On Prisons

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Before the advent of agriculture and cities, humans lived together in small groups of mostly related individuals, not staying in one place for long periods of time.  Minor offenses against the group like assault or theft were typically treated with corporal punishment and public shame.  The most serious offenders and those exhibiting incorrigible bad behavior were often banished from the group.  Expulsion, condemned to living alone in the wilderness, usually resulted in the death of the offender, from starvation or predators.  In this manner the group was able to eliminate the threat of harm from the miscreant, without the repercussions of outright capital punishment, e.g., revenge on the executioner.

Modern societies do not have that luxury, they needs prisons, if not capital punishment.  By prisons, I mean correctional institutions where the minimum sentence is one year.  Evil doers of every description are among us.  The human race provides a fresh crop of criminals at every turn.  Depending on how strict a society’s laws are, at any given time we can expect a certain proportion of the population to be incarcerated for common crimes, sometimes for many years.  The objective of modern prisons is to a) separate dangerous criminals from civil society; and b) where possible, rehabilitate the criminal to normal citizenship status.

What has changed in recent times, and will continue to change in future centuries, are the methods society uses house prisoners and prepare them for re-integration into civil society.  Even with all the humane advancements of the past, prisons for criminals are still primarily treated as warehouses, a place to incarcerate dangerous people for long periods of time. 

To varying degrees, attempts to rehabilitate the inmates are made, with some success.  Unfortunately, most inmates in prisons are housed together with other inmates in a “general population”.  This give rise to the rule of gangs, at least in men’s prisons, typically organized along ethnic or religious lines.  Women’s prisons may not suffer from the full effects of gang rule, but hardened inmates are still free to influence first offenders.

Needless to say, many young lives are ruined in these places. First offenders are corrupted by older gang members, pressured into committing more crimes and lengthening their sentences.  Some of these gangs have considerable power outside of their prisons, through gang members who have been released and young adherents who have not yet arrived. 

Most people would agree modern prison systems in the US and around the world are, for the most part, abject failures at their assigned tasks - the only exception being their ability to temporarily separate evildoers from the general public.  Given the high cost of even today’s rudimentary prison housing and rehabilitation efforts, it is unlikely we’ll see much reform in the near term.  General overcrowding of prisons, largely due in the US to the “war on drugs”, makes matters even worse.  Operational costs are higher and the living conditions for inmates in the general population are horrific.  To be thrown into one of these hellholes is a fate no one deserves.

Accordingly, society cannot expect things to change anytime soon.  A gradual end to hostilities in the so-call war on drugs will ease overcrowding, but the snake-pit conditions will continue for many years to come.  What we can do is to start thinking and talking about what prisons of the future ought to be like.  What methods can be used by a more capable society to house prisoners so they do not fall prey to gang rule?  What methods can be used to effectively rehabilitate inmates and ensure that those who will not, or cannot, reform are not released from incarceration?

Fortunately, psychologists and neuro-scientists are continually improving our abilities to modify thinking and behavior through operant conditioning.  A willing subject can (theoretically) be conditioned to permanently shun criminal behavior and actively conform to societal norms.  Clearly, modern civilization is not ready to embark on what we rightfully call “brainwashing” criminals, but sooner or later, public attitudes will change. 

We associate such behavior modification practices with the “re-education” of political prisoners in tyrannical societies.  But fast-forward several hundred years to a future society that no longer has such qualms.  Once the ice has been broken about advanced conditioning methods, prisons will reform, largely driven by economic considerations.  Fewer inmates, who don’t require high walls and don’t re-offend after release, will result in smaller, more efficient prisons requiring fewer, more highly paid staff positions. 

Crime in this future society will be recast as aberrant behavior, something to be corrected, if possible.  The punishment aspect of several years of operant conditioning will still be there, and useful for deterring citizens from offending in the first place.  I believe Fyodor Dostoevsky would approve of the new arrangement.

To illustrate this future prison paradigm, imagine you are a young offender in the year 2313:  You have a history of anger management problems, fighting and drunkenness.  You got into an argument in a bar, picked a fight, invited the victim outside and inadvertently killed him in the following brawl.  Since you were the aggressor and the other party is dead, after a trial by a jury of your peers, you are convicted of the crime of second-degree murder and sentenced to an indefinite term in the state penitentiary.

After you pass from the county jail to the state prison bus, the first thing you notice is how nice the attendants are; calling you sir and asking if you are comfortable.  Each prisoner is isolated in a separate cubicle and blanketed with “white noise”, so they can’t hear anything from outside except occasional voice contact with the attendants via a squawk box. 

Upon arrival at the state prison, you are ushered by burly attendants into a hospital-like environment.  Everything is clean and clinical.  You are still confined, with locked doors and occasional shackles, but everyone seems to be interested in you and your well-being.  The food is good, the rooms are comfortable, but there are no other inmates in sight.  You are starting to wonder if this prison facility exists only for you, which is precisely the intended effect.

From day one, treatment begins with extensive psychological examination and carefully prescribed conditioning, often without the inmate being aware of it.  Psychoactive drugs are applied and sensory deprivation sessions are used to focus the mind on prescribed words and thoughts.

Contact or correspondence with other inmates is entirely absent, therefore no gangs or unwanted influences.  Visits or correspondence with persons outside the prison are infrequent and carefully controlled.  Access to public communications is carefully controlled to fit each inmate’s rehabilitation program.  The staff becomes your only society, a comfortable surrogate family and support group. 

As we should expect when dealing with humans, some inmates will respond positively to this enlightened and coercive environment.  After two or three years, a typical first-time murderer comes out a different man or woman, anger management issues under control and deeply sorry for his or her previous crime. 

