First, two headlines: “In New Ebola Outbreak, Health-Care Workers Come Under Attack,” * and “Libya: Five medical staff dead in latest attack on health facilities in Tripoli.” **
 
Second, something about electrical charges. Until someone can prove otherwise, I’m going with a neutrally “charged” or uncharged universe because all around me I experience a generally neutral physical world as un-likes attract and balance in a state of equilibrium. Atoms, we know, are electrically neutral. Of course, there are those occasional imbalances, some excess positive or negative charge, but the components of charge, like electrons and protons, run into their opposites eventually, and everything returns to balance after the electric “discharge.” Lightning evens things out. Across the universe, there seems to be a balance of charge so pervasive that we don’t have to worry about living in a universe that is a constant lightning strike.
 
Yet, I can’t deny that locally electric discharges are not only possible, but also common. That makes me think that regardless of the overall neutrality of the universe’s electric field, we’re always going to have lightning strikes, shocks when we touch a doorknob after we walk across a carpet, and hot wires ready to fry us. The state of localities is often a charged one.
 
The locality of every political world is a good example of constant disequilibrium—with some rare and temporary exceptions. The emotional world of humanity is also one of lightning strikes, even in what are apparently cloudless times. Static electricity awaits us, and just by moving, as in crossing a carpet to help someone, we prime ourselves to release the charge. Those who carry a positive charge in life meet inevitably those who carry a negative charge.
 
Have you noticed how many people wander around like moving negative charges. Maybe the universe as a whole is electrically neutral, but locally, the negative charges are always after the positive charges. Negative people do what they can to overwhelm positive people. It’s a tough world for the positives, but it’s the only world we have. If neutralizing positive excess by negativity resulted in an equilibrium, shocks would disappear everywhere. We might argue that positive people are also out to neutralize negative people. But, as the headlines and their stories indicate, for all the efforts of positive people, the negative ones keep appearing. Possibly, the presence of so much disequilibrium indicates that my belief in a neutral universe is wrong and that negative charges outnumber positive ones. Certainly, it seems to be that way with people. It’s difficult to stay positive with so many negative charges.
 
Health-care workers under attack? It’s the way of locality. I want to believe it’s not the way of the universe as a whole, but too many incidents provide evidence that in spite of efforts to neutralize imbalances, charitable, altruistic and positive people will always meet an overwhelming number of negative ones.
 
*Steers, Julia and Gabriele Steinhauser, Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2019. Online at https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-new-ebola-outbreak-heath-care-workers-come-under-attack-11555260780   Accessed September 28, 2019.
**World Health Organization, July 28, 2019. Online at https://www.who.int/emergencies/attacks-on-health-care/en/   Accessed September 28, 2019.

An adopted pig has learned to paint on canvas. Pigcasso’s works can sell for as much as $4,000.* And then there are the paintings made by elephant artists. They, too, have fetched more than the price of a blank canvas. So, what does a nonhuman artist’s work say about a human artist’s work, especially about human nonrepresentational art? And, shouldn’t we ask, “What does art by a pig say about humans who buy it?”
 
You remember that study in which people with noses and palates for wine were fooled as a researcher simply colored white wine to look like red wine? ** There was a corollary study that mislabeled wines for a test group. *** Is there a difference between one’s being fooled by packaging a cheap wine under an expensive wine label and one’s being fooled by splotches and lines painted on a canvas by an animal and not a human? Is it intent, the intent of the artist or the intent of the observer?
 
If art is a matter of intent, then one has to ask how to judge intent? And if it is not a matter of intent, and if critics who say that there’s more in any artwork than any creator knows, then is any judgement of art simply a matter of personal preference and guesswork. Is a cheap wine that tastes good to the taster as good as an expensive wine that tastes good to the taster?
 
So, who pays for artwork done by a pig? A philanthropist who wants to donate money to a zoo or rescue farm? A shrewd investor who knows that once an artwork is sold for X number of dollars, it’s price will go up in resale? Someone with so much money that buying pig art is a novelty or joke? And, here’s the question for you: Do you have any knickknacks? Any coffee table sculptures of twisted shapes (“Oh! Look at the curving lines; feel the smooth sides; it’s like a Möbius strip, just going on forever, and it’s contained within the space above my coffee table; sooo artistic”) or any paintings of Elvis on velvet?
 
“You’re revealing your Philistinism, Don. Uneducated in the arts, you simply don’t understand the nuances, the refinements, the aesthetics behind the art. You probably think that abstract art is child’s play, that any child with fingers can paint with chocolate icing.”
 
Right, I am a Philistine, somewhat practical and utilitarian in my approach to art. I’ve wandered through the National Gallery of Art’s two wings and stopped to sit on a bench to stare at a painting or two. I’ve stood before squiggles and lines, almost blank canvases and multicolored ones, in front of representational art collected over the ages and preserved on guarded walls in stark halls. I’ve looked at titles and read the captions. And I’m still hard pressed to define the difference between art by Pigcasso and some abstract artists, regardless of their—and their astute critics’—contentions that they might be turning chaos into order or showing the underlying chaos in any order or that they might be carrying on an artistic tradition that is justifiable as ars gratia artis. Hey, I’ve seen those images before: I’ve had nightmares when I was feverish as a kid; I know the mix of colors, lines, and shapes that the brain forges from every experience.
 
