THE TRUTH

Condensed Edition
 
 

Joseph P. Firmage
February 22th, 1999

PART I
 

Evolving in a place called Eden...

Who are you?

You read this as a living homo sapiens animal clothed in manufactured fabrics, staring at a Microsoft Word document delivered to you through an electronic communications system called the Internet. The Internet touched large populations of animals for the first time approximately 2000 revolutions of the Earth about her Sun following the birth of a being named Jesus. You are a speck of dust of biology on a speck of dust of geology circling your Sun, within a revolving arm of the Milky Way. As far back in time as you have been able to peer through your Hubble Space Telescope, you have learned that the Milky Way is one of about 150 billion vast astrophysical cyclones you call galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of suns and planets.

A strange introduction to yourself, isn't it? Yet that is actually a more complete description of you in this moment from the eyes of the Cosmos and distant future history books of Earth.

Whenever we think about such abstract ideas, we all seek to answer the basic questions of life: Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? What is my place? These are difficult questions to answer. Let us start by looking at what we're made of.

You are made of Milky Way galaxy. You are made of the Cosmos. The Cosmos includes everything you smell, taste, touch, hear, see, know, or do. It is everything that is.

We have been taught for millennia the tale of the origin of the Cosmos. Scientists in the discipline of  cosmology call it "the Big Bang". Those faithful to the Western world's dominant religions call it "Genesis". In the beginning there was a special kind of energy, or light, a light that makes all things - a kind of temporal potential. Billions of galaxies, trillions of stars, and an uncountable number of worlds formed. On many of those worlds, when of just the right size, just the right distance from their suns, with just the right chemistry, as night parts with day in a rare ecological harmony, the spiral of life springs forth from their oceans and gardens.

The Earth upon which you stand and all of the chemistry within your body and in the air you breathe was formed from simpler matter as a star perhaps like our sun exploded in death over 6 billion years ago. It spat out atoms in forms suitable for the evolution of a wondrous place such as Earth, and a being such as you. Perhaps the first time we homo sapiens truly understood the majesty of Earth was when we could see a picture of her. She was the cover star of Life Magazine in October, 1968. For the first time in our recorded history of the planet, millions of her own children - human beings - saw her whole face, and understood that they were looking at the home creation has made for them.

It took a decade from those first Apollo images of Earth for a human to loudly proclaim that our planet is a living being. In James Lovelock’s Gaia, the evidence is as plain as ink on a page. There is life-like precision, care, and process across all the disciplines of "non-living" science -- physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, meteorology -- not just biology, particularly as these disciplines interrelate in the definition of place suitable for human life. If we take a brief trip to visit the life on Earth, it becomes clear that our world simply must be categorized as an organism herself with a metabolism tuned by biology, for the sake of biology itself. And since biology clearly serves the purpose of evolving consciousness, it can now be said that the Earth exists to advance consciousness.

We live upon an amazing engine of life!
 
 
 

Life

"Of all the planets in the solar system, why is Earth the only one fit for life? Simple: because Earth has a surface that supports liquid water, the magic elixir required by all living beings."

-- James Kasting, Scientific American, 3rd Quarterly, 1998
 

Oceans cover over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface. Scientists theorize that the oceans formed upon the Earth’s crust through some combination of liquid and gas release from the interior of the planet and impact of ice-laden comets from the heavens. Whatever the source of the water, there is now 350 million cubic miles of it sloshing upon Earth’s crust, reaching to a depth of 36,200 feet in the Pacific’s Marianas Trench, where the pressure from the weight of the water is equivalent to over a thousand atmospheres.

The ocean is separated into its barren and fertile zones just like the land. Massive rivers within the ocean called currents carry water around the globe in huge circling patterns, influencing and influenced by global weather systems. Powered as forcefully as they are, currents move quickly only at the surface, for deep cold water takes about 1,000 years to recirculate with the surface.  With the remarkable exception of the ocean floor itself, where perhaps millions of species of life remain undiscovered, the deep of the ocean is a desert compared to the dazzling garden of beings found inhabiting the more temperate, shallow zones. The upper two percent of the ocean’s volume contains most biological organisms, at least those familiar to us.  From the smallest single-celled amoeba to the largest blue whale, the ocean courses with simple, intelligent, and majestic life.  It might surprise you to learn that the ocean supports a greater diversity of living body types than land. Indeed, of 33 animal phyla, 30 describe residents of the ocean. Only 16 describe residents of dry land or freshwater.

The tree of life grows swiftly in water. Indeed, the root of the tree of genetic biology spirals outward from the oceans, and has turned a pregnant clump of geology into a verdant garden on the land.

If ever there was a true Garden of Eden, its last superpower sprawls across our South American continent. No place on Earth is the majesty, power, and truth of the double helix of life more splendidly evident than in the depths of the jungle, across the plains, in the canopy, along the mountain peaks, and near the edges of this great labyrinthian river. Indeed, might not the river basin itself be alive, and thinking the thoughts thought by it’s many different cells -- the trillions of organic life forms among millions of species which it sustains and evolves?

We know of no other place like this in the universe, at least none most scientists believe we could ever hope to reach. All the more precious this last vast preserve of Eden would then have to be to the life of Earth, and to all humans. Certainly to any true scientist.

First, the obligatory numbers. The Amazon basin and adjacent regions in Central and South America represent 50% of the remaining rainforests on the planet. The basin delivers 20 percent of worldwide river water to the Atlantic ocean, from the reaches of 2.7 million square miles of rainforest. Its total water flow is greater than that of Earth’s next eight largest rivers combined, with a mouth at the ocean 200 miles wide, containing an island larger than Switzerland. Oceangoing vessels can travel up the river for 2,300 miles, placing them much closer to the Pacific ocean than the Atlantic.

The rainforests contain 50% of living species of life on this world, yet they cover only 7% of the area of land. That 7% forms an indispensable segment of the branch of the tree of life upon which humanity stands at this moment.

Underlying these dry numbers rests a secret of incredible majesty: the rainforests are the most powerful and concentrated womb of life ever created on the land of Earth.

The most pervasively beautiful life form in this place is the tree. Trees of every possible variety, thousands and thousands of different species. Some individuals are older than the Bible, some stretch as high as the length of a football field, these mighty creatures shelter the biosphere of Amazonia. They shield most of the sun’s light from reaching the forest floor, creating an enclosed womb for the dance of life below. At their roots, the life of the jungle is a product of the geology and chemistry of Earth, and at their highest leaves, they are home to the most fantastic winged life forms known to man. In between soil and canopy is an infinitely complex yet stable web of life, with millions of species of microorganisms, plants, and animals evolving at a breathless pace.  Would it surprise you to learn that much of your DNA, the programming in the cells of your body, is the same as within the cells of these trees? It should surprise you, and it is true.

As you climb from the flood plains towards the mountainous peaks of the Andes, the temperature drops about 1ºF for every 330 feet of elevation, which means that ambient temperature can drop below freezing at 16,400 feet at the equator. Hence the snowcapped peaks above the hot heart of the tropics.

In the steep mountains of the rainforest, the clouds themselves become the integral part of the fabric of life, rather than the rivers of the basin below. The clouds create an atmosphere rich in water, which accumulates on leaves through condensation and rainfall. In this place, the leaves themselves have evolved drip systems to gently convey condensed water to the soil below.

By shielding much of the sun’s light, the clouds inhibit the pace of photosynthesis, thereby slowing the pace of life in the misty forests below the canopy. But among the clouds, whole new forms of life spring forward. The trees in this zone of our ecology are coated in thick ferns and mosses, and are inhabited by thousands of plants and animals of incredible variety.

At night, the forest does not sleep. It is often not even completely dark, as luminous fungi in the rotting leaves on the ground glow an eerie green light, covering the forest floor with a veil of light like a living Christmas decoration. And in this almost silent night, the luminous fireflies have there way too.

In the rainforests you will find plants that eat only air, sun and soil, plants that eat plants, and plants that eat animals. You will find plants that can survive 50-foot floods and plants that withstand the harshest of droughts. You will find plants larger than airplanes and smaller than pinheads. You will find plants bearing all manner of fruits, undiscovered thousands with the most mysterious healing powers, some with fruit containing 30 times the Vitamin C of citrus, and a few with the most lethal toxins known to science.
 
 
 

Animals

The fruit of the kingdom of plants is the kingdom of animals, and it is yet more majestic. Animals are far more sophisticated creatures than plants. On Earth, there have been the smallest insects, and the largest dinosaurs. There have been the most curious beetles and the most frightening spiders; the slowest turtle and the fastest falcon; the florescent green frog, and the bright red snake; the sound-navigating bat and the electric eel; the homing pigeon and the childlike dolphin; the most gentle kitten and the fiercest tiger; the finest horse and the fattest cow.

Living today, the smallest animals are the chlamydia and rickettsia bacteria, and are only a few hundred atoms in diameter. The longest insect is the pharnacia serratipes of Indonesia, measuring up to 13 inches. The longest worm is the bootlace worm, and has been recorded at lengths up to 100 feet. The oldest form of animal on Earth are the deep-sea snails, which have not changed in 500 million years. The fastest land animal is the cheetah, reaching speeds up to 60 miles per hour. The largest animal is the blue whale, with one individual found to measure over 110 feet long. The world's largest carnivore - the sperm whale - also has the world's heaviest brain. At 20 pounds, it's four times heavier than the human brain. The only cold warm-blooded mammal is the Arctic ground squirrel, which can lower its body temperature below freezing.

What absolute cosmic majesty!

Animals live lives of wildly different durations. The longest authenticated human life in modern times is 120 years. For a housefly, the longest life has been about 2 months. The cat, 34 years. The goldfish, 41 years. The orca, 90 years. The tortoise, 150 years. Yet scientists do not yet know exactly why animals age the way they do.

There are some 10-30 million species of animal on planet Earth. Of these, we have catalogued only about 1.2 million. Each year, 10,000 new species are added to the list of forms not already included in zoological classifications. Thousands of these wondrous forms of creatures face extinction because of the environmental hubris of the human animal. We are not simply killing animals. We are burning the blueprints that made them.

As with the plant kingdom, the mecca for animal life is the rainforest. In the Amazon, there are animals that live in the sky, never to cross underneath the canopy below. There are animals that live only amongst the branches. There are animals that live on the ground, others only under the soil, and yet thousands of species that scurry all over. Some animals eat plants, others eat animals, and still others are omnivores. Some are day creatures, while many roam only unseen in the black of night.

