George’s original work on the origins of war inspired me to take a close look at some anthropology and cultural history that followed the migration out of Africa of the invasive species of people that has now covered the earth.

Thousands and thousands of years ago, people learned to speak. Before our cultures developed the written word, we had the spoken word. And humans have been around talking with each other for a long, long time. The first people, as we think of people, showed up in Africa about 200,000 years ago. They walked upright. They made and used tools. They lived together in bands or tribes or family groups. They were descended from a long line of animals that were not strictly speaking “people.” Evolutionary biologists and anthropologists tell us that this line of ancestors went back perhaps six million years. And during that time, before we became, strictly speaking, “people,” we were adapting. We developed tools. We were adapted to eat almost anything. We weren’t good at eating cellulose like the herd animals were, but we made up for that by eating them.

Six million years ago our mammal family tree branched out and we—or our Australopithecus ancestors, the ancestors of homo sapiens, the folks I’m calling “people”—went a different direction from our cousins the gorillas and the chimpanzees.

Six million years.

It took us another four million years or so to become “makers.” And then, for most of the next two million years the “human” genus evolved into a number of different species… Australopithecus became homo habilis, homo neanderthalis, homo rhodesiensis… new discoveries of ancient hominid species turn up from time to time in the fossil record. The most recent, I think, is the Denisovan, a new species discovered in a Siberian cave. All of these species are different from modern people, creatures who in a fit of hubris we named homo sapiens… which is Latin for “wise person.”

How wise are we, if we are the only surviving species of our clade? When our species emerged on the scene there were at least four other kinds of hominins around. Genetic testing shows that there was some interbreeding among the species. But I suspect the reason that homo sapiens survived and the other hominins went extinct is because homo sapiens was just better at making things, including the tools of stone age warfare. Were some of our relatives naturally peaceful? There’s no reason to think they were not. Anthropologists’ perception of the Neanderthals suggests that they were artistic, and like homo sapiens, they adorned themselves and buried their dead.

So for tens of thousands of years we coexisted with others who were like us, but different. We developed languages, and finally, about six thousand years ago—an eye-blink compared to the millions of years of fossil record and the two hundred thousand years of human existence we’ve been talking about—we developed the written word. For a hundred thousand years or so people had been migrating out of Africa and settling into regions they found comfortable. An agricultural revolution occurred and the hunting and gathering cultures shifted to farming and staying pretty much in one place. Among the cultural ramifications that showed up early were religion and law. Both of these very human pursuits were arguably improved by a written language. When literacy appeared, stories and rules that had been handed down by word of mouth were locked into text. And it’s from these early texts that we can gather that homo sapiens has for a long time been interested in making peace as well as war.
Christianity and Judaism share the biblical old testament and the idea that a messiah will come and offer people salvation. In the second chapter of the book named for the prophet Isaiah is this verse:

“And He will judge between the nations, And will render decisions for many peoples; And they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they study war.”

“Ain’t going to study war no more…”

There’s an old spiritual that many of us know, Pete Seeger sang it, the Weavers, Holly Near, Emma’s Revolution has a version. It’s probably in our song book…

I’m Gonna lay down my sword and shield
Down by the riverside
Down by the riverside…

And the Chorus goes:
Ain’t gonna study war no more,
Ain’t gonna study war no more

So the same bible that brought us plagues and floods and a Nile River full of blood, the bible that tells the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho also has that lighter, more peaceful moment.

I think it’s interesting that the Book of Isaiah has a lot about Cyrus the Great, King of Persia in it. Cyrus was Zoroastrian, and so there are cross references between the Hebrew Torah and the clay tablets that the Persians used for historical records.
On one of those tablets, describing his own achievements, Cyrus the Great says:

“Amid jubilation and rejoicing, I entered Babylon in peace to establish a just government and strive for peace. My troops wandered peacefully throughout Babylon. In all of Sumer and Akkad, I gave no cause for fear and no one was terrorized. I concerned myself with the needs and welfare of the citizens of Babylon, Sumer and Akkad, and with promoting their well-being. I freed them from their improper oppression & bondage. I healed their afflictions and put an end to their misfortune. I restored their dilapidated dwellings. I gathered and assisted the displaced held in bondage, to return to their homes.”