I’ve even seen a cumulus cloud that looked like Pigcasso. Should I have taken or drawn a pic?
 
* https://pigcasso.myshopify.com/
https://www.facebook.com/pigcasso/
https://www.dogonews.com/2018/2/5/meet-pigcasso-the-worlds-first-pig-artist
 
**Pomeroy, Ross. The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts across the Globe. RealClear Science. 18 August 2014, online at https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html     Accessed September 26, 2019.
 
***See David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart for an account of Frederic Brochet’s experiments with “wine experts.”

I can hear the conversation at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm.
 
“Bob, old Chompers just doesn’t seem to have an interest in any of the ladies. You think he’s just too old to care?”
 
“I dunno. He’s been in that pond with all the girl crocs for almost a year now. Nothing seems to be goin’ on, not even at night ‘cause I looked at the CCTV footage.”
 
“Maybe there’s something wrong with him. He’s certainly not producing offspring.”
 
You know, just when you think you have all the facts, someone comes along and says, “Look what I discovered.” And that’s the way it now appears to be with crocodiles from New Guinea (at least one of which is in that aforementioned alligator farm). According to a recent study of 90-year old skulls, the island is home to two species, one in the northern part of the island and the other in the southern part.* One was known; the other was recently named Crocodylus halli for the late Philip Hall, whose initial work led Chris Murray and Caleb McMahan to its discovery. Anyway, apparently to the untrained human eye, crocodiles all look alike, but crocodiles have always known the difference between their own and another species. Before Murray and McMahan continued his work, only Philip Hall among investigators (sorry, I couldn’t resist) surmised there were two species on New Guinea.   
And that makes me think of today’s world in constant political turmoil stirred by an enormous population of reporters and would-be reporters, many of who seem to have untrained eyes.** To discover the true nature of species covered by old reports, we need to re-examine the fossil news; otherwise, we might connect people with no true connections, people incapable of producing the “offspring” that reporters with agendas suggest they produce(d). We might have been mixing our crocodiles. It makes me also think that as news people report on those against whom they have some bias, they see the gross similarities in a group and fail to see the subtle differences. Just as there are differences between two species of New Guinea crocodiles that went unnoticed by all but one researcher, so there are differences among the political species within one party.
 
“You know, Bob, people just like to come to the farm to look at alligators and crocs and to learn that one has a pointy snout and the other a more rounded one. They really don’t want to spend the time to learn the anatomical or physiological differences. What would they do with all that specific information, anyway? They just want to point and say to their children, ‘If you kids don’t start behaving, I’m gonna feed you to the alligators.’ Or, “Look at those teeth, kids.’ Or even, ‘Them’s the reason you don’t go into the swamp.’”
 
*Phys.org. New species of crocodile discovered in museum collections. 25 Sept 2019.  https://phys.org/news/2019-09-species-crocodile-museum.html   Accessed September 25, 2019.

​**Just a grammar note here: “who seem to have untrained eyes” is the object of the preposition of. The use of whom in that sentence would be incorrect, but notice that in this very sentence whom by itself is the object of the preposition. In the essay’s paragraph, the subject of the verb seem is who.

Let’s make it simple. If I say, “General Motors,” “BP,” “Amazon,” you understand that I am referring to a company. If I say, “Big Business doesn’t care about the little guy,” “Big Pharma” knows that opioids kill, but doesn’t care,” or “Volkswagen’s emissions scandal is typical of industry,” you understand. What if I say, “Environmentalists,” “Oil Industry,” or “Government”? Yes, you have no difficulty with the terms and might even have used them yourself. But what if I say “Native Americans,” or, gasp! “Indians,” or “African-Americans,” or, gasp! “Coloreds,” or “WASPs,” “Dagos,” “Red Necks,” and, well, you get the picture, don’t you? And it is a picture, isn’t it? An image that is both inescapable once mentioned and characterizing. It is, I contend, your being able to form that kind of image and recognize its connotations that lies at the heart of bias and racism. Let me explain.
 
The USA’s mottos include “In God we trust” and “E pluribus unum,” with the latter serving as another example of those terms in the paragraph above (“From the many, one”). We understand what those terms mean because we tend to classify, to group, to make the many, one. Grouping makes the world easier to understand, thus, the Linnaean classification of organisms, for example, or the periodic table of elements. It’s easy to say “carnivore” to know an organism’s place on the food chain, and so a term like “Wall Street(er)” makes one’s place on the “economic food chain” more easily understandable. When we personally feel insecure, we can pigeonhole the world around us to gain a feeling of security. And regardless of the legitimacy of the ordering system, just having one is, for most of us, comforting. “Democrats,” “Republicans,” “Catholics,” “Jews,” “Evangelicals,” are all terms of similar nature. They represent aggregations not for the individuals in them but rather as an overriding “one.”
 
