SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
At this point, LEARNERS’
assumptions branch out in all directions.
Interstellar space offers
us a type of savanna ecology (just scaled-up).
It offers lots of food to those who may learn to harvest it. It promises unlimited stellar energy and free
hydrogen, more than enough for a sun-powered, plant-like civilization like
ours, once we evolve beyond our vegetative, static, planetary phase, using a
ridiculously small fraction of available stellar energy.
Current human technology
pegs us as microbial ‘decomposers’: global leaf mold, if you will. Indeed, we juggle sunlight, plants, animals
and various dirts to produce cities, armies, waste heat and light, carbon
dioxide, methane, rust and impermeable membranes (of concrete and
asphalt). In so doing, we are creating a
witch’s brew of toxic refuse, sewage and unending tonnages of human flesh.
“The pattern of human population growth in the twentieth century was more bacterial than primate. When Homo sapiens passed the six billion mark we had already exceeded by as much as a hundred times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land. We and the rest of life cannot afford another hundred years like that.” Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002, p. 29.
Earth-bound civilization
may liberate itself from such primitive routines. We may stray thereafter into the living space
of other herbivorous civilizations. Let
us hope each side will have graduated from its atavistic weapon mentality and
rejected heroic hysteria.
Then again, there may be
predatory civilizations out there, fast, stealthy and lethal by design. “They may act toward us,” Paul Lackman suggests, “the way
European colonists acted toward the rest of the world.” I had in mind a much more lethal interaction:
like that of big fish towards smaller ones or like worms that devour the
soil. Their hunger might tempt them to
engulf all life that showed the slightest weakness, down to planetary bedrock.
Today, an electromagnetic
signal bubble pulses louder and louder from the Earth. As we speak, its radius spans one hundred
light years: more than twenty-five times the distance to the nearest
stars. This bubble is spreading out at
the speed of light: the radio signature of a second sun that’s not there, plus
800-odd electromagnetic pulses from idiot-savant nuke tests. If any hungry entity can sift our signal from
the background crackle of cosmic radiation, they can. Our ultra-primitive radio signals might
attract them, the same way a bleating calf hidden away by its mother might
betray them both to hungry hyenas.
Their biosphere-eating,
however, might become lethargic if we put up a proper fight to begin with. Defense against this kind of predation may be
the only justification for our inbred ferocity.
For the same reason, rams bash each other’s skulls during courtship
rituals—the better to fend off mountain predators.
Robert O’Connell’s study of weapon management, Of Arms and Men, concludes that most battles are ritualistic
duels fought between equally powerful armies.
They resemble courtship duels among ungulates and other beasts. Like rutting males, each army risks the
destruction of a tolerable number of its soldiers (cells) only to withdraw and
perish unfulfilled if the business goes sour.
He called this phenomenon
“intra-species warfare.” It is
interspersed with “extra-species” fights during which a heavily armed aggressor
dehumanizes and exterminates its victims until weapon parity, attrition and/or
genocide bring on martial exhaustion.
We face both challenges
in the future, whether fighting among ourselves or against aliens.
In his compilation, A History of
Warfare, John Keegan presents two kinds of warfare: true war and real
war.
True war is the
Clausewitzian ideal. It is chock-full of
weapon justifications: the Chinese School of Law, Realpolitik and Machtpolitik
(the politics of realism and might).
True war boasts of elaborate battle preparations; the self-sacrifice,
professionalism, noble bonding and peacock panoply of professional soldiers;
the arrogant elitism that sets them above non-combatants; etc.
Real war is the art form
of the bully and the tyrant. It involves
routine massacre, vandalism, rape, terror and subversion of conscience. Real war is the disgraceful way we express
our reptilian neural wiring and paleomammalian thought processes that govern
human fear, authoriphilia (love of authority) and aggression.
Weapon mentors take great
pains to disguise real war as true war.
John Keegan
characterizes as typical of Western combat, the face-to-face,
fight-to-the-death rituals ‘invented’ by urbanized Greek farmers. He differentiates them from cavalry/missile
duels fought on the steppes of ancient Asia and during modern tank
battles. To him, the latter are examples
of ‘sissy’ war. He prefers the
symmetrical geometry of steel-thorned hedges of foot soldiers stolidly
harvesting each other's flesh and of Enlightenment regiments playing ‘firing
squad’ against each other in tightly packed checkerboard squares.
This preference is a
matter of taste or perhaps atavism. A
case may be made that the first ‘battles’ (aside from individual murders and
Freud’s assassination of the Father?) were fought between lines of
hunter-gatherer-scavengers who confronted each other during the harvest season
across precious patches of wild barley, potable water and fishing holes. Did they wield the first generation of
weapons adapted from hunting, gleaning and fishing tools?