Of course the story is that Cyrus was sent there by Marduk, a deity, who suggested that it was time to put things right, to restore certain temples and so forth. So there was a little bit of conquest required in order to enter Babylon in Peace, but so it goes.

* * *

Over the centuries since we started writing things down, we’ve started to understand ourselves better by studying history. And history they say is written by the winners. Ironically enough the losers are often the more peaceful people. When we started to bring this humanist service together one topic we thought we’d focus on was “Peace,” and –can you believe it?—what came out of that was a closer look at the origins of war.

Many humanists are non-theists, and among us there are peacemakers, people who try to live with an eye on equality, community, integrity, and—often—simplicity.

Howard Zinn was a historian, a playwright, and an activist who was also a humanist. His life’s work focused on a wide range of issues including race, class, war, and history, and touched the lives of many people. He was aware of the crushing fact that the violent and warlike often dominate while the idealistic folks, the peacemakers, are subordinated among them. Here’s what he says about that:

You ask how I manage to stay involved and remain seemingly happy and
adjusted to this awful world where the efforts of caring people pale in
comparison to those who have power?

It’s easy.
First, don’t let “those who have power” intimidate you. No
matter how much power they have they cannot prevent you from living your
life, speaking your mind, thinking independently, having relationships
with people as you like.

Second, find people to be with who have your values, your commitments,
but who also have a sense of humor. That combination is a necessity!

Third, understand that the major media will not tell you of all the acts of
resistance taking place every day in the society, the strikes, the protests, the
individual acts of courage in the face of authority. Look around for the evidence of
these unreported acts, and you will certainly find it. And for the little you find,
extrapolate from that and assume there must be a thousand times as much as
what you’ve found.

Fourth: Note that throughout history people have felt powerless before
authority, but that at certain times these powerless people, by organizing, acting,
risking, persisting, have created enough power to change the world around them,
even if a little. That is the history of the labor movement, of the women’s
movement, of the anti-Vietnam war movement, the disable persons’ movement,
the gay and lesbian movement, the movement of Black people in the South.

Fifth: Remember, that those who have power, and who seem invulnerable are in
fact quite vulnerable, that their power depends on the obedience of others, and
when those others begin withholding that obedience, begin defying authority,
that power at the top turns out to be very fragile. Generals become powerless
when their soldiers refuse to fight. Industrialists become powerless when their
workers leave their jobs or occupy the factories. Matadors cry when the bull
refuses to fight.

Sixth: When we forget the fragility of that power in the top we become
astounded when it crumbles in the face of rebellion. We have had many
such surprises in our time, both in the United States and in other
countries.

Seventh: Don’t look for a moment of total triumph. See it as an
ongoing struggle, with victories and defeats, but in the long run the
consciousness of people growing. So you need patience, persistence, and
need to understand that even when you don’t “win,” there is fun and
fulfillment in the fact that you have been involved, with other good
people, in something worthwhile.

Thinking about those seven pieces of advice from Howard Zinn, I’m still left with the question of whether our warlike behavior is so burned into us genetically that it will always dominate our culture, or can we transcend those hundreds of thousands of years of historical conflict and find a peaceful path into the future?
As he said, a sense of humor is crucial! But in closing I still gotta ask, What’s so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding?

[Presented today, 2/7/2016 at the Palomar Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Humanist Service]

Today I’m musing about links and personal web presence. I’m not going to talk much about Facebook, Google+, twitter, or any of the other social networks that provide people with opportunities to share their thoughts and their work on the web. Maria is an interesting person, and an interesting study in public web presence. She had a blog called “Alembic.” I think I asked her one time if she’s related to the Alembic electronics family that emerged in Marin in the late sixties and she said she was not, but I appreciated the synchronicity none-the-less. And of course everybody’s only a few degrees of separation from everybody else. Consider Kevin Bacon….

