By: Matt

Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase; more commonly known as “Rubisco” sounds like something you might find in the cookie aisle at the grocery store. In fact you find Rubisco almost everywhere you look. It is the most common protein in green plants, and is by and large responsible for life as we know it. Many of us have seen Chuck Missler’s misguided video “Peanut Butter-the Atheist’s Nightmare”. Missler argues that if evolutionary theory is correct, then occasionally life should spontaneously occur in a jar of peanut butter. He is missing the boat on more than one issue. First evolutionary theory doesn’t address the origin of life; it states only that over time the frequency of genes in a population will change. Secondly it’s extremely unlikely that a jar of Peter Pan® is going to be exposed to an atmosphere similar to earth’s 3 billion years ago. He has set up a straw man, hoping that an uneducated public wouldn’t notice, and then tried to knock him down. In this essay I would like to argue that Rubisco is, in effect, “the creationist’s nightmare”. Rather than set up an imaginary straw argument I will ask a legitimate question and hope for an honest discussion.

Like all proteins Rubicso has a function, its job is to grab carbon from CO2 early on in photosynthesis and make place it onto a 5 carbon sugar (Ribulose biphosphate) in order to create a pair of 3 carbon sugars. There are several more steps involved before the plant has converted Ribulose Biphosphate into the much more familiar glucose, but all that is for another day. If you really want to understand how it all works Google “Calvin Cycle” Figure 1 shows where Rubisco fits in the Calvin cycle.

But here’s the rub. Rubisco is painfully ineffective. Virtually all life as we know it depends on green plants ability to fix carbon from the atmosphere, but the enzyme that does it is barely functional. Unlike most enzymes, which do their task and turn over in hundreds or thousands of times every second, Rubisco can fix only three carbon atoms/second. Worse, it isn’t very selective about what molecules it grabs. 27% of the time (more than a quarter of all reactions) our beknighted enzyme grabs Oxygen instead of Carbon. When this happens the oxygenated Ribulose Biphosphate molecule travels along the Calvin cycle to its completion, thus wasting not only Rubisco’s efforts, but those of every other enzyme along the way, and then a further set of enzymes that are required to break down this faulty molecule. The term for this miscue is “photorespiration” and if you were a plant you’d really hate it. The reason Rubisco is so common in plants is that it is so ineffective. If it was as speedy and precise as the other enzymes in the photosynthetic pathway its numbers could be reduced by a factor of at least 100.

So how did this come about? Why are plants saddled with this weak enzyme? Of course we can’t know for sure, as gene sequences from the pre-Cambrian are not preserved, but it’s a reasonable guess that the Rubisco was one of the very first enzymes created by the earliest organisms on our planet. There are over 400 varieties of Rubisco, indicating that it has had plenty of time to evolve, and identifying the variety of Rubisco in a leaf is one way (albeit kind of an unnecessary one) to identify the species. On the way to becoming photosynthetic, a necessary early step would have been simply capturing carbon atoms and using them as building blocks. It is easy to imagine at the time this happened our atmosphere didn’t have any Oxygen, so photorespiration wouldn’t have been an issue. Unfortunately for plants evolution isn’t a magic bullet, and even though we can imagine better ways to fix carbon, none have evolved. It’s not for lack of trying. Several plants have modified the system somewhat through either the C4 pathway or the Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) pathway. Neither eliminated the need for Rubisco, but both found ways of having the enzyme do its work in a region of the leaf with either less Oxygen or more CO2.

I believe that if a thoughtful creator was involved the single most important enzyme for the pinnacle of His creation (presumably that’s us humans) would not have an error rate of 27% and a speed orders of magnitude slower than others. Without green plants we don’t exist, and without photosynthesis there are no green plants, and without Rubisco there is no photosynthesis. Clearly this doesn’t prove there is no creator. An idea that can’t be proved is equally hard to disprove, but to my way of thinking this is even more telling than the litany of other questions out there. Ones like: Why do whales have finger bones? How come the Panda’s thumb is made from a different bone than my thumb? Where did the T-Rex’s go? What is does prove is that if there is a creator, the creator was forced to work from a toolbox of available pieces and parts to put together life on our planet. And THAT flies in the face of a good many religious doctrines.

My feeling is that there was no creator involved, but it can’t be proved either way and isn’t arguable. However, “young earth creationism” is wrong on every level, and can be countered by looking at the ages of rocks, the ages of stars, the geology of the Hawaiian Islands and a host of other big ticket items. We can look at the inside of each and every leaf on the planet and see the truth that stares us in the face.

By: Bill The Butcher

The sun had already travelled far down towards the west when Kande emerged from the doorway under the bridge, and the shadows stretched across the sluggish water. Its rays glittered off the surface, but faintly, weakened by the drifting haze in the air.

Kande squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, leaning back against the ancient stone of the bridge support. Although she’d known, of course, that it would be like this, she was still overcome by a rush of memories of the last time she’d seen all this.

It had been a mild autumn day, with golden leaves still on the trees and carpeting the banks. It had been evening, too, the sun a deep golden-red, the sky a blaze of colour from all the particles in the air. She’d known that it was all poisoned, even then, of course – but she’d never thought it would get quite as bad as now.

Kande was just over seventy years old. She was small but compact, with broad shoulders, built like a little tank, and for all her years was tough and still strong. Her mop of silver hair was crushed down under the hood of her contamination suit, which covered her from top to toe, except for the gas mask over her face. Through its pair of windows, small and thick, her grey eyes peered out at the altered world.

It was a scene of such desolation that she wished she could retreat back into the shelter that lay behind the doorway. Stretching ahead of her, up to the horizon, was a tumble of broken concrete and twisted metal, shattered stumps that was all that was left of once towering buildings, and the river, dead, grey and sluggish as liquid mud.

Kande had been born far away from here, and grown up on the south-western coast, where she’d thought to be a pilot, and had earned a flying licence even before she was eligible to learn to drive. It helped that a relative had had a light plane of his own and hadn’t minded teaching her. She’d never made the transition to a commercial licence, though.

She still remembered the moment she’d decided on the course her life would take. She’d been at the controls of the Cessna, on a flight across country, the sea a band of blue on the horizon behind her and the land below a drab brown. In the middle distance she’d noticed a smudge of black, which as she approached had resolved itself into a gigantic cloud of smoke. At first she’d thought something was on fire below, but as she’d got closer she realised that it came from a forest of factory chimneys, belching out their sooty breath into the noon air. Once she’d landed back at her home airport, she’d tried to find out what she could do about it.

Those were the days when the crisis point was evidently fast approaching, and environmental scientists had imagined that they would at last be taken seriously. Kande had enrolled herself in the University in this city, and stayed on to do postgraduate research. She’d believed, in those days, that they would make a difference, that they could still pull the ecosphere back from the brink. But she – they, all of them, the whole faculty, hell, the entire discipline – hadn’t reckoned with the tenaciousness of corporate greed and the spinelessness of political will. Big Business had proclaimed there was no crisis, the politicians had enthusiastically agreed, and Big Religion had fallen in line. By the time the damage was so great that it was no longer possible to pretend there was no crisis, the people in charge had declared that there was no point doing anything because it was too late for anything to be done. And that was that.

Overnight, the funding had been turned off like a tap, and research labs in environmental studies had been forced to shut down; first, all over the country, and then – for it was still an important country, one that decided the condition of economies across the globe – all over the world. Except for tiny and unimportant labs in tiny and unimportant nations, humanity had turned its back on the environment. And then things had got so bad, so fast, that there was no longer anything to be done.

But some people had seen the writing on the wall in time, and acted.

Far below Kande’s feet, stretching under the river and beyond, into the city, were the tunnels of the old underground railway. They’d fallen into disuse by then, since the government had decided to do away with them in favour of private vehicle ownership, which, as the economists had assured everyone, created jobs and hence wealth. The empty subway tunnels had proved a good place to turn into a secret underground system of shelters, and they had retreated into them while there had still been time, with as much food and water as they could get hold of.

They’d had hopes then, of holding out a few months to years at the most, before humanity came to its senses. But the years had turned into decades, and the world outside had become a poisoned wasteland, where even the air was no longer fit to breathe.

Underground, they’d waited until they’d run out of food and water, and then they’d tried to get hold of food and water, in foraging expeditions to the surface. But even those sources had dried up a long time ago, and in recent times there had been almost nothing to eat or drink. Not that there were many left to eat or drink it anyway.

She’d made up her mind to leave while there was still time, while she could still leave on her own terms. There had been others who had left over the years, plenty of them, but there had still been a kind of hope that things might get better, and with what equipment had been left they’d carried on the research they could. Now there was nothing left, not even hope.

Kande walked down to the mud by the edge of the water, where the debris was less of an obstacle and walking slightly easier. Thick greyish-green lumps of weed grew here on the mud, of a kind she had never seen when she’d been young. Even the pattern of life was changing.

As the sun sank and the temperature dropped, a thin mist began to accumulate over the surface of the water, and licked at Kande’s knees as she walked. It was probably harmless vapour, but seemed sticky and poisonous, so that she had a strong desire to get away from it. Clambering up an inclined slab of stone, which had probably once formed part of the collapsed roadway above, she climbed onto the embankment.

Even softened by the last of the day’s light, the devastation was amazing. Kande had known, of course, of the conflicts that had marked the final struggles of those who had remained on the surface – the battles over food, and water at first, and then over shelter and breathable air. But that knowledge hadn’t prepared her for the devastation that she saw.

It was almost as if an angry giant had stomped all over the city, crushing everything under his boots in a rage, and kicked over what was left. Here and there still upright buildings poked their heads over the desolation but they were only shells, windowless and scorched by fire.

“Don’t go,” the man who had once been the scientist in charge of the laboratory, then her lover, and was still the leader of those remaining in the tunnels had said. “You don’t know what it’s like there. Trust me. I’ve been up to the surface, you haven’t.”

Kande had looked at him. Once he’d been young and had the looks of a minor movie star, and then grown fat, bearded and rubicund until he looked vaguely like Santa Claus. Now he still had the beard, but the fat had fallen away and he looked like nothing more than a tired old man with not an original idea in his head, nor the capacity for one.

“I can’t stay here either,” she’d said, trying to sound as kind as possible. “There’s nothing left here. In another year, at the most, you’ll all have to leave too, or starve. I’d rather not wait.”

“That’s silly. In another year things might be better.”

She hadn’t even bothered to reply to that, concentrating on packing her things in her rucksack. He’d followed her around, looking as hurt as though she was leaving him for another man and as though whatever was between them hadn’t been over for fifteen years.

“What will you do out there?” he’d asked. “It’s not even as though you know where you’re going.”

She’d shrugged, checking to see that she’d taken all she wanted. It was little enough, she’d thought, not even filling the rucksack – the accumulated possessions of a life. “It’s not as though you know what you’re doing, hanging around here,” she’d said at length, not looking at him. “As I see it, at least I’m trying for some kind of control over my own destiny.”

“You’re old, damn it,” he’d said. “You don’t have much destiny left, do you?”

She’d grinned mirthlessly. “All the more reason to make use of what time I have left.”

“All right, go” he’d said, waving his arms. “Get out of here. Do whatever the hell you want. But remember, out there everything’s poisoned – even the air!”

She nodded now, imperceptibly, inside her gas mask. As the sun set, the river, below the embankment, began to glow from pollution in the water. The air, too, became almost visible, clouds of greenish and yellow phosphorescence drifting low over the shattered street, so that she had a little light to make her way along and didn’t have to use the precious torch she’d purloined from the stores when nobody was looking. Or, rather, she amended, he’d known for sure that she was taking it, but he hadn’t said a word. And she’d known he wouldn’t.

