on humanism and environmental crisis

Posts tagged ‘materialism’

No greed parenting

(Can parenting save the World from collapse?)

I am a pediatrician. I worked with kids and families in Poland, The Gambia (West Africa) and then in the U.S  for the last 40 years. It is no surprise that my solution comes from my experience in that field. I can’t change myself, can you? Forget the existentialists, we can not become anything much better. But as a pediatrician, I’m telling you—we can change the next generation.

Completely? No, but substantially, significantly- yes. I saw it happen many times in my practice.

My research also says: yes.

So, our kids. What we do with the little ones is parenting. With the bigger kids: education. Of course, the younger the child, the deeper and more fundamental changes we’d be able to impart. On the other hand, education, unlike intimate and vague parenting, is more structured, organized, and accessible. Ideally, we should try to address both.

I.   Introduction

Our human niche is severely stressed. Our resources are limited and dwindling. But we,  the consumers want more and more things, gadgets, and material goods. And we’d fight for them to the death.

What is worse is that even if the total number of people is not growing fast (“only” 9 billion by 2050), the number of consumers lifted from poverty and subsistence will double—and they are us, the worst polluters.

But the products need to be purchased. If people would not want them or want less, less will be sold and produced.

This is the beauty of the reversed spiral of capitalism. (The more you grow, the more you must grow, but also the more you shrink, the more you need to shrink.)

 You, my reader, will exclaim: this would be terrible, economies would slow down and people would starve. Well, people will not starve. Actually, agriculture would flourish, while some malls and factories could close. Some people might work part-time, the communities, gardens, not-for-profit occupations, and family life, it is what would flourish. But this is not an essay to convince somebody about the environmental crisis. Deniers, bad luck, don’t read it. Read “Laudate Deum” first.(14)

 Here, the question is: how to make people want fewer material goods, buy fewer gadgets, and be less obsessed about these things, in such a pervasive, pernicious way from birth. How to make us, humans, less greedy?

It is impossible, we are rotten to the bones, I agree.

What we are trying to do, like flushing less toilets, recycling, and such, will not do the trick, really.

And my solution has this neat extra bonus: all real and imaginary powers that enslave us, the governments, nationalisms, religions, corporations, conspiracies, aliens, lizard people—all these powers rely on one thing: our greed. Nobody can force you to go to the mall or click into the amazon.com paradise.

Without our greed they are powerless.

With this in mind, during one of our recent Socrates Café meetings, I asked the participants:

Should we:

  1. embrace the advances in technology and train our children to become specialists as fast as possible and as best as possible, i.e. continue the recent emphasis on science, business, and computer science /artificial intelligence?

Or should we:

  1. make a desperate pivot away from technology and teach our children about lifelong learning and humanities with a new emphasis on the family, relationships, community, nature, history, arts, music, language, literature, and (yes!) philosophy?

The answer was a resounding: “NO” to my call for the desperate pivot. Nobody was ready to compromise our “progress” even if it is responsible for the mess we are in.

I wanted to say, look, guys, alternative education is sprouting everywhere. Well, it was sprouting in my mind. I found these humanistic systems, and they were interesting, but most of them were old, heavy with angels, ghosts, spirituality, and obsolete didactic principles.

Waldorf Schools are the most familiar to me, as my daughter attended this school for a while and my very good friend was the Waldorf School teacher and organizer. The book of M.C. Richards Toward Wholeness (1) makes the concept even more enchanting by the poetic approach of this extraordinary woman—a poet, potter, hippie, and new age teacher at the famous Black Mountain very alternative school. Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, a weird Christianity of the early 20th century, permeates the mood and ideas behind the school but is not taught to the pupils. The schools are fantastic, there is art, dance, music and play everywhere. Education is vibrant and alive, the teachers are enthusiastic and attached to their students’ learning with strong emotional bonds. No competition, no grades are necessary. The love of learning is everywhere, learning is shared by students and teachers as an exciting lifelong journey.