More probably, the
tactics of warfare – like fire and most other sentient management techniques –
were first experimented with as child’s play (perhaps inspired by shamans’
crazy improvisations?). The most useful
of them were taken up more systematically by their mothers and elder sisters,
adopted by young males and then institutionalized when those young males took
over from grizzled elders who never wanted the know newfangled tricks in the
first place. This according to The Hundredth Monkey
by Ken Keyes, at http://www.spiritual-endeavors.org/free/100monk-pre.htm.
This is the standard path
of primate adaptation, the routine of Learner revolution. I expect the same thing to happen with
respect to World Peace, once all those die who never wanted anything to do with
it in the first place. Hopefully,
they’ll have passed away quietly without dragging the rest of us down with
them.
Paul Lackman
reminds us that Roman Legions fought with a short sword (gladius). Zulu Impis
(regiments) did so with a short-handled spear (assegai), some of the deadliest edged weapons ever forged, along
with Nepalese kukri. All three nations intended their warriors to
close in hand to hand combat with the enemy; this despite their recruits’
sensible aversion to that option.
Throughout the ages, weapon mentality propounded the “spirit of the bayonet”
regardless of piles of casualties on both sides.
Shaka Zulu punished any
warrior who lost his spear in battle. He
did not want his soldiers to throw them (the traditional fighting method). They were to thrust and slash with them in
close combat. Shaka’s recruits could not
marry until they had killed an enemy in battle.
This is another example of sublimation of the sex drive into military
violence.
Zulus suffered from
runaway population growth and resource depletion: the same problems we face today. So did all the South African tribes at the
time of the Mfecane
(“Crushing”). Entire valleys were
carpeted with human bones during this Zulu-initiated genocide of neighboring
Bantu tribes, and then aggravated by them as they fled from the Zulus. This devastation took place just before a new
wave of European tribal immigrants arrived to compound the military problem of
Africa.
If forced to choose
between these fighting styles, others could favor the swift-mounted herder of helpless
foot soldiers into static herds ripe for slaughter. Over the course of countless mobile battles
of annihilation – Carrhae, Adrianople, Angora, Liegnitz I, Mohacs, Little Big
Horn, Kursk and the Southern Golan – we’ve hyper-refined this aspect of the
threat formula. Unlike Keegan’s
pedestrian ideal, modern combat emphasizes mobility, long-range missile attack
and distancing from the target, both physical and psychological. From this point of view, infantry exists to
occupy ground, deny it to the enemy, abuse local civilians and soak up
devastating volleys of mobile firepower.
Ultimately, such quibbles
are moot and secondary to Learner purposes.
From playground to parade ground, kindergarten to kindermord (baby murder), our institutions subtly lure us into the
meat grinder.
Even though we’ve been
taught a lot about the warrior king Shaka Zulu, another African leader demands
our attention. Weapon mentors have
ignored him while they’ve flooded our conscience with books and movies about the
psychopathic warrior, Shaka.
Moshoeshoe (Moshesh,
Mosheshwe or Mshweshwe – pronounced MOH-SHWAYSHWAY) was a prince of the Basotho
born in 1786. As a young man, he was
angry and impatient. So his father sent
him to Mohlomi, a famous chief who taught him dignity, self-restraint, patience
and leadership. Moshoeshoe learned the
value of hard work, that powerless people merit justice, and the poor,
compassion. These lessons served him well
under the most trying circumstances a successful ruler could face.
After a great drought
brought on the mfécane or lifaquane, Moshoeshoe withdrew with his people to the
mountain fortress of Buta-Buthe. When
overwhelming Tlokoa tribesmen invaded, he withdrew with a few survivors to
Thaba Bosiu or Bosigo (Mountain of the Night) from which he would never be
dislodged again.
His warriors captured
Tlokoa cannibals who’d killed and eaten his grandfather when he straggled
during the retreat. Moshoeshoe forgave
them and gave them land so they would give up cannibalism. He said he had to revere the resting place of
his grandfather.
Through a series of
brilliant military campaigns and diplomatic coups, he defeated a succession of
attacks against his people. He defeated
victorious, superior forces of the Tlokoa, the Ndebele Zulu (after who’s
defeated troops he sent cattle and rations, wishing them peace – they never
attacked him again), Voortrekkers and British Regulars. Any army too powerful to defeat, he’d
negotiate its destruction or diversion against some other group. He was a better general than his enemies and
a better negotiator than his neighbors.
All his wars were defensive. What
he held, he never gave up without a hard fight.
Always he sought peace.