Tidying up links on this blog, I saw that my link to Maria’s blog (Ashladle.org) had rotted. Rather than delete her from the list here, I looked for another public web address where she is active and found her blog (small change blog), and I found her on twitter. Also, I found a project she started last winter, a photographic journal called “A Year of Mount Tamalpais.” I lifted this picture from that location…

Photo by Maria Benet

The project I lifted the above picture from is over. Maria still blogs at small change blog where she migrated after her ashladle.org domain name expired, and she’s working on a WordPress site called Marin Bytes. She tweets as @Alembic, and her friends can find her in the walled garden that is Facebook. Amazing the number of ramifications a web-head’s personality requires in the new age of social networking….

Time goes by and our virtual back fences get more and more convoluted, sort of cyber-Christo projects that require the participants’ engagement on a different level than we have known before. How many people actually click on the links they find in a tweet or a posting? The author put them there for a reason, but whether pressured by time or only superficially engaged, most readers fly right by the links and miss some of the allusive content that lends value to what they are reading. In the good old days, missing links were something else entirely, an evolutionary thing. “Missing lynx” of course refers to a lost bobcat, but that’s neither here nor there. In the old days, one could listen in on the party line (ask your grandma what a party line was) or a couple of neighbors could gossip over the back fence. People wrote letters and sometimes got replies. People read newspapers and magazines. Kids at camp and vacationers wrote postcards, usually with pictures on them, and no reply was really expected. All of those mediated conversations were well bounded. The same can not be said for conversations on the web.

I sent off a message to Maria letting her know that I was writing a post about her and asking for her permission to use the above photo. She got back to me faster than a letter in a bottle, faster than teh pony express, faster than airmail, faster–in fact–than the US Post Office could possibly manage. She got back to me so quickly you’d have thought we were connected by a series of tubes or something! I like the Internet for that and for the fact that so many talented people can make their work accessible. Thanks Maria, you’re a poet and , well… the conclusion is self evident.

4pm to 6pm EST, 1pm to 3pm PST–at this link http://www.democracynow.org/

Saturday, January 19, 2024 Democracy Now! will provide a special livestream as family and friends of Aaron Swartz gather at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York City to celebrate his life and remember their beloved friend, sibling, child, and partner.

Speakers include Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, David Segal, Ben Wikler, Roy Singham, Doc Searls, Edward Tufte, David Isenberg, Holden Karnofsky and Tom Chiarella and other friends.  OK Go’s Damian Kush will be performing at the service.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwITESzeCf4

The federal prosecutor dropped the charges against Aaron the day before his funeral. (Does that count as a tie in her Won/Lost statistics?) The gesture was lost on Aaron’s family, who said Aaron’s death “…is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims.” It seemed clear to the family and many of his friends that the prosecutor had over-reached in Aaron’s case, had in fact driven him to suicide. No less a legal light than Larry Lessig, normally mild and even tempered, weighed in with harsh criticism. Aaron, Lessig wrote,

…was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”

The American criminal justice system is worse than imperfect. It is adversarial, each case a trial by combat, defense attorneys and prosecutors jousting before a judge and–infrequently–a jury who will determine the victor. Elaborate criminal codes, precedents, and judicial rules and guidelines describe the boundaries within which the serious game is played. Many, perhaps most, lawyers will agree that the US Attorney’s Office dealt properly with Aaron. Orin Kerr, writing at The Volokh Conspiracy offers a detailed two part post about The Crimimal Charges Against Aaron Swartz.

