This writing evolved into a paper for my degree for which I made a website CLICK
The empathic research pathway has led me all the way back to Aristotle along multiple paths (who would have thunk it?). Darwinism has its roots in Aristotle's approach. Also, as I started reading about Buddhist psychology through the writings and speeches of the Dalai Lama, the term eudaimonia, often meaning leading a good, clean life-- key to the Buddhist escape from suffering. This term, eudaimonia, is linked to Aristotle, I discovered, through -- of all things -- a speech by Dr Timothy Leary. From the Dalai Lama's perspective, eudaimonia implies a psychology that is about discovering the person and making positive changes, especially with the backdrop of the environment. The other approach, what the Dalai Lama would call Western, what I call cold, involves collecting facts from studies and applying them indirectly, and usually unsuccessfully, to therapy.
aristotle and phyllis
These, and other related writings, are leading me closer to a verifiable link between the basic human thinking and feeling facilities (fortified by the new neural research), with local communities (through community knowledge), to the natural environment that we come from (through evolution).
It seems that the paper will have alternate between data collected from the newer studies which I present in as raw a format as possible (so that the readers will be forced to believe the astonishing research), with a series of introductions to the concepts as connectors embedded in between the scientific data.
Major linking information includes writing by David Suzuki about tribal elders, and also a Native tribal document about "historical trauma" that shows how the separation of the Native cultures from the environment damaged the Natives the most. This document shows how the reconnection with nature and the natural community of knowledge is the cure for the inherited trauma disorders lingering since the genocides that ran from the colonial era through to the early 1900s.
In a sense this creates a tight loop against which I can compare cold science-- replete with concepts now proved to be false, such as the greedy gene. I also have examples of animal torture tests done, amazingly, to prove empathy-- showing how much of science can be the most extreme form of stupidity. This stupid, cold science affects us all because it provides much of the data with which didactic teaching is framed, a cognitive approach which does not necessarily, by design, provide students with the truthful concepts. It corrupts society at its very basic learning point: late childhood.
In studying Buddhism, I am finding a positive tool which seems like a form of selfishness. It creates an easy path for an Buddhist towards the concept of self-preservation. Buddhist monks are often former family men-- who abandoned their families, along with their native community of knowledge, for the community of knowledge of the monks-; the Buddha himself abandoned his family. This runs contrary to the concept of empathy and love benefiting the community especially in the evolutionary sense, yet Buddhism is greatest religion of empathy.
And Buddhism goes farther with this selfish concept; it allows for self-actualization in the extreme-- the preservation of self through self-defense with martial arts when we are being threatened. This concept links closely with the aggressive Native rights movement in North America. Both Buddhism and the Native movement create defenses against the destruction of the community, the community of knowledge, and the environment. Buddhism effectively teaches us how to protect constructed knowledge.
The Buddhists promote the concept of the protection of constructed knowledge; the evolutionary approach to nature shows us how constructed knowledge is part of our past and part of the environment, and the Native studies that I am reading prove that humanity needs the environment to survive psychologically and socially.
Unfortunately much knowledge comes from what we lose, in the case of the knowledge learned from the Native tribes comes about from the loss of 90% of their population along with their culture. Much of neurological knowledge comes from the loss of mental abilities in humans, usually from brain trauma. Hopefully, with new research methods such as being used to prove empathy in the mind, empathy in society, and the empathetic link to the environment can be proved through therapeutic positiveness and cultural restoration.
Most religions oppose the idea of aggressive self-defense, rather they prefer to confuse pacifism with cowardice; promoting capitulation to destructive powers. As Mumford points out, religious leaders very often have financially driven agendas. Current global strategies especially oppose self-preservation, promoting capitulation in the face of centralized corporate and multicultural onslaught. In fact they are so certain of their global reach, that they consider the concept of self defence not to be just suicidal, but insane. The terminology revealed by corporations and economic consortia reveals a strategy combining global governance with corporate citizenship; it is reminiscent of the ancient Roman empire and it includes no individual expression in the democratic process. No where in any economic study, especially the study of the psychology of economics, is there any mention of the environment, nor is there any mention of the need to preserve or restore community knowledge. What corporations and economists prefer is the bulldozing of all that precedes them, with the replacement of all those who oppose them. The preservation and restoration of the community of knowledge is nearly purely a tribal, spiritual, and educational idea.
dennis banks, AIM movement
While the tone of the paper is not militant, it is not hard for a reader to get wrapped up in the local struggles of Native peoples everywhere when learning about the suffering Native tribes have experienced, while considering and the benefits of their nature-based knowledge. It so happens that my present sources for tribal information are both Canadian; David Suzuki teaches genetics in Vancouver, BC, and the tribal restoration movement is also in Canada.
The one difficult relationship to be proved in the paper, is that connecting the empathic abilities we experience as humans, with the need for the community of knowledge as the tribal Natives are seeking to restore. A related and equally difficult connection to make is that of the evolution of empathy in nature with spiritual faith: the basis of religion. One source I have found which provides some empathetic linkage with nature is in studies of tribes that are not made up of people-- but are made up of animals. One is a monkey tribe from Puerto Rico, which operates purely synergistically, without possibility knowing who Ruth Benedict is; and the other is the wide reaching tribe of elephants of the world who seem to be rebelling against the pains inflicted by humanity: the elephants seem to be delivering payback to humanity-- they are doing something Goleman would disapprove of, but is natural and in keeping with Buddhist principles of self-preservation. Elephant tribes extend this idea with their legendary burial grounds; a truism that was the basis for much fiction about India and Africa including the story of Tarzan.