We’re preprogrammed to make the One from the many. We constantly do it. It’s a human default perspective. And it is, I believe, the reason that bias and racism will always be part of human interaction when people don’t know people personally. So, if you know someone who works on “Wall Street,” you know the “Non-Wall-Street” side of the person, and the same goes for knowing a “Democrat,” “Republican,” “gas-well driller,” “Irish-American,” “Nigerian-American,” or “Protestant.”
 
The only easy solution to racism is to make the one into many, to see the individuals outside the group. To alter the default perspective that replaces internal insecurity with externally derived security, think "individual." Let’s add a verb. “Extrahe unum e pluribus” or “Extract one from the many.”  It’s the only way the struggle against racism will ever succeed.   

Sometime when you have nothing to do or are doing nothing (That might be now, I fear), you can research the many symbolic associations with the number nine. Here are some: The Great Ennead or Great Nine in Egyptian mythology and the nine muses in Greek mythology; the numerous mentions of and symbolic meanings for nine in Judaism and Christianity (the number occurs 50 times in the Bible); Dante’s Inferno with nine circles (levels), and being in euphoria as being on Cloud Nine. And of course, there are Vesna’s—excuse me, a cat’s—nine lives.
 
Vesna Vulovic apparently used up all nine of her lives, demonstrating that even the luckiest or most blessed of us will eventually fall. Vesna was the stewardess who on January 26, 1972, survived a drop from about 30,000 feet when her plane exploded in midair. She fell with part of the plane, landed in deep snow, suffered some injuries, eventually went into a coma, and then recovered to resume working at a desk job for the airline, but flying only as a passenger. Her plunge is in the Guinness Book of World Records. Thirty thousand feet is 200 times the height assumed to be the limit for the human body to survive a fall. After her recovery from her injuries, even temporary paralysis, Vesna said she was a cat: She had nine lives. She apparently used all nine of them. Vesna died in December, 2016.
 
The problem finite beings have with having nine lives is that nine is finite number. But in a way, it wouldn’t matter if we had ten or ten thousand lives to spend because all are finite numbers. You can be fortunate like Vesna and survive even an extreme event like a fall from 30,000 feet, but eventually….
 
Let me get personal. My father lived to age 97. In that year, he said, “I never thought I would live to 97.” He survived the battle on Okinawa as a Marine. In all those years I had with him, he didn’t talk much about the war—I believe he might have had some form of PTSD that he covered up until it appeared to surface occasionally in his late eighties—but I remember his recalling one incident. He operated a radar shack on the edge of a cliff on the island during the battle. The radar was connected to antiaircraft guns. Japanese pilots skimming the water to avoid detection, rose to get over the cliff, where the radar picked them up. The guns swiveled to fire, hitting planes just over the roof of his shack. For one of those ever-so-brief-but-seemingly-eternal moments as ack-ack flack burst over them, he and another Marine thought they would be blasted by their own antiaircraft guns or have a plane crash into the shack. They survived. My dad survived World War II, and he lived another 68 years for which I am thankful. Oorah.
 
Vesna Vulovic survived her fall and political turmoil in her country to reach age 66. She was an activist for democracy and against the Socialist Party of Serbia. I can only suppose that having survived that great fall, she became fearless in her political life. The regime never threw her in jail, probably because of her fame. But she did die, living two years fewer than the period my dad survived after WW II. 
 
There’s a limit for each of us. And that is the fundamental reason that I call this website thisisnotyourpracticelife.com. Even the longest of human lives is short. So, if you feel you have nothing to do some day, think again. You have everything to do and little time to do it.

This is what Jean Baudrillard writes: “Everyone can dream …of a perfect duplication or multiplication of his being, but such copies only have the power of dreams, and are destroyed when one attempts to force the dream into the real.” * Among those who seek to make copies of humans are the molecular archaeologists who reconstruct the bodily forms of our long-lost cousins, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. The latest attempt by Liran Carmel and David Gokhman and colleagues at Hebrew University in Jerusalem involved taking the pinkie bone of a Denisovan girl and turning it into a recognizable face.**
 
I know what you’re doing right now. You’re looking at your little finger and asking yourself, “Do I really look like that?” But no, this isn’t a joke. Using DNA hypermethylation to infer gene downregulation and making comparisons with chimps and Neanderthals reconstructed through similar processes, the researchers think they have a pretty good idea of what the girl looked like. 
 
So, is Baudrillard making a valid point? Before we had this reconstruction, we could dream of what the Denisovan girl looked like and what her kind of human looked like in general. Of course, we have the same limitations that our own diversity imposes on making copies: Some of us are tall, some short, some thin, some porky, etc. Maybe some distant day, some geneticist or molecular archaeologist will find your pinkie and reconstruct what you “might have” looked like. As that future construction comes into reality, will it destroy what you once were? 
 