There are 30 pound rodents with webbed feet. There are tapirs, distant relatives of rhinos, zebras and horses, with an aquatically adapted fused nose and lip system. This accommodates their penchant for swimming, and is used to spray water at attacking dogs. One remarkable creature is the basilisk lizard, also known as the Jesus Christ lizard because of its ability to literally run over water. It would be impossible for humans to emulate this action, because the size, shape, and power of our legs are not evolved to accommodate such a rapid-fire energy-consuming propulsion task.

Tending the garden's soil are the ants. A mature community of leaf-cutter ants can have as many as three million members. These animals are the gardeners of the forest because they carry leaves into underground chambers, not to eat, but to use as food for the fungus gardens they cultivate. These colonies play vital roles in returning plant nutrients into the deep soil, for the cycle of life to continue.

There are stunningly colored species of frogs, many mysteriously disappearing, whose biological powers are remarkable. Not only do their skin pigments warn predators of their extreme toxicity, but many species possess a potent antibacterial substance on their skins which may hold promise for human disease prevention. And living in the land of these frogs are thousands of species of insects, spiders, scorpions, and other crawling creatures, many of which are colored and patterned so finely matched to their habitat that they are essentially invisible.

The snakes of the rainforest are as amazing as the frogs and lizards. Across Asia, Africa and America are the bushmasters, coral snakes, rattlesnakes, vipers, cobras, and mambas. Of course, we seem to know best the giants of them all, the boas, pythons, and anaconda, which kill by constriction and consume their prey whole. But one of the most striking snakes is the flying snake, which has no wings to fly, but has a body shape which allows it glide as much as 165 feet with little loss in altitude. For millennia humans have feared the snakes of the jungle, but this fear is largely unfounded. Most scientific teams have adventured in the jungles for years without single instances of snake bites. The most common deaths resulting from snakebites occur on farms.

There is the giant anteater, which forages for food in the form of termites exclusively on the forest floor, while its lesser cousins exploit both the floor and the canopy. Then there are the slow-moving sloths with what you'd swear are permanent smiles on their faces, looking like they're just fine with an other-than-A-type lifestyle. They really don't need to move all that much, because they can turn their heads in a 270 degree radius.

Of the exceptional large mammals of the Amazon, the jaguar is the king cat. The jaguar climbs among the trees and swims among the rivers, feeding upon the fish, alligators, and primates of the jungle. These carnivores hunt either through stalking or ambush, and they will take almost anything on. Indeed, large cats dominate the tops of food chains in all major rainforests in the world.

The primates - the closest large classification of animals to the human, live at all strata of the rainforests of Earth. These creatures are stunningly beautiful and remarkably human-like. The face-painted mandrill, the scarlet-faced uakari. The swinging orangutan. The howling monkey. The macaque. The gibbon. The striking black and white diurnal lemur. The stunning red-haired tamarin, being rescued from the brink of extinction by biologists in Brazil. The tiny, one-pount marmoset. The nectar drinking, white-faced capuchin monkey. The cousin to the human, the chimpanzee, often seen clutching, grooming, feeding, playing with, and generally loving their children. And we find the largest ape, the gorilla, threatened of extinction by civil war among homo sapiens animals in Rwanda.

To the cloud forests large mammals rarely go. But in this elevated paradise, countless animals flourish. Tree-dwelling monkeys with hauntingly-human looking faces stare at us through our camera film. Hundreds of variety of scurrying mammals inhabit the holes, nooks, and knots of the trees. Scores of species of bats navigate through the dusk, like the vampire bat, which consumes only the blood of other animals. And at night, as we shine flashlights into the dark, we see thousands of pairs of reflecting retinas staring back at us from the deep, indicating that the forest remains very much awake. The most frightening ocular reflections are those of the caiman crocodiles, peering back from the surface of the dark flowing waters.

Up in the canopy, the birds are the most beautiful creatures. The resplendent quetzals. A stunning variety of hummingbirds hover amongst the flowering plants of the forests. The toucans, macaws, eagles, parrots, cotingas, and cacique birds live among the emergent trees where hawks and vultures also land to perch. The vulture's large cousin, the Adean condor, gracefully glides above the trees, with a wingspan of over 10 feet. Under the canopy fly the woodpeckers, trogons, jacamars, and puffbirds. At eye level you will see ant birds, tanagers, flycatchers, and manakins, and on the forest floor, tinamous, ground doves and wrens.

All of these animals live within and contribute to an incredibly harmonious symphony of biology. Every animal in Amazonia is a basic part of the ecosystem we call life.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing for modern humans to learn from the biota of Earth is that the human may be the most sophisticated Earth-based life form in terms of its collection of capabilities, but it is far from the most sophisticated in terms of its specialized capabilities. Plants directly convert inorganic chemistry into the food of life. We do not. Some plants can live for thousands of years. We cannot. Hawks can spot a mouse from hundreds of feet away. We cannot. Cheetahs can outrun an automobile. We cannot. Pigeons can home. Some snakes can see infrared light. Electric eels can shock. Bats use sonar to see a vivid image in a pitch black night. Some sea life can smell across their entire bodies. Some animals can see in two places at once. Some animals can fly with wings. Some animals can exist in water. Some animals can walk on water. Some animals can biologically clone themselves.

We can do none of these things... yet.

These are truly majestic, awe-inspiring creatures, with kinds of abilities we would ascribe to science fiction if possessed by a human. What symphony is life! It is the music of time, the music of creation.

We are just as remarkable, for the human is the only animal presently native to Earth that can read and write, and even then only in the last few thousand years. We have just begun the process of learning about our Cosmos.

There are some 6 billion individual homo sapiens animals presently living on Earth. Human animals have evolved to communicate through physical gestures and vocal sounds, organized in temporal patterns called speech, and have learned to record these communications through the process of reading and writing. A human's brain is sufficiently advanced for it to be able to correlate observations of itself and its surroundings. Possessed with remembered senses and the ability to interpret time -- periodicity, duration, and precision -- the human has evolved a way to manipulate its future. Homo sapiens animals refer to themselves individually as "me" and collectively as "we".

We have become a flower, long since evolved from seed of the plant that created us.

Human beings are undergoing evolution of the mind as the ability to observe is enhanced through technology and perhaps biology of our own imagination. The rapid rise in our ability to acquire truth through observation has, in the past 100 years, given us a most remarkable and I believe physically significant new sense, what you might call a sixth sense: the ability to see into time - both the past and the future. This sense of prediction exists in the mind alone, as the synthesis of the perception of the past and the imagination of the future. The human is now made even more remarkably unique because of its rapidly growing ability to learn history and predict the future from knowledge drawn from dramatically enhanced skills and tools of observation - skills such as science and tools such as telescopes. The more truth we perceive, the better we predict change.

What wondrous revolutions in the history of worlds must occur when its most advanced beings come into such power? How powerful and sacred must evolution be, to have created such beings as we? As you and I evolve to be able to know more through greater and greater powers of observation, what secrets of time will we be able to predict, or even at some point "see" in our mind’s eye? Might we someday be able to reverse this power of observation and "make" reality with imagination alone?

Whatever we may see or do in the future, we must pause now and look upon the history that I have just briefly described, all 15 billion years that we know of.

What an incredibly precious legacy of creation are we! Even though I've known and studied it for years, my jaw still drops whenever I consider the majesty of our history.

The Cosmos has labored for billions of years to produce us. Regardless of what life may exist outside of Earth, we know that we are unique and special, for whatever life outer space may hold for us to find, we know that we are rare in time. Our gestation just to the point of reaching homo sapiens has been one of incredible majesty, through hundreds of millions of human generations worth of time. And the combination of all human mechanical or electrical technology ever invented pales in comparison to the simple beauty of a single fish in the sea, let alone a human being.  The Cosmos simply must have wanted to create beings like us.

What other forms of animal are we likely to meet one day as we venture into the Cosmos? What capabilities might they possess which perhaps lay undeveloped or nonexistent in homo sapiens? And how might we acquire such powers? Will it be a natural process, or a derivative technology? Both?

As we prepare to ask yet the most important questions of our future, we must ask ourselves a deeply profound question: what from this distant past of creation do we wish to take with us, as a species, into the distant future? We often ask this question for knowledge recently acquired to be reused soon, but almost never do we ask this question with an eye for eternity. Evolution has taught us that only the most robust and stable creations will survive over time. If we wish to make our distant future the brightest it can be, what are the core principles we must learn from our past in order to flourish in the crucible of billions of years of future evolution?

We shall address this question later.
 
 
 

Evolving in a place called Eden
is a promising young civilization...

Look at the headlines seriously this past week. Observe the magnitude of the issues in play, in the history of civilization. In mid January, 1999, these were the issues:

The White House and Congress are locked in battle over the significance of the President's lies about his sex life told while under the oath of truth.

The first "city in space" is under construction.

Spacecraft are heading out to survey asteroids and physically examine the polar caps of Mars.

A single European currency has begun its life.

Uneasy truce remains between Catholic and Protestant.

Peace or war between Arab and Jew to be determined by election.

Confrontation of superpower and dictator has the world watching.

Preparations are underway for an unprecedented test of computing technology at Year 2000.

Rise and fall of modern national economies abroad troubles the world.

Brutal weather patterns and systems continue to circle the globe.
 

You are participating in all of this, every concept, person, event, headline, and consequence as the Cosmos unfolds time.

Richard P. McBrien in his book Catholicism has related in striking metaphor the radical degree to which human history has changed in the last tiny fraction of our human existence.  He notes that if the last fifty thousand years were divided into periods of sixty-two year life spans, we’ve enjoyed eight hundred lifetimes.  "Six-hundred and fifty were spent in caves.  Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate through the written word, and only during the last six lifetimes has the human community had access to the printed word."

We traveled by camel caravan before the Christian era, at about eight miles per hour.  This form of travel was common for just under eight thousand years, until the chariot, which pushed human travel to 20 mph.  Steam locomotion of the early nineteenth century allowed speed of only thirteen miles per hour, and the sailing ships, before and after, were slower still. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, with improvements in the steam engine, we reached speeds of 100 mph.  As McBrien notes, it had taken this hominid species millions of  years to be able to communicate with each other and travel to each other.  Then, in a revolution during the last part of the last one of our eight hundred lives of the last fifty thousand years, we have seen planes, jets, rockets, and space travel with astronauts and space capsules and the capacity to reach Neptune and one of its moons, and send back computer-enhanced photographs from celestial bodies at the edge of our solar system.

