Gender, love and natural law

The moon is visibly smaller every night; too weak to cast any moon shadows. The stars are growing brighter every night as the moon’s power declines. Reminds me of a once great nation now in decline as other nations surpass it. Maybe that nation will regain its full brightness just as the moon does. If it could do so in 29.53 days as the moon will, I’d be so happy.  Many ancient counting devices called tally sticks have 29 notches.  All nature works in cycles. Nations also follow cycles of growth, maturity and decline.  The Lebombo tally stick with 29 distinct notches was left in a cave in Swaziland 35,000 years ago. The ancient San who made that tally stick were all but destroyed by the invasion of Bantus from Nigeria about 300 AD. But we can’t blame outsiders for the decline of our nation.  We have forgotten the natural laws which govern all living systems. Too many follow whatever man-made laws the elite dreams up.

The first humans looked much more like these San or Bushmen than like modern Bantu.

The oldest law code was written about 1600 BC during the reign of King Hammurabi.  We know his Hammurabic Code of 282 laws from the letters carved into a black nine foot column so all his people would know the rules of the kingdom.  Abraham, father of all Arabs and Jews, was born in Ur.  About 300 years after Hammurabi, Abraham’s descendant, Moses, came down with a set of laws somewhat similar to Hammurabi’s but dedicated to one god.  The Hittites, Egyptians and Chinese all soon followed with their own written laws.

All these codes of written laws were turned on their head by a movement which claimed that “the letter of the law kills, but the spirit of the law give life.”   This new movement claimed that love is the foundation of all natural law.  Loving your neighbor as yourself and loving the one God were declared as the foundation of all law.

In the two thousand years since, most have strayed from trying to know the spirit of the law and instead have become practical and down to earth and, consequently, gazillions of laws have been established.  Lawyers have multiplied like bunnies and made modern America the most litigious society on earth.

A small remnant of lawyers continues to try to make human law consistent with the laws of nature.  To these jurists law should be natural, meaning: consistent with the instincts and emotions common to all, such as the instinct of self-preservation and love of offspring.  For this dwindling remnant, written laws are just attempts to put into words the laws found in nature.  They will always be lacking, never totally true, and slavishly following them will always lead to problems.  Man-made laws are made to be broken.  Only by breaking and perfecting them can we bring them closer to natural law.

The trouble is that most folks nowadays don’t have any concept of the “spirit of the law.”  As man loses touch with nature, he ceases to know natural law.  The cities where most people live are designed to exclude nature.  Nature is an enemy to be fought.  Those whose world is the city can easily become separated from natural cycles and natural communities.

All natural cycles and communities are built on cooperation and complementarity.  You may have difficulty seeing how love is manifest in nature.  After all, nature is alleged to be “red in tooth and claw” based on survival of the fittest.  Recently, ecologists have come to realize that the selfish, individual selection central to classic Darwinism is misleading.  The fittest individuals are not single individuals.  They are individuals which are part of communities which help each other.  Each species is part of a community of all sorts of species which are complementary to each other and help each other.  It is the community which is selected, the individual is just the mechanism by which the community is selected.

So think about cooperation and complementary species if “love” seems too wishy-washy and sentimental.

But, please, when abandoning the notion of individual selection and the capitalism which logically sprang from it, don’t trade it in for another set of rules such as socialism or organic agriculture.   All these rules are imperfect and made to be broken.  Instead focus on the consistencies in natural cycles and communities.  Look at which communities survive and thrive, not which ones meet your external criteria.

Organic agriculture, for example, is appealing in so many ways.  If you define qualities of systems which survive and thrive (e.g., are resilient) in line with most ecologists and define organic farming by IFOAM Basic Standards, you’ll probably contend:  “for most criteria, organic farming displays encouraging and promising features and mirrors the characteristics of farm resilience.”

Yet organic farming has become dominated by farms which focus on stability using the command-and-control approaches of classic resource management.  This class of organic farms has become just a set of industrial farms which follow slightly different rules but the same philosophy as their conventional brethren.  They follow the letter of the law and not the historic spirit of organic farming.