With all reconstructions, whether they are events or people, the simulacra take on their own reality. I submit that any historical reconstruction has a character of its own that cannot be a dream “forced,” to use Baudrillard’s term, “into the real.” All history is revisionist. The attempts today to rewrite history are as all historical reconstructions have been: Simulacra in the historian’s image, a reflection of a world contemporary with the historian. And that’s unfortunate, but it is the way of the world. Every generation rewrites history in its own image.
 
Whether or not the Denisovan girl’s image is what she looked like is irrelevant. We have a general idea that she and her relatives had a wider jaw than we, that her fingers might have been longer on average than ours, and that her brow was slanted à laNeanderthals skulls. But look around at your contemporaries. Can you make the generalizations into the “real” when there are so many different versions of us? You probably say, “No.” But someone in our future will make a model, and that model will acquire a reality of its own, a character that some members of a generation hence would recognize, but that you wouldn’t.
 
But what of “history in the making,” the process of recording something that one contemporary to the event witnesses? Well, now we butt our heads up against the problem of observation and bias. Various dubious accounts of events and people circulate over the Web, in magazines and newspapers, and at parties. In all accounts, the process involves some modifier. Choosing one adjective over another can make the difference in the telling and also in the level that the simulacra represent truthfully the person or event. Modifiers? That’s just the way we are. I can think of many examples, but a glaring one was the description of the OJ Simpson trial that gripped the American public as it was daily broadcast on national TV. The twentieth-century trial was called “the trial of the century.” And I think that however tragic were the circumstances that led to that trial (the deaths of two people, Simpson’s ex-wife and Ronald Goldman), the Nuremburg trials had to take precedence as the “trial of the century.” Given the short memories and the lack of historical education that permeate the masses, it’s understandable that trials like that of Rudolph Sacco and Vanzetti (1921), Hauptmann (1935), and those Nuremburg trials (1945, 46) had by the 1990s faded from the culture. 
 
And if we watch TV and read newspapers today, we find ourselves in what I call Contemporary Revisionism. Reporting appears to be based primarily on political agendas. So, if in some distant future, someone attempts to reconstruct you, as Liran Carmel and David Gokhman have reconstructed the Denisovan girl, will the people of the time say, “Oh! So that’s what she looked like and that’s what she did. It’s a wonder that her kind survived as long as they did. Hmmn. And we learned all that just from looking at her little finger.” 
 
The next time you read any news story or watch its TV version, look for or listen for the adjectives. They shape how we see the current world, and if they survive as a record, they will shape how the future world views us. Every reporter with an agenda looks only at a pinkie finger and writes the holistic simulacrum.  
 
 
*Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 95. 
 
**Price, Michael. Ancient DNA puts a face on the mysterious Denisovans, extinct cousins of Neanderthals. Science. September 19, 2019. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/ancient-dna-puts-face-mysterious-denisovans-extinct-cousins-neanderthals  also https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/19/mysterious-human-ancestor-gets-face-body/    Accessed September 19, 2019.
Original article in Cell. Vol. 179:1, pp. 180-192. September 19, 2019. PDF at https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2819%2930954-7

When I think of “green,” I think of environment. Don’t you? Maybe I connect the two because one research project I led for the Commonwealth I entitled Green Technologies in Pennsylvania. But “living green,” as so many advocate we do, isn’t one of my fortes (if I can be said to have any strengths). I use plastic for groceries and garbage, for example. And paint. My town is not required to recycle, so, sorry for this, I don’t. And other stuff I acquire becomes more stuff to throw into landfills when I’m done using it. So, yes, although I researched “green” for the state, I probably haven’t really lived “green.” In that, I’m like every other environmental hypocrite. What I profess is buried in a mess.
 
Maybe for most of us, “living green” is, in fact, hard or almost impossible. But we keep bringing up the topic, typically in a fashion that casts guilt freely about. It’s as though we accuse one another: “Well, don’t you care about the environment?” I’ll ask you, “Well, don’t YOU care about the environment?”
 
“Green Buying: The Influence of Environmental Concern on Consumer Behavior,” a research paper by Tina Mainieri and others, focuses on predictor variables that influence people to “buy green.”* Here we go with yet another study that killed another tree. This was Maionieri et al.’s methodology: “A written questionnaire, mailed to randomly selected residents of 8 middle-class communities in the Los Angeles area, was answered by 201 respondents.” Okay, let’s consider. Middle-class communities. Los Angeles area. California has both given lip service to and made laws for environmental stewardship. Californians teach environmental stewardship in their schools. Middle-class communities probably recycle, and their kids complete lessons on “living green.”
 
Certainly, the intentions appear to be noble. The problem, of course, lies in the action, reticent action, or inaction of the state’s citizens. Californians will not easily relinquish their affluent lifestyle even when they pay lip service to environmental stewardship. Think California will have empty ten-lane highways because Californians take mass transit, walk, bicycle, or work from home? Truly living green is not going to happen for a very long time—maybe never. But we keep getting the same message from those who control cultural messaging. “If you ain’t livin’ green, you don’t care about the environment.”
 
