The title was borrowed from the late Barbara Tuchman,
it refers to her insight that governments often work against the best
interests of own their people for extended periods. She also described
some of the mechanisms by which they do so.
Never before have the follies of human existence been more evident; nor
has the denial of their absurdity by world ‘leaders’ been
greater. However, because we are also learning that nothing in ‘nature’
remains constant, it’s very likely that next week–– and next year— both
phenomena will have gotten measurably worse.
Admittedly, that’s a profoundly pessimistic assessment of the world’s
future; unfortunately, the evidence favoring it is all around us.
Everywhere we look on the international scene, we find evidence of
festering disagreements between rival groups that have been violent for
years and are further from resolution than ever. No longer is violence
confined to relatively orderly wars between readily identifiable
nations; modern wars are increasingly waged between belief systems
commanding constantly changing sectarian allegiances of the sort found
both within and between nations; the important divisions are more often
economic, religious or racial than purely national.
When we attempt to trace the present global chaos to its origins, we
are soon left with only one culprit: human cognition. In other words,
the agency which allows us to be informed with lightnig speed of the
latest deadly car or railway bombing half a world away is the same one
that enabled our species to create the mess which both generates the
carnage and makes restoration of ‘order’ unlikely.
Cognition, the modern ‘in’ term for thinking, involves several
functions we humans share with other species, but possess in greater
abundance and with a considerably greater degree of integration. The
organ integrating and controlling cognition, the brain, is also
possessed by other animals; but in demonstrably less complex form. That
the modern human brain was eventually produced by a gradually adaptive
process (evolution) was first separately intuited by Darwin and Wallace
in the mid-Nineteenth Century and is still hotly disputed. However, its
accuracy is also very obvious to anyone possessing sufficient
background in science and enough ideological freedom to think
independently.
Which brings us to a watershed understanding: based on certain
pre-existing beliefs, all humans seem to have a variable capacity for
accepting certain ideas as ‘true.’ If we return to the notion
that the cognitive abilities which created the present global mess are
also rendering its solution difficult, we can see a likely connection.
It’s difficult to imagine any phenomenon but ‘science’ that might have
allowed the acceleration in human population growth over the past six
hundred years. Although we have ample historical and anthropological
evidence that agriculture facilitated the emergence of many complex
civilizations in various parts of the world, it wasn’t until the
first clear-cut technologic advances produced by empirical science in
Western Europe produced a cascade of technologic advantages; and
Europeans attempted, with considerable ‘success,’ to extend their
hegemony to the rest of the world, that ‘modern times’ really began.
What's the connection between the above essay and the study of pot
smokers which impelled me to start blogging? It's actually fairly
direct; once one realizes that the most obvious conclusion of that
study is that our cognitive abilities are impacted to a considerable
degree by the same emotions which are–– all at the same time–– the
source of our noblest ideas, the root of all evil, and inescapable
physiological manifestations of human brain function.
That's a combination which makes their 'control' a sort of
Holy Grail that both government and religion can't seem to resist
pursuit of...
