My son, Kalen, and I watched a movie last evening named "Chaos" because "Chaos Theory" (Edward Lorentz, 1961) was beneath the plot of it all. I have been criticized for attempting to extract wisdom from "pop culture," but there is no sin in doing so. Wisdom is found everywhere in this world and it is found wherever one finds it.The term "Chaos" theory describes the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamic systems that may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. As a result of this sensitivity, which manifests itself as an exponential growth of perturbations in the initial conditions, e.g., fractal dynamics, the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future dynamics are fully defined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.
In other words, the term "chaos" comes from the fact that the system, e.g., our cultural evolutionary program, is, on its face, apparently random and disordered, i.e., chaotic ... but this is most certainly not so. Chaos theory is really about finding the underlying order in apparently random data. True to form, the movie "Chaos" requires going back to the beginning to comprehend the order buried in the plot. It requires putting little examples of order together until the order inherent in the larger program emerges.
One of the lead players in the movie kept referring to a story of the Buddha who had journeyed far from home only to find disappointment with his destination. In visiting with an elephant one day, the elephant pointed out that he, i.e., the elephant, did not care to see the Buddha depressed and unhappy. So, the elephant urged the Buddha to return to his beginnings and give it another shot. This the Buddha did, only to discover that :"By returning to one's beginnings, one can more clearly see one's path forward".
This, it strikes me, is precisely what the people of this world are going to have to do in finding their way to a global human community. Human rights and democracy are currently desired on a global basis and we, the people, are going to have to return to our beginnings in human rights and rethink our own cultural-historical paths to human rights and democracy. Every nation on earth has people capable of doing the necessary thinking.
For all advocates of the People, our beginnings in the story of human rights go back to the first Christian, Jesus, know it or not, like it or not. Jesus provided our beginnings in human rights and Jesus launched the People on a two millennial cultural evolutionary program that has taken us from tribal to national to global levels of human organization.
The "holy Roman Catholic church" has never practiced nascent Christian ethics nor has it ever honored human rights. The Roman church nourishes and personifies what it sees as being evil in the world. In doing so, it becomes a primary source of evil in the world as a justification for war. We seet this on a daily basis in the Middle East.
The human rights-based message of Jesus was compromised beyond human recognition by Roman emperors and the Roman church, the primary purpose of this overt and intentional confusion being the maintenance of Roman despotism, i.e., rule by the rich and powerful. This Roman denigration of the Christ justified imperialism for over a millennium, it drove colonialism for nearly half a millennium, and it has driven U.S. capitalism for over half a century.
The concept of human rights began to return to the world in the early 17th century with Spinoza and Newton and the EuroAmerican Enlightenment, which culminated in Jefferson's Declaration and Jefferson's Bible which provided a new human Jesus. The last line in Jefferson's Bible reads, "They rolled a large stone in front of the sepulchre and departed." No resurrection, no ascension. Jesus was dead and gone only living now in the People.
This was all a gift from rethinking the world following the Newtonian deductive revolution (which was followed by the Industrial Revolution) and the emergence of a mechanical world view all over the world, firstly moving into Japan with the Meiji Reformation and the end of the Shogunate rule by warrior era.
The concept of human rights will soon return to this entire world, a gift from rethinking the world following Einstein's reductive revolution. This "postmodern" approach to thought has already been followed by the Informational Revolution (and the technology to allow a global human world in touch with itself). This emergence of a systematic world view all over the world has now moved into India and China, where the People want and need human rights like everyone else.
In other words, no matter how chaotic and random the cultural evolutionary program may appear, there is an underlying sense of order that goes back to the initial conditions which inspired the cultural evolutionary program requesting the honoring of human rights. If we go back to the beginnings of human rights, we can better comprehend how we got to our current status in chaos and we can better see our way to a better path forward.
We need to go back to our beginnings in allowing the cultural evolutionary program to go full circle in establishing a much grander human evolutionary program allowing the emergence of deity on earth. Someone is going to have to assume the job at the top, and there is no one to look to but the People.
Working on intuitive ground, the Buddha had it right millennia ago. Cultural evolution has been a determined process since the emergece of nascent Christianity, that determination coming from those few individuals dedicated to natural science, natural philosophy, human rights and democracy, e.g., Jefferson, Franklin, Priestly and Paine. The People are going to have to pick up that determination on behalf of the People.
Cultural evolution will continue to be a determined human program, but determined by the People not by some ancient cultural program in despotism. This will require that the People wrest control away and demand a world that honors human rights and democracy so as to make collective human determinations in the interest of Life itself.
Natural science, in resurrecting itself as natural philosophy, needs to return to its beginnings, but not to look back at itself. Rather, it needs to look back on How it looked at the world over time. This will allow appreciation of the evolutionary flow from inductive/descriptive knowledge (Socrates) to deductive/mechanistic knowledge (Newton and the Industrial Revolution) to reductive/systematic knowledge (Einstein and the Informational Revolution).
Here we have three increasingly sophisticated ways to look at the world, none of which have anything to do with the western religions ... other than having been inspired by the ignorance of these religions and disgusted by their use of fear and ignorance-based control in the interest of despotism and rule by the rich. It has been a conflict between reason and religion all along, good People, beginning with the Christ. It is a conflict which must soon come to resolution.
In a fundamental way, the millennial conflict has been between Judeo-Roman religion and natural science, natural philosophy and nascent Christianity, the latter being uniformly based in reason, screw religion. Taken together, these reason-based approaches to the comprehension of Life constitute a religion on their own.
But, these approaches to comprehension constitute a religion for individuals alone. Common ground is found in others through that upon which we can all intelligently agree. In this human world, there is immense common ground.
Within the confines of that religion, we can still argue all that we want about which way is up and which way is down. Within the confines of that religion, we can also all agree that there is only one People on one Earth under Jefferson's God in "the will of the People, substantially declared".
We can all agree that reason ... honesty, integrity, compassion ... human knowledge and human rights properly define the world that we live in, nevermind religions and ethical systems unrelated to human knowledge. We can all agree that human rights are the proper bottom line in all human cultures, a gift to the People from Jesus, the Father of Human Rights, and Jefferson, the Father of American Democracy ... both of their thinking based solidly in reason and compassion.
One need no more pray to Jesus than to Jefferson or Gandhi. These men are dead and gone and have no influence over the world, except through the People as kindred spirits.
Gentle people, one need in no way worship these gentle men, one needs only to emulate them in thought and word and action, in coming to know what it means to be fully human. To worship Jesus in the Old Testament Roman tradition is to be a "fake" Christian in the eyes of others. Listen up all Roman Catholics and latter day evangelicals. You people "know not what you do", wallowing around in ancient Roman ignorance, afraid of the first Christian's primary message, "Think for yourself".
Was Jesus more like Gandhi or was Gandhi more like Jesus, both seeing the world with the same reasoned light? As individuals, we have all come to be embedded in the cultural evolutionary program from consciousness to comprehension, an appropriate human goal. As a People, we have come to be embedded in one cultural evolutionary program on the path to a global human-rights based democracy.
Until we come to comprehend who we are as a People on this Earth, we will continue only to screw everything up on the global stage. We are the mind beneath all concepts of deity on earth. That fact compells us to see human knowledge and human rights as providing the path to Deity and Heaven right here on Earth.