Every effort to corral the non-green lifestyles and consumerism of an affluent culture is probably destined for some failure. Even with repeated shaming, people of means will continue to live non-green lives. And there’s been no better example of living non-green while paying lip service to living green than the $20 million Google Camp in Sicily where “celebrities” flew in on more than 100 private jets, sailed in on yachts collectively worth more than a half billion dollars, and arrived in luxury cars with 500 HP engines to stay in five-star hotels.**
 
But let’s consider the study done by Mainieri and gang. What are the predictor variables that influence us to buy green? Wait! This study was a survey. And that means self-reporting. No one went to the homes of the 201 respondents (regardless of the supposed randomness of the sample, it was a small sample in a state with more than 30 million people). Here’s what I would suggest to Mainieri. Watch what they watch on TV; read what they read. Go through 201 garbage cans. Look in 201 medicine cabinets and garages. Peek into the closets and under beds. Check the subscriptions to magazines and newspapers that will fill landfills. Weigh the catalogs they receive. Examine the electric bills and the electronic equipment of any kind. Don’t forget those light bulbs, dehumidifiers, and humidifiers. Check the duration that any electrical device remains on or on “standby.” Look at the price lists for “green” foodstuffs in local grocery stores as predictable variables, and see how many of the 201 eat organic arugula.  
 
We’re in a real bind with respect to green living. We know we’re not going back to cave dwelling, not going to stop eating fish, and not going to stop going to beauty salons and spas. We’re going to stay warm in winter and cool in summer, so conditioning our indoor air will be with us for as long as we can afford it.
 
Have you calculated your carbon footprint?*** If you have and if you found yours to be above average, have you altered your lifestyle? What of your landfill footprint? Would you measure such a footprint by weight, volume, or resistance to decay? And how can you calculate your pollutant footprint? Have you ever used fertilizers or insecticides? This kind of footprint is a puzzler because of its complexity. Should you consider that the vitamins you take enter the environment through your sewage or septic system? Ever throw away a used AA battery? Ever choose not to car pool? Hey, and what about those old lawnmowers, car tires, and toys? Consider yourself frugal and practical? Have any rooms you use just for storage? Got stuff stuffed under the bed, in the cellar, or in the attic? One more: Do you wrap birthday, anniversary, Christmas, and wedding presents in colorful paper?
 
We might be past the point of no return. Even if Californians learn to buy green and live green, they are only one tenth the American population, and the American population is just a small fraction of the world population. Consider that all those other countries’ populations are striving to live non-green lives of affluence like Americans. Do you think China and India will actually stop using coal?
 
And then there’s NBC’s “Climate Confessions.” The network asks, “Tell us: Where do you fall short in preventing climate change?”**** Even where there’s no religion, there’s always religion of sorts. But don’t feel guilty or worried. NBC can’t impose penance for your environmental sins.
 
Humans have always lived with excess when they had an opportunity to do so. What is the chief variable that makes people “live green”? Probably poverty. That’s a relative term, of course. So-called green products that you’ve been told to consume are often too pricey for the lower middle class and the poor. Absence of wealth is definitely a predictable variable.
 
We are a strange species, but in some ways we’re not too different from squirrels. “Squirrels?” you ask with indignation, “Squirrels?” At the end of every summer I can observe a couple of squirrels collect and bury walnuts from a hundred-foot high black walnut tree in my yard. They accumulate as many as they can, and scamper to bury them almost everywhere. One might think they are just prudent, storing for the harsh winter, but, no, squirrels don’t remember where they buried every walnut as a study involving grey squirrels and hazelnuts by Princeton University researchers suggests. They sometimes dig up the nuts, sample them, and rebury them. Those they forget about become trees. What’s that growing in your extra refrigerator? What’s that stuff in the back of your garage? And do you really need all that stuff under your kitchen sink? “I dig it up occasionally,” you say.
 
We have members of our species with inordinate wealth living non-green lives or pseudo-green lives in mansions, driving electric cars that have batteries that will probably end up in landfills and that are mostly recharged by fossil fuel electric power plants, and going to conferences in distant lands with five-star hotels, where they proclaim their passion for Mother Earth from the decks of yachts and brightly lighted stages, after which they feast on caviar, fish, and organic arugula.
 
When I think of my own level of hypocrisy, I look in the mirror and say, “You’re not so bad. You’re kind of average bad. You just had to exploit Mother Earth a little, much less than the one-percenters did for a single conference they could have held over SKYPE or some other online meeting venue. You really do care about the environment, don’t you, Donald? After all, you did write reports on environmental matters for the state and federal governments. That has to count for something.”
 
