A couple of months ago I sent out a newsletter regarding two ‘Zeitgeist’ films - http://www.untamedlife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1568 .
At that time I promised to comment about them at a later date, which I will now do, briefly.
While I have not researched all of the information presented in the films, and thus am unable to defend all of its factual accuracy, I generally share the perspectives presented there and strongly encourage everyone to watch these movies.
However, while viewing, two points jumped out at me about which I disagree.
First, the films state that there is no human nature, just human behavior.
Obviously there exists a wide array of personality styles among humans as well as many cultural differences, developed in response to varying environments.
That being said, at a species level, just as one might generally describe the usual patterns of conduct of elephants or starfish, the human animal has certain general tendencies that can be observed cross-culturally. One might define these tendencies as being ‘human nature’.
As well, a fundamental tenet of what I present is that, for each organism, the secret to well-being is to follow the path mandated by the free expression of its genetic program, leading to self-actualization. It is understood that this expression involves an interaction with its environment, with different outcomes occurring within different circumstances.
Nonetheless, when I strive to be true to myself (and encourage others to do the same), I have a powerful sense that there is a true ‘me’ that I am facilitating the revelation of, and I consider this person to represent my true individual human nature.
The purpose of untaming oneself is to stop following the agenda that our domesticators have imposed upon us to allow that personal version of human nature to flourish.
The second area of disagreement that I had with the films was to do with the conclusion of the second film, the ‘Addendum’.
What is offered there as a solution to the disaster that humans have created is a futuristic higher-tech and extremely centrally organized society in which all problems are solved and all needs are met.
While it is refreshing to be presented with a message of hope in these challenging times, I found what was put forward to be facile and ignoring of both reality and human nature.
Although I do not decry all technology, it is shocking to me that the sorcerer’s apprentice has not yet learned anything from its experiences thus far.
Furthermore, a core cause of the destruction created over the course of civilization, as well portrayed in these films, has been the evolution of very large depersonalized and disempowered groups manipulated by the ‘elite’, sitting on the tops of the pyramids of power.
So while highly centralized approaches may have a certain attractiveness, in a fascist sense, to clean up this mess, the true solution lies in the fragmentation of these large groups and the destruction of these pyramids.
Individuals regaining control of their own lives and developing local solutions to their problems in an anarchic fashion, while reconnecting with natural rhythms and systems, is how we can save ourselves from destruction, both individually and as a species.
With this in mind, I encourage the creators of the film to continue to pursue their own means of addressing the crisis at hand, and similarly invite everyone else to empower themselves and to seek out their own solutions that make sense for them.
It is time for a return to diversity.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Elephants, lions, wolves, cats, dogs, and humans
I often refer to civilization as a zoo and those within it as zoo animals.
While I most commonly focus on human zoo animals, my interest in wildness and untaming and the effects of zoo-like existence extends to other organisms.
A recent article in Science states that elephants in zoos suffer from a significantly poorer level of health and have much a shorter lifespan than those not in zoos (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/12/12/zoo-elephants-lives-cut-short-by-obesity-loneliness/ , http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/1211/2 , http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7777413.stm ).
The authors indicate that...
"Some of the zoo elephants' problems stem from the practices of removing young calves from their mothers and transferring females from one zoo to another, usually for breeding. Both practices break the animals' family ties and presumably cause mental stress. "In the wild, females always stay with their mothers; they never leave the herd where they're born," says Mason. Zoo elephants are often overweight as well, due to a lack of space in which to roam."
The human slave trade has operated for millennia in the same manner.
As one person commented in one of the above links,
"Boycott zoos.We have enough resources for people to become educated about elephants and ALL animals stuck in zoos for human “needs”, without holding them captive in cages. When are people going to realize that nature does just fine without our intervention? Put the money used to sustain zoos toward protecting natural habitats."
The argument that zoos are there to protect animals is bogus.
Visiting a zoo is like visiting a prison. However, at least some of the people in prison have done something to merit their incarceration while all of the zoo animals are innocent.
Further to the theme of innocent animals, I happened to come across an ESPN television program on bow hunting mountain lions the other day.
I have reached a point in my life where it takes a great deal to shock me, but the horror and revulsion that I experienced watching the hounds tree the cougar and seeing the hunter calmly take out his bow to cold-bloodedly kill this cornered magnificent wild creature (that had done him no harm and which he was not killing to feed himself) was so great that I was unable to actually view the murder.
