As voters in the Netherlands go to the polls today, one wonders if a natavistic populism will sweep the country. As we wait and watch, we US citizens should remember that we founded our country through the racist genocide of the Native American tribes–from King Philip’s War in the 17th century to the Winning of the West. As a naive Irish-American child watching Westerns in the 1940s in Los Angeles, I thrilled to John Ford’s image of the US Cavalry riding to the rescue with the bugle sounding the charge and the U.S. Regimental flag waving. But we need to remember that the Europeans are their own native tribes, and the Dutch and the Swiss or the Austrians do not wish to see their cultures over-run and so each wave of immigration plays Leitmotifs of the Battle of Vienna (1683) and keeping the hordes of Turks and Tartars out of Christian Europe. We in the USA, by contrast, are a nation of immigrants and it is unconstitutional for Trump to say Christians can come in, but Muslims can’t. In the 19th century, the White Protestant nativists objected to Irish Catholics and Central European Jews coming to “their” country. When one reads 19th century editorials and essays, one is struck by the omnipresence of racism. Even with good minds like those of Mathew Arnold and Abraham Lincoln, “race” is a reality and not a literary trope. Although our country was founded on genocide and developed through slavery, we have now advanced to the level of a planetary cultural mix of races and languages. And just as Italian, French, German, and Romantch are officially accepted languages of tiny Switzerland, so now Spanish has become our second language, and French is the accepted second language of Canada. So if Geert Wilders is triumphant in the Dutch election, those of us who are liberal and not White Suprematist should not rush to judgment. It took the USA more than four centuries to experience an emergent planetary culture, so we should give Europe more time. At least in our century we have the science of DNA to teach us that “race” is a cultural construction and not a biological reality.
Footnote to March 15, 2017:
Geert Wilders is, of course, not basing his argument on the idea of race, but on ideology. He claims Islam is not a religion, but a cultural ideology. So when religion becomes an ideology–as Christianity did in the Inquisition and Judaism did in Zionism or the contemporary views of the West Bank Israeli settlers–then a transformation takes place that is like the shift from Marxism to Leninism. The same deadly shift takes place when nativistic movements become xenophobic. So, structurally, nativism and Islamist movements like IS are isomorphic. This polarization to extremes with the middle ground falling away was first noticed by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides in his remarks on the Corcyrean Revolution and became re-articulated by Crane Brinton in his ANATOMY OF REVOLUTION.
Industrial civilization must be stopped now dead in its tracks, or humanity will be stopped dead in its tracks. Since China now produces all the cheap consumer goods the world wants, before long the air pollution everywhere around the world will interconnect to sicken and asphixiate humanity. Because humanity cannot respond to such a global crisis, it is safe to say that humanity is headed for extinction–both from industrial pollution and bacteria and viruses shifting into larger patterns of circulation.
When we consider that people have been calling for the shift from economics to ecology as the new governing science of the planet since Earth Day, 1968, there are grounds for despair when the most recent governmental action taken has been President Trump’s call for the elimination of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) and his directive for the shift of its funding to the military-industrial complex.
Homo inspiens is just too stupid to be able to avoid its own auto-extinction. Add to all the problems listed above the list of other problems you read and hear about every day, and you will realize the list is just too long so our time on Earth has just been shortened.
But do not grieve, for the coming Dieback will be good for the planetary bioplasm of bacteria. So let us lift our perspective from the evolution of species to realize that it is the planet that is evolving. Mind is not limited to the small screen of human consciousness, but is, as Gregory Bateson pointed out in the nineteen-sixties, immanent in the whole ecology.
This week’s cover of NATURE (February 23, 2017) shows a suite of planets in a nearby galaxy, so we need to realize that the Gaian mind of our planet is but one chreode amid a cosmic multiplicity of others. The Big Mind of our planet no longer needs to have the small minds of humans to evolve, so as these new systems of complexity emerge, we humans can become compost for new biospheres.