And during just the last lifetime, we have seen the rise of literacy, telegraph, telephones, radio, television, transistors; and computers, microchips, and the Internet; and radio telescopes and space probes with the capacity to send and receive messages to the outer reaches of space. Perhaps the most haunting and emotive of all advancements in communications recorded in our lifetime are the images from the Hubble Space Telescope -- humanity’s first clear-vision eye peering into the secret places of the history of the heavens.

Clearly we live in an important time.

But what knowledge of history has the culture of the United States, the bastion of Western idealism, left in the minds of its children?  Instead of McBrian’s yardstick of time at 800 lifetimes in 62 year units, let us resolve further to human generations, for simplicity’s sake let’s say averaging just over 20 years from time one gives birth to the next. By that reckoning, what is the state of mind of our newest generation, the last in 2400 human generations over 50,000 years?

Circling recently on the Internet was a simplistic but wonderful answer to this question, adapted below.

The people who left high school last spring across the U.S. were born in 1980. They have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era and did not know he had ever been shot. They were prepubescent when the Persian Gulf War was waged. Black Monday 1987 is as significant to them as the Great Depression. There has only been one Pope.

They can only really remember reading about one president. They were 11 when the Soviet Union broke apart and do not remember the Cold War. They have never feared a nuclear war. "The Day After" is a pill to them, not a movie. CCCP is just a bunch of letters. They have only known one Germany. They are too young to remember the Space shuttle blowing up, and Tienamin Square means nothing to them. They do not know who Momar Qadafi is. The New Deal is most likely a rebate on a new VW Beetle.
 
Their lifetime has always included AIDS. They never had a Polio shot and likely do not know what it is. Bottle caps have not only always been screw off, but have always been plastic. They have no idea what a pull top can looks like. Atari pre-dates them, as do vinyl albums. The expression "you sound like a broken record" means nothing to them. They have never owned a record player. They don’t enjoy playing Pac Man and have never heard of Pong. Star Wars looks very fake, and the special effects are pathetic. There have always been red M&M's, and blue ones are not new. What do you mean there used to be beige ones?

They may have heard of an 8-track, but chances are they probably have never actually seen or heard one. The Compact Disc was introduced when they were 1 year old. As far as they know, stamps have always cost about 32 cents. Zip codes have always had a dash in them. They have always had an answering machine. Most have never seen a TV set with only 13 channels, nor have they seen a black and white TV. They have always had cable. There have always been VCR's, but they have no idea what Beta is. They cannot fathom not having a remote control. They were born the year that the Walkman was introduced by Sony.

Rollerskating has always meant inline for them. They have never heard of King Cola, Burger Chef, The Globe Democrat, Pan AM or Ozark Airlines. The Tonight Show has always been hosted by Jay Leno. They have no idea when or why Jordache jeans were cool. Popcorn has always been cooked in a microwave. They have never seen and remember a game that included the St. Louis Football Cardinals, the Baltimore Colts, the Minnesota North Stars, the Kansas City Kings, the New Orleans Jazz, the Minnesota Lakers, the Atlanta Flames, or the Denver Rockies (NHL hockey, that is). They do not consider the Colorado Rockies, the Florida Marlins, the Florida Panthers, the Ottawa Senators, the San Jose Sharks, or the Tampa Bay Lightning "expansion teams."

They have never seen Larry Bird play, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a football player. They never took a swim petrified by the idea of Jaws. The Vietnam War is as ancient history to them as WWI, WWII or even the Civil War. They have no idea that Americans were ever held hostage in Iran. They can't imagine what hard contact lenses are. They don't know who Mork was or where he was from. They never heard the terms "Where's the beef?", "I'd walk a mile for Camel", or "de plane, de plane!". They do not care who shot J.R. and have no idea who J.R. is. M.A.S.H., The Cosby Show, The Facts of Life, Silver Spoons, The Love Boat, Miami Vice, WKRP in Cincinnati, and Taxi are shows they have likely never seen.

The Titanic was found? They didn't know it was lost. Michael Jackson has always been white. They cannot remember the Cardinals ever winning a World Series, or even being in one. Kansas, Chicago, Boston, America and Alabama are places, not groups. McDonalds never came in Styrofoam containers.

Very few have felt the deep emotion from the hand-me-down memories of World War II and the Holocaust. Fewer still have any recollection of the basis for the Cold War. Almost none can personally relate the two World Wars together, distinguishing or even remembering their teachings for the future of the world. The term appeasement doesn’t ring a bell for them. Neither do they admire Churchill as a hero, if they even know why they should.

Do you feel old now? Remember, the lucky few of the people who don't know these things will be in college this year.

And in four years, they'll be part of the workforce. I hope college teaches them well.

Ungrounded in technical history they may be, this new generation is the most innately conscious of all before it. It has been barraged with the loudest, most, biggest, brightest, strongest, tastiest, foulest, best and worst that western marketing can offer, all delivered in THX sound, with digital fidelity, on widescreen, at 400Mhz and at 28.8Kbps, or better yet 56, or even better, a megabit over a cable modem. To the older generation, if you don’t know what those words mean, let it be your clue to the vast, valuable and potent new advanced culture now leaping up on its own two feet, as the very skeletal and nervous system of our future civilization.

Despite all this noise, or perhaps because of it, this new generation is more resonant with the soft, subtle, true qualities of life than any before. Their culture reveals it in the way they talk, dress, eat, work and socialize. They have no desire for war. They have an intuitive concern for the world, a concern that leaves some depressed, others lost, some on a returning path to religion, and a few motivated like crazy to save the Earth from humanity. Most of them feel powerless in a society where the only thing that seems to have power is money. They have the least desire for amassing wealth since their great-grandparents’ generation, which, incidentally, was in the previous 62-year life span. Sometimes the best advances can come only after funerals for arthritic minds.

It is this new generation that will carry our world into the future, perhaps through some of our greatest crises, certainly through some of our most painful challenges, and hopefully into the grandest of discoveries. Let us teach these young men and women well, for we are entrusting the future of the world to them, and humanity’s future across the Cosmos.
 
 
 

Evolving in a place called Eden
is a promising young civilization.
We grow more dangerous...

"Against his paralyzing smile and honest realistic style, our best protection is that we in fact live in eternity."

-- W. H. Auden, in reference to the devil

Whether you believe in a God or not, it's safe to say you would agree that humanity has learned, however imperfectly, many lessons over the past several millennia, lessons entrusted to progeny through the oral and written history of our ancestors. Let us revisit several of the more painful ones...
 

Holocaust is a term of enormous gravity to a huge portion of the world. It should be so, for in reference to the slaying of six million Jews, there are few crimes against life that compare. There have been many conflicts among regimes in history where loss of life has been comparable or even larger in simple numbers, but very few such catastrophes can compare in depth of evil to the systematized and ruthlessly calculated machine of death constructed by Adolf Hitler, for no reason other than hatred.

Adolf Hitler and this top three henchmen, Himmler, Goering and Goebbles, were the architects of the atrocity of the Holocaust. It formally began on January 30, 1933 when Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and continued over twelve years to May 8, 1945 - VE Day.  Rising from the ashes of the first world war and the Great Depression to be the Furher of Germany, this leader created a system of murder never before witnessed in the history of the world.

There have been numerous acts of inhumanity in the 20th Century, such as the massacre of one million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks, the starvation of five million Ukrainians during Stalin's forced collectivization, the murder of 1.5 million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge regime, and most recently the killing of one million Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda.

However, in no other case have the efficiencies of the modern industrial age been put to such diabolical use as in Germany under Hitler.

The systematic persecution of Jews and other undesirables started immediately upon the Nazi rise to power. The Nazis' ideology of racial purity and superiority coupled with their hatred and intolerance of 'others' spurned their actions forward.  Initially, the Nazis merely excluded 'undesirables' from society and forcibly induced them to leave the country.
 
The war in Russia saw the formation of four SS units of 3,000 men each, expressly formed to kill Bolshevik sympathizers, but eventually turned into the field arm of the Nazi death machine.  These mobile units were ultimately responsible for the death of over two million Jews and other 'undesirables'.

According to Stephen Ambrose, in New History of World War II, "These groups were called Einsatzgruppen, and although 'Bolshevik leaders' were supposedly their major target, most of the victims were Jews.  Other victims were 'Asiatic inferiors,' gypsies and 'useless eaters' such as mentally ill or terminally ill people.  One Einsatzgruppen unit reportedly killed 6,400 Polish mentally-challenged patients.  According to the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal on War Crimes, altogether in the Soviet Union the SS killed two million men, women and children.  Most were shot.  Himmler, who had witnessed an execution, was upset at the sight of women and children being killed in this way, so he ordered another method: they were put in gas vans so constructed that at the start of the motor the exhaust was conducted into the van, causing death in ten to fifteen minutes.

Concerns over the effectiveness of the operation, field morale in both the civilian and military personnel, and in an attempt to keep this operation secret from both the Jewish population and the world led to the search for another solution. The Final Solution, Endlosung, was made effective at the Wansee Conference in 1942.  The Final Solution was the brainchild of Reinhard Heydrich and executed with brutal efficiency by Adolf Eichmann.  The Final Solution called for the extermination of all Jews and other 'undesirables' at six major death camps in Poland, Auschwitz - Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

Auschwitz - built originally as a POW camp in summer 1941 - was expanded into a labor and death camp.  The brutal conditions at the camp ensured that precious few humans survived.  Of the total of 16,000 Red Army prisoners sent to the camp only 96 survived.  Of the 405,000 registered prisoners, as opposed to those were exterminated upon arrival, only 65,000 survived.  In one brutally efficient two-month period in March 1944, of 350,000 Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz, 250,000 were gassed.  Over the course of 1944, 10,000 Jewish lives were extinguished each day.  In total, between two and four million Jews and another two million non-Jews had been gassed by the time the Red Army liberated the camp in late 1944.

"Trainloads of Jews in sealed boxcars, packed so tightly for so long without food or water - often for days - that the dead could not fall down, arrived regularly at the Auschwitz siding.  Guards threw open the doors and began shouting at the Jews to get out and line up. They were marched to an SS doctor who made a visual scan and pointed either to the gas chamber or to the labor camps.  Infants, young children, old people, pregnant women, the disabled, and the sick were sent to an immediate death; between 20 and 40 percent were sent to the labor camps where they remained until, too weak to work any longer, they too were sent to the chambers.

