Human beings think and feel and act and do so in response to what lies around them. As various communities have advanced in the way of civilization, they’ve done so—thought and felt and acted—in response to some more or less plausible worldview covering created being in its abstract realms as well as this concrete realm. That worldview has to have not only some understanding of concrete stuff, such as human flesh and blood, and abstract stuff, such as geometric relationships, but also an understanding of the specific narratives in which human beings and human communities live, including that narrative of the entirety, the story of the world in which we live. Call it a cosmogony leading into an ongoing story if you will. At times, some of the abstract realms of being were, and are, brought in by way of mythical terms, such as vaguely apprehended forces personified as gods or spirits or daemons or as a story in which the meaning of human life and human lives are given a purpose and meaning at the very beginning of this world.
In my way of thinking and speaking, many myths are valid efforts of speculation given a limited set of tools and limited empirical knowledge. Myths become superstitions when they don’t properly use the best empirical knowledge and the best thinking methods available to the participants. Let me write briefly about the subject of the world of the resurrected, Heaven in traditional terms. The ideas of Heaven found in better quality works in the Middle Ages, most certainly the great poems of Danté, draw upon the best understandings of what we call the universe and was often called the Cosmos. There is a problem here, which I’ve perhaps aggravated by using the term `universe’ to designate one possible entity in the concrete realm of Creation. To Danté and others before and after him, the Cosmos was all that God had created; some even seemed to imply, by way of Heavenly thrones and the like, that God Himself lives in this Cosmos. In any case, Heaven, the home of the blessed, was seen as simply the `highest’ or `purest’ region of the Cosmos. Heaven was a real place. In principle, creatures could make the journey from Earth to Heaven though men were missing angelic wings. The point is that Heaven and Hell were part of the same Creation as Earth in a way that made sense to men accustomed to Ptolemaic models of the Cosmos—in fact, I’m sure most men thought in terms less sophisticated than a geometer but compatible with those models.
Recently, I published an essay, Theories, Meta-theories, and Meta-etc., dealing with the correspondence between created being and human knowledge. In this context, `knowledge’ includes feelings disciplined to the circumstances and also proper activities. A human being is a microcosm, more so if he makes a morally guided effort to shape himself to reality as he best understands it given his abilities and those of his communities. Unlike creatures mostly limited to the concrete realms of Creation, including perhaps some small amount of abstractions in the case of social animals, men can encapsulate the more abstract realms of Creation. We can’t go beyond on our own powers; thus are transcendental realms beyond our reach except for some small bits of knowledge revealed to us by God.
We human beings are creatures of empirical reality, in its directly perceptible concrete aspects and its abstract aspects as well. Our communities are no different in this regard, except perhaps for having a relatively higher proportion of abstract aspects. The Body of Christ as I conceive it will draw fully upon all realms of Creation, from the concrete realm of material objects to that of the truths as manifested by God as the raw stuff of Creation.
This entire line of thought has led me to reconfigure a book I’d been stuck on. I had planned for the entire book to be about the human mind. Now, I’ll be dealing with the complete human being, mind and heart and hands. Moreover, I’ll try to put my understanding of the individual human being into the context of the spectrum of created being (abstract to concrete) and also the context of the developing and evolving Body of Christ.
It’s that last and ultimate goal of understanding human nature in terms of Christian beliefs, that is, in terms of the promises Christ made to those He’s chosen to raise from the grave that they might share His life for time without end, which is worrying me. As I’ve interpreted it, in line with Christian tradition and also modern understandings of created being which tend to be both profound and incoherent, I’ve seen this resurrection into true life as an enfolding into the Body of Christ. In that body, the members will remain individuals while being truly the one Body of Christ as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit remain individuals while being truly the one God.
The goal is to be able to discuss all of this in a way that’s rational and coherent. I realized I couldn’t discuss mind apart from other important aspects of human nature when I read some of the works of Jacob Neusner and sided with him and the Judaic Sages he’s studied so lovingly and written about so powerfully—see Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?. Mind, heart, and hands are the aspects of a human being which must be considered when we study what the modern students of those Sages would call a `mensch’, a true and God-centered man.
From a Christian point of view, we complete the work of Jesus Christ by first taking up discipleship as individuals and then working to complete the Body of Christ, the community which includes not only Jesus Christ as head but also all of His brothers and sisters as members. We do this in various ways, using hands and heart and mind. As a Christian, I’m particularly concerned with the formation of the Body of Christ, including the ultimate intellect, that is, the capitalized and communal live mind of that Body—in terms of Jacques Barzun’s definition from his profound discussion, from a secular and cultural viewpoint, in The House of Intellect. (See Intelligence vs. Intellect.)
