[A-List] How we've made ourselves into abstractions

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Chris Maser

Culture Change (December 25 2007)


Editor's note: Chris Maser is a leading author with an interdisciplinary
knowledge-base of sciences. His purpose is to help his readers and
clients deeply understand our world and its problems, so that his
answers resound with logic and heart. In considering the development of
our species, touched on briefly but well done, Chris identifies our
essential challenge: "... once the world is divided into 'us' versus
'them', people perceive the necessity of acting either in
'self-interest' or 'self-defense', which today translates into our
'national interest' versus everyone else's. And it's this sense of
dualism that's the seat of humanity's increasingly fragmented view of a
seamless world". He develops this further in a section titled
Consolidation of Personal Power. Chris's insights include
hunter-gatherer culture, which helps him be a most effective ecologist
and forester, among other capabilities. -- Jan Lundberg


In discussing how I think fear subverted the sharing, caring way of life
that most hunting-gathering societies enjoyed (replacing it gradually,
insidiously with a life ruled progressively by acquisition, competition,
subjugation, and fear itself), it is important to remember that mine is
- at very best - a grossly simplistic notion of what might have
happened, beginning with the development of language.


Development of Language

Of all the gifts of life, language is one of the most incredible.
Through language, we can create, examine, and test concepts, those
intangible figments of human thought and imagination. Concepts, such as
love and fear, can only be qualified, not quantified; only interpreted,
not measured. And concepts can be reinterpreted hundreds, even
thousands, of years after they were first conceived, uttered, and
written. Language thus guides thought, perception, and our sense of
reality by archiving knowledge - and our cultural sense of fear.

Knowledge, in turn, is the storehouse of ideas, and language is the
storehouse of knowledge. Language therefore allows each succeeding
generation to benefit from the knowledge accrued by generations already
passed, as well as their perceptions of love and fear. Language is a
tool, a catalyst, a bequest from adults to children - that based on love
is a gift, whereas that based on fear a curse. Moreover, language allows
each generation to begin farther up the ladder of knowledge than the
preceding one. Language is an imperative for our survival because the
tenets of society are founded on it. As well, our understanding of
Nature, and our place therein, is founded on knowledge conveyed through
language. We simply must understand one another if our respective
societies are to survive.


Technology and the Abstraction of Life

Development of any kind is the collective introduction of thoughts,
which inevitably lead to further introductions of practices, substances,
and technologies in a strategy to use or extract a given resource or to
defend those already in possession. Another facet of technology is the
sense it gives us humans of ever-greater control over our environment,
which in today's Western industrialized society is often a war against
the uncertainties of Nature - against the creative novelty of the
Universe itself. Consider the development of weapons.

The abstraction of life, which shifts our perception from the spiritual
to the material, began unconsciously through the technological
development of weapons. Weapons initially came about as a means of
protection from predators and for obtaining food. The first weapon
probably was a hurled rock or a piece of wood used as a club. Then, a
human-like creature saw the advantage of using a long piece of wood to
hold some viscous predator at bay. With time, it was discovered that a
stick could be fashioned into a more potent weapon by rubbing one end
against rough rocks until a sharpened point was affected, one that
caused pain or death.

Next, a pointed stick was hurled at a foe or potential meal, and thus
was born a spear, the sharpened point of which could be hardened by
subjecting it to heat from a fire. Then a piece of sharp bone was
fastened to the end as a more lethal tip and finally a piece of stone
shaped into a cutting point. With time, a throwing stick or atlatl was
devised to hurl a spear with greater force than available in one's
extended arm.

Next came the bow and arrow, which could be shot faster and farther than
a spear could be thrown. In addition, one could carry more arrows than
spears, and arrows were probably more economical to make and less of a
setback when broken or lost. This progressed to the crossbow and finally
gunpowder and guns. Today's rifles can fire bullets so fast one scarcely
has time to see an enemy's face, and others are exceedingly accurate at
long range. Each technological advance made life and killing more
abstract - such as "smart bombs".


Domestication of Animals

With the advent of domesticating and herding animals, came the necessity
of continually finding enough pasture on which to graze one's herd. The
more people in a given vicinity who had flocks of sheep or herds of
goats, and later herds of cattle and/or horses, the more inevitable it
became that competition for grazing lands would sooner or later find its
way into culture. Competition became accentuated when people viewed
their animals as their wealth and thus built flocks or herds to numbers
far exceeding those necessary for mere survival.

Here the challenge is that once the world is divided into "us" versus
"them", people perceive the necessity of acting either in
"self-interest" or "self-defense", which today translates into our
"national interest" versus everyone else's. And it's this sense of
dualism that's the seat of humanity's increasingly fragmented view of a
seamless world.


