3 Real humanitarianism requires accepting real human nature
If the foregoing evidence and arguments have merit, then the absence of debate concerning whether our nation's leaders can successfully achieve aggressive, Machiavellian goals should be cause for alarm. Whether or not U.S. citizens deplore leaders’ undisguised readiness to conquer, torture and enslave when "necessary" is indeed a crucial question, but it is not the same question. Passionately deploring the violence of leaders who can presumably keep one safe is not the same as vigorously rejecting leaders who can clearly not keep one safe. At this stage of our cultural evolution, U.S. citizens are still unlikely to challenge their leaders for being ruthless, but might well do so if they perceive them to be irrational and inept. Therefore, it is crucial to ask if our leaders can, with a reasonable degree of certainty, annihilate masses of poor Africans and Asians, and kill and oppress "expendable" Americans as well, with impunity?
The absence of this debate constitutes perhaps the strongest indication of the need for a powerful education initiative. Much of the success of the Civil Rights Movement depended upon replacing common assumptions about the biology of race with facts contradicting those assumptions. The threat of nuclear warfare was nullified worldwide as hard evidence of its devastating consequences became widespread. Predicting the inability of our leaders to prevail is counterintuitive for most people. Our leaders, and those before them have indeed prevailed, for as far back as we can recall. Subjugation of the weak by the strong has been the norm. Powerful evidence tells us that this may well no longer be true. In important ways the world has changed. 4 Education for sanity
It requires little imagination to envision devastating attacks upon random schools, small towns, church picnics and crowded streets, changing the United States into a place of fear, depression and outrage at leaders who add to our torment in order to preserve their control. This is what U.S. citizens can rationally anticipate if we fail accurately to assess the rationality, if not indeed the sanity, of our leaders. These include not merely the Incumbency, but the more elusive, shadowy group who no longer earn but simply own money. The men who sit on the boards of major corporations, who manage the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who fund the great Neo-liberal/ Neo-conservative think tanks, and who decide which candidates citizens will be allowed to select amongst. Even as our government proclaims that only they can protect us from ethno-centric enemies bent upon our destruction, history firmly rejects this argument. In-groups have defined themselves based upon ethnicity, religion and ideology, but wars have been waged when people thought they could win them, or when their backs were so far to the wall they found death preferable to the life they faced. Only the insane pursue warfare likely to produce only chaos. Until this point, somehow sanity has managed to prevail in a world torn by warfare for what hopefully will turn out to be a brief period of human history.
Evidence that our government bears a rich tradition of subjugation, enslavement and the extermination of inconvenient and easily disposed of out-groupers is abundant. Evidence that those we subjugate constitute threats to our way of life is scarce. Contrary to the propaganda citizens receive, the State Department’s own chief advisors since the 1950s have characterized Arabs in particular as people eager to join us at our table of prosperity, not to replace us. They need our expertise and hope we need their labor. They seem motivated not by hatred of our lifestyle, but by optimism that they too can attain the skills of production and marketing and planning that we have achieved. Their history indicates that they are, however, as capable as we of ruthlessness, and are no less strategically adaptive. Having not occupied the seat of power for centuries, they may be less corrupt and less insane than we. If we will not accept them, they will surely do all possible to change our minds.
5 Where to begin
Education for sanity might begin with this lesson: that social conflict is not an inevitable product of human nature. Growing evidence affirms that human conflict has more to do with social context than with genes or personality or primitive instincts and drives.
The second lesson, perhaps, might be that ethics and morality, our commitment to decency, constitute the most practical political basis for our continued existence. Extending the concept of in-group to include all humans, and then all beings, would seem to be a necessary, and perhaps even sufficient step toward saving the world Presumably, we are wise enough, probably, to grasp and act upon these facts. Should we, on the other hand, allow power-corrupted leaders, people who seem truly ill by any reasonable definition of the term, to nullify our collective wisdom, our suicide seems predictable and puzzling. It would amount to a profound and strange reversal of the adaptive driving forces of natural selection.
The third lesson might describe how change could occur. As people grasp essential facts and patterns, some of which have only come into sharp relief during the past few decades, there will surely be tipping points and groundswells and upheavals, and a new renaissance of social organization. This might include revamping high school history courses, creating people's media, and forming "churches" that deplore addictive religion. It also might mean selecting political candidates compelled to deal in truth whomever this might discomfit. It might mean offering people currently choosing the false safety of fascism, a real choice.
If addressing the question of aggression’s feasibility seems cold blooded it also seems the most rational way out of the trap of endless in-group vs out-group aggression. Because we are not innately compelled to act humanely toward “others,” we must elect to do so based upon evidence of its survival value. Because we possess the capacity to assimilate such evidence rationally, and then to integrate it emotionally, we should be able to achieve the level of moral and ethical behavior that we envision but cannot yet fully embrace. The true function of education is to ensure this logical/emotional process by enabling us to gather and analyze evidence pertaining to the question of whether warfare can any longer guarantee the survival of anyone.
This is hardly an abstract issue. People are desperately trying to come to terms with current events in Iraq. Is it a deplorable but necessary venture? Is it ruthless and inhumane? The reasoning presented here indicates that it is profoundly irrational.
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Blaut, James M., The Colonizer's Model of the World : geographical
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Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. New York: Basic Books 1969
Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard : American primacy and its
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