The intellect hasn’t been doing so well in the Christian Church for at least the past couple of centuries. Etienne Gilson made the claim that Catholic intellectuals had failed to come up with good, Christian answers to the legitimate questions raised during the early phases of the Modern Age and then, when some very bad answers had shown themselves in anarchy and the guillotine, had led the Church into an intellectual ghetto. Protestants did no better though the details were different. Nor do I see signs that secularists, Christian or nominally Christian or non-Christian, did any better in terms of an overall understanding though they produced—perhaps—better individual works than those of Christians in the West. In this twentieth century after Christ, Catholic intellectuals continue to think, feel, and act as if we can inhabit a concrete realm of Creation described well by Einstein and Darwin and then talk about greater truths in terms given us by descriptions of this concrete realm from the 18th century and earlier. I’m suggesting that modern Christians, including the best of our intellectuals, don’t even have an understanding of created being, in particular—human nature in its individual and communal aspects, which will support a view of the Body of Christ which is sufficiently rich and complex to seem plausible in light of modern human communities in this mortal realm.
Let me move on to a rough view of the human nature in its individual and communal forms, including the ultimate community, the Body of Christ.
A plausible description of individual human beings
I gave what I consider a good framework for a plausible description of individual human beings in the essay I referred to above: Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?.
[M]odern biological sciences including evolutionary biology support the idea that emotions aren’t some sort of imperfection in the human being nor do they merely exist to give us epiphenomena to color our existence in a world which is `just material’, let alone `only logical’. Most biologists who have had reasons to express opinions on the importance of emotion to thinking don’t even consider emotions to be primarily short-cuts to conclusions we would reach by thinking if we had the time. There is that element in feeling but also in thinking and doing. They are different aspects of acts-of-being, more fundamental than even substance, and thinking can help us when our feeling is inadequate—as any Catholic would know from reading a guide to confession which will tell us an intellectual repentance suffices when we can’t muster up the proper depth of feeling. Similar statements can be made about all these three aspects of human efforts to participate in God’s acts-of-being: feeling, thinking, and doing. They can each help the others along and perhaps a resurrected and perfected human being would become God-like in that he would no longer feel, think, or do without doing and feeling and thinking, all three at once and in each and every act.
We are given a sort of concrete human nature, including a very complex brain, which allows us to shape ourselves to encapsulate some relatively greater or lesser part of Creation. We understand Creation, created being, by these active responses, those of Fred Astaire and those of Vincent van Gogh as well as those of Albert Einstein—a viewpoint advocated by such prominent neuroscientists as Gerald Edelman and Walter J. Freeman, both of whom have written books which provide pleasure as well as wisdom to the truly literate reader. The neuroscientists Jerome Kagan and Antonio Damasio are but two who’ve written accessible and widely available books on the irreducible importance of emotions to human life.
If we are to understand Creation, spacetime and matter and all other components and aspects, then we’ll understand by shaping ourselves to encapsulate Creation. We won’t understand Creation if we start by misunderstanding ourselves and trying to fit created being into `logical frameworks’. We have no such `logical frameworks’ in our brains in which to fit Creation and have no reason to believe Creation could fit into any such frameworks if they existed. In fact, even when we try in ways more proper to human nature, we’re too small and too imperfect to understand much more than a vanishingly small bit as individuals and not much more even at the level of the community of the entire human race. But we’re making progress in understanding some parts and some aspects of Creation, a surprising amount of progress given our small and imperfect selves.
Do those components of human understanding, feeling and thinking and doing, really respond to irreducible components or aspects of Creation? Let me first paraphrase Einstein in words he wouldn’t use but I don’t think he would object to the general thrust of my ideas: Our understanding of created being should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Reduce reality to its various components and aspects but stop reducing when you reach components or aspects which cannot be used to fully explain or to `reconstruct’ each other. At that point in the process of analysis, it’s time to look for explanations which include all those seemingly fundamental components and aspects. You might be wrong and the next few generations might busy themselves taking your fundamental components and aspects apart to find still smaller particles. First, we searched for atoms, a search which had lasted for centuries and went through such strange paths as alchemy, but did result in the deep knowledge summarized in modern periodic tables of the elements. Then, we explored subatomic particles and discovered electrons and protons and neutrons and then strange hints of particles which didn’t fit into the simple scheme of things. Then we found out that there is a large zoo of particles out there and they seem to be broken pieces of more symmetric entities. [A still more complex process has started in which modern brain-scientists and evolutionary theorists are replacing the idealistic psychologies given us by St. Augustine and Freud and others.]