I presently live in Mississippi, where hunting is almost as important as fundamentalist religion, but even the ardent hunters here that I described this TV program to (who always eat what they kill) were enraged with such behavior.
I was reminded of a dentist that I met who recounted a bear hunting trip he had taken to Canada. He described how he and his fellow 'big game hunters' had transported a large tub of donuts out into the woods and placed it near the base of a hunting stand perched in nearby trees and then patiently waited for a bear to come along, which they then shot with their high powered laser equipped rifles. To my amazement, he actually seemed to believe that he had done something admirable, and proudly displayed the stuffed bear as an indicator of his remarkable virility.
I was unable to find the video of the ESPN program referred to above but I did locate the following two clips which are similar enough to what I viewed that day, both in terms of the obscenity of the murders as well as the pathetic nature of the perpetrators of these deeds. They are well worth watching, if you are able to handle their gruesomeness - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChpALNNragI , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNiTDo5W8Js .
The wild mountain lions in these recordings were able to be killed due to the combined efforts of domesticated humans and dogs. This partnership is the longest standing domesticated relationship, one that predates the official start of civilization by thousands of years and may well have been important in its eventual development.
I must confess that I have little respect for either domesticated dogs or domesticated humans but do hold cats in high regard, even the domesticated ones to a significant degree in that, unlike most domesticated creatures, they generally maintain their independence, typically considering themselves to be the master rather than the slave in the human-cat dynamic.
Some cat quotes...
In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have never forgotten this.
Way down deep we are all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them.
If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
If man could be crossed with a cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.
The cat, an aristocrat, merits our esteem, while the dog is only a scurvy type who got his position by low flatteries.
Dogs have masters. Cats have staff.
What's the difference between a cat & a dog? A dog ponders his relationship with man: "He feeds me, he grooms me, he takes care of all my needs... He must be God". A cat thinks: "He feeds me, grooms me, takes care of me. I must be God".
The killing of wild mountain lions by the collaboration of these inferior species (domesticated dogs and humans) embodies the tragic devolution of life that domestication and civilization have wrought - the (temporary) brutal triumph of ugliness over beauty.
A Untamed Newsletter subscriber from Europe let me know about an interesting article on the co-evolution of the dogs and humans - http://www.uwsp.edu/psych/s/275/science/coevolution03.pdf .
The article explores the transformation of the gray wolf into the domesticated dog and suggests that humans emulated aspects of wolf pack behavior and in so doing transformed themselves into a species that became more amenable to larger group interaction - ultimately expressed as civilization.
The authors quote Jane Goodall, the renowned expert on the common chimpanzee (please note that when she refers to the chimpanzee she is referring specifically to the common chimp, not the bonobo), regarding the bond between dogs and humans and comparing it to possible human relationships with our closest primate cousins....
“Dogs have been domesticated for a very long time. They have descended from wolves who were pack animals. They survive as a result of teamwork.They hunt together, den together, raise pups together. This ancient social order has been helpful in the domestication of the dog.
Chimpanzees are individualists.They are boisterous and volatile in the wild. They are always on the lookout for opportunities to get the better of each other. They are not pack animals. If you watch wolves within a pack, nuzzling each other, wagging their tails in greeting, licking and protecting the pups, you see all the characteristics we love in dogs, including loyalty.
If you watch wild chimps, you see the love between mother and offspring, and the bonds between siblings.Other relationships tend to be opportunistic. And even between family members, disputes often rise that may even lead to fights.
… even after hundreds of years of selective breeding, it would be hard if not impossible to produce a chimpanzee who could live with humans and have anything like such a good relationship as we have with our dogs.
It is not related to intelligence, but the desire to help, to be obedient, to gain our approval.”
There is no question that humans have used dogs to their benefit for thousands of years and value their loyalty, obedience and desire for human approval.
Such behavior is very useful within the wolf pack. The pack is essentially a multibodied organism and undoubtedly gray wolves evolved such behavior as an effective means to survive from generation to generation, often in very hostile environments.
The hierarchy of the pack has an alpha couple as the head of the unit and it is generally just this pair of wolves that reproduces.
