On Human Networks & Living Biosystems.

On Human Networks & Living Biosystems.

By Chris Arkenberg.

Increasingly, we live in a world defined by flat networks. Folks like Clay Shirky, Ben Hammersley, and others have observed in great detail how the design patterns of the internet are challenging and changing the landscape of human civilization. So many of our institutions have been built as hierarchical pyramids designed to exert the maximum degree of control over their domains. These top-down management structures have come to define business, government, the military, medicine, education, the family, and knowledge itself. Leaders rise to the top as centralized governors dictating down the chain how things should be, while workers march in step towards execution of their appointed tasks. Such structures were modeled after the clockworks & steam engines of classical mechanics, designed to be precise, rigid, and durable, capable of lasting hundreds of years. These structures informed the defining metaphors of our entire industrialized society.

Computer architecture recapitulated the mechanical metaphor by designating a central processor that assigned & managed tasks bussed out to sub-processors and specialized functional components. In this way the computer became more of a powerful extension of the industrial age rather than a stake in the ground of a new paradigm. While the mechanical metaphor gradually evolved into the computational metaphor which has defined the last two decades, it wasn’t until computers began to follow the model of telecom and began connecting with each other across flat networks that the seed of a biological metaphor began to take hold.

Nature, it seems, does not create very many rigid, top-down control systems. Those are too stiff and inflexible for the dynamics of life. Rather, nature evolves vast horizontal networks that assemble into specialized functions within their environment. For example, the messiest, most distributed organizational structure known - the human brain - does not have a top-tier manager or CPU. There is no executive function within the brain or its mind, though we typically like to think there is. Instead, the brain is a vast & mostly flat hierarchy that is bundled into loosely vertical functional bodies. These functional bodies are themselves existing across a mostly flat horizontal network of interactions. The thalamus receives all inputs and routes them up to higher cortical processing and lower hindbrain autonomic structures, into the amygdala for emotional content and across the hippocampus for memory, then down throughout the body. The processing chain is massively parallel, interconnected, and marked by complex feedback pathways. Mind arises off of these processes in a very ad hoc manner, always shifting, always flexible, and always derived from a mass summation across the network.

Mycelial networks offer another example. When we see mushrooms scattered across a forest floor we're not seeing individuals. Each mushroom growing from the soil is a fruiting body rising from the underground web-work of mycelia - the skeletal framework of the colony. Some mycelial colonies have been found to have areas extending over 2000 acres making them some of the largest superorganisms on the planet. The pattern suggests mushrooms as terminal nodes and mycelia as the network backbone.

In ecosystems, large predators constitute a form of top-down management but they themselves are part of the predator-prey relationship - a dynamic that must always seek relative equilibrium with the broader network in which it is embedded. Predators do not have a choice to over-consume prey or stockpile & re-sell it to others. Large ocean gyres also suggest a high degree of top-down control by seasonally establishing the engines of hemispheric weather. The North Pacific gyre becomes more active in the Winter of the northern hemisphere, driving the scale & frequency of storms hitting the pacific northwest of the United States. But the North Pacific gyre is an emergent structure that is itself built upon the properties of a nearly-infinite set of factors. It is not a regulatory structure or a governor by intent or design and there is no top-level group of components that determine its next move. It is a super-system derived from innumerable sub-systems.

Most importantly, all biological systems are guided not by top-down governors or control mechanisms but by feedback from the networks in which they are embedded. This is how nature regulates, preserves, and evolves itself towards greater adaptability. There is no fallible ruler driven to resource over-reach and myopic certainty. There is only the ongoing trial & error of embedded growth tempered by continuous communication between & within organisms.

As computers began to connect across the ARPANET, and with the dawning of the visual internet, the CPU evolved away from being specifically a central control system to become a node within a distributed network. This initial shift quickly challenged the established domains of publishing, content creation, intellectual property, and knowledge management while inviting the crowd into a shared virtual space of increasingly global identity & transaction. The advent of social networks established an organizational structure for connecting the human capital of virtuality, making it easier for like-minded people to connect & share & collaborate non-locally, subtly undermining the very notions of borders, statehood, family, and allegiance. Soon after, the mobile revolution has tipped everything on its side and bundled it into a portable device bringing instantaneous global communication & information access to most people on the planet.