Invention of the Irrigation Ditch

As the first ditch - a human-created water diversion - became the many
ditches, it allowed the expansion of humanity, plants, and animals into
places heretofore uninhabitable by those needing water in close
proximity. In so doing, the supply of available water and the ability to
divert it to areas of one's choice became a basis of a more secure life
with respect to the production of food. Thus, local populations of
people increased, as well as competition among them. With time, the
supply of available water became contentious as those people who
controlled more land than others wanted more of the available water.

This scenario was compounded when water either originated on the land
controlled by an individual or ran through a piece of land under a
person's direct control. The farther away one's land was from the source
of water one used, the more at the mercy and good will of the person or
people upstream one was likely to be.

Over time, ditches, and the water they carried, gave rise to agriculture
and eventually led to such feats of engineering as the Suez and Panama
Canals, each of which physically connects one ocean with another, and in
the process, both canals became commodities over which wars have been
fought.


Centralization of Leadership

Centralization of leadership, which may well have given rise to the
proverbial struggle for power, probably arose with the acquisition of
material goods, such as herds of livestock, and the inevitable material
advantage that came from having more than someone else. Such distinct
material advantage undoubtedly prompted the notion of personal
privilege-based material wealth.

For example, when the first European invaders set foot on the shores of
the "New World" and saw its wealth, did they not set out to get what
they decided was rightfully theirs by the act of "discovery" before
someone else did? However, the New World was already discovered - and
occupied - by humans, but that did not stop the European invaders, with
their superior technology, from stealing whatever they wanted. So began
the centralization and consolidation of alien powers in the New World.


Consolidation of Personal Power

The struggle for power was born the moment the first person with a
social advantage consciously eliminated human equality from the heart of
the hunter-gatherer way of life and replaced it with inequality based on
gender and/or social class, both of which are a contrived behavior
disguised as privilege and translated as "power". This sense of
privilege, the underpinnings of most organized religions, is based on
holding power. Fear of losing power through opposition means that all
voices but its own must be silenced - as exemplified by the Catholic
Inquisition in olden times and dictatorships today.

With the advent of wealth and personal power, still another lesson from
the hunter-gatherer culture was lost, namely that self-centeredness and
acquisitiveness are not inherent traits of our species, but rather
acquired traits based on a sense of fear and insecurity within our
social setting that fosters the perceived need of individual and
collective competition and the notion of "rights" such competition for
power engenders.


Establishment of "Rights"

The establishment of "rights" led to the introduction of slavery,
subjugation of the growing masses, and finally to the perceived
unequivocal and absolute "ownership and rights of private property".
Speaking of rights, the Dalai Lama said: "If we are prevented from using
our creative potential, we are deprived of one of the basic
characteristics of a human being. It is very often the most gifted,
dedicated, and creative members of our society who become victims of
human rights abuses. Thus the political, social, cultural, and economic
developments of a society are obstructed by the violations of human rights."

Those who violate human rights attempt to do so in the secrecy of an
information blackout. To remove the cloak of secrecy and shed light on
these violations, hundreds of journalists have given their lives to
bring the news of such atrocities to the world by going into areas where
free journalism is discouraged, if not outright forbidden.

Today, one understanding of a "right" is a legalistic, human construct
based on some sense of moral privilege. Although a right in a democratic
system of government is created by people and defined and guaranteed by
law, access to a right may not be equally distributed across society.
Conversely, a "right" does not apply to any person outside the select
group, unless, of course, that group purposely confers such a right on a
specifically recognized individual - someone from a foreign country
seeking political asylum from clan violence in Somalia, rape in Kosovo,
or forced sterilization in China.

Ostensibly, a "right" in democracy gives everyone equality by
sanctifying and impartially protecting socially acceptable behaviors
while controlling unsanctioned ones - which includes the "right" to
extract natural resources by the global corporate powers. There is,
however, a price exacted for having rights, even in a true democracy.

Rights have responsibilities attached to them, such as protecting the
legitimate rights of all peoples from the overreach behavior of
resource-mining corporations, which means protecting the rights of
extant hunter-gatherers, even those who simply want to be left alone to
live their lives in peace and harmony within their homelands, be they
forest, jungle, desert, or Arctic shores. Thus, whenever a law is passed
to protect the rights of the majority against the transgressions of the
minority, everyone pays the same price - a loss of freedom of choice, of
flexibility - because every law so passed is restrictive to everyone.
Put succinctly, we give up personal freedoms in order to gain personal
rights, but those without access to the cherished "rights" reap only
less freedom.