Just outside the gas chambers, the Jews were ordered to strip and told they were going to take showers, for delousing purposes.  First they were shaved, and their hair saved for stuffing for mattresses and the like.  They were herded into the chamber, which looked like a high school gym.  Once they were packed in, the door was sealed shut and cyanide gas was pumped into the room through showerheads.  After a minute or two of screaming that no one except the other victims heard, there was silence.  After clearing the gas from the room, inmates - often Poles and sometimes Jews, always under extreme duress - entered and pulled gold teeth, and tore open anuses and vaginas of the cadavers to probe for hidden jewelry.  The task completed, the bodies were taken by handcart to the crematory furnaces.  The ashes of the dead went to farmers to enrich their soil."

Exact statistics for the actual total number of human beings exterminated in various programs during the war are difficult to arrive at, as the Nazis destroyed many records, or in other cases kept none at all.  The numbers of dead among European Jewry can be traced to census records and Nazi official tallies presented during the Nuremberg trials. In total 5,796,129 or 60% of the pre-war European Jewish population were killed during the Holocaust.
 
 

 
 The American Holocaust

There are perhaps a few other holocausts in recent history which can compare in depth of evil, and they strike painfully close to home.

As a time and place of flowering for human civilization, Renaissance Europe began a period of ascendancy, which was to last well into the 20th century.  The cultural and scientific rebirth, whose foremost catalysts included Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Gutenberg, Galileo, and Copernicus, found a receptive home in the relative economic, political and religious stability of late mediaeval Europe. This rebirth gave the Europeans the scientific and technical means to act on a strongly emerging economic motive, fueling the Age of Discovery.  This cultural and intellectual rebirth also provided the philosophical and moral justification for horrendously evil actions, as newly acquired power often does.

With the power of weapons and global mapmaking, both cultured through mastery of the seas, late fifteenth century Europe chose to remap the globe. Europe launched a massive rape of the new world, when through the Pope's authority the newly discovered territories were divided between Spain and Portugal. One Spanish historian wrote that what they sought was "To serve God and His Majesty, to give light to those who sat in darkness, and to grow rich as all men desire to do."

In 1501, the Spaniard Rodrigo de Bastides had reached the coast of South America, on orders from his king. Moving westward towards the snowcapped mountains soaring into the clouds, he met the Tairona, one of the most advanced of the Indian societies. The Tairona had transformed the slopes of their mountains establishing roads, structures, and irrigation systems of amazing complexity. Perhaps their most remarkable, or at least most remarked, quality, however, was their gold work, among the most beautiful produced in the Americas. Trading posts quickly emerged, and in 1526 de Bastides founded Santa Marta, now a part of the modern nation of Colombia. Santa Marta soon became a center of trade.

For hundreds of years, as Europe's conquest of the last preserve of Eden swept across the continent, an uneasy truce, pregnant with anger and anguish, hung over the northern coast. In the remarkable words of the very thoughtful ethnobotanist, Wade Davis, in his book One River:

"There was conflict and rebellion, and death by enslavement and disease, but the Spaniards made no systematic attempt to destroy the Tairona. Few in numbers, they were initially content to control the coast, trading fish and salt, axes and metal tools for gold. The Tairona valued peace even as they retreated further into the hinterland.

It was not until the end of the sixteenth century that the Spaniards launched a campaign of annihilation. Their excuse - and the Spanish, obsessed as they were with jurisprudence, always had an excuse - was completely bizarre. Hungry for gold, they were nevertheless scandalized by the phallic and sexual representations that formed a significant motif in Tairona ceramics and gold work. The chronicler Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo described a gold piece weighing twenty pesos that depicted "one man mounted on another in that diabolical act of Sodom," a "jewel of the devil" that he righteously "smashed at the smeltering house at Darien." Such graphic depictions of sodomy confirmed their deepest suspicions. It was known that Tairona men gathered regularly in large ceremonial temples, often for nocturnal rituals that lasted until dawn and excluded women. From experience the Spaniards recognized that when their own sailors and soldiers spent long hours together, it was only the restraint of Christian virtue that kept them from "unnatural acts." Since the Tairona were not Christian, it was obvious, at least to the Spanish, what the Indians had been up to at those nightly assemblies. When in 1599 Santa Marta's new governor, Juan Guiral Velon, undertook the final destruction of the Tairona, he did so charged with the certainty that all of his enemies were homosexual.

The subsequent struggle was as violent and brutal as any recorded in the Americas. Tairona priests were drawn and quartered, their severed heads displayed in iron cages. Prisoners were crucified or hung from metal hooks stuck through their ribs. Those who escaped and were recaptured had their Achilles tendons sliced or a leg cut off. In Santa Marta, Indians absurdly accused of sodomy were disemboweled by fighting dogs in obscene public spectacles. Women were garroted, children branded and enslaved. Every village was destroyed, every field burned and sown with death. When the Spaniards took the Tairona settlement of Masinga, Velon ordered his troops to sever the noses, ears, and lips of every adult.

Marching inland, Velon attempted to vanquish an entire civilization. In the midst of the carnage, the Spaniards never forgot their ultimate mission. To ensure the legality of their deeds, before each military action Velon's captains read aloud in the presence of a notary public the famous Requirement, a standard legal document exhorting the heathen to accept the true faith. Recited in Spanish without translation, it was but a prelude to slaughter. "If you do not accept the faith," the text read, "or if you maliciously delay in doing so, I certify that with God's help I will advance powerfully against you and make war on you wherever and however I am able, and will subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their majesties and take your women and children as slaves, and as such I will sell and dispose of them as their majesties may order, and I will take your possessions and do all the harm and damage that I can."

The Spaniards were true to their word. In the end the entire Tairona population was either dead or given over as slaves to the soldiers as payment for their services. Those Indians who survived were expected to pay the costs of their pacification. On pain of death they were prohibited from bearing arms or retiring into the Sierra Nevada. But flee they did - a tragic diaspora that brought thousands into the high mountains, leaving behind a desolate, empty coast of ruined settlements, shattered temples, and fields overgrown with thorn scrub and ultimately redeemed by the forest."

Seven years before Rodrigo de Bastides found Santa Marta, Cortes had stood in awe of the beauty of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire.

That great city was twice the size of Spain's largest city.

At the same time, the children of Europe were raping North America too.

European exploration, colonization and settlement of North America forever altered the evolution of Native American civilizations.  Rather than an equitable mingling of cultures and societies, Native American culture and society was largely displaced and destroyed by disease, war and migration. The Native American civilizations were simply not equipped to resist or even absorb the successive waves of migration.

This pattern has occurred many times through the millennia, anytime there has been a conflict between cultures over land, sustenance and wealth.  However, never has the impact been so profound as to depopulate an entire continent of 90% of its population, with no hope of revival.

Exploration in the 16th century by the Spanish, French, English and Dutch introduced new elements to tribal societies.  Disease, the horse and trade with the Europeans profoundly impacted Native American civilization across much of North America. The diseases introduced by the Europeans had the greatest immediate impact, decimating much of a native population which heretofore had never been exposed to them and consequently had no immunity.

This was especially evident in the civilizations along the Mississippi, Tennessee and Ohio River valleys, which were almost completely depopulated due to the disease spread by DeSoto's expeditions. Indeed, it was disease that was the greatest European killer, wiping out virtually all of the populations of the Caribbean, Inca and Aztec Indian populations as well.

Horses, which were introduced to the American southwest by the Spanish, had a largely positive impact, forever changing the way of life of the plains Indians.  With the horse, they became great nomadic hunters dependent upon the great bison herds of the Plains for their way of life.

Less arbitrary were the changes which came with the establishment of trading posts along the great river valleys and the settlements along the eastern seaboard.  These settlements and trading relationships set the pattern for waves of displacement that were to characterize the interaction between natives and Europeans across the following four centuries.

European politics played a key role in the colonial expansion of the 17th and 18th centuries. The colonies were important contributors to European economies and were consequently involved in every major European war of the time. With the consolidation of power along the eastern seaboard, Indian populations began to realize that the territorial hunger of the Europeans would not be sated. Consequently, tribes were involved in many European conflicts, siding with one European nation against both European and Native enemies in a desperate fight to preserve their territory and way of life.

This was to be a losing battle.

The American Revolution would ultimately create a new chapter in this struggle as the young nation sought to control all the land in its domain.  The young nation articulated a philosophy for what it saw was its divine right to consolidate its hold and to expand and settle westward into Native American land.

The attitude of European settlers in America is described by Reginald Horseman in Race and Manifest Destiny, "...this inferior native population, as a result of amalgamation, and that great law of contact between a higher and a lower race, by which the latter gives way to the former, must be gradually supplanted, and its place occupied by this highest of races....(The United States) will occupy the entire extent of America, the rich and fertile plains of Asia, together with the intermediate isles of the sea, in fulfillment of the great purpose of heaven, of the ultimate enlightenment of the whole earth, and the gradual elevation of man to the dignity and glory of the promised millennial day."

The "Trail of Tears" episode perhaps best exemplifies the government-sanctioned effort to displace the native population in favor of American settlers.  Over 15,000 Cherokees were forced to migrate to the Indian territories in Oklahoma.   Of those a little over 2/3 survived the journey.  With the expansion westward into river valley's and ultimately into the Plains, the struggle continued.  Numerous wars were fought, and treaties broken as the natives sought to halt the migration westward and preserve their way of life, but to no avail.

The notion that the natives were inferior justified the settlers rights to take and settle the land with little regard for the Native American lives.

With each lost battle and with each treaty, the majestic and humble Native American way of life was further demeaned through the 20th century, as Native Americans were reduced to living on government-policed reservations.  Thus, Manifest Destiny for the Native American population proved to be a destiny of enslavement, poverty, death and cultural extermination.

By 1900, the taking of the bulk of the American continents would be complete.
 
 
 

A Century of Total War

As war was coming to a close in America, the originating militaristic tendencies, honed through centuries of conquest, continued in the hearts of European nations. The mentality of empire building was confronted with the constraints of Earth’s surface area. As one might with hindsight expect, the culture of imperial war turned inward on itself, with the unfortunate, unplanned, and totally groundless entrance into the First World War.  A system of total war, driven by technology that made it possible, occurred as Europe fought two civil wars in the same century which came to involve the entire world. It would not end until November 1989.