God acts and feels even as He does, and so forth. The Almighty is unified, and coherent and complete, in ways that aren’t possible to us—at least in our mortal lives. Why can’t we be unified in this way?
As noted above and in many of my essays on this blog, the concrete forms of being in this universe are the results of the fragmentation of more symmetric forms of created being, more abstract forms of created being. Physicists, in the Standard Theory of particle physics, have described an electroweak force which is the more symmetric entity which shattered into electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force as the universe expanded and cooled after the so-called Big Bang. The electroweak force can be described and understood in many ways but it’s electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force which are manifested in our concrete realm as particular forms of that more abstract force. In a similar way, we are concrete creatures who have evolved and developed from broken pieces of more symmetric, more abstract, forms of being. Feeling and thinking and doing are tightly related and can even help strengthen each other and can even cover for one another under certain circumstances.
As I said above: Reduce reality to its various components and aspects but stop reducing when you reach components or aspects which cannot be used to fully explain or to `reconstruct’ each other. We can replace `reality’ by `this concrete level of being’ and then we can understand, by analogy to modern physics, that we can construct plausible understandings of being in which feeling and thinking and doing are broken pieces of but one symmetric act-of-being, but those three components, again—in analogy to electromagnetic force and weak nuclear force, are irreducible components or aspects of minded [and social] creatures in this world of concrete being.
For now, I have nothing new to add to this plan for describing human nature.
What can we say about the forces which draw or force individuals into communities?
We are drawn together not by the soft or squeamish emotions, not even fear, so much as we are drawn together by ties of dependencies, whether those ties are to those we like or dislike. Something tells me we’re relatively unlikely to form ties of dependencies to those to whom we’re indifferent, but that’s merely my speculation.
The ties of dependencies have evolved and developed, and will continue to do so, as the binding forces of human communities which have evolved over millions of years and developed over the centuries. I’ll not try to add to what I’ve written in the past about this issue. In an essay I published in July of 2009, As the Ruins Crumble…, I wrote about the bottom-up evolution and development of communities and paid a little bit of special attention to those who are currently pessimistic about the very existence of governments—truly, an understandable feeling within the context our unfolding political disasters. Recognizing the truer developmental and evolutionary past of human individual and communal nature will lead us in a different direction though not justifying any optimism about the current governments of the West. In that essay, I claimed:
Many are the classical liberals and libertarians who seem to think that we can solve our problems by getting the government off our back and getting back to work, unlikely as it is that Washington or Boston/Albany/Sacramento/… will shrink to more appropriate sizes. The problem is that, as I’ve discussed in a few entries, the human mind which is so important to our ability to function in a complex civilization has developed along with that civilization. If that civilization has decayed, or has never taken root in the case of the United States, that tells us that few are those who have minds well-formed enough to really understand themselves as individuals living in complex societies embedded in complex political structures. Few can even understand such abstract concepts as property rights or even rights over their own persons. It takes many generations to build a civilization that can be destroyed in a single generation, but that destruction reaches down into the minds and souls of the resulting barbarian children.
I’ve written of the contingent nature of the human mind, that is the aspects of a human being that work with abstractions — see Preliminary Thoughts on the Evolution of the Human Mind. Simplistically, the human mind has evolved over eons at the species level though it doesn’t seem to have shown itself until circa 600BC when Homer and the succeeding lyric poets had made philosophy and mathematics possible, when some unknown Israelites put together the complex mosaic known as the Books of Moses, when some unknown Vedic geniuses created Hinduism. No matter how poor or rich the social environment, the individual mind must develop over a lifetime. Clearly, there are going to be complications as a result of intermediary relationships and entities such as large-scale civilizations and smaller-scale societies, including towns and church communities and extended families. It takes centuries, and a lot of hard work on the part of butchers and bakers and poetry-makers, to build a civilization which can then be a home to those smaller-scale societies. In the case of the most recent cycle of Western Civilization, it has taken about five centuries of growth and then decay in literacy and reasoning skills to bring us to a sad point — see Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence for a powerful narration of this most recent major period in the West.
