Rising from the Phoenix's Flames
By Emily Spence
07/20/07 "ICH"
-- --
Governments come and go. Whole civilizations
disappear into the sands of time and new
ones rise up to take their place. In this
sense, they're all like an image of the
Phoenix, a dramatic archetypal creature
consumed in flames and rising out of its own
ashes only to be burned once more. Universal
and spanning all cultures, its
mythic bird-like visage is found again and
again, while symbolizing the regenerative
properties in healing, the cyclical nature
of seasons and an awareness that each
generation disappears and, out of its
demise, each subsequent one is
born. Particularly as a sign of triumph
over hardship when cities are destroyed and
rebuilt (i.e., San Francisco after the 1906
earthquake and Atlanta after major fires in
1864 and 1917), the Phoenix well serves as a
reminder that recurring adversity can be
overcome with effort.
Yes, individual lives and history, as a
whole, have a way of repeating themselves
over and over with the same themes and
circumstances surfacing yet another
time. Nonetheless the Phoenix, in a
sense, is less apt a model than would be an
evolutionary one. This is because
individuals, species and whole empires
verify, more often than not, the paradoxical
truism, "the only constant is change."
Indeed, advancement requires it. As such,
evolutionary principles, despite whatever
some Creationists allege to the contrary,
are the driving force behind everything in
both its current and ever new
configurations. The reorganizing principles
are present whether on the cellular level
or, analogously, in more complex social
systems wherein, for example, each section
of a community provides a function and,
indirectly, shapes the overall drift of the
commonwealth in its entirety. In this sense,
those elements that serve to damage the
whole organization are in constant need of
being checked and, if extremely detrimental,
eliminated.
Thus, the latest efforts to remove R. Cheney
and G. Bush from office through impeachment
are exemplary. A growing number of
Americans have simply had enough of the
increasing death toll in the Middle East,
budget deficit, indifference to problems at
home (such as the huge population still
displaced from Hurricane Katrina) and other
signs that the current administration
represents a deep pathology needing, like a
cancer, to be routed out of the body
politic. In short, they are becoming
increasingly aware that the op
US leaders are dangerous to both America and
the world at large.
At the same time, the act of eradicating
whatever is needed to be ended to
serve our furtherance comprises one of the
underlying shaping factors in evolution. It
is the reason for some extinction, vaccines,
pesticides and wars. It is the reason that
oceans are over-fished, and other groups
(whether member of different species or our
own) are slaughtered when competing against
ours for resources. Likewise, it is the
reason that overall biodiversity is
vanishing at an alarming rate [1].
Instead, there will be ever more Burger
King, Pizza Hut, CVS, WalMart, Radio Shack,
Staples, Best Buy, Starbucks, Target, BJ's,
Duncan Donuts and other franchises littering
the landscape. This is because these, not
biodiversity, are what the
masses covet. Moreover, their wants (not
whatever is necessarily best for people)
drive the economy.
With our burgeoning population and the
push for increasing wealth on the parts
of entrepreneurs -- desires, cravings and
yearnings for all sorts of
goods provide more than ample incentive
for business owners to expand the market
for monopolizing chains. In such a way, our
world is gradually being transformed while
uniformity in vistas and provisions, whether
in Shanghai or Boston, is all but assured.
Besides the annihilation of whatever or
whomever gets in the way of the
collective desires for the dominant group, a
second dynamic comes into play from an
evolutionary angle. This is that we do not
kill off whatever is serviceable to us as
long as it is of use. For this reason, herds
of wooly sheep are maintained and
deliberately made to reproduce, as are milk
cows. Slaves (for which there are 27 million
worldwide) and indentured servants are kept
alive [2], and wage earners are given a
living wage AS LONG AS they are not easily
replaced at less cost [3].
In addition, a third variable
propelling life onward is that we tend to,
in a descending order of propinquity, foster
those people and other entities with which
we most closely identify while
dismissing entirely those who seem radically
different. In this sense, we support our own
children over those of others, people of our
own religious backgrounds more readily than
those who are not, individuals with our own
cultural (and ideological) understandings
and, of course, groups who are ethnically
similar. This is the reason that it seems,
for many, more easy to love a dog or a cat
than a leech or a beetle. They, simply, seem
more like us.
Meanwhile, this same sort of affinity
predisposes many citizens to be more
concerned about deaths amongst their
own kind (i.e., the 3,600 + US troops killed
to date in Iraq) than the injustice carried
out against innocent foreign civilians
(i.e., the 655,000 + murdered Iraqis) since
it is just too hard to not view the
latter as "the other" [4] -- as some sort of
subhuman aliens not worthy of much concern
on our parts, nor having anywhere near
comparable value as our own soldiers. In
other words, we are more moved by
our militia despite that the latter serve as
aggressors criminally trespassing onto Iraq
soil based on fabricated information
concerning WMDs.
