A call for proportions, perspective and balance

At the day loud headlines and breaking news report that terrorists perhaps killed 10 people in Germany, 10 people in Germany died in the traffic and 1,000 from diseases.

Where are the headlines that daily report on those one hundred times more often occurring tragedies, every day, all year round?

Where are the headlines to daily warn us for fear and chaos that terrorists are eager to spread while cheering the disproportionately large media coverage that generate more fear and chaos?

Where are the headlines to daily warn us for the politicians and secret services eager to exploit our emotions in order to further reinforce their control over us?

Where are the headlines that daily warn us for oil companies in areas those governments conquer in their artificially created wars?

Where are the headlines that daily warn us for the corporations selling aircraft, shotguns, listening devices and other equipment to governments that they bribe into warfare in the name of fighting terrorism?

Where are the headlines to daily help us keep perspective, see proportions and hold balanced opinions?

Ominous news, worldwide improvements

Disregarding ominous feelings created by regular media, a number of worldwide improvements occur:

• In Europe homicide rates have dramatically decreased over the last millennium.
• In the USA the number of casualties from gun violence is declining over the last twenty years.
• People live much longer worldwide than they did two decades ago, as death rates from infectious diseases and cardiovascular disease have fallen.
• The number of people living below the poverty line declined from nearly 2 billion in 1990 and to less than 1 billion in 2012.
• Casualties from natural disasters declined from an average of 100,000 to 20,000 per year.
• Casualties from warfare are spectacularly declining since 1945.
• Literacy rates all over the world are increasing steadily.
• The number of mobile phone users has gone up to 4.6 billion.

https://ourworldindata.org/homicides/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/03/weve-had-a-massive-decline-in-gun-violence-in-the-united-states-heres-why/
http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview
http://www.healthdata.org/news-release/life-expectancy-increases-globally-death-toll-falls-major-diseases
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/07/natural-disaster-losses-declined-in-2014.html
https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace-after-1945/
http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-highest-literacy-rates-in-the-world.html
http://www.statista.com/statistics/274774/forecast-of-mobile-phone-users-worldwide/

Outer jungle, inner balance: The challenge of postmodernity

Yes, our jobs are less certain than in the past. Messages about climate change, shortages of natural resources, food pollution, improper diets and wifi radition can be disturbing or confusing. Social media and Google bring information that we did not learn from regular media, school teachers and home doctors.

Trade unions, welfare arrangements, retirement funds and customer banks become weaker, unstable or outdated. Migrants, tourists, terrorists, goods, services, economic booms and depressions, money and exchange rates cross national borders like nation states hardly exist anymore and make national governments fairly helpless in coping with excesses.

All this and more, clubbed together under the heading of postmodernization, requires fundamental reorientations for large numbers of people.

We may consider that the certainties many of us are accustomed to, did not always exist. Oh no, not at all. In the human evolution of seven millions years, those certainties arose with agriculture only some 10,000 years ago and became stronger with the modern nation states just a few centuries ago.

That means, the collective certainties that we know exist for only about one-thousandth of the entire period. The other period we managed to survive in other ways and that survival management may still be very much in our DNA.

Perhaps we will revive those capacities and adjust them to present-day conditions.  Like our long gone ancestors we may become constantly alert again, always aware of details in our environment, with all senses and energy frequencies relating to what happens around us. For us, like for our ancestors, and for animals and plants, it will be a matter of life or death again to stay in contact with the environment.

This state of alertness is also called situational awareness. Most of us have lost that capacity as it was not direcly needed for survival anymore. We will have to rediscover it through deliberate efforts of overcoming our resistance against it.

Awareness training in spiritual circles may be rejected as unrealistic, but become seen as plain awareness needed to deal with the reality of growing uncertainties. It helps to regain inner balance in the face of outer dangers and uncertainties like in the old days of jungles and savannas. That opportunity is also the fruit of postmodernity.

Humanity needs a second pioneer revolution

Tribal communities have migrated to new frontiers for millions of years, until they arrived at all corners of the planet and just could not move further.

Meanwhile, the spirit of pioneering made humans move to new frontiers in social organization and technological innovation as well. That was the first revolution in human pioneering.

In their social organization and technological innovation, however, humans cannot rely on external, physical edges to hold them back anymore. But without such limitations we are heading for structural disaster.

If humans want to survive on this planet, they will have to reorient their pioneering spirit towards learning how to build limitations themselves. But can they build sufficiently strong systems of personal limitation and social restraint in time?

To create this second pioneer revolution is the present-day challenge of humanity. If this revolution will come at all, it is likely to arise bottom-up.

The lost boat from India

Kuttanad has wooden snakes competing in boat races. They are long, narrow ships rowed by dozens of deep dark men wanting to win the Nehru Trophy. They create an unparalleled excitement among the local spectators and increasingly so among foreign tourists.

For me and the Dutch a drinking water engineer, they organized one extra time of that boat race. Yes, they did that. In 1980.

Well, was it really for us two? We were delegated by the Dutch government who had in mind sending millions of guilders for the construction of the three large drinking water projects. We had to find out the soundness of the submitted plans and the social needs of safe drinking water in this South Indian state of Kerala.

