insane Creationist and savior ideas.
But we do know that man's lot seemed to have taken a turn for the better with the emergence of agriculture - at least AT FIRST. There is no real clear line of demarcation between human hunter-gatherer societies and agricultural ones, because it has been discovered that hunter-gatherers will engage in a kind of "landscape domestication." For example, the Australian aborigines are known to have lived for over 20,000 years without agriculture, but they engage in burning fields of vegetation to encourage the growth of some species of grasses they depend on for food, species which fare better than other plants in burned over areas. Youe may have seen "fireweed" or willow herb, which is an opportunistic plant that almost only grows after forest fires defoliate areas in temperate latitudes. The flowers are pretty. Hunter-gatherers like the Australian aborigine use knowledge like this to reduce the risk of the economic loss of wild food plant species they depend on. But the distinction between hunter-gatherer and agriculturalist still stands out, because the aborigine is still only managing WILD plants.
The agricultural revolution, which seems to have occurred in seven parts of the world independently, the most famous of which known to the Western world was in the Fertile Crescent of Western Asia, saw the domestication of seven or so major plants and animals that man had been relying on for food, like barley, einkorn wheat, goats, pigs, etc. The domestication of animals is usually called "animal husbandry," but it is not different in principal of human behavior from agriculture, which is "plant husbandry," for both are a type of food risk management. But human behavior aside, when humans living by agriculture get their hands on various plants and animals for domestication, a different path of natural selection takes command and, in only a few hundred generations (or sometimes MUCH less) the managed plants and animals change or evolve differently than they would have if left wild: even the seeds look different. For example, agriculturally produced barley has more rows of seeds on a spike, providing harvesters with a denser package of food. In contrast, the actions of the aborigine on opportunistic wild plants do not seem to change these herbs. The same is so for domesticated animals: some herder nomadic societies simply follow their animals around, such as when the herd moves to higher altitudes in the spring to graze. This practice is called "vertical transhumance." Agricultural societies, however, make animals captives, and then natural selection acts to upset any equilibrium the animal had achieved in its ecological niche. Thus, while in terms of behavior, hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists seem to be doing the same sort of "risk management" in regards to their food supply, with agriculturalists doing it more forcefully and effectively, the actions of the two kinds of societies are really different from the point of view of natural selection and environment. One type of society is not drastically altering its environment, while the other does so with a vengeance, while causing natural selection to skew the flora and fauna of that environment in directions that, in the short run forseeable to finite human intelligence, reduce the risk of food running short.
Scientific critics of the agricultural system who now forecast its coming end due to a kind of "burn out" have run smack into very ardent defenders of this system who, quite unexpectedly, have proven to be as dogmatic, fanatical, and self-righteous in their defense of agriculture as defenders of the Holy Bible, foreign war and interventionism, monogamy, or male superiority. This did NOT surprise US at all. But this surprised many critics, such as scholars associated with the Smithsonian Institutionand others, who apparently did not count on the fact that many people take a very Romantic view of agriculture. To such types, it is a "Sacred Verity" that the Earth produces food for man, as if the planet were put here for man's benefit, and every living thing in it (sound familiar?), as if those saying agriculture is in its "endgame" are insulting human prescience and privilege. By a "Romantic view" of agriculture I mean that these "defenders" of agriculture are not asking, "Well, what food source do you smarty-pants have to replace it with?" which is a very good question, but rather, they leap to agriculture's defense as if the system is "God given," which many in fact DO believe, or because of their emotional involvement in a fact true enough in itself: that the agricultural system laid the basis for the world's population increases, specialization of labor, and the whole chain of remarkable sociological, political, philosophical and religious changes that culminated in the rise of urban civilizations, all of which they feel are "too glorious" or "valuable" for them to give up clinging to. Or they are afraid to embark on a new adventure in survival strategies, fearing the perennial fear voiced by so many of the philosophers and intellectuals who backed the colonial efforts of Great Britain: a "relapse" of civilized man to the status of those "horrifying" barbarians with those "gruesome" practices who always seem to be around to invade and occupy collapsing cosmopolitan areas like hordes of wolves and hyenas. The Romantic view of agriculturally based social systems is very blinding to them: it is even impossible to suggest to some of these "believers" that (though Jane Goodall and others have found out that apes fight tribal wars (as do hunter-gatherers) massive compressed warfare, famine, disease, pestilence, slavery and repressive regimes ONLY COME INTO EXISTENCE WITH AGRICULTURALLY BASED SOCIAL SYSTEMS, and much of the famine, disease, pestilence, slavery and repression is a consequence of or DUE TO the NEW KIND OF warfare of which there is no record or reason except in the Neolithic: colossal bloody battles of conquest for control of new arable areas, which is exactly one of the problem agriculture faces now in its "endgame."