Something scuttled from between her feet, squeaking, and disappeared into the shadows, making her jump involuntarily. It was too small and quick to get a look at, and when her heartbeat got back under control she realised that it was probably only a rat. Still, it proved that animal life still existed among the ruins, and she searched until she found a stout metal rod with a twisted, jagged edge. It was heavy and unwieldy, but would serve as a weapon – she hoped.

It was too warm for comfort inside the suit, and the sweat began to trickle down her face under the gas mask. She wished she could take it off, but that would be a stupid error. After all these years, the air was still full of poisonous gases, and likely would be for years more. Somewhere, factories were still pumping smoke into the air, she was sure. If they could find raw materials, and a source of energy, people would continue polluting, and telling themselves they had nothing to lose.

Kande realised that she’d been walking, unconsciously, in the direction of the University, where she’d worked before they’d moved the laboratory underground less than a week before they’d have run out of funds to keep it going. It was not really a surprise, because the laboratory was where she’d spent so many years working, and it was the one place in the city with which she’d been familiar. She’d never cared to get to know the rest of it, the theatre district and the main drag with its towering malls, the remnants of one of which she was passing now. Obscurely, the sight of the gutted ruin pleased her. Back in the day, when the environmental scientists been pleading with everyone to do something about the coming catastrophe before it was too late, the politicians and the media had accused the likes of her of plotting to take away peoples’ simple pleasures. That would teach them!

She’d been walking for hours now, and the night was well advanced. Long ago, she’d left the river behind, and now she was passing through an area where most of the buildings were, in comparison to those by the embankment, relatively intact. Many years ago, this had been one of the great thoroughfares of the city. Even now, although it was still dotted with the rusted carcasses of vehicles, it was easier going than earlier. The glowing vapours by the riverside had dissipated, too, but she wasn’t ready to take off her mask quite yet. The entire city lay in a depression surrounded by higher land on which the industrial estates had been situated, which meant it was still flooded by the effluvium of those temples of economic progress.

She’d rested as much as she could before setting out, and had eaten what passed for a good meal, but the slow plodding pace the terrain and the uncertain light forced on her made her legs and back weary. She wanted to sit down somewhere for a while, but she had a distinct feeling that it wouldn’t be safe. She realised then that this feeling had been creeping up on her ever since she’d left the river, and been growing imperceptibly stronger. It was almost as though something was watching her, waiting for her to display some weakness, let her guard down for an instant- Kande spun round, metal bar raised awkwardly at chest level, ready to lash out, but there was nothing there. But, more than ever, she was sure someone – something – was watching her, from the shadows, circling closer and closer, preparing to charge.

It was at that precise moment that the sound started.

It began as a low moan, as of pain, and rose swiftly into a shriek of anguish that split the sky, echoing from the deserted buildings and the forgotten cars. Again it came, the echoes making it impossible to locate its origin, and then there was another, surely from behind her this time, and another, now to her right. All around her, the noise, and she did not know which way to turn.

She fumbled the rucksack off her back and pulled out the torch. After the hours of darkness the yellow beam of light was almost dazzlingly bright, and she screwed up her eyes involuntarily.

When she could see again, the first dog was already out in the open, watching her.  It stood beside the skeleton of a car, a large white animal with heavy muscular shoulders and ragged ears. It trotted forwards a few steps, stopped, raised its muzzle and howled again, to be answered by another not far away. Kande could see them now when she swung her torch around, slipping from shadow to shadow, coming steadily closer. Bending quickly, she picked up a stone and threw it at the first dog, the big white one. It moved aside a little to avoid the clumsy missile, but that was all.

Kande had never been afraid of dogs. In her younger days, before she’d left all else behind to concentrate on her research, she’d made a practice of gathering bread crumbs and scraps to feed the strays on the street corners, something which had not endeared her to the shopkeepers. She’d ignored their hectoring and kept on feeding the dogs, a thin young woman surrounded by a forest of waving tails, and finally the shopkeepers had relented and left her alone.  But those had been friendly dogs, not a feral pack on the hunt.

The first dog, the big one, began walking towards her, stiff-legged, head held low. Its broad muzzle wrinkled, exposing huge canines, and its voice was a low, almost musical rumbling in its massive chest.

Kande backed away from it, slowly, keeping the beam of the torch focused on its face. She’d seen videos of wild dogs, and she knew it was trying to intimidate her into running. The rest of the pack would be behind her, waiting for her to break and run. Then they’d come in from all sides, darting under her guard and biting at her legs and underbelly. Once she went down, that would be the end. They’d rip her to pieces. The suit would only prolong her agony by keeping her alive that little bit longer.  Whatever happened, she mustn’t break and run.

The big dog was closer now, and she swung her crude club, almost connecting and making it jump back for a moment before advancing again, more cautiously, weaving back and forth. Its growl had deepened to a snarl, and it seemed only a moment before it would duck under her club and hurl itself at her.

Something bumped her rucksack from behind, large, hard and unyielding. Cautiously, she rubbed herself against the obstruction, not taking her eyes from the dog, and realised that she had backed herself against a wall.

This meant, at least, that she was temporarily protected against attack from behind by the rest of the pack. She began sidling along the wall, making passes at the white dog with her club, but her arm was tiring fast. The dog seemed to know it too, and had started to feint, forcing her to react each time by lunging at it as best she could. It was an intelligent dog, and brave, and in other circumstances she would probably have enjoyed making its acquaintance. But for the moment she only wanted to get as far away as possible from it.

From the corners of her eyes, distorted through the thick windows of her mask, she saw some of the other dogs of the pack, approaching. Less bold than the big white pack leader, they came warily, ready to back off if necessary, but they came. If she let her guard down, they’d lose their wariness and be all over her.

The wall behind her disappeared, so suddenly that she almost fell over backwards into darkness. Stumbling in an effort to regain her balance, she realised she had inadvertently passed through a doorway and was inside the building. And there was the door, just by her right hand. Throwing down the club with a clang, she hurled herself at it.  With a snarl, the dog charged.

It came rushing forwards, leaning into the attack, massive haunches pumping. It came so fast that she had only got the door halfway closed when it struck, ripping at her thigh, managing only a bite of the contamination suit. It twisted, trying to rip the mouthful of suit away, and as its teeth slipped off the tough fabric it fell. It was up in an instant, but Kande had finally slammed the door shut, throwing her shoulder against it. She felt the thud as the dog hurled itself against the door, its fury palpable through the wood, barking frenziedly. The other dogs were shouting too, raucously, the whole pack just on the other side of the slab of wood. She leaned against the door with all her weight, and after a while the noise outside abated. The last she heard of it was harsh panting that faded gradually in the distance.

Kande decided to go no further that night. The torch’s batteries needed conserving, but she had to expend a little more power to check her surroundings. She was in the tiny hallway of what had evidently once been a block of flats, with doors opening on both sides and narrow stairs ascending opposite. The nearest of the doors, to her left, was ajar, and, pushing it cautiously open, she entered.

The room was fairly large and had probably once been luxuriously furnished. The carpet on the floor was so thickly covered with dust that at every step she took puffs of it rose into the air, but it was soft and deeply-piled, and the furniture which remained looked expensive and quite possibly – Kande was no expert in such things – antique. The curtains over the windows had flowery patterns on them, faded but still visible in the torch’s light, and a framed print of flowers hung on one wall.

It was, in other words, a room so feminine that it filled her with revulsion. But she was only going to stay for what was left of the night, so she merely snorted and moved on to check over the rest of the apartment. It consisted of a bedroom with a double bed, which was shrouded in dust, and a tiny kitchen, absurdly small compared to the size of the other rooms, and a bathroom with rust stains on the pink porcelain of the sink, and a washing machine which took up half the space.

Shaking her head at the pretension, Kande returned to the living room, slapped the dust off one of the chairs, and sat down, turning off her torch. It would have been useless in any case, because the dust she’d raised filled the air, and even though the gas mask filtered it out she felt her throat tightening reflexively. The darkness flooded in, and she leaned back, feeling the weariness in her limbs.

Idly, she wondered what he was doing now. She remembered the last she’d seen of him, his liver-spotted hand on her arm as he once again tried to dissuade her from coming. She’d looked away from his face, because the look in his eyes made her feel as though she was abandoning him instead of merely leaving while she still could.

Perhaps he would be sleeping, inside the carriage of the abandoned subway train which they’d long ago converted to living quarters. More likely, he’d be awake and going over the results of the latest air sample readings – readings which had not changed in a year or longer, perhaps because the equipment no longer worked properly – and trying to convince himself things were getting better. Maybe he was thinking of her, but she hoped not. She didn’t want to hurt him, even inadvertently. He wasn’t a bad man, never had been.

Her mind slipped to thoughts of what he’d said, and she acknowledged that from his viewpoint he’d been making sense. Where was she going, with only the food and water she had in her rucksack? How far could she get? Even if the dogs didn’t get her, what other dangers lay in wait in the ruins of the city? Even if she found food or water, how could she know if it was edible or just more poison?

Hell, she thought, I don’t even dare take off this mask to eat or drink what I’m carrying with me. I must be insane. But she wasn’t insane. What was insane was remaining inside the subway tunnels waiting for the end. What was insane was being left with no choice. At least she was exercising a choice.

Somewhere not too far away, a dog howled. The pack was still around, then – naturally, because this must be its territory. Gripping her club, Kande stared through the thick eyepieces of her gas mask into the darkness and waited for the dawn.

She woke suddenly, her heart thumping and mouth dry. She’d had no memory of sleepiness, let alone falling asleep. It was still dark outside, no trace of light leaking past the curtains on the windows, but she had the indefinable feeling that hours had passed. Something had woken her, but what? A sound?  Even as she strained her ears, listening, the sound came again.

If it had been the old days, she’d never have given it another thought. It was merely the blat-blat of an unmuffled motorcycle engine, coming steadily closer. But who would be using a motorcycle here, in these ruins, at this time of the night?

Carefully, trying not to disturb the dust, Kande stood and walked over to the nearest window, gently lifting the corner of the curtain enough to look out into the street. She could see the beam of the motorcycle’s headlight, a pale wavering glow, steadily approaching. A few moments more, and the bike came to a stop almost directly opposite the window, and the headlight blinked out as the engine was switched off. The pillion rider, a dark shadow, swung an awkward leg over and stepped off, while the person in the front seat hunched over the handlebars and seemed to be waiting for something.

Kande had almost decided that the better part of valour would be to drop the curtain and retreat back into the room when she heard the other engine. It announced itself with a discordant grinding, clearly audible through the gas mask and contamination suit hood, and another pair of headlights swept briefly over the window, making her duck reflexively.

When she looked again, the car was standing near the motorcycle, its arthritic engine still running and its headlights illuminating the scene. At least two people could be seen near the car, talking to the two who had arrived on the bike, and Kande could see another person at the wheel. Whatever the discussion was about, it wasn’t going well. She heard voices raised in argument, and suddenly there was the gleam of light on metal, a knife blade raised high.

Someone screamed, shrilly, and the shadows merged, scuffling, one going down, another suddenly breaking away and running across the street towards her. Before Kande dropped the curtain and stepped smartly back, she saw that it seemed to be the same size as the pillion rider of the motorcycle. She heard the door of the building squeak shrilly, and running footsteps on the other side of the wall. The next moment, the door of the apartment, right next to her, slammed open.