Each of us received two miniature snake boats. One, presented by the local engineers who smelled money, was made of black mahogany wood with rowers carved out of white ivory. I received that boat with mixed feelings. The other boat was made of cheap wood and had the text: ‘Presented by the People of Kuttanad’. I took to it immediately.

On our journey back home, it appeared that the mahogany boat fitted well in my suitecase, but the People’s boat was too long. The only available solution was to keep it as hand luggage.

At Kochi Airport I had to explain how I got that long snake boat. Security officers remained busy assessing the danger, worried as they were about the sharp yellow point it had. We found out that point could be removed and I had to put in my main suitcase. Thus the problem was solved and we departed.

In Mumbai I spent a night at the house of my colleague Dr Pillai and his family. Next evening Pillai walked me, through the homeless families that peacefully prepared for the night on the pavement of his street, to a taxi. The taxi took me to Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport.

Once in the Swissair plane above the Indian Ocean I reflected on our mission in Kerala, the bad drinking conditions, the local poverty and the boat race they nevertheless held for us. But, hey, where was my People’s boat? It was lost. Where did I leave it? I could not remember.

It was three years later that I made a stopover in Mumbai again and visited Dr Pillai in his rather well-to-do neighborhood. We discussed life and the world at his balony, with the homeless families peacefully murmuring on the pavement.

Back inside, Pillai went up to a cupboard and came back with something I recognized. It was the Kuttanad boat. It still had ‘Presented by the People of Kuttanad’ painted on it. I was stunned.

‘Yes’, Pillai said, ‘you left the boat by mistake at the back seat of the taxi. The driver was from nearby here, remembered my street, asked around among the pavement dwellers and brought the boat back to me. Some people in India are unreliable, others have a good heart.’

From that journey I brought the boat safe and sound back to Holland and still have it.

Snake Boat Race 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ASLLcLb9LY

The evolutionary stage of constructive action: overcoming muscle power, ignorance and passivity

During most of the evolution, the power holders used their larger physical strength. It was hardly possible to change the difference in physical force between people.

With more education and larger-scale social life, differences in knowledge came to count and knowledge became a tool for power holders to exploit the ignorance of the majority. But that ignorance is on the decline with more education and access to information.

What remains for the power holders is the exploitation of our passivity. Therefore, we are at a stage in the evolution where we are learning by trial and error to use our knowledge, take responsibility and turn emotional behavior into constructive action.

Nappies and better worlds in experimental Amsterdam

She started her day-nursery life in the large office room of a professor. That was sociologist A. den Hollander. He had an authoritarian personality and could not cope with the democratization at the University of Amsterdam in the late 1960s.

He refused to teach anymore and left his office unused. With a group of assistants and students I encroached his room for our infants. Each long morning two parents too care of the children.

The nursery got a permanent status when the professor came to collect a book and found a bunch of undisciplined, shouting infants crawling over and under his desk and smelled some dirty nappies in one of the corners.

But, alas, the remaining authorities at the university wanted to get rid of us. Right in the city center of Amsterdam we found shelter in a monastery of nuns that ran out of nuns and needed some extra income.

The culture gap was not much of a problem. The aging nuns were tolerant and appreciated our attempts to behave. But the noise level produced by our infants became too much for the nuns in the otherwise so silent monastery.

With decency and determination they told us we were out again. That was in the summer of 1972.

One of the mothers knew another group of parents who had run a nursery under the bridge on Vondelpark but were also ousted. As a compensation, the municipality had offered them a place at the workshop of the park, next to a pathway called Kattenlaan. That is where I live now.

Their group was too small. They merged with us and we settled at the workshop for a long summer. In the construction shed on wheels we could keep some stuff and find shelter during rain showers. A large pile of white sand was the children’s paradise.

After bringing our children to the improvised nursery, many of us met again at the terrace of Groot Melkhuis café. We had horror conversations about stinking nappies and dream conversations about better worlds.

We even stayed at the terrace until it was time to pick up the kids again. Some returned to the terrace to let the children play in the bordering playground until tiredness turned into crying and it was time to go home.

In the evenings we had hippy-styled barbecues in the park, with the children running around in the grass and weeds clouds hanging in the bushes. At home we held meetings to brainstorm about new ways to raise children, communicate among parents and change wider society.

I loved the experimental, creative mood but was too pragmatic about organizational and financial matters for some. Friction between the goals of solidarity and idealism arose.

One of the fathers said he came from Yugoslavia and wanted to go there with a group of parents. I was to be the anthropologist explaining the Yugoslavian collective enterprises that had been started. But the father appeared to come from Amsterdam and the expedition was called off.

By the end of the summer the Vondelpark manager had enough of our nursery. For our daughter we found the nursery in the wooden barracks of the Theosophical Society, in the garden behind their former temple. There we stayed until our daughter reached pre-school age.

I don’t think she was much aware of the societal upheaval of those days. But from the nurseries she kept two girls as friends, likely because the parents got along quite well and agreed on a certain balance between dreams and nappies.