In what follows I have taken the 7 major
themes of the Story that we tell ourselves about ourselves, here in the US of
America, from the previous essay and suggested plots and subplots that have
been developed from each of them; then attached identifiable issues from
present experience to the plot-lines.
There can be, and should be, questions about the correctness of the
assignments: that there is considerable crossover among the categories implies
that some refinement is necessary, but for now these will do to begin the
process.
It is important to remember that the full
themes are not to be seen as the collected structural parts of a coherent
narrative, but as a reservoir of elements from which bits and pieces can be
selected. This seems pretty clear
as one reads through them. Very
often aspects of one theme will contradict aspects of another or one theme will
lead to quite different subplots for the same issues – a little like the
Christian Bible.
(1) Belief in the human right
and responsibility to dominate the earth
(without any consideration of any need to integrate actions into the
material and energy economies of natural cycles). This belief, combined with #4, takes on the special form of ‘American
Exceptionalism’
Plots and subplots: Whatever can be said to “improve” human
life takes precedence over other interests. Human beliefs trump all other
realities. The “way of life”
currently lived is necessary and natural.
Specific issues in today’s world: land-property and mineral rights;
manifest destiny; extractive industries; factory farming; road building;
damming of rivers; climate change issues and denial; oil/gas drilling; pipeline
construction; mineral/energy exploration; imperialism (combines with #4); war
and military growth (competition for domination); space programs; soil loss and
degradation; energy generation (hydroelectric, gas and coal fired, nuclear, all
solar based forms); life-style standards that exceed the earth’s productive
capacity; environmental degradation and biodiversity loss; 6th
extinction event; GMOs.
(2) Belief that human life
is specially anointed by a non-material superior entity that (who) created the
universe and then created humans as its (his) material representative.
(another, slightly less metaphysical, form of this belief is that humans are
the culmination of the evolutionary process – what evolution was proceeding
toward from the beginning.)
Plots and subplots: humans are responsible to the
prescriptions and values of an entity beyond earthly concerns; humans are both
supreme on the earth and a servant of God; humans who have all the right
God-given values are “good”, those who deviate from those values are variously “evil;”
God judges human action by his rules, revealed to and reported by a Select
Order, rather than
arriving at behaviors that comport with ecological reality through an
adaptation process.
Specific issues in today’s world: abortion; religious “liberty”; “marriage”
issues; all manner of social behavioral prescription and proscription; drug
use; religious fundamentalism; population growth/control; religious belief
conflicts and controversies; challenge of atheism.
(3) Belief in agency (human
agency and supernatural agency) rather than events being moved by the immediate
and direct action of preceding events and the statistical properties of
randomness.
Plots and subplots: An agent, a conscious intelligence, must
be the source of all organized, “non-random”, actions; if an event seems to be
purposeful, then an agent must be directing it. Humans are to be the controlling agents for a large set of
earthly actions and some supernatural intelligence must be the controlling
agency for all other actions.
Specific issues in today’s world: meaning of freedom and liberty; socialism-communism
as inherent evil; early childhood, public and university education; affirmative
action; healthcare, health insurance, medical issues (epidemics, life
extension), exotic medical procedures; rejection of evolution and “materialist”
science.
(4) Acting on a “natural”
hierarchy based on how much a living thing is like one’s self and one’s
community: some humans are more “human”, more worthwhile, than others. Some can be considered as having the
same worth as animals, and animals are valued (and feared) in relation to how
much they display human-like appearance and behavior.
Plots and subplots: humans who are worth less than others
can be treated by different standards; some humans can be effectively enslaved,
often seen as for their own good; defective nature of those who differ from
assumed social and sexual norms.
Specific issues in today’s world: immigration; racism and bigotry; inferiority
and subjugation of women; social injustice, LGBT issues; nationalism; patriotism;
animal suffering; human rights issues; militarization of domestic police
forces; class warfare; stop and frisk (and its many cousins); gender based pay
rates; women’s healthcare.
(5) The human leader
principle: another, more CSO based, system of valuing (while still tied to primate
group dynamic principles) is based on accumulations of power-related objects
and behaviors: defined in the US American society as wealth and charisma.
Ultimately, this has to do with the biology of leadership and its adaptation
from primate social evolution into human communities. (Charisma is interesting
in this context, not a mystical quality, but the product of display of
confidence and the ability to rapidly read others and appear to be like them –
a specialized form of imitation, magnified in effect by attractiveness.
Confidence without empathic connection is considered boorish, empathic
connection without confidence is considered weakness and attractiveness without
the other two is considered frivolous.)
Plots and subplots: leaders have the right, and are
expected, to tell others what to do; their success by social standards
demonstrates their special status.