The parents are involved—they’d better be as Waldorf education is expensive. And still, this network is growing, with 1200 schools worldwide in 35 countries, and numerous grants that make the students’ profiles more diverse.(2,3)

This is the best example of a humanities-saturated education I could find. The others: Montessori education (4) Paideia Schools (Chattanooga School of Art and Science), Quaker schools, Unitarian-Universalist education, and “Forest Schools” are much more similar to “normal” schooling in America aimed to produce rich or at least employable people.

But even Waldorf’s students end up in a mainstream university—maybe more of them studying visual art, literature, languages, or history. But wthey were not told why to dance around the fire and play with dolls without faces, so they experience , by and by fades away.

Some recent research (5) suggests that humanistic education or even writing your personal worldview (6) by engaging in the “big questions” and philosophy, especially with a supportive small group of students, can shift people’s personal goals and hierarchy of values towards less materialistic worldviews.

And then, about 1 year ago I encountered the work of Frederic Lenoir. (7)“The Happiness”, 2012, and “Le Desir” 2022.

He has a philosophy and practical system “on the ground,” all in French and in six Francophone countries (including Quebec!) The courses teach children humanities- mindfulness and critical thinking. Since 2016 more than 100,000 children have gone through SEVE courses. (Savoir Etre and Vivre Ensemble: “Knowing how to be and live together.”) We do not yet know if these children have a less materialistic worldview or if their families buy fewer gadgets, living a simpler life. Or if they are happier and their environment is improving.

Overall, my research into existing systems was deeply disappointing. It is not only that we don’t know how to make children less greedy, we do not want it. We need a system with a clear-cut philosophy, conscious of what we would do with our children and why. 

We need parenting and educational philosophy linking our curricula with the vision of sustainable society, linking the worldviews of the new generations with human niche’s collapse.

And, at last , linking consumerism and greed with this collapse.

Lenoir points out in his new book the importance of desires “Without them, life is not worth it” and suggests “redirecting” them away from consumerism. To me, desires make only the emotional part of our worldview. A person’s character, habits, dreams, obligations, and many other elements decide how we act and how we influence the world and people around us.

While thinking about the direction in which we want to “desperately pivot” (I am stubborn), we need to consider two types of happiness. (“Happiness” might be not the best term and not the one you like. But in the end, what is a better term describing the “desired situation”—your wishes, drives, habits, what you want? So, for the lack of a more comprehensive term, let’s stick with the H word).

The first type of happiness is ancient: inherited from social mammals and then fine-tuned during the last 10 million years of primate and hominid evolution. It is the mother’s and child’s love, safety, satiation, and belonging. Then: the awe of the unknown, the joy of figuring things out, and friendship of cooperation. With language, imagination, and a love of pattern we created art, music, dance, love of beauty, and nature. Then curiosity and social bonds produced storytelling, learning, and the love of knowledge. Notice the pro-social nature of this type: doing this with a friend or family member actually enhances the experience.

The second type of happiness is the opposite, it works like pie—the more you take, the less is left for me. Money, social power and position, and material possessions work like that.

The first type, call it experiential, is sustainable on two levels:

It takes a lot of time and effort to get it, waiting for the beautiful sunset, reading The Tempest, so you’ll understand the play in the theater, and visiting your grandmother. The satisfaction is short and difficult to measure and requires repeated tries. The results are vague. (A good example is marriage.) But, you have less time for shopping. Instead, you meditate or read Ulysses.

I hope that, with the first type of happiness, practiced since birth, possessions appear less important, so you do not seek them so mindlessly and obsessively.

The second type is easy: it is the pleasure of things, money, the ownership: just step into the garage and your glistening new Tesla is waiting for you, no effort is needed.  This type of happiness is responsible for the economy to hum, also responsible for the environmental crisis, societal recession, violence, wars, personal loneliness, anxiety, and despair.

