Moral Emotions in Prelinguistic Infants

"In various experiments, prelinguistic infants show a rudimentary sense of fairness, justice, empathy, compassion, and generosity, along with a clear ability to distinguish between kind and cruel actions. Morality is intrinsic to the human condition." Embracing Interconnectedness - Patterns of Meaning. Jeremy Lent.

Aware of a bias in myself that favoured kindness and moral responsibility, I find Neoliberalism a failure in the way it has established a pseudo-ethical regime which encouraged isolation, selfishness and cruelty over our species tendency to be compassionate in a basic sense of fairness.

This allows the individual to believe all is well as long as he is on top.

To do this a conscience must continually congratulate the ego for these 'achievements'.  

To say we are destroying our future is too neat and tidy a claim.

What is actually happening is the group attacks the individual  who is, for whatever reason (different religion, different colour skin, different fashion, language or abilities) is placed on the bottom rung in the estimation of the most articulate and cunning bully in the pack.

It assures that vulnerable people lose hope of belonging, it traumatizes those who are already traumatized, and makes others in the group feel insecure and unsafe.

It ultimately destroys civilization as we know from the rise of Nazi power.

It announces that the value of everything depends on where it lies in the pecking order, and so you have young teens ridiculing victims of rape and ultimately creates a society entertained and in awe of brutality.

We have known this from the Roman Gladiator sports, from the contempt shown to missing and murdered indigenous women after the cruelty of residential schools.

Everything and anything that is supportive and of true value like the arts, creative talent and problem solving is trashed. Children soon learn that they have no intrinsic worth, and the only survivors are psychopaths and sociopaths, applauded for all that they can destroy.

War celebrates killing, cruelty and death as though power is fed by the number of lives crushed. Refugees lose everything and in such a system we are all refugees because life means nothing. People, plants, animals, land, air and water is stolen, exploited and poisoned.

The duality of this is authoritarianism. Individuals will choose fundamentalist, fascist, systems in the belief that they will be safe. But these systems fall into the same despair they are attempting to run from.

As individuals we are genders, races, and classes — fighting to maintain our space, our 'nation'. But cunning psychopaths know how to manipulate us into giving up what little we own for the sake of a false sense of security.

The current conflict in Canada on pipelines, first nations territories, energy and jobs is one of those manufactured conflicts where ultimately all will be destroyed — either by poverty, violence and trauma — while the owners of the oil industry who live thousands of miles away will be the only ones to profit.

Is it possible to create radical change without violence?

(first posted August 24, 2016)

"The climate crisis is here, now, but a compromised, corrupted media doesn’t want to know." says George Monbiot (The Purse is Mightier Than the Pen)

Who controls culture? Is it media, public opinion, or money?

Culture is starved of wisdom if we abandon it to the authority of the purse.  If leaders are mesmerized by money they will follow trends. They will believe they have no choice, and what has happened to western culture is the wholesale sacrifice of life to the altar of profit.

The Library of Social Science researchers and scholars have hypothesized a law of sacrifice in six ways, the first of which is "Cultures invent or create ideological concepts that they elevate into “absolutes”— worshiped as the essence of society. But how do people persuade themselves that the ideas their society has constructed are real? "

Propaganda is very sophisticated, and we often can't see how we are being persuaded if not manipulated. Our own desires are reconfigured to lead us to accept horrible outcomes. Like war, for example - do we leave our home and family to slaughter strangers or let the enemy slaughter us?

We are raised to fit into the community, to trust the authority of parents and teachers, who help and protect us, and who will punish us if we don't obey.

But what constitutes  a well functioning society? One that makes clear the rules and laws and where the masses are seen as stakeholders. It's not fear that preserves this but social responsibility and integrity.

The radical change comes from the actions of an observant citizenry that is informed, educated on history and politics, who understands the principles of fairness and the power of inclusion. Those who watch and listen to what is going on around them and weigh that against media headlines. Those who ask who benefits and who choose the greater good, and who do not trust an institution just because it has power.

