Deganawida -The Great Peacemaker

Who is the greatest American most people never heard of?  If you ask me, that person is Deganawida, the native American spiritual leader who inspired the creation of the great Iroquois Confederacy. The binding laws of the Iroquois Confederacy provided much inspiration for Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin,  and their co-creators of the U.S. Constitution. 




Etching of Deganaweda

Deganawida is thought to have been born sometime in the 13th or 14th century.  What is known about him is imprecise because it all comes via oral history.  He was born into the Onondaga, or also possibly the  Mohawk tribes, both of which are indigenous to New York state, and the surrounding region. At the time of Deganawida's birth, the native American tribes in that region had a long history of bloody, intertribal warfare.  

Deganawida was a prophet.  Along with his disciple Hiawatha, he provided the vision and leadership that replaced confrontation and war with cooperation and friendship among six tribal nations, which became known as The Great Iroquois Confederacy. This Indian confederacy was quite possibly the first true democracy in the history of humanity.  The tribes that made up the confederacy were the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Tuscarora, and Cayuga.  Together, they came to be known in native language as Haudenosaunee, which in English is the Iroquois Confederacy.

Deganawida's vision provided a powerful place for women in the process of governance. In the structure of the confederacy, the clans that made up each of the tribes were led by male elders, who were elected by the clan's women.  Decisions were made with thoughtful consideration for future generations.

Were credit given where credit is due,  the Iroquois Confederacy would be recognized in history books as a prime inspiration for the Constitution of the United States.  Moreover,  we might be celebrating  Deganawida, the Great Peacemaker with a national holiday in October instead of a brutal thug named Columbus.

The Power of Myth

Back in 1988, journalist Bill Moyers interviewed Joseph Campbell in a six part PBS TV series called, The Power of Myth.  It gave me an almost entirely new way to look at my place as a human person making my way through a life on Earth.

Joseph Campbell spent his life studying cultures and the role of mythology in shaping the lives of the individuals who were part of those cultures. As one might expect, the myths and legends that have formed around different cultures are extremely diverse.  Campbell found in a lifetime of studying myth and legend that there are many common threads in these stories that explain and give meaning to life.

Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell

One of the common threads in myth and legend is what Campbell called, The Hero's Journey.  He wrote about it in a book titled, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

Campbell found that the stories behind almost every human culture are about a heroic figure that risks all on a quest in service to his {virtually all heroes are male in mythology) people. Along this journey, the hero overcomes a series of challenges. In the process, he gains wisdom which becomes the foundation of his culture.

I was just thinking about Campbell and his wisdom this morning, and I realized that it was about that time, in 1988 when The Power of Myth was being broadcast, that my life went from a struggle to learn and find direction to one in which I began to see and follow a pathway that resonated for me and made me happy. In essence, I began to follow my bliss,  and I learned to enjoy the journey I was on,  and accept the failures along the way as part of the process that one grows from on the way to achieving something genuinely worthwhile. I'm still one that pathway. It has made me happy, and it has brought me some success, and I see even greater possibilities on the road ahead.

There are many pearls of wisdom in the work of Joseph Campbell. For me, it comes down to one very meaty aphorism...
 

 

“Follow your bliss.
If you do follow your bliss,
you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.
When you can see that,
you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they open the doors to you.
I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid,
and doors will open
where you didn't know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.”
                                                         Joseph Campbell

Here is a link to a video trailer of the original PBS TV series, The Power of Myth... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdUaQNsjwNM

The Wash Line

Hans Rosling is a Swedish professor of International Health and founder of gapminder.org

Rosling has become famous for his delightfully charismatic presentations that show how the world has changed and continues to change. He calls himself a possibilist and says that makes him an optimist.

Here is a link to Rosling's wonderfully engaging presentation on how the washing machine symbolizes a rapidly changing world.    http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/en//id/1101

Selecting for Stupidity

I like the image below. It accompanied an article I just read on the Common Dreams webpage that highlights the research of  Gerald Crabtree, Stanford University.  Crabtree claims that human intelligence peaked at least ten thousand years ago when humans lived as stone age hunter-gatherers.