Some inmates, however, will prove to be incorrigible, or mentally ill to an extent that poses a permanent threat to society, ergo the indeterminate sentences.  If my hypothesis is correct, these dead-enders will be in the minority.  Nevertheless, they must be treated humanely, helped to cope as much as possible and by all means kept separate from other inmates.  By definition, these people are a danger to others, including other dead-end inmates.

We may not see much movement towards this new kind of prison in our lifetimes.  Current societal norms weigh against adoption of methods we consider cruel and unusual.  However, in the long run (several centuries) public attitudes will change, concomitant with a gradual increase in state controls on individual behavior – think of it as creeping socialism. 

Barring some environmental disaster like severe global cooling, the advanced civilization of 2313 will be very different from the daily existence we are familiar with.  Many aspects of individual life will be tightly controlled by society.  For example, women will not be allowed to give birth to children without permission from the state, in order to control population levels and eliminate birth defects.  In that sort of highly socialized environment, operant conditioning of serious offenders will be considered enlightened application of scientific knowledge.  Citizens of the 24^th Century will rightfully look back on today’s penitentiaries as barbaric institutions.

“O wonder!
How many goodly creatures there are here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world, that has such people in it”

- Shakespeare’s Tempest

On Religion

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No one knows for sure when religious practices began, but by about 25,000 years ago, Homo sapiens were burying their dead with decoration and grave goods, perhaps for use in the afterlife.  By the time cities emerged and written records were kept, religious practices were in full flower, with temples, priests, altars, sacrifices and incantations.  Why did this happen?  Other animals and early hominids do not have religious practices.  What is it about the human condition that causes this sort of behavior to evolve?

Note:  A heavy influence on my thinking in this topic comes from two books that examine religious practices in general, and two others that examine the Christian tradition from a historical perspective:

1. The Golden Bough: A study in magic and religion - by Sir James George Frazer, published 1890

2. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A study in human nature –delivered as lectures by William James at the University of Edinburgh during the 1901-1902 term

3. An Explorer’s Life of Jesus - by Wendell Phillips, published 1975

4. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish life and the emergence of Christianity - by Paula Fredriksen, published 1999

 Let’s start with some context and definitions.  I consider philosophy to be superior to religion and science.  By superior, I mean logically prior to the other two modes of thinking.  Even before Paleolithic humans began conjuring up spirit protectors, they had a proto-philosophy in mind, a simple set of conclusions or beliefs about reality, the world around them and their society.  That much follows logically from their use of language. 

Religion, when it finally evolved, was an expansion of that proto-philosophy, namely belief in, and attempted communication with, a spiritual realm of existence.  Belief systems which deny any such higher form of reality, such as atheism or Scientology, should not be described as religions, I submit.  By the same token, Satan worship must be recognized as a true religion, no matter how distasteful it might be.

My objective conclusions about religion in general cannot be entirely separated from my own religious beliefs.  So I’ll try to address the former in the midst of describing the latter in sparse detail.  By objective, I mean based on what I’ve concluded independently, while consciously skeptical of the conventional wisdom propounded by religious authorities.  Nevertheless, most of my conclusions are pure conjecture.  That is the nature of religious thought.  Scientific thought, by comparison, strives for conclusions based on empirical data, as much as possible. 

My own philosophical understanding, corroborated by science and theology, recognizes there is more to this universe than meets the eye.  Astrophysicists have produced convincing evidence that space and time are not uniform, contrary to our native perception.  Current “M-theory” in physics postulates up to nine extra dimensions beyond the four we perceive directly. 

After several million years of hominid evolution, early humans developed big brains, complex languages, reasoning powers and relatively sophisticated cultures.  So armed, I believe anatomically modern humans became aware of a spiritual dimension of existence, an unseen yet ever-present dimension populated by spirit beings.  Their universal belief in, and interactions with this spiritual dimension, was the beginning of continuous religious practice on earth down to the present day.  Neolithic societies typically include various healers, shamans, witch doctors, etc. with the ability to obtain information, and perhaps assistance, from these spirit beings. 

At various times in human history, including the modern era, materialism as a fundamental belief system has flourished.  Many people alive today, especially in developed societies, are convinced that what we perceive with our senses, the material world around us, is all there is.  Any reference to spirits, ghosts, etc. is nonsense to them.  They understand religious belief and practice to be mere superstition, and they are partially right.  Consider the typical tele-evangelist.  Modern materialism unconsciously follows a well-established school of philosophy, namely Logical Positivism.  Its first principle is: any proposition, whose affirmation or negation makes no difference in the material world, is nonsense.

Nevertheless, there are people like me who are inclined to think deeply and often find themselves on the fence between these two conflicting belief systems.  They were raised with some religious education, from their parents or local institutions, but immersed in a society that assumes a materialist perspective for normal behavior.  For example, anyone who claims to commune with ghosts is instantly lumped together with fortunetellers and shamans, and therefore either crazy or dishonest. 

Some of these deep-thinking people, caught in between their religious tradition and the all-pervasive world of materialism, have more than enough faith to sustain their religious belief.  Others have little faith, but want so much to conform; they go through the motions of religious practice, but without any strong convictions for it.  Then there are still others in this situation who openly reject all religious belief as superstition.  They may tolerate religion, but do not subscribe to it.

My own religious journey in adulthood started in the middle group above, thoroughly conditioned to materialism, but still hanging on to a residual belief that there must be something to the Christian system I was taught as a child.  All that changed as I began to witness miracles and read eyewitness accounts of phenomena involving angels, demons and ghosts.  I’m a sucker for a plausible story anyway, and it didn’t take long to start connecting the dots and construct a model of the spiritual dimension that explains these supernatural phenomena.  I’ve now moved into the third category of true believers.  But with a difference, my faith is founded on my rational explanation of spiritual phenomena I have either witnessed, or learned about from credible sources.