If Kande had been younger and faster, she would undoubtedly have given herself away. It was her slowed reflexes more than anything which kept her frozen where she was, in the darkness next to the window. In her black suit and mask, she was invisible.

The person who had run in fumbled to close the door, pulled across the nearest chair and pushed it under the handle, and stood panting. Apparently, the others outside hadn’t noticed precisely which door had opened and closed so abruptly, and Kande heard them rush through and up the stairs at the back.

There was a long moment of silence. Kande stood frozen in place, trying not to breathe, while the other person in the room stood in the same attitude of watchful stillness. Then, stepping softly, the shadow moved to the window, within touching range of Kande, and pulled the curtain back.

In the faint light filtering in from outside Kande saw a girl. She was dressed in a faded denim jacket, over whose padded shoulders her thin, triangular face looked even thinner. Her hair, stringy and ragged, fell over her forehead and hung limply down her back. When she leaned against the windowpane to look down the street, Kande saw that her eyes were red and inflamed, rimmed with crusted purulent matter.

The girl was dangerous. Kande was no physical coward, but she knew that the worst mistake she could make was to approach her. She looked as though she was poised on the edge of violence at all times, and, when she was scared, as she obviously was now, she would be even more aggressive. Kande couldn’t see a weapon on her, but was sure she carried one. Her sort would never be unarmed, even for a moment. Even the big white dog earlier had probably been a much lesser danger than she was.

The situation was getting rapidly impossible. The sky outside was lightening rapidly, dawn creeping onto the world. Soon she could no longer remain hidden – the girl must see her. Even if she didn’t, the others, who from the faint noises were probably searching upstairs, would finally arrive and break the door down. She wondered why the girl hadn’t realised it herself. Did she imagine she’d be safe in here? Kande wondered just what had happened outside, who she was, and who the people hunting her were.  But it was pointless speculating about all that. Time was precious now, and Kande’s first responsibility was clearly to herself.

There was only one thing to do, and much as she hated to do it, Kande acted. Waiting until the girl turned away for a moment, she stepped softly forward, raised the club she’d been carrying for so long, and brought it down in a vicious arc. As the girl collapsed, Kande stepped quickly over her to the window and looked out.

In the half-light just before dawn, the car and the motorcycle were picked out in degrees of shadow. Something dark lay beside the car’s rear wheel, knees drawn up and arms thrown open wide. There was nobody else to be seen, not even a sentry.

Pausing only to pick up her rucksack, Kande pushed the window open. It stuck partway, but left enough space for her to clamber out onto the windowsill and drop to the ground. She was about to trot down the street when she had a sudden thought. Crossing quickly, she went to the car, ignoring the corpse on the roadway, and looked inside. No luck, the key was missing, and she hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about starting the engine without it. Nor did the motorcycle have a key. But if she was right and the girl had been the pillion rider, then the driver was probably the one who’d been stabbed. And if so, the key should be –

Less than a minute later, Kande was astride the motorcycle, the engine throbbing between her legs, a faint yell in the distance fading as someone from the building caught a glimpse of her from a window. She rode as fast as she dared, the contamination suit clumsy and the mask making for restricted vision, but every revolution of the tyres pushing her towards safety. At the first opportunity, she turned into a side street, and then into another, until she was reasonably sure that if anyone found her, it would be by accident.

It had been many years since Kande had last been on a motorcycle, but one never forgot how. She had loved biking back then, ignoring the helmet law, her hair blowing in the wind as she drove for tens of kilometres out into the country and back, her only relaxation from University and the laboratories. She’d become very well known, the biker woman who drove, as they said, as well as a man. But those days were long past.

Kande had long since given up all plans of going to the University. She didn’t know what was going on in the city, but obviously the danger level was extreme. Swinging the bike onto another broader street, she drove towards the east, determined to get as far as she could out of town. After that, she’d see-

She’d almost made it out of the outskirts when the bike ran out of fuel.  She’s known, of course, that it was coming, the needle on the fuel gauge hardly flickering above zero for the last few kilometres. Still, it was with a sense of acute disappointment and near grief that she heard the splutter of the dying motor and steered the bike to the side of the road. Propping it on the kickstand, she took the precaution of taking the key with her. Nobody would be able to chase her on it, assuming they could find petrol for the tank.

The sun of late morning was hot, beating the sweat out of her skin as she trudged along, miserably uncomfortable inside the suit and the mask, and tired, hungry and intensely thirsty. However, she dared not stop to rest, and after seeing the pus-encrusted eyes of the girl she’d hit, she was even charier of removing the gas mask.

As the houses fell away and the brown desolation of the country opened around her, Kande once again began to feel that she was being followed. After last night’s encounter with the dog pack, she had even more reason to trust her instincts – but, even though she turned round again and again to check behind her, she couldn’t see anyone, not even the hulking white dog with the wrinkled muzzle and tattered ears. Surely if it were the people in the car, they’d have attacked her by now, not merely hung back watching?

Her thoughts were growing confused as hunger and thirst joined hands with her physical weariness, and she became conscious of her seventy years as she hadn’t been in a long time. If there had been trees on the roadside, she might well have sunk to the foot of one and rested, hidden follower or not; but except for thick patches of scrub bushes, no vegetation survived by the roadside. The few remaining trees were leafless skeletons.

She was beginning to stumble and weave when she saw the airport. It lay to the left of the road, a tiny control tower perched like an afterthought on the roof of the blocky red terminal building. The runway stretched on either side, flat and empty, but for a hangar in the distance, its metal doors and walls promising shelter.

Desperate energy flooding back into her limbs, she shambled off the road and across the runway towards the hangar. It loomed above her as she approached, far larger than she’d thought it from the road, and the steel doors were almost shut, wide open enough only to squeeze through.

Squeezing through the crack, she stopped with the shock of surprise.  There on the concrete floor stood a Piper Cub.

It had been decades since she’d last seen one, but there it was, still in its bright yellow paint, looking as fresh and bright as though it had only just rolled off the factory line. Reverently, almost unbelieving, she walked up to it and touched the propeller. The blade turned at the pressure of her hand, slowly but steadily, and with mounting excitement she realised that it might still even be usable.

“But where could one fly with it?” she asked aloud, her voice a murmur inside the gas mask.

“As far away as possible,” someone said right behind her. “To someplace where the pollution hasn’t killed everything yet.”

Slowly, heart thudding, she turned. “You.”

“Of course.’ He raised his contamination-suit clad arms, an embarrassed grin on his bearded face. His gas mask dangled from one gloved hand. “Who else could it be?”

“It was you. You followed me.”

“I really couldn’t let you go wandering off to the middle of nowhere alone, could I now?” He stepped closer, but warily, as though she was a dangerous animal. “I’d thought you might make for the old airport, you being a former pilot and all. I saw you in the distance a while ago, and, well…”

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t want you to think I was keeping an eye on you. I saw you come in here, and wanted to take a look to see if you were all right. I swear that was all.”

Kande stared at him. “How’s the air?” she asked at last.

“The air?” He sounded surprised. “Breathable.”

“Whoo.” She pulled off her gas mask and sighed deeply. “Air! I needed that.” She looked at him, and then back at the plane. “Come on,” she said briskly. “Since you’re here, you might as well make yourself useful. Help me get this going.”

“You’re sure?” he asked doubtfully. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

“What the hell else can we do? This place is more lethal than you think, I can assure you. Now let me see if we have some fuel. Let’s have a look at those cans over there.”

Much later, when they’d managed to push open the doors of the hangar, and wheeled the little plane onto the runway, she paused to wipe the sweat off her face. “What if we crash somewhere?” She looked at him. “Not that I’m saying we will, it’s just something to consider. What if we crash and burn?”

He shrugged. “Got to take a chance sometime. Besides, I trust your piloting skills.”

“Thanks for nothing,” she snorted, sliding into the front seat and frowning over the primitive instrument panel. “Let’s see if I can at least get it into the air.”

“Told you,” he said a few minutes later, as the little yellow plane lifted somewhat unsteadily off the runway. “I trust your ability.”

“You’re a good man,” she said quietly. “Not the best, don’t get a swollen head – but there are worse. Much worse.”

He grinned from the rear seat. “That’s why you’re taking me along?”

“Well, you are an old coot, but so am I.” She glanced back at him over her shoulder. “This plane’s an old coot too, but there’s a world outside, and some of it’s probably still fresh and new. All we have to do is find it.”

The plane flew on towards the gathering dusk.

]]> http://subversify.com/2011/11/24/away-from-it-all/feed/ 1 http://subversify.com/2011/11/11/storm-horizon-the-adaptation-of-a-globally-warmed-state/ http://subversify.com/2011/11/11/storm-horizon-the-adaptation-of-a-globally-warmed-state/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:18:04 +0000 karlsie http://subversify.com/?p=15130

By Karla Fetrow

Twenty Years of Change

November, and winter has moved in, solidly creaming over the landscape with a thick layer of snow.  The earth and sky meet in a single blurred testimony, leaving only the trees and the houses to mark the boundaries of earthly and celestial visions.  The termination dust gathered late; much later than childhood muses remembered.  A friend who hasn’t visited Alaska since he left over thirty years ago wrote telling me he remembered how, in the midst of fishing, hunting and harvesting during the summer, the first light sprinkling would gather on the mountains, announcing the approach of winter.

Funny how quickly memories can fade when you are a part of the continuity of changing seasons.  Thirty years ago autumn began around the same time as school started, in early September.  The leaves turned rosy or bright yellow in their preparations for winter.  The mornings were frosty and the evenings, crisp and clear.  They were rewarding times; a time between seasons.  A time to take the load of your back awhile.  Soon enough, the vegetables canned or frozen would be brought out to compliment the dinner table.  Soon enough the smells of baking would fill the house as frozen rhubarb and berries were made into pies or served on pancakes.  Soon enough the pile of split wood in the shed would be used and in the blue dusk of morning the axes would ring as they snarled into the piled rounds.  For a few short weeks, the work was finished.

When the winter came, there would be other challenges.  Keeping the driveway plowed, the automobile running, rescuing friends from a ditch.  People often remark how Alaskans all seem to have broad shoulders.  This is because from the time they were seven or eight years old and had at least sixty pounds to lean with, they were initiated into the arts of successful car pushing.  These aspects haven’t changed much over the years.  Outside the City of Anchorage, life styles are still highly subsistence based.  With the first heralds of spring, seeds are nurtured in window sills, the snow is dusted away from garden patches, the long routine of filling the potholes in private driveways, of clearing the yard of winter’s debris, of preparing the groundwork for new construction begins.  The mechanics are tinkering under their cars.  The back hoes, the tractors, the bob cats, the loaders are brought out, their engines cleaned, their tires patched.  Fishing poles, dip nets, fly rods are unloaded from the closets and the tackle boxes refurnished.

Yard work in a rural home is a summer long activity.  Alaska has some of the fastest growing and most aggressive plants in the world.  Within a week after the last of the snow is gone, the weeds come up.  Alder, willow bushes, devils club can be cut to the root and still grow back to four feet tall within a month.  Fireweed grows over six feet tall.  A freshly paved road will show weeds pushing through the cracks before summer’s end.