 

 

Crabtree asserts that life was hard in the stone age.  In his view, survival of the fittest definitely applied.  Being smart provided an extra edge.   Since then,  being smart has become less important to everyday survival. Perhaps that accounts for why humanity seems to be sleepwalking into an increasingly ominous future.

Published on Tuesday, November 13, 2012 by Common Dreams

Human Intelligence Peaked Thousands of Years Ago: Study

Stupidity trend will continue, says new research, but collective education can save us

- Common Dreams staff

Controversial study suggests human intelligence peaked several thousand years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline ever since.

Humankind's intelligence peaked thousands of years ago and advanced civilization has made life so easy for so many that our trend towards stupidity will continue as the ingenuity and intellect once needed for basic survival erode even further.

This, anyway, is the argument of a new study out in the journal Trends in Genetics, authored by Stanford University professor Gerald Crabtree.

Crabtree's study claims that harmful genetic mutations—occurring generation after generation as society advanced—have reduced our "higher thinking" abilities and the accumulated result has led to a gradual dwindling of our intelligence as a species.

The Guardian explains that Crabtree's thinking is a speculative idea—one he'd be happy to have prove wrong—but also a simple one:

In the past, when our ancestors (and those who failed to become our ancestors) faced the harsh realities of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the punishment for stupidity was more often than not death. And so, Crabtree argues, enormous evolutionary pressure bore down on early humans, selecting out the dimwits, and raising the intellect of the survivors' descendants. But not so today.

“I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas and a clear-sighted view of important issues,” Professor Crabtree says in the paper.

“Furthermore, I would guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues. I would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas, of perhaps 2,000 to 6,000 years ago,” he continues. “The basis for my wager comes from new developments in genetics, anthropology, and neurobiology that make a clear prediction that our intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprisingly fragile.”

Speaking with the Telegraph, Prof Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at Oxford University, pushes back against Crabtree's hypothesis, saying:

[Prof Crabtree] takes the line that our intelligence is designed to allow us to build houses and throw spears straighter at pigs in the bush, but that is not the real driver of brain size.
In reality what has driven human and primate brain evolution is the complexity of our social world [and] that complex world is not going to go away. Doing things like deciding who to have as a mate or how best to rear your children will be with us forever.
Personally I am not sure that in the foreseeable future there is any reason to be panicking at all, the rate of evolution with things like this takes tens of thousands of years...no doubt the ingenuity of science will find solutions to these things if we do not blow ourselves up first.

Other scientists were also skeptical. “At first sight this is a classic case of Arts Faculty science. Never mind the hypothesis, give me the data, and there aren’t any,” said Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist at University College London.

"I could just as well argue that mutations have reduced our aggression, our depression and our penis length but no journal would publish that. Why do they publish this?” Professor Jones said.
“I am an advocate of Gradgrind science – facts, facts and more facts; but we need ideas too, and this is an ideas paper although I have no idea how the idea could be tested,” he said.

"You don't get Stephen Hawking 200,000 years ago, he just doesn't exist," University of Warwick psychologist Thomas Hills told website LiveScience.
 

"But now we have people of his intellectual capacity doing things and making insights that we would never have achieved in our environment of evolutionary adaptation."
 

Despite his own research, Crabtree does not predict a future of diminishing returns for civilization and says that the species' ability to thrive is inherent in advanced civilization, and specifically in our ability to share information with one another. "Remarkably it seems that although our genomes are fragile," Crabtree says, "our society is robust almost entirely by virtue of education, which allow strengths to be rapidly distributed to all members."
 

The Independent offers this quick survey of man's descent into stupidity:

Hunter-gatherer man
The human brain and its immense capacity for knowledge evolved during this long period of prehistory when we battled against the elements
Athenian man
The invention of agriculture less than 10,000 years ago and the subsequent rise of cities such as Athens relaxed the intensive natural selection of our “intelligence genes”.
Couch-potato man
As genetic mutations increase over future generations, are we doomed to watching soap-opera repeats without knowing how to use the TV remote control?
iPad man
The fruits of science and technology enabled humans to rise above the constraints of nature and cushioned our fragile intellect from genetic mutations.
_________________________

This piece comes from the Common Dreams webpage, a great source of progressive journalism.