I believe a sentient being created the universe and the first life forms therein.  From the beginning, the universe included a spiritual dimension where the Creator operates.  The earliest lifeforms on earth had the potential to produce intelligent life. 

Once Homo sapiens arrived on the scene, about 300,000 years ago, the Creator populated this spiritual dimension with a relatively small number of spiritual extensions which humans refer to by name.  For example, Gabriel the messenger, Michael the punisher, Satan the devil and the one we call the Holy Spirit, the helper. Satan exists to provide humans with true freedom of will, a choice between ultimate love and ultimate evil.  

Through H. sapiens' use of complex language, shamans began to communicate with these spirit beings God provided for them.  Because early humans were primitive by nature, bloodthirsty barbarians, the spirits they encountered were mostly demons, sub tentacles of Satan.  It has been this way with witch doctors, magicians, astrologers and soothsayers ever since.  To the extent they actually communicate with spirits, those spirit beings are typically either lost souls, i.e., people who died but whose souls are somehow stuck in a particular place, or outright demons from Hell spreading trouble on earth. God has a plan for us, and we are fulfilling that plan as expected.

About 4,000 years ago, the legendary Abram of Ur in Mesopotamia, began a communication with the Creator of the universe that led to the formation of three of today’s prominent religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  All three worship the same Spirit being.  It’s possible other people, outside of these three traditions, have also communicated with the Creator. 

For reasons we don’t completely understand, it pleases the Creator to limit the activities of angels and demons to our minds most of the time, particularly the faculty we call the conscience.  Most outright physical manifestations such as poltergeists seem to be possible only through the participation of a human mind.  Meanwhile, all living creatures have a built-in resistance to spirits invading their minds.  This resistance is so strong, the spiritual influence only works when a person consciously seeks out or permits the connection.  Notwithstanding occasional uninvited encounters with spirits, such as that experienced by Paul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, most of the time, it is incumbent on humans to trigger the event with their intentions.

What proof do we have that this spiritual realm and its inhabitants exists.  No modern instruments have yet detected spiritual phenomena, even though countless people have personally experienced them.  Drawing on those eyewitness accounts, and my own first-hand, unequivocal experience with a healing miracle, I came to the inescapable conclusion the spiritual dimension is as real as the material world we are so familiar with. 

By all accounts, unexpected encounters with demons are often triggered by experimentation with occult practices such as Ouija boards and Transcendental Meditation.  When you open your mind to any spirit that happens to be listening, you are inviting demons to get into your head and start influencing your thoughts and behavior.  There is an extensive literature of documented cases of Catholic priests encountering and driving out demons from possessed individuals.  Some poor unfortunate person gets involved in occult practices, with an open mind and eager intentions, and ends up tormented by a demon inside her/his head.  Mass murderers frequently get started in this manner.

Encounters with angels, on the other hand, are distinctly different.  People pray to the Creator and the angels, especially Jesus Christ and his mother Mary, Queen of the Angels, giving thanks and asking for all sorts of things.  In this manner Creator constantly intervenes in personal lives.  We refer to these as acts of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete promised by Jesus.  Healing seems to be the primary benefit granted.  Asking for a new Cadillac won’t get you very far, apparently.

The Creator also occasionally intervenes in human affairs on a larger scale, to steer the course of history.  Heaven only knows how much and why, but one striking and well documented example is that of Jeanne La Pucelle (The Maid) aka Joan of Arc.  An illiterate peasant girl of 16 when she began her mission, Joan was very religious, praying to the angels every day.  One day in 1428, Joan experienced a vision of Saint Margaret and Saint Catherine.  These saints reportedly were martyred as young girls, for refusing to renounce their Christian faith. 

These angels spoke at length to Joan, repeatedly over the next three years, until her execution by the English at Rouen, France on May 30, 1431.  Her story and the eyewitness accounts of the miracles she performed in battle and elsewhere are compelling.  The transcript of her trial is direct evidence (provided you believe her) that the Creator occasionally intervenes in human affairs on a grand scale.  Praise the Lord, Hallelujah, God is great.

So what is philosophy of religion and what is my position therein, admittedly as a parvenu.  According to Wikipedia:  “(it) is a branch of philosophy concerned with questions regarding religion, including the nature and existence of God, the examination of religious experience, analysis of religious vocabulary and texts, and the relationship of religion and science.”  My remarks above briefly explain my position as to the existence and nature of God the creator and ruler of the universe.  I’ll leave the analysis of lingua sacra (written and spoken) to others, or at least until another day.  However, the nature of religious experience and its relationship to science is a hot topic with me these days.

Let’s begin with the central philosophical problem associated with religion.  Namely, that from the average non-believer’s perspective, religious belief is indistinguishable from superstition.  An account of an appearance of the Queen of the Angels is ranked alongside a Bigfoot sighting or your daily horoscope, by the average person in the street.  All true religions are founded on the idea of a spiritual realm of existence, inhabited by spirit beings.  For that reason, some scholars question whether Buddhism is really a religion, rather than a code of conduct like Confucianism.

Admittedly, this non-material realm cannot be readily detected by current instruments.  Believers and non-believers agree on that point.  It’s just that non-believers will say the spirit realm exists only in our minds.  It is true these spiritual phenomena are most often manifested in our heads; however, they sometimes involve direct action by the Holy Ghost on a material thing, typically a living thing.

Before we give superstition a bad name, I need to point out that much of what we consider voodoo, demon worship and occult practices are in fact communication and familiarity with actual spirit beings of the wrong kind.  In fact, the strongest corroborating evidence for the existence of God and his angels is the phenomena associated with demonology, e.g., possessions, poltergeists, etc.