This would be the seed of the radical - that we practice citizenship and refuse ideological absolutes.

Often what is presented as radical is an invasion of hostile ideologies that persuade us to sacrifice our lives for God, country, communism or capitalism. These require violence and human sacrifice in the thousands because they are a transfer of power.

Whatever is worth defending is that which asks our input and attention, our care and help - to live for it, not to die for it. 

Evolution

Painting by Paul Grignon

Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau

died in America.

Four boys escaped Lejac and froze

to death on the lake near home.

The army in Uzbekistan executed children

as an example.

We are not really toilet trained.

We are trained to believe we are.

I have learned how to scream
with my mouth closed.

from Infinite Power, Ekstasis 2016

Social Currencies

The business of keeping people alive, supporting one another, emergency and  crisis response, food banks, community libraries, child-raising, education, language development, storytelling in all its forms, transport, food production, water, electricity, communication, safe shelter - these are just a few of the capacities that have enabled our species to survive and thrive.  We take these things for granted in first world countries, until they are no longer there.

The people of Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and some Eastern European nations have lost their support systems. Refugees don't give their money away to pirates for a shaky sail in dinghies by choice. When societies are destroyed people become homeless.

No matter how established, cultured, intelligent or wealthy we are today, we are all refugees when the meaning of our life is translated into a single obsession - money.  Salaries, real estate, stocks, markets, jobs, economics, screeching media and weapons of mass destruction.

"The experience of oppression does not grant supremacy, in the same way that being a powerful colonizer does not. Justice will never look like supremacy. I wish for a new societal order that does not revolve around relations of power and domination." Frances Lee, Kin Aesthetics, Excommunicate Me From the Church of Social Justice.

The currency that supports life and gives it meaning is the power of influence. "Influence is like lighting one candle with another. Sharing your influence with someone else does not mean you have less; you have more. When we use the flame of a candle to light another candle, the first is not diminished. There is now, simply, more light." Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

More light, more warmth, more knowledge that builds homes and community.

Delusions and Fantasies

 "And it's not a secret: Les Moonves, the Executive Chairman and CEO of CBS, said, as reported by the Hollywood Reporter about Trump's candidacy: "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." He added: “Donald's place in this election is a good thing. … Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun... I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” Thom Hartmann, AlterNet.

The trust in our civilization to represent truth and justice, to find balances, to protect us against the abuse of power, is a delusion.

A society is based on what individuals and groups contribute to it.

1. It depends on our level of education - a recycle of greatness propaganda, or the facts plus a humility to engage with them? 
2. It depends on the kind of vigilance we bring to raising a family, watching children grow and making sure we intervene with guidance and integrity when they appear to be heading down  a destructive path. We will have to care for the family of humankind as we have cared for our own family. 
3. We will need to apply the skills we have learned to build community to the rebuilding of our nation. This is not the nationalism of bragging violence, but a nationalism of concern.
4. We need to listen to others who express ideas we don't agree with and respond with respect to explain why we don't agree.
5. We will need to give up the demand that others see the world as we do.
6. To stretch our awareness and interrogation of our own interests as part of the dialogue. Give up the simplistic divisions and generalizations such as LEFT and RIGHT, MALE and FEMALE, WHITE and BLACK, to include all in our circle.
7. To accept that we are part of the animal kingdom who have evolved in amazing ways - creating music, art, stories, and ideologies. And while our exploration and behaviours have been far from perfect, we can learn from our errors.
8. To see that errors are not failures but signals to redirect our goals.
9. Particularly that economics is not just about profit and wealth for a few. Greed is not an inspiration to create more, it is a collapse of values that diminishes the organic journey to a forced and shallow end.
10. And finally, that the ultimate goal of our existence is not to kill, subdue, and conquer others for our egocentric interests, but to celebrate the mystery and reality of it with a level gaze.

The Greatest Poverty

The greatest poverty of our age is when you have no control over the room you sleep in, or where the next meal is coming from. Or even worse, when social services assumes you are an unfit mother because you are too poor to give your children what they need, and you fear you will lose them.