Little red paper coins used to buy stamps for rationing books, Liberty Bonds, dart boards with the faces of Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolini, a tank at the end of my block on South Ingleside Avenue at 47th and Drexel Blvd, and me on my knees unfolding a huge map on the living room rug, using my newly acquired reading skills to spell out the new word Hi-ro-shi-ma.
Monarchy is an institution that is a leftover from animal evolution. It is the system of dominance and hierarchy of monkeys and primates. Democracy is a uniquely human institution and is the product of millennia of cultural evolution.
If we look around the world now we can appreciate how war lords, dictators, kings and queens, as well as imperial American presidents are still with us, and just how shallowly rooted is this recent development of Walt Whitman’s vision of democracy. The French Revolution was followed by the Reign of Terror and the imperialism of the military dictator Napoleon. The American Revolution was followed by the imperial Mexican American War, the Civil War, and then another imperial expansion with the Spanish American War. The Irish Revolution of 1916 was also followed by a Civil War in the nineteen-twenties, and then by the dreary Irish Catholic theocratic state of De Valera in the nineteen-thirties and forties.
When Ireland finally broke free of all its ties to the United Kingdom and joined the European Union in 1973, its economy took off and it sloughed of its stagnant clerical state and became a vibrant and prosperous secular republic.
Now it is time for Scotland to follow Ireland’s republican example and separate from the United Kingdom, the English monarchy, and the English Pound. As England contracts with Brexit to leave the European Union, it is a moment of opportunity for Scotland to seize its kairos and become another Celtic republic.
Whatever happened to the Republican Party of Eisenhower? I can remember back to the days when my family in moving from Irish Chicago to the New World of California also shifted from the Democratic Party machine politics to the “I like Ike” culture of of a leader who appeared to be rational and responsible in a world threatened by the prospect of nuclear war. My grandfather Timothy Patrick Fahey had been a cog in the machine politics of corrupt bosses, crooked labor leaders, and sycophantic neer-do-wells in a culture of favors and cronyism in smoke-filled rooms–a world of the Irish “us” against the nativist and know-nothing “them.” But now it seems as if the Republicans have become a cult—an Ayn Rand instead of an L. Ron Hubbard cult of lost souls looking to secede from reality into a smaller and simpler world their small and simple minds can understand. Somewhere back in the days of Goldwater’s 1964 revolt against Nelson Rockefeller and the East Coast elite, the Republican Party went South and put together a new constituency of ex KKK members, Bible Belt fanatics wishing to take science out of the public schools, and angry middle-aged white guys who just didn’t want to pay taxes as the price we pay for civilization. Just at the time that civil rights, Feminism, and the counter culture began to change the America of Disneyland’s vision of 1910 small town America, these white guys decided to leave the complex metropolitan America of African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, and Castro and Christopher Streets openly gay couples, and hold rituals of the Dreamtime in which they waited for Jesus to land with new cargo or take them up to a white trash-compacted Protestant heaven in the Rapture. If the thirty white guys from solidly provincial red districts who are now holding our government hostage were metropolitan Ché Guevara communists, Black Panther radicals, or Hollywood celebrity Scientologists, the Speaker of the House would be deposed in a flash of photo-op camera lights, but because these are clean-cut white guys looking like Mormon missionaries, they are getting away with devilry by posing as rescuing firemen when they are crazed arsonists. The time has come for the Republican Party to return to reason and put an end to the ideological fanaticism of those who think they are absolutely right and therefore are above the rule of law. The Cromwells of history leave the stink of carnage, genocide, and civil war behind them, so we need to be wary of those zealots who do not need to listen to others because they know they are right.
2/28/2017 Trump’s speech tonight proved that he is not a narcissist, as I feared, but is someone who can listen to his speechwriters and staff and stick to the text.
American nativists did not like admitting Irish Catholics into the US in the nineteenth century, and then Central European Jews in the twentieth century. Now they don’t like admitting Muslims. What is truly unAmerican is for the U.S. President to try to decide which religions should be admitted and which excluded. Constitutionally, the separation of Church and State forbids President Trump saying Yes for Christians, No for Muslims.
william irwin thompson 