John Donne’s  “Meditation XVII“

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“Until the late nineteenth century the question of woman’s ability to profit from or even survive higher education was controversial. Vassar College opened in 1865 was often described by its first president as an experiment.… as late as 1871 an MD at Harvard Medical School published a book on the dangers of higher education for girls, he doubted the achievement was worth the cost from their psyche and procreative powers.”

From: Carl N Degler, In Search of Human Nature, Oxford University Press 1991

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Female divinity was driven from shared eminence in the Western world by around 500 A.D. How did this happen? The likeliest explanation is brute force. Consider that male domination of civilization may be a direct result of larger body size and physical strength. According to a U.N. report on the status of women in 2000, one in three females is beaten or sexually abused in her lifetime. Does this fact offer a fundamental clue about the source of earthly power?

Good News for Modern Man

Here’s the good news. Slowly but surely, women are gaining a fairer share of power in civilization. Many tribes and nations are moving closer to accepting the principle that the genders are entitled to equal rights and privileges before the law. Women are gaining ground in the leadership of government commerce and even religion. Consider the following list of currently serving elected national leaders:

Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany
Portia Simpson, prime minister of Jamaica
Julia Gillard, prime minister of Australia
Johanna Sigurdardottir, prime minister of Iceland
Christina Fernandez de Kirchner, president of Argentina
Yingluck Shinawatra, prime minister of Thailand
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia
Laura Chinchilla, president of Costa Rica
Sheikh Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh
Dalia Grybauskaite, president of Lithuania
Kamala Persad-Bissessar, prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago
Iveta Radicova, prime minister of Slovakia
Atifete Jahjaga, president of Kosovo
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, prime minister of Denmark

Add to this list millions of hired and appointed women who lead globally and locally in every kind of human endeavor, famously including Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s democracy leader; Sonia Gandhi, leading India’s Congress Party; and Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who we hope is helping to shepherd us into a global economic recovery.

In the past, Iceland, Ireland, Malta, Philippines, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Guyana, Latvia, Panama, Finland, Indonesia, Serbia, Liberia, Chile, Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, Lithuania and Kirgizstan have all elected female heads of state. Five of the world’s most populated nations, China, Russian, Nigeria, the United States, and Japan, have so far not elected a woman president or prime minister.

Vote. Vote. Vote.

The world population of men and women is currently almost equal. How will humanity be affected as more women gain and exercise their right to vote? American women gained the right to vote less than 100 years ago. More women voted than men in the U.S. 2010 congressional elections (46.2 percent compared with 45 percent of eligible male counterparts).

Celebrating Gender Alliance

Human gender alliance is naturally grounded and barely subject to the shifting tides of cultural history. Two-gender strategy has provided millions of life forms with survival solutions for more than 100 million years. Gender alliance might be described as life’s most successful strategy in nature. Surely human conversation about gender is informed by the fact that more than a million versions of gender alliance exist in the world today. Gender equality is one of civilization’s revolutionary developments.

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Previously we wrote that civilization resembles a placenta, because it protects and nurtures life. The placenta is a temporary organ that transfers oxygen and nutrients from mother to child, removes wastes including carbon dioxide, and shields the fetus from the mother’s immune system. The placenta is rich in blood vessels and provides a reservoir of blood for the fetus, delivering blood to it in emergencies.

Civilization is an approximately 10,000-year-old social placenta sustaining us by transferring nutrients to 7 billion people. Healthy civilization includes toilets and green technology, which control and remove environmental wastes including carbon dioxide. Successful civilization protects us from natural calamities and societal collapse. Civilization truly is a two-way conduit between humanity and nature.

A reader responded to the previous post: “This analogy does not hold. The placenta is merely a conduit. Civilization not only sustains but also shapes humanity. The placenta plays no role in shaping a child.”

Recently researchers in Britain and the United States demonstrated that the placenta actually does play an active role in human development. In Scientific American, Claudia Kalb reports that “The placenta does more than nourish offspring in the womb – it actively shapes brain development, … actively protects the fetus and shapes neurological development. … It is the placenta – not the mother – that provides the hormone serotonin to the fetus’s forebrain early in development. … Placental abnormalities could directly influence the risk of developing depression, anxiety and even autism.” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fetal-armor

The nearly 4,000 placental mammals currently in existence include dogs, cats, elephants, whales, primates, cattle, horses, rats, sheep and humans. Genetic research suggests that the evolution of the human placenta can be traced back to the earliest multicellular organisms. We bear our young live after nourishing them for varying periods of time in their mother’s uterus. We are Mammalia.

