Seven
reputed intellectuals of the world met to discuss the present status of the
world and suggest a theory to guide
thinker – activists’ conscious of the ailing humanity.
The
intellectuals were Michael Albert, Editor Z Magazine, Leslie
Cagan,
an organizer who has been involved in hundreds of movements, events and
projects particularly in Cuba, Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics
at MIT in Cambridge and a tireless critic of U.S foreign policy, Robin
Hahnel, a professor of economics at American University in Washington
D.C. and a participant in diverse anti-war, community, socialist, and anti
–interventionist movements. Mel
King is a professor at MIT and director of the Community Fellows
program.
Lydia Sargent
edits Z Magazine and is a director,
playwright, and actor with the Newbury street Theater in Boston. She has been
involved in the feminist and anti-war movements.
Together they
wrote the book Liberating Theory.
Michael
Albert wrote, ‘…..establishing a humane society is the only way to attain
lasting liberation. Nonetheless, in
recent years “the left” has largely lost its capacity to project an uplifting
conception of human possibilities and a plausible picture of how people’s
potentials might be fulfilled. Since I
believe Liberating Theory can help reinvigorate our desires for
capacities to achieve a better future, I worked on and advocate its conceptual
framework and hope others will do likewise.’
Leslie Cagan wrote, ‘… I believe it will
be possible to bring fundamental, revolutionary change to this country. Out of the everyday struggles of people
through this nation and around the world, we learn new ways to name the
problems and define new solutions. At
the same time, our organizing and mobilizing needs a framework that gives
direction to our efforts.
………. I hope this book will be read by
people active in a wide range of political, social, and economic struggles, as
well as those just beginning to think about such issues. This book does not solve the problem or give
us magical formulas for organizing. What
I hope it does do is provoke discussion, open up debate, motivate further
theoretical work and play some role in inspiring us all.
Wrote Lydia Sargent, ‘As I drift further
from the events, ideas, and goals that contributed to my own radical
consciousness- raising, I feel more and more impatience, despair, even boredom
creeping into my political work and my life and getting a stranglehold on my
lofty reasons. I am haunted by the fear
that I will live out my life as a witness to the continued existence of what I
hate, without ever seeing the fruits of a hoped for revolution’.
Robin
Hahnel: Functioning separately, movements to overcome racism, sexism, classim,
and authoritarianism fail. Functioning
together and sharing aims and methods, they can succeed.
I helped write Liberating Theory because
I believe that to go forward radically we need to develop a new understanding
of society and ourselves suited to human potentials and able to promote
solidarity among people with different priorities. …….. I know that life and
society can be much better, and that we can make it happen.
Liberating
Theory takes into consideration the development in the field of
science.
To
quote the book, ‘Just as Marx and Engels paid strict attention to “state of Science”
in their time, we should keep up with contemporary developments. Ironically, however, though most contemporary
Marxists pride themselves on being “Scientific”, few bother to notice that
“state of the art” science has changed dramatically in the last hundred
years. While avoiding simplistic
mimicry and misapplication of scientific principles, we should update our
methods by seriously examining contemporary science for new ideas relevant to
our theoretical efforts.
Modern
quantum physics, for example, teaches that reality is not a collection of
separate entities but a vast and intricate “unbroken whole”. Ilya Prigogine comments, “The new paradigms
of science may be expected to develop into the new science of connectedness
which means the recognition of unity in diversity.” When thinking about phenomena, we inevitably
conceptually abstract parts from the whole in which they reside, but they then
exist as separate entities only in our perceptions. There are no isolated electrons, for example,
only fields of force continually ebbing and flowing in a seamless web of activity
which manifests events that we choose to call electrons because it suits our
analytic purposes. For the physicist, each
electron, quark, or whatever is, is a “process” and a network”. As a process it has a developmental
trajectory ……. extending through all time.
As a network, it is part of an interactive pattern… stretching
throughout all space. Every part
embodies and is subsumed in a larger whole.