The next greatest poverty is when you yourself assume that those living in poverty are there because they failed in some way. Or that people who have addictions are weak willed and have simply given up.

And the next greatest poverty is if you live in a society where these attitudes prevail. Because you will find categories but not the causes of social problems.

Categories really help the ones who organize society - but who are they now? Is the government organizing anything beyond budget, traffic and policing? When police officers, doctors, nurses and social workers keep fixing the wounds, go home, come back to find only more of the same, do they begin to question if they are helping at all?

Who is responsible for taking care of the bigger picture? If our prime minister is unable (or unwilling) to keep the promises he made during elections - who exactly is in charge? And if we don't know who is in charge of the infrastructures of our civilization, aren't we just refugees with debt?

The greatest poverty of our age, as I see it, is when we don't care about the infrastructures in terms of how it impacts our quality of life. It's Bleak House on a grand scale. It's like having plenty of electrical sockets in your house but you don't know which ones will charge your cell or blow you apart.

The emphasis on trade deals are saying to us - we cannot survive without plugging into a system we do not have the vocabulary to understand.

Poverty is not being able to navigate our future because the options are not available to us. Scrolling through Facebook is an inventory of injustices and structural violence from around the world. Nanosecond updates on all that is wrong and all that we (humanity) are failing at, and none of these observations and news items direct us on what we can do about it.

In this way we do not have a society, just overplayed myths about who we are, and who we are better than.

What can we plan without bullying or criticizing others? How can we hold onto a vision if no one else cares? How do we measure what matters if we have been reduced to the Gross Domestic Product?

How can we challenge one another without exploding the rage we all feel just under the skin?

Four Lessons on how to Change the World

Ilona Szabó de Carvalho left her career in banking to lead the Igarapé Institute in Rio de Janeiro, which focuses on security and development policy. In her TED talk she gives us four lessons she learned while tackling the violence around issues of drugs and guns in Brazil.  Carvalho's experience contains an important message for us all – we can challenge big issues and achieve change.

The four lessons she learned in the process are: 1. change the narrative, 2. never underestimate your opponents, 3. use data to drive your arguments, 4. bring together odd bedfellows

What would this look like for those of us who want to change the current political narrative? Below are the thoughts I have wrestled with.

1. change the narrative

We are not nations or religions competing for the most of what each of us want. We are sentient beings trying to survive the cumulative effects of a global hierarchy that enables mass starvation and violence to sustain the power of a few.

The conflict is not between right-wing and left-wing, capitalism and socialism, Christianity and Islam, the conflict is between power and life.

The Operating System has moved beyond tribal competition for territory and is now in the stage where power is valued only as a wholly separate construct from human nature. This requires a structure that upholds, defends and worships the non-human measures of  our culture such as money, technology, numbers, formulas, ideologies, celebrity (not the person but the image), and ideas.  Which also requires a consistent doctrine.

The doctrine tells us that life is not valued because the world is over-populated. Life is a threat to order and must be managed, categorized, brainwashed, dehumanized and reduced through organized war, disease, starvation and addiction. Authorities create fear, insecurity and misery, and make it appear that we ourselves have chosen the conditions we live under.

Hierarchical power requires a rationality that is free of sentiment,  compassion or reverence for life. Any progress that has been made in the last two hundred years is that sophistication and application of purified power and its increasing contempt for anything that breathes. Entertainments must be pornographic to uphold this regime. Food must be genetically modified to its meanest elements. Civil society, art, community must be destroyed for these are the elements of power from within and are difficult to manage. Community is reduced to a shopping mall restricting human interaction to the impersonal , where all other human emotions such as compassion and empathy become a  means to the end of a business transaction. Here we become willing consumers of our own self-hate.

Corporations are the controllers, government are the police and media are the instructors who must continually promote the notion that life in itself has no value, and the more things we possess the more contempt we feel for earth's unpredictable and uncontrollable forces. Social intercourse celebrates and promotes consumerism through the adoration of new gadgets, rare and expensive foods, new trends and sophisticated technology. The household that possesses the most up to date fashionable stuff can congratulate itself as the winner.