In this sense, Edward Said's understandings
in Orientalism were right on the mark
[5]. Westerners tend to hold derogatory,
imperialist views towards Easterners. Then
again, hegemony and xenophobia have always
driven hatred and a sense of anomy toward
whomever is chosen as the target of
plunder. No one group --whether
the Conquistadors, Nazi, Mussolini's crowd
or the American government with its vast
military-industrial complex girding the
globe -- is exclusive in this regard.
Yet, at the same time, more and more people
are, finally, beginning to realize that the
Iraqi citizens are not easily going to give
up the prize -- the oil -- for which the US
government invaded in the first place. So it
is becoming increasingly hard for them to
justify additional deliberate loss of life
in this unconscionable crusade.
Further, “Those who cannot learn from
history are doomed to repeat it,” as George
Santayana remarked. In
this vein, Bush and Cheney should have
realized from the US Revolution,
Vietnam tragedy and a host of other,
comparable events that nationalists,
generally, resist having their countries
ransacked and their population butchered by
unwelcome "outsiders." As such, the
US-Iraq war will drag on until the US stands
down and the Iraq fighters weary of their
ensuing factional rivalry.
In the end, the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds --
like all of us -- have to learn better how
to share resources and be more inclusive of
others, who come from disparate religious,
cultural, ethnic, socio-economic
and educational backgrounds. Indeed, this
must be done as we're collectively running
out of time in terms of addressing the
multitudinous pressing calamities that face
humanity and the planet in general of which
there are a wide variety requiring immediate
attention. Moreover, any one of these,
alone, is enough for grave concern whether
involving global warming, depletion of
forests worldwide, provision of sufficient
alternative energy, the spread of pandemic
diseases and so on.
As Noam Chomsky suggests, "Regrettably,
there are all too many candidates that
qualify as imminent and very serious crises.
Several should be high on everyone’s agenda
of concern, because they pose literal
threats to human survival."
Moreover,
there will no more safe havens to which to
move when life gets too rough where one's
currently located if the looming threats
worsen. It will not be like "the good old
days" when Australia, New Zealand and the
Americas were lands of plenty (ample
resources). There won't exist only a
(relatively) small number of indigenous
peoples, who the rapacious invaders can
easily quell by guns,
deliberately introduced Small Pox, legally
sanctioned slavery, forced marches to
reservations (concentration camps) and sheer
force of their numbers in a ceaseless
flood of ever more raiders pouring into some
"new world." (The ease with which such
processes were carried out is well
documented in Jared Diamond's Guns Germs
and Steel. [6]) This is because we've
simply run out of "new worlds" to overrun.
All considered, we have to, post haste, turn
ourselves around and learn better to fix our
homelands instead of screwing up territories
belonging to others. Likewise, we have to
learn better to cooperate, be supportive
and mutually enabling. This is
because there's a whole new set of variables
in play worldwide with dwindling oil and
coal, increasing nuclear arms
capacity, shrinking agricultural yield due
to changing weather patterns, spreading
regions of droughts and floods related to
global warming, burgeoning population and
other perilous factors -- ones on a
dangerous scale never before experienced by
our entire Earth.
So, somehow we have to learn better
to resist our tendency to put whatever
is unfamiliar and, seemingly,
different from ourselves into the first two
classifications (i.e., worthy
of extermination or to be abused and
oppressed as a source of economic gain). We
must learn to better follow "the golden
rule," that prevails as an underlying
central tenet in all of the major world
religions. Indeed, we must learn to stop
putting our individual advancement and greed
above collaboration and provision of mutual
benefit since few of us are completely
self-sufficient. In other words, our
collective fates are inexorably linked and
we do need each other for
survival. Consequently, it's high time that
we started to act accordingly.
If we do not, the far-reaching
disaster
that will come to pass will be beyond
our wildest nightmares. As such, we must
rise up like the Phoenix, but,
this subsequent time, in a new
pattern. So, we, also, need a new paradigm
to proceed, a fresh world view to envision,
as well as a novel way of going our business
and our lives in general. In this vein, it
will have to be a design that's broadly life
supportive rather than primarily
self-serving.
All considered, we will have to become more
aware that whatever everyone does (or
doesn't do) can effect the social whole in
monumental ways. Therefore, we can no longer
afford to take advantage of others to fill
our own coffers. We can no longer be caviler
about the widespread demise of other
species. We can no longer tolerate
escalating consumption of resources as if
there is no end of them in sight. More
importantly, we can no longer maintain a
path guaranteed to destroy other people and
the Earth while, glibly, thinking that
there can always exist infinitely more since
everything will always renew itself. In
short, there will come a point wherein it
can't and won't.
With the many diverse, monumental and
urgent calamities facing the world today,
the need for massive sweeping change on the
part of humankind is undeniably clear.
Without further delay, it's imperative that
the necessary adjustments start here and
now!
[3] Excellent critiques concerning the
distribution of wealth and exploitation of
workers are at:
Emily Spence lives in Massachusetts and
deeply cares about the future of our world.
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