Similarly, so many societies have been founded on the principles of socialism and grew weak and declined.  You may argue that unfettered capitalism has always resulted in the obliteration of species and pollution of the earth.  And you’d be right, but the same is even more true of all socialist societies.  

Around 2020 the most radical departure from natural law began sweeping urban areas.  Suddenly, previously normal people began declaring that there were more than two genders, that people can be a variety of genders and change their genders.

Children were encouraged to discover their gender for themselves.  If a four-year-old decided their real gender was different from their natural gender, the intelligentsia said they must be affirmed.  They must be given hormones to stop their natural development and be surgically altered to fit their new gender.

Of course, defying natural law has its consequences—such as not being able to have children. Many adolescents who are “affirmed” when young now regret the surgeries and hormone treatments and suffer from a variety of mental illnesses.

So strong is the new man-made law of affirming those who wish to change genders that books must be banned which detail the suffering of those who switch genders.

Many believe a lot of things which are just not true in our declining country.  The good news is that nature will win.  Those who fight natural law always lose.  Countries which defy natural law will decline and fade away. Unless they are destroyed by countries which understand and follow natural law—such as that the most adept at fighting and strongest are men and armies should be made up of the strongest fighters in the nation.

Natural laws can’t be changed.  Yet many ignore natural cycles and time-tested facts and put their faith in the latest man-made philosophy which you know will be proven wrong?

Any if you don’t know that any man-made philosophy or law has flaws and will fail you, then you are stuck in a polarized and polarizing position.  You will inevitably come into conflict with other totally convinced people at opposite poles.  You will help create the wicked problems which bedevil our world.

Full moon embracing transformation

We’ve had a beautiful full moon the last few nights.  Reached its peak yesterday evening. It was bright as day at 5 this morning when I walked out get a good view of it.  Nice to walk in and out of the moonshadow.

Every day the moon is further from the west horizon at 5 am and every day a little bit more is sliced off the side nearest the western horizon.  We accept and enjoy the way the moon changes.  Why don’t we embrace such transformations in our own lives?

We’re heading into autumn in Arkansas.  The dry weather has hastened the loss of leaves from our trees.  The creek maples have already lost all their leaves.  The views at Meadowcreek have started to open up.  It’s less like maneuvering through a lush tunnel when you travel Meadow Creek road.

Deciduous trees embrace change.  Right now, they are all transforming themselves for the coming winter.  The shorter days have told them to start decreasing supplies to the leaves and start storing it in the roots.   In a month or so they’ll shut down chlorophyll production and colors will start to appear on the remaining leaves.  Then the leaves will fall and our huge trees will just lie dormant for a few months.  That’s a transformation most of us humans couldn’t abide.

Our here in the country, we’re the exact opposite of dormant in the fall.  We’re chopping wood and putting up preserves.  Soon we’ll be canning salsa from our fall tomatoes. We’re tending our winter tomatoes which we’ll bring inside when the temps fall. The cooler fall weather stimulates us to do more outside.  When the frost comes and beats back the chiggers and snakes, we spend even more time working outside.

Why are we doing all this work, when all around us Nature is slowing down to rest for the winter?  Because we want things to be the same in winter as summer. We want tomatoes in winter even when we can’t pick them off the vine.  We want the house to be warm as toast even when there’s snow outside.

Humans like stability.  No matter how many times we hear, “the only constant in life is change,” we don’t accept it.  We want things to be stable.  We want our kids to stay young and we want to stay young.  We want lives that are balanced and run on an even keel.

This need for stability leads us to see stability in nature when it doesn’t exist.  We like to think of the “balance of nature” when ecologists have abandoned this notion.  We like the mature forest and believe in “climax communities,” though ecologists have also abandoned this notion.

Ecologists now realize that ecosystems are made up of multiple competing and cooperating species which eat and are eaten by each other.  Nature is never in balance, it is continually fluctuating.  As prey numbers fluctuate according to forage growth, predator numbers fluctuate.

