Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. chapter 7 The Beginnings of a New Stage in History H umanity has reached an important point in its history. As we’ve indicated, we’re at the end (perhaps a bit past the end) of the adolescent “all you can eat” era on Earth. While many feel that it’s time for big changes, there isn’t a clear idea of the what, how, and where of the changes needed. Many now realize that the main drivers of the deterioration of humanity’s life-support systems—overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich, and the use of environmentally malign technologies—all must be dealt with. But despite abundant warnings from the scientific community,1 increasing population and consumption remains ignored by politicians, economists, and the general public. We’ve pointed out the adaptability and great capacity of the human mental system, but now it’s time to specify social and political recommendations that could lead to an attractive and possible human future. There is an authentic conservative view of human nature and its consequences for politics and social action, one more traditional than ours. It holds that competition and conflict are innate and predominant in human affairs, and individualism and individual action will always dominate social concerns. (This view is not that of the lunatic fringe, “birthers,” and “death panelers” who are influencing the modern Republican Party in the United States and the neo-Nazis who are gaining adherents in Europe.) This view sees it as a mistake, often counterproductive and certainly unwise, to try to change something as deeply rooted as what its holders view as “human nature.”2 It’s a point of view, traced as a rule to the eighteenth-century British parliamentarian Edmund Burke, that is respectful of the status quo. It assumes that public and government institutions and the society’s norms 87 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 88 | H u m a n i t y o n a Ti g ht ro pe of behavior have developed over millennia to good effect and shouldn’t be overthrown capriciously. It is “conservative” in the true sense as to how society should approach change.3 So, any dream of an overarching or global (in both senses) management of human action just can’t happen, and to think otherwise is just indulging in 1960s “Kumbaya” wishful thinking, and possibly would open the door to such radical catastrophes as the slaughters that followed the French and Russian revolutions. The influential conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott ridiculed as “rationalism in politics” the reconstruction of traditional social institutions, customs, and morals on the basis of theory.4 In his view, attempts to force a society to change due to an intellectual idea are likely to do damage to traditions grounded in centuries of practical experience. Oakeshott expressed scorn mostly for the social schemes of the planners on the Left, but he also criticized right-wing plans. In modern America, one major justification for the conservative approach was the failure of several attempts to change society. One was the attempt, through the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States. “Prohibition” led to large illegal operations controlled by gangsters who made fortunes selling illicit hooch. The amendment failed so disastrously that it was repealed in 1933. Another failed attempt to change society, this time more influential, was the urban renewal movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that also led to gang formation. While social planners’ housing developments sprang up throughout the United States, England, and France, the most famous of these was the Chicago (housing) “projects.” The aim was empathetic and compassionate: Get rid of the shacks that the poor (predominantly black) people lived in, dwellings lacking good sanitation, good heating, good services. Put the people in well-constructed, well-heated, and well-cooled apartments in well-designed, large high-rises (to keep cost down), and it would be a great improvement in their lives. Out of the favelas, into safe, secure, solid apartments. It sounded good. But the devil lay in the details. One of the main building projects was placed between two of Chicago’s wealthiest neighborhoods, Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast, close to Michigan Avenue’s high-end shopping district. So this made Cabrini-Green, begun in 1942 and completed in 1962, a great place for selling drugs, and with a population largely of young people who didn’t have jobs, it produced gang violence and conflict. In one nineweek period in 1981, ten residents were murdered and thirty-five wounded by gunfire.5 Vandalism flourished as gang members covered walls with graffiti, broke doors and windows, and jammed the elevators to foil their competitors. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Th e B e g i n n i n gs of a N ew S tag e i n Hi s to ry | 89 The architectural design didn’t help: the planners fenced the buildings to prevent residents from throwing garbage over the railings, from falling, or from being thrown off. This made it look like, well, a prison. There were famous photos of the piles of garbage, which once made it up to the fifteenth floor, and the water and power often went out. Did the social planners’ compassion for the poor improve their lives? It seemed a great day for people living in squalor when these “projects” were built, and another, greater day when they were dynamited and demolished.