Within the 20th century, legal restraints to prevent war, or failing that, to make its effects less savage and all-pervasive, were obliterated: institutions for the peaceful resolution of disputes were ignored or destroyed; limitations upon armaments, distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, civilians and soldiers, neutral nations and belligerents, laws of engagement designed to limit war to a discernable, finite "battlefield," all were lost.

To a limited degree, some of these elements began as sinister portents of the fate of the next century in America’s Civil War.  The power of defensive positions with increasingly accurate rifles became apparent.  A war of attrition appeared, where economic resources became irresistible factors in determining success, whatever the individual valor and the quality of generalship on the weaker side.

Hence, making war on an entire society, including the civilian economic and social infrastructure of the opponent, seemed necessary.  Sherman’s "March to the Sea", cutting a miles-wide swath of civilian destruction through the heart of Confederacy, was a mild harbinger of the horror of the next century.

The First World War was an accidental war, a war none of the major powers wanted, but each feared.  Acting on those fears, responding to stereotypes of the other that they themselves had largely created,  then seemingly frightened by their own projection, each side acted upon their own self-fulfilling fearful prophecies about the other.  Political and military leadership among the participants never reached the high point of mediocrity.  Unlike the wars before and after, territorial aggrandizement didn’t seem to be a major declared factor.  Neither faction was economically advantaged.  England and Germany, each other’s major trading partner, linked historically by history, language, and by monarchial intermarriage, lurched into war driven by their own fears, a naval arms race, and finally, an alliance system which invited pugnacious smaller states to involve the major states in a war which could never result in anything but catastrophe.

A contemporary English writer noted that, "the lights are going out all over Europe, and they will not come on again in our time."  In fact, the lights never came on upon the society that entered the war.   The major imperial systems of governments that plundered the Americas fell. The genocidal slaughter suffered by  Russia and the chaos that followed birthed the Bolshevik Revolution. The economies and the societies of all the major participants were catastrophically damaged. With the advent of trench warfare and machine guns, battles occurred resulting in mass slaughter never before seen. Each state was exhausted.  After a brief respite, the world plunged into a deep depression; Germany into both depression and the greatest inflation the modern world has ever seen. The war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty was the final element necessary for a mad genius of manipulation to come to power in a Germany roiling in tumult which never came to rest since the advent of the First World War.

Unlike the First World War, the Second World War was a war of naked aggression where something much closer to battles between good and evil actually occurred. Nevertheless, the seeds of the Second World War were clearly planted in the first great struggle, rendering almost inevitable a re-engagement of most of the same powers in another war more terrible than the first.

Now, tanks and massed mobile artillery would allow for an extended front to sweep back and forth throughout Europe, devastating huge areas of the continent, sometimes several times.  Civilian casualties for the first time exceeded military losses.  The greatest crime and sin of the twentieth century occurred in this context, the holocaust: Hitler’s nearly successful effort to exterminate European Jewry.  Mass bombing of civilian centers of population occurred by day and night.  Fifty million people died, and Russia, where the ultimately critical battles of the Second World War were fought, again in the same century lost 10% of her population.  With awesome portent for any later world war, the Second World War ended with the advent of the nuclear age and the use of the only nuclear weapons ever employed in war, dropped by the United States upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A Cold War commenced as unlikely allies, forced together by the threat of Hitler’s Germany, broke apart under the fears and the naked extensions of power by the former allies against each other.  Soviet Russia, a creature of World War I, attempted to secure Eastern European border states as satellites and allies to buffer them against yet a third assault on the motherland in the same century from Germany.  The United States and its European allies saw this extension of brutal totalitarian dictatorship as an atrocity in itself, and, more threatening, a portent of an intention to extend Soviet power throughout Europe.

The natural assumption of "a state of war" is that it is a highly unnatural condition resulting from desperate and unique conditions necessitating the resort to violence, normally to be avoided.  The natural condition is that of peace.  Now, war became the "natural condition".  Whole generations of people never really knew a condition of peace.  The Cold War introduced war of the mind: the definition of our national interest and identity negatively determined by the existence of the enemy. We entered an age of perpetual war of the mind. Our advantage, our well-being, was defined as that which threatened or made more precarious the well-being of our enemy. Where previously, peace was the norm, highly  valued, sought and protected; now, war was the norm, manifest always in the mind, and frequently in hot wars between surrogates of the two super powers, punctuated by covert and overt actions of sabotage, espionage, assassination of political and military leadership of the enemy, and covert undermining of governments thought to be sympathetic with the enemy, even though legally and diplomatically a condition of peace and diplomatic relations and recognition existed between the superpower and the target state.

In Asia, the Chinese civil war, interrupted by Japanese attacks on Manchuria and then throughout China, resumed with the triumph of  Chinese Communism.  The Cold War was born, now fully worldwide, including both Asia and Europe.  This war was punctuated by dozens of hot wars.  Some of these were resumptions of wars of national liberation against colonial governments, the result of the reimposition after World War II of the last vestiges of European colonialism and imperial  power.  Other wars, most prominently Vietnam, were clearly fought between surrogates or proxies of the two superpowers which emerged from a Europe in which the other states of Europe, previously the world’s most powerful, were now exhausted shells of their former selves, at least until a later economic recovery.  The existence of nuclear, and then thermonuclear weapons, served at once as deterrents to full-scale global war, and as potential instruments of global destruction if ever, by accident, miscalculation, or design, they should be used.

A numerical nuclear arms race between the superpowers commenced.  This was joined by a technological arms race which always threatened to allow one or the other superpower somehow to leap beyond the opponent and tempt one or the other to accept the suicidal proposition that such advantage might allow one side actually to fight and "win" a nuclear war. Finally, a horizontal nuclear arms race began among the previously non-nuclear states, extending outward the number of nuclear states able to trigger a nuclear conflagration.

Finally, the collapse of the Soviet Union under the weight of its own monstrous bureaucratic and totalitarian structure allowed respite.  With the decision in November 1989 of President Gorbachev not to intervene in genuine national uprisings in Eastern Europe, as his predecessors had done so brutally decades before in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Soviet empire crumbled in all of Eastern Europe; the Berlin wall fell; and the contagion of freedom swept through the Soviet Union, ending the last great imperial system to survive World War I.  The century of total war was at its end.

Once started, each of these wars had to be fought. The best human decision-makers could not reasonably control the past, given their knowledge. The momentum of hatred founded in utter lie had been energized and would run its genetic course. The roots of 20th century military conflict stemming from politically-based ideological hatred were sown in war guilt and wallowed in the pain of an economic depression.

The Century of Total War cost uncountable hundreds of millions of lives and resulted in the political, military, and industrial superstructure to facilitate wars over ideology. This superstructure now begs to be dismantled and its energies and funding redirected into defensive functions and peace-keeping operations.

The Nature of Human War

Throughout recorded history, wars have been given intellectual justification in the creation of a myth of inherent distinction of rights to freedom among groups of intelligent beings. We have fought wars because we could not communicate with the "enemy". We have fought wars over the color of skin. We have fought wars over cultural rituals. We have fought wars over political structures. We've fought wars over rivers, islands, mines, oil, water, and seas. We have fought wars over economics. And we have fought wars for no identifiable reason at all other than vague fear.

But the most common ideology employed to justify war is the precisely the one least able to do so: faith. We have fought wars over every religious difference imaginable, and yet a rational mind strains to find scriptural basis for any religion's god declaring an offensive warmaking intent, however confidently invoked by "inspired" leaders. It is in mis-interpretations of religious teachings on every nation's part that humanity has killed the most combatants and civilians alike. Had there been integrity to the history of core spiritual teachings rather than interpretive dogma, no wars would ever have been fought.

But, perhaps only the fighting of these frightening wars, and the cumulative personal experiences of great loss, can now equip humanity with the ability to see the ugly truth of this.

When we do one day discover or receive the means to voyage to other worlds across the heavens, to touch other verdant continents and valleys and oceans, will we not engage and enforce the most solemn "prime directive" to intelligently interact with a foreign biosphere? We in the United States of America must remember that it was our ancestors who came from Europe to plunder the Americas.  The lessons of what happened must never be forgotten.
 

An End to Slavery?

If holocaust and war are the relatively loud and declared crimes of humanity, then humanity's most heinous silent cultural choice has been the toleration of enslavement. Both science and religion have taught us nothing if not this fact.

When Western humans think of slavery, they often envision slavery involving blacks and native peoples in the Americas between the latter part of the 15th century during early European colonization, up to the late 19th century and the end of the US Civil War. Slavery was hardly unique to the United States, the New World, or what is considered western civilization and culture. Nor was it restricted to this time period.

It is likely that indentured servitude has been a part of world society as long as war and trade have existed between differing peoples. It is well known that the ancient Chinese, Indians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs practiced some form of slavery.  The indigenous peoples of the Americas and the coastal regions of West Africa practiced slavery as well. These practices were supported worldwide for centuries, the last governments officially abandoning slavery as recently as 1962.

The definition of slavery varies with culture and time period.  These differences have made cross-cultural and temporal studies of slavery difficult. Nevertheless, there are attributes common to all slave-owning cultures and to all definitions of slavery.

One common point of view in slave societies is that ownership of one person by another is perfectly right and natural. Another is that a slave is something less than human, a chattel similar to a farm animal or pet, to be used and disposed of as needed. Western civilization best exemplifies this. Ownership of human chattel was a central characteristic of the slave society’s socio-economic way of life and cultural development. It is remarkable that an institution that existed for thousands of years should in little more than a century be abolished and considered wrong in the eyes of God and the laws of man. This is a profound change, which gives hope for our continued social evolution.

The first known western slave society was the Hellenic culture of Athens in during the 6th through 3rd century BCE .  In the earliest times period, the slave population was composed of prisoners taken in battle, criminals, Athenians  (often children) bartered for debt, abandoned children.

Kidnapping, especially of women, was common. Only the poorest and most wretched of Athenians were without slaves. Slaves performed a variety of tasks. On the estates of the wealthy, they were household servants; farmers, estate managers, and tutors. House servants were typically all under the direction of the woman of the house, the wife or eldest daughter of the owner. Some of these houses had as many as 10-20 slaves.

Slaves were the artisans and craftsmen of Athens.  They also served many bureaucratic functions such as scribes, clerks and accountants.  At one time slaves administered the police and treasury.  Some estimates suggest that slaves accounted for close to one third of the Athenian population.