Satellites originally launched for war now serve a peaceful function, and their view of the Earth from on high has awakened some as to how farmers are encroaching on zones of the Earth of only marginal productivity as more and more good topsoil is needed to replace what is depleted, stripped away, salinized, poisoned, or eroded. The Earth's bounty is limited, contrary to what many of the "God's good Earth" types think. Many people naively think farmers are growing their crops in soil that goes down for miles, and farmers just need to plow the soil to "turn it over" between plantings when, in reality, the few areas of the Earth's surface where there is arable land has soil only a few feet deep. Below that is solid granite that, if the topsoil is stripped or eroded away, would not be useful for plants to root in for many EONS, for it would takes THAT LONG for wind and weather to make the granite into "soil." Each day satellites pass over the Amazon rain forests of Brazil, showing the smoky plumes from mounds of burning vegetation - deforestation done to create new productive farmland. The ANNUAL deforestation rate for the entire globe, which includes much done in the Far East, is well over two per cent. More and more of what remains of the Earth's surface is being converted to pasture or farmland, as satellites also record the dessicated sites of many ancient civilizations whose glorious urban pinnacles toppled when the soil was used up and new areas could not be conquered. The highly increased mechanization of farming since the 1950's has hastened our approach to the limits of agricultural expansion. Hence the process or survival strategy which began 10,000 years ago in the fertile crescent and shortly thereafter in Europe is in its "endgame." This is why the old adage that "mass-production makes things cheaper" does NOT apply to farm produce any more. Defenders of the agricultural system cite false statistics, as do economists who act as apologists for the present political system, to show that "nothing is wrong, we are more affluent than ever." But there is an historical way to cut through all of these statistics, LIES and apologies: shortly after the Revolutionary War in America, an ex-soldier could wander into an inn in Massachusetts or New York and have a "five o'clock ordinary," which was a meal consisting of a bottle of Madeira wine, deep bowl barley soup, double main courses of turkey and oysters, with side dishes of "currie" beef and macaroni au gratin, pudding or pastry of his choice (like baked sago pudding or mince pie), finished by a "dessert" of all the raisins, nuts, figs, oranges and apples he wanted - all on his modest allowance! I once attended a "dinner" like this in New Jersey in the 1970's, but it was called a "banquet," not an "ordinary," and it cost me one-hundred and thirty dollars to eat! This was a forbidding one-third of most of the weekly paychecks of most of the people I knew at the time. The explanation for this real and true inflation of the cost of meats and produce is the ever increasing costs of exploiting marginal or new arable areas, and the exhorbitant costs of high-tech agricultural "forcing," that is, of making salinized, poisoned, nitrogen depleted, dessicated, or otherwise "burned out" soil produce something edible. This is also why farmers increasingly need to go on "welfare," that is, receive federal subsidies from monies annually paid by taxpayers like you or me into the U. S. Treasury.
To the more innocent defenders of the agricultural system, it just does not seem possible that a system that has been so successful for "so long" (10,000 years!) could "burn itself out." The fallacy here should be obvious: that 10,000 years is "a long time." Yes it is, measured by the human life span of only a few score of years. But measured in terms of the evolution of species, geological erosion, and environmental change, it is as long-lasting as a finger snap. The more innocent types, when persuaded buy the evidence, often ask a very good question: "If we have gone for 10,000, how much longer do we have to go?" The answer is not long, because a system that needs to deforest over 20,000,000 acres of forest a year to continue its present productivity and keep prices within reach of SOME food consumers such as you or me is not only in very dire straits, it is undertaking a very, very daring risk or tactic to continue its overall survival strategy of agriculture. We are no longer talking about altering species through domestication or changing the environment through engineering: now we are talking about doing something that UNDERMINES the green blanket that first began covering the land of the Earth after the oxygen revolution over a billion years ago, an event that changed the course of life on Earth, and paved the way for the evolution of reptiles and mammals and primates and humans, which would NOT have come into existence without it and cannot LIVE without it given our present technology (we don't know how to make sunlight, oxygen, and good carbohydrate and protein food yet, and who would want to eat rudimentary forms of this out of tubes or breath out of cylinders anyway.)