What has changed is the climate; so delicately that the changes have seemed almost imperceptible.  In 1990, I returned to my home in Alaska after a ten year hiatus in Mexico.  It was early July.  The family said we were having a spectacular summer, with warm sunny days temperatures in the seventies.  But on the near mountains, there were still patches of snow, rivets and gullies we had always considered a permanent factor.  The breezes blew gently down from the mountains.  I could feel their snow melt, their icy promise of winter.  I shivered.

Winters’ first snow fall came in early October.  The years spent away made me feel like it had come too soon, yet my memories chided me.  By Halloween, it almost seemed pointless to put on costumes as the snow was usually knee deep and the temperature sitting around zero.  The costumes were stuffed inside snow clothing and boots, with only our make up or masks proving we had put out the effort to wear a disguise.  Time had preserved the image of the environment, but had erased the memories of the cold.

It didn’t take long to get those memories back.  My first year home, I lived at the end of a three mile off-road that received very little traffic and no state maintenance.  My cabin was heated with a wood stove.  As the days grew colder, I stayed up later at night, feeding the fire, and waking earlier in the morning to stoke it back up.

Each snowfall presented new challenges to my driving skills.  A wet snow meant a thick, icy glaze over the road, full of slush that clumped and knocked inside the tire wells.  A pile of light, fluffy snow meant very little traction, sleet meant it was better to simply put on ice skates.  There wasn’t really any such thing as holing up until the bad weather was over because blizzards, snow flurries and white outs were part of everyday winter life.

I spent about as much time getting myself out of a ditch as I did going up and down that three mile road.  I learned a new trick with my tire jack.  It wasn’t just handy for changing tires.  When a wheel dropped over the edge of the road, burying one end of the car up to the axle, I’d bring out my jack, crank up the offending end, lean against it and push it over.  Sometimes I’d have to repeat this exercise two or three times, but eventually my car would be back on solid pavement.  My childhood pushing muscles were becoming rather well developed.

Normal Alaskan Summer @ 2006 Karla Fetrow

By the second winter, I had traded my heavy bodied mid-eighties Malibu in for a much lighter Ford Tiempo.  My brother, the mechanic, sneered about it, calling it a tampon, but there was one advantage to this otherwise nondescript machine.  I didn’t need my car jack.  If it plowed into a bank, and it did so with greater aplomb than the heftier sedan, preferring to bury itself up to the windshield than sink a wheel rigidly into a ditch, all I had to do was put it in neutral, jump on the bumper a few times, and I could usually loosen it up enough to drive out.  If I had an adult passenger or two with me, we could just about lift it out.

Entering the Decades of Bizarre Weather

There was some talk about global warming back then, but it was basically idle speculation.  There wasn’t any real evidence other than some rapidly shrinking glaciers.  The winters came promptly, in early October and reluctantly shrank away by mid May.  But, beginning with that first summer when I returned, described as spectacular, a new pattern began to emerge.  The normally overcast days became less frequent.  The sunny days would roll over, one into another, in stretches of a week or two at a time, with each clear day nudging the temperature a little higher.  It was almost as if the sun streaming down in rustling waves was trying to show just how spectacular it could be.

My second year home, the returning sun of spring was so enthusiastic, it was sixty-four degrees by mid-April.  This was extraordinary for a climate that rarely saw more than fifty degrees throughout the entire month of April, which was often included in the winter months, as it could turn treacherously cold or snow at any time, but that year it didn’t.  What was even more extraordinary was that we had accumulated nearly nine feet of snow that winter.  The snow had only just begun to melt when the sun decided to do its warm up dance.  It cast a brilliant, uniform sheen over the covered landscape, a sheen that looked liked like a smoothly rolling ocean of diamonds.

It was an invitation to play my six year daughter could not resist.  She dashed off the main trail and into the undisturbed snow field; immediately sinking up to her neck.  The rapid change from winter to spring’s first kiss had melted the snow pack just under the glistening blanket.  She was literally swimming in snow.  Regina had been learning English ever since we’d first arrived, but in her surprise and panic, she reverted to her native language.  Her cries of “ayudame!  Ayudame,”  caught my immediate attention.  The slush and water rose up around my waist as I waded in to assist her.  I had to break into a bit of a swim myself in order to grasp her hand and pull her into safety.  Yes, Virginia.  In Alaska, you can drown in mud puddles.

That summer heralded a stint of week long eighty degrees weather.  The locals were enthralled.  Eighty degrees was an occasional luxury that happened when nature was being especially nice; a day or two to notch away in the mind as to what paradise really feels like, but a week long was just something we entertained in our dreams.

The most peculiar aspect about that year fading so quickly from memory as even more peculiar years took their place, was that when the more typically cooler days of overcast skies and rain took its place, the change was announced by thunder and lightening.  Thunder is relatively common on the Cook Inlet, but not lightening.  Lightening appearing in the sky was about as likely as, well; being struck by it.  The odds just weren’t in its favor.

But that year, and during subsequent ones, we began witnessing lightening storms.  As the dramatic cymbals of nature announced the weather change, huge black clouds rolled in, slamming against the mountains.  We didn’t receive the usual sprinkles and drizzles that announce the beginning of our rain season.  It poured.  It rattled on the roofs for hours before settling down to the normal patter of our summer rain.  It became normal, after a few years, and speculation died down as to whether or not we were experiencing global warming.  After all, our winters were still cold.  Never mind that a few summers later, we had record breaking hundred degree temperatures in areas that rarely had a high of over sixty-eight degrees.  The thermometer  still dropped below zero by November.

That was before we had a series of winters so bizarre, we had names for them.  There was the undecided winter.  The first frosts came at their normal times, midway through September, with a respectable blanket of snow by late October.  Then, just when it began to drop down to zero, a warm snow storm came in, mixed with sleet and rain.  Another cold spell hit, followed quickly by another rise in temperatures.  The rapid rise and slide on the thermometer became the pattern of the entire winter, sometimes dropping or climbing to extremes of forty degrees in a matter of hours.

Then there was the pie avalanche year.  The snow was particularly enthusiastic that year, burying barely frozen ground with a few good feet before the serious cold set in.  The cold spell was long, creating a thick crust of hard pack over the soft layer underneath.  When it broke, it brought freezing rain before delivering another foot or so of snow.  Another cold spell came, freezing the new upper crust, followed by another snow storm.  The layers of snow and icy hard park built up.  By February, the thick accumulation of termination dust teetered precariously on the mountain tops.  With the first warm touch of sunlight, the snow resting on its slippery ice slope began tumbling down.  As each layer was warmed by the strengthening sun, it tumbled like the filling of a pie turned sideways.  Nearly every snow covered mountain top in Alaska avalanched.

Early October and No Snow @ 2011 Karla Fetrow

In first place, was the winter that never came.  Even the youngest Alaskan who was more than a toddler at the time, remembers it.  Sometimes the frost came, but it melted away in a rain storm.  By November, new grass was springing up from the exposed ground.  It wasn’t until Christmas that we received our first snow, but it was mixed with sleet and rain.  January, our coldest month, basked in thirty degree weather.  March came to remind us it’s still a month of unpredictable, wintry weather, but by then, spring was firmly on its way.  A winter that lasts only a few weeks is not a winter at all in Alaska.

The victory cries of global warming were very short lived.  The next few years seemed to see a return to normalcy for Alaskan weather.  The typical overcast skies returned in the summer, with spells of sub-zero temperatures in the winter, and the term “global warming” was carefully crafted into “climate change”.

When You Know There Will  be no Reversal

Memory, so fickle, so willing to be altered, however, didn’t pick up on the subtle changes.  Eighty degree weather had become so common, the locals complained if there weren’t at least a few remarkably hot days.  Autumn moved in later and later.  The pumpkins that were typically carved and placed out on the porches in early October, waited until the week before Halloween as more and more often the pumpkins rotted before the holiday instead of remaining frozen in place.  One of the more notable differences was in the use of the yearly permanent funds.  Usually distributed in the first week October, the most common uses for the bonus was to take a vacation, pay winter’s high energy bills or save it for Christmas shopping.  But, with winter coming in so late so often, people began hedging and crossing their fingers that the ground would still be warm enough for just a little more construction.  Often, it was, and then there would be an extra flurry of work activity as sheds were built, porches finished, the new well settled in.  More and more, the dividend was used for land improvement instead of vacations and shopping.

Elementary science teaches you that white reflects back light and black absorbs it.  This basic principle applies to the science of permanent snow coverage.  The more the glaciers, fjords and snow caps melt, the more dark earth is exposed to absorb the heat from the sun.  Last year, an astonishing thing happened.  The summer, that had been so typical, was accompanied by warm rains that extended well into September.  At the end of the rain season, a strong wind blew in, straight off the Inlet, much warmer than our usual north-westerly gales that herald in the winter.  When it was spent, every bit of snow that had in the past, always decorated our high mountain tops; was gone.  It had been dwindling steadily for years, greenery spreading up bare rocks that had once been covered with snow, but now there were no ribbons of white, no tidy blankets at all.

The changes have been slow, so slow they blur and what had once been considered unusual now feels normal.  While other parts of the world alternately suffered between drought and flood, Alaska enjoyed a beautiful summer.  It came in gently.  The ground had not frozen completely before the first snow so as the snow melted, it sank, drying the mud puddles more quickly than usual.  By mid-May, the leaves were furling open and the grass was over-taking the bare earth.  The rains came evenly in between long spells of sunny weather.  The long rain season, which usually lasts at least a month and generally comes in July, held off until late August.  When the sky cleared near the end of September, it was as warm as an August day.  There had been no frosts, no freak snow flurries, no sudden drops in temperature.

Construction crews that had worked frantically all summer to meet a cold weather deadline, idly filled in ditches, brushed off bike paths and added touches of black top to the roads.  Yard work was carried through until there was absolutely no remaining interest, and tired bodies began to yearn for those vacation days of cozy fires and hot coffee, with nothing better to do than stay warm.  Bicycles, usually put away by now, pressed for one more day of recreation, than another and yet another, the cyclists basking in the amazingly long autumn.  Each day, the locals looked at the mountains, waiting for that telling coat of termination dust that would announce winter was creeping down and would arrive in the lowlands within two weeks.  Yet September rolled into October and the mountains stayed bare.

Snow Creeps Down from the Mountains in Mid-October @2011 Karla Fetrow

Winter finally came to us on Halloween.  The sky clouded over.  The temperature dropped.  By evening, we had our first layer of snow.  It seemed our weird weather had settled back to normal, but this wasn’t so.  A massive storm front of hurricane proportions moved up the northwest coast toward the Chukchi Sea on November sixth, causing a statewide emergency alert.  It wasn’t the size of the storm front that worried the residents, although it was one of the most massive on record, or even the winds.  At this time of year, the Chukchi Sea is usually covered with ice, but this year the storm hit open water.  It was the storm surge that kept people sitting on the edges of their seats.  According to the news broadcasts, at least thirty-seven communities experienced some fallout from the storm, ranging from minor flooding, to power outages, to residents taking refuge in school shelters.

The big scare turned into only a minor boom by Alaskan standards.  As Alaskans shook their heads, laughing at the storm that drove them to buy extra supplies and prepare to knuckle down, they stated the one cardinal rule that all seasoned veterans go by; never, ever try to predict Alaskan weather.  What we can predict is the climate will continue changing.  Many of the villages slammed by the storm had already been suffering erosion over the last few years, with plans, but very few funds, for moving further back from the coastline.  The Big Storm could simply be the prelude to other storms which, finding a new playground in open water, will alter the coastline, change the jet stream and create new bizarre patterns that will eventually be considered normal.

