[Paleopsych] Fw: [bigbangtango] Slowly Slicing The Violence Out of War

Mon Oct 11 19:44:41 UTC 2004

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Geraldine Reinhardt 
To: paleopsych at paleopsych.org 
Cc: bigbangtango at yahoogroups.com 
Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 11:36 AM
Subject: Re: [bigbangtango] Slowly Slicing The Violence Out of War

Rob and Howard,
I think both of you present succinct and clearly defined arguments not unlike what we see and hear from American's two presidential candidates Bush and Kerry.  Howard, not unlike Bush, believes in laissez-faire style capitalism while Rob offers a somewhat softer, gentler picture that Kerry also presents i.e. stressing the importance of universal health care paid for by taxing the wealthy 2% in our nation, retaining jobs in the USA, assisting the disenfranchised, protecting our environment etc. Classic liberals like Howard (and really not unlike Bush) differ from modern liberals such as Kerry in that the ultimate result would be the deindustrialization of the West.  Whether or not that brings about the disintegration of America is a strong issue that must be addressed.  My guess is that China is off to a running start and will be impossible to overtake.  Besides, why do we need retain topdog status when a softer, gentler stance seems to be what many Americans now wish.  

Best wishes,
Gerry Reinhardt
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Rob Kritkausky 
  To: bigbangtango at yahoogroups.com ; paleopsych at paleopsych.org 
  Cc: bigbangtango at yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Friday, October 08, 2004 1:58 AM
  Subject: Re: [bigbangtango] Slowly Slicing The Violence Out of War

  Howard:
  Thanks for the excellent editorial.  While I enjoyed your analysis, I must admit it left me feeling rather malnourished.... even cheated.  I fear the public(you ...me all of us) have been happily thinking on a diet made up almost entirely of the junk food  that the media has been preparing for us daily.  I fear this type of big picture, politically detached, data driven thinking you are serving here, may no longer be relished by a large segment of the population.  We are being fed a most unhealthy diet.......information is expected to come processed, slanted, sweetened or spiced up.. The objective communication/description of events (news) is currently exceedingly rare and in fact, come to think of it, I don't even think objectivity to be a goal of the media these days. 
  All that being said....I loved the piece, but don't be surprised if it keeps getting sent back.  "Excuse me, I ordered my information spun and could you sugar coat it a little for me?"

  Regards:
  Rob Kritkausky

  howlbloom at aol.com wrote:

    â?oIt is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization  witnessed by the history of mankind:  You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah  in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws.â?  Osama bin Laden explaining to Americans why they are Satanic, Message To the Ummah May 12, 2004

    Western Civilization gives the right to do it your self, diy, the right to createâ?"the right to create new movements, the right to create new artforms, the right to create our own constitutions, laws, theories, and beliefs. Osama wants to take all that away.

    Every pecking order battle between groups is a battle between hypotheses in the mass mindâ?"guesses about the best way to do things. Osamaâ?Ts guess, his hypothesis, has been tried out in Sudan and Afghanistan. Its result is a living nightmare.

    Margaret Mead said that every primitive, indigenous tribe in the early days of man forbade the murder of human beings. The problem was the definition of a human. The name of our tribe meant we were humans. Everyone from another tribe wasnâ?Tt human at all. he or she was fair game. In early tribes like these, said Mead, the number of â?ohumansâ? whose lives were sacred was only 50 to 75. The rest of the earth's population was a legitimate target for murder. But today, Mead pointed out, the number a single society says â?othou shalt not killâ? is much, much greater. In India and China your fellow tribe members, your fellow human beings, your fellow Indians or Chinese, your brethren who youâ?Tre not supposed to kill, is 1.2 billion.

    Two anthropologists, William Divale and Marvin Harris, combed through data from 561 primitive tribes and discovered that 21% of the males were killed off violently before they ended adolescence. One out of every five men in these primitive, indigenous tribes died in skirmishes and war. The percentage of the slaughtered skyrockets if you include the women and children wiped out by indigenous peoples like the South American Taulipang, who burned dozens of families in their huts, loved the screams of pain inside, then marched home shouting a joyous "hei-hei-hei-hei-hei!"[i] 

    If our techno-modern society killed at the old tribal rate, roughly 720 million modern humans would be blasted to smithereens in wars or homicides every generation. Compare this with the 55 million who died in WWII, and the bloodlettings of the last hundred years, are less than one-tenth of what they'd amount to under tribal or hunter-gatherer ways. 

    Much as many of us hate Donald Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld tried to invent a new form of humanitarian war in Iraq. He tried to achieve it with smart bombs and with missiles that could jet down the street, turn a corner, and go directly into the room where a military group was hiding out. 

    Total American deaths in Iraq now total 1,100. Civilian deaths come to a maximum of 13,603 . The total deaths in a regional conflict of this sort 150 years ago, the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, came to 615,378.[ii] For every 41 people killed in the Crimean War, the Iraq War has killed only one. 

    The war in Iraq is grisly, ghastly, and deplorable. But for all practical purposes, the War In Iraq has saved 600,000 lives. That is a huge reduction in violence.

    Compare the deaths in the current Iraq War, revolting as it is, to deaths in the war that dragged on between Iraq and Iran from 1980 to 1988. That war lasted eight years and cost more than a million lives.

    Or compare this to a total of a million deaths every year worldwide in car accidents. Or compare it with the deaths worldwide each year caused by cigarette smoking, which total about 5 million[iii]. Every death is horrible and every war is deplorable. But thanks to industrialism, capitalism, technology, cultural advances, the spread of western values, and thanks to what some of us call cultural imperialism, we are making progress.

    Thereâ?Ts an unspoken moral imperative to capitalism. It says to those who practice it, â?osave thy neighborâ?. Save her with a delight. Save her with a moment of joy. Save her by taking her out of herself for a minute, an hour, or a day. Save her by giving her new powers. Save her by giving her new comforts and new consolations. Save one neighbor and you make a dollar. Save a thousand neighbors and you can make a thousand dollars. Save ten million folks youâ?Tve never seen, folks who are your neighbors on this planet, and you can make ten million dollars.

    If you forget that your mission is to understand your neighborâ?Ts needs and serve them, you will go home empty at the end of the day. Youâ?Tll wonder why youâ?Tre among the mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation, why youâ?Tre among the hollow men, heads filled with straw, trudging without purpose through life. Save your fellow human beings with what we call products and services and you can go home knowing that someone needed you today. You can go home knowing that you were a part of something far, far greater than yourselfâ?"the advancement of others. 

    And perhaps you were even a part of something that Osama deplores and we should celebrate-- the handmade evolution of the human race. 

    ----------
    Howard Bloom
    Author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century
    Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
    www.howardbloom.net
    www.bigbangtango.net
    Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology; advisory board member: Youthactivism.org; executive editor -- New Paradigm book series.
    For information on The International Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org
    for two chapters from 
    The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
    For information on Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see www.howardbloom.net

  www.worldblend.net - Where art and science conspire to produce a digital world ruled by the imagination and where the possible exists within the realm of the infinite.

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