Ecologists recognize multiple equilibria instead of just one climax community.  A savanna with plenty of open grassland will have more diversity and more production than a mature forest.  Native peoples realized this and maintained grassland with fire to increase herds of grazing animals.

We like to accomplish things on a regular schedule.  The people of India used to say, “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.”  They preferred to adjust to the environment and not try to force the environment to adjust to them.  The dedication to order, stability, and control did enable the English to conquer a good bit of the world.  But which culture is more resilient?  Based on the numbers of people from India running motels, research labs and even large companies in the US, maybe the British model is not so resilient.

We value hard work.  But timing needs to be right.  Last week, I only had one day I could help dig beds.  So we dug them even though the ground was dry from lack of rain.  We couldn’t dig as deeply as we wanted to, so the bed won’t be as productive. I strained my back pounding the shovel into rock hard clay.  We should have waited on the beds and done something else instead.  To everything there is a season.

Being in sync with the rhythms of nature is required for resilience.  We weren’t in sync with the rhythms of nature when we decided to dig that bed last week.  We knew it, but we did it anyway and I’m still paying for it with a sore back.

Native species don’t have any problem adapting to natural rhythms.  If they do anything else, they don’t survive.  The fungal structure we call a mushroom is the very transitory fruiting body of an organism which can live for centuries and occupy acres of soil. The mushroom only appears when the organism (as mycelia underground or in decaying logs) has colonized all the available territory.

Then it waits until a rain comes and conditions are perfect for sporulation.  Only then does it produce the fruiting body of the sexual phase.  These then produce the innovative offspring which can colonize new territories.

All resilient systems follow this path. Most of life is spent in the growth and maturation phases. But when needed, the alpha phase is begun to create the transformation and innovation which leads to more fit, adapted and productive systems.

The resilient system is content to wait and wait until conditions are right and then it explodes with vigor and growth and transforms itself.

One of Nature’s most spectacular transformations is butterfly metamorphosis. Around 280 million years ago, some insects began to hatch from their eggs not as minuscule adults, but as wormlike critters with plump bodies and many tiny legs.  These voracious worms are built solely to eat, grow and accumulate the resources needed to form a chrysalis or cocoon.  Inside the cocoon, these larvae release enzymes which dissolve nearly all of its tissues. However, some organized groups of cells survive. These clusters of cells, called imaginal discs, first form when an insect embryo develops in its egg. The imaginal discs remain dormant until the larva has been destroyed, then they rapidly proliferate and grow into adult legs, wings and eyes, using dissolved larval cells as fuel and building blocks.

Similarly all resilient systems carry the equivalents of imaginal discs (such as seeds or new inventions or new social organization) which enable the system to transform as it uses the resources generated in previous stages.

Unfortunately our desire for stability and order inhibits our resilience.  A leader stays too long in office and his state or country declines.  A businessman or farmer refuses to relinquish control of his business to the fresh energy and ideas of the next generation and the enterprise declines.  An industry refuses to accept a new technology and is run out of business.

Resilient systems embrace periodic transformation.  Natural systems because they have to, man-made systems because they need to.

Pay attention to your local system and the forces impinging on it.  Is it time for intense work or time to accumulate reserves or just time to rest and be alert for opportunities?

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For more details on the contributions to resilience of periodic transformation see Chapter 9 of our free online book available at this link.

What is Critical Race Theory anyway?

Unless you’re extremely luck, you’ve probably heard of Critical Race Theory, also called CRT. And you may be like me and not really know what it is. Thanks to a whistleblower at Wal-Mart, we now have a clear statement of what CRT preaches, at least in trainings given at Wal-Mart. Seeking cover from the woke crowd, from cancel culture, Wal-Mart’s boss required all executives to go through the training and recommends it to all employees.

