Reason, Sentiment and Human Survival

July 14^th was Woody Guthrie's posthumous 100^th birthday. Listening to his songs of social injustice, especially Deportee and its lament at the careless anonymity with which we regard migrant workers, recalls an earlier age of American humanity. It elicits the pathos of so much of the world's poor and anger at the rank contrast between them and the waste and greed of excessive wealth. The fundamental human compassion of Guthrie's songs strongly suggests the missing element in so much of our efforts to deal with humanity's major and increasing problems ranging from famine to war for the world's remaining resources.

But compassion is not the only missing element and it often cuts short our attention to the realities, often overlooked, that underlie the situations that move us to compassion. Guthrie's song Deportee, lamenting the callous indifference of a report on a plane crash, which killed the deported immigrants, has behind it the fact of gross human overpopulation. Where is the lament over that gross tragedy? Why can we not bring our compassion to bear on the fate of children born into an overpopulated world that makes their lives even more desperate than that of their parents? Why can we not bring our anger to bear on the Catholic Church and the Muslim fundamentalists and the Christian fundamentalist Quiverfull movement which promote increased birth rates knowing full well the fate that awaits those born to a world having little use for them?

There is an old gospel song titled This World is Not My Home. The fact is this world is our only home. Yet the former elicits a feeling of longing for a non-existent place and the latter elicits little emotion at best.

The central concern in all this is to begin a process of engaging human emotions, especially those surrounding the concept of home. Carl Sagan in his brief Pale Blue Dot homage to Earth as the birthplace and only home mankind has ever had, made a poignant effort in this direction. It should be as ongoing a theme in human discourse as any religion. I have appended it at the end of this article.

Until humanity can or will devote its compassion to these fundamental causes of human suffering, remote though they may seem, we will make little progress in ameliorating that suffering.

Additionally, it is imperative that we divorce morality from religion. We need to return to that good old 18^th century notion of a moral sentiment inherent in all people. As our world continues its global integration it is equally imperative that that sentiment is guided by reason applied to the facts of human existence. Morality can be taught. Compassion is an imperative element in that education. We must do this before the bigotries now extant in society destroy us all. An example of the moral sentiment is the refrain from Pete Seeger's My Rainbow Race. This song was sung by 40,000 Norwegians, standing in pouring rain, in, as they said, Love and Defiance. This was a unifying protest against those who would pit Christians against Muslims and to that end murdered 77 members of Norway's socialist Labor Party, which promotes multiculturalism. The majority of those killed were teenagers at a summer camp. The singing event can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q7CPNNWfME. For the meaning of moral sentiment I strongly suggest viewing this event and letting it fully sink in. You may want to view it several times to let its full dimensions sink in.

The refrain:

One blue sky above us, one ocean lapping all our shore
One earth so green and round, who could ask for more?
And because I love you I'll give it one more try
To show my rainbow race, it's too soon to die

Bob Newhard

aken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, lion miles in the dista

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) from Earth.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Go Small. Go Big. Go to Hell?

That mankind has a future, tenuous though it may be, is a given. What that future should (must?) be is currently being contested primarily by those who insist we must go small, such as Bill McKibben on the one hand and those who insist we must go big, albeit with greater concern for humanity than current globalization has afforded, such as Joseph Stiglitz. Both are good people concerned for what is best for humanity, which allows us to focus on the evidence offered rather than the motivations behind both positions.

Those who would have us go small propose economic and political localism. Goods should be produced as close to the areas of consumption and use as possible to minimize the energy and environmental costs of transportation. Currently the average distance food travels to the United States consumer is 1,500 miles. The economy as a whole should also be localized to minimize the excessive accumulations of capital that underlie the ruinous speculation that occurs when capital is increasingly detached from production. Localism in politics brings the political process closer to the citizen and makes participation in the political process more relevant to citizen concerns.

Among the downsides of localism is provincialism with its attendant narrow mindedness that can lead to violence when the differences between local groups are unmitigated by a cultural consciousness of our commonality. One of the virtues of large cities is the cosmopolitanism they can produce. McKibben sees the Internet, with its plethora of cultural and informational content as a major offset to localism’s potential for provincialism. Localism also fails to take into account that the earth’s resources are not equally distributed. Those humans living in the Sahel aridity of northern Africa, subject to frequent drought, have far less in natural resources than those living in temperate zones in Europe and the United States. Interestingly, South Korea seems to understand this. They are currently developing prefabricated, enclosed farms growing produce hydroponically. These immense enclosures could be placed anywhere and powered by locally-generated electricity. As population continues to grow, humans will have to live on less productive land. Even in the so-called developed world agricultural resources are being depleted. In some parts of the American Midwest top soil that was initially 2 feet thick is now down to 6 inches and has to be intensively fertilized with fossil fuel-produced fertilizers to maintain its productivity.

Proponents of globalism point out that humans are one species. That the planet is our only home and that we have to manage ourselves and our resources in global terms to even begin to effectively address the problems we have created. If we do not do this we risk perishing as a species as we quibble and kill over our differences. It can be argued that globalization has not been the problem. Globalization in the hands of immense profit-driven financial institutions has been the problem.

But let us look at a third alternative. Not what we ought to do, but what are we likely to do. The global economy and hence global power is in the hands of those who are focused on immediate financial and/or political objectives. As an example, the recent meeting of the G20 on global warming took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The first such meeting took place 20 years ago. Currently about 25% of the Amazon rainforest, sometimes referred to as the lungs of the planet, has been lost. Yet this enclave of global power meeting in the very country that contains most of that forest could come to no firm plan of action. Brazil, one of the larger economies of the world, pleaded that it did not have the resources to stop the steady encroachment on the forest. There was no attempt by these world leaders to bring together the world’s resources to stop the destruction and begin restoring this essential feature of global geography. We can globalize financial speculation to a 24/7 world-wide operation, but we cannot find the resources to protect life on this planet. That is but one of many instances that illustrate mankind’s inability to deal effectively with problems of this magnitude. It is, in my judgment, more likely that this incapacity to take seriously problems that will take more than one human generation to eventuate, compounded by the inability to overcome the relatively petty issues that have always divided us, that will spell the end of our species or at least spell the end of civilization and send us back to the tribal cultures of our forebears. We know how to obliterate our species. The idiocy of scientists' creating a much more virulent version of the pandemically deadly avian flu virus is testament to that.

Evolution produced an animal with a brain that has done absolutely amazing things, but encased it in the usual emotion-driven, narrow focus of the rest of the animal kingdom. This brain, that with its discovery of the Higgs boson is now in a position to understand the universe it inhabits, that sees inadequacies in its thinking as opportunities for further understanding and because of that does not war and kill over major differences such as Newtonian or Einsteinian cosmology as religion does over its differences, was unfortunately encapsulated in the same emotion-driven body as the rest of the animal kingdom. Our curse is knowing more than we can ever be and the inability to control that small portion we can be.

Bob Newhard