The framework was laid for new forms of emergent, non-hierarchical, distributed collaboration & innovation, to both productive & destructive ends. Groups could now form and coordinate around affiliations, interest, and goals in ways that directly challenged the institutional structures monetizing our production & consumption and regulating our behaviors. It has become vastly easier for small organizations to take on multinational interests, whether in business & innovation or in power & politics. The conflicts we see across the world today are, in large part, a symptom of the younger generations leveraging flat network technologies to rise up against the older generations who long ago settled into their legacy hierarchical power structures. To paraphrase Ben Hammersley, the people who are running the world, who are entrusted with our future, are not able to understand the present. They lack the cognitive tools that are a basic part of the Generation C toolkit - the digital natives who grew up with a mobile in their hands and the internet at their fingertips, embedded in specialized networks that span borders and extend identity into the virtual.

The global disruptions that seem to characterize modernity constitute a civilizational correction driven by natural law. The DotCom bubble went through a correction, shedding excess value and pruning the garden of exuberant innovation to favor only the most fit. It was a good thing, if not painful. We witnessed the correction in the housing bubble and will likely see similar corrections in credit & commodities, as well as a painfully positive correction in energy, subsidized and under-valued for so long. The impacts of climate change are a correction imposed upon the legacy model of industrialization & growth by nature itself - the super-system in which all human endeavor is embedded and to which we are ultimately accountable.

The civilization correction is an emergent regulatory mechanism embedded within natural systems forcing our legacy human systems to progressively modify the unsustainable design patterns of our past. The mechanical metaphor & the computational metaphor are necessarily opening to include the biological metaphor. We can see this in every aspect of technology and it is equally emergent across human behavior & social systems. Nanosystems emulate biosystems. Computation & robotics are integrating with neurology & physiology. Individuals are finding agency & empowerment in leaderless multi-cellular collaborations. The built environment is becoming sensory-aware, communicating with itself through discrete feedback mechanisms. It can be argued that the emergence of the internet and of ubiquitous mobile communication & computation is an expression of our natural instincts to move into closer alignment with our environment; to follow the adaptive design patterns of nature in order to find a more sustainable & equitable posture for our species; a thermodynamic need to seek maximum efficiency in energy expenses. And to express a direct intervention programmed by nature itself to nudge the Anthropocene back towards equilibrium.

Such lofty ponderings aside, our world is undoubtedly approaching an inflection point. Everything appears to be upending and it’s all spread out in glorious detail for everyone to see. The feedback loop between humanity and it’s creations - the biological & cybernetic communication among individuals & groups & cultures & organisms & ecosystems - is tightening and getting more & more dense every day, feeding on itself and forcing exceptional degrees of novelty into becoming. It’s frightening & awesome and the Old Guard can barely see it happening right in front of their eyes. The shift may be apocalyptic, a sudden phase change, or an accelerated-but-managed transition... Probably it will be all of these things in differing degrees & locales. However it happens, the emerging paradigm is much more about networks, messaging, feedback, and biology rather than hierarchy, control, power, and mechanization. Nature is the super-system, the ultimate controller enforcing the laws of physics and prescribing the design templates for fitness & adaptation. If we are, as Kevin Kelley suggests, the sex organs of technology, then our technology is born from the natural imperatives coded deeply into our DNA.

Via spacecollective.org

Dagens Citat: Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. on the purpose of education:

"It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life.

Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one's self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals."

From the speech "The Purpose of Education" by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

David Korten: "Living Buildings, Living Economies, and a Living Future."

In another excellent piece by Dr. David Korten, former professor of economy at Harvard Business School, he states that:

We humans, in a fit of adolescent hubris, have sought to liberate ourselves from the responsibilities of life in community. We are in denial of our fundamental nature as living beings—forgetting that because of the way life manages energy, living beings exist only in active relationships to other living beings.

We have so confused individual autonomy with personal liberty that we have created economies that reduce caring human relationships to soulless financial exchange and structured our physical space around buildings and auto-dependent transportation systems that wall us off from one another and nature. In isolation from nature we have sought to dominate and control rather than work with nature’s natural generative processes. We have paid a terrible price.

As we restructure our physical and economic relationships to achieve true economic efficiency and reduce the human burden on the biosphere, we will see even more clearly our interdependence with one another and the place we live. We will know where our food, water, and energy come from. We will know where our wastes go. And most of all we will be constantly reminded of the extent to which our happiness and well-being depend on our active engagement with the generative living community of which we are a part.