How can the religious person explain to the materialist why she/he believes in spirits?  As stated above, religious belief looks just like superstition to the casual observer.  For all the materialist can tell, the whole thing is a figment of the believer’s imagination.  The answer is found in the actual religious phenomena the believer experiences.  Sometimes the non-believer has had similar experiences and thereby begins to understand, but normally religious experiences are strictly personal.  Nevertheless, a personal religious experience such as a vision or a miraculous healing is often substantial and compelling enough to require explanation. 

Because of their paranormal nature, these experiences tend to corroborate the belief in a spiritual realm.  That’s why religious belief and practices have been so widespread since Paleolithic times.  From my perspective, the religious phenomena I have personally experienced, combined with what I have learned about other people’s encounters with the paranormal, can only be rationally explained by the existence of a spiritual dimension.  I consider myself blessed in this regard.  The Creator has endowed me with an open mind and generally protected me from harm.  I can only assume it’s because the Creator loves me.  Beyond that, the whys and wherefores are a mystery, a key characteristic of all religious thought.

The Christian path to enlightenment in religious matters starts by praying to Jesus, asking for help with something important you need, large or small.  The secret for connecting with the spiritual realm is your intention.  For starters you have to honestly accept His rule to love your fellow humans and repent for current or past practices to the contrary.  Your mind is like a radio beacon, normally closed to the spirits, as a defensive posture (who’s afraid of a ghost?)  But once you honestly accept the Golden Rule, then you can safely open your mind and make clear to yourself that you intend to communicate with Christ the Redeemer.  Act with faith and speak (inside your mind) to Jesus with your request, as a friend.  It could be something as simple as:  What can I do to free myself once and for all from gluttony?  Or, it could be something serious like a plea to heal a sick child.  Two people praying together are even more effective.  Either way, through prayer, and with patience, you will begin to perceive miracles, large and small. 

The skeptical materialist would say these are random events that you choose to interpret as meaningful.  But for the thinking person who is wondering about religious belief, these unusual phenomena start to add up, beyond what the odds would predict.  Plus, some of the events are downright paranormal, e.g., dramatic healings.  At some point, any rational person, who carefully examines the miraculous events they have experienced, large and small, will likely be ready to accept that Jesus is alive, he loves us and he intervenes in our world as it pleases him. 

No doubt religious Muslims and Jews have similar paths to enlightenment.  The same for Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, et al.  Some or all of them may be in communication with the one and only being we call God the Creator, I have no way of knowing.  My belief system is centered on the Christian tradition, and it’s constructed on rational explanation of religious phenomena, the best explanation I can imagine, drawing credible accounts by others of the whole range of spiritual phenomena. 

Fortunately, the Christian tradition is loaded with eyewitness accounts of what Jesus and his apostles said and did.  Since then many paranormal events with religious or demonic overtones have been documented.  Making these rational connections, between my own experiences and credible accounts by others, I have reached certainty in my mind about the nature of religious experience and its true relationship to the material existence all humans are familiar with.

Communication Media

G-FMBF5NWNX5 Understanding the most widely used communication media, and their respective effects on human culture, is an important part of understanding why we behave the way we do.  By communication, I mean transmission of information, not physical transport.  In my earlier posts, I described how all higher order animals, including our ancestors, use vocalization and body English to convey information between individuals and with other species.  Canines and a few others can even smile to convey their feelings.

Hominids took the vocalization further and developed a modest language capability by about one million years ago, with a vocabulary beyond anything previously evolved.  In this manner, speaking face-to-face, singing together and body English/facial expressions became the initial and only set of communications media our hominid ancestors used until relatively recently.  Representational art, e.g., body painting and cave drawings, appeared somewhere around 50,000 years ago.  More importantly, writing was introduced no later than 4,000 years ago in Egypt, Mesopotamia and possibly in the Indus river delta. 

Writing was the beginning of a series of new media put to work by our clever species.  For simplicity, I’m going to discuss six primary media introductions during the last 4,000 years, and their effects on human affairs. 

1.     Writing - using various physical media – introduced about 4,000 years ago.

2.     Telegraph - “What hath God wrought?”, test message sent from the Supreme Court chambers in DC, over a fledgling commercial carrier, to Samuel Morse’s partner in Baltimore, May 24, 1844

3.     Photography – Starting with Daguerreotype photos which became widespread in the US and Europe during the 1840s

4.     Radio - wireless telegraphy became widespread on ocean-going vessels in the first decade of the 20^th Century.  Audio broadcasting (AM radio) became widespread in industrialized countries in the 1920s.

5.     Television - broadcast TV over the airwaves was introduced in a few cities in Europe and America starting in the late 1920s, but rapidly expanding in the late 1940s and 50s.

6.     Internet - developed under US government contract in the 1970s, it rapidly spread to most of the planet in the 1990s.

Note:  Much of what I have absorbed from a layman’s perspective about communication media started with the works of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Professor of Communications at Toronto University.  I can personally recommend two of his many works:

·       Mechanical Bride- 1951

·       Understanding Media - 1964

Writing from about 5,300 years ago was quickly adopted by governing authorities and the elites for its obvious ability to convey unambiguous messages of considerable length across time and distance.  Kings and queens wanted their names carved in stone; merchants needed records of their transactions, and so on.  However, the masses of humanity, even in cities, for the most part remained illiterate until the middle of the 19^th Century Anno Domini. 

Nevertheless, writing immediately was put to work in building and sustaining large city states and empires.  It seems that agriculture begat towns and cities, which needed and invented writing to enable large political entities.  Notice the Mesoamericans independently developed writing under exactly the same circumstances.  Later, books made of ink on parchment or papyrus were used to codify religious works like the Torah.  Having the doctrine in written form enabled widely dispersed Jewish religious communities to remain true to their Covenant.  Weekly synagogues provide the perfect venue for a literate teacher to read from the book, so the illiterate audience can be familiar with the law.  Until relatively recently, however, writing as a means of conveying information to large numbers of people was limited by its need to be printed on a physical layer.