* Conservatives could make a similar case for the poor results from the trillions of dollars of foreign aid that the West has spent, with generally good intentions, for development in poverty-stricken countries. Of course, empathy alone isn’t enough; good intentions mixed with good analysis is what’s needed. We’re beginning to see this in foreign aid, where the different “traps” that countries suffer from are better understood. The remedies are different for countries suffering from bad governance or from civil war, or for those with rich natural resources and the corruption, theft, and arms acquisition that result from exploiting those resources. It’s been well said that “diamonds are a guerilla’s best friend.”6 When aid funds are tracked, the situation can seem very bad indeed; one study found that of those funds given to the Ministry of Finance in Chad for rural health clinics, 99 percent didn’t reach the clinics. Empathy and compassion are nothing without competence,† so due diligence needs be applied.7 But on the thought that it’s not desirable or possible to change or tinker with “human nature” and established social mores, the conservative view is simply wrong. Indeed, the conservative idea that past arrangements are best for the present grows more untenable every day as human behavior and technologies transform the world and produce new opportunities and dilemmas. We must learn from history but not be paralyzed by it. * But a good example of rather nonempathetic urban development is Robert Moses’s plans to have New York build seemingly every possible highway in the city, plans that were stopped due to protests. The best book on Moses is probably Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). † Alex de Waal, for instance, documented, that our initial humanitarian and liberal tendencies have gone wrong in Darfur. It would seem obvious that bringing war crimes charges against Omar Hasaan al-Bashir, the head of the Sudan, was a good idea. De Waal counseled against it, saying that al-Bashir would react violently and the rebel groups would be emboldened. Sure enough, it was a disaster; al-Bashir shut out Oxfam and Save the Children, expelled aid workers, and allowed violence to increase. Alex de Waal, ed., War in Darfur and the Search for Peace (Cambridge, MA: Global Equity Initiative, Harvard University, 2007). EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 90 | H u m a n i t y o n a Ti g ht ro pe The term “human natures” is properly plural; they always change generation to generation as the environment develops people with very different views.8 We get prepared early on for a certain lifestyle, for our future behaviors. Like George H. W. Bush, most people think our current way of life is inevitable and unchangeable. Indeed it’s a common function of the human mental system to simplify the world and to produce a kind of psychological inertia, to assume the future will be like the past and that it has always been the same. This is obviously wrong, and our adaptations to the changing world begin, actually, before birth. In the first few days of their lives, French infants cry differently than do German babies. The French infants cry with a rising intonation; Germans with a falling one. Kathleen Wermke analyzed more than twenty hours of recorded cries: “Newborns prefer exactly the same melody patterns that are typical of their respective mother tongues. . . . As a result, they reproduce exactly the same intonation patterns that are typical of their respective mother tongues.”9 A key to changing human nature and expanding empathy for others may be found in research on how people respond to their surroundings. David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, noted that “[it isn’t] possible for any set of men to converse often together, without acquiring a similitude of manners.”10 In Hume’s philosophy, people (sometimes called “Humean” beings) are sensitive to changes not only in their immediate personal environment but also in the social and the global environment. That understanding of the crucial role of environments led to tests of the so-called broken window theory. That theory postulates that the more disorder, even petty disorder like broken windows or graffiti, is evident in an environment, the more that incidents of petty crime and further disorder will spread among people. The same theory predicts that favorable trends will also spread. New York was counting on the spreading of positive trends in the mid-1990s when they started an anti-graffiti and street cleanliness crackdown. This campaign coincided with a decrease in petty crime, but since this was a quasi experiment (at best), we can’t really know what the cause of the decline in crime was and it produced much consternation among those graffiti artists and litterers who felt discriminated against. The crackdown was and is controversial, for it was initiated in the administration of Rudolph Guiliani, which often harassed innocent people who were deemed to be antisocial by the predominantly white police department. And no one has defined the term disorder. Psychologist Kees Keizer and colleagues set about trying to test the broken window theory. They conducted their experiments on unsuspecting members of the public in two situations: either a norm was violated or not (example of norm EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Th e B e g i n n i n gs of a N ew S tag e i n Hi s to ry | 91 violation: graffiti right next to a “No graffiti” sign). They tested whether seeing disorder isn’t just priming people to commit the same crime, but to commit crimes in general. So what did they