The challenges we face in making the transition are enormous. But so too is the opportunity to create and secure a living future for ourselves and our children for generations to come.

Read all of it here.

Dokumentar: The End of Poverty?

We're Not Broke, Just Twisted: Extreme Wealth Inequality in America.

Dagens Citat: John Stuart Mill.

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

Why Privacy Matters.

Daniel J. Solove, professor of law at George Washington University, has a highly recommendable essay on The Chronicle of Higher Education's website in which he refutes the most common argument against privacy, namely "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."

Monsanto pesticide found to infect plants with AIDS-like disease.

Research conducted by a team of senior plant and animal scientists found that Monsanto's glyphosate chemical, which is the primary ingredient in its popular RoundUp herbicide formula, appears responsible for infecting plants with an AIDS-like syndrome that destroys their immunity, blocks their absorption of certain vitamins and minerals, and eventually kills them.

Why Nuclear Energy Isn't Going to Power the World.

A quite interesting analysis by Derek Abbott, Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Adelaide in Australia, concludes that nuclear energy isn't a very promising alternative to the fossil fuel based economy due to a number of factors.

[Research]: Food Speculation.

The following is a bit of research clearly indicating that economic liberalism in practice - in the form of speculation in food prices - leads to starvation and misery for the most impoverished people on the planet.



Economic Times August 8 2008: "Speculation behind global commodity price rise."

PRI August 9 2008: "Orchestrating Famine – a Must-Read Backgrounder on the Food Crisis."

The Guardian January 24, 2011: "Food Speculation: 'People Die from Hunger While Banks Make a Killing on Food'"

The Guardian, Feburary 05, 2011: "How Banks and Investors are Starving The Third World."

Foreign Policy, April 27, 2011: "How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis."

Al Jazeera English, May 09, 2011: "Glencore: Profiteering from hunger and chaos."

CNN: As food speculators make money, the world's poorest suffer.

Danwatch (23/09/2011): Banker har ingen politik for fødevarespekulation.

Oxfam International Report (October 2011): "Not a Game: Speculation vs Food Security".

Monthly Review (Jan. 2012): Food as a Commodity.

New studies link lowered IQ in children to pesticide exposure.

Three studies undertaken independently, but published simultaneously last month, show that prenatal exposure to organophosphate pesticides — sprayed on crops in the Salinas Valley and used in Harlem and the South Bronx to control cockroaches and other insects — can lower children’s IQ by an average of as much as 7 points. While this may not sound like a lot, it is more than enough to affect a child’s reading and math skills and cause behavioral problems with potentially long-lasting impacts, according to the studies.

Source - Yale Environment 360: From Fields to Inner City, Pesticides Affect Children IQ.

Empathic Education: The Transformation of Learning in an Interconnected World.

Empathic Education: The Transformation of Learning in an Interconnected World

By Jeremy Rifkin

With the passage of health-care reform, President Obama has turned his attention to reforming education in America. In his State of the Union Message, he called for a significant increase in support for his "Educate to Innovate" campaign, which puts renewed emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to ensure "our nation's economic competitiveness." The goal, according to the White House, is to equip every student with the knowledge that he or she needs to become a productive worker in the global economy.

Maybe it's time to ask the question of whether simply becoming economically productive ought to be the primary mission of American education. Shouldn't we place at least equal attention on developing students' innate empathic drives, so that we can prepare the next generation to think and act as part of a global family in a shared biosphere?

The biosphere is the narrow band, from the ocean floor to outer space, where living creatures and the earth's geochemical processes interact to sustain one another. We are learning that the biosphere functions like an indivisible organism. The continuous symbiotic relationships between every living creature and the geochemical processes are what ensure the survival of the planetary organism and life on earth. The issue of what kind of education students should be getting is particularly relevant today, as humanity attempts to cobble together a sustainable global society in time to avert potentially catastrophic climate change.

When we talk about revolutionizing the way our students learn, we must understand the larger context that sets the framework for fundamental changes in our notions about education. Ultimately, our ideas about education flow from our perceptions about reality and our concepts of nature—especially our assumptions about human nature and the meaning of the human journey—which become institutionalized in our educational processes. What we really teach, at any given time, is the consciousness of an era.