We adapt.  One of the harshest climates in the world is gentling its hand, but in the process, will set the precedent for climate change everywhere.  The question of the new era will not be how to reverse the effects already set in motion, but how to live with them.  It will not be how to avoid natural disasters; drought, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes, but how to survive them.  Nature is oblivious to status, gated communities, well protected homes.  It doesn’t care about your religious denomination, if you’re a friend of pets, or harbor guns in your basement.  It has only one question for you.  When you meet it face to face in its full wrath, will you be prepared?  The answer is, only if you are able to adapt.

By: Gordon Smith

http://www.internetproviders.net/blog/2011/10-ways-satellites-have-been-used-to-spy-on-you/

http://www.internetproviders.net/

In these post-9/11 days of the Patriot Act, there has come a sharp transformation of America’s collective psyche with regard to the interrelationship between public security and personal liberty. Whereas in times past we had been a people who placed freedom above all else, today we seem more willing to compromise that freedom in the name of national defense. So then it comes as no surprise that Uncle Sam has been keeping a watchful eye on more than just his usual suspects: terrorists, communists, and militant environmentalists. Given the fact that satellites provide a global link between other technologies, their use in intelligence gathering is extensive indeed. Here’s a list of ten ways that satellites have been used to spy on you too:

1. Intercepting E-mails – According to this report in the New York Times, the National Security Agency has used spy satellites for the interception of private emails. In an apparent case of “over-collection” of data, American citizens who were not identified as security threats were inadvertently targeted.
2. Intercepting Phone Calls – The same report indicates that phone calls of private citizens were also monitored via U.S. government-owned spy satellites.
3. GPS Monitoring – Spying is not just a government pastime either. Employers are increasingly making use of GPS technology to keep tabs on drivers. With it, they can track your movements, driving speeds, and how long you’ve spent parked under that tree on your lunch break.
4. Google Earth – It may not be real-time tracking per se, but Google’s satellite imagery can get awfully up close and personal. I could see the lawn furniture in my mother’s backyard. Just saying. Let’s hope her neighbors have a building permit for that room addition they’re working on.
5. Cell Phones – With mobile devices having been equipped with GPS capabilities, your cell phone is now essentially a tracking device attached to your hip. The overt purpose of this is to provide a local response locate for callers in emergency situations, but it still means that Big Brother can find you if he wants to.
6. Television Programming – We already know that spyware tracks our movements on the world wide web, but it seldom occurs to us that the same thing is being done via that box sitting on top of our entertainment centers. For starters, let’s just say it could at least be a source of embarrassment for some, when their cable TV provider starts offering suggested viewing based on previously viewed programming.
7. Mobile Web Tracking – For that matter, just as with TV providers and with terrestrial internet connections, satellites make it possible to track internet activity on mobile devices.
8. Private Purchasers – The Cold War having long since passed into history, satellite surveillance has become accessible to the private sector. Individual and corporate entities can buy satellite access for myriad legitimate uses such as mapping. Privatization of satellite surveillance, however, can lead to some questions about accountability.
9. Photos For Sale – One such area of concern with regard to accountability is in the sale of satellite imagery. Some privately owned satellites are taking high-resolution photos that are available for purchase for as little as $750. Even with a federally mandated restriction on their resolution, such photos can still identify Mom’s lawn chairs.
10. OnStar – This satellite-based feature featured in General Motors vehicles has recently been in the news because of a policy change regarding their service. GM apparently has decided that it would be in your(?) best interest to continue tracking your movements even after you’ve unsubscribed from the service. Additionally, they have made provision for the sale of customers’ private information.

Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things- the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by a lack of it. And things cannot love.

 – Paulo Freire (2000)

By Edward SantoPrieto

Do you know the sound the human body makes upon impact after being flung from a five-story tenement building?

Do you know the ringing absence of sound and the smell of cordite when the enraged husband of the woman whose body he flung off that roof, empties his revolver into her lifeless body?

Do you know personally what it feels like to get punched in the face, or to be jumped by a group out to hurt you and to have your face cut in the process?

Do you know what it’s like to have fight almost every day of your life?

Have you ever felt skin and bone crush under your fists as, adrenaline coursing through your bloodstream, you repeatedly punch someone you fear and hate as he lays helplessly underneath you?

Do you know what it feels like to have someone to point a gun at you and pull the trigger; to hear the bullets zing by you as you run for your life?

Do you know what it’s like to lose a friend to bullet, or to have to push another friend in his wheelchair after he was crippled by a bullet?

Do you know what it feels like to actually stab someone? To take a sharp object and thrust it into another human being, perhaps hitting a bone in the process, and still press forward because you felt that it was either that person’s life or yours?

Have you ever plotted and waited, intending to cause harm to another human being because you were afraid for your own life?

Do you know violence? Have you been intimate with violence? Have you ever committed violent acts? Real violence, not violence as something abstract or theoretical, but as an everyday reality?

I do.

And I knew and experienced most of these things before I reached adolescence. I grew up in some of the most violent places in this country — fuck, in the world. In fact, the infant mortality rates of some of the places I was raised still rival third world rates.

I don’t mention this because I think it’s something to brag about or because it somehow privileges me in any way (except to experience some really fucked up shit no one should ever have to experience). I mention this because I want to properly contextualize my advocacy for nonviolence as a radical, revolutionary form of social change. I want to impress upon you that I didn’t come to my own nonviolent stance as a result from a rose-colored or sheltered existence. I know violence in ways very few people know it, having lived it and experienced it first hand in ways most of you only read about in novels or see glorified on TV and movie screens.

I remember the first time I met someone who told me he had never, ever, had a physical altercation. My immediate response was disbelief. I could not conceive how any individual could reach adulthood without ever having gotten into a fight. Impossible! I thought to myself. But that day, during a lull in a research study on the effects of violence on childhood development, no one on the research team, mostly young adults from middle and upper middle class backgrounds, had ever been in a real fight. And they were genuinely horrified at the personal recollections I was sharing. They could not believe I had been subjected to (and subjected others) to the horrific acts of violence I was sharing as casually as if I were eating an ice cream.

Sure, some admitted to having had some intense shouting matches, and some pushing here and there, but not one of my colleagues ever actually committed an act of violence — at least not to the degree I knew violence. And this had been something of an epiphany for me, realizing that perhaps, my experience wasn’t “normal” in the sense that most people didn’t grow up in an overwhelmingly violent environment.

I have been a practicing Buddhist (in the Theravadan tradition) for a little over two decades now. I first became a practicing Buddhist — meaning, among other things, I had committed to five precepts, one being abstaining from harming others — while I was incarcerated in a maximum-security prison. I wrote about that experience previously at Subversify. The main point of that article was really about the challenges of practicing non-violence in a very violent environment (probably one of the most, if not most violent, dehumanizing experiences in my life). My question at the time was that if Buddhism were to have any relevance in my life, then it should work under any circumstances. What follows is what I think is a clarification about what nonviolence means — a too short introduction to nonviolent struggle and to some of its modern-day applications, as a way to dispel some of the bullshit and as a clarification.

In my most recent post on my eyewitness account to the savagery of the events of 9/11, someone responded in the comments section that nonviolence was a “conditioned” evil or some such nonsense. I equate that with other Orwellian-like Newspeak such as “greed is good,” or the new term for torture, “enhanced interrogation techniques.” It’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard in some time. Yeah, thoughtful, peaceful attempts at conflict resolution are evil. Right. ::winning::

First, I’ll state it right up front and say that violence is the way of the coward. It’s the easiest, mindless thing in the world to enact violence. It’s easy to pull a trigger or punch someone you disagree with or (most likely) fear. I have a rule: if you advocate for violence as a means for social change, then you will have to tell me how it is you come to defend killing mostly innocent women and children because the vast numbers of the casualties of war are women and children. If you’re advocating for mass violence (war), then you have to begin your defense of that advocacy in this way, “I advocate the senseless murder and brutal rape of mostly women and children because… ” Why? Because that’s the reality of war1. That is the reality of violence. Violence unleashes a bloodlust that reduces us to the level of the reptilian end of our DNA. War is rape is unbridled capitalism is mindless consumption. The fact I’m often confronted with is that most people who advocate violence really have no true intimate knowledge of it. And those who do know it first hand and still advocate it are usually disaffected youth (or emotionally stunted adults), chickenhawks,2 or worse, sadistic sociopaths. Most have never ever really experienced violence and almost never ever engage in its brutality.

I first became familiar with the notion of nonviolence from the perspective of Eastern philosophy. It was the mid-60s when I was about twelve-years-old; I was in a fight with someone who fought in a way I never experienced. He was using his hands, elbows, and feet in a way that was completely alien to me (my uncle, against my mother’s protestations, taught me Western boxing). In short, he was kicking my ass. The fight was stopped by a tall, bald black man. Sensei Blair, as we came to know him, would take kids off the street and teach them Gōjū-ryū Karate for free. He owned a storefront and it was there I would learn nonviolence, among many other things. Sensei Blair demanded an oath to never use the martial arts to harm, and never out of anger. If he caught you fighting, you were barred from the dojo (school). Paradoxically, the more adept I became in the art, the less I fought, and the more I walked away from taunts and fights. It was at the dojo where I first learned meditation and my first introduction to Daoism and I devoured the books on Eastern philosophy Sensei Blair kept. Sensei Blair was also something of a role model/ father figure for many troubled youth. In a very real way, Sensei Blair was teaching nonviolence in a very effective way — offering kids an alternative to gangs, general criminal activity, and drug dealing otherwise so easily accessible.

Nonviolent action is a means of social struggle that arises from the more evolved stage of human development. It has been developed in a conscious way only in the last several decades. It does not, contrary to common misunderstanding, rely on the goodwill of the opponent but instead is designed to work in the face of determined opposition and violent repression. It is not limited to any race, nationality, social class, or gender, and has been used successfully in a wide range of political circumstances.

Nonviolent action is not simply any method of action that is not violent. Generally speaking, it means taking action that goes beyond (transcends) normal institutionalized political methods such as voting, lobbying, letter writing, verbal expression, etc., without injuring opponents. Interestingly enough, nonviolent action is like war in that it is a means of waging conflict (some would say “waging peace”). It requires a willingness to take risks and bear suffering without violent retaliation. In its most essential form, nonviolence is a means by which people discover their social power.

No discussion of nonviolence is complete without a mention of Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) and his career, which marked a watershed moment in the development of nonviolent struggle. In leading the struggle for Indian independence, Gandhi was the first to intentionally combine a wide range of tactics according to a strategic plan in a campaign unequivocally nonviolent. He was also the first to conduct a series of campaigns toward long-term goals. Spiritually-centered, practical, and innovate in temperament, Gandhi was nonetheless an astute, indefatigable, and efficient organizer who combined a basic joy with a unwavering determination. He was not only a political strategist but a social visionary whose work, marked by a deep concern for the unconditional regard for all persons, illuminates several critical discourses in political theory, touching upon debates that overlap the thought of many Western thinkers.

Gandhi’s nonviolence had three main features: 1) self-improvement (the effort to raise one’s level of consciousness, or make oneself a better person), 2) “constructive program” (a concrete schema with which to replace the status quo aimed at), and 3) campaigns of resistance against the oppressive obstacles that block the way forward, such as the caste system and colonialism (Gandhi, 2001). Gandhi’s success in linking mass action with nonviolent discipline demonstrated the enormous social power this form of struggle tapped into. While it is true that his was an experimental, sometimes less rigorous approach, instilled with his charisma, making it difficult to disentangle these factors, his contribution was still overwhelmingly positive, with tangible, long-lasting results.