We aren’t those Glasgow Scots of the mid-1700s with their damaged but intact moral and social structures. We should be careful in applying Adam Smith’s thought to modern Americans who possess little hint of the perhaps defective but certainly strong moral character of an eighteenth century Scotsman. And those Scotsmen lived in a society that demanded certain types of behavior from its merchants and professionals. Whatever one thinks of the specifics of that morality, it provided a good framework for freedom in the marketplace, that is, one merchant could trust another if only because he knew the price the other would pay for behavior seen as wrongful.
I’ll go no further into those sorts of issues, preferring to make the more fundamental, and Thomistic, claim that we are intentional animals. Our moral natures and our minds develop in an organic manner producing physical changes including changes in external relationships. For now, I’ll ignore the complication that our relationship to our Creator isn’t quite external and deal with the other aspects of our lives.
Man is a particular creature, each of us developing by our responses to our environments — which sometimes include some representation of the entire universe or even some additional parts of Creation. But our environments and our readily available responses, our habits and customs, are the results of historical processes themselves made possible by billions of years of evolution. I believe man has become the sort of creature who can, in principle, encapsulate all of Creation within his mind, thus imitating by way of understanding what God did in creating this world and all else that is part of Creation. That implies there are some proper directions for our development. To transcend our immediate environments and even to understand the depths of our own human nature, we have to develop our abstract reasoning abilities. To move towards a state where we are truly images of God, we have to be like Jesus Christ, true persons who move with freedom yet do the will of the Father.
In an essay I published in May of 2011, The Liberal Mind: What is politics?, I continued my efforts to understand, and explain to others, the bottom-up evolution and development of communities. In that essay, I claimed:
And we have to be careful about our thoughts. We think about a certain realm of human life in terms of engineering or bureaucratic system building when we should be participants in a narrative process which can’t be guided if it’s to remain healthy and strong. That is, we’d have to be careful not to ‘guide’ the process too much and certainly not to try to impose our favorite solutions upon an evolving system.
Healthy human communities evolve over longer scales of time and develop over shorter scales of time. As the historian Carroll Quigley claimed: “The truth unfolds in time through communal processes.”
In my way of thought, this is an recursively entangled line of thought. You see, “Things are true,” and “Truths are thing-like.” This means that communities are true and not just ad-hoc arrangements. Moreover, communities are thing-like. The communities and the communal processes themselves unfold in time.
But entities like the United States and the so-called global economy are hierarchical structures imposed on masses of human beings and various human communities which would otherwise develop truer and more fruitful communities.
Perhaps we can say that the community evolves in time as true relationships emerge?
We haven’t gotten it right yet and we aren’t capable of fixing everything because we don’t even know what we’re fixing let alone what it’s really supposed to be like. More than that, we’re organisms, ourselves growing and developing towards futures we can help shape but can’t plan in the way that modern bureaucrats once imagined they could plan for a safer and more prosperous and more aesthetically pleasing Harlem.
Rather than trying to design our various communities, we need somehow to regard them as being more like evolving and developing organisms than designed and manufactured machines. When we so regard them, we can research them and analyze them, not for the purpose of controlling what shouldn’t be controlled but rather for the purpose of understanding them that we might move along with their development in our own lives and with their evolution to the extent we can consciously live as members of one generation in that democracy of the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.
In conclusion, I think it relatively easy to define politics as the art, drawing upon some science, of bringing together different skills and other forms of memory for the purpose of forming a community, perhaps to serve God and perhaps to get in a good game of bridge once a week. It’s harder to define even a vague range of legitimate actions on the part of the those who take on leadership roles with a ‘political’ aspect, but I strongly believe they should limit themselves to being actors who are part of more or less spontaneous processes, perhaps guiding them when a community begins to stray from all possible moral paths, but, even then, not trying to guide them down a specific path.
More recently, in February of 2012, I wrote an essay, Moral Order vs. National Welfare Systems, to deal once more with issue of bottom-up evolution and development of human communities, using the current American battles over healthcare as a good example of how we’re doing a very bad job of dealing with the problems—and opportunities—of our modern, complex and densely populated, communities. In that essay, I wrote:
[T]he American Catholic Church and its leaders, Christian leaders in general, had no business in recent decades pushing for any sort of national health-care in a country where there is no consensus on moral issues affecting medical care, such as abortion, contraception, hospice care, or the care for children lacking some of the capabilities of most children. If anything, they should have been questioning many existing programs such as Social Security and Medicare. After all, the opponents of Social Security beginning in the 1930s have criticized more than the financial dangers of Social Security. Some have also claimed that such a program would weaken the bonds of families and would even cause an inter-generational war. And, as it turns out, weak families and inter-generational war over Social Security and Medicare are among our greatest existing or imminent problems.