I believe, as I tried to argue in other essays, that this second type of happiness is very recent, less than 20,000 years old, and way too recent to have a genetic base. It is closely related to symbolic language. As we named things and agents, (8) the survival advantage was almost immediate, the incredible invention of language saving us from nearly certain extinction, which was the fate of 26 or more other hominid branches and perhaps 90% of the Homo Sapiens population.

Ah, the lure of things, now we paying for this dearly; the new extinction is looming.

II.   No greed parenting

We should continue our efforts to mitigate the collapse of the human niche (recycling, community gardens, etc…) At the same time, we should redirect our desires, as Monsieur Lenoir writes, or pivot desperately our parenting and education to attempt a shift in the type of happiness the new generation will strive for. As I said, we can’t change ourselves, but maybe the new generation can become less materialistic. I am calling this program “no-greed parenting.”

Most parents want their children to be happier than they are. The most common pathway is to help your child to have a successful life. That usually means improved outside circumstances like better, more prestigious jobs, more money, and a better place to live. Sometimes that “better life” includes more personal elements: being prettier, funnier, healthier, stronger, and friendlier.

But here with “no-greed parenting,” we wish for the inconceivable; to flourish in the future world, our children need a different worldview, one which for us is difficult to imagine. Lenoir in his recent book Le Desir plans to “redirect” or “rearrange the set of desires.” I suggest that we work on the different types of happiness.

The Principles of No-Greed Parenting: ( This is not a manual. This short list should start the conversation and give you an idea. If you know how to implement it, tell me).

  1. Provide secure attachment:

Help children feel safe

Help children feel loved

Help children feel respected

Help children be curious

Help children be joyful

Help children be open to novelty and adventure

  1.  Teach a child to like and play with others:

                         Listen to others

                             Try to understand

                        Express yourself

            Be confident and brave

                 See humor everywhere

3.   Teach the child social skills:

                 Surround the child with family, organize visits, cousins, and friends

Parents and family need to spend time with the child, including housework. Make the child a part of the family team.

No TV, no electronic toys, make the child “bathe” in stories, songs, laughter, and dancing.

4.     Teach the child to use hands:

Play with simple toys

Make toys with the child

Draw, and play with clay and plasticine. Use creativity and imagination.

5.     Use magic: for the first few years, everything is magic.

3 to 7- some explanations are not magic, some are magic.

After 7- everything should be saturated by human imagination, curiosity, and love of beauty.

6.     Play outside, climb, swing, make a garden, become a naturalist.

7. Play instruments, dance, tai chi (9), qi gong, hiking, and nature walks(12)

As a pediatrician, for 50 years I tried to talk about these principles to my parents during every well visit, and whenever was the opportunity. My practice brochure (10) contained also some of these concepts.

          III.  Paleo Café

I had grandiose ideas about designing such education ( 11). Now I’ve scaled it down dramatically to a “Paleo Café.” The concept echoes my ideas of Ovids’s Golden Age societies with early human language. Think Atlantis, Stonehenge, pre-Imperial Meso-America or Göbekli Tepe.- These ancient societies are most mysterious to us, we just can’t imagine social structures creating these immense monuments but otherwise, they make no sense- to us. There are no signs of violence, hierarchies, personal richness- no signs of greed. Shared language brought to these humans immediate control over the material world (13)- counting, sorting, measuring, timing- but the lure and the evil of personal possessions and power developed only slowly later. This concept of two separate phases of human becoming materialistic are just my musings, inspired by the strange book (12) but it fits beautifully with my other theories. I am going to write more about the anthropological concepts of that- see the essay:” Zombies, Idealistic Animals and Radical Anthropomorphism”.

But for now, can we create in our neighborhood a glimpse of Golden Age?

The vision:

A small group of 5 to 10 people meets weekly at a community center or even better in a private home. “Paleo” connotes the idea of the simplicity of the setting. No electronics, simple furnishings, few simple toys, Waldorf style.