In my article regarding my attempts to live nonviolently in a prison setting, I mention only the dynamics between myself and another individual. What I never mentioned was how that incident actually grew into a small movement in itself and to the transformation of my immediate surroundings from one of almost animalistic brutality to one of individual and group transcendence. Shortly after avoiding a fight, my little corner of that prison began to resemble a workshop of sorts. A small group of us who had an interest in political consciousness-raising, began meeting informally, and from those meetings began a germ of an idea that eventually became a curriculum, which I conceived and wrote with the help of this “committee” and which I titled, How to Escape Your Inner Prison.

It was an attempt to lay out a psycho-spiritual road map for awakening. It exposed the fact that the prison system thrived when we fell into the violent mindset, and it highlighted how buying into separating ourselves (Black vs. White vs. Latino, for example), served to incarcerate our minds. Physically, we had very little choice about being in prison, but we were, my curriculum pointed out, giving outside forces permission to incarcerate our minds. “Breaking out,” it followed, meant to break out of the conditioned violent mindset of the prison culture.

We held informal meetings, somehow managed to get several copies of the curriculum circulated for feedback from other inmates who became interested and thus began our first leadership workshop. It changed our world, and it transformed us all profoundly. The changes were so palpable that some of the guards took the workbook home! I’m not going to say everything became Oprah Winfrey-like — we were still in prison — but our lives were changed drastically. More than twenty years later I still keep in touch with some of these individuals, quite a few of whom are spreading their nonviolence in innovate ways. And my curriculum became the template for other curriculums, other workshops.

Eventually, I would be put in solitary confinement for attempting to organize a prison breakout (the title for the workbook was ill-advised, it seems).I believe the trumped up charge was raised because some saw the effects and were fearful.

It is through nonviolent direct action campaigns in the tradition of Gandhi that most people in the United States have become aware of nonviolence and nonviolent methods. The fact is, however, the United States has its own native tradition of nonviolence (Lynd & Lynd, 1995). Before Martin Luther King, Jr., there was A. J. Muste (Muste & Hentoff, 1970) who as early as 1928 laid out his position in his article titled, “Pacificism and Class War.” He was an important leader of the lost history of labor struggles and also chided other pacifists critical of violent action to recognize that, “… they violence on which the present system is based.” He turned his back on nonviolence for a while, but through his experience became convinced of its inadequacy and sought a politics that would be revolutionary and nonviolent.

After advocating for violence earlier in her career, Emma Goldman eventually came to the conclusion that, “… violence in whatever form never has and probably never will bring constructive results… [the] methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose.”

But it was the movement of African American people for civil rights and an end to racial oppression that is most connected to the idea of nonviolence on the American psyche.

King’s important role as a spokesperson and moral symbol of the struggle, however, has often led to an under emphasis of the grassroots, democratic nature of the movement. As anyone who has been involved in any form of action knows, there are so many nameless, faceless people that make direct action and a movement possible. There are, for example, the men and women who prepare the foods for meetings, the various committees that undertake the task of consciousness-raising, recruitment, the people who help reframe the way issues are conceptualized, and down to those who paint signs, knock on doors, solicit economic support.

The way we tend to look at history is through the patriarchal “Big Man” lens: history filtered only through the lives of famous men. But Martin Luther King and others, great though they were, would have never been able to accomplish anything on their own. A movement, especially an evolved, nonviolent social movement, takes place on many different levels, working the transformative dynamic in many different ways. At the heart of the heart of the civil rights movement was the collective decision by tens of thousands of ordinary, everyday people to risk their security and often their lives to the cause, and to grow toward a greater fulfillment of their own potential in the pursuit of human dignity, justice, and community.

The civil rights movement had an enormous and lasting impact. It affected the full range of the American experience: Blacks, whites, Latin@s, women, Asians, The LGBTQ community, among others. It created a shared moral and political ground from which they could move to challenge other injustices such as the Vietnam War, imperialism, poverty, ethnocentricity, and sexism. These achievements are often minimized if not dismissed by those who, radicalized by the enormity of the task, realize that it is more than merely correcting a flaw in an otherwise healthy system. Those entering the movement for social change sometimes take for granted the gains that were made by huge costs.

Still, the work continues and many of today’s nonviolent revolutionaries continue to emphasize the issues and tactics of earlier movements. The struggle to replace the violence of capitalism requires that we strive to change ourselves in ways that eliminate the role our own personal behavior plays in perpetuating sex, race, class, and other oppressions. Nonviolence is being the change you desire to see in the world, to paraphrase Gandhi’s famous admonition. It’s about rejecting the dominant capitalist discourse of the “good life” based on mindless consumption in favor of a fuller, richer life grounded in a higher awareness of self and our place in the world, a life of fun, and more social satisfaction — a way of life achievable only through revolutionary (indeed, evolutionary) change. It’s promoting a flatter organizational scheme and consensus decision-making. It’s seeking to help people empower themselves through education and training programs (such as the workshops I mentioned earlier). Political work in this context means efforts to spread an alternative analysis of society, a vision of a more just one, and a strategy for getting from here to there, and the implementation of nonviolent campaigns as a part of that strategy.

The conventional view of power is that it is a commodity of sorts to be hoarded. It is something some people have and others don’t. From this perspective power resides in soldiers, authority, ownership of wealth, institutions, and even correctional officers.

The nonviolent theory of power is essentially and radically different: rather than seeing power as something to be possessed (or taken, even by force), it argues that power is a dynamic of social relations. Power is relational. Power depends on sustained obedience. When people question laws and refuse to obey rulers, it erodes the power of those in positions of authority. One would think this is something obvious, yet it took the dramatic events of Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaigns to illustrate this new model of power. The fact is that in routine life the truth is often hidden.

From the perspective of conventional theory of power, what happened while I was in prison was defeat — we were all in prison, after all. We had no power. In reality the situation was a lot more complex. Instead of two social factors at work, the New York State of Corrections and our little band of prison activists, a whole range of forces was involved. Nonviolence is not magic; it is a way of mobilizing existing (and often untapped) power for maximum effectiveness. Beyond “action/ reaction” or the clash between the prisoners and the system there were prisoners who weren’t as committed to change, or who were on the fence. In addition, there were correctional officers who, eavesdropping on our workshops immediately saw the benefit of a pedagogy of freedom. They saw that they were as much part of the dehumanizing effect and were, in turn, being dehumanized as well. The stress, the dependence on alcohol, the family dysfunctions, they saw that the system was having an adverse effect on their lives as well and became, to varying degrees, sympathetic to our cause. In the end, this is what saved me, as officers testified on my behalf when I was falsely charged with planning a prison breakout.

In other words, the actions of the main social actors have the potential to affect all the stakeholders in any given situation. This is the power of nonviolence. Three main ways in how nonviolence attains its goals are: conversion, accommodation, and nonviolent coercion. Conversion might be viewed as the gold standard. It means that the opposite extreme of the spectrum has had a change of heart. Examples are the correctional officers who participated in the leadership workshop we created. Another example would be Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon papers after being converted to opposition to the Vietnam War.

At the other extreme is nonviolent coercion, where activists have it within their power to frustrate the opponent’s will. In my prison experience, nonviolent coercion was exemplified by inmates refusing to participate in the dehumanizing process; refusing to buy into the dominant narrative that we were worthless, animals. Other examples are work stoppages by unions, jury nullification by jurors who refuse to abides unfair laws, and GIs in Vietnam who refused to risk their lives in an unpopular war.

Accommodation means that the opponents give in, partly or completely, not because they have changed their minds, and not because they have no other option, but because the costs override the benefits.

In the end, I am an adherent of nonviolence mostly because my lived experiences have taught me it is the noblest, most evolved path. It’s ironic that for years I practiced a martial art, Wing Chun that, tradition holds, was passed down by a Buddhist nun. It’s considered one of the most vicious systems stressing never meeting force with force. And the more I learned the art, the less reactive I became, realizing that the knowledge of how to blind or maim another human being came attached with a profound responsibility toward non-harming.

Some of you might ask something along the lines of “What about Hitler? Wouldn’t taking out Hitler have averted the senseless murder and genocide that followed in his wake?” And my response would be that this is true only if you’re stuck in the paradigm of violence. Hitler didn’t create all that suffering by himself. His was a political movement that was made possible through an earlier war; a zero sum “solution” that left the German people starving, literally burning wheelbarrows of German marks for fuel, their currency had become so worthless. And that set the stage for fear, hate, anger, fueling the hunger for a scapegoat to blame. Them. The Jews, the homosexuals — anyone that could become the face of evil. So my answer is that Hitler was a creature of violence, and the same mindset that creates the problem cannot be used to find a solution. I can tell you this much: fuck the academic posturing, experientially, in order for you to get to the point that you rationalize enacting violence on another human being, you first have to dehumanize that person. And most of you just don’t know what that entails…

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

References

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th Anniversary ed.): Continuum.

Gandhi, M. K. (2001). Non-violent resistance. New York: Dover.

Lynd, S., & Lynd, A. (1995). Nonviolence in America: A documentary history. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Muste, A. J., & Hentoff, N. (1970). The essays of A. J. Muste. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Notes
1. 90 per cent of war casualties are civilians, almost 80 per cent of whom are women and children (see here, here, and here). In addition, a unique harm of war for women and children is the trauma inflicted when men wield their penises as weapons to demean, assault, and torture. Military brothels, rape camps, and the growing sex trafficking for prostitution are fueled by the culture of war which relies on and authorizes aggression, and by the social and economic ruin left in the wake of war which is particularly devastating for women and children. Rape and sexual exploitation in war, however, were not systematically documented and named as war atrocities until very recently. Yet, history reveals that senior officers of war and military occupation have always sanctioned and normalized the sexual exploitation of local women by military men. Governments on all sides of war have initiated, accommodated, and tolerated military brothels under the auspices of “rest and recreation” for their soldiers, rationalizing that brothels contain male sexual aggression, limit STDs, and boost morale.

2. Chickenhawk: political epithet used in the United States to criticize a politician, bureaucrat, or commentator who strongly supports a war or other military action, yet who actively avoided military service when of age. Click here to view a virtual who’s who of chickenhawks to get an idea of the mindset of those who advocate for violence and war.

By: Eddie SantoPrieto

Listen — really listen — to the underlying beliefs of many people, and you’re confronted with common assumptions about human nature that really have no grounding in reality (or at least empirically baseless). This is far from an academic exercise; these assumptions drive our economic policies, for example, and are often used as rationales for zero-sum societies, and, most of all, justification for brutal wars that murder, for the most part, innocent women and children.

This false false portrait of humankind feeds both a harmful adulation of dog-eat-dog individualism and a sense of powerless in the face of godlike market forces that must be obeyed no matter the cost in lives, global environmental catastrophe or gross economic injustice.

Its roots lie in the gloomy conservative worldview of an essentially brutish human nature needing to be tamed. Conservative thinkers, looking to rationalize authoritarianism and explain away its social the destruction wreaked by unrestrained greed, simply invented whole-cloth concepts of human nature that made their policy goals seem inevitable.