As you can see, the cold approach to science has no monopoly, nor has it ever. The cold approach is simply in control because it supports the existing structural arrangement, the one that is causing phenomenal collapse of environments and local society everywhere.
The paper also introduces a new series of thinkers whose philosophy is spiritual and comparable to the Humanists. Daniel Goleman is central to this group, and many of them came from Harvard. Still, I am not as happy with them as I have been with the Humanists. The new group is. well, naive, as they reveal to us concepts that may have been valid twenty years ago, but have now passed. They act as if malevolence does not exist; if it does exist it is very rare, and it is people who resist their perception of how things should be. Following Aaron Beck, Goleman and those he associates with seem to imply that feelings of self-preservation are themselves disruptive thoughts; that simply changing the human mind to feel good thoughts using the science of neuroplasticity will save the day. Goleman is scary in that he supports the concept of rewiring all thinking minds through neuroplasticity. Or more accurately, the minds of people who are troubled, and those who dissent with his ideas. In reality, the well-adjusted Nazis, as Maslow called the most famous of malefactors, will submit to no such rewiring. By changing all thinking to suit his ideals, Goleman proposes leaving us defenseless to economic, cultural, and environmental deprecation-- the work of well-heeled malefactors. The elephants who are rebelling across their habitats will not submit to neuroplastic rewiring either, putting Goleman's thesis for Social Intelligence, his plan to rewire human emotions for global benefits (precisely as Skinner had proposed his world of behavior modification), out to sea into the shark infested waters of reality.
Another area of concern for me relates to the official Buddhist approach with Tibet's domination by China coming from the Dalai Lama; the thought seems to be that Communism is the problem. The solution, as many others as well as the Dalai Lama see it, is that the free financial markets, what they perceive to be democracy, will change China, and the Chinese will give Tibet it's freedom.
That may happen, though I personally doubt it. According to activist sources Communism and Capitalism in China have combined to promote each of the worst traits. The result is a capital growth feeding on near-slavery that has created growth so extreme that it has become the biggest threat humanity has. The effect is that China alone is literally melting the polar ice: China now consumes 75% of the worlds energy; energy consumption for the world has nearly tripled because of combination of Chinese capitalism and communism. This is a threat to the entire planet yet Goleman and the Dalai Lama both turn a blind eye.
Tribal, spiritual, and activist forces may have to move forward without leadership; hopes for pure democracy may have to give way to politics resembling the animal rebellion of the elephants: animals and humans struggling for independence from the dominating controls of governance from all three structures of government, corporations, and religion.
In the empathy discussion, it seems that creation and evolution ideas will clash, yet again. The followers of empathy, at least those of us who allow for the ideas of evolution, there is confusion because, from our perspective, evolution clearly slowly developed minds capable of moralistic and altruistic thought; nature gives us the capacity for faith, and the environment in which to feel it. It is difficult to conceive of why religious leaders have been so commited to separating nature from humanity; putting the two entirely in different domains, giving the human domain the right to exploit, even destroy, the natural one.
When introducing Darwin, my research revealed a root cause of the conflict between evolution and creation; that is that church leaders of the time had no desire to see the human spirit connected with natural beginnings: a phobia to nature. On one side is Darwin; on the other is the Church and Hobbs. Hobbs is an originator of the unfeeling approach to nature; he is possibly the originator of the concept of the greedy gene. Hobbs is heartless, and so is the Church; Darwin is only slightly better; it is he research that benefits nature; not his approach to life. When it comes to everyday human life, Darwin comes across as colder than ice: he viewed the suicides of depressed people as part of natural selection.
Darwin was not radical in the way we imagine the word to mean today. He was a man of his era-- totally misogynistic: he considered male dominance of society to be the result of natural selection. He was nearly antithetical to our notion of a liberal: he was all for locking away people who are foot-loose; he would have put me in prison for my wandering ideals.
I moved on from Darwin to try to find other better examples of empathy as it has been correctly understood in the past, in light of the new research. In other words, I want to be able to say "Hey, that research is great, but we (the old school empathizers) knew that all along."
My reading by David Suzuki and that of the Natives in Canada seeking to treat their cultural losses as historical truama, shows the universal tribal approach to empathy is an approach to nature. In a sense, nature acts as a mediator for humanity; we all relate to nature, but not so much nature, but our perception of nature: our community of knowledge that is built on nature. Knowledge built by people considered to be ideal from the Constructivist point of view, as Tribal members are able to practice a perfected form of community construction, and have the opportunity to be humans at their finest.
This learning helps confirm my view that knowledge, and especially community knowledge, cannot be built-- it can only be built upon. When there is no community to build upon because it has been destroyed, what existed before the destruction, presumably by bulldozers, has to be restored. I developed this concept after taking a ride with some old acquaintances that went wrong; I wrote about it in my blog: The negative flip side of community of knowledge construction.
http://linux-society.blogspot.com/2006/10/negative-flip-side-of-knowledge.html