No money talk, no competition games, no media, no news, no talk about violence and war. There is a lot of sharing, borrowing, and lending. There are young people with children—the gift for the future community. Probably 2 to 5 children would be easiest to handle. There are also old, retired people—the gift of wisdom for the new generation. Among them are also young people without children—friends, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors.

They all have fun, there is reading, telling stories, singing, and dancing. The religious overtones are fine but in the “Paleo,” mythic form and distance. Instead, wild imagination, curiosity, and openness to the unknown are encouraged.

Everybody is equal, respected, and helped to express herself.

Some cross-cultural activities are important, maybe there is invited an indigenous person, a foreigner, or a newcomer.

The agenda.

The host greets and welcome each person. The agenda and loose schedule are agreed upon.

Somebody is reading to the children, some are playing on their own.

Somebody may make music or sing/dance.

Some people prepare simple food. Everybody eats together, unhurriedly, with gratitude and joy.

The next meeting, the venue, and the agenda are planned.

There is a continuous weekly thread—a story, a book, a play, the art or garden project.

These groups can happen spontaneously but also can be generated with the help of social workers and the staff from the neighborhood’s cultural center—during the monthly meeting to which anybody and everybody is invited.

References:

1. M.C.Richards “Toward Wholeness” 1980

2. Sharifa Oppenheimer “Heaven on Earth” 2006.

3. Jack Petrash “Understanding Waldorf Education” 2002

4. Simone Davies “The Montesori Toddler” 2019

5. Zachary Swanson’s Master Thesis 2021UTC

6. Tom Voychehovski “My Worldview. Dr.Tom’s Method” Amazon, Kindle.2019

7. Frederic Lenoir: “The Happiness “(2012) and “Le Desir” (2022)

8. Merlin Donald “The mind so rare” 2001

9. Tom Voychehovski, Luke Prater “The Dark Attic”  2021

10. Tom Voychehovski, Comprehensive Medical Care,” Parents’ Brochure,” 2001

 11. Tom Voychehovski “The Rome conference or die”, my blog: ecohumanistlab.com 2023

12. David Groebner & David Wengrow, “The Dawn of Everything” 2023.

 13. Ian Tattersall “ Understanding Human Evolution”. 2018

14. Pope Francis “Laudate Deum” Apostolic Exhortation, October 4th, 2023.

Category:

climate change, enviromnental crisis,, human nature, materialism, parenting/education, Pediatrics, wychowanie i edukacja

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Invention of things

So many puzzles, one key.

Here are some examples of puzzles:

  1. The anthropic dilemma or fine-tuning. 
  2. What happened before the Big Bang? Or how Entropy 0 can change to non-0?
  3. Why did we not find any evidence of aliens?
  4. Where is the center of the Universe?
  5. Why are homo sapiens so much more complex than other animals?
  6. What was crucial in the human evolutionary leap?
  7. What was the evolutionary origin of human language?
  8. What was an evolutionary origin of materialism?
  9. What is the solution to our niche crisis?

The key: the event which occurred over a relatively short evolutionary time- probably several thousands of years, about 50,000 years ago in Africa or the Middle East. It involved one or at the most a couple of groups of ancient humans. 

     To continue the explanation or the description of the hypothesis- the key- we need to stop and insert an explanation. An explanation for the explanation? Yes, this sentence might need to be moved to the beginning of the essay, definitely can not be postponed. The explanation involves bootstrapping. ( A la Baron Munchausen) Explaining the working of the human brain with the human brain. Explaining the nature of reality using the language created by this reality. Explaining the complexity of the system using tools created within this system. It is why our explanation doesn’t explain what really happened, but how we continue to improve our explaining it. The best and the only thing we can do- is bootstrapping. It is obvious then that the nature of things reflects (or follows) the nature of our probing system. Mainly our brains but also other experimenting or probing machines. The results of probing depend and reflect the structure of the probe. 