The irony in all this is that this authoritarian Kool Aid is swallowed whole by so-called libertarians. You hear it all the time that human nature is selfish, war-like, brutal. Of course, the theory that we have a “selfish” gene is just that, a theory, founded upon absolutely no evidence. Yet it is propagated as if it is the gospel truth. As social scientist Riane Eisler, who in her seminal work, The Chalice and the Blade (1990) (and her later work) successfully dismantled this view, states:

I don’t want to lump every single sociobiologist into the same category, but the kind of sociobiological theories that tend to get popularized present what I call a dominator way of relating as the only human possibility. This is the model of human relations, as I describe in my work, in which males are ranked over females; violence and abuse are systemic and institutionalized; the social structure is hierarchic and authoritarian; and coercion is a major element in sexuality. And it’s all supposed to be just human nature.

The ugly, empirically invalid portrait is this: a human is a cold and isolated individual who uses unemotional reason to reach pre-determined ends. This is the widely discredited but still popular “rational actor” model. And there’s another gradation, which some are now calling the “rat choice” model. This tells us those pre-determined ends are always selfish or self-interested. This myth is what is at the heart of so-called libertarian and conservative worldviews, popularized in economic terms by cranks like Ayn Rand and von Hayek.

We are rats, these conservatives say!

As Eisler conclusively shows, however, virtually every field within the human sciences has found that we are nothing like that. Cutting-edge neuropsychological investigations show that because we are hard-wired for empathy, we can (and do) act altruistically. We seek fairness. Our selves are not isolated, but interconnected in many ways. Yes, we are competitive, but we are also cooperative. Reason and emotion are intertwined. There’s no such thing as reason detached from emotion. We don’t coldly follow the rules of logic in making moral decisions.

The notion that there is no such thing as altruism is based on the neo-Darwinian theory of kin selection. In other words, if you do something altruistic, you’re protecting your genes so you can pass them on. Well, what about the people in Nazi Germany who took in Jews, total strangers, knowing that not only they but their whole families would be killed if they were discovered? Where is the kin selection there? This notion just doesn’t hold up to rigorous scrutiny.

Darwin also wrote a book called Descent of Man, in which he very explicitly stated that natural selection, random selection, survival of the fittest, simply do not apply as the only factors, and certainly not as the primary factors, when it comes to human evolution. There is also the very important factor that he called “the moral sense.”

Despite the overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary, the narrative of human nature as intrinsically evil is still the dominant prevailing religious and scientific narrative championing “original sin” and “selfish genes.” These also present male dominance as justified by either God or evolution (talk about irony), though scholars from many disciplines tell us a different story of our cultural origins.

In this alternative narrative, the invention of tools does not begin with the discovery that we can use bones, stones, or sticks to kill one another. It begins much earlier, with the use of sticks and stones to dig up roots (which chimpanzees still do) and continues with the fashioning of ways to carry food other than with bare hands (simple vegetable slings and baskets) and of mortars and other tools to soften foods.

In this story, the evolution of hominid, and then human, culture also follows more than one path. We have alternatives. We can organize relations in ways that reward violence and domination. But, as some of our earliest art suggests, we can also recognize our essential interconnection with one another and the rest of the living world.

In his recent book, The Fair Society (2011), biologist Peter Corning writes:

Contrary to the stereotype about our innate selfishness and greed, most of us share a desire to live in a society where fairness is the operative norm, where everybody’s basic needs are met… where there is a robust sense of ‘reciprocity’ — a rough balancing of benefits and obligations.

Corning’s provocative challenge is this: what if we’re wrong simply to resign ourselves to the notion that human nature is essentially destructive and war-like? What if we have the power — and more importantly, the duty — to change society for the better?

As cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff (2008) have been advising us for some time to grasp the new 21st Century understanding of human nature and thinking. It is impossible to advance a progressive social vision using false frames of reference clothed as unbiased scholarship — assumptions intended to forever rule out a fair, progressive, and democratic society.

Lynn Stout demolishes the concept of human beings as selfish creatures who respond only to punishments and rewards in her book, Cultivating Conscience (2010). She shows that the lonely, selfish, hyper-individualistic creature invented by conservative propagandists is actually a myth. That view, Stout correctly observes, “implies we are psychopaths.”

Rather than lean on the power of greed to shape laws and human behavior, Stout argues, we should rely on the force of conscience. Stout makes the compelling case that conscience is neither a rare nor quirky phenomenon, but a vital force woven into our daily lives. Using empirical studies from social psychology, behavioral economics, and evolutionary biology, Stout demonstrates how social cues — ideas about others’ selfishness and unselfishness, and beliefs about benefits to others — have a powerful role in triggering unselfish behavior.

It should come as no surprise that corporations and the financial elite have funded the multi-decade effort to convince Americans our nature is intrinsically evil. Rational choice theory, a theory that postulates that people working separately to pursue their ego-centered needs creates the ideal society, would hold sway over economics and political science and it would redefine the foundations of public policy by assuming that self-interest defines all aspects of human activity. It was also used to redefine “freedom” as a fundamental aspect of greed (George Lakoff, 2007). When applied to corporations, the theory exempted them from any social responsibility other than that owed to their shareholder. Today, that corporation is considered a legal (if fictitious) entity. Or, as Mitt Romney succinctly put it the other day, “Corporations are people [too].”

As a former scam artist, I have to admit that this has been the greatest scam ever in the history of human kind. The wholesale acceptance of the idea that there is a moral imperative for the pursuit of wealth and power, whatever the consequences for the many and for society at large, is almost too ugly to countenance. But this is what lies behind our current political system — this false and destructive view of our own natures. In fact, this scam has succeeded to the point that many so-called libertarians, “independents,” progressives (many of whom like to make fun of the rest of us unwashed masses) remain content to operate within the frames and narratives generated by the scam.

To paraphrase Einstein, the same consciousness that is part of the problem cannot be used as a solution. A society organized around the values generated by an evolved consciousness look radically different from political and economic structures forced upon us by the greedy authoritarians who sold us a bill of goods about ourselves. But before that can happen, you have to disabuse yourself of the myths of human nature.

References
Corning, P. A. (2011). The fair society: The science of human nature and the pursuit of social justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (click here)

Eisler, R. (1990). The chalice and the blade: Our history, our future. New York: HarperOne. (click here)

Lakoff, G. (2007). Whose freedom?: The battle over America’s most important idea. New York: Macmillan. (click here)

Lakoff, G. (2008). The political mind: Why you can’t understand 21st-century politics with an 18th-century brain. New York: Penguin. (click here)

Stout, L. A. (2010). Cultivating conscience: How good laws make good people. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (click here)

By: Edward SantoPrieto

When the historical Buddha asked us to examine our relationship to the elements as a path to the realization to the awareness that our body has no separate, independent existence, he was encouraging us to become scientists of the self. His instructions were based in part on one of his era’s principles known as the law of karma.

In Sanskrit, karma means “to do” or “to make,” and refers to the fact that every action is followed by consequences. As I have written before, in common modern usage karma has been corrupted to mean “payback” and has become synonymous with retribution. This is a faulty and misinformed concept of karma.

The Hindu law of karma, which was current when the Buddha lived, was concerned mostly with an individual’s actions in the world, and how the consequences of those actions would affect that person’s destiny, even in future lives. For example, if one person hurts another, that sets up whole series of events that ends in the first person experiencing pain. People today like to say, “What goes around, comes around.” Which brings me to the sad realization that a little (or incomplete) knowledge is a dangerous thing.

The Buddha added a completely new dimension to this law by emphasizing that karma is also a psychological conditioning process that operates in this very life. He recognized that our thoughts as well as our actions have consequences and that those consequences take place in our own mind.

The Buddha advised us not to try to tease out all the specifics of the entanglement of our karma, saying it was an imponderable. We could never isolate or measure all of the events and processes that have produced this particular here and now. What is important is to see the fact that nothing arises independent of causes and conditions. Equally important is that we become aware how unwholesome states such as hatred and greed create suffering. What happens when we do this is that we begin to see ourselves and each moment as embedded within all of creation.

It has nothing to do with other people getting their “payback.”

All of this got me thinking (always a dangerous thing) one day when I happened to come upon a series of photographs of the development of the human fetus. I was taken immediately at how it seems as if fetal development is a reflection of our evolutionary history.

Looking at these photos, I came away thinking that the scientific story of evolution can offer a new angle on the idea of reincarnation. Life itself seems to reincarnate in form after form, with new forms of locomotion, perception, or types of consciousness. In fact, the human condition can be seen as our shared incarnation, part of common “evolutionary karma.”

Evolutionary science is even showing us some of the faces of our previous shared past. You can see, twitching away on a Petri dish, a living example of past life as a single-celled organism. In a water-breathing fish, you can imagine a version of yourself in a previous life, swimming through the single ocean that once covered the earth. You can perhaps more easily recognize yourself as a great ape, or as a Homo Habilis in the Stone Age.

But what struck me was that our shared lives could be even more easily recognized by looking at individual development in the womb. Think about it: within a nine-month period we develop from a single cell to a complex mammal, keeping the adaptations we might need and discarding those that are unnecessary, such as gills, and downsizing others, such as the acute olfactory region of the brain, since smell is no longer as essential to our survival as humans.

In What Is Life? Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis put forward the depth of our inheritance: “We share more than 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees, sweat fluids reminiscent of seawater, and crave sugar that provided our ancestors with energy three billion years before the first space station had evolved. We carry our past with us”

The notion that we have previous lives in the evolutionary past can extend beyond biology, into the realm of elemental forces and cycles. After all, the entire earth was once a cloud of gas, and later cooling into a molten mass. Were we not part of those too? The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in The Heart of Understanding, “As I look more deeply, I can see that in a former life I was a cloud. And I was a rock. This is not poetry; it is science. This is not a question of a belief in reincarnation. This is the history of life on earth.”

The concept of life evolving is not foreign to Buddhism, whether it be told in legends of reincarnation, or as the interconnection of all things in the universe. And perhaps most importantly it is expressed through the core belief in the possibility of transformation in this very life.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

By Darren Allen

The child is a potential threat to society: firstly the free, ungovernable and creative initiative of the child, and secondly its sensitive, mysterious and direct experience. The task of neutralising these threats begins with the parents before being taken up by the teacher.

The first thing for a teacher to do is to create a ‘school’ – a mediated environment separate from community, culture, context, society and nature. The simple act of separation is enough to foster confusion, stifle enthusiasm, warp relations between children and make learning a curiously unreal experience. After this critical first step, stunting initiative and denying experience are relatively easy.

Stunting Initiative

The individual must be dependent on society for everything; for his food, shelter, security, knowledge, entertainment, health, transport and energy. The greatest threat to society therefore are people who can grow their own vegetables, build their own houses, protect themselves, educate themselves, entertain themselves, heal themselves, transport themselves around and generate their own energy. Independence, in short, must be crushed.

Independence is gained through initiative, which comes from uncertainty, confusion and the unknown, into which children are happy to plunge, heedless of consequence. This is not something they learn, but an inborn ability which all uneducated children possess. From a maelstrom of chaotic data and continual failure the child can pick out faint patterns, casually discard ideas or strategies that do not work and blithely continue playing, undaunted by apparent failure.

Your job, as a teacher, is to destroy this heedless insouciance and make sure that children approach uncertainty and confusion with extraordinary trepidation; recoiling, for good, at the slightest failure. They must be taught that the unknown is an intolerable, painful or humiliating experience.

This is done in stages. First of all you should introduce something called “learning” into the child’s life. This is the belief that in order to do something it must first be broken up into a set of abstract laws and skills which a child must learn. This approach to reality is so alien to the child, so confusing and painful, that it will soon learn to recoil from vast swathes of experience with abhorrence.