For example, at the dawn of the modern market economy and nation-state, Enlightenment philosophers—with some exceptions—saw people as rational, autonomous agents, driven by utilitarian desires and material interests. To bring out those qualities, educators established an educational system along the same lines.

Unfortunately, our system today is still largely mired in those outdated assumptions. The classroom is a microcosm of the factory system, market forces, and nation-state governance. Students have been taught to think of "knowledge as power" and to regard learning as an asset one acquires to advance one's material self-interest. The educational process emphasizes autonomous learning—sharing knowledge is considered cheating—and the mission is to produce efficient and productive workers for the market economy. While those Enlightenment assumptions have provided the intellectual motivation and justification for a vast expansion of wealth for many people, they have also left the earth's ecosystems in shambles, with ominous consequences for our species' future.

Of course, we know that the ideas espoused in the Enlightenment are not set in stone. Great changes in human consciousness occur when new, more-complex energy regimes arise, making possible more-interdependent and complex social arrangements. Coordinating those civilizations requires new, more sophisticated communications systems. When energy regimes converge with communications revolutions, human consciousness is altered.

All forager-hunter societies were oral cultures, steeped in mythological consciousness. The great hydraulic agricultural civilizations were organized around writing and gave rise to theological consciousness. Print technology became the communication medium to organize the myriad activities of the coal- and steam-powered first Industrial Revolution, 200 years ago. Print communication also led to a transformation from theological to ideological consciousness during the Enlightenment. In the 20th century, electronic communications became the command and control mechanism to manage a second industrial revolution, based on the oil economy and the automobile. Electronic communication spawned a new psychological consciousness.

Today we are on the verge of another seismic shift. Distributed information and communication technologies are converging with distributed renewable energies, creating the infrastructure for a third industrial revolution. In the 21st century, hundreds of millions of people will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on-site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen, and share electricity with one other across continental grids that act much like the Internet. The open-source sharing of energy will give rise to collaborative energy spaces, not unlike the collaborative social spaces on the Internet.

The third industrial revolution paves the way for biosphere consciousness. When each of us is responsible for harnessing the earth's renewable energy in the small swath of the biosphere where we dwell, but we also realize that our survival and well-being depend on sharing our energy across continental land masses, we come to see our inseparable ecological relationship to one another and our fellow species.

That new understanding coincides with discoveries in evolutionary biology, neurocognitive science, and child development that reveal that people are biologically predisposed to be empathic—that our core nature is not rational, detached, acquisitive, aggressive, and narcissistic, but affectionate, highly social, cooperative, and interdependent. Homo sapiens is giving way to Homo empathicus. Historians tell us that empathy is the social glue that allows increasingly individualized and diverse populations to forge bonds of solidarity across broader domains so that society can cohere as a whole. To empathize is to civilize.

Empathy has evolved over history. In forager-hunter societies, empathy rarely went beyond tribal blood ties. In the great agricultural age, empathy extended past blood ties to associational ties based on religious identification. Jews began to empathize with fellow Jews as if in an extended family, Christians began empathizing with fellow Christian, Muslims with Muslims, and so on. In the Industrial Age, with the emergence of the modern nation-state, empathy extended once again, this time to people of like-minded national identities. Americans began to empathize with Americans, Germans with Germans, Japanese with Japanese. Today empathy is beginning to stretch beyond national boundaries to biosphere boundaries. We are coming to see the biosphere as our indivisible community, and our fellow creatures as our extended evolutionary family.

The realization that we are an empathic species, that empathy has evolved over history, and that we are as interconnected in the biosphere as we are in the blogosphere, has profound implications for rethinking the mission of education. New teaching models designed to transform education from a competitive contest to a collaborative and empathic learning experience are emerging as schools and colleges try to reach a generation that has grown up on the Internet and is used to interacting in open social networks where information is shared rather than hoarded. The traditional assumption that "knowledge is power," and is used for personal gain, is being subsumed by the notion that knowledge is an expression of the shared responsibilities for the collective well-being of humanity and the planet as a whole.

Classrooms could become laboratories for preparing young people for biosphere consciousness. Students are already becoming aware that the way they live leaves an ecological footprint, affecting the lives of every other human being, our fellow creatures, and the earth we inhabit together. They learn, for example, that the wasteful use of energy in the family automobile or home results in an increase of carbon-dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. The rise in the earth's temperature that follows can lead to less rainfall and more droughts in other parts of the world, adversely affecting food production and putting more of the world's poor at risk of malnutrition and even starvation.

