The Death of Humanity and The Rise of Artificial Morality

For some reason that might be easy to guess, knowing that guesses only inspire further learning, I see a pattern that indicates the death of humanity as power becomes the greatest addiction.

Chris Hedges has warned of our inability to fully support life over power rather than power over life. Moral outrage has been silenced and replaced with everlasting war against "the other". 

Toxic masculinity has invaded the public spaces like schools and business. When artificial intelligence becomes big business and billionaires develop a cocky response to questions of doing the right thing for the greater good.

We have become alienated from our own best interests, such as survival for all, not just the fittest. We have swallowed so many slogans in our enthusiasm for worldliness, being "well informed". 

How can we stop the endless slaughter of innocents during war? Will the future be endless war imposed on innocents until we no longer notice? Over the centuries of variously labelled wars and struggles for peace, we leave, escape, find new lands to live, rename ourselves, start new religions and buy new things.

Where is this headed? Full worship of things and fear of whatever we can't control?

The end of birth giving feminine? Education and medicine is out of reach for many. Death of intelligence, art, love, music, dance? In countries where women are not allowed in public unless they are covered head to foot, not allowed to be seen or heard, is more than reminiscent of the days when children should be seen and not heard, while women who speak in public are locked in stocks.

Men create society with money, literature, sport, law and entertainment, while the men who thumb their nose as trends and manners, become "great" in the public eye.

Now the voice of bipoc and  women is acknowledged, there is white supremacy, racism and misogyny threatening our peace. A nervous reaction to reason that makes violence predictable.

Where is this headed? Will the feminine gender be herded naked into cold sheds without heat and food, until they die and a brave new world (Huxley) is created?

For our own mental health we need to be aware that new movements start and they are not always in our best interests. Men questioning their personal greatness, creating worlds where everything is overlooked except their own importance. A world where children are tortured, starved and murdered, where education and social integrity is dismissed for fast cars and rockets?

Is this ridiculous? If so what is holding our society in place?

 

 

Imagining a Hundred Years in the Future

 

Based on the politics today  - we hear of wars, using children as enemy targets, the re-establishment of misogyny, racism and fascism - the end of democracy and civilization. 

The centuries of witch hunts silenced feminine wisdom making it the servant of white male power.  Capitalism created the working class used in factories and religious beliefs that preached poverty as laziness. Very useful for right wing politics.

Where is this trend heading? Cruelty as threat to community. Family and friends competing for status.  Political parties who make a woman's body the property of the nation. Holding up the law as the means to deliver justice but not if you're female. A new slave trade. In China female infants sold or drowned.

Schools train children to serve factories (or offices if the're lucky).  Training to make them useful in factories and offices. The High Street to sell off your wares, to install consumerism in the town. Shopping centres to display the things you need to buy.

New fashions to show off your dedication to modernity. Reshuffling the class system through media and education. Praise for those who had the money to buy it.

WWI and WWII to threaten the peace and turn notions of morality into courage to fight on battlefields designed by people you'd never meet. Public calls to annihilate newly identified minorities. New minorities to exploit while claiming to offer a home to those displaced by war.

Television in everyones home to watch shows where everyone competes and only one or two win. Desperate struggles to win the top prize. Showing off young children to old folks, singing in front of moving cameras, promising fame and wealth. 

Will this end? If so how will it end? 

There are powers that seek absolute control.  A future designed by clever minds to further centralize power.

How can we promise a future for all life on this planet? Will we recognize ourselves in a hundred years? As long as we humans create systems that benefit a few while looking for scapegoats our future is not utopian. 

PASS IT ALONG - Transatlantic Session

Dear Flowers

 

Dear Flowers

You brighten and humble us humans with your constant beauty and humility. You speak volumes and say nothing. You never complain that people are destroying your home or that weather makes you wet and cold. Your reds are bright, your greens are uplifting, your seeds are staunch and tiny, your perfume is welcoming and gentle. Now I know some flowers are not light in scent but you have a job to do and must do it for the sake of bees and insects and interdependent web of life which we are all a part.

In appreciation,

Janet

The Eighth Principle (Canadian Unitarian Council of Canada)

The 8th Principle

 “We, the member congregations of the Canadian Unitarian Council, covenant to affirm and promote: Individual and communal action that accountably dismantles racism and systemic barriers to full inclusion in ourselves and our institutions.”  https://youtu.be/1aWVP15y17s

But how do we fight racism, antisemitism, class, genders and all other labels that place people in categories for the sake of exclusion?