find? In six experiments, they found the percentage of people violating the norm was consistently two to three times greater when the norm was violated in the environment to which they were exposed. The violations included littering, trespassing, and even stealing money from a mailbox.11 The experiments suggest interesting possibilities for creating environments that expand empathy, in which improved environments and sprucing up areas, fostering larger groups and cooperative ventures, can increase empathy. But there are a lot of determinants for antisocial or criminal actions, of course, even for something as important as suicide: people commit suicide more when it’s nice out more than when the weather is poor.12 So our immediate surroundings affect us greatly: runners go faster when they are paced; women eat one hundred calories less per meal when they are eating with men than if they are dining only with other women (men don’t care so much who they eat with, the animals).13 Now the challenge is to further redesign our surroundings in order to redesign our behavior. One way of redesigning surroundings to move to a more cooperative human society might be to adopt the Sabido method, based on research by Stanford University social psychologist Albert Bandura.14 His techniques have been successfully employed to increase the acceptability of family planning. It involves writing and producing serialized dramas on radio and television that can win over audiences while imparting socially beneficial values. The method bears the name of the pioneer of this entertainmenteducation strategy, Miguel Sabido, who was vice president for research at Televisa in Mexico in the 1970s. Character development and plot lines provide the audience with a range of characters—pseudokin—that they can relate to. Some characters are good, some not so good, and the plots lead them through evolutionary changes. Characters may begin the series desiring to have large families, and then through interaction with other characters, twists and turns in the plot, and sometimes outside intervention, they may end up deciding to stop at two children. Under the guidance of Bandura’s findings, the serial dramas are not soap operas in which characters wallow endlessly in the seamy side of life. The serial dramas portray people’s everyday lives and realistic solutions to their problems. The dramas are aimed at increasing empathy, altering norms, reducing discrepancies in power relations, linking people to support groups, and so on. Sabido took the classic literary device of character growth and developed the process in a way that enabled TV series to tackle the most sensitive EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 92 | H u m a n i t y o n a Ti g ht ro pe of subjects—sex, abortion, family planning, AIDS—in a nonthreatening and even enlightening manner. By transmitting values through the development of pseudokin, the Sabido method has proven able both to attract large and faithful audiences and to stimulate thoughtful discussions throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Sabido’s first soap opera to promote family planning was Acompáñame (Accompany Me). Acompáñame was a nine-month dramatic series that showed the personal benefits of planning one’s family by focusing on the issue of family harmony. The Mexican government’s national population council (CONAPO) reported the results as follows:15 • Phone calls to the CONAPO requesting family-planning information increased from zero to an average of five hundred a month. Many people who called mentioned that they were encouraged to do so by the soap opera. • More than two thousand women registered as voluntary workers in the national program for family planning. This was an idea suggested in the telenovela. • Contraceptive sales increased 23 percent in one year, compared to a 7 percent increase the preceding year. • More than 560,000 women enrolled in family planning clinics, an increase of 33 percent (compared to a 1 percent decrease the previous year). During the decade 1977 to 1986, when several Mexican soap operas on this theme were on the air, the country experienced a 34 percent decline in its population growth rate. As a result, in May 1986, the United Nations Population Prize was presented to Mexico as the foremost population success story in the world. Thomas Donnelly, then with United States Agency for International Development in Mexico, wrote, “Throughout Mexico, wherever one travels, when people are asked where they heard about family planning, or what made them decide to practice family planning, the response is universally attributed to one of the soap operas that Televisa has done. . . . The Televisa family planning soap operas have made the single most powerful contribution to the Mexican population success story.”16 Similar programs introduced in Tanzania at the end of the last century provided dramatic evidence of the approach’s efficacy. Before the program was broadcast in the test area, many people believed gods dictated how many children they had. Following the broadcasts, there was a significant rise in the use of contraceptives in the test area, and the same was observed when the broadcast was later played in the previous control areas. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Th e B e g i n n i n gs of a N ew S tag e i n Hi s to ry | 93 There and elsewhere the Bandura approach has also had dramatic effects on changing behavior relative to AIDS.17 So behavior, even in important matters such as family size, can be changed, and quite rapidly at that. It’s easy to imagine that similar programming could prepare people to join in actions that involve coordination with other nations. Carefully orchestrated media could help direct society toward sustainability, just as it unfortunately moved Rwanda toward genocide. Another wedge that could prove very useful in moving people in those directions is called deliberative polling. It was developed by Stanford political scientist Jim Fishkin. Deliberative polling is a novel approach to public opinion research that itself could be a useful wedge in changing behavior. A sample of people is polled on some critical issue. Then some of the people are invited to a weekend gathering to discuss it. Before the weekend, carefully balanced briefing materials are sent to the invitees. During the weekend, attendees work in small groups with trained moderators to develop questions that they later use in conversations with competing experts and political leaders. Some of this process is made available to the original sample as television, live or taped (and edited), broadcasts. Then the original sample is again asked the original questions. The changes in opinion observed are an estimate of the conclusions an informed public would reach on the issue. Software (PICOLA—Public Informed Citizen Online Assembly) has been developed that would allow much wider use of deliberative polling and much wider dissemination of the results. Deliberative polling could clearly be one wedge used to help close the culture gap and speed the spread of empathy. On issues such as climate disruption, there is both a lack of information in the public media mixed with an excess of disinformation. Conventional public polls reflect this with small economic trends rated as of greater concern than critical issues related to the survival of civilization. In one week, Tiger Woods’s car crash and infidelity received more media coverage than the connection between overpopulation and climate disruption has gotten in all of history. Indeed, on a chart of percentage coverage of news stories in the media in 2009, neither overpopulation nor climate disruption appeared. Stories on Woods, the “balloon boy,” the murder of a Yale graduate student, and the sex life of South Carolina’s conservative governor all got significant coverage, and the death of Michael Jackson occupied about as much media space as Pakistan, Russia, and the Mexican drug war combined.18 The public is subject to “rational ignorance,” the situation where an individual sees little advantage to educating herself on a subject when there is little practical use to which she can put the information. There’s often little or no corrective action available to an individual. “What can I do about EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 94 | H u m a n i t y o n a Ti g ht ro pe more droughts and increasing deserts even if I’m convinced that greenhouse gas emissions by my country are contributing toward them?” People don’t like to confront the inevitable trade-offs or don’t care to invest time and effort in acquiring information or coming to a considered judgment on issues when they feel powerless to influence the course of events. Important for changing attitudes is the likelihood of new information or a new outlook persisting and being translated into behavioral change. How “sticky” is culture in certain respects? Does being better informed on environmental issues lead to people making different, more sustainabilityfriendly decisions? How much does people’s moral competency (their capability to be, say, empathetic) determine their performance toward others as opposed to the incentives built into the cultures to which they are exposed? These are difficult issues, to which substantial attention has been paid but with little resolution beyond the historical observation that education does not ordinarily produce action that maps one-on-one with newly acquired knowledge.19 We don’t always do what we have learned is right. History can be a two-edged sword when it comes to empathy and sustainability. Knowing history is important, but inferring the proper lessons from it is even more important. From our viewpoint, the one genuinely positive thing about the U.S. invasion of Iraq—the one proper lesson that could be drawn from it—was the role that empathy played. It was empathy for the Iraqi people’s suffering under Saddam Hussein that was one factor (albeit a minor one) in the support many Americans originally gave to the war. History has its dark side. Some of humanity’s most destructive ideas are based in purely imaginary “nostory.” Sometimes history is simply faked, as when Hitler had the SS simulate a Polish attack on the PolishGerman frontier as a pretext for invading Poland in 1939. More often an entire nation or large group of citizens can believe the imagined history, such as Israel being a gift from a god to the Jewish people, or that the United States has always been on the side of civilization and democracy and that its various adventures from “manifest destiny” to invading Iraq were in support of those two ideas. An attempt should be made to “end history”—but not in the sense of Francis Fukuyama,that the present form of what he views as liberal democracy terminates the human cultural evolution in the political sphere (a deeply silly idea, in our opinion).20 What should be ended are historical views that justify past atrocities by implying “they deserved it.” Nations and peoples take pride in their histories, even though to a large degree they are fictional.21 The Trojan War myth helped unify ancient Greece, even though many doubt a war happened, or if it did, that it lasted a decade and ended with an enormous hollow horse containing soldiers. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Th e B e g i n n i n gs of a N ew S tag e i n Hi s to ry | 95 The United States has had many fine moments, from producing the world’s best constitution to building a system of higher education that was once the envy of all nations and, after a delay, opposing Hitler’s tyranny. But the United States has had many dismal moments as well in which the empathy deficit was all too apparent. It is hard for Americans to remember that our “land of the free and the home of the brave” has also been the land of slaughtering and impoverishing of Native Americans, holding slaves, lynching blacks, attacking weak nations far from our boundaries to establish our empire, “civilizing the Filipinos with a Krag,”* fighting Hitler with troops segregated by skin color, burning Japanese cities and immolating the innocent women and children who lived there, invading Vietnam and killing its citizens (remember the My Lai massacre), and transferring wealth from poor to rich (that is going on busily today). Similarly, most peoples have grievances tracing to historical events— the Holocaust and the long history of other persecution of the Jews in Christian countries, the Arab memories of the Crusades, the slaughter of Palestinians during the establishment of Israel, the rape of Nanking by the Japanese army, the defeat of the Serbians at the first Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the murder of millions on both sides during the partition of India, the killing of thousands in the World Trade Center in reprisal for the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, and on and on. The time has come for humanity as a whole to lessen its focus on family issues from the past and look forward to how it can unite as a single family at a higher level to avoid incalculably greater horrors in the future. It is, for example, time for Jews to leave the horrors of the Holocaust behind when it comes to formulating policy, and it’s time for Palestinians to put aside what the Israelis did historically in the Middle East and stop acting as if responding to the postwar grant of territory to the Jews.† Now, unable to rewrite history, both peoples need to move forward and focus on how to solve their difficult disputes in the context of today, build their mutual empathy, the roots of which can be seen in various groups trying to build bridges to the other. They need most of all to work together to * The Krag-Jorgensen was America’s first bolt-action repeating rifle. † Indeed, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who isn’t our absolute favorite person or political leader, points out that it was the Germans and anti-Semites of Italy, France, Poland, and other European nations who slaughtered the Jews in World War II, and yet the Jews were given land in Palestine as compensation. If past history were to be the quide, why weren’t the Jews given Sicily or East Prussia—or even Grenada or Cordoba, from where they were forcibly expelled in the fifteenth century? (Or, as an amusement, think why not Miami Beach, which we had already conquered and occupied?) But they were given Palestine, where of course Jews lived two millennia ago. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 96 | H u m a n i t y o n a Ti g ht ro pe stay alive in a world of weapons of mass destruction, as climate disruption, misallocation, and population growth threaten the scanty water supplies both peoples depend upon. History is overflowing with unfairness; it’s time to forget that and to initiate a new history that isn’t unfair. And there are many ways, some of them symbolic, that can help all of us put the past behind us. A famous example is Nelson Mandela’s classic donning of a gold-trimmed, moss-green Springbok rugby team jersey, a symbol of the apartheid regime, for his appearance at the June 1995 Rugby World Cup game between Australia and South Africa. It had an electrifying effect on the unity of the healing nation. One can imagine similar symbolic gestures that could help spread a feeling of common identity and thus empathy. For example, if the Israelis simply stated that the Palestinians got short shrift when the Europeans solved the “Jewish problem” in their territory, and if the Palestinians announced that the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” were a fabrication and they were being removed from Palestinian school textbooks, that might help change attitudes that must change if the two peoples will be able to move forward together in an increasingly crowded and environmentally vulnerable area. Putting the past behind can lead to reconciliation in the wake of historical injustices—as in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the Gacaca reconciliation court system in Rwanda.22 Gacaca (“justice on the grass” in Kinyarwanda) is a traditional local justice procedure that the Rwandan government tailored to process the huge amount of local and relatively small genocide cases. Gacaca has helped clear Rwanda’s overcrowded prisons and overwhelmed domestic courts using a familyand community-based system of justice—local participation, having the perpetrator confront the victim, community healing. In so doing, Gacaca doesn’t focus on punishing the individual, but on agreeing to put the past behind, and the results are mixed, sometimes creating hard feelings rather than community feelings. Indeed, the power of empathy and the potential for