The new sense of biosphere interconnectivity and responsibility goes hand-in-hand with empathy workshops and courses that help students draw global emotional connections in the same way that environmental curricula help them draw global ecological connections. Empathy curricula now exist in 18 states. In many schools, empathy curricula start as early as first grade.

One interesting example is the Roots of Empathy project, begun by a Canadian educator, Mary Gordon, which has been introduced into first through eighth grades across Canada. A mother and her baby visit the classroom once a month for a school year. Students are asked to closely watch their interaction, especially how they communicate and respond to each other. Over the course of the year, the children experience the baby and her mother as unique people with needs and desires for affiliation and affection not unlike their own. They become attuned to reading the baby's feelings and develop an empathic relationship with the baby and the mother. Children come to learn about emotional literacy—which Gordon defines as "the ability to find our humanity in one another."

Putting students into direct emotional contact with the parent-child attachment process and empathic bond creates "citizens of the world—children who are developing empathic ethics and a sense of social responsibility that takes the position that we all share the same lifeboat," Gordon argues. "These are the children who will build a more caring, peaceful and civil society, child by child."

The newly emerging awareness of global ecological and emotional interconnectivity is accompanied by a revolution in the way students learn. The traditional top-down approach to teaching is giving way to a distributed and collaborative educational experience designed to instill a sense of the shared nature of knowledge. Intelligence, in the new way of thinking, is not something one inherits or a resource one accumulates, but, rather, an experience that is shared among people.

Such trends are taking education beyond the confines of the classroom to a global learning environment in cyberspace. The extension of the classroom's central nervous system to embrace the whole of civilization exposes students to their peers in widely different cultures, allowing empathic sensibility to expand and deepen. Education becomes a truly planetary experience.

The global extension of learning environments in cyberspace is being matched by the local extension of learning environments in school neighborhoods. The walls separating classrooms and communities are breaking down. In the past 20 years, American high schools and colleges have introduced service-learning programs into the curriculum—a deeply collaborative learning experience. The exposure to diverse people from various walks of life has spurred an empathic surge among the nation's young people. Studies indicate that many students experience a deep maturing of empathic sensibility by being thrust into unfamiliar environments where they are called upon to reach out and assist others. Such experiences are often life-changing, affecting students' sense of what gives their lives meaning.

Although not yet the norm, more classrooms at the college and secondary-school levels are also being transformed, at least for small periods of time, into distributed-learning environments. It's not uncommon for large class groups to be divided into work groups, which are then given collaborative work assignments. The students later reconvene in plenary sessions where they share their findings, generally in the form of group reports.

Distributed and collaborative education begins with the premise that the combined wisdom of the group, more often than not, is greater than the expertise of any given member, and that by learning together, the group advances its collective knowledge as well as that of each member. The value of distributed and collaborative education first came to light in the 1950s, in research conducted by M.L.J. Abercrombie at the University College London Hospitals. Dr. Abercrombie observed that when medical students worked together in small groups to diagnose patients, they were able to more quickly and accurately assess a patient's medical condition than when they diagnosed alone. The collaborative context allowed students the opportunity to challenge one another's assumptions, build on one another's ideas and insights, and come to a negotiated consensus regarding the patient's situation.

In distributed and collaborative learning environments, the process becomes as important as the product. The old hierarchical model of learning is replaced by network ways of organizing knowledge. Learning becomes less about pounding facts into individual students' brains and more about how to think collaboratively and critically. To be effective, collaborative learning requires mutual respect among all the players involved, a willingness to listen to others' perspectives, being open to criticism and a desire to share knowledge, and being responsible for and accountable to the group as a whole.

Distributed and collaborative learning favors interdisciplinary teaching and multicultural studies. The traditional reductionist approach to the study of phenomena is beginning to give way to the pursuit of "big picture" questions about the nature of reality and the meaning of existence—which require a more interdisciplinary perspective. Cross-disciplinary academic associations, journals, and curricula have proliferated in recent years, reflecting the burgeoning interest in the interconnectedness of knowledge. A younger generation of scholars is crossing traditional academic boundaries to create more-integrated fields of research. Several hundred interdisciplinary fields, like behavioral economics, eco-psychology, social history, eco-philosophy, biomedical ethics, and social entrepreneurship, are shaking up the academy and portending a paradigm shift in the educational process.