The problem is that rights, as granted by humans to one another in daily
life, including in the United States, are based on access, not on
equality. Access is determined by some notion that one race, color,
creed, sex, or age is superior to another, which means that differences
and similarities are based on subjective judgments about whatever those
appearances are. In American society, for example, men are judged more
capable than women in most kinds of work because society has placed more
value on certain kinds of products; that is, those demanding such
masculine attributes as linear thinking and physical strength as opposed
to those demanding such feminine attributes as interpersonal
relationship and physical gentleness.

With notable exceptions, the stereotype holds that perceived differences
in outer (superficial) values become social judgments about the inherent
(real) values of individual human beings. Superficial characteristics
are thus translated into special rights or privileges simply because the
individuals involved are different in some aspects and either perform
certain actions differently or perform different actions. The greater
the difference one perceives between another person and oneself, the
more likely one is to make black-and-white judgments about that person's
real value as expressed through one's notion of that person's rights.

The most extreme example of personal judgment is the use of superficial
differences to justify a social end. One group of people thus declares
itself superior to another group because it wants what the other group
has. The "superior" group tells the "inferior" group that they have no
rights, and through this denial of rights justifies its abuse of fellow
human beings.

By replacing spirituality, Nature, and human well-being with material
wealth, as symbolized by the money chase, the road to social
impoverishment, environmental degradation, and, in numerous instances
throughout recorded history, the collapse of societies and their
life-support systems become the norm - exemplified by the Industrial
Revolution.


The Industrial Revolution and the Rise of Capitalism

If we leap forward in time by the thousands of years it took to advance
from the domestication of animals to the Industrial Revolution, we find
that technology was still idealized both as labor saving and as a means
of increasing the predictability of control over Nature in maintaining
material lifestyles. But then something shifted in the human drive for
predictability and power, a shift that began to focus technology on
replacing people with machines, which in turn fostered the growing
social inequality among those with material means and those without.

Those who could afford to own the machines, which did more work than one
person could, kept more of the profits. Thus, if it originally took ten
men to produce a given amount of goods for sale, each man was paid a
certain amount. With the advent of a machine that could now replace nine
of those men and still produce the same amount of commodity, the
reasoning became something like this: "I've invested my monetary capital
in the purchase of this machine; therefore, I'm entitled to keep
nine-tenths of the profits since my machine represents nine-tenths of
the productive capacity because it takes only one person to operate the
machine". And so the first people were put out of work by a
"labor-saving" invention that not only separated economic production
from social life but also strictly reinforced the tie of individual
well-being to individual production. This coupling of individual
well-being to individual production inevitably led to competition, which
in turn led to social inequality, poverty, and environmental degradation.

Labor-saving technology shifted to social tyranny when those who lusted
after wealth and power discovered they could both own and use technology
to produce more of a given product with fewer people and thus keep a
disproportionate amount of the profits for themselves. At that point,
the unspoken purpose of such technology began to move from labor saving
in terms of creating a better life for everyone, to people-replacing in
order to garner more wealth and power for the few who could afford to
own the technology. After all, machines do not ask for wages; are not
late to work; do not call in sick; make no human mistakes; do not want
child care or maternity leave; do not expect health benefits, paid
vacations, retirement pensions, and so on.

The Industrial Revolution spawned not only the ability to produce more
products than were needed to fulfill life's necessities but also the
capitalist economic thinking that contrived the notion of scarcity as an
economic construct to foster consumerism and increase profits. And thus
fear choreographed the psyche of the industrialized human to deal with
the economist's notion of scarcity and want.

The contrived scarcity, which is built around the economist's vision,
which perceives the ever-increasing need to consume, always consume, was
built into the Rational Economic Man (and Woman) as an inherent part of
human nature {1}. As the dominant behavioral paradigm permeating
conventional economic theory, Rational Economic Man is a bundle of
assumptions about human nature from the philosophers of the
Enlightenment who were responsible for early economic thought. The
features assumed by economists to define Rational Economic Man are:

1. self-interested
2. competitive with perfect knowledge of all alternatives
3. acquisitive
4. materialistic
5. believing more is better - always preferable to less
6. preferring immediacy - something now is preferable to something later
7. always making the same choices ("rational")
8. the desire for power and its perceived psychological benefits
9. and, I might add, an addiction to machines and gadgets

To the uninitiated eye, the traits appear to accurately describe human
nature and behavior. Anyone who builds mathematical models realizes that
realistic assumptions generate useful models because they have the
ability to accurately predict real-world phenomena. Economists, among
others, go to great lengths and invoke elaborate semantic gymnastics to
convince themselves and others that their assumptions are realistic and,
therefore, "factual" in that people really do act this way. In so doing,
their style of speaking can be incredibly difficult to decipher, which
Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan refers to as "constructive
ambiguity".