Leaders have special qualities and special knowledge that make their
decisions superior to others. The
human need for a social organizing principle.
Specific issues in today’s world: pop culture devotion; celebrity fetish;
pop culture demonization; cult and cult-like identification; authoritarianism;
the Tea Party; megachurches; being the “good German”; my country right or
wrong.
(6) The accumulation of
material possessions is the measure of worth and value: wealth and power trump
all other human achievements justifying much that would be called sin or crime
without the actual attainment of wealth.
Plots and subplots: the human worth of a person can be seen
in their material possessions and lifestyle. A rich criminal must be taken seriously, but a poor laborer
not at all; ‘getting ahead’ is a valid reason for devaluing other people.
Specific issues in today’s world: corporate power and corporate
personhood; shame from poverty, pride from wealth; concentration of economic
power; corporate criminality; international trade; internet access; national
debt; multi-tiered justice (sic) system.
(7) The belief that humans
are individual self-reliant units of action: each person is seen as a fully
independent actor making from the world’s opportunities what they can (moved
properly by acquisitiveness).
Success and failure are equally earned only by the amount and quality of
effort. Circular reasoning is
generally applied: success (by the standards of #4 and 6) equals effort;
failure equals sloth.
Plots and subplots: a person has the right to all they
accumulate by their own effort; Private property is a central value; no one has
a responsibility to any other person, to community or to the ecology; the
have-nots just don’t work hard enough or want to work hard enough; acting in
self-interest operates the ‘invisible hand’ to improve everyone’s life.
Specific issues in today’s world: wealth inequity; welfare; corporate
welfare; tax policy/progressive taxation, taxes as theft; poverty; plutocracy;
free market ideology; the shift of greed from deadly sin to virtue; banking
power; social safety net; social security; marginalizing the middle class; smothering
the poor; guns, ‘stand-your-ground’ laws; response to human needs (biological
need, social need and actualization need); institutional surveillance/privacy
loss (competes with #5); homelessness; unemployment and under employment; prison
policy and more.
(N) There are a number of
specific issues that don’t seem to me to fit neatly into any of the categories,
although several themes may speak to aspects of them, the above themes don’t
clarify, define or organize action for them except, perhaps, only by denying,
rejecting or being inadequate for their consideration as issues. This accounts
in part for our ambiguity toward them:
institutional secrecy, terrorism, eco-terrorism, financial terrorism, failing
infrastructure, loss of reserve currency status for the dollar, return to a
multipolar world/loss of US hegemony, education in an environment of controversy,
need for a reliable epistemology, cloning animals (and possibly humans),
genetic control and eugenics for humans, economic collapse, ecological collapse.
If your favorite issue is not included or
wrongly placed, you too can play the fun game of taxonomy.
* * *
If you unconsciously and uncritically
accept the Story and its themes, then trying to correct a plot or subplot that
you recognize as destructive, or otherwise unfortunate, is difficult, if not
impossible. And many of the
subplots are becoming clearer and clearer in their consequences to “real life,”
but arguments surrounding the subplots are still being framed by the dominant
Story.
Real issues with no clear category are
especially difficult to think about or act on appropriately. Many issues can
and do cross categories. This is
naturally the result of issues having more than one consequence, the filling in
of ‘empty spaces’ to rationalize a narrative and the artificial nature of
categories in general. In particular themes 2 and 3 are brought to the service
of actions created in the other themes as a justification. Some issues have a
positive relation to the underlying assumptions of a category and some have a
negative relation.
Several of the issue/category relations
result in paradoxes – as one might expect – when the natural fit with the
category contradicts the underlying assumption of the category: for example,
theme #3 assumes agency, but the natural fit with insurance must also recognize
that insurance is structured on actuarial data based on statistical
probability.
What we face is an array of real issues
that must be acted on and a collection of Story elements to which we appeal for
guidance in forming the actions; and the Story fails to address the Reality of
the issues. We either attempt the
utterly impossible, change the issues to match the Story, or we attempt the
supremely difficult, work backward from the issues to remake the Story more
appropriate and responsive.
There are two lines of development in
human thought to which we can appeal.
The first is the 3 to 4 thousand year history of philosophical discourse
on how best to live: the world’s religions have produced a reasonably
consistent underlying framework of values; secular moral philosophers have
produced a complementary body of values that in large measure agree with
summary religious values (combining points of agreement and tossing the
outlying prescriptions). The
second is the increasing, science process driven, understanding of
sociobiology/evolutionary psychology and the overall ecological processes by
which life organizes and survives in the hostility of the universe. Humanity, and the rest of life as presently
organized, is approaching the moment when the present Story (and especially the
Story as manifest in the US of America) will utterly cease any relevance to the
issues that irrevocably control our fate.
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