In
Liberating
Theory there is in-depth discussion
of four interconnected topics. They
are 1. Community (The concept of one world). 2. Feminism (Man & woman
equality) 3. State –Abolition (Anarchism) 4. Economic Equality. No where in the world do we find progress in
any one field as visualized by the authors.
In every field the world has remained static or moved in the reverse
direction.
It
is unfortunate that the world thinkers are ignoring the only civilization which
was ideal in all the fields mentioned in Liberating Theory. This was the Sindhu
Civilization.
No
king or priest oppressed the people in the Sindhu Civilization (Archeology and
the Mahabharata). There were Yogis
guiding the people.
To
quote R. P. Chandra, ‘a group of stone statuettes found at Mohen-jo-Daro in a
mutilated condition seems to me to supply this missing link between the
pre-historic and the historic civilization of India. The only part of these statuettes that is in
fair state of preservation, the bust is characterized by a stiff erect posture of
the head, the neck and the chest, and half-shut eyes looking fixedly at the tip
of the nose. The posture is not met with
in the figure sculptures, whether pre-historic or historic, of any people
outside India; but it is very conspicuous in the images worshipped by all
Indian sects, including the Jainas and the Buddhists, and is known as the
posture of the Yogin or one engaged in practicing concentration.
According to the Buddhist texts Gautama
Buddha taught that austerities were not absolutely necessary for gaining
perfect knowledge: Dhyana-yoga (the practice of the four dhyanas) was enough
for that purpose………
Buddha says in conclusion, “Well,
Kevaddha, it is because I perceive danger in the practice of riddhi or wonders
(as well as mind and character reading), that I loathe, and abhor, and am
ashamed thereof.”
Survival
of the prehistoric Civilization of the Indus Valley------ from the book Studies
in the History of Indian philosophy Volume-I. Edited by Debiprasad
Chattapadhyaya…….
Buddha
was against miracles and mysticism.
The
elite of the Sindhu Civilization practiced the three philosophies Yoga, Samkhya
and Lokayat (collectively known as Aanwikhiki). Most of the women were enjoying
sexual freedom (Mahabharata and Jainism up to the period of Mahavir). There was egalitarianism in the Sindhu
society (R. Rajagopalan: THE SECRETS OF INDUS VALLEY;
archeologist R. S. Vist). The Sindhu civilization was free from violence
(Mahabharata and archeology). The elite of the society were fully rational
(Arthasastra).
Why
did the Sindhu civilization develop differently from other civilizations? The
answer is that this was the only developed woman’s civilization in the world.
No male- dominated civilization of the
world can give so much importance to non-violence by the elite and the absence
of wars. Yoga can only be the discovery
of women folk because all its values are matricentric. The presence of too many female figurines in
this civilizations also reinforces the idea that a female –centric civilization
developed in this Sindhu valley. Women’s sexual freedom and their choosing the
caring and sharing males as the fathers of their progeny was the key factor in
development of the human species. The
story of Sulabha in the Mahabharata supports this point of
view. The Vedas tell about Indra’s
killing of Vritra and Namuchi. Both were
Yogis (Mahabharata) and did not have wives.
(The Vedas and the Mahabharata) Sulabha was a scholar of Samkhya and preferred Janaka
as her sexual partner. Uddalaka episode in the Mahabharata shows that
even married women living in families had sexual freedom. Madhavi,
the daughter of king Jajati spurned kings and preferred to marry Galab,
an ascetic. Even great kings and warriors wanted their wives to mate with sages
and have children from them. The great
Vedic king Sudas is an example. He asked
his wife, the famed lady Madayanti to mate with Vasista, the sage.
These
women –centric societies led to a civilization free from predatory institutions
like the military, the priests, the sports-supporting and the ruling classes as
mentioned by Thorstein Veblen. Unlike women in the past who preferred caring
and sharing males as sexual partners, to day’s women are crazy to marry members
of these predatory institutions. So to
day’s competitive societies are becoming more and more violent and cruel as
days pass. Caring and sharing
people are marginalized as twenty first century advances.
The
great –ape species are five in number.