Walmart has put more than 1,000 employees through a CRT training that teaches that the U.S. is a “white supremacy system” created by white Europeans “for the purpose of assigning and maintaining white skin access to power and privilege.” The training teaches that white trainees are guilty of “white supremacy thinking” and “internalized racial superiority,”

The program suggests that white people are guilty of “white privilege” and “internalized racial superiority,” the belief that “one’s comfort, wealth, privilege and success has been earned by merits and hard work” rather than through the benefits of systemic racism. The training claims that the “white supremacy culture” is defined by several qualities, including “individualism,” “objectivity,” “paternalism,” “defensiveness,” “power hoarding,” “right to comfort,” and “worship of the written word.”

It adds that “discussions about racist conditioning” should occur in racially segregated groups as “people of color and white people have their own work to do in understanding and addressing racism.”.

According to the training, employees who are racial minorities suffer from “constructed racist oppression” and “internalized racial inferiority” and struggle with internal messaging such as, “we believe there is something wrong with being a person of color,” “we have lowered self-esteem,” “we have lowered expectations,” “we have very limited choices,” and “we have a sense of limited possibility.”

This harmful internal thinking forces them to buy into the “myths promoted by the racist system,” according to the training, and to develop feelings of “self-hate,” “anger,” “rage,” and “ethnocentrism,” and they are forced to “forget,” “lie,” and “stop feeling” to survive.

The program suggests that the solution is for white people to work on “white anti-racist development” and to accept their “guilt and shame” and that “white is not right.” Ultimately they should work toward “collective action” where “white can do right.”

You can read documents from the training at this website: https://www.city-journal.org/walmart-critical-race-theory-training-program

Universities DIE on altar of equity

“Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” Scientists at our best universities used to believe this. Now public relations is everything. Universities no longer look for the most talented and best trained mind. Instead they kowtow to those who hate empirical truth, white men and western civilization.

MIT used to be known as the nation’s foremost university devoted to science and technology. More recent it is known for cancelling a lecture on atmospheric and planetary science because the lecturer, Dorian Abbot, believes in merit, fairness and equality rather than diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE).

In August, Abbot of University of Chicago, and Ivan Marinovic, Stanford University, argued in Newsweek that the politically correct regime now taking control of America’s universities, which they identify as DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—is undermining the mission of what universities are supposed to be about. That mission is “the production and dissemination of knowledge.” When universities no longer look for the “most talented and best trained minds” in hiring, and politically motivated criteria drive hiring practices, the university’s “core business”—the “search for truth”—is undermined.

They proposed that “MFE”—merit, fairness and equality—be adopted as the regime to define hiring practices to displace DEI. MFE is about hiring based on individual merit and qualifications alone.

Abbot is now paying the price for publicly expressing such heresy. Twitter outrage descended on the administration at MIT, and Abbot was disinvited. Today, academic speech is not allowed for those who don’t genuflect before the idols of DIE.

Abbot and Marinovic were right on target in their Newsweek essay, suggesting that the DIE politically correct regime promotes everything about racism that we’ve been trying to get rid of since the 1960s.

Racism is all about obliterating individuality and making predetermined judgments about who any individual is based on socially defined characteristics of the group to which they are assigned.

How can any Black child in America not be injured when they are not taught that they are special and unique human beings but that what is most important is their color?

How can any American Indian child not be injured when they are taught they are victims and lack any personal responsibility for their actions?

How can any white child in America not be injured when they are taught they are evil?

Science advances when we recognize that truth is discovered piece by piece, through humility and hard work, not political arrogance, pretending we already know it.

Modern science only emerged some five centuries ago. It wasn’t all that long ago that most believed that the sun moved around the Earth rather than the other way around. Scientists such as Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei, through honest observations, concluded the prevailing view was wrong. This was politically incorrect then; they were attacked, and their books were banned.

One famous graduate of MIT was the great Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman.

Feynman observed, “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” The increasing deference of reality to public relations, meaning suppressing what is true to serve what the politically correct want to be true, is destroying our national integrity, hurting the very people that supposedly we are trying to help, and threatening the future of our nation.

The good news is that our culture has not totally descended into the dark ages. We don’t yet burn heretics at the stake.