In Part One, The Law, he concludes that “…the charges against Swartz were based on a fair reading of the law. None of the charges involved aggressive readings of the law or any apparent prosecutorial overreach. All of the charges were based on established caselaw. Indeed, once the decision to charge the case had been made, the charges brought here were pretty much what any good federal prosecutor would have charged.”

In Part Two, Prosecutorial Discretion, Kerr writes, “I think that some kind of criminal punishment was appropriate in this case. Swartz had announced his commitment to violating the law as a moral imperative in order to effectively nullify existing federal laws on access to information. When someone engages in civil disobedience and intentionally violates a criminal law to achieve such an anti-democratic policy goal through unlawful means — and when there are indications in both words and deeds that he will continue to do so — it is proper for the criminal law to impose a punishment under the law that the individual intentionally violated. (Indeed, usually that is the point of civil disobedience: The entire point is to be punished to draw attention to the law that is deemed unjust.)”

Kerr addresses a range of legal questions and issues and I find it hard to disagree with him. But, there seems to be a meaningful issue that the best legal minds avoid. How fair was the prosecutor in the way she played the game? It’s not a question that we often consider. Are prosecutors required to play fair? We have judges and referees to keep both sides in line. But Aaron had a point to make. In order to make his point he needed to have a fair hearing. To get a fair hearing for his victimless crime, he was asked to risk thirty-five years of his life and be branded a felon. The prosecutor offered Aaron a choice. She was willing to drop Aaron’s risk of incarceration to a mere six months, to accept a plea bargain. Aaron could brand himself a felon by pleading guilty, and he would have been denied any hearing whatsoever. In the context of the prosecutor’s daily work, this may have seemed fair, but I think the prosecutor’s balls to the wall approach effectively denied Aaron Swartz a hearing and therefore it denied him justice, and that depressing circumstance cost him his life.

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—–
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (Darwin)
Comment: key at http://www.aaronsw.com/pgp

iD8DBQA+kQIGQUVSHnnw30sRAn9qAJ44xTbFM2lq55eycQvy6pes8cblQACgwIca
521+sRe8O9WOTpYzyzpYKeI=
=wcl4
—–END PGP SIGNATURE—–

If I get hit by a truck

Many of the workers also express their willingness, indeed their obligation, to sacrifice to be sure their kids are well provided for and in their own time well launched into the world of work.

Cleaning women and caregivers, stone masons and iron workers, burger flippers, receptionists, and tech support people, a waitress, a retiree, a hedge fund manager, a UPS delivery man, a prostitute, a fund raiser, a press agent, a housewife, a student, a fireman, a school teacher, and a flight attendant… like us they all have stories to tell, they’re all human, they all work.

One aspect of finding a job and keeping it that isn’t examined in “Working” are the ever so human practices of nepotism and croneyism. I would have been sorry to miss it, so I’m feeling lucky that a musical comedy number played itself out over the last few weeks in the offices of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. There’s a kid, Brian Deschane, a college drop-out. No shame in that, Governor Walker himself was a college drop-out. The kid’s got a couple of drunk driving convictions. No shame in that. The last Republican President of the United States had a few youthful indiscretions under his belt. They didn’t hurt his job hunting prospects. But Governor Walker has been under a lot of scrutiny since he devalued the work of all public employees in the state. So things didn’t work out too well for young Brian. Yet. I’m sure he has a great future ahead of him, though.

From the Huffington Post: “In the young man’s lack of management experience and two more drunk driving convictions than college degrees, Walker saw untapped potential. Another thing he saw in Deschane was the way his father — Jerry Deschane, the executive vice president of Wisconsin Builders Association — skillfully managed to stack dollar bills in the amount of $121,652 for Walker’s gubernatorial campaign.”