Recently a couple of Nobel Prizes have gone to scientists who finally figured out how plants use chlorophyll to get the sun to energize electrons, a process which the plant uses, in conjunction with the absorption of water and minerals, to reduce carbon and "fix" it to make and repair organic tissues. It is on these tissues - and this amazing process - that even meat-eaters (like me) ultimately depend, since most of the animals they eat are herbivores (cattle, chickens, etc.) Were someone to suggest that humans now exploit what they now know about how plants make carbohydrates, he could justly be laughed at, so infantile is this area of science: it has not even started to crawl. Instead, trillions and trillions of dollars and man-hours are habitually pumped into propping up the agricultural system and all of its adjuncts, expecially, in this century, the ever increasing need for improved and more effective methods of warfare and control of human populations, to which this great amount of money and time is already dedicated and earmarked. This vast treasure is being used, like deforestation, as a "dire straits" tactic to keep the dying agricultural corpse breathing, instead of letting it expire while finding a new way to live before the INEVITABLE happens: the corpse just can't breathe anymore, no matter what. And we won't be able to breathe either, no matter what.
On a more immediate and smaller time scale, alongside the agricultural system's inability to pay off today with resultant farmers' subsidies and mass-starvation (like in S. American areas) we find the more innovative S. American peoples doing something to MAKE some money from agriculture. Instead of harvesting crops and trying to sell them (which keeps them starving and in poverty) they harvest "new" crops: coca and poppies, poppies being in vogue again. Peru is the main coca producer with Columbia being a close second. Mexico is now in on the act. Agriculture is finally paying off again for these people, AT THE EXPENSE OF their largest client: the USA. And where do most of these drugs end up? Among USA Blacks. Since the late 1980's, over 50% of babies born in inner cities have been damaged by "crack" cocaine, brain-damaged in a way that makes them spontaneously violent and unable to concentrate. What happens when they grow up and become big, strong legal adults? What choices do we have aside from impotent paper words and hollow threats issued by our government? Well, we can legalize drugs and cash in on this. We can defoliate the S. American crop areas with Agent Orange and exterminate the people. There are NO OTHER viable CHOICES. These "farmers" are managing VERY well to eat and survive - but at the expense of American citizens. Or at the expense of certain American citizens who are being slowly exterminated. The cost of funding the DEA to patrol this and make arrests that don't hold is about 10 times higher or more than it would cost to simply level the S. American countries and the "agriculturalists" involved.
But someone doesn't want to do it. Why not? No one cared about defoliationg and murdering in Vietnam when Vietnam was no threat to Americans at all.
The REAL cost of living in America today is absurdly high and hundreds of thousands of people are homeless. These people are not dumb or ne'er-do-wells. Some of them were former lawyers and white-collar workers. No need to ask Tani Jantsang what she'd do: to a Tatar, war is a simple matter. You either fight a war and win it or it's not a war. Peru and Columbia would cease to exist as populated countries. Nothing would grow there for a very long time. That's how you fight the drug cartels! Exterminate them and all their allies and POTENTIAL allies. It's so easy! Hungry people are the cause of the profits made by growing coca and poppy. Eliminate the hungry people. Problem solved. Colonial expansion was nothing but a war of "lebensraum" for arable land, complete with slave labor and all, legally called "indentured slaves." But Tani, I know, would also tell you that this is not a viable long-term solution to anything. The solution, as she tried to propose in "Male Disease," is to CHANGE FROM WITHIN.
All humans have done for a long time is survive by artifice. You might considder this laudable, but the reality is different. You survive by artifice because you are UNABLE to evolve, unable to really change. This is not the case for the more mobile, "animal like" humans that never had these rigid systems but were far more adaptable. They were never tied to particular locations or administrations, but drew more flexibly from among subistence alternatives. Example: Tani's race can easily survive in both the hot, humid climates with tropical sun as well as in freezing arctic climates where there is very little sunlight and it's dark for 6 months. They physically CHANGE. I've seen it myself with one person (Tani) I've known for over twenty years. From having poker straight hair (like any other Asian) I now see hair that is almost bushy and curled up. She didn't do anything to it. From being able to walk around comfortably in thirty degree weather with a sweater on she easily acclimatized to this sub-tropical environment in less than one year. Her skin changed too: it looks different, not just a lot darker. The darkness doesn't tend to fade from lack of sun exposure: it gets retained. I don't think anyone notices much of this in other human beings because the occasions wherein Westerners might observe it first hand are few and far between and they are rarely deliberately paying attention to it. Yet our friend Hill has developed all the neurasthenic symptoms and illnesses that the physical anthropologist Carleton S. Coon said people like him suffer from when they move to tropical or sub-tropical