Tuesday, April 02, 2002

Wake Up Humanity! Our House is on Fire! As I remarked yesterday, in a sad way the sentiment expressed by Aman and today seconded by Stuart Johnson makes a strange kind of sense. Especially in our present world of overpopulation and fossil fuel depletion. Joseph George Caldwell has come to a similar conclusion and provides the rationale for that conclusion in his online book: Can America Survive ? ... It is time for humanity to wake up and grow up! Our house is on fire and we are all asleep. Most of us continue as blind men and women earning our livings in the great market and leaving our future in the hands of politicians locked in the adversary paradigm of the third world where one bullet=one vote, or here in the West where one dollar=one vote. We must put away the toys of adversity and neutrality, and begin to seriously work together.  Only a synergic society can change our future. (04/02/02) We Are Not Prisoners of Our Brains Most of us have a genetic spectrum that can range between acts of the most heroic empathic caring and acts of the most unfeeling cruelty. Cruelty is related to excessive activity of a "fight-or-flight" system in the brain designed to cope with threats to survival. Caring is related to the activity of a system in the brain designed to promote cooperation, love, and family and social bonding. Both of these systems are necessary for our effective functioning, and both are the products of millions of years of evolution across reptiles and mammals. Maintaining the balance between the fight-or-flight and bonding systems is delicate. The results we cite indicate that the amount of stress in the social environment has a great effect on the balance point between these two systems. (04/02/02) How Many People Should the Earth Support ? Earth scientist Ross McCluney writes: When environmentalists say that the world is overpopulated, they mean that the environmental consequences of the excessively high human population are destroying the biosphere--the Earth's life-support system. This leads to the question of what these environmental consequences are, and the related question of how many people can the Earth really support. As we'll see in this article, the question cannot be answered without offering another, "What kind of world do you want?" Finally, there's another, more fundamental, question, "What kind of worlds are possible?"  (04/01/02) Should We Trust Young Humans ? The student-run Honor System, which covers academic and social life, is based on the belief that students can take responsibility for establishing and maintaining standards for their own behavior. ...  Students are expected to take full responsibility under the Honor Code for their conduct and integrity in all academic work, including all homework assignments, papers, and examinations, and to confront those who do not. In return, Haverford students are trusted with a greater degree of freedom in their academic pursuits. Self-scheduled, take-home, and/or unproctored examinations are a routine part of the Haverford experience.  (04/01/02) 6:30:40 AM

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