In 570 BC. The leader Solon, faced with a crisis in the Athenian economy, instituted laws that cancelled debts of the enslaved and repealed the laws allowing debtors and their families to be sold into slavery.  From this point on, Athenians relied on non-Greeks for slaves, importing them from around the Aegean through regular trade. During their brief period of imperialism the Athenians used more direct methods. In 416 BC, an expedition landed on Melos, a neutral Aegean and sacked it, executing all men of military age and selling the women into slavery. As justification, they said:

"We believe that Heaven, and we know that men, by a natural law, always rule where they are stronger. We did not make that law nor were we the first to act on it; we found it existing and it will exist forever, after we are gone; and now we know that you and anyone else as strong as we are would do as we do."
-- Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War 5.105

The life of a slave was not easy. While there were laws that protected slaves against the vilest abuses, slaves were not considered citizens. Non-Greek slaves were barely considered human, though there was the notion that they might be raised from their baseness. Their masters chose their names.  Slaves were not allowed to marry, although they developed a pseudo-marriage known as countubernium that had no legal status.

Children born of female slaves were automatically slaves.  It was not unusual for criminals, the mentally disturbed, and slaves who have fallen out of favor with their masters to be selected to crew ships or work mines.  This was hazardous work and often ended in the death of the slave.

In contrast to how they were treated under Athenian law, slaves were a principal source of the prosperity of Athens.  This provided leisure time for the aristocrats to develop what we now call  “the roots of Western civilization”. Athenian imperial power would be broken at the end of the Peloponnesian War in 371 BC. Their social system would continue for another forty years, until conquest by Phillip of Macedonia at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 put an end to their way of life.

The Roman civilization between about the 2nd century BC and the 4th century AD would be the next western culture to develop a slave society.

Early Rome was little more than a collection of farmers, craftsmen and laborers which developed into a loose knit society.  The conflict with Carthage and the result of the Punic and Greek wars would change all that. By the end of  202 BC, Carthage was beaten, with all its territories from North Africa to Spain subjugated and turned into Roman Provinces.

The Greeks, who had aligned themselves with Carthage while Hannibal laid waste to much of Italy, were subjugated and enslaved.  When Carthage later defied Rome’s order to move its inhabitants inland, the entire city was put to the sword. The city was leveled, and surrounding lands salted to insure that Carthage would never rise again. The few that were spared were ushered off in chains. Rome had gained an accidental empire.

With much of the farms and towns outside the Rome destroyed.  Many once-able farmers and artisans found themselves without work, and no way to support themselves. But most of the citizens who had stayed within the walls of Rome were vastly unaffected and saw the destruction as an economic opportunity. Merchants and aristocrats quickly bought up the land that had been ravaged. In the conquered lands, the military and their sponsors did the same. They had no way of working the vast acreage themselves. They wouldn’t have to. There were many able hands available.

There were a number of ways people became slaves.  Thieves, debtors, murderers and those who avoided military service would end up as slaves. If a child’s mother was a slave, then the child was a slave as well. Anyone captured and taken prisoner by a hostile people, regardless of citizenship, would become a slave.

Piracy, kidnapping and the selling of newborns were also common, though the latter died out in the later Republic as the number of foreign slaves increased. Like Athens, Romans preferred to use foreign slaves when they were available. People who were far from home, with no family, a different look and languages stood out and were easier to capture if they escaped. It is a pattern that would be repeated in the Americas.

The hardest labors were in the mines, as naval oarsmen and in rural field labor. Most of this grueling work was done in chains and perceived slackers were quickly beaten or killed outright. Slaves also served as servants, cooks, musicians and artisans. Dozens would be maintained to run the households of the aristocracy. In the cities, public slaves were hired as bureaucrats and functionaries, tending to the needs of running the city.

As the empire developed, more and more of the population were considered slaves. By the 1st century, it is estimated that a third of the population of Rome were slaves. The ratio in the large estates was even larger, sometimes ranging between five or ten slaves to each free person.

Romans developed an early fear that their slaves were going to revolt and slaughter their masters, due to growing numbers and their masters' brutal treatment. Thus, any hint of uprising would be dealt with swiftly and brutally. When the Spartacus rebellion was crushed in 71 BCE, over 6,000 slaves were crucified and placed along the Appian Way as a reminder of what awaited the rebellious slave.

No act was too small to take notice.  In 61 BCE Pedanius Secundus was killed by one of his slaves. As a result, all 400 of his slaves were put to death in order to frighten others from following the example.

In the later years, as the empire began to collapse, external slaves became harder to come by. Roman slave society ended as the slaves were legally converted into coloni, or serfs who were tied to the land. This system would last in the West until the end of the middle ages.

But the best known and documented of slave societies were those of the so-called New World. At the beginning of the 16th century, the Portuguese and Spanish were moving into the Americas and establishing their colonies. Their initial quests were to become rich mining gold and silver, but following 1645, the explosive demand for sugar shifted their focus to growing sugar cane.  The work was highly demanding and required extreme amounts of labor. European diseases were ravaging the native populations and the harsh climate took its toll on Europeans colonists.

The Europeans found the perfect solution: African slaves. During the years between 1500 and 1867 when the slave trade was abolished, it is estimated that 9-10 million African slaves were shipped to the Americas. At least another 2-3 million did not survive enslavement.

About 41% went to Brazil, 47% to the Spanish Americas, British and French Caribbean, 5% to the Dutch, Swedish and Danish colonies and 7% for what eventually became the United States.

About 2/3 of all slaves shipped over ended up in sugar colonies. At their time, sugar plantations were considered among the world’s most profitable enterprises with returns ranging from about 10 to 20%.

At first, transport of slaves to the New World was primarily a Portuguese enterprise.  They had mapped a significant part of the African coast as early as the mid 15th century in their search for gold and a route to the orient. They soon found that slaves were a much more valuable commodity. At first they raided the African coastlines for slaves, but it became clear they could do much better by trading with the coastal tribes.

In 1445, they established their first base. Slaves were captured inland by Africans and brought to the coast for sale.  This usually consisted mostly of males, the females and young often being kept for lineage incorporation. The slaves were exchanged for weapons and exotic goods, the former of which gave the native slavers significant advantage over their rivals.

Over the years, a vast and complex slave network developed to feed the demands for labor, depopulating whole regions of Africa and decimating entire tribes. The slaves were examined, shackled, and shipped off for work in the New World. The system developed by the Portuguese would serve the Dutch, Spanish and English just as well. To the slavers, their goods were just a different type of cargo, similar to cattle, hogs or any other economic livestock.

In most of the New World, the Africans grew to vastly outnumber the Europeans. On some of the Caribbean islands, the number of slaves ranged from more than a third in Cuba to some 90 percent in Jamaica, Antigua and Grenada. In 1800, almost half the population of Brazil was slaves, though that number decreased rapidly with the end of the slave trade and a program of free immigration by the government to draw in more Europeans.  Of all the proto-American slave societies, only that of the southern United States had a population where the numbers of whites was initially similar to blacks.

While slaves were first brought to Virginia in 1619, the English mostly relied on indentured servants rather than slaves. Tobacco was initially the profitable crop of the south, and did not lend itself well to the work-gang methodology used around the Caribbean.  The number of slaves an owner had was usually small, rarely more than a handfull, except on the largest plantations.

Women were bought as domestics and nannies while men more commonly worked the fields. All that would change in the latter half of the 18th century.  The opening for settlement of the New Southern States of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana made huge areas of land available for cultivation, bringing with it a huge need for labor. In 1793 Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin which would revolutionize the processing of cotton for use in textiles, increasing the demand (and profits) in cotton ten fold over night.

Planting and cultivation of cotton did indeed lend itself to the gang methodology. Hence, the pattern that developed the huge sugar cane plantations of the New World would be played out again in the New South, but this time with cotton. By  1850, nearly two thirds of the slaves on plantations were engaged in the production of cotton.

An advantage of cotton was that it could be grown profitably on less land, and required fewer skilled laborers and artisans for processing. The labor was less rigorous, some of which could be easily performed by men as well as women. The ratio of men to women was closer in the United States, more like 3-2 versus anywhere from 8 or 20 to one in other parts of the new world, which helped create a boom in slave population.

By 1825, it is estimated that the southern United States accounted for more than 35% of all the slaves in the New World, the majority of whom were at least second generation slaves.  The profits from the sale and maintenance of slaves coupled with proceeds from textiles were one of the most profitable enterprises of the day.

It wasn’t until the beginning of the 18th century that the emerging social, religious and political systems would call the legitimacy of slavery into question.  While most Western Europeans considered the notion of enslaving other Europeans barbaric, this notion only covered people who shared the religions and culture of Europe.

Indians, Africans, Asians, and other supposed cultural inferiors were excluded.  Some thinkers in Scotland, France, England and America voiced strong misgivings about the handling of Africans, but their objections were noise in a hurricane. A few looked beyond simply the slave issue at the impact the institution had on the social system.

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this…and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious pecularities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”

-- Thomas Jefferson

History and precedent were on the side of the slavers, and opportunity itself can be a harsh mistress. But things were beginning to change. Some began to open themselves to listening to others and hearing about alternative perspectives. What was it like to be a slave? How did the slaves see life? Fredrick Douglass made it perfectly clear that what American Blacks saw was considerably different than what most saw in this land of opportunity.

“What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

-- Frederick Douglass - July 4, 1852

What is amazing is that in the span of just over a century, the unassailable institution of slavery which was accepted without question would be outlawed in the entire western world.

The Society of Friends (Quakers) in both England and Pennsylvania were some of the first to take action against slavery of any kind. In 1774 they voted for expulsion of any member participating in the slave trade and in 1776, required any members holding slaves to emancipate them or be expelled. Pennsylvania adopted a gradual emancipation program in 1780 to free all children of slaves born after 1780. Rhode Island and Connecticut followed suit three years later and this trend was more or less adopted by most of the northern states.

In 1787, formation in England of the “Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade”, a non-sectarian organization originally made up most of the Quakers. They started by circulating pamphlets and preaching. Their influence grew first with the masses and then with parties in Parliament that eventually lead to the passage of the 1807 Act to abolish the slave trade.

The United States followed suit. Sweden and Holland agreed to abolish the trade in 1813 & 1814 respectively. France and Spain paid lip service to the agreement while, with Portugal, they continued the trade in earnest. Britain’s naval muscle was unchallenged, and they took it upon themselves to press agreements with other countries for them to patrol the West Coast of Africa.