Meanwhile, the globalization of education has brought together people from diverse cultures, each with an anthropological point of reference. The result is a plethora of fresh ways of studying phenomena, each conditioned by a different cultural history and narrative. By approaching a study area from the perspectives of a number of academic disciplines and cultural perspectives, students learn to become open-minded and able to view phenomenon from more than one view.

Distributed and collaborative learning, with its emphasis on mindfulness, attunement to others, nonjudgmental interactions, acknowledgment of each person's unique contributions, and recognition of the importance of deep participation, can't help but foster critical thinking skills and greater empathic engagement. In that sense, collaborative learning transforms the classroom into a laboratory for empathic expression, which, in turn, enriches the educational process.

If our primary nature is Homo empathicus, and the biosphere is the larger indivisible community where we and our fellow creatures dwell, then the mission of education ought to be dedicated, at least in part, to the task of bringing out our core being, so that we can optimize our full potential not only as productive workers in the marketplace but, more important, as empathic human beings in the biosphere. Our nation and our schools and universities should invest in distributed and collaborative learning experiences —curricula emphasizing the interconnectedness of life and geochemical processes in the biosphere, empathy courses that promote social behavior, cyberspace classes connecting students around the globe, service-learning programs in communities, sharing knowledge in peer groups, and interdisciplinary and multicultural studies—with the objective of nurturing students' empathic nature. While no one would disparage President Obama's effort to prepare our young people for the challenges they face in a global economy, the bigger task is to prepare students to live on a peaceful sustainable planet.


Jeremy Rifkin is the author of The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (Tarcher-Penguin), and a senior lecturer at the Wharton School's executive-education program at the University of Pennsylvania. This essay is adapted from his recent addresses to the annual meeting of the College Board and the British Royal Society for the Arts.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Om Liberalismen.

En af liberalismens grundtanker er individualismen, nærmere bestemt den fejlagtige idé, at individet er adskilt fra og hævet over naturen, som i den liberalistiske optik egentlig mestendels er at betragte som et stort ressourcelager, som individer kan udnytte så meget de måtte ønske det mhp. at vinde personlige materielle fordele og dermed skabe vækst i økonomien, en vækst man tilsyneladende mener bør fortsætte i det uendelige.

Denne kortslutning kunne ganske vist undskyldes i det 18. århundrede, men som ethvert intelligent menneske i dag kan regne ud, så kan der ikke eksistere uendelig økonomisk vækst på en endelig planet med et endeligt antal ressourcer, hvorfor tanken om individet som en størrelse der er adskilt fra naturen og hævet over den, i dag må siges at være en utilgivelig dumhed.

At denne liberalistiske grundtanke er ensbetydende med vold og tvang er ikke svær at se (i det mindste for folk som ikke er liberalister): Artsudryddelse, overfiskeri, afskovning, udpining, menneskeskabt global opvarmning og omfattende forurening er alle konsekvenser af denne bizarre logik og det siger sig selv, at følgevirkningerne af ovennævnte fænomener er omfattende lidelse og destruktion af habitater for både dyr og mennesker.

Liberalismen er det ideologiske grundlag for den industrialiserede kapitalistiske civilisation, som jo altså er global, hvorfor det ikke betyder det store om et givent land har en liberalistisk politisk tradition, så længe det økonomiske system er kapitalistisk. Idéen om uendelig vækst, individet der er hævet over naturen og biosfæren som et rent ressourcelager er alle liberalistiske i deres ophav, men i dag så indlejrede i den globaliserede kapitalistiske logik, at man kan have svært ved at se skoven for bare træer.

Liberalister er ganske rigtigt meget frihedsorienterede i deres egen selvforståelse, men denne er sjældent forenelig med hvad man rent faktisk støtter op om. Man ser tydeligt i eksempelvis Liberal Alliance, hvad det er for en frihed man mestendels ønsker sig, nemlig den økonomiske frihed til at akkumulere i det uendelige og simultant friheden fra at være bundet af nogen former for kollektiv ansvarlighed hvad ressourcefordeling angår. Man har altså ikke noget problem med at støtte op om regeringen og deres støtteparti, som i alle henseender har forsøgt at indskrænke den enkeltes frihed gennem snart ti år, så længe man kan få nogle politikker gennemført, som sørger for, at nogle af de rigeste mennesker der nogensinde har levet, får mulighed for at betale lidt mindre i skat. Det er nemlig den største uretfærdighed, at man ikke har friheden til at spise guldbelagt kaviar hver dag, mens mange tusinder dør dagligt af sult.