The connection between humanity and the nutritional abundance of our sacred planet is as indispensable as the placental connection between a mother and her child.

Defend Civilization

The placenta has been described as the only disposable organ ever made. Civilization is also disposable. Numerous pathologies can affect the placenta, and numerous pathologies, including terrorism, racism, poverty and war, affect civilization.

A Declaration of Interdependence makes sense for 21st-century humanity. Just as the placenta secretes Neurokonin B to protect the fetus from attack by the mother’s immune system, humanity needs to expand and enrich the conduits of cooperation, protecting civilization from ourselves. If the connection between humanity and civilization fails, our descendants will have no more chance of survival than a fetus disconnected from its placenta.

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Before Thanksgiving weekend 2011 passes into history, let us be thankful for people who pay their taxes, because they are supporting the people who don’t.

Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Indeed, civilization cannot exist without taxes, by which we pay for services including national defense, clean water, public safety, education and, increasingly, health care. People are likelier to accept their share of the tax burden when such services are efficiently provided and the taxes are fairly administered.

The exact day in human history when taxes were invented will never be known. Tax resistance probably began the same day. Cynicism, anger, frustration and skepticism about taxes has been a global phenomenon in every age. Resentment against taxes played a part in many historical uprisings. In 1794, settlers west of the Alleghenies rebelled against a new federal tax designed to help pay down the national debt. President George Washington recruited an army of 15,000 men to fight tax resistance. Many politicians today cultivate their constituencies by opposing this source of their own power.

A national income tax was considered in 1814, to pay for defense spending during the War of 1812. It was not enacted because that war ended just one year later, in 1815.

Cost estimates for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to date range from 1 trillion to 5 trillion dollars. No special tax to cover these expenses has been imposed. Is it patriotic to saddle future generations with the costs of today’s wars? They are being added to our national debt.

A recent article in Forbes Magazine, “Rise of the Shadow Economy: Second Largest Economy in the World” (http://www.forbes.com/sites/benzingainsights/2011/11/07/rise-of-the-shadow-economy-second-largest-economy-in-the-world/), faults governments for taxation and bureaucratic regulation inhibiting healthy commerce. “Of course, the black market extends to illegal activities fitting the characteristics of classical crimes such as burglary, murder, robbery, drug dealing, but much of the shadow economy is made up of individuals who are not what average Americans would consider criminals,” according to the article. Workers at flea markets, roadside produce stands, bake sales, babysitters and kids selling lemonade are presented as “embracing their entrepreneurial spirit … and seeking to better their lives.”

Assuming that the many sectors around the world that are currently granted special tax benefits will continue to enjoy them, and that the percentage of the human population that survives and even thrives in the shadow economy continues to grow, who pays for civilization? Taxpayers.

This Thanksgiving, we should all be grateful to the apparently shrinking portion of the human constituency who pay their taxes. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”

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Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton and Omar N. Bradley “were immensely ambitious.” So says The New York Times, reviewing the recently published summary of their relationship, “Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley and the Partnership that Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe,” by Jonathan W. Jordan. Like many politicians in Washington today, these three great generals disagreed frequently. But, as Jordan’s book describes, they worked together to win World War II in Europe. Their shared objectives took precedence over their personal perspectives.

In his review of Jordan’s book, Michael Korda writes, “… In the end, they somehow got it right, and managed to deploy America’s strength on the battlefield in a way that not only defeated, but destroyed, an army that was in some respects better equipped, better trained, undoubtedly more battle hardened and, until the very end, motivated by a degree of fanaticism that went beyond mere dedication to country.”

Civilization’s Challenges

In 2011, the economic situation we find ourselves in resembles war. Tens of millions of people are suffering. The nation’s health is in jeopardy. More will suffer if our national credit rating becomes a casualty. The most tragic loss of all would be the premature death of the American dream.

Our national leadership is flawed, yet no more flawed than their constituents, the American people; no more flawed than the leaders of other peoples; no more flawed than the entire human constituency. Civilization’s challenges are not going away. A century of problems and solutions lie before us. What we hope is that our elected and appointed leaders find ways to minimize the damage and maximize the opportunities on behalf of the American people.

The Founding Fathers’ design of our government with a separation of powers presupposed that a spirit of compromise would encourage differing branches and factions to unify in the best interests of the American people. Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, Montgomery and de Gaulle worked together because the situation they were appointed to deal with demanded it. Eisenhower was in command.

In Washington today, uncompromising politics is in command. Many of our government leaders – in the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court and the executive branch – are so committed to political dogma and their financial backers that they are unwilling to find common ground. But there will be no unconditional surrenders and no total victories. Let compromise be the order of the day.

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