GO FOR IT, TSIPRAS

The leftist government of Greece, headed by Alexis Tsipras, should use the present situation to mobilize the poor population, involve the sympathizing intelligentsia and activate the lazy bureaucrats in order to tackle the rich.

Instead, this government, just like the former one, waists time and energy to go and ask for money elsewhere, now not only in Brussels, Frankfurt and Washington, but also in Berlin and Moscow, That’s not leftism, that’s clientelism, the same social mechanism of client-patron relationships that parallelizes affairs at home.

And what’s more, when again loans would be given, the Greeks may emit a sigh of relief and continue practices that are creating the present problems, including personalized contacts, such as in client-patron relationships, that breed social skills but also undermine initiative, achievement motivation and efficiency, and therefore hampering economic and technological progress.

Paradoxically, there’s a fair chance that the foreign bankers and politicians may not like it when the leftist government of Greece would really undermine the positions of rich Greek patrons because they may be in the same financial and economic networks as the foreign bankers and politicians, having the same outlook on society. Anyway, I would be delighted to see that surface, provided the Greek leftists will ever go that far.

But what fascinates me even more, as an anthropologist, is again the underestimation of cultural differences, basically perhaps between north and south Europe in this case, when the political and financial leaders decided to start the Eurozone. It’s one more example in a long series of underestimations of the power of cultural difference.

HUMANITY'S SURVIVAL BY PROACTION

If humanity wants to survive, we may have to shift from genetically shaped reactive adaptation to intentionally proactive adaptation. In other words, we have to exchange environmentally dangerous technologies for environmentally friendly technologies, and better be fast in it.

Evolution is the gradual adaptation to conditions in the here-and-now. For humans that meant a reactive, slow, piecemeal and localized adaptation by which they could evolve during millions of years. But while our genetic evolution gave us the capacity to let technological growth accelerate, it did not generate a genetic evolution that created an equally fast acceleration of adaptation capacities.

Technology goes on creating economic growth and population growth which, together, lead to the increasing problems of meat production, climate change, depletion of ocean fish, depletion of groundwater stock and depletion of forests. Some of these processes have even reached points of no return.

In other words, our genetic evolution did not generate a sufficiently large shift from environmentally dangerous technologies to environmentally friendly (green) technologies. As a consequence, we have arrived at a point where this enlarging gap between fast changing physical conditions and our genetically shaped slow adaptation has become the most dangerous growth process for us. This growing gap is in fact more fundamental than the dangers of economic growth and population growth.

Therefore, the core question is whether our genes will make us go on to gaspingly run behind the effects of economic growth, technological growth and population growth, or make us able to modify those growth processes in time.

More precisely, the question is whether we will be able to change our genetic influences so that we become proactive and fast, at a global scale, in order to reduce the gap between the environment degradation and our adaptation practices. Can we timely shift from reactively fighting of symptoms to proactively fighting of causes?

HOW TO EXPLAIN AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

Some say that the exclusive American imperialism is built on genocide and enslavement - genocide among the Natives and enslavement of imported Africans. Well, first of all, we may keep in mind that the Americans are not exclusive in their genocide and enslavement, because genocide and enslavement are as old as agrarian societies that arose some 12,000 years ago.

More precisely, in the recent history of the Americas, the Spanish and the Portuguese have a more or less similar record of genocide and enslavement in Latin America, while they did not conquer the rest of the world from there. Therefore, the American conquering of the rest of the world may need another explanation than the initial genocide and enslavement they committed at home.

The explanation that the American boldly optimistic pioneering, conquering, colonization culture seems attractive. After all, when the colonists had conquered North America from east to west and their wheels finally stopped rolling at the Pacific coast, the boldly optimistic pioneering mentality did not stop. Culture is harder than iron and steel. But again, the Spanish and Portuguese had a more or less similar history of colonization in Latin America while they did not develop their economies as fast as the Americans, nor did they conquer the rest of the world from Latin America.

The typical imperialism by the Americans may have roots in their cultural origins in Western Europe. And I don’t mean the imperialist culture of all Europe, because the Spanish and Portuguese in Europe also had an imperialist culture but that did not bring them to conquer the world from Latin America. No, it seems to be the West European culture in its difference from the Spanish and Portuguese culture that had a decisive influence in North America.