And so, I’ll assuage myself, as, I’m sure, those wealthy celebrities assuaged themselves at a conference estimated to have spewed a minimum of 800 long tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Variable influences that make me want to buy green and live green? We could get a cheerleading squad to keep shouting, “Go Green; Go Green.” If I hear it enough, I’ll be influenced to radically change my ways from marginally green to largely green. But then, if I win the lottery, I might be influenced by that variable to acquire something I don’t actually need, to travel in a style I could not previously afford, and to attend a conference of “concerned” greenies to present my previous research on green technologies.*****
 
 
* Tina Mainieri, Elaine G. Barnett, Trisha R. Valdero, John B. Unipan & Stuart Oskamp (1997) Green Buying: The Influence of Environmental Concern on Consumer Behavior, The Journal of Social Psychology, 137:2, 189-204, DOI: 10.1080/00224549709595430 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224549709595430  Accessed September 18, 2019.
 
**Stickings, Tim and Dianne Apen-Sadler. The $20 million climate change party: How Camp Google wracked up an 800-tonne carbon footprint flying ‘hypocritical’ celebrities to environmental talking shop on 114 private jets to watch Coldplay and hang out on mega-yachts. DailyMail.com, 1 August 2019 updated 5 August 2019. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7311015/Google-splashes-20million-Italian-climate-change-party.html   Accessed September 18, 2019
 
***Carbon footprint calculator. The Nature Conservancy, online at https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/consider-your-impact/carbon-calculator/ Accessed September 18, 2019.
 
****Hasson,k Peter. NBC News Asks Americans To Confess Their Climate Change Sins.” Daily Caller. 18 September 2019. Online at https://dailycaller.com/2019/09/18/nbc-news-climate-confessions/  Accessed September 18, 2019.
 
*****According to one report, Naomi Campbell gave a “heartfelt speech” about Nelson Mandela. Say what? I wish I could have heard that speech. I didn’t know anything about Mandela’s “greenness.” https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/festival-of-wealth-inside-googles-mysterious-camp-for-the-elite/news-story/e1762dfc4a6a11009c09a21a9fa81a0a   Accessed September 19, 2019. “Local media reported the A-listers “invaded” the island, clogging local roads with Maseratis, Ferraris and Porches, with celebrities photographed tooling around the island in gas-guzzling, high-end SUVs.”—with The Sun, New York Post.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Do you get tired of all the political bickering? Do you wish people, in Rodney King’s words, could “just all get along”?
 
Kwasi Wiredu, African political philosopher, argues that consensual democracy would be a better form of government than majoritarian democracy. In counter arguments, Emmanuel Ifeanyi Ani, disagrees. Wiredu’s position is that western democracy is predisposed to “gridlock,” as evidenced by the politics of the United States, and he also believes 1) Kenneth Kaunda’s statement that “original” African societies operated by consensus, with members of communities meeting in “solemn conclave” until they agreed on an issue and 2) Guy Clutton-Brock’s statement that “elders would sit under the big trees, and talk until they” agreed. Wiredu would argue that the political system of the United States is a “pre-established disharmony,” and, as Ani summarizes, is an example of how majoritarian democracy is “the quintessence of uncooperativeness” and, for Africa, is an “epiphenomenon of colonialism” that is antithetical to “the spirit of communalism.” *
 
That the United States system of checks and balances can become unchecked imbalances has always been evident. The two-party system has an inherent vying for power that leads to the gridlock of Wiredu’s argument. But consensus? Elders? What would that look like in any large society? What would it look like in any tribal society? What would it look like in your workplace or family?
 
The setting:    A large tree in the courtyard of an assisted living home.
The Elders:     Mr. Humbug, a disgruntled displaced elder whose family appears to have abandoned him because, well, he’s just plain irascible
                        Mrs. Quilt, an affable matron whose grandchildren visit often and bring multicolored patches of rags their mothers were using to dust and new spools of thread
                        Mr. Spring, still participating in marathons
                        Miss Tight, a retired librarian
                        Rev. Upright, a retired evangelical minister
 
The Conversation:
 
Mr. Humbug: I can’t chew this stuff. The meat is always overdone and the vegetables are underdone. Get rid of the cook. I could do better in the kitchen if my macular degeneration didn’t prevent me from seeing.
 
Mrs. Quilt: Oh! did you meet the cook’s grandchildren? They were here today. Lovely. One of them gave me some old dish towels for my new quilt.
 
Mr. Spring: Humbug, you should go for a walk every day. It would do you good.
 
Miss Tight: (No comment)
 
Rev. Upright: Now, Mr. Humbug, not everyone can turn loaves of bread and a few fish into a sumptuous meal. Why, I think it’s a miracle if the cook can come up with a menu that pleases everyone. You know what Leviticus says…
 
Mr. Humbug: You can quote the Bible all you want, Upright, but that don’t get me chewable food. My dentures are always comin’ loose on that stuff, ‘cept the mashed potatoes—and they’re always dry. I say get rid of the cook.
 
Miss Tight: (No comment)
 
Mrs. Quilt: When I was at home, I used to make big meals for everyone.
 