reconciliation can be seen in the history of men of opposing armies who refuse to kill their opponents and to make death-sparing arrangements with them. Those histories put the lie to the common notion that men are born killers. On American Civil War battlefields, it was common to find the standard muskets holding many unfired loads; some men could not bring themselves to shoot the “enemy” but just went on ritually reloading their weapons—stuffing load after load down their barrels—without firing them. Following the Battle of Gettysburg, 27,574 muzzle-loading rifles were picked up from the battlefield, and almost 90 percent of them were still loaded; 12,000 with more than one load; and 6,000 of those with between six and ten loads.23 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Th e B e g i n n i n gs of a N ew S tag e i n Hi s to ry | 97 In World War I, German machine gunners at the Battle of the Somme refused to shoot British infantrymen who were retreating after the enormous slaughter. Early in that war, much to the distress of their generals, the soldiers from the two opposing sides had made informal live-and-let-live pacts with each other to avoid bloodshed, and even in 1915 they prearranged Christmas truces. During World War II, it is estimated that as many as 85 percent of soldiers failed to fire at the enemy. In the Vietnam War of the 1960s, the American military had to convince their soldiers to shoot to kill. In all these situations, the soldiers’ relationship with their “targets” was very recent history. The machine gunners’ empathy was directed at men who a few minutes before were trying to kill them in the course of a desperate assault. In any case, the big issue is how to reorganize global civilization ethically and consciously evolve its norms to promote the spread of empathy and a transition to a sustainable and fair society.24 A key to all this, we believe, is making the discussion bottom-up, with the participation of as many people as possible—not a top-down attempt of old, rich, white males to find their preferred solution to the human predicament. Finding convergence will be challenging: there are few ethical universals, and it is highly unlikely that many will be agreed upon soon—although most ethical systems do converge on some basic elements, for example, special circumstances are required before killing is justified. A typical case where detailed convergence has not resulted is the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There was substantial opposition to that declaration among Muslims originally, and they produced a Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights in response. The Muslim version assigned certain rights to women, but not equal rights, and it did not give everyone the right to marry, regardless of religion. It says that Muslims are required not to submit to rule by non-Muslims, allows beating and amputation as punishments, and puts religious restraints on freedom of speech. On the other hand, even some small improvement in human rights can provide an important weapon for the weak, and we believe it would be a better world if basic rights to subsistence and security were accepted while more difficult goals such as gender, racial, and religious equity are pursued. We clearly need an international discussion of such eco-ethical issues, one that involves not just “leaders” but as much of diverse publics as possible. “Rights” should not be granted from above by those claiming to be in communication with supernatural entities or defined by the powerful, but, we believe, they should be voluntary and agreed upon as democratically as possible by societies—they should not be imposed upon people, and there should not be a right to abuse the weak or the “other.”25 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 98 | H u m a n i t y o n a Ti g ht ro pe Indeed, even if some believe rights might stem from supernatural entities, in our current world of many differing religions, rights must nevertheless be harmonized across religions and other belief systems in order for our world to achieve peace and necessary cooperation. Humanity’s future hangs on finding some broad agreement on major eco-ethical decisions involving difficult topics like population size and the equity of patterns of consumption.26 We need to create a venue to serve as a rallying point for those myriad organizations fighting for environmental quality and social justice, and for the efforts to “cancel” history. It would emphasize that the whole human family has outside enemies, from climate disruption and global distribution of toxic chemicals to the threat epidemics and of ecosystem-destroying nuclear war. These enemies are threats that the global family must cooperatively organize to deal with in order to avoid its own destruction. A new attempt to focus humanity’s attention on this crucial issue, the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB), is treated in the appendix. At the extreme of human family structure questions is how more than seven billion people should organize themselves into a single entity to solve massive global problems. That is, how should we unite the nation-states? Many aspects of this global governance question are reminiscent of the issues in the 1787–1788 debates between the progressive Federalists and conservative Anti-Federalists over uniting the states of North America.27 Those debates were over the ratification of a then-radical proposed constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation of the thirteen states that became the United