Our darkest nights understand that once a weapon of mass destruction is invented that will kill most of the people without destroying the elite playgrounds on earth, it will be used. But it won't solve the problems humanity faces because all, including the elite, are oppressed by the doctrine that power must eat life.

This is the narrative of post-modern literature - Wells' Time Machine, Orwell's 1984, Monty Python, Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and other classics that have warned us.

This is a narrative that makes sense of all that has happened socially and politically. It's not the only narrative but it is one that puts us in the centre of the problem.

2. never underestimate your opponents

First we need to identify who our opponents are. Are they the one-percent, the corporations, the governments, the media, the ideologies? Are they the sum of our apathy, greed and ignorance? Is it our reluctance to examine life?

Many empires have come and gone throughout history so we can’t pin the blame on a singular tribe or a political system. It has been an endless return of revolution and corruption.  That's the force of power-over.

Is the opponent our own ego which separates us from the cause and effects of our habits? Is it the way we try to hide from our inherent malevolence, or inability to see ourselves as the earth sees us? Is it the ruling elite who manipulate us? Is it always the other who is incapable of self governance?

What if we were able to reclaim our human family, to embrace and acknowledge our power from within, through dialogue and reflection. What if we listed all the tricks we use to deny our involvement and responsibility in the evolution and care of this planet? What if we nurtured our world and loved nature? What if the imagination could bridge the small things we can do with the large movements for change?

Our opponent is really our own ignorance on how power is used against us, and how easily we slip into the narrative provided by our oppressors. As we have learned to write, read, decipher symbols, understand metaphors, we can also learn how to recognize power in all its forms.

3. use data to drive your arguments

You can find data in many places. Mainstream media sometimes includes it but other news sources and websites developed by concerned citizens are available.

The Gun Violence Archive; Amnesty International; Humanist and Liberal Religion that celebrates the human experience through diversity; news sites that defend social justice; those who acknowledge the complexity of society and its problems at the cost of making their message less slogan-ready; thought leaders who seek wisdom and do not rely on power-over to influence others; poetry; statistics.  And our own level gaze.

4. bring together odd bedfellows

What and where are the odd bedfellows of this issue? Members of the Gun Club, members of Tax Payers Federation, workers within community services, managers of the CBC, the homeless, the working poor, MP's within all political parties, police chiefs, scientists, environmentalists, artists, writers, philosophers and deans of the academy – all who are willing to talk and listen.

Bring together different narratives of how the world works, different personalities from different faith groups (including atheists and nihilists). Make it clear that their views are important and that everyone has a voice, but the point of the voice is not to be right, but to open doors. 

The future, if there is to be one, must embrace and hold up the reverence and dignity of all.

Civil Society Dying Slowly and Painfully

Listening to CBC radio this morning I heard someone say that the federal government would not openly challenge Rob Ford in a call to dislodge or demand he resign as Mayor of Toronto because his supporters commonly termed "Ford Nation" are the same base as the "Harper Nation." 

Chantal Hébert writes in the Toronto Star "There is a jarring disconnect between the Conservatives’ punitive judicial agenda, their much proclaimed law-and-order principles and their efforts to look away from the public transgressions of the man who runs Canada’s biggest city and the disruptions to Toronto’s municipal life that result from them."  

What kind of people support political representatives who appear to have a contempt for their responsibility to uphold the laws of Canada? 

What qualities do those in the Ford or Harper nation possess?  What is their world view besides repeating the mantra "low taxes" and "the economy"?

Are they addicted to a drug-like notion, that our society is a shopping mall, where you choose the world you want to live in just as you choose commodities from a shelf? That virtues such as hard work, intelligence and self-preservation will keep them safe, no matter how many others suffer?  

Or are these "nations" invented/manufactured by corporate sponsored media?

Institutions and national identities have largely been built on the addictions of the privileged, and sooner or later, we shall see clearly that we have spent and wasted our achievements in an inebriated stupor of self-congratulation. Our governments and institutions uphold our delusions and cannot afford to save us from them. We must re-invent ourselves within a just society if we want our species to survive.