       Another metaphor can be helpful: You look and you realize that the fur gloves you have worn for a long time are actually inside out. So, you flip it, put it on and it obviously works much better. The cold hand’s problem is solved. No repair, no surgery, no expense, just a fresh look- so simple, and the result is incredible.

     Now, back to the cavemen.  Well, the event I am going to describe carries similarities to several older events. We see these events as a cluster of extremely unlikely circumstances that occurred only once (an event can not be rarer than that). Like: Big Bang, creating solar/’planetary/earth system, creating life from no life systems, creating a nervous system to support nonrandom behavior, creating big brain social mammals in post dinosaurs niche. 

We also see our lives similarly- the nodes of unlike events and circumstances. I hypothesize that our brain creates in developing neural networks an important (nodal) but uncommon structure (few axons or dendrites) reflecting the structure of these outside- (niche) events. Or, if you reverse this concept, outside events reflect neural structures. ( the “glove hypothesis”- the glove corresponds to perceived reality, the brain is the hand inside the glove).

     Now, really back to cavemen. The unlikely cluster of events occurred circa 50,000 years ago. The horde which became our ancestors was migrating north under the pressure of bigger and stronger hominids. 

They had to outsmart them: by the level of cooperation and sophistication of communication. In migration, the children in the band were few and exceptionally precious. Many members took care of them, communication, talking back and forth was more intense, more social, and prolonged. Toddlers who started to talk were still being talked to and nolens volens listened to. Toddlers naturally: 1 ask questions, 2. ask for names of things. 

      Until then the communication had a lot of characteristics of animal communication.  When I read about the evolutionary origins of language, invariably linguists make it extremely complicated and jargon -saturated and missing evolutionary mechanisms. Communication is what the nervous system does, it was created to enable organisms to develop nonrandom behavior. So information from outside the system can benefit the system. This actually defines and creates “outside and inside”. The cells have their internal communication system, then when cells become “social” and create multicellular organisms- it opens new “outside”, and at last, when organisms become social- the concept of outside moves up to another level. The information which does not benefit the system- does not survive, the things it describes – do not exist. So the content of information is always the same: the descriptions of beneficial behaviors. You manage to remember it, you live, you manage to inherit it- your species niche expands. In archaic bacteria, it would be “move towards higher sugar concentration”, In bees- a dance directing other bees to flowers- in chimps- the details of organizing a rebellion against an alpha male. These descriptions might contain communications full of actions, places, objects, and animals but it is not language. They might contain stories, memories, emotions, and logical decisions but it is not language. Or, you may call it proto-language. Because of the crucial difference between that and human communication is really not linguistic. It’s ontological. These animals and early humans have the concept of reality described by Jacob Uexkull as Umwelt.  Their brains are full of beneficial behaviors. Nothing else. And beneficial behavior expands the species’ niche- usually but not always improving organisms’ survival and reproduction. It is impossible to manipulate this type of reality, the more complicated behaviors the more unwieldy it is to use them in different situations. The learning is painfully slow. Hominids hit the evolutionary wall, over the last 5 or 10 millions of years, they all died.

      Then, the miracle happened. The cluster of unlikely circumstances and events occurred. 

       The 15-month-old cave girl said: “daaaa’’ and pointed at the apple. ( She meant “ what is that, sis”?) It’s called “joined attention” . Her older sister answered: “an apple”. The older sister pulled the apple from the description of behavior- about how we find apples, which are good to eat, etc, etc. Then she stuck this apple into a brand new thing – reality. It was very small, beginning, just between the toddler and big sister, but they could manipulate it easier- “two apples, big apples, red apples” the endless uses of the THING. ( Notice that she mixed domains-or dimensions- the trick very often used with inventions, like a steam engine, gravity or double helix ) Paradoxically the reality which was starting to be socially shared opened the door for individuality. Budding modularity made recursive speech possible. In the Umwelt world, it was only me with my niche. 