Telegraph – widespread in America and Europe by the late 1840s, the first reliable transatlantic cable went into operation in 1866.  Information that previously took 10 days to cross the Atlantic now took only a few minutes using Morse code.  With dispatches moving at near light speed, newspapers around the world took on a new feeling of realism.  None of us were there at the time, but the feeling must have been profound, giving the average literate citizen a sense of the coming global village.

Photography – After 1840, for the first time in history, it was possible to quickly make a high-definition, reproducible image of any visible scene.  Ancient stone sculptures, particularly by the Romans, produced a similar degree of realism, also some painters of the second millennium AD, but each rendition took so much time, and they were limited to very small numbers for the elites of society.  After photography hit the scene, newspapers began reproducing photographs in their daily papers, replacing the earlier artist’s renditions.  It’s no accident that telegraphy and photography emerged during the Industrial Revolution, which in turn emerged as a direct result of the Enlightenment.

While still-picture photography lives on in a big way with our modern digital cameras, it’s spin offs of motion pictures and video (with sound) as communications media cannot be ignored.  Presently, motion pictures (including video) are primarily delivered via television channels or movie theaters, with some DVDs thrown in.  Penetration of streaming video into the Internet medium has already begun.  More on this below.

Radio – Wireless telegraphy began shortly after the turn of the 20^th Century, primarily used by marine transportation.  By the 1920s, audio broadcasts became widespread in industrialized countries.  Radio receivers became a standard fixture in homes with electricity.  Politicians could now speak to millions of voters, merchants could advertise their wares to mass audiences.  People in these countries rapidly became accustomed to receiving their entertainment in their living rooms instead of the local tavern.  Radio newscasts began to supplant newsreels (in theaters) and newspapers as the preferred source for daily news.  McLuhan describes radio as a “hot” medium, meaning it is concentrated in a single human sense – hearing, same as the telephone in this regard.  McLuhan maintains people are affected differently, with more immediacy, by hot media.  Some believe there would not have been a Roaring Twenties without the influence of radio and the telephone.  Today, radio still has a foothold in automobiles, but that’s about it.  Cellphones, which are two-way radios, are gradually replacing land lines for telephony services.  Cellphones become smartphones and smart watches, bringing in email, texting, Internet access, even two-way voice and video conversations.  You can wear Dick Tracy's 2-way wrist radio.

Television started in Europe in the 1930s and became widespread in America in the early 1950s.  Other countries quickly followed, until by the 1990s there was scarcely a country left on the planet whose citizens did not have ready access to satellite television.  Because of my age, I clearly remember this particular media revolution.  As a young boy, I recall sitting next to the family radio that occupied a prominent place in the living room of our home.  This was before transistors, so radios were fairly large.  My evening entertainment consisted of listening aptly to various dramatic serials like the Phantom and the Whistler.  When my favorite programs were not on, you could find me running around the neighborhood after dark with my friends, climbing fences and getting into mild forms of mischief.

When TV arrived, there were only a few in the neighborhood, so all the youngsters gathered at key homes to watch TV together.  Unlike the solitary radio experience, these were more like a party, with the typical fare consisted of wrestling and roller derby for the kids and game shows like Beat the Clock and What’s My Line for the adults.  TV proved to be a much bigger draw than radio.  By the end of the 1950s, not only did every home have TV, but most people spent considerably more time every day viewing TV than they previously did listening to the radio, when that was all they had. 

By the 1960s, microwave stations extended network television feed to even the most remote parts of America, spreading a kind of New York/Los Angeles brand of culture to places where it previously did not reach.  Before network TV came, some parts of the South did not celebrate Independence Day.  Before network TV came to rural New Mexico, the most popular athletic pastime for young people was riding bucking broncos, not baseball and football.  At every turn, we see how TV has affected our way of life and helped spread American culture around the world.  Even election campaigns are different than they were in the days when newspapers and radio were king.

McLuhan describes television as a “cool” medium, meaning its impact is diffused over two senses, vision and hearing.  I’m not sure I can pinpoint exactly how that plays out, but it is obvious TV is much more effective at conveying information than radio or newspapers ever were.  It grabs your attention with its immediacy.  The video camera is merciless and shows every fault in a person’s appearance and deportment.  After 60 years, TV has become ubiquitous and holds no more surprises.  The global village is clearly apparent in living rooms all over the planet.

Internet – The Internet and its world wide web became widespread in the early 1990s.  The primary driver was the rapid adoption of personal computers.  Standard browsers are the universal client.  I recall in the 1980s we used floppy discs to transmit data from one PC to another, before network technology and Internet Protocol provided the needed connectivity between PCs and servers.  The use of physical media to load software and other information onto PCs has mostly been eliminated.

You could say TV was simply radio with moving pictures.  However, the combination of personal computers and the Internet is fundamentally different.  There is nothing like the client-server model in any of the previous new media introductions throughout history.  Unlike broadcast radio and TV, the Internet is interactive.  Telephony is interactive too, but limited to that one aural sense.  The Internet provides combined two-way voice and video conversation, plus myriad other services. 

The global village that was born with the telegraph has now reached full-fledged status.  There is a portal into this village, accessible by approximately half of the households on the planet.  The concept of cyberspace is widely understood and used by a large portion of the human race.  People routinely engage in near-real time, two-way communication with others around the planet, often with people they don’t know.  Millions of discussion forums and other cyberspace communities have sprung up like mushrooms. 