He welcomed refugees from
all over South Africa and multiplied twenty-fold his few thousand
survivors. He forged the Basotho nation
and held it together through every adversity despite its traumatized and
scattered constituents. His was perhaps
the only place in South Africa where a homeless refugee and his family could
find security and justice. In return,
they gave him their loyalty and desperate valor. No other place thereabouts stood up so well
against the tests of time and man.
In 1838, some wandering
priests arrived from the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society. He welcomed them, encouraged them to create
an alphabet for his language and set up schools for his people. He sent them to negotiate with Queen
Victoria. Though he could quote Bible
verse, he never became a practicing Christian.
After Voortrekkers finally
defeated him in 1868, he turned his intact nation over to British
protection. The British took his best
land. Eventually, the truncated
remainder became the country of Lesotho.
Moshoeshoe died in 1870; his grandson rules Lesotho to this day.
There are warriors we
should admire and the rest. Learners
should not despise warriors; they should denounce dishonorable warriors who
believe in error that anything less than permanent peace is victory. Victory means permanent peace: anything less
is no more meaningful than a train wreck; it insults the sacred memory of the
dead. If there is no permanent peace,
there is no victory. If there is no
victory, there is no honor. If there is
no honor, there should have been no fighting to begin with, except in the most
extreme case of self-defense.
Moshoeshoe understood
this exactly—the way everyone must come to understand it. And whenever possible, he accepted and
welcomed the Other, the unknown stranger, the way we all must learn how to do.
In the distant past, alien
garrisons may have posted various solar orbits, a hypothetical planet orbiting
beyond Mars (that may have been blown to fragments) and other orbital
platforms.
Orthodox astronomers
believe that billions of years of gradual meteoric activity caused the random
planetary craters our telescopes survey today.
On the other hand, extra-solar flotillas may have herded swarms of
asteroids and comets – both as shields and missile weapons – and pummeled
planets with them. If this bombardment
lasted months instead of millions of years, cumulative impact forces might have
shattered planets, shifted continents, topped off or bailed out marine basins
and planetary atmospheres and left the planetary pockmarks we observe today.
Only recently have
geologists concluded that geological layers on Earth, thought to represent
centuries of volcanic activity, were laid down during a few short cataclysms
and their erosional aftermath.
Venus is devoid of
tectonic features and cratered with absolute randomness. It seems to have undergone a crust failure so
complete that its entire surface liquefied and then turned inside out. Mars bears an enormous crater in its Southern
Hemisphere, as if a moon-sized chunk had hit it there;
and a reciprocal deformation of the planetary surface on the opposite side,
raising it above the average altitude of such a sphere along the strike path,
and sucking it lower along its outskirts.
According to some astronomers, the Pacific Basin was carved out by the
ejection of the Moon’s mass during another cosmic collision. Scientists may unearth unforeseen new
findings regarding the timing of trans-species die-offs and planetary morphology (see De Grazia, 1981).
A hail of cosmic
fragments may have snuffed out all at once the late Bronze Age civilizations of
Akkad, the Old Kingdom of Egypt, Greece, Israel, India, Afghanistan and
Hongchan, China. A similar flurry may
have annihilated the Early Iron Age civilizations of the Mycenaeans, the
Hittites, the Egyptian New Kingdom, as well as Late Bronze Age Israel and the
Shang Dynasty in China. This second
kill-off occurred a thousand years after the first. Once again and almost simultaneously, it
smashed all its victims. Otherwise we
may be talking about super El Niños. The Society for
Interdisciplinary Studies at http://www.knowledge.co.uk/sis/
is a good source of material on this topic.
It is interesting to
picture the synergistic effects of a relatively modest (and thus more frequent)
asteroid or comet smashing into a seismic fault line or volcanic weak spot on
Earth. Titanic lahar beds in India and
Siberia may have formed in this manner, as well as the island of Java’s
traumatic separation from Sumatra.
Other cosmic collisions
may have scored civilization-destroying Tilts on the terrestrial pinball
machine. Psychiatrist
Velikovski (Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds
in Collision) is famous for having speculated about a massive celestial
pass-by that occurred some 3,500 years ago.
The planetary turmoil it overshadowed could have included the
Exodus. Current scientists dismiss his
findings. In like manner, positivist
reactionaries (“I’m positive you’re wrong.”) dismissed the first reasonable
speculations about plate tectonics, as well as other scientific hypotheses that
turned out to be correct despite their denial.
One of these days, I’ll
get around to writing a chapter that lists all those official detours from
scientific truth. At least those I could
catch. Chapter? Archives!
I refer you to those reactionaries described above, whose job it is to
refuse to learn anything new and forbid anyone from learning anything new as
long as they can forbid it.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
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