      But now, or with a generation or two, with the invention of things, it was so easy, soon the whole family used more and more names, not as a part of the description of behaviors, but as building blocks of intergroup reality. Now the same story could be told in so many ways. How many fish do we need? Well, how many are coming for dinner?  You could talk about the quality of things and the quantity of things- the birth of abstraction and mathematics. And, after you talked about things- next big step- you could own them. And lack them.

     It probably took generations to populate the budding joint reality of the group with things. But modularity, later known as grammar, and recursiveness were the keys.

Now, an easy part, the puzzles.

  1. The anthropic dilemma or fine-tuning. It is true that many facts in the history of the cosmos, origins of Earth, and life on Earth are incredibly rare and improbable. The same can be said about evolutionary facts leading to modern humans. But if you examine the events leading to the creation of Saturn rings, or penguins, or squirrels, these are also incredibly rare and improbable. The measuring and exploring and assigning of probability occur within the same system. Chinese medicine does not see any brain- the probing and the result operate within the same system.

       2. What happened before Big Bang? Or how Entropy 0 can change to non-0?

Again, the time concept and Big Bang belong to the same system. The Universe began with Big Bang – they are all human-made concepts and if something was before we would not call it the beginning. Entropy occurs in time, and when there is time, there is non 0 Entropy. The time is defined by change, with change the order has to be imperfect -sooner or later.

       3. Why did we not find any evidence of aliens?

Aliens with gods and unicorns belong to human stories, as does the rest of the Universe. So, they do exist, inside our culture, like forest, fear, and Finland. And there is nothing outside, they are real inside this mind-boggling reality.

       4. Where is the center of the Universe?

The reality and the Universe were built during the evolutionary development of the nervous system. Every living organism has its center of reality inside the organism (well, how about ants or bees, do they share it??). Humans are an exception. They developed, starting about 50,000 years ago, shared reality. Their stories, which by and by become myths and then split into religions and science contained the notions of the center of the Universe, but ultimately these concepts and constructs are related to human intelligence. As long as we stay here on Earth, even if our science or religion points into a special part of heaven, I would assign the center to the person who points there, wouldn’t you?

       5. Why are homo sapiens so much more complex than other animals?

We invented things, language, and the Universe and it makes learning exponentially easier.

        6. What was crucial in the human evolutionary leap?

The invention of things and abstract thinking ca. 50,000 years ago.

        7. What was the evolutionary origin of human language?

Intragroup reality switch- from social and emotional sharing to language sharing to reality sharing to language modularity.

       8. What was an evolutionary origin of materialism?

The events described above, it is what made us modern humans and now it can kill us.

       9. What is the solution to our niche crisis?

Use an understanding of the evolutionary past to expand our niche by building a society based on experiential happiness. If we continue to try to be happy with material things we’ll run out of them and die out ( see details in the previous posts- esp. “niche crisis II”).

   

       

Category:

climate change, enviromnental crisis,, Evolutionary Reality, Explicit and implicit worldview, Inventions, materialism, nature of reality, Pediatrics, What will happen to the mankind

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Same horde of cavemen 2

The same horde of cavemen 2

 

This essay describes the origin of materialism.

This is interesting but to talk about it we need to make two pretty bold assumptions.

  1. In the evolutionary past, our ancestors were not materialistic- otherwise, we couldn’t talk about “the origin”. Even with the notions that “there is a jungle out there” and “survival of the fittest” the animals do not have the concept of ownership or greed. Their world is the world of behaviors not the world of things. The deeper back we look, this becomes more and more obvious. But it is also true for higher animals and true for early humans and for hunter-gatherers. We shared what we’d got, “feast or famine”, there was nothing to keep.