climates. He is worse than ever now: he can't take the sun AND he can't take the cold! My eyes are large, typically Mediterranean or Levantine, and dark. Hill's are typically blue and rounded. Tani's are almond, slanted. Cold never bothered her eyes or chapped her lips. Heat doesn't seem to bother them either. She doesn't need sun-glasses to sit in the sun, but she can also see quite well in the dark. She can read easily by candlelight; I cannot nor can Hill. Some people, in sum, are internally and physically more able to adapt and change. The Asian races, for the most part, did not stick themselves in a single ecological niche. Blacks are in a niche: without Vitamin D supplements in temperate latitudes they die of Ricketts. They were dying in Chicago in this century after having relocated there from the Deep South until milk was vitamin-D enriched for them. Willowy built, fair-skinned people can't live easily in cold climate either: they are not really cold adapted. They got stuck in that niche DUE TO exclusive agricultural subsistance: nutrition based on cereals caused them to change as they did, to get fair-skinned in order to be able to absorb Vitamin D through their skin from the sun. But now they also have to leave the warmer climates due to sun poisoning and skin damage (and sometimes skin cancer) to various degrees. The tropical neurasthenia I mentioned that they suffer is enough to make such people socially dysfunctional and in need of tranquilizers or other drugs to get them throughf, owning homes, etc. - you know, the "American Dream." Jews did the same thing when they came here. While Jews identify with the Black Americans and try to help them (and now get blamed for all the ills of the Blacks), the Asians don't quite see it that way. They ask: "What's their excuse?" as they simply look at themselves who began in worse situations yet made good for themselves. The West underestimates their intelligence. These people do not share Western values or morals. They, furthermore, all come from "satanic" or Dark Traditions that they innately think up because they are "another kind of animal." They may as well be aliens among you. And on a truly comparative scale, I'd say they are superior in terms of pure nature. They are healthier, more adaptable, learn faster, have better dispositons, are not anosognosic, and seem just plain smarter. They are not just intellectually smarter, they are "body" smarter by a long shot (a different kind of "IQ"). You can't even compare this with your average Westerner.
All the distractions about lack of freedom in China, poor treatment
of women and overcrowding in Japan, mistakes the Communists made, etc.
are poor Americanist (or White American) Christian or political propaganda.
This propaganda misdirects attention away from the fact that hundreds of
thousands of Americans are homeless, that Black communities are literal
war-zones worse than Lebanon, and that the average American can't afford
to own a good, durable home or support two children (when they can accomplish
this both parents have to work and both are in debt). Illiteracy prevails
in White American schools and/or the equivalent of what would be called
"functional illiteracy" when I went to school. Vietnamese refugees come
here unable to speak a word of English and in a few years they win national
spelling-bee contests. Black American schools? No products of these ever
win. Most of these schools are literal zoos with armed animals. When such
events befell Asians, they did drastic and very practical things about
it. What do American Whites do? They become Born Again Christians in greater
numbers than ever before and throw their money away more than ever before
on causes best set aside. (Or they become Setians). This is their "survival
strategy." What they do in regards to the Black citizens "neighbors" can
be best described by the expression "benign neglect." But WHY NOT neglect
them? Asians were neglected and they made good on their own. And need I
say again, so did Jews. The reasons for this are that these people, non-Christians
by birth and culture, are "grounded" in harsh reality. They are exceedingly
carnal people and are able to think on their feet in most situations, ranging
from nomadic yurt living or living in the ghettos of Europe to over-crowded
dog-eat-dog city life. They rise. And they do it on their own. They don't
pray or otherwise waste time. What the S. American drug-crop agriculturalists
can be said to be doing is preying on the weakest of Americans in order
to fatten their bellies and bank accounts. Since White Americans now seem
unable to muster their warlord spirit and do something real about it, they'll
lose in the end. When Blacks move into these Whites' living areas all they
(the whites) can be seen to do is cower in fear and trembling and then
throw away their money moving out. Studies show that most Americans who
do this move more than once every five years, with the concomitant loss
of money that keeps them just in the financial "surivival zone," wherein
they can heap up or save nothing, just to escape the "Black plague," as
THEY PERCEIVE it, and unwilling or too stupid or cowardly to take more
positive and final action. Their children are ill educated and stupid,
unablus pleasure in such drugs. Tani and I have both had one experience
with "demerol" when hospitalized and after having had surgery. Our experiences
were similar: we'd rather have the FLU than ever have such a drug again.
Tani can't even imagine how such a thing can be addicting since it feels
AWFUL to be numbed like that. But does being numbed like that feel better,
say, than feeling what a "klippoth" feels? These drugs feel "GOOD" when
they change the chemistry OF THE BRAIN in CERTAIN people: WHICH people?
"Klippoths."