The non-alpha wolves dedicate their lives to insuring that the alphas and their offspring survive. It is extremely important to understand that the non-alphas have a tremendously close degree of genetic sharing with the alphas of their pack. Thus the success of the alphas' survival is truly the best means whereby an overwhelming percentage of the non-alphas' genes are able to move forward in time. In an environment with quite limited resources, if all the wolves were reproducing, few if any would be able to find enough food to survive from generation to generation and thus essentially no genes would carry on.
Of course, in the wolf pack, the alphas are wolves and all of the energy devoted to survival on the part of the various members of the pack is invested in the wellbeing of the wolves and in no other organisms.
It is thought that feral dogs branched off from wolves as an expression of scavenging from human communities. Some wolves tended to increasingly rely on human refuse as their source of food and in so doing became less focused on hunting. On might assume that those who were less successful hunters would have been more inclined in the scavenging direction from a survival perspective.
When comparing wolves with dogs, both feral and domesticated....
"Dogs display much greater tractability than tame wolves, and are generally much more responsive to coercive techniques involving fear, aversive stimuli and force than wolves, which are most responsive toward positive conditioning and rewards....Although they are less difficult to control than wolves, they can be comparatively more difficult to teach than a motivated wolf.
Dogs tend to be poorer than wolves and coyotes at observational learning, being more responsive to instrumental conditioning. Feral dogs show little of the complex social structure or dominance hierarchy present in wolf packs. For dogs, other members of their kind are of no help in locating food items, and are more like competitors. Feral dogs are primarily scavengers, with studies showing that unlike their wild cousins, they are poor ungulate hunters, having little impact on wildlife populations where they are sympatric."
It would seem that dogs came from the inferior strata of the wolf population and survived and prospered due to their willingness and ability to integrate into human society (presumably they were considerably less likely to survive without such integration).
Wolves, like virtually all wild animals, have had an increasingly hard time of things as humans became a more powerful force upon the planet. I recall watching a nature program on wolves several years ago in which the narrator (ironically named Peter Coyote) stated that the dog branch of the wolf family tree had clearly made the better choice due to its far superior population today in comparison with the ever diminishing numbers of wild wolves on the planet.
The trouble with being a domesticated dog, however, is that your alpha is now a human animal and not a canid, with whom your sharing of genetic information is significantly limited. While humans have undoubtedly done some accommodating for 'man's best friend', it is beyond argument that the relationship has been set up to favor humans and not dogs. Thus, the 'virtues' of desiring to help, obedience, and gaining approval, originally for the benefit of the members of the wolf/dog species, are now exploited (and of course valued) by dog owners around the world to enhance human and not canine agendas.
That the human animals that have owned civilization have encouraged and artificially selected for the same characteristics as those possessed by dogs among their domesticated human property may well indicate that they recognized such characteristics to be very beneficial to the furtherance of their own avaricious objectives and have thus aggressively promoted them throughout civilized societies for ten thousand years.
Again, one will assume that those humans most attracted to being the dogs of civilization rather than the wolves of the wild come from the lower strata of the human species.
Similarly, it would appear that on the basis of numbers the human dogs have done far better than the human wolves who, for the most part, have found themselves cornered and violently brought down like the mountain lions in the hunting videos.
For those of you not inclined to continue following the dogs' path, however, it is time to reaffirm your wildness (i.e. being true to your internal genetic agenda - i.e. wildness does not necessarily mean having a stone age lifestyle) and to commit to reclaiming ownership of your life.
There is much to be done, given the situation in which we find ourselves today.
Only you can make this happen for yourself.
While I most commonly focus on human zoo animals, my interest in wildness and untaming and the effects of zoo-like existence extends to other organisms.
A recent article in Science states that elephants in zoos suffer from a significantly poorer level of health and have much a shorter lifespan than those not in zoos (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/12/12/zoo-elephants-lives-cut-short-by-obesity-loneliness/ , http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/1211/2 , http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7777413.stm ).
The authors indicate that...
"Some of the zoo elephants' problems stem from the practices of removing young calves from their mothers and transferring females from one zoo to another, usually for breeding. Both practices break the animals' family ties and presumably cause mental stress. "In the wild, females always stay with their mothers; they never leave the herd where they're born," says Mason. Zoo elephants are often overweight as well, due to a lack of space in which to roam."
The human slave trade has operated for millennia in the same manner.