In 1841 the Quintuple Treaty is signed under which England, France, Russia, Prussia and Austria agree to mutual search of vessels on the high seas to suppress the slave trade. Ships caught trafficking in slaves would be confiscated, their crews and owners tried according to the laws of their nation.

Between 1820 and 1870, the British captured some 1600 slave ships. The British presence increased the price and risk of acquiring slaves from Africa. Brazil, one of the largest importers of African slaves acquiesced in 1851.  Cuba was the last of the New World to give in, yet in 1867, they too folded.  The Atlantic Slave trade was over.

With the exception of the Southern United States, where the slave trade had ended, the end of slavery soon followed. By 1830, more than a third of the blacks in the New World were free. In the Spanish and French-founded country, only 25% were still slaves. Slavery was abolished in the old Spanish Americas between 1824-1850), all British colonies in 1838, French and Danish Colonies in 1848, Dutch colonies by 1863 and the United States in 1865. Brazil, one of the first countries to begin the slave trade, was the last to abolish it in 1888.

The legalized dealing in human flesh was finished.

So in little more than a century, societies round the world have taken significant steps in ending an institution that has been with us for as long as we’ve considered ourselves civilized.

This is not meant to imply that holding other humans as chattel has by any means vanished in the world.  Slavery is still practiced, albeit more discretely, in remote corners of the world.  Many cultures still consider women and children little more than property, subject to the will of their husbands, fathers or male siblings. Race, sex religion and ethnicity are still excuses for hate, violence and conflict.

And the world's economy is now dangerously close to enslavement by yet a different human classification system - the zeros and ones stored as magnetized bits on a hard disk computer holding our bank account balances.

The important lesson taken from our progress with slavery is this: we as a world society have the ability to change and grow.  We can move and grow toward tolerance of others if we choose.  We’ve developed missiles and weapons of mass destruction.  Scientists have developed specialized biological and chemical weapons capable of decimating populations. The disenfranchised will eventually have access to sources of retribution like they’ve never had before.

Wisdom would suggest that we find solutions for living together and soon.
 
 

Endangered Technology

"The conveniences and comforts of humanity in general will be linked up by one mechanism, which will produce comforts and conveniences beyond human imagination.  But the smallest mistake will bring the whole mechanism to a certain collapse.  In this way the end of the world will be brought about."

-- Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, 1922 (Sufi Prophet)
 

"Y2K" has become an increasingly frequent placeholder in the headlines of the world, in reference to the forthcoming challenge we face looming throughout the information systems that run modern lives at the year 2000. The opinions on the seriousness of the crisis run the gamut from "smoke in the theater" overblown way out of proportion, to the end of civilization as we know it.

One of the brightests futurists I have come across is a man by the name of John Petersen, President of the Arlington Institute. An expert in the emerging discipline of scenario planning, Mr. Petersen has written extensively on Y2K. Early last year, he wrote a seminal article that can be credited for raising the consciousness of tens of thousands of people, helping to motivate action to prevent crisis and deal effectively with whatever the severity of circumstance that may present itself.

Some excerpts follow from his article on the Year 2000 crises...

"The millennial sun will first rise over human civilization in the independent republic of Kiribati, a group of some thirty low lying coral islands in the Pacific Ocean that straddle the equator and the International Date Line, halfway between Hawaii and Australia. This long awaited sunrise marks the dawn of the year 2000, and quite possibly, the onset of unheralded disruptions in life as we know it in many parts of the globe. Kiribati’s 81,000 Micronesians may observe nothing different about this dawn; they only received TV in 1989.

However, for those who live in a world that relies on satellites, air, rail and ground transportation, manufacturing plants, electricity, heat, telephones, or TV, when the calendar clicks from ’99 to ’00, we will experience a true millennial shift. As the sun moves westward on January 1, 2000, as the date shifts silently within millions of computerized systems, we will begin to experience our computer-dependent world in an entirely new way. We will finally see the extent of the networked and interdependent processes we have created.

At the stroke of midnight, the new millennium heralds the greatest challenge to modern society that we have yet to face as a planetary community. Whether we experience this as chaos or social transformation will be influenced by what we do immediately.

We are describing the year 2000 problem, known as Y2K (K signifying 1000.) Nicknamed at first "The Millennial Bug," increasing sensitivity to the magnitude of the impending crisis has escalated it to "The Millennial Bomb." The problem begins as a simple technical error. Large mainframe computers more than ten years old were not programmed to handle a four digit year. Sitting here now, on the threshold of the year 2000, it seems incomprehensible that computer programmers and microchip designers didn't plan for it.

But when these billions of lines of computer code were being written, computer memory was very expensive. Remember when a computer only had 16 kilobytes of RAM? To save storage space, most programmers allocated only two digits to a year. 1993 is ‘93’ in data files, 1917 is ’17.’ These two-digit dates exist on millions of files used as input to millions of applications. (The era in which this code was written was described by one programming veteran as "the Wild West." Programmers did whatever was required to get a product up and working; no one even thought about standards.)

The same thing happened in the production of microchips as recently as three years ago. Microprocessors and other integrated circuits are often just sophisticated calculators that count and do math. They count many things: fractions of seconds, days, inches, pounds, degrees, lumens, etc. Many chips that had a time function designed into them were only structured for this century. And when the date goes from '99 to '00 both they and the legacy software that has not been fixed will think it is still the 20th century -- not 2000, but 1900.
 

Peter de Jager, who has been actively studying the problem and its implications since 1991, explains the computer math calculation: "I was born in 1955. If I ask the computer to calculate how old I am today, it subtracts 55 from 98 and announces that I’m 43. . . But what happens in the year 2000? The computer will subtract 55 from 00 and will state that I am minus 55 years old. This error will affect any calculation that produces or uses time spans. . . . If you want to sort by date (e.g., 1965, 1905, 1966), the resulting sequence would be 1905, 1965, 1966. However, if you add in a date record such as 2015, the computer, which reads only the last two digits of the date, sees 05, 15, 65, 66 and sorts them incorrectly. These are just two types of calculations that are going to produce garbage."

The calculation problem explains why the computer system at Marks & Spencer department store in London recently destroyed tons of food during the process of doing a long term forecast. The computer read 2002 as 1902. Instead of four more years of shelf life, the computer calculated that this food was ninety-six years old. It ordered it thrown out. A similar problem happened recently in the U.S. at the warehouse of a freeze-dried food manufacturer.

But Y2K is not about wasting good food. Date calculations affect millions more systems than those that deal with inventories, interest rates, or insurance policies. Every major aspect of our modern infrastructure has systems and equipment that rely on such calculations to perform their functions. We are dependent on computerized systems that contain date functions to effectively manage defense, transportation, power generation, manufacturing, telecommunications, finance, government, education, healthcare.
 

The list is longer, but the picture is clear. We have created a world whose efficient functioning in all but the poorest and remotest areas is dependent on computers. It doesn’t matter whether you personally use a computer, or that most people around the world don’t even have telephones. The world’s economic and political infrastructures rely on computers. And not isolated computers. We have created dense networks of reliance around the globe. We are networked together for economic and political purposes. Whatever happens in one part of the network has an impact on other parts of the network. We have created not only a computer-dependent society, but an interdependent planet.

We already have frequent experiences with how fragile these systems are, and how failure cascades through a networked system. While each of these systems relies on millions of lines of code that detail the required processing, they handle their routines in serial fashion. Any next step depends on the preceding step. This serial nature makes systems, no matter their size, vulnerable to even the slightest problem anywhere in the system. In 1990, ATT’s long distance system experienced repeated failures. At that time, it took two million lines of computer code to keep the system operational. But just three lines of faulty code brought down these millions of lines of code.

And these systems are lean; redundancies are eliminated in the name of efficiency. This leanness also makes the system highly vulnerable. In May of this year, 90% of all pagers in the U.S. crashed for a day or longer because of the failure of one satellite. Late in 1997, the Internet could not deliver email to the appropriate addresses because bad information from their one and only central source corrupted their servers.

Compounding the fragility of these systems is the fact that we can’t see the extent of our interconnectedness. The networks that make modern life possible are masked by the technology. We only see the interdependencies when the relationships are disrupted -- when a problem develops elsewhere and we notice that we too are having problems. When Asian markets failed last year, most U.S. businesses denied it would have much of an impact on our economy. Only recently have we felt the extent to which Asian economic woes affect us directly. Failure in one part of a system always exposes the levels of interconnectedness that otherwise go unnoticed-we suddenly see how our fates are linked together. We see how much we are participating with one another, sustaining one another.

Modern business is completely reliant on networks. Companies have vendors, suppliers, customers, outsourcers (all, of course, managed by computerized data bases.) For Y2K, these highly networked ways of doing business create a terrifying scenario. The networks mean that no one system can protect itself from Y2K failures by just attending to its own internal systems. General Motors, which has been working with extraordinary focus and diligence to bring their manufacturing plants up to Year 2000 compliance, (based on their assessment that they were facing catastrophe,) has 100,000 suppliers worldwide. Bringing their internal systems into compliance seems nearly impossible, but what then do they do with all those vendors who supply parts? GM experiences production stoppages whenever one key supplier goes on strike. What is the potential number of delays and shutdowns possible among 100,000 suppliers?

The nature of systems and our history with them paints a chilling picture of the Year 2000. We do not know the extent of the failures, or how they will effect us. But we do know with great certainty that as computers around the globe respond or fail when their calendars record 2000, we will see clearly the extent of our interdependence. We will see the ways in which we have woven the modern world together through our technology.

Until quite recently, it’s been difficult to interest most people in the Year 2000 problem. Those who are publicizing the problem (the World Wide Web is the source of the most extensive information on Y2K,) exclaim about the general lack of awareness, or even the deliberate blindness that greets them. In our own investigation among many varieties of organizations and citizens, we’ve noted two general categories of response.

In the first category, people acknowledge the problem but view it as restricted to a small number of businesses, or a limited number of consequences. People believe that Y2K affects only a few industries-primarily finance and insurance-seemingly because they deal with dates on policies and accounts. Others note that their organization is affected by Y2K, but still view it as a well-circumscribed issue that is being addressed by their information technology department. What’s common to these comments is that people hold Y2K as a narrowly-focused, bounded problem. They seem oblivious to the networks in which they participate, or to the systems and interconnections of modern life.

