"The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological,
evolutionary process. Yet we face an enormous crisis because the
most central and important aspect of globalization-its economy-is
currently being organized in a manner that so gravely violates the
fundamental principles by which healthy living systems are organized
that it threatens the demise of our whole civilization." --
Elisabet Sahtouris
It was sometime ago that Tim Shire, Publisher of Ensign, was
mentioning that our universities have become centers of training for
the corporations rather than learning centers of education.
I have reiterated more than once that we need to speak the same
language to understand each other, and today's language to
communicate with each other includes always room for
misunderstanding. And aware of this misunderstanding, I have learnt
to include in my communication the wording "it is my understanding
that..." I am trying to convey the message that we have lost our
natural way to communicate with each other; for instance, I can make
reference to the misappropriation of language when Nike has the
copyright of the saying "Just do it." And as President Bush's speech
has been hailed as a masterpiece to rally the American people
against the war against terrorism, so the same speech has been
partially criticized as providing a message of division among people
in the world.
We must relearn how to communicate with each other, and use a
human language rather than constrained languages as artificially
created by our fragmentary world. Humberto Maturana, a biologist,
explains that languaging is our natural way to coordinate our
behaviour and become more intelligent. A language (say English) is
part of our languaging, and we know that we can understand each
other by the way we look, by the way we move our hands and our
bodies, by the way of our culture.
Languaging means to provide a common understandable meaning for
our actions to each other. And this is why for instance I got so
much irritated at one time when a teacher told me that one of my
sons was failing phonetics. I mean, what we need phonetics for when
we may construct a wider vocabulary by reading, conversing and
writing. We need a new language, and today's language of emphasizing
money as a the supreme means of coordinating our behaviour is
faulty.
Sometime ago I was explaining how uncivilized was to find the
culprits of crimes by providing monetary rewards to anonymous
informants. The bounty for Osama Bin Laden has been raised from
$5-million to $25-million. And I ask if this bounty is net of taxes,
and if Osama Bin Laden himself would agree to turn himself in, for
the market price, by conjuring with a friend of his who would
receive anonymously the reward.
I have heard that some U.S. politicians have called on investors
to undertake patriotic buying to prevent a free-fall in stock market
prices; and I question what this Free Market economy is all about.
The Free Market ideology has hijacked the human rights of people to
feel free, for instance from ignorance, and I am happy that the
Bush's Administration has relearnt Keynesianism, and put lives
before money in America. But that is not enough as we are becoming
citizens of this planet rather than citizens of a nation.
Life Web, Web page of Elisabet Sahtouris http://sahtouris.com
http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/globalize.html
Humberto Maturana, http://www.pnc.com.au/~lfell/in.html
About dividing the world into two camps: a new Vietnam looming
ahead, by M. Ali Ibrahim, The Egyptian Gazette, September 24, 2001
http://64.124.221.202/algomhuria2/gazette/1/3.htm
RECKONINGS: A Bad Week, by Paul Krugman, September 23, 2001, New
York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/opinion/23KRUG.html?todaysheadlines
Note (dated June 22, 2006): But Bush's Keynesianism turned
out to be one on behalf of the Few and privileged. |