States of America. The debates focused on how disparate political units could be united to provide for both common defense and economic prosperity, while retaining personal liberty in a representative political system. They debated whether defense could be left to the individual states, depending on independent militias in times of crisis, or whether it was necessary to have a professional standing army and navy under the control of the central government. A main point of the Federalists was that a strong central authority was needed so that treaty obligations could be met (the states weren’t, for example, meeting their obligations with Great Britain agreed to in the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War). The Federalists also asserted that a permanent national military was a prerequisite to proper national defense. A major issue in that long-ago national security debate was how much the nation was threatened by external enemies (more explicitly, European powers). That should be thought analogous to whether today’s external enemies (global problems such as climate disruption or lethal pandemics) are serious enough to demand some sort of global governmental regime instead of the ad hoc multiple treaty system in place today. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Th e B e g i n n i n gs of a N ew S tag e i n Hi s to ry | 99 The Federalists took the position that relative security at the end of the eighteenth century could easily become imperiled at a future point; in the same way, environmental scientists today are concerned that before the end of the twenty-first century, today’s relatively benign climate could become a major source of death and destruction. The Anti-Federalists felt that militias could be united and organized in time for defense, fearing government control of a permanent military more than outside enemies. Today’s conservatives often seem to fear government intervention more than they fear a threat to civilization. Many conservatives still claim that climate worries are overblown and that people are not contributing to climate change. Much of the Federalist-Anti-Federalist dispute focused on the relative importance of liberty and security, a live issue today as the United States is being converted into a combination theocracy and corporate plutocracy, with an increasing concentration of power in malign hands.28 And population entered into the eighteenth-century discussion big time, with the Anti-Federalists pushing for power to rest in the states—as close to the people as possible so that their representatives could be from individuals who lived among their constituencies and would thus be truly representative. At the time of the debate, the U.S. population was four million people, and it was 95 percent rural. The population is now about 310 million, almost eighty times as large, and 20 percent rural. With a country so much more populous than it was in 1788, with diverse groups of people living cheek by jowl in cities and with instant communications, this issue of representation has become even more problematic. And at the global scale, the ways liberty might be promoted and preserved with seven billion people poses a challenge to family organization and empathy spreading that is truly unprecedented. The main lesson, for us, from the legendary constitutional debates is how they illuminate the need for similar informed citizen participation today. The founding fathers had some distinct advantages in their discourse: it was a discourse among an elite group of men, many of whom knew each other and all of whom had similar educations. All were familiar with the premier discourse on politics of the day—Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws.29 There was no significant culture gap. There are reasons to hope. Enthusiasm for the MAHB seems to be growing. Enough people are interested in supplanting complete sovereignty of nation-states with a new sort of planetary regime that a global referendum has begun on a democratic world government (www.voteworldgovernment .org/). Its goals are to abolish war and settle disputes between nations by EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 100 | H u m a n i t y o n a T ig h t ro pe law, as they are usually settled now within nations; lower taxes globally (without the burden of supporting huge, useless, or positively dangerous military establishments, they easily could be); and solve global problems, especially the environmental predicament. Of course, the idea of a world government goes back thousands of years, was mentioned in the Bible (Isa. 2:2–4), and was an especially hot topic a couple of centuries ago when Immanuel Kant wrote his essay “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795). Kant was perhaps inspired by the founding of the first democratic union of states in 1782. Needless to say, the world of Rush Limbaughs and Mahmoud Ahmadinejads hardly seems ready for a global government of any sort, or more global influence in national affairs, which is much more likely, any more than European nations and their colonies seemed ready for democracy in 1700. Yet, with all its governance flaws, the United States has now been a republic for well over two hundred years. Europe itself, a mere sixty-five years after the defeat of Hitler, has moved, with all its governance flaws, toward being a union of states. But, of course, today there is a much more pressing need for global governance (and thus a global “family”) than there was in Kant’s time. Then, there was no possibility of a nuclear winter, the