As one person commented in one of the above links,
"Boycott zoos.We have enough resources for people to become educated about elephants and ALL animals stuck in zoos for human “needs”, without holding them captive in cages. When are people going to realize that nature does just fine without our intervention? Put the money used to sustain zoos toward protecting natural habitats."
The argument that zoos are there to protect animals is bogus.
Visiting a zoo is like visiting a prison. However, at least some of the people in prison have done something to merit their incarceration while all of the zoo animals are innocent.
Further to the theme of innocent animals, I happened to come across an ESPN television program on bow hunting mountain lions the other day.
I have reached a point in my life where it takes a great deal to shock me, but the horror and revulsion that I experienced watching the hounds tree the cougar and seeing the hunter calmly take out his bow to cold-bloodedly kill this cornered magnificent wild creature (that had done him no harm and which he was not killing to feed himself) was so great that I was unable to actually view the murder.
I presently live in Mississippi, where hunting is almost as important as fundamentalist religion, but even the ardent hunters here that I described this TV program to (who always eat what they kill) were enraged with such behavior.
I was reminded of a dentist that I met who recounted a bear hunting trip he had taken to Canada. He described how he and his fellow 'big game hunters' had transported a large tub of donuts out into the woods and placed it near the base of a hunting stand perched in nearby trees and then patiently waited for a bear to come along, which they then shot with their high powered laser equipped rifles. To my amazement, he actually seemed to believe that he had done something admirable, and proudly displayed the stuffed bear as an indicator of his remarkable virility.
I was unable to find the video of the ESPN program referred to above but I did locate the following two clips which are similar enough to what I viewed that day, both in terms of the obscenity of the murders as well as the pathetic nature of the perpetrators of these deeds. They are well worth watching, if you are able to handle their gruesomeness - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChpALNNragI , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNiTDo5W8Js .
The wild mountain lions in these recordings were able to be killed due to the combined efforts of domesticated humans and dogs. This partnership is the longest standing domesticated relationship, one that predates the official start of civilization by thousands of years and may well have been important in its eventual development.
I must confess that I have little respect for either domesticated dogs or domesticated humans but do hold cats in high regard, even the domesticated ones to a significant degree in that, unlike most domesticated creatures, they generally maintain their independence, typically considering themselves to be the master rather than the slave in the human-cat dynamic.
Some cat quotes...
In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have never forgotten this.
Way down deep we are all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them.
If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
If man could be crossed with a cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.
The cat, an aristocrat, merits our esteem, while the dog is only a scurvy type who got his position by low flatteries.
Dogs have masters. Cats have staff.
What's the difference between a cat & a dog? A dog ponders his relationship with man: "He feeds me, he grooms me, he takes care of all my needs... He must be God". A cat thinks: "He feeds me, grooms me, takes care of me. I must be God".
The killing of wild mountain lions by the collaboration of these inferior species (domesticated dogs and humans) embodies the tragic devolution of life that domestication and civilization have wrought - the (temporary) brutal triumph of ugliness over beauty.
A Untamed Newsletter subscriber from Europe let me know about an interesting article on the co-evolution of the dogs and humans - http://www.uwsp.edu/psych/s/275/science/coevolution03.pdf .
The article explores the transformation of the gray wolf into the domesticated dog and suggests that humans emulated aspects of wolf pack behavior and in so doing transformed themselves into a species that became more amenable to larger group interaction - ultimately expressed as civilization.
The authors quote Jane Goodall, the renowned expert on the common chimpanzee (please note that when she refers to the chimpanzee she is referring specifically to the common chimp, not the bonobo), regarding the bond between dogs and humans and comparing it to possible human relationships with our closest primate cousins....
“Dogs have been domesticated for a very long time. They have descended from wolves who were pack animals. They survive as a result of teamwork.They hunt together, den together, raise pups together. This ancient social order has been helpful in the domestication of the dog.
Chimpanzees are individualists.They are boisterous and volatile in the wild. They are always on the lookout for opportunities to get the better of each other. They are not pack animals. If you watch wolves within a pack, nuzzling each other, wagging their tails in greeting, licking and protecting the pups, you see all the characteristics we love in dogs, including loyalty.
If you watch wild chimps, you see the love between mother and offspring, and the bonds between siblings.Other relationships tend to be opportunistic. And even between family members, disputes often rise that may even lead to fights.