Mr. Spring: I’m goin’ for a run.
 
Mr. Humbug: Nurse. Wheel me back inside. Too much wind and too many bugs under this tree.
 
CONSENSUS: The cook keeps his job by default.
 
Is Wiredu correct? Can large African populations operate by consensus because they supposedly operated thus in tribal villages of the past? Could any large population truly operate by consensus? Is there a limiting number of people for which consensus can be the methodology of efficiency? Is it a family of four?
 
But in a family of four, consensus would mean giving children with their limited experience and knowledge the same voice as the parents. Children might also see short-term, whereas parents, because of their greater experience, might see long-term.
 
And then there’s the matter of rationality, a component essential to consensus. Wiredu assumes that the “elders” discussed matters rationally. But how far did that rationality extend. One of the reasons that African DNA is more diverse in that continent than it is outside Africa, is that tribal rivalries kept the African versions of the Montagus and Capulets separate. Racism reigned for centuries and still reigns today. Consensus, if it worked at all, worked in the smallest of groups. Today’s national aggregations force various analogs of Hutus and Tutsis to live together. And throughout the continent one can find similar “divisions” among religions like Islam’s Shia and Sunni, Christianity’s sundry Protestants and Catholics, and numerous tribal religions, all having influence over their adherents and all, at times, taking precedence over rational discussion under some village tree.
 
Maybe pre-established disharmony is the human way. Western civilization’s inheritance of Greek philosophy and democracy based on reason has rarely led to consensus simply because humans are programmed to argue from that which is irrational: Feelings, moods, different interests from altruistic to narcissistic, varied experiences, hasty conclusions and non sequiturs based on incomplete knowledge and manipulated facts, and hormonal drives. Is it difficult to guess why all governments—from those of large tribes to those of large nations—find themselves embroiled in uncooperativeness?**
 
Sometimes events drive temporary cooperation and consensus, but even potential pandemics caused by diseases like Polio and Ebola have not been met with universal and rational cooperation. Thus, health workers have come under attack in places as separated from one another as Pakistan and Equatorial Africa.*** Irrationality is universal. Consensus is rare.  
 
Wiredu’s argument against western-style democracy is no more valid than his argument for African-style consensus. The latter probably never truly existed in the “idealized” version that Wiredu, Clutton-Brock, and Kaunda present as evidence. Sitting under that tree with the elders, those three political philosophers might find themselves getting a bit perturbed. But if they need some evidence that the elders don’t have the deliberative powers they imagine, I invite them to sit beneath the courtyard tree of the nearest assisted-living community to reach a consensus among the gathered elders.
 
Philosopher Thomas Hobbes and novelist William Golding ascribe a fundamental evil or savagery to human nature. I wouldn’t agree. True, evil and savagery are part of human history and current and future potential, but with regard to humans governing themselves, I would ascribe not savagery, but a fundamental irrationality to our nature. And that irrationality, regardless of the setting—under trees or in parliaments—manifests itself in “deliberations.”
                                   
 
*Two documents: Ani, Emmanuel Ifeanyi, “On Traditional African Consensual Rationality,” 17 May 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12013 and Ani, (2019) “The question of social conformity in Wiredu’s consensual democracy,” African Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2019.1609763.
 
**In the late twenty-teens, numerous countries find themselves incapable of consensus. Examples abound: Brexit, international treaties, impeachment of the US President, the role of government in the lives of individuals, war. Reason (and substantiated fact) rarely plays a role in the deliberations, and when it does, it is dismissed because of emotional attachments by parties and special interest groups with particular agendas, with all confrontations now exacerbated by agenda-driven widespread media.

***https://www.cbsnews.com/news/health-workers-battle-trust-issues-attacks-in-ebola-outbreak/ 
and https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/26/health/polio-worker-deaths-pakistan-intl/index.html
 
 
 

Headlines don’t shock anymore, do they? Two reasons: We’ve seen the worst of humanity in both real and fictional settings; we can’t trust nowadays that the headline isn’t a corruption of truth. But I was struck by this one: “Man kills school bully at school reunion after 53 years.”* The story centers on Thanapat Anakesri and Suthat Kosayamat, both 69 years old. Anakesri wanted Kosayamat to apologize for bullying him in high school, but the latter refused. Anakesri then shot and killed him.
 
Sometimes, we hold tenaciously onto the unpleasantness of a past event. In the museum of memory, we preserve fossilized unpleasantness. We can’t let the incident go, so it surfaces in our ever-renewing present. But what was once tangible no longer exists except in memory, and as we know, different people remember differently. Those who caused the unpleasantness might not have enshrined their actions in their memory museum. 
 
It is, of course, difficult to get past the past. In some ways, we can say we’re obsessed with it. In fact, there are professions devoted to “digging it up,” an appropriate term because fossil means “something dug up.” But paleontologists recognize two classes of fossils: Those that remain as hard parts like bone and shell and those that serve as hints of or traces of animals or plants. A good example of a trace fossil is a dinosaur footprint. Nothing of the original animal remains except that impression in lithified sediment.** It’s a chance preservation. Dinosaurs didn’t make footprints in hard rock, just in soft sediments that were rapidly preserved by rapid burial.
 