In addition, when the child is inclined to do something, it will find its ability to do so catastrophically restricted by the teacher, the school and the school syllabus which has near total control over what children can do, and when they can do it. What a child wants to do is forbidden during school time, and when he wants to do it is out of his control.

Next, the classroom experience must, for the young child, be so strange, stressful and artificial, that they will have nightmares about it for the rest of their lives. Children must not be allowed to freely explore their environment or playfully interact with it without being coerced towards an external measurable result. This is done through placing twenty or thirty children in one room, getting them all to do one thing, then rewarding them with positive attention and praise for producing a right answer. If the student cannot produce the right answer she is wrong, and does not win any positive attention or praise (or if her answer is particularly wrong, she is stupid and is laughed at). In addition to positive attention, praise or, in many cases, the relief of getting the right answer when asked, the child must also be rewarded with prizes for good marks, stars, grades, numbers and prestige. The child must be tested repeatedly and the results and league tables displayed.

The result of all these rewards is that the child will understand that original experience and the unknown are inevitably punished with disgrace and public failure, that life is a competition and that the main motivations for action are pride, fear and envy. He will begin to display the same behavioural characteristics as students the world over: competitiveness, snobbishness and exclusivity. He will focus on getting right answers, attention, marks, prizes, status and stimulation rather than on enjoying, understanding or perceiving what is going on; his own honest, ungovernable, and therefore socially disruptive, experience.

Denying Experience

To subvert the child’s experience, focus, first of all, on the experience of other people, other authorities, external rules and imposed norms. This does not mean you cannot ask the child what he thinks, or that you cannot allow him to ‘express himself’; in fact this is to be encouraged in a liberal society as it gives an illusion of child autonomy, while, in effect, confirming nothing more than the opinions of the child’s parents, peers or celebrity heroes; which is to say, of society. It is also quite safe as, by the time the child reaches school, he will have spent most of his life in a mediated virtual environment and, despite being most likely apathetic, violent or hysterically self-centred, is unlikely to give unpredictable or genuine responses.

Note however that while you must always defer to the knowledge of the professional, you must, at the same time, be very careful not to dwell on that of the genuine connoisseur, genius or master – who tend to promote independence, appeal to the sense and perception of the child and pass on traditional knowledge which is of very little economic benefit.

After limiting the child’s understand of truth you should go on to curtail its experience of sensory reality. Anything more real than a limited band of ideas, emotions, passive virtual sensations and competitive sports must be excluded from the classroom. Unemployment, drugs, solitude, ecstatic art, quality, death, madness, birth, sex, love, beauty, God, silence, nature, free meaningful creation, all practical skills and crafts, and direct experience of nature are all banned from school. Students and teachers can talk about these things, but they cannot experience them. Children are not allowed to do nothing, they cannot be completely alone, they are not allowed to see or touch dead bodies, to watch a woman giving birth, to shape their own environment, to ride horses, to farm, to learn how to light fires or to live directly in the wilderness. Nature must only ever be experienced in the form of passive sanitised entertainment; ideally film, or, if necessary, the odd carefully structured holiday. Again, you the teacher do not have to do much to make sure this happens. Simply being in school is enough to isolate children from reality.

It is particularly important that students specialise. The more they interest themselves in a range of different subjects – arts together with sciences, but particularly abstract learning together with practical action – the more they will start to ask themselves what different things have in common; and that is extremely dangerous – because what different things have in common is the free experience of the individual child, or her common sense. A concern for the big picture could end up with doctors concerning themselves with architecture, lawyers investigating the origin of property or otherwise productive engineers wasting years of their lives staring at dandelions; and I don’t need to tell you how disastrous common sense can be.

Schools and Good Students

Schools are fundamentally the same everywhere. Styles of teaching change, but stunting initiative and denying experience are inherent in isolated and managed institutions; which is what all societies – whether democratic or dictatorial – demand.

Good students are also the same everywhere. They have shown that they are able to put the authority of the school and syllabus above their own instincts and they have shown they can tolerate institutional dependence and uncritically accept institutional rankings. After twenty years of school and university, and ideally another five to ten years as a junior, they will be given more freedom, until they have demonstrated that they are incapable of free creative thought, sensitive nuance feeling and spontaneous generous action, are they allowed to do as they like.

Family Values @ 2011 Karla Fetrow

By: Azazel

All too often, we allow various biases to affect us – bias towards cultural mores and values imparted to us, bias towards notions of “morality” regarding the nature of “good” and “evil” (however those are defined), bias towards or against certain individuals and/or people groups based on personal experiences with them, etc…

But could we be overlooking the greatest bias of all time – the one thing that makes the concept of a “bias” possible in the first place?  Could it be that all forms of value stem from one single chemical reaction that occurred about 3 billion years ago in a pool of primordial soup that everything we know came from?

Could it be that the greatest bias of all time is towards life itself?

“Ridiculous” one might say – “how can life be a bias of any kind?”

Does anyone really stop and think about the origin of value itself?  Since the concept of value is meaningless apart from a given mind that ascribes it to that which is around it, it’s only natural that the mind that goes about ascribing value to existence would forget about the effects that being alive have on its own mental state (after all, life is what makes the mind possible in the first place).  Hence the rise of all sorts of concepts that have never been seriously questioned by society: concepts that have led to all manner of vain pursuits and disappointing fantasies that left us as a culture unprepared to handle reality…

Myths of self-esteem:

How many people have been told growing up that “everyone is special?”  That there is no one else on earth at any point in time like you?  In the end such talk is little more than ego masturbation – life is ultimately little more than a chemical process that produces a biological entity that is self-contained, possesses a metabolism and can replicate itself.  If one considers that there is a finite level of matter and energy in the universe that perpetually assumes new forms, then there are only so many combinations that matter and energy can assume: therefore it’s rational to assume that the present material forms we know have existed at some point before – that all of existence just continually recycles and repeats itself (something akin to the notion of the eternal return).

If this is so (and there’s little reason to doubt it – not unless you can come up with a mechanism to spawn brand new matter and energy into being…), then it’s possible that an infinite number of life forms akin to yourself have existed at some point.  Therefore, you are not really all that special as far as your place in the universe is concerned.

And yet this myth continues to perpetuate – why?  Because we have been socially conditioned to believe that we exist to serve some external force to ourselves, we have to curb our own selfish impulses.  If we are to act according to our interests and desires we need some sort of belief that allows us to esteem ourselves: an idea that gives us a reason to behave selfishly – and what better idea than to think that you are one-of-a-kind in the world, set apart from all others?

By no means am I against selfish behavior, but I ask that people at least be honest about it – we don’t value ourselves because we are unique, we value ourselves because we *are* ourselves.  If one embraces his own sovereignty as an individual he does not need another reason than that to act in his own interests whilst fully aware of his place in existence.

Myth of the life-death dichotomy:

Too many people, especially in modern society (one largely divorced from nature), embrace this notion that life is what is “good” and death is “bad” – in a Manichean fashion they have separated two parts of whole in their own minds.  Such a view rejects the reality of a complex relationship between life and death.

Consider the basic nature of nourishment – all life forms depend on the death of other life forms to sustain their own metabolisms: the predator consumes the flesh of its prey, the herbivore consumes the living cells of plant life, plant life depends upon the death of other plants and animals to replenish nutrients to the soil (and some have even resorted to predatory tactics themselves – a la the venus flytrap) and all manner of bacteria and fungal life forms colonize the bodies of dead multi-cellular organisms (and sometimes the living as well – resulting in infectious diseases).  Like it or not, all life depends upon death for sustenance.

Of course, being sentient life forms with an exaggerated sense of our own self worth as a species, we have come to recognize the end of life as a “bad” thing as we have become self-aware – for we are all too easily reminded of our own mortality.  This condition has become further exacerbated in modern culture due to the fact that we are so alienated from nature: most modern people no longer produce their own food, chop their own wood for fuel or construction, deal with predators or even rely on themselves for their own safety (we’ve been taught since childhood to call 911 at the first sign of trouble, which impacts our own ability to handle a life-threatening situation – why learn to protect yourself when protection is just a phone call away?).  All of these activities involve dealing with death in some form or another, but since modern man no longer performs them regularly he loses his appreciation for death’s benefits and remembers only its cost (which evokes the specter of the grim reaper).

I’m not suggesting that we all go back to a primitive form of living (I doubt that is even a possibility for most right now – although a little wilderness survival training might serve you well when modern society collapses…), but is it too much to ask that you recognize that the food on your plate was once alive?  Would it kill you (pun intended) to remember that death is an essential for life to exist?

Myth of life’s sacredness:

Over and over we are told that human life is something special – that we are more than just animals that learned to use bigger and better tools that all the others: that we are all made in the image of some “god” that has placed us in dominion over the earth.  Even among those that have rejected religion there is a tendency to elevate human life to a sort of sacred pinnacle and assert that its value cannot be challenged.

Ok, let us just assume that there is some being out there that can be called “god” (something which can’t be proven as their isn’t even a consistent definition of what such a thing is) and that one day it decided to create a masterpiece of life: a superior race of beings to rule over all its creation.  Tell me, would a being with such intentions create a physically inferior specimen (as humans are pound-for-pound one of the weakest life forms on earth) with all sorts of design flaws that would hinder its ability to live a full and satisfying life (a head that rest directly over the spine with little muscular support, inefficient criss-cross wiring of the nervous system that requires for the left hemisphere of the brain to control the right side of the body and vice versa, spines that are prone to degeneration of cartilage disks, etc…) as well as a  maladjusted psychology (particularly herd mentality and a tendency to favor short-term ambitions over long-term best interests)?  This kind of life forms sounds more like the work of a blind, amoral watchmaker called natural selection than of some almighty deity.

But as I previously stated, even among those who don’t believe man was the product of divine authorship there are those who continue to assert that human life is intrinsically more valuable than other forms of life – of course, when pressed to substantiate why this true they don’t have any real answers.  Without some assumption that humans have some kind of “special destiny” laid out by some power beyond human comprehension all one really has to appeal to is species loyalty: humans value human life because they themselves are human – which essentially reduces the value of human life to one of opinion based on membership of a group, which is anything but objective (if cockroaches were sentient they would likely hold cockroach life as being more valuable than all other life, etc…).

So, objectively speaking, life has no more value than the mind that ascribes value to it – meaning in turn that there is no objective reason why any life should be held as being “sacred.”  But this is exactly what we are supposed to believe when various issues relating to human desire vs. the natural world come up: that we should support destruction of the ecology through such means as clearing more land for farming and industry because it benefits humans.  Granted, the benefits are more than a little disproportional (as the social elite get the lion’s share of the resources exploited this way, whilst the average Joe gets next to nothing out of the deal) but even if the benefits were spread more equally why should we just assume that human needs and desires take priority?  What about the needs and desires of non-human life forms – why they matter less?

In the end, it’s questions like these that will not just go answered but unaddressed altogether by the social mainstream – as the society we live in itself is built upon all manner of unchallenged assumptions about the nature of value: were the values of society ever to be challenged on a level playing field they would fall like a house of cards.

Naturally, it’s in the best interests of society to keep the field tilted in their favor and avoid questioning of the most fundamental biases they hold concerning the nature of life itself.  Only when the fundamental assumptions of reality are questioned can one finally escape the super-imposed paradigms of the established order and begin to assert his own sovereignty: saying “no” to the traditional concepts of life and death and create new ones to serve his own purposes without compromising his intellectual honesty.