When, however, economists are confronted with evidence of human behavior
that is inconsistent with the assumptions of Rational Economic Man, the
instinct of self-preservation often leads them to point out that a
particular assumption was not really granted or that a twist in
language, which would indicate an apparently altruistic behavior, was
really self-interest, and so on. If nothing else, they retreat to the
premise that most people act consistently with the assumptions of
Rational Economic Man most of the time, and that should be sufficient to
ensure the validity of their "rationalistic" economic theory.

Of course, if exceptions do exist, monstrous errors in describing the
goals and behavior of people can also occur, as pointed out by Sherlock
Holmes to Dr Watson: "While the individual man is an insolvable puzzle,
in the aggregate, he becomes a mathematical certainty". Holmes goes on
to explain that it is impossible to foretell what any individual person
will do, but an average number of people are always predictable because,
although individuals vary, percentages remain constant.

Holmes, in his discussion of the predictability of human behavior,
touches the core of special cases and common denominators. Although each
person is a special case and therefore unpredictable, if we study enough
special cases with an eye for their common traits (common denominators),
then we can make certain predictions about the generalized behavior.

Where technology is not yet available to replace people, corporations
still find ways of divesting themselves of those people they feel cost
more than they want to pay. As corporations downsize, and as technology
increasingly replaces people, lower-paying jobs, such as clerks in
retail stores and positions in fast-food establishments, fill the gap,
but most receive minimum wage or slightly higher (usually without
benefits, such as health insurance), which is not enough to pay for
housing. As a result, many people with jobs are homeless. That is
different than in the past, when a full-time job almost guaranteed a
person the dignity of being able to afford housing. There is yet another
way human dignity is lost, one that especially affects men. {2}

In the days of the hunter-gatherers, there were clear rites of passage
to help men find their path in life. In the not-so-distant past, men had
communities (churches, unions, political groups, civic groups, and
various associations of war veterans) to help them find their way along
the time-honored path of masculinity. Now, however, good work is
difficult to find and real community has been replaced by virtual
community, which offers but a faint shadow of the once ways. Today,
there is a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of many a man's stomach as
the bedrock of community continues to crumble.

For lack of a more substantive way to define themselves in today's
society, men have become overly obsessed with their images because their
jobs not only change too often to become a firm basis of personal
identity but also are increasingly demeaning. Nevertheless, the dark
side of technology (and its negative, human fallout) is ignored, brushed
aside, as it were, by most corporations and many economists so more and
"better" technology can be developed to deal with the problems of
earlier technologies. The latter, however, more often then not become
the technological problems of tomorrow and the endangerment of
social-environmental sustainability. Although I could go on at length
about the cumulative impact of making ourselves into abstractions, I
think the point has been sufficiently made.

So, where is society today? Now that we humans have the technological
capability to destroy the entire world as we know it, more and more
people are beginning to question the wisdom we possess to cope with many
of our so-called technological advances. I find hope in this questioning
because people are beginning to realize that we have duped ourselves
into thinking that technology can progressively allow us to control
Nature and therefore to separate ourselves from Nature, and from one
another along the way. By the same token, people are gradually beginning
to understand that they are, in fact, an inseparable part of both Nature
and one another's experiences of life.

Endnotes

1. The discussion of Rational Economic Man is based on: Chris Maser,
Russ Beaton, and Kevin Smith. 1998. Setting the Stage for
Sustainability: A Citizen's Handbook. Lewis Publishers, Boca Raton,
Florida. 275 pages. For a more thorough discussion of Rational Economic
Man, refer to Chapter 6 of this book.

2. The preceding discussion about American men is based on:

(1) Susan Faludi. 1999. The Betrayal of the American Man. William Morrow
& Company, New York, New York. 662 pages

(2) Joseph H Pleck. 1999. Balancing Work and Family. Scientific American
10 (2): 38-43

(3) Martin Daly and Margo Wilson. 1999. Darwinism and the Roots of
Machismo. Scientific American 10 (2): 9-12,14.

_____

This essay is condensed from Chris Maser's 2004 book The Perpetual
Consequences of Fear and Violence: Rethinking the Future. Maisonneuve
Press, Washington, DC. 373 pages.

Chris has written several books that are showcased on his website,
chrismaser.com. Chris lives in Corvallis, Oregon. He is a consultant on
environmental land-use development, sustainable communities and forestry.

Further Reading:

"Ancient innovations for present conventions toward extinction" by Jan
Lundberg, Culture Change Letter #161 (June 10 2007): culturechange.org

http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=141&Itemid=2#cont


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