chance of sudden climate disruption from human activities was extremely remote, there were no synthetic toxins spread from pole to pole, economic transactions in New York could not influence markets in New Delhi in a tiny fraction of a second, and a fatal disease from the Congo could not be transmitted to an Englishman in London in less than a day. Clearly, there isn’t time to wait for the institution of a new, powerful global government to deal with pressing problems such as climate disruption, but it clearly is the time to bring the overall issue of world governance to the forefront.30 So, can we further foster developing the global human population as an imagined community of pseudokin? New tools are becoming available. PRE attends meetings in Second Life (http://secondlife.com/support/downloads.php) in which difficult issues are discussed in beautiful surroundings. Participants can be totally anonymous, with no accent or appearance factors entering into the discourse. A woman who wears a burkha in real life can be represented by a male avatar in biker’s dress. And a discussion group often forms a group of pseudokin. The building virtual world represents both a threat and an enormous opportunity for humanity. Cross your fingers. Such technological devices can help, but, unhappily as we have pointed out, there seem to be no silver bullets. Working on all EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. Th e B e g i n n i n gs of a N ew S tag e i n His to ry | 101 the many wedges seems the best way to go, while working to create positive interactions among the different approaches to the problem and among families. We can also hope for one of those social transformations such as occurred in racial and gender equity in the United States after the Second World War or in the collapse of the Soviet Union and international communism at the end of the twentieth century. Complex natural and human systems produce those kinds of surprises, but scientists are not sure whether their occurrence can ever be predicted with any accuracy.31 But by closing key parts of the culture gap, we may encourage the emergence of a social transformation toward sustainability. Watching current events makes the odds of such success seem ever smaller, but salvation may lie dormant in the seeds of growing concern. We certainly hope so. One important wedge could be a new emphasis in educational, political, and nongovernmental organization campaigns upon the communality of humanity, the important nonrational aspects of our behavior, and how important it is that this be fostered. For the foreseeable future, there’ll be families, clans, tribes, religions, team identification, company identification, racial identification, and so on. But for now, a goal needs to be adding courses about human identification and empathy to all school curricula, emphasizing how common are all our problems and interests, and emphasizing how crucial to our decision making are our emotions.32 In theory, education from kindergarten on could be revised to make the general public more conscious of the us-them impacts of our family heritage. Ideally, the key elements of what has been learned about human perceptions, cognition, and emotion (and their interactions) should be woven into early school curricula and emphasized to all college students. Other changes could greatly improve the quality of education and at the same time improve the levels of empathy and the sense of community in societies. Children are often schooled in too much isolation, without a mix of adults. Efforts should be made to bring more adults with time on their hands into the schools, especially in the early grades, to increase the ratio of caregivers to students. Today the United States, with its badly decaying educational system, could take advantage, for example, of unemployed and retired executives and the elderly, to the benefit of both young and old.33 Cooperative rather than competitive children’s games should be encouraged by governments, perhaps (among other things) with subsidies in rich nations to toy makers to engage with and follow the advice of cooperative game theorists and those who design cooperative-play video games. The focus would be not cooperation to vanquish other teams, but cooperation within the team to outwit humanity’s worst enemy—us. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093 Copyright © 2010. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. 102 | H u m a n i t y o n a T ig h t ro pe Early science fiction stories had the population of a threatened Earth come together against weird extraterrestrial enemies. Now our society has need of unity against the enemy from within. While modern media, especially racist Internet sites, exaggerate the differences between people and peoples, now they need encouragement to work for a human reunion.* Given appropriate incentives, many could also increase awareness of our similarities and the boat we’re all in. Much is known about the techniques of changing awareness (the entire marketing profession is dedicated to developing them); what is less clear is how to develop the incentives. * In today’s world, should running a racist Internet website be considered the ethical (or legal) equivalent of crying “fire” in a crowded theater? EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 2:09 PM via UNIV OF NORTH ALABAMA AN: 350450 ; Ehrlich, Paul R., Ornstein, Robert E..; Humanity on a Tightrope : Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future Account: s4595093
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