The Internet has opened the door to a huge increase in the sheer volume of information the average connected person has access to and consumes.  Likewise, the quality of information available to the human race has rapidly increased.  Consider Google’s mission to bring the entire world’s accumulated knowledge to the average person’s fingertips.  Amazingly, in just a few years Google and its competitors succeeded, at least for a respectable portion of that noble goal.  Premier educational institutions like MIT and others are sharing classroom instruction materials and live video lectures with the world, online free of charge.

Because the Internet is still relatively new, its growth and evolution are still unfolding.  Its effect on humanity is not yet fully realized, but it’s fair to say the 21^st Century will see a massive penetration of computers and networks into every aspect of our lives.  From simple things like refrigerators with IP addresses to designer malware and cyber warfare.  Already, government institutions and commercial enterprises around the world have adopted computer and Internet technologies wholesale. 

In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the transformation of typical businesses from paper and printer-based information systems to almost total computerization.  Modern enterprises still have printers and copy machines in their offices, but they are starting to gather dust.  Most people in public life now communicate with emails and PowerPoint presentations.  More and more meetings are virtual.  Currently, these virtual meetings are merely telephone calls with still pictures added, but increasingly live video is being added.  The objective is: voice, video and data, all delivered in one Internet Protocol session, sometimes called unified communication and collaboration (UCC).

The new Information Age has also greatly enlarged the proportion of society employed full time as information workers, i.e., little manual labor involved.  Even older touch-labor jobs in agriculture, manufacturing and services are increasingly being conducted with a richer set of information inputs – what to plant and where, how much water and fertilizer to apply, materials in the supply chain, market demand forecasts, and numerically controlled milling machines - the list is endless.  Action-prompting information that used to come straight from a human brain into a pair of hands, now often comes over a network from a database, which in turn is maintained by humans using keyboards.

New collaboration techniques include “total immersion” rooms with special lighting, video cameras, speakers and microphones, where one side of the meeting table has chairs and the other side is an array of high definition TV screens.  The effect is uncanny; one quickly forgets or suppresses the fact that people appearing on the screens are not physically present.  Beyond that, most visual input to the senses comes via flat screen monitors.  Soon enough, most flat screens will be replaced by virtual reality visors, sort of like surrround-sound for your vision.   That's why Facebook bought Oculus.  They want their patrons to access their service in this manner.  Classic paradigm shift.

Voice recognition is another technology spawned by personal computing.  In the future, we can expect most computers, both servers and client devices, to carry on natural language conversations with us, as depicted by Hal 9000 in the movie 2001.  The concept of a personal computer will take on a whole new meaning.  People will form relationships with their computers that begin to replace relationships with other humans.  Some people will undoubtedly retreat into their little cells - talking to, working with and playing with computers instead of people. 

Can we adapt to these latest changes in communication media, or will we all fall into some kind of dysfunctional malaise, like a bunch of compulsive gamers?  I’m confident the human race will adapt, since those who fall prey to dysfunctional modes will be marginalized, suffer adverse consequences such as reduced income and be less likely to reproduce, natural selection at work.  However, society must be ready to deal with those who cannot adapt and not be surprised or confused about the resulting phenomena.

In any event, this New Century of ours promises to be a game changer for the human race, meaning the dawn of the 22^nd Century will see a very different society, one we would barely recognize or be comfortable in.  The Internet and associated computer technologies will transform human affairs in ways we cannot completely foresee.  Hang on to your hats and keep your eye on the ball, because it will be a fast and bumpy ride. 

The older communications media are not completely fading away.  The telegraph and its Morse code may be almost gone, newspapers and printed magazines are fading from the scene, but radio and especially television hang on, popular as ever.  Already, TV has begun to move to Internet Protocol, becoming increasingly interactive and delivered “on-demand”, similar to other Internet services.  New flat-screen TVs have this capability built in.

As more and more of our communication needs are served by electronic media, we can expect a modest reaction – a renewed emphasis on the value of face-to-face conversation.  The original set of communications capabilities our ancestors developed a million years ago, in-person talking and making music together are still with us.  Because our species have evolved around them, no amount of new technology can replace them or make them obsolete.  I fully expect new countercultures to reject consumerism and modern technology in favor of a simple lifestyle, balanced with a few essential modern devices, sort of like the Mennonites do.

In summary, the 21^st Century promises to be a Golden Age of art and science for that portion of the human race fortunate to live in developed societies.  Nevertheless, many surprises are in store for us, good, bad and indifferent.  I have a feeling our rapidly advancing communications capabilities will be heavily involved in many of those surprises.

PS:  Last night I watched a portion of the 2013 Motion Picture Academy Awards, aka “the Oscars”.  The total television audience was estimated at one billion viewers worldwide.  For a relatively small industry, the motion picture business (mostly centered in Los Angeles) has a huge cultural influence on the human race, way out of proportion to its size.  The people who make movies are acutely aware of that.

Modern Civilization

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In previous posts, I described from my point of view, the series of events from creation of the universe, up to the current Holocene era on Earth, i.e., the last 12,000 years since the ice sheets retreated to their mountain homes.  Before I begin to address in future posts topical matters of current interest, I need to account for the rapid growth of human culture and technology during the Holocene.  From Neolithic hunter-gatherer to sophisticated urban dweller in the space of a few thousand years.  Biological evolution of the human organism moves fast, but not that fast.  The following is a quick review of when, how and why civilizations arose and the challenges they present to a species that was mostly as wild as Tarzan only 12,000 years ago.

Let’s start with when civilizations arose on Earth, a highly controversial topic.  The oldest known large towns or cities date from about 6,000 years ago.  Recently however, the Indian Navy, using side-scanning radar, located some obvious underwater ruins in the Gulf of Kutch that could be an early site of the city-state of Dwarka, home of the legendary Lord Krishna.  Sea levels were 100 feet lower than they are now about 11,000 years ago.  