… even after hundreds of years of selective breeding, it would be hard if not impossible to produce a chimpanzee who could live with humans and have anything like such a good relationship as we have with our dogs.
It is not related to intelligence, but the desire to help, to be obedient, to gain our approval.”
There is no question that humans have used dogs to their benefit for thousands of years and value their loyalty, obedience and desire for human approval.
Such behavior is very useful within the wolf pack. The pack is essentially a multibodied organism and undoubtedly gray wolves evolved such behavior as an effective means to survive from generation to generation, often in very hostile environments.
The hierarchy of the pack has an alpha couple as the head of the unit and it is generally just this pair of wolves that reproduces.
The non-alpha wolves dedicate their lives to insuring that the alphas and their offspring survive. It is extremely important to understand that the non-alphas have a tremendously close degree of genetic sharing with the alphas of their pack. Thus the success of the alphas' survival is truly the best means whereby an overwhelming percentage of the non-alphas' genes are able to move forward in time. In an environment with quite limited resources, if all the wolves were reproducing, few if any would be able to find enough food to survive from generation to generation and thus essentially no genes would carry on.
Of course, in the wolf pack, the alphas are wolves and all of the energy devoted to survival on the part of the various members of the pack is invested in the wellbeing of the wolves and in no other organisms.
It is thought that feral dogs branched off from wolves as an expression of scavenging from human communities. Some wolves tended to increasingly rely on human refuse as their source of food and in so doing became less focused on hunting. On might assume that those who were less successful hunters would have been more inclined in the scavenging direction from a survival perspective.
When comparing wolves with dogs, both feral and domesticated....
"Dogs display much greater tractability than tame wolves, and are generally much more responsive to coercive techniques involving fear, aversive stimuli and force than wolves, which are most responsive toward positive conditioning and rewards....Although they are less difficult to control than wolves, they can be comparatively more difficult to teach than a motivated wolf.
Dogs tend to be poorer than wolves and coyotes at observational learning, being more responsive to instrumental conditioning. Feral dogs show little of the complex social structure or dominance hierarchy present in wolf packs. For dogs, other members of their kind are of no help in locating food items, and are more like competitors. Feral dogs are primarily scavengers, with studies showing that unlike their wild cousins, they are poor ungulate hunters, having little impact on wildlife populations where they are sympatric."
It would seem that dogs came from the inferior strata of the wolf population and survived and prospered due to their willingness and ability to integrate into human society (presumably they were considerably less likely to survive without such integration).
Wolves, like virtually all wild animals, have had an increasingly hard time of things as humans became a more powerful force upon the planet. I recall watching a nature program on wolves several years ago in which the narrator (ironically named Peter Coyote) stated that the dog branch of the wolf family tree had clearly made the better choice due to its far superior population today in comparison with the ever diminishing numbers of wild wolves on the planet.
The trouble with being a domesticated dog, however, is that your alpha is now a human animal and not a canid, with whom your sharing of genetic information is significantly limited. While humans have undoubtedly done some accommodating for 'man's best friend', it is beyond argument that the relationship has been set up to favor humans and not dogs. Thus, the 'virtues' of desiring to help, obedience, and gaining approval, originally for the benefit of the members of the wolf/dog species, are now exploited (and of course valued) by dog owners around the world to enhance human and not canine agendas.
That the human animals that have owned civilization have encouraged and artificially selected for the same characteristics as those possessed by dogs among their domesticated human property may well indicate that they recognized such characteristics to be very beneficial to the furtherance of their own avaricious objectives and have thus aggressively promoted them throughout civilized societies for ten thousand years.
Again, one will assume that those humans most attracted to being the dogs of civilization rather than the wolves of the wild come from the lower strata of the human species.
Similarly, it would appear that on the basis of numbers the human dogs have done far better than the human wolves who, for the most part, have found themselves cornered and violently brought down like the mountain lions in the hunting videos.
For those of you not inclined to continue following the dogs' path, however, it is time to reaffirm your wildness (i.e. being true to your internal genetic agenda - i.e. wildness does not necessarily mean having a stone age lifestyle) and to commit to reclaiming ownership of your life.
There is much to be done, given the situation in which we find ourselves today.
Only you can make this happen for yourself.
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