 

The Turin Erotic Papyrus

Imagine a three thousand year old sex magazine. In effect, that's what you get with The Turin Erotic Papyrus. In was discovered in the 19th century in Deir el-Medina, an Egyptian village that once housed the artisans responsible for the great pyramids in the Valley of the Kings.

Turin Papyrus

Located now in the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy, it measures roughly 8.5 feet by 10 inches. Because of its poor condition, it took years of painstaking work to reveal its contents.

Reconstruction  of the original Turin Erotic papyrus

Little else exists that reflects on the sexuality of the ancient Egyptians.   What the Turin Erotic Papyrus reveals is open to interpretation. It seems clear that the Egyptians of 3,000 years ago were as enamoured with sex as most of us are in contemporary times.  Further proof that we are hardwired to be interested in and find joy in that very fundamental part of our existence.

The link to the Turin Papyrus webpage is  http://www.perankhgroup.com/the_turin_papyrus.htm

The Archimedes Palimpsest

A palimpsest is a page from an ancient text that has another text hidden beneath that which appears on the surface.

Archimedes  (287-212 BC), the immortal Greek mathematician,  is known only through two ancient texts that carried his writings into contemporary times, or I should say, was....was only known by two surviving texts.

Archimedes

Now there is a third.... a third  text, The Archimedes Palimpsest, was found hidden beneath the pages of an ancient prayer book that used recycled parchment paper, on which Archimedes' words and ideas remained hidden for centuries.

The Archimedes Palimpsest

How that third text, The Archimedes Palimpsest, was discovered and how its secrets have been revealed is a fascinating story, presented by William Noel, Curator of Manuscripts and Ancient Texts at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.  

Here is the link to William Noel's  TED video presentation...

 http://www.ted.com/talks/william_noel_revealing_the_lost_codex_of_archimedes.html

Collapse

Humans have a history of overreaching. In his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond offers up several examples.   As the Rapanui culture on Easter Island in the Pacific expanded its population, it exploited its critical resource base to the point of exhaustion.  Once forested, Easter Island was stripped of its trees by the people who lived there.  When they reached the point where they no longer had trees to make the canoes needed for sustenance fishing the ocean, the Rapanui civilization collapsed, and has never recovered.

The same ignominous fate brought down the Anasazi in the American Southwest and Viking settlements on Greenland. Too many people, too few resources.

The human population on earth has nearly tripled just in my lifetime. There are now more than seven billion of us, each needing food, water, and shelter, at a minimum.   Everywhere one turns, one can see serious resource overreach. Deforestation, water depletion, soil depletion,  exhaustion of commercial fisheries;  the biological fabric of our planet is unraveling, and we are totally responsible.

Jared Diamond's book is a very serious wake-up call.
 

Here is a link to a TED video with Jared Diamond talking about his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed...

http://www.ted.com/talks/jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collapse.html

Koyaanisqatsi

'Life out of balance', that is the meaning of Koyaanisqatsi, a word in the Hopi indian language that was applied in 1982 to a remarkable work by filmmaker, Godfrey Reggio. It's hard to believe that 30 years have passed since I saw Koyaanisqatsi the first time, when I was still a very young man. It had an indeliable impact on me, with its relentless montage of troubling images of the Earth and man, punctuated by a powerful soundtrack by Phillip Glass. Koyaanisqatsi helped bring focus to my life. I've traveled a meandering, unconventional path ever since, seeking ways to leave a positive mark.

Here is the trailer for the film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PirH8PADDgQ

I had the privilege of spending time with Godfrey Reggio a few years after Koyaanisqatsi was released. He was and remains a remarkable human being, in a life committed to exposing the troubling relationsip between humans and the planet they all depend on to survive. Reggio followed up Koyaanisqatsi with a second film, Powaqquasti, which means, 'Life in Transformation'

Here is a link to some moments from that film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFHQ8dhAJWU

I recently learned that now, all these years later, Reggio is working on what he calls the final piece of his triology. He calls it Naqoyqatsi, 'Life as War'. That suggests that Reggio's final shot across humanity's bow will be rather apocalyptic.

Here is a link to Godfrey Reggio's website.

http://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/films/film.php

Godfrey Reggio was a big part of my personal wake-up call. I recommend his marvelous work to anyone who cares about the future of human life on Earth.