As we become more dependent upon medical systems which are certainly not under the control of individuals nor local communities nor even the larger religious communities, we’ll be offered such poisonous fruits as drugs and techniques developed by experimentation on lab-grown embryos `engineered’ to have specific medical problems, growth of embryos who will never be born but will provide transplantable tissue or organs, engineering of babies to be brought to birth to provide transplantable organs — some of this is already happening quietly in major research centers. For example, this relatively old article article from 2006, Harvard to Create Human Embryonic Stem Cell Lines , tells us, “After more than two years of intensive ethical and scientific review, Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers at Harvard and Children’s Hospital Boston have been cleared to begin experiments using Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) to create disease-specific stem cell lines in an effort to develop treatments for a wide range of now-incurable conditions afflicting tens of millions of people.”
Here’s an article from the Harvard Gazette, talking about a meeting of some theologians who discuss some varying views on the allowability of using these embryos for research — the Catholic Church and more conservative Protestant churches seem not to have been represented: Stem cells, through a religious lens. Read the article and note the difference in moral teachings regarding the use of embryos grown from stem-cells even amongst theologians of monotheistic religions. How can Catholics participate fully in a health-care system with Muslims who allow the therapeutic use of stem-cells derived from `surplus embryos’ produced in fertility treatments? I don’t feel the right or the urge to go on a nationwide crusade to stop all acts I consider immoral but I also can’t benefit from such acts without endangering my relationship to God, not even surreptitiously by way of medicines or techniques derived from research on those embryos. Nor do I even wish to be in a hospital which carries out what I consider to be immoral research or treatment. If we can’t be sure the service or product isn’t free of the taint of moral disorder, then we’ll have to refuse it. The bishops have helped to create a situation where any morally well-ordered Catholic Christians might soon have to refuse all services and products of the American medical industry. The entire industry is on its way to being morally contaminated in a very deep way.
We should learn to think in terms of the general rule suggested above: Social systems which have a major moral component should be designed for and implemented within morally coherent communities. [I should have added that those morally coherent communities are themselves organically developing entities.]
Human beings with diverse moral beliefs aren’t going to be able to agree on a wide variety of health-care issues or social welfare issues in general. A morally diverse group of human beings or a morally diverse gathering of human communities aren’t going to be able to form a coherent community at a small or large scale. A falsely-justified attempt at implementing social programs with those who don’t agree with your moral positions will result first in the moral corruption or confusion of human beings in the various communities, not just the community with the highest moral standards. In addition, such confused efforts will produce serious disagreements threatening any existing social coherence, however slight, and will endanger any chances of meaningful dialog on matters of fundamental moral importance. And they might even endanger the very existence of some of these communities reduced to dependence upon a government which pursues its own interests, probably more free to do so because of the lack of moral coherence along with the pretense that we are a morally coherent nation.
The Body of Christ
I was myself a little surprised to realize that though I mention the Body of Christ regularly in my essays, I’ve not written too much in the way of even preliminary exploratory analyses as I’ve done with other realms of created being. This is probably reflective of a deep uncertainty I’ve felt about the proper way to discuss the Body of Christ. As an example, perhaps the most important example, of a particular problem: the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches even more so have moved away over the previous five centuries or so from the idea that the Christian churches, as ecclesiastical or liturgical institutions, can meet all the legitimate and inherent needs and desires of human nature. Few, if any, really have any desire to spend all their hours for time without end in liturgies. We have needs and desires which are met in terms of this-worldly vocations and avocations of various sorts. Some are met in our economic activities, some in political activities, some in human-centered art and literature, and some in simple human gatherings—parties and picnics. In January of 2010, I published an essay, Freedom and Structure in Human Life — The Reality of Perfection, in which I made some very sketchy proposals about the Body of Christ:
So-called traditionalists and conservatives will often deny that real progress can occur in this world. This is a valid viewpoint for a pagan thinker but not a Christian. A Christian has to believe that progress is possible, at least in principle. The individual man can, at least in principle, develop towards a Christ-like state. The entire race, even including those men who will not be resurrected into Heaven, can develop towards the state we call the Body of Christ. We can’t achieve such a state of perfection, even in principle, in a world where decay is a fact. This is the place to point out that decay, increasing entropy, isn’t a law but rather a direct world of God’s choice to produce a world particular in certain ways — the world has been advancing towards a more probable state since then. This particular advance results in an increase of entropy. In other words, ‘increasing entropy’ isn’t a fundamental property of matter and energy but rather a result of the universe starting out in a very specific state, specific in a sense still being explored by scientists.
