I have always been interested in trying to understand my loves, but even more importantly, to understand from where and whom my biases come. What prompted me to prefer something over something else? Who lifted or lowered the curtain over my choice of realities, either tried to shield me or tried to lift me up?
And, I always believed in the cultural reality that all people will find amazing persons and constructive ideas in their own culture that will make them different from everyone else, not necessarily because of power, status, and territoriality or dominance, but because of the sensitivity of observation and deeply seated beliefs and regard for human life and that which matters to achieve survival. If one recognizes the truth, that if one is alive today, one has as tall a family tree as everybody else who is alive, with the caveat-lector that in each personal background of existence over the many millennia, one will find many ancestors, regardless of what genealogists claim, that have contributed to the evolution of homo sapiens in unmeasurable ways.
There is no decadent, destructive culture that can survive beyond short moments, because everything needs to support life, if there is to be survival. If one means for the largest group of humanity to make it into the next millennia, then there is the obligation directed at anyone and everyone to believe in “Reverence of Life” and anything and everything that promotes it.
I grew up with the writings of Franz Boas on my mind, an ousted German Jew who came to the United States and is known as the father of American anthropology.
Franz Boas
(From the encyclopedia: Among Boas’s main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the then-popular evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western European culture at the summit. Boas argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas and that consequently there was no process towards continuously “higher” cultural forms. This insight led Boas to reject the “stage”-based organization of ethnological museums, instead preferring to order items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question:
I often ask myself what advantages our “good society” possesses over that of the “savages” and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them . . . We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We “highly educated people” are much worse, relatively speaking.
We do not discuss the anatomical, physiological, and mental characteristics of a man considered as an individual; but we are interested in the diversity of these traits in groups of men found in different geographical areas and in different social classes. It is our task to inquire into the causes that have brought about the observed differentiation and to investigate the sequence of events that have led to the establishment of the multifarious forms of human life. In other words, we are interested in the anatomical and mental characteristics of men living under the same biological, geographical, and social environment, and as determined by their past.
Even now there lingers in the consciousness of the old, sharper divisions which the ages had not been able to efface, and which is strong enough to find—not only here and there—expression as antipathy to the Jewish type. In France, that let down the barriers more than a hundred years ago, the feeling of antipathy is still strong enough to sustain an anti-Jewish political party.
I have always been of the opinion that we have no right to impose our ideals upon other nations, no matter how strange it may seem to us that they enjoy the kind of life they lead, how slow they may be in utilizing the resources of their countries, or how much opposed their ideas may be to ours…Our intolerant attitude is most pronounced in regard to what we like to call “our free institutions.” Modern democracy was no doubt the most wholesome and needed reaction against the abuses of absolutism and of a selfish, often corrupt, bureaucracy. That the wishes and thoughts of the people should find expression, and that the form of government should conform to these wishes is an axiom that has pervaded the whole Western world, and that is even taking root in the Far East. It is a quite different question, however, in how far the particular machinery of democratic government is identical with democratic institutions…To claim as we often do, that our solution is the only democratic and the ideal one is a one-sided expression of Americanism. I see no reason why we should not allow the Germans, Austrians, and Russians, or whoever else it may be, to solve their problems in their own ways, instead of demanding that they bestow upon themselves the benefactions of our regime.
Revelations:
A soldier whose business is murder as a fine art, a diplomat whose calling is based on deception and secretiveness, a politician whose very life consists in compromises with his conscience, a businessman whose aim is personal profit within the limits allowed by a lenient law—such may be excused if they set patriotic deception above common everyday decency and perform services as spies. They merely accept the code of morality to which modern society still conforms. Not so the scientist. The very essence of his life is the service of truth. We all know scientists who in private life do not come up to the standard of truthfulness, but who, nevertheless, would not consciously falsify the results of their researches. It is bad enough if we have to put up with these because they reveal a lack of strength of character that is liable to distort the results of their work. A person, however, who uses science as a cover for political spying, who demeans himself to pose before a foreign government as an investigator and asks for assistance in his alleged researches in order to carry on, under this cloak, his political machinations, prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be classed as a scientist.
Then there is my favorite, Albert Schweitzer, my antidote to Fascismwith whom I grew up; side by side; he older, I a juvenile, going house to house, soliciting support for his hospitals in Lambaréné, Gabon, Africa.
Who can describe the injustice and cruelties that in the course of centuries they (the non-white peoples) have suffered at the hands of Europeans? …If a record could be compiled of all that has happened between the white and the races of color, it would make a book containing numbers of pages which the reader would have to turn over unread because their contents would be too horrible.
In my great tiredness and discouragement, the phrase “Reverence for Life” struck me like a flash. As far as I knew, it was a phrase I had never heard nor ever read. I realized at once that it carried within itself the solution to the problem that had been torturing me. Now I knew that a system of values which concerns itself only with our relationship to other people is incomplete and therefore lacking in power for good. Only by means of reverence for life can we establish a spiritual and humane relationship with both people and all living creatures within our reach. Only in this fashion can we avoid harming others, and, within the limits of our capacity, go to their aid whenever they need us.
The man who dares to live his life with death before his eyes, the man who receives life back bit by bit and lives as though it did not belong to him by right but has been bestowed on him as a gift, the man who has such freedom and peace of mind that he has overcome death in his thoughts — such man believes in eternal life because it is already his, it is a present experience, and he already benefits from its peace and joy. He cannot describe this experience in words. He may not be able to conform his view with the traditional picture of it. But one thing he knows for certain: Something within us does not pass away, something goes on living and working wherever the kingdom of the spirit is present. It is already working and living within us, because in our hearts we have been able to reach life by overcoming death.
Through Boas, I was introduced to Edward Sapir.
Edward Sapir
From the Encyclopedia
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.
We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.
Philip Morrison
Philip Morrison (November 7, 1915 – April 22, 2005) was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and for his later work in quantum physics, nuclear physics and high energy astrophysics.
A graduate of Carnegie Tech, Morrison became interested in physics, which he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He also joined the Communist Party. During World War II he joined the Manhattan Project’s Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where he worked with Eugene Wigner on the design of nuclear reactors.
In 1944 he moved to the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, where he worked with George Kistiakowsky on the development of explosive lenses required to detonate the implosion-type nuclear weapon. Morrison transported the core of the Trinity test device to the test site in the back seat of a Dodge sedan. As leader of Project Alberta’s pit crew he helped load the atomic bombs on board the aircraft that participated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war ended, he traveled to Hiroshima as part of the Manhattan Project’s mission to assess the damage.
After the war he became a champion of nuclear nonproliferation. He wrote for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and helped found the Federation of American Scientists and the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies. He was one of the few ex-communists to remain employed and academically active throughout the 1950s, but his research turned away from nuclear physics towards astrophysics. He published papers on cosmic rays, and a 1958 paper of his is considered to mark the birth of gamma ray astronomy. He was also known for writing popular science books and articles, and appearing in television programs.
I encountered Philip Morrison at MIT, when he delivered many an inspiring lecture at Kresge Hall in the sixties. He was a small man, with an amazing sense of humor. Because of his physical restrictions, he hobbled over to the podium, bent over, seeming even smaller. Then an amazing transformation would take place. As soon as one heard his voice, as if with magic, equal to a giant released from his bottle, he filled the hall with his lecture which compared the creative competition of constructing architectural arches between the Termite and its mount and Homo Sapiens’ cathedrals, exploring their unique abilities. His lectures prepared me for Edward Osborne Wilson, which again later lead to Stephen Jay Gould.