Liberalister har ikke noget problem med totalitære magtkonstruktioner, så længe disse udelukkende befinder sig i den økonomiske sfære. De fleste liberalister mener ikke der er nogen grund til at regulere multinationale selskaber, der jo skal være frie til at akkumulere i det uendelige, da dette skaber den økonomiske vækst som man mener er et ubetinget gode. Man støtter altså op om en verdensøkonomi der er fuldstændig domineret af multinationale selskaber som i deres organisationsstrukturer er bygget som totalitære stater. I disse selskaber går kommandolinjen kun en vej, nemlig oppefra og ned og ordrer fra toppen skal følges slavisk eller også finder man sig et andet sted at være. I den liberalistiske optik er dette okay da der ikke er tale om tvang, forstået på den måde, at virksomhederne ikke tvinger nogen til at arbejde for sig, hvorfor de arbejdende altså er gået frivilligt med til de forhold de nu engang er underlagt på deres arbejdsplads.

Den enes frihed er den andens ufrihed på en endelig planet bestående af endelige ressourcer. Opkøber de formuende landjorden i et fattigt land, hvilket sker lige nu mange steder i Afrika, vil det selvsagt begrænse andres muligheder for at komme til at blive jordbesiddende, da prisen uundgåeligt vil stige. Har nogle så mange penge, at de kan købe sig til indflydelse og få indført de politikker som er mest gavnlige for deres egoistiske interesser, vil det selvsagt yde strukturel vold på alle de som ikke samtidig kan få deres interesser repræsenteret. Når liberalister altså postulerer, at de er frihedens vogtere er det en sandhed med nogle ret alvorlige modifikationer, idet liberalismens ideologi når den indlejres i den økonomiske tænkning, alt for ofte er årsag til det komplet modsatte, nemlig tvang og vold.

Two new speeches by Noam Chomsky

Dokumentar: Fuel.

Dokumentar: END:CIV - Resist or Die.

Dokumentar: Dirt!

The Doha Debates: Should Arab Governments Let NATO Deal with Libya?

Dagens Citat: Martin Luther King jr.

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

Mordet på Osama Bin Laden.

Angrebet på tvillingetårnene den 11. september 2001 var det man i amerikanske efterretningscirkler kalder 'blowback' dvs. en uintenderet konsekvens af den førte politik. Nærmere bestemt en konsekvens af træningen og bevæbningen af de hellige islamiske krigere (mujaheedin) som man flittigt anvendte i proxy-krigen mod Sovjetunionen i Afghanistan i 1980'erne. Det var nemlig i disse år, at Osama bin Laden modtog sin militære træning, sammen med titusinder af andre som blev trænet i de træningslejre som den pakistanske efterretningstjeneste ISI opførte i samarbejde med CIA, hvilket senere skulle komme til at skabe grundlaget for såvel Al Qaeda som Taliban.

Efter krigen i Afghanistan rejste Osama Bin Laden tilbage til Saudi-Arabien, hvor han med stor sandsynlighed blev påvirket af de tanker som skulle forme hans anti-vestlige sindelag. Bin Laden anså Israels besættelse af Jerusalem, islams tredjehelligste by, som et voldsomt zionistisk angreb på islam og han havde yderligere meget lidt tilovers for den vestlige levevis og ønskede derfor at bekæmpe alle former for vestliggørelse af den islamiske verden.

Da Saddam Hussein indtog Kuwait spurgte Bin Laden det saudi-arabiske kongehus om tilladelse til at bekæmpe Saddam Hussein med de hellige krigere han havde allieret sig med i Afghanistan. Det havde man hos landets ledelse svært ved at se den lysende idé i og da det Saudi-Arabiske styre valgte at støtte op om USA under den første golfkrig, forlod han landet i vrede og flyttede til Sudan hvor han begyndte sin terroristkarriere. Da den sudanesiske jord begyndte at brænde under ham flyttede han sine aktiviteter tilbage til Afghanistan hvor han genoptog kontakten til sine hellige krigervenner og blev ganske tæt tilknyttet til Talibans daværende leder Mullah Omar. Fast Forward til 9-11.