So, we may ponder on that West European culture, the same culture that made West Europeans strongly develop their technology and economy and  exploit their advantages by colonialism. This culture also made the Americans strongly develop their technology and economy.

But here, the pioneering mentality of the Americans that I mentioned comes as an additional force. It is probably the combined West European culture and the boldly optimistic pioneering mentality that made the Americans exceptionally bold and energetic in their technological and economic innovation and expansion. And once they became the leading country in the world, the USA, as any leading country might do, used their almighty position to develop imperialism.

INDIA ~ INNER AND OUTER

As much as it is underrated or misunderstood by outsiders, it is highly and widely appreciated by insiders: The Inner World, a book by the Indian psychologist Sudhir Kakar. I read it in 1981, reread it now and am all the more impressed and delighted by its lucidity and profoundness in explaining dominant identities and behaviors in India and their differences from western identities and behaviors.

Back then, I devoured the book as an enormous relief, a finally offered beautiful explanation of the typical Indian behaviors that related to so many of the problems I faced in understanding deep human love, harshly maintained inequalities and dreamy states preferred over pragmatic solutions that I, as a westerner found so obvious to see and implement. And many ways, the book provided a model for analyzing other cultures and intercultural dynamics as well. So far, I have not encountered better models for such purposes than Kakar’s The Inner World.

If it comes to understand how children are brought up in a specific kinship system and how that, next to their genes, deeply affects their behaviors as adults in the wider world, the book is a jewel. At the same time, mind you, it’s not a jewel for sissies.

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journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=7051544&fileId=S0021911800124283

http://www.voxmentis.com/2011/01/inner-world-psychoanalytic-study-of.html

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23002311?sid=21106095950663&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3738736

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198077152.001.0001/acprof-9780198077152

HUMANITY ALIVE IN 2100? AND IT WAS SILENT

It’s now more than ten years ago that we casually sat with seniors scientists of different disciplines in the coffee room of our Institute of Environment Studies in Amsterdam and I asked: ‘Will humanity still be alive in 2100?’

We were impressed by the reactions. Nobody immediately said ‘of course we'll be alive’, or ‘what an unimportant question’. It was just silent. We all took it seriously. Then came the answers. Most of us agreed that we'd better not count on governments, companies and mainstream media, that the rich and powerful would manage to monopolize the diminishing natural resources, and that only they would survive.

So the next question was, would the large majority of citizens see the demise coming and organize themselves to effectively prevent global disaster. That question is now asked by more people and although citizens' actions are still drops in the ocean they are on the increase.

THE MODERNIZATION OF POVERTY

Households living in extreme poverty are mostly found in Africa. But the largest number of poor households live in Asia. That’s broadly speaking the difference among the two hundred million poor households. 

The resemblance is that nowadays most of the poorest households are no longer self-sufficiently living of their limited pieces of land or small number of cattle. Nor are they anymore oppressed and exploited in direct, personal relationships with owners of more land or cattle but at least kept alive to provide labor for the lord. 

The poor of today are increasingly dependent on markets - markets at the local, national or international levels. By working for others at low wages the poor income earners participate in the labor market. By spending their small amounts of earned money on food items and medicines they participate in the consumer market.

Their income depends on the days or hours they find employment and the wages they receive for their work. The relation between that income and the prices of goods they buy is their purchasing power. This purchasing power decides on their level of welfare.

But while at the different markets the fluctuations in supply, demand and prices are influenced by the power centers of New York and Washington, Beijing and Tokyo, London and Paris, Riyadh and Moscow, Delhi and Singapore, the poor have hardly any say in such fluctuations. The outcome is that many of those poor see their money income grow less than the prices of goods they buy and that, so, their purchasing power decreases.

This massive misfortune happens in silence, far away from the distracting spectacles presented by the media and with very few local persons to be targeted as directly responsible: the modernization of poverty.

See also: Werff, P.E. van der (1992). Modern Poverty: The Culture of Distribution and Structural Unemployment in the Foothills of Kerala. ISBN 8185425612. Delhi: Manohar Publications, pp. 212

Peter van der Werff: SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: JUNGLE OR TEMPLE

Peter van der Werff: SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: JUNGLE OR TEMPLE: Meditation calms down your racing mind, but is not meant to close yourself off from noticing what happens in yourself or depart for a drea...