I believe irrigation agriculture began in river deltas much earlier than we realize, before the most recent (Wisconson-Wurm) ice sheets retreated.  Ruins of the associated large towns were obliterated as sea levels rose.  Agricultural practices and the culture of town life survived these displacements and are represented in the earliest known Mesopotamian cities, dating from about 6,000 years ago.  Ancient Sumerian texts suggest their agriculture technology came from “the east”, perhaps referring to the Indus river delta.

Homo sapiens have been roaming the Earth for about 200,000 years, 70,000 of those years outside of Africa, starting on the Indian subcontinent.  For at least the last 10,000 years or so, substantial numbers of humans have we been living in built-up environments, in close proximity to thousands of other humans they don’t know.  This radical shift from living on the open range with your friends and relatives, to a mild form of confinement with strangers, has had profound effects on human mental life and behavior; a kind of “snake pit” effect, after the movie by that name.

Cultural anthropologists, starting in the Nineteenth Century, have closely studied the remaining societies on Earth which have not yet been heavily affected by modern civilization.  Although primitive humans had their own full plate of social ills, especially thievery and blood feuds, people living in modern towns and cities developed a whole new set of physical and mental illnesses virtually unknown to primitive people.  

If one is well integrated into a modern, smoothly functioning, high-tech society, one might say it was a good tradeoff.  No more periods of hunger, fear of attack from enemies and constant suffering from parasites and pathogens.  A pretty fair deal in exchange for a few minor neuroses, although calling them few and minor may be exaggerations.  

If on the other hand, one is an economic refugee living in a Third World shantytown; one gets the worst of both primitive and modern existence: hunger, disease, parasites, plus all the pressures of living with strangers in an overcrowded, dangerous and polluted neighborhood.

Either way, living in a modern, high-tech society has its difficulties.  From an evolutionary standpoint, Homo sapiens is still a wild animal, whose behavior is heavily influenced by instinct.  The essence of civilization is our ability to suppress those instincts, through conditioning and will power, in order to maintain social order.  This is the social contract Rousseau, Locke and others described.  

On the open range, primitive peoples greeted strangers with suspicion and occasional violence.  On main street, people pass by strangers, even unaccompanied women, with no more than a second look.  In a multitude of ways, people are forced by circumstances and social pressure to act out behaviors almost unknown to their Neolithic forbearers and sometimes contrary to our basic instincts.  Fortunately, our species is relatively generalized, resilient and able to subsist on many different kinds of foodstuffs, in many different environments.  Like the cockroach, crow, rat and dog, we are eminently adaptable - survivors. 

 

More disruptive cultural changes are yet to come, no doubt at an accelerated rate, but in the meantime it’s worthwhile to consider this rapid urbanization when examining causes and effects of everything from common neuroses and depression, to mass murderers, child molesters and hate mongers.  Among these aberrant behaviors are compulsive disorders, where sane people act in ways that damage their health or safety, usually, but not always, in exchange for a short term dose of pleasure.  Think of the seven deadly sins - smoking, drinking, gambling, shooting drugs, chasing women, etc.

In future posts, I’ll examine the causes and mechanics of these compulsive behaviors, but in the meantime, suffice it to say Homo sapiens has arrived, ready or not.  More than half of today’s humans live in the relative ease of modern civilization, compared to our primitive forbearers.  For us collectively, the world is there for the taking, the future is ours for the making.  

Did we get here by a series of accidents?  Perhaps, however, I subscribe to philosopher GWF Hegel’s proposition - that the potential for today’s human existence was inherent in the very beginning of creation, and definitely inherent in the spark of life that began on Earth a billion years ago.  For Hegel, the Idea of a sentient life-form existed as potential in the beginning and has progressively been realized, until modern times, when through human minds, the Idea has become aware of itself.

How humans differ from other animals

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In my last post, I described the evolution of hominids from apes to modern humans.  By evolutionary standards, these adaptations were rapid and eventually produced the new species, Homo sapiens, with many similarities to apes and all other animals.  Everything we think of as uniquely human is also found in other higher order animals.  Prototypical examples of reasoning, verbal communication and toolmaking can be found in other species to a lesser degree.  

People commonly believe that cats and dogs, for example, can’t think and don’t reason like humans.  However, anyone who has closely observed animals can plainly see that is not correct.  Their brains work in the same fashion as ours - taking in and evaluating sensory data, recognizing patterns and matching them against their memories of similar patterns and past consequences.  Humans have the same 5 or 6 senses, the only difference being the size and sophistication of our brains.  The physical and capability differences between humans and other animals are simply a matter of degree, not kind.  

What then makes us unique?  Since we are without a doubt the crown of creation on Earth at this time, there must be something unique that enables us to dominate all life on the planet.  Physically, all the hominids were fundamentally different from other animals by combining bipedal locomotion, forearms with grasping hands, social organization and an omnivorous diet.  This winning combination resulted in the two additional distinctions between hominids, especially modern humans, and the rest of the animal kingdom:  toolmaking and language.  Even the great apes don't come close, Only hominids are bipedal, and all of them are extinct (that we know of) except H. sapiens.

Apes and some birds use sticks to prise grubs from deadwood.  Otters use stones to crack open shellfish.  Great apes often throw sticks and stones as primitive weapons.  Many animals build nests, dig dens and otherwise create fairly sophisticated artificial environments for shelter and subsistence; consider the lowly beaver and his dams.  

Hominids, however, took toolmaking to a whole new level.  The earliest stone tools found so far are stone hand choppers, several million years old.  At about 1.8 million years ago, I believe, some of the hominids began fashioning wooden spears by cutting off and sharpening a branch of the right tree.  The same with semi-sophisticated wooden clubs.  Stone cuts wood quite nicely. The beginning of culture.