What is Government?

image created by DOSGuy

The most basic definition of government is the organization or administration of the state.

But much has been written about government from many voices with varying points of view, it might be said that our own personalities are defined by how we define it.

Abraham Lincoln said "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. When they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it."

The often quoted Thomas Jefferson said "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."

"For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery" according to Jonathan Swift.

A part of the American consciousness is the suspicion of government as revealed by Henry David Thoreau "That government is best which governs least."

The notion that government is a handicap, brought to the new world from England by Thomas Paine is suggested in this quote. "The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security."

Even worse, that government is our teacher. It ... "teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy" (Louis D. Brandeis)

Or it "reflects the soul of its people. If people want change at the top, they will have to live in different ways. Our major social problems are not the cause of our decadence. They are a reflection of it." says Cal Thomas 


"Freedom isn't free" says Bill Maher. "It shouldn't be a bragging point that 'Oh, I don't get involved in politics,' as if that makes someone cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers in government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn't insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable."

Easier said than done.  Noam Chomsky is more sympathetic. "If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works."

Government has been studied for many centuries, so we should be getting close to electing good governments, shouldn't we?  Especially as there is no shortage in wisdom expressed on the subject. George Monbiot does it frequently:

"Just as taxation tends to redistribute wealth; regulation tends to redistribute power. A democratic state controls and contains powerful interests on behalf of the powerless. This is why billionaires and corporations hate regulation, and – through their newspapers, thinktanks and astroturf campaigns – mobilise people against it."

Although there is a shortage of quotes by women, this doesn't mean women don't comment on government. Perhaps we think of how the structure of government and power affects our society, and so the last word goes to Frances Moore Lappe in an article that appeared in Straight Goods News.

"Maybe we begin here: recognizing that our crisis is not that we humans are too individualistic or too selfish. It’s that we’ve lost touch with how deeply social we really are. Easing the fear at the root of so much pain and violence that generates more fear — from suicide to child abuse to school massacres — comes as we embrace the obvious: We are creatures who, in order to thrive individually, depend on inclusive communities in which all can thrive."

This sensitivity to what is around us, is government of the mind and the soul. 

How is your sic-o-meter?

Is your skin uploading too much information these days? Do you see strange reports on Facebook and Twitter?  Phrases quoted, beliefs expressed, coming from the mouths of those who should know better? Are you wondering what happened to our leaders and our stateswomen?  Do you ask why there is no good news anywhere?

Well you have joined the world as you perceive it.  Your body is now a nervous substrate of all the information you read, see and hear.  Your sic-o-meter is working.

If you feel there is nothing you can do to respond effectively to all this noise, you are not alone.  What I think might be happening to your mind-body receptor (and mine) is the convergence of all those tweets, headlines and status updates. They are pureed into a felt-sense of the world which may feel like you are well-informed.

This puree, already containing your tribal associations, your habits and prejudices, will blend with external information. Rationally you may think that a mud slide in the Kootenays doesn't affect you, or that suicide bombers in Pakistan are not a threat to your loved ones.  You may not even stay awake at night worrying about climate change outside of a heat wave in summer.  You may receive the hourly news with equanimity and calm as though all the bad things just happen to others.

But our sic-o-meter could be working a lot better if we are able to see the many ways in which we are connected to this world.  If any news story elicits empathy for those who are personally affected, then our sic-o-meter does more than hear and internalize the 'out-there'. It tells us how we can respond, emotionally, intellectually, and physically to the world we live in, so that we are not powerless, not simply sitting in the audience watching a movie.

This doesn't mean taking sides. Or giving all our savings to charity. Or declaring our political opinions with everyone we meet.  The way in which you or I can respond is as a member of this global human family.  It is compassion not judgement, that gives us the power to respond authentically.  Judgement  without empathy is an alienation technique that gives us the fleeting sense of being innocent bystanders.  We are not, we are stakeholders.