They are Orangoutang, Gorilla, Chimpanzee, Bonbon and Homospecies. In the past women of the last two species
were more powerful than men. Bonbon
women were indiscriminate in choosing sexual partners. Only among Homospecies women were
choosy. They chose sharing and caring
males to alpha males having powerful bodies.
This led to the diminishment of physical dichotomy of males and females
only among Homospecies.
Recent
scientific discoveries give credence to the female-centricity of human evolution.
The
Hindu (11th December-2014) contains an evolution-centered article
named Skulls Reveal the Dawn of Civilization
(by D.
Balasubramanian). To quote the article.
When and how did we humans turn “modern”
and technologically and culturally adept?
This was the theme of a symposium held several weeks ago at the Salk
Institute in California. Dr. Ann Gibbons
has given a lucid summary of the main conclusions of the symposium in the 24
October 2014 issue of the journal Science.
The experts attending the meeting suggest that “self-domestication”
turned humans into the co-operative species we are today.
………….. Dr. Gibbons mentions the work of
Robert Cieri and others…..They carefully measured and compared the features of
the skulls of archaeological specimens of the early humans (80,000 years old)
with those of more recent (some 10,000 years ago, and some contemporary)
ones. The sheer job of collecting
thousands of skulls, measuring their shapes, dimensions, features of individual
parts such as the brows, ridges between the eyes, shapes of teeth, size of the
cranial part of the skull (which house the brain) and so forth has been a
gargantuan task in itself. But they
persisted and found some remarkable differences of the human skulls over the
millennia. The brow ridges above the eye
have reduced over the years, teeth became smaller, the cranial volume came down
(smaller brains), and the faces shortened over time.
They have termed this set of charges in the
skull and head itself, as “crania-facial feminization”. This is because they claim that these changes
over the years have made the male faces look more like female ones. Over the last 80,000 years and particularly after
the early, middle and late stone age era), we have become less, “wild” and more
“delicate”……….
…….studies on animals, for example dogs,
have suggested that the genes that regulate robustness and aggression affect
the facial shape. These in turn lead to
lower levels of “aggression molecules” such as testosterone, stress hormones
and changes in the action of neural crest cells leading to changes in teeth,
muscles, bones and glands. See how much
the skull can tell.
Such changes have not been sudden or
rapid, but evolved over time. Growth in
human population size, beginning about 200,000 years age lead to higher
population densities, giving rise to the play of natural selection.
Humans started forming groups as early
as about 68,000 years ago in Africa and began their long migration across the
globe. In doing so, they formed groups
or societies over millennia, settling down in various places across the
world. Languages, customs, social mores,
culture, religions and technology began emerging. The main thread that bound each such society
has been tolerance, cooperation and leveling down of aggression. This, in turn, Cieri and others argue, led to
the evolution of technology-tools, taming and using fire, navigation, fishing
and birding, water harvesting and agriculture- all over the millennia spanning
the early middle and later stone ages (almost until 25,000 years ago)
Domestication of horse and cattle occurred.
All this could happen because we ‘self-domesticated’.
To day human brain has lost much of its
power of socialization. Families and societies are getting adversely
affected. Violence against women is devastating
societies. Surveys are increasing our
worries.
The
director of Children’s Movement for Civic Awareness (C.M.C.A) Sadasiva
says “We were not only taken aback by some of the views
and answers of the students, but worried for the country, especially about
violence against women and about being ‘ok’ with violating rules.”
Among youth (15 to 19 years) 55% say the
dresses of women excite them.
36% among girls and 44% among boys think
dowry should be given at the time of marriage or later.
65% among students say that boys and
girls belonging to different religions should not gather together in public
places.
Democratic consciousness is decreasing
day by day. The majority of youth is not
against military rule in the country.
(To be continued
in Evolutionary (Science-Directed) Socialism: Part-IX)
Bhagwat
Prasad Rath,
3rd
Line, Roith Colony,
At/PO/Dist. –
Rayagada –2
PIN- 765002,
Odisha.
Phone No.
06856-235092
Cell
No.-08895860598
www.samalochana1.blogspot.com
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