The second category of reactions reveals the great collective faith in technology and science. People describe Y2K as a technical problem and then enthusiastically state that human ingenuity and genius always finds a way to solve these type of problems. Ecologist David Orr has noted that one of the fundamental beliefs of our time is that technology can be trusted to solve any problem it creates. If a software engineer goes on TV claiming to have created a program that can correct all systems, he is believed. After all, he’s just what we’ve been expecting.

And then there is the uniqueness of the Year 2000 problem. At no other time in history have we been forced to deal with a deadline that is absolutely non-negotiable. In the past, we could always hope for a last minute deal, or rely on round-the-clock bargaining, or pray for an eleventh hour savior. We have never had to stare into the future knowing the precise date when the crisis would materialize. In a bizarre fashion, the inevitability of this confrontation seems to add to people’s denial of it. They know the date when the extent of the problem will surface, and choose not to worry about it until then.

However, this denial is quickly dissipating. Information on Y2K is expanding exponentially, matched by escalation in adjectives used to describe it. More public figures are speaking out. This is critically important. With each calendar tick of this time, alternatives diminish and potential problems grow. We must develop strategies for preparing ourselves at all levels to deal with whatever Y2K presents to us with the millennium dawn.

As individuals, nations, and as a global society, do we have a choice as to how we might respond to Y2K, however problems materialize? The question of alternative social responses lies at the outer edges of the interlocking circles of technology and system relationships. At present, potential societal reactions receive almost no attention. But we firmly believe that it is the central most important place to focus public attention and individual ingenuity.

Y2K is a technology-induced problem, but it will not and cannot be solved by technology. It creates societal problems that can only be solved by humans. We must begin to address potential social responses. We need to be engaged in this discourse within our organizations, our communities, and across the traditional boundaries of competition and national borders. Without such planning, we will slide into the Year 2000 as hapless victims of our technology.

Even where there is some recognition of the potential disruptions or chaos that Y2K might create, there’s a powerful dynamic of secrecy preventing us from engaging in these conversations. Leaders don’t want to panic their citizens. Employees don’t want to panic their bosses. Corporations don’t want to panic investors. Lawyers don’t want their clients to confess to anything. But as psychotherapist and information systems consultant Dr. Douglass Carmichael has written:

Those who want to hush the problem ("Don’t talk about it, people will panic", and "We don’t know for sure.") are having three effects. First, they are preventing a more rigorous investigation of the extent of the problem. Second, they are slowing down the awareness of the intensity of the problem as currently understood and the urgency of the need for solutions, given the current assessment of the risks. Third, they are making almost certain a higher degree of ultimate panic, in anger, under conditions of shock.

Haven’t we yet learned the consequences of secrecy? When people are kept in the dark, or fed misleading information, their confidence in leaders quickly erodes. In the absence of real information, people fill the information vacuum with rumors and fear. And whenever we feel excluded, we have no choice but to withdraw and focus on self-protective measures. As the veil of secrecy thickens, the capacity for public discourse and shared participation in solution finding disappears. People no longer believe anything or anybody-we become unavailable, distrusting and focused only on self-preservation. Our history with the problems created by secrecy has led CEO Norman Augustine to advise leaders in crisis to: "Tell the truth and tell it fast."

Behaviors induced by secrecy are not the only human responses available. Time and again we observe a much more positive human response during times of crisis. When an earthquake strikes, or a bomb goes off, or a flood or fire destroys a community, people respond with astonishing capacity and effectiveness. They use any available materials to save and rescue, they perform acts of pure altruism, they open their homes to one another, they finally learn who their neighbors are.

We’ve interviewed many people who participated in the aftermath of a disaster, and as they report on their experiences, it is clear that their participation changed their lives. They discovered new capacities in themselves and in their communities. They exceeded all expectations. They were surrounded by feats of caring and courage. They contributed to getting systems restored with a speed that defied all estimates.

When chaos strikes, there’s simply no time for secrecy; leaders have no choice but to engage every willing soul. And the field for improvisation is wide open-no emergency preparedness drill ever prepares people for what they actually end up doing. Individual initiative and involvement are essential. Yet surprisingly, in the midst of conditions of devastation and fear, people report how good they feel about themselves and their colleagues. These crisis experiences are memorable because the best of us becomes visible and available. We’ve observed this in America, and in Bangladesh, where the poorest of the poor responded to the needs of their most destitute neighbors rather than accepting relief for themselves.

As we sit staring into the unknown dimensions of a global crisis whose timing is non-negotiable, what responses are available to us as a human community? An effective way to explore this question is to develop potential scenarios of possible social behaviors. Scenario planning is an increasingly accepted technique for identifying the spectrum of possible futures that are most important to an organization or society. In selecting among many possible futures, it is most useful to look at those that account for the greatest uncertainty and the greatest impact.

For Y2K, David Isenberg, (a former AT&T telecommunications expert, now at Isen.Com) has identified the two variables which seem obvious - the range of technical failures from isolated to multiple, and the potential social responses, from chaos to coherence. Both variables are critical and uncertain and are arrayed as a pair of crossing axes. When displayed in this way, four different general futures emerge.

In the upper left quadrant, if technical failures are isolated and society doesn’t respond to those, nothing of significance will happen. Isenberg labels this the "Official Future" because it reflects present behavior on the part of leaders and organizations.

The upper right quadrant describes a time where technical failures are still isolated, but the public responds to these with panic, perhaps fanned by the media or by stonewalling leaders. Termed "A Whiff of Smoke," the situation is analogous to the panic caused in a theater by someone who smells smoke and spreads an alarm, even though it is discovered that there is no fire. This world could evolve from a press report that fans the flames of panic over what starts as a minor credit card glitch (for example), and, fueled by rumors turns nothing into a major social problem with runs on banks, etc.

The lower quadrants describe far more negative scenarios. "Millennial Apocalypse" presumes large-scale technical failure coupled with social breakdown as the organizational, political and economic systems come apart. The lower left quadrant, "Human Spirit" posits a society that, in the face of clear adversity, calls on each of us to collaborate in solving the problems of breakdown.

Since essentially we are almost out of time and resources for preventing widespread Y2K failures, a growing number of observers believe that the only plausible future scenarios worth contemplating are those in the lower half of the matrix. The major question before us is how will society respond to what is almost certain to be widespread and cascading technological failures?

What is a possible natural evolution of the problem? Early, perhaps even in early ’99, the press could start something bad long before it was clear how serious the problem was and how society would react to it. There could be an interim scenario where a serious technical problem turned into a major social problem from lack of adequate positive social response. This "Small Theatre Fire" future could be the kind of situation where people overreact and trample themselves trying to get to the exits from a small fire that is routinely extinguished.

If the technical situation is bad, a somewhat more ominous situation could evolve. Government, exerting no clear positive leadership and seeing no alternative to chaos, cracks down so as not to lose control (a common historical response to social chaos has been for the government to intervene in non-democratic, sometimes brutal fashion). "Techno-fascism" is a plausible scenario -- governments and large corporations would intervene to try to contain the damage -- rather than build for the future. This dictatorial approach would be accompanied by secrecy about the real extent of the problem and ultimately fueled by the cries of distress, prior to 2000, from a society that has realized its major systems are about to fail and that it is too late to do anything about it.

Obviously, the scenario worth working towards is "Human Spirit," a world where the best of human creativity is enabled and the highest common good becomes the objective. In this world we all work together, developing a very broad, powerful, synergistic, self-organizing force focused on determining what humanity should be doing in the next 13 months to plan for the aftermath of the down stroke of Y2K.

This requires that we understand Y2K not as a technical problem, but as a systemic, worldwide event that can only be resolved by new social relationships. All of us need to become very wise and very engaged very fast and develop entirely new processes for working together. Systems issues cannot be resolved by hiding behind traditional boundaries or by clinging to competitive strategies. Systems require collaboration and the dissolution of existing boundaries. Our only hope for healthy responses to Y2K-induced failures is to participate together in new collaborative relationships.

At present, individuals and organizations are being encouraged to protect themselves, to focus on solving "their" problem. In a system’s world, this is insane. The problems are not isolated, therefore no isolated responses will work. The longer we pursue strategies for individual survival, the less time we have to create any viable, systemic solutions. None of the boundaries we’ve created across industries, organizations, communities, or nation states give us any protection in the face of Y2K.

We must stop the messages of fragmentation now and focus resources and leadership on figuring out how to engage everyone, at all levels, in all systems.

As threatening as Y2K is, it also gives us the unparalleled opportunity to figure out new and simplified ways of working together. GM’s chief information officer, Ralph Szygenda, has said that Y2K is the cruelest trick ever played on us by technology, but that it also represents a great opportunity for change. It demands that we let go of traditional boundaries and roles in the pursuit of new, streamlined systems, ones that are less complex than the entangled ones that have evolved over the past thirty years.

There’s an interesting lesson here about involvement that comes from the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Just a few weeks prior the bombing, agencies from all over the city conducted an emergency preparedness drill as part of normal civil defense practice. They did not prepare themselves for a bomb blast, but they did work together on other disaster scenarios. The most significant accomplishment of the drill was to create an invisible infrastructure of trusting relationships.

When the bomb went off, that infrastructure displayed itself as an essential resource--people could work together easily, even in the face of horror. Many lives were saved and systems were restored at an unprecedented rate because people from all over the community worked together so well.

But there’s more to this story. One significant player had been excluded from the preparedness drill, and that was the FBI. No one thought they’d ever be involved in a Federal matter. To this day, people in Oklahoma City speak resentfully of the manner in which the FBI came in, pushed them aside, and offered no explanations for their behavior. In the absence of trusting relationships, some form of techno-fascism is the only recourse. Elizabeth Dole, as president of the American Red Cross commented: "The midst of a disaster is the poorest possible time to establish new relationships and to introduce ourselves to new organizations . . . . When you have taken the time to build rapport, then you can make a call at 2 a.m., when the river’s rising and expect to launch a well-planned, smoothly conducted response."

The scenario of communities and organizations working together in new ways demands a very different and immediate response not only from leaders but from each of us. "
 

The Major Crises of the Our Generation

As John Petersen cogently suggests, Y2K is a serious challenge, one that must be addressed at all levels of society, across the world. I also believe that Y2K will be conquered by humanity. Thanks to many loud and proactive stands taken by futurists and clear-minded technology thinkers, a lot has