Before this watershed event, hominids probably competed in Africa with baboons and other omnivorous, terrestrial apes, feeding on whatever they could gather or kill at the edge of the savannah, but retreating to their trees or cliffs at night.  Baboons have vicious teeth and in their groups can defend themselves quite well.  It’s fair to assume the earliest hominids that ran on two legs, about 4 million years ago, also primarily used their teeth and thrown rocks, against enemies and small game.  

After hominids began making and using the first portable, reusable weapons, their whole world changed.  They created them to catch and kill big game that was everywhere around them.  Foraging for carrion also became more practical because an organized band of adult hominids, armed with spears, could fend off other scavengers and even some apex predators - strength in numbers.  Their evolutionary strategy involved a trade-off:  tooth and nail in exchange for bipedalism and grasping forearms wielding weapons.  

After the widespread use of wooden spears and clubs, about 1.8 million years ago, evolution kicked in and hominid dentition and faces began to change – optimized for vision, diminished nose in favor of ears, mouth parts optimized for eating a varied diet, less need for fighting. Hominids became the only animals that carried their tools, food and water with them, probably in simple rucksacks made of animal skins.  It seems significant that at about this time, H. erectus broke out of Africa, expanding their range across the lower latitudes of Asia.  When you chase migrating herds for a living, those herds will eventually take you far away from your homeland in east Africa.

To put this into perspective, imagine a small band of hominids chasing down the weakest member of a herd of ungulates, cornering it and dispatching it with multiple spear thrusts.  Because they are bipedal, they are superb long distance runners, chasing prey the same as packs of wild canines do. Next they butcher it with their handy stone choppers, which they carry with them on hunting excursions.  Dismembering a large animal with your bare hands and teeth is not possible.  They had become dependent on the use of tools.  The earliest tools may have been made at the site of a kill, but not all kills happen conveniently close to the right kind of rocks.

Because the hominids were social animals, they left their children, and some adults, behind at their encampments, while the other adults chased their prey for many miles across the savannah.  Being bipedal with grasping forearms, it’s fair to imagine the hunters dismembering their prey into right-sized pieces, packing them into simple rucksacks made from animal skins, and toting the meat, tools and weapons across the plains back to their waiting families.

These circumstances favored the evolution of larger brains, especially those parts involved in complex thinking and language.  Conducting organized hunting expeditions and gathering preferred plant foods is more efficient to the extent verbal instructions can be memorized and shared among individuals.  As the hominid toolkit gradually became more sophisticated, the techniques for making the tools were more readily passed down from one generation to the next through the use of language.  The “monkey see, monkey do” approach works well enough, but augmenting the learning experience with language greatly expands its efficiency and scope.  

By the time hominids began making fire with friction tools; about 1 million years ago, language was part and parcel of human life, I believe.  The use of verbal communication by animals is instinctive.  True, animals learn the finer points from their parents or social group, but the innate capability for verbal communication and drive to use it is deeply ingrained in the genes.  One can observe this in human children under the age of 3.  They clearly exhibit an intense, drive to talk and learn the words they hear other humans speak.  Baby talk is their way of saying, “I can do it too”.

This unique combination of toolmaking and language arts produced a complex cultural component of human life.  By culture, we mean the accumulated information, aside from instinct, that is passed on to each new generation.  Other animals do this too, e.g., mother cats teaching their kits how to hunt prey, but without language and big brains, there is only so much information that can be conveyed.  With language and big brains, Paleolithic hominids were able to accumulate and pass on a growing store of knowledge about how to find and process food, how to build shelters and how to defend the band against predators, including other hominids.

At time passed, growth in the cultural component of human life accelerated.  By 130,000 years before present, hominids were decorating and burying their dead.  By 40,000 years before present, anatomically modern humans were creating representative art on cave walls.  Although no one is sure, its stands to reason singing was adopted much earlier, as a means of expressing shared emotions such as a successful hunt or death of a prominent member of the band.

At the present, our Homo sapiens species is completely adapted to advanced toolmaking and complex language arts.  We could not survive as an apex predator without them.  The instinctive desire to acquire a vocabulary and communicate with other members of our social groups is very strong, as anyone who has raised young children can attest.

Now that Homo sapiens can think and communicate with other humans across long distances and time spans, our minds have grown to an immensely expanded scope compared to even the smartest dog, orca or chimp.  All higher order animals think, but always about very mundane subjects, immediate needs and memories.  At this point, only people create representative art, have religious tendencies and wonder about the wider universe.  Humankind’s expanded form of mind has arrived and has taken on a life of its own for, during the lifespan of the person it is part of.  Collectively, through communication media, our culture lives on, transcending the individual mind.  Every human generation has to relearn much of this accumulated knowledge.

What is meant by mind?  It is not the same as the brain, which is the organ that contains and sustains the mind.  Instead, the living brain creates a form of cyberspace, a separate entity, within which lies a rich set of accumulated information content, i.e., memories, patterns, habits, etc.  Also operating within this space are our instincts, which are directly connected to the brain, not separate.  Add to this an individual's freedom to listen to her/his conscience then choose to act or not, and you have a complete model of the mind and its consciousness.  All Psychology begins with such a model, and this is the one I favor.  I concede that ultimately our minds are both a direct function of our brains and separate entities free to make their own decisions.  For as JP Sartre put it, we are condemned to freedom, constantly choosing what to think about and how to behave.

I’ll have more to say in later posts about the phenomenology of the mind (as in GWF Hegel’s Phanominologie des Geistes), especially compulsive behavior, after I study the subject more thoroughly.