As a summary of sorts, I’ll note it remains true to a Christian thinker that: “Grace completes nature and doesn’t destroy it to replace it with something else.”
If what we are is the rough beginnings of a completed man — that is, one perfected to a Christ-like state, then a healthy moral imagination can imagine moving towards that perfected state. The principle is established that what we are can be perfected into a Christ-like state. A similar though more convoluted statement can be made about human communities, families and political communities and economic communities and the Church, being rough — in fact, fragmented — beginnings of the Body of Christ.
The next month, February of 2010, I published an essay motivated by the American response to a major earthquake in Haiti, Why We Can’t Build or Rebuild the Countries of Other Peoples, in which I wrote:
We don’t know where the world is heading. We don’t even know what will happen to our families or countries, we who are Christians are bound to believe that the end result will be the incorporation of those who belong to Christ in the Body of Christ without loss of individuality. In fact, that individuality will be enhanced so that we can be truly Christ-like. Before I can further explore this idea of the Body of Christ — not to be done in this article, I have to say what should be obvious from the Bible, especially the letters of St. Paul. Individuals are unique and don’t even all fit in the same general categories. The same is true of nations and other natural groupings of human beings. We won’t fill the same role in the Body of Christ and we don’t fill the same role in this mortal realm. Not every human being is suited for life as a rocket engineer at NASA and not every human community is suited to be a part of a high-tech society that sends rockets to the moon. Moreover, some individuals capable of living such a life, some communities capable of so forming themselves, have no desire to do so.
And, I added a warning about the complex way in which these processes work bottom-up but not exclusively:
Development of an organism, or the evolution of a family-line of organisms, isn’t really something that works [entirely from the] bottom-up. The development of complex organisms is ongoing at multiple levels and perhaps at all levels of development currently available to that organism. One of the best examples involves only two levels — individual organisms develop over their lifetimes even as species evolve over longer periods of time. But individual development and special evolution overlap. As we develop as individuals reflecting one temporal stage of evolution of the human species, we remain part of the greater evolutionary flow, though there is reason to believe evolution might itself have evolved with the appearance of a rational and self-aware race. Moreover, we have other forms of evolution or development which overlap with biological evolution and the development of an organism. Life on earth engages in complex and recursive relationships with the atmosphere of the earth. There is also interaction at the level of DNA and soma between different species — such as that between viruses and their hosts. Viruses can implant their genetic coding inside the genetic code of other species. Viruses can also transport pieces of genetic coding from one species to another. Bacteria form a superorganism of sorts, being able to shed some genes and pick up others from a pool of bacterial genes flowing through the earth’s biosphere and including genes for resistance to various antibiotics. An interested reader can download my dark comedy, A Man for Every Purpose, which plays off some of these confusions caused by our willful misunderstandings of our human selves and our situation in this world.
A human community is one very complex entity. We should fear those who try to guide this development because they will deform the organism, just as if a child were to be fitted at birth with a brace to straighten the natural and necessary curve in his spine or to force his skull into the shape found in a different ethnic group.
Something Like a Summary
I’ll end with an observation about the current political and economic arguments which are going nowhere, leading us to neither deeper understandings nor to a courageous movement into the future, even if the courage has to be faked at first.
I’m claiming the situation is different from those who are pessimistic about the entire idea of government because we haven’t done it right yet and those who hold the delusion that we just need to fine-tune our existing governments and they’ll be fine. Our existing governments have failed to do what they should as our human communities of various sorts have grown more numerous, larger, and more complex. Moreover, those human communities and most individual human beings have failed to take notice of our promising and dangerous situation. Our communities have increasingly been co-opted by the central governments and we as individuals have preferred to remain within our comfort zones, assuming those fine men and women in Washington are dedicated to doing right by the United States and its citizens and leaving us free to enjoy our gadgets. In any case, we can’t do better by `designing better governments’ or by `reforming our current governments’. We have to take a deep breath, admit we’ve failed for now, and prepare for the hard work of moving towards a vaguely seen but plausible future, step by step. Don’t ask me how to do this in detail. If I knew, I could design that better government for you and just tell you how to build it. I’m here to tell you that’s the wrong way to go about the task.