The reason that people have been labeled is to keep the lord of the manor comfortable, so he can keep his house clean and tidy by employing servants to deal with the domestic issues.  Then his servants want what he has so the lord must invent some new categories.

Keeping a society running smoothly never happens without some conflict but when that conflict involves force and violence, the cause is forgotten and new problems arise.

The first thing the mind seeks is to believe it's not my fault. (a) I am a good person, I am innocent, I am not comfortable learning about how others, especially if it gives me unearned privilege. 

I naturally want to believe I have earned my status, my position, my wealth. So whenever a privileged person is accused of having privilege they often deny it. Unless of course they are "woke".

"Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke#:~:text

But although there are more diverse conversations they include holding onto privilege by calling it something else and using more pressure (racism) towards those who are not in the privileged group.

This all seems quite easy and reasonable, however the pushback means that the privileged are willing to invent "reasons" for their status. The easiest way is to make fun of "woke" people.

Conversations indicate generally we have not understood how our socializing history has been about creating classes of privilege, breaking them down, rebuilding with new prejudices.

No doubt the status quo relies on using media to sustain their privilege by calling it something else. Class, talent, intelligence, organization, quality, rationality, communication and justice.

All of our labels have been soiled by self interest. It started in the Garden of Eden before Abraham was born. And dear reader you might be asking how would I know that? Well of course I wouldn't.

Everything humanity has invented was based on desire more than knowledge. Everything we have learned, written, sung, spoken is born by desire first then establishment. Until we learned the hard way that knowledge was more than words.

For centuries we lived in caves and if not centuries then years. We survived storms, famine, war and struggle. We created stories to explain how we got here, and weapons to kill our food and other tribes who wanted to eat too.

Then we created bigger stories to sustain our beliefs which include labels for different DNA's like skin colour, brain size, strengths and weakness, family origins, and ownership.

Yes I know this is simplistic and beyond this is the larger universe. 

Our planet has been beautiful but we are destroying it now, believing we must survive. What is the final cause? How do we get the whole world to agree on who is destroying the world and how to take responsibility for it.

The loudest arguments are organized by powerful interests ... corporations who have established boards, laws, preferences, languages. And still we deny our own parts in what we describe as problems.

Still we are annoyed by 'the experts on what others do wrong'. Still we shut up that which we do not want to hear.

And still there are millions of people who sign up to spend millions on how to save lives. How to solve the problems we face. 

George Yancy On The Horrors of This Age

 

George Yancy: "As a philosopher, I find myself struggling to find the words to communicate moments like these, moments when the world is filled with so much violence, suffering, dread and injustice. As philosophers, we are taught to think with clarity, to reason, to be philosophical — that is, to remain calm in the face of great difficulty. I’m not always convinced that the academic study of philosophy has what it takes to tarry with the burden of human suffering, to face it, to describe its horror..."

"Think of the horrors that are encircling us: wars, genocide, xenophobia, femicide, anti-Black racism, mass incarceration, the rise of unabashed white nationalism within the U.S. and the spread of far right populism globally, the breakdown of democracy, climate crisis. Add to this the killing of over 1,200 people in Israel and the over 22,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza. Over 5,000 Palestinian children have been wiped from the face of the Earth by Israel’s continued genocidal war." https://truthout.org/articles/how-can-philosophy-speak-to-a-world-in-crisis-the-answer-may-lie-in-our-bodies/?utm

I am not trained as a psychologist or sociologist but I have thoughts about how to respond. That's all I have. I have read news articles, listened to radio programs on current events, thought about them at church.

So here is this old nobody tackling this thought and the first response I expect is -- there's nothing you can do so just get on with your own life. 

My life is filled with family and friends who care about what happens to me and others.  We are humbled because evil is so easy and morality is so hard.

Today at Church we were given permission to take this weight from our minds and our bones. But this doesn't mean we do nothing. This doesn't mean forget it. It means finding a way to connect to our humanity. 

To believe we are isolated units with no connection to the world we live in is a lie, and I suspect it is a lie on purpose.

What is the purpose? What can the purpose be? It's nurturing, taking care of the world, much like housecleaning, repairing. 

The world is not just roads and buildings. It is our relationship to it. Would I be on the right path to say we have been raised to believe we don't have the power, we have been lead to believe through media and finance, we should let the big boys deal with it and just get on with our lives, then every four years go out an vote?