Det mest vellykkede terrorangreb i historien fremprovokerede en hurtig amerikansk respons, idet man som bekendt gik i krig med Afghanistan, hvilket var nøjagtig hvad terrornetværket ønskede allermest, idet Al Qaedas strategi var at lokke USA ud i en langvarig udmattelseskrig, i forhåbning om, at denne ultimativt skulle få samme konsekvenser for supermagten, som krigen i Afghanistan i 1980'erne fik for USSR, nemlig økonomisk kollaps, forårsaget af hvad der over tid ville blive ubetalelige krigsomkostninger. Hvad man imidlertid nok ikke havde forventet i den tidlige del af det nye årtusinde var, at USA blot to år senere invaderede endnu et muslimsk land, men endnu engang var den amerikanske udenrigspolitik vand på Al Qaedas mølle, for invasionen skabte grundlaget for en omfattende rekruttering i Irak, hvor unge irakiske mænd stod i kø for at bekæmpe invasionsmagterne med alle mulige midler.

Bin Laden, hans medsammensvorne og deres sympatisører har hele tiden været en marginal gruppering, som langt hovedparten af verdens muslimer har taget afstand fra, ikke desto mindre har man haft held med at sprede de bagvedliggende tanker og strategier i en række lande i Vesten, Mellemøsten og Asien. De mange oprør i mellemøstlige lande hvor regionens muslimer har krævet reformer, frihedsrettigheder og demokratisering indikerer dog, at Al Qaeda ikke har haft held med at sprede deres ideologi i et omfang der vil gå hen og få større betydning for regionens udvikling, i det mindste på kort sigt, tværtimod lader det til at kun meget få bakker op om Al Qaedas ultimative målsætning – genindførelsen af kalifatet.

Al Qaeda har aldrig været en centralt administreret organisation, men snarere et meget løst sammenhængende netværk af ligesindede som kan slutte sig til et sæt af idéer eller principper for voldelig religiøs og politisk oprørskamp mod USA og hegemonens tro støtter i den muslimske verden. Så selvom Al Qaeda har mistet mange af netværkets mest prominente medlemmer og - såvidt vides - alle deres træningslejre, er netværket langt fra afgået ved døden, idet limen der forbinder de involverede snarere er et sæt af idéer end netværkets forskellige personer og et sæt af idéer er ganske enkelt langt sværere at komme til livs end en gruppe af mennesker. Bin Laden var da heller aldrig arkitekten bag netværkets strategiske tænkning, men snarere en art åndelig leder. Den strategiske del - dvs. udformningen af principperne for oprørskampen - har Ayman al-Zawahiri stået for og han er stadig i live, såvidt vi ved.

Spørgsmålet om hvordan Osama Bin Laden har haft held med at gemme sig i en pakistansk by tæt på en militærbase, angiveligt i årevis, uden at den pakistanske stat har været vidende om det, er her ganske interessant, for var det virkelig tilfældet eller har den pakistanske regering i årevis været bekendt med hvor han befandt sig og således dækket over ham? Mange finder det forståeligt nok lidet plausibelt at den pakistanske regering har været så inkompetent. Den indiske forfatter Salman Rushdie går endda så langt som til at kalde Pakistan for en terroriststat og man kan da også let ledes til at frygte, at der i visse voldsforherligende kredse vil blive fremsat krav om yderligere interventioner i landet med udgangspunkt i lignende anklager.

Incitamentet til at bekrige en nation med en atomar våbenkapacitet med udgangspunkt i ovennævnte kritik er imidlertid nok ret begrænset og endvidere bliver det ganske svært at mobilisere støtte til noget sådant under den igangværende økonomiske krise, så det kommer næppe til at ske. Til gengæld har man nok god grund til at frygte, at der vil ske en yderligere optrapning af drone-angreb i Af-Pak regionen, samt yderligere krænkelser af Pakistans territoriale integritet med henvisninger til landets inkompetence (og manglende vilje) ift. til bekæmpelsen af terrorisme. Den opinionsmæssige grobund for yderligere statslige voldshandlinger er i hvert fald ganske god for tiden, for som den amerikanske forfatningsadvokat og systemkritiker Glenn Greenwald udtrykte det i en blogpost forleden: "Whenever America uses violence in a way that makes its citizens cheer, beam with nationalistic pride, and rally around their leader, more violence is typically guaranteed."