Think of unpleasant memories as trace fossils on soft brains. The “animals,” that is, the participants, in the circumstances of the past are no longer around or are no longer what they once were. Since his high school years, the bully Kosayamat had spent his time as a tailor, not a profession that we associate with bullies, I’d say. But Anakesri never forgot the bullying. One of his friends said, “Thanapat would get drunk then often talk about how angry he was about being bullied by Suthat. He never forgot about it.” And what of this trace that Anakesri held onto? Well, apparently his brain held the “footprints” of the bullying, whereas the brain of Kosayamat did not.
 
Thanapat Anakesri carried the trace fossil of his high school circumstances around with him as though he had the “hard part” itself. In holding onto the unpleasant past, we act as though we have the tangible hard parts of that long-gone moment. In reality, we are holding onto trace fossils. The people and events of that unpleasant memory are, in reality, either gone or changed; the past moment is gone, and its trace on your brain might not be preserved as a trace fossil on someone else’s brain.  
 
Don’t obsess over traces of long past events; don’t dig them up. That obsession is one form of “paleontology” that buries present “hard parts” under traces of the past.   
 
*Realnews. Tuesday, September 17, 2019. https://realnewsmagazine.net/crime/man-kills-school-bully-at-reunion-after-53-years/
 
**One can see good examples of dinosaur footprints at Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, where the trace fossils have been preserved under a geodesic dome. http://dinosaurstatepark.org/  and https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrC_C0svIBdAQoAugAPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByMDgyYjJiBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMyBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?p=dinosaur+footprint+museum+at+rocky+hill+connecticut&fr=yhs-pty-pty_maps&hspart=pty&hsimp=yhs-pty_maps&guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9zZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tL3locy9zZWFyY2g_aHNwYXJ0PXB0eSZoc2ltcD15aHMtcHR5X21hcHMmdHlwZT1BMSZwYXJhbTI9OTc4NDQzNDctNDU3NC00MWZhLThkNzUtNzQ4N2E4Y2UzNGVkJnBhcmFtMz1tYXBzZGlyZWN0aW9uc3NlYXJjaF80LjR-VVN-YXBwZm9jdXM1OTUmcGFyYW00PS1haXNvX2VtYWlsLUFkdmVydGl6ZV92NC1kc2ZfZW1haWwtLWJiOX5DaHJvbWV-ZGlub3NhdXIrZm9vdHByaW50K211c2V1bSthdCtyb2NreStoaWxsK2Nvbm5lY3RpY3V0fkQ0MUQ4Q0Q5OEYwMEIyMDRFOTgwMDk5OEVDRjg0MjdFJnBhcmFtMT0yMDE5MDYwMyZwPWRpbm9zYXVyK2Zvb3RwcmludCttdXNldW0rYXQrcm9ja3kraGlsbCtjb25uZWN0aWN1dA&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAJZ0sDhIFf_ydHb-KAjWtrAbasdGDGJjz1bLmU_iPlCVLVj7IjDaxv3oLHgufMQ6mt2YYzNH4JK5R2vU-VzJYT_-GzhsgGkVAQdSwRlZwhYK8qQvHTZj4nrmbJcYMooudseQMdAE3Pf3i5D91fOpE9f8lPeMgAifcfZUOC2Nr40D
Finding fossils isn’t easy. The forces of decay and erosion destroy the actual remains and their traces more frequently than they are preserved. One has to “go looking” or accidentally stumble upon places where preservation has occurred, usually because of rapid burial. Had the backhoe driver at Rocky Hill felt no need to stop his digging when he uncovered the footprints, his machine could easily have destroyed the fossils that had escaped erosion under giant glaciers and flowing waters.  

There’s something to be said for stability; most humans like it. After all, who wants to contend daily with chaos?
 
You got me. Yes, I have said elsewhere, “Give me chaos, and you make me a god.” Not that I have an unrealistic opinion of myself, but think about it: In chaos, we get to make our own worlds; we get to order things. And, of course, I know I have limitations and that I could not take total chaos and turn it into arrant order because, well, there are just too many details to keep in mind, too many consequences of putting things together in ways they just might not fit, like gluing the wrong fragment where it doesn't fit into a broken ceramic cup. But generally, yes, I say challenge me to order my world, to glue a broken cup's fragments to reassemble the cup.
 
And then, I think, but if I order my “world,” do I wish for more chaos to order. Won’t I then spend my life simply re-ordering that which is in disorder? When will I get some respite? Certainly, there’s something to be said for stability. I might want to be challenged, but because I am limited by my nature, I will eventually seek some stability.
 
I should ask myself, “In what aspects of my life do I want stability?” The corollary question? “In what aspects of my life will I welcome or tolerate chaos that I have to turn into order?”