Worrying thoughts that come from those who are not famous don't count.

Thousands of writers, scientists, poets and doctors have written about this yet the world is still in danger. But don't give up yet, don't sell yourself short. There are clues in our questions even as our friends and family no longer invite us to dinner parties because we annoy everyone who simply want to get together to enjoy a meal.

But here are questions that need, that bleed for our attention, our tears, our sleepless nights until we can agree on changing course.

1. Liberal Capitalism favours power over integrity. If money has a louder voice than your grandmother settle for a society where a few have power over the majority. Power that's unexamined dismisses life as a means to an end but not a reason for survival.

2. Those who give birth, care and feed humanity are required to fit in, not create sustainable practices. The market is to serve the life it protects and engages, not the other way around. The economy must serve the world it lives in.

3. Being tough includes accepting truths that make us uncomfortable, not dismissing them. Truth is truth whether we accept it or not.

4. Violence never settles differences, it attempts to squash those who try to reach out to settle.

5. War gives up on life. War says death is good, life is unmanageable. Death creates a scorched earth without flags or flowers. War supports the arms industry not women, men, dogs and cats. War destroys houses, schools and shopping malls.

6. When people decide to fight we must fight injustice, hate and violence.

7. Yes there are people who do not care about life, they care about winning, which never lasts for long if the party that lost must starve, freeze, be enslaved and tortured. We cannot kill them all without putting ourselves in the conflict.

8. Societies have found ways to elevate themselves by promoting hate, but their solution only lasts as long as the defeated are imprisoned.

9. Hearts that don't bleed are dead. Bodies with dead hearts are dead within a few minutes.

10. Life and its survival is based on feminine and masculine principles. The reason we are in so much trouble is because hierarchies rarely valued both genders equally. This is a teachable moment.

Why Do I Write These Posts?

Because news and media articles can write about action to change or defend laws, but does not allow media to talk about why the laws are there, why there is outrage for some and not for others. Mainly because (I suspect) writing on feelings does not produce proof.

For example there is much coverage on public outrage or support. The back rooms and town halls that initiate or stop action, the NIMBY acts, the Anti-Abortion movement, the Anti-immigrant protests, and anti-tax protests. My mind rolls over and over thinking about the why's.

The danger is spreading my own unexamined prejudices. It's easy for me to think, no more generalizations from this blog or mouth. Write only what you know. But I fail to stick to that.

In my head there exists a lot of noise, a lot of questions, then a lot of suspicion. It's an Orwellian disease. Even the author of 1984 used a pen name. Why?

But I refuse to keep my laptop unplugged when so much injustice has been done to so many. I refuse to fall asleep straight away when I climb into bed.

Back to the anti-abortion movement as it evolves in the states where life only has value if it creates profit. The night time is where my emotions rule.

There is a belief that emotion should not govern politics and yet it shows up in acts of racist and misogynist habits.

For example, the recent cases of women being charged with murder after miscarrying. The women who have no money for food or housing being criminalized for getting pregnant while the men who provided the womb with the seed never even face accusation without a costly legal trial.

I am way past believing the anti-abortion movement is about the right to life when men organize wars and women who have the money to pay for medical care, go unchallenged in their right for health.

For centuries, only women who were part of a moneyed family could press charges against rape or get an education. The poor were called trash then and we treat them like trash today, but disguised in a moral gloss of self-control. 

Capitalism has enabled us to spout opinions without demanding any cost or responsibility from us. Socially there is a cost but we don't seem to talk about it enough. The homeless, the poor, the hungry, are problems. But pollution and climate change are "issues" separate from our own moral obligations.

What emerges in so-called conservative ridings are ways to ensure the people of colour, the women and children are locked into road blocks. A woman trying to escape a violent partner is given a death sentence when she gets pregnant. It sounds extreme but that is the reality.

Children born into a family of domestic abuse, suffer during their most vulnerable years and become adults with no self-esteem without tireless inner work on themselves.

Men lauded as heroes receive admiration starting wars, corporations that create bombs and guns, yet are ridiculed for acknowledging feelings of regret. 

Most of our injustices begin inside our heads where we give up space or rights or voice without trying. Believing we have no power is the first gate to overcome. Next is attempting to control others (what they think and say).

Today I am not going to apologize for talking about the politics that matters to me.