Reinvigorated by the idealism and fighting spirit on display right now in America’s heartland, the movement for “hope and change” has a rare, second chance. It can renew itself and become again a national force with which to be reckoned.
— Van Jones

I caught the last half hour of Meet the Press yesterday, a segment that featured Southern Democrat and white supremacist Haley Barbour. NBC gave Barbour a nice boost, a moment of respect that legitimizes him. I think most young people have no idea of the enormous burden of shame that Barbour and many of his fellow Southern Democrats carry. The migration of white supremacists and racists from the Southern wing of the Democratic Party to the Republican Party following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a kind of wholesale political laundering that shifted national political power from the Democratic Party to the Republicans and laid the foundation for Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.”

Something similar is happening today. Billionaires, oligarchs, and corporatists are exploiting the deep discontent felt by most middle class Americans and playing on fears that they have nurtured for the last eight or ten years in order to influence the middle class to vote against our own best interests.

In Wisconsin, the outcome of this corporate influence, the millions of dollars of slick advertisements, was to stick us with a Governor that only an out-of-state billionaire could love. How embarrassing for us all.

As it happens Wisconsin’s Governor Walker was the opening act on the Meet the Press show that Haley Barbour closed. I didn’t get up early enough to see Walker, but here’s what he had to say…

In the above presentation Walker lies and over-simplifies. The State of Wisconsin is NOT facing a 3.6 billion dollar deficit unless the Governor grants every request his own cabinet agencies have made for funds. Normally, the budget process is a matter of give and take, almost a poker game where agencies ask for more than they expect to get in order to be sure that what they really need won’t be cut. Also, Walker is sweating a fiscal deadline for refinancing the State’s debt. A prudent man would have addressed the refinancing as a matter separate from public employee collective bargaining issues in order not to miss the deadline. If we miss that deadline and lose $165 million in interest, the governor will have only himself to blame for his artless handling of the situation. The taxpayers, of course, will be stuck holding the teabag.

Walker is a teabagger, plain and simple. At River Falls, Wisconsin this weekend, Walker and Minneapolis teabagger Representative Michelle Bachmann were turned away from a rally. The pressure is on. They are now shamed and shunned most places they go. Tomorrow, Walker will finally deliver his budget speech and he will enter the Capitol through a steam tunnel in order to avoid the people he governs. In our two party system, Walker and his fellow teabaggers, unlike the morally bankrupt Southern Democrats of forty years ago, have nowhere to go as we the people return from that awful decade of fear and loathing, incivility and mistrust, back to our own moral center.

Let me tell you about Ralphie the neighbour boy when I was six and seven and lived on Antrim Road always dressed in women’s clothing. Huge lobster, perhaps the hugest lobster ever, hung over the fireplace mantle in the playroom. Couldn’t tear my eyes offa it. It figured largely most likely to succeed probably. I feel like I am making this up. I can’t remember if he wore makeup. And another neighbour kid who later lost her arm. And her sister Kathleen … and a huge collection of Catholic memorabilia branding me for life. German last name. They drew on their genitals seems weird but it was true. I abstained. Use your arm while you got it I guess.

I don’t know how this emerged today. Stole it from a good friend and super writer five or six years ago. Stuffed it away so I wouldn’t lose it. Like this memory…

Once in Berkeley in the botanical gardens, I crossed a bridge over Strawberry Creek and there on the bank below me was a young woman with no arms gazing into a pool at a huge cray fish (Procambarus clarkii). I fixated on its claws. The irony, the contrast, was intense. The crustacean had powerful arms, huge pincer claws. The girl, I imagined she was as struck by the unfairness of it as I was, but that’s hubris. I can’t read minds, but I certainly can project.

Today in America it’s “Presidents Day.” We used to celebrate the birthdays of Washington (February 22) and Lincoln (February 12) separately, but Richard Nixon, assuredly deserving of no holiday of his own, combined the two and decreed the third Monday of February to be Presidents Day. Now we’ve diluted our heritage but we’ve added a three day weekend between the Super Bowl and March madness. That can’t be all bad.

The drum circle was constantly changing. This crowd is smaller than some, and this was the last afternoon of the convention so the Orange County Convention Center had already started to clear out.