  2. We have to think about what type of event or change, in which domain, can be a candidate for the ‘trigger”. The brain scientists and paleontologists agree that there must have been a huge leap in development. Many agree that the language made the crucial difference. Other candidates are better tools, extra rich food, and the time to rest and chat, and walking on two feet (bipedality). To me, the history of humanity shows that we usually progress by the change in the mind and then the environment changes accordingly.

         Now, I have no evidence that my hypothesis is true, but it agrees with everything I know about linguistics, child development, early human history, and evolution.

         So, the time is about 50,000 years ago.

In Africa, the hominid experiment continues, over the last 2- 3 million years there were several subspecies of homo- some branches died out in  Africa, some migrated all over the world but eventually all of them (neanderthal and Denisovan will go soon) died out.

       A small group of survivors, the smartest and more fiercely cooperating than other groups are facing more challenges, after Mnt. Tuba eruption  (~66,000 years ago) it is dark, people are hungry and cold. But at the same time, their tools are getting better and they communicate better and better. They slowly migrate north pushed out by bigger and stronger and multiplying faster more primitive hominids. Their number is dwindling, will they reach salmon-rich Mediterranean rivers in time?

       Their babies are few, migration takes a toll on mothers and babies. The whole group takes care of them, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, even brothers, and uncles. Prosocial babies get the best care, they smile, bubble, and play. It is so much to learn now, even in the second year of life they require a lot of care, they spend a lot (comparing to the past and to other groups), a lot of time with adults.

       Their language, even being more rich and sophisticated than other groups, still has a lot of characteristics of animal communications. Remember- the animal brain is created for one sole purpose: to communicate- between sensory and muscles first ( lizard brain), then we add the neurotransmitters and old nuclei ( mammals), then here and there the social systems evolve -and the communications “spillover” to the other organisms of the community. But the content of these communications ( thus the content of the brains) is still the same back to the bacteria: helping organisms make nonrandom choices- that’s it. The brains are the “libraries” of THE DESCRIPTIONS OF USEFUL BEHAVIORS. Other fluff will not get inherited, the competition is tough, the brain tissue is a very, very costly luxury.

In the higher, so-called “eusocial” societies these descriptions can be amazing- bee dance, birds’ astral navigation, chimps coalition forming, elephant’s memories, parrots discussing future menus. But their nature is still the same – all brains have the same functional structure- even if the content is hugely different.

       This creates a “perfect storm scenario”. Suddenly, a little 18-month-old cave-girl comes up to her father, points to the apple, and asks: “What’s that, Daddy?” She asked for the NAME!. The apple’s link to the description of the behavior has been severed, carved out. Better than any deity, from nothing she created something- the thing. As a pediatrician I know little kids well, they are smart, they know emotions, family, their likes, and their needs. They play, they vie for adult attention and they name things. And if an adult listened- suddenly the apple exists separately from eating. (Actually “eating” doesn’t exist per se?). There is no looking back!  The advantages of things! Unlike “eating”-you can have 2 or 4 apples, bigger and smaller, more or less ripe- they do exist. Suddenly your mind manipulates the things around you with ease- like new toys or juggling new skills. From now- on.

The materialism or “The Universe of Things” over the next millennia opened the door for technology, economy, power, and violence. I guess our horde of cavemen made it to the Mediterranean…

Post scriptum: Over the time their language acquired also other important elements ( named much, much later):

     – the concept of reality- the things- what you touch, smell and kick- are steady, unchangeable, real,  while the rest – not so.

      – the concept of “I, you”, and people versus the rest of the Universe, (hence the grammar- my nemesis.)- future “self” or ”soul” or “consciousness”.

      – the concept of Unknown- “figuring things out“ will remain the human’s hallmark of his modus operandi, his pride, joy, awe, and fear. This will be future Religion, Philosophy, and Science.

Post post scriptum : How about “story”? The story is all it is. Much older than things, as old as art, as joy and pain. (also in human development- it is “older-” 4-month-old does peek-a-boo!)

 

Category:

climate change, enviromnental crisis,, Evolutionary Reality, human nature, materialism

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