Columnist Opeyemi Parham: Masculinity and the Global Heart

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Masculinity and the Global Heart .

On the cover of the September 20th issue of Newsweek is this photo of a hunk of a guy (and I do mean hunk, the muscles just ripple off of his naked back, as he faces away from the camera), holding a three year old boy in his arms.  The boy looks directly into the camera, and the look on his face is wise beyond his years.
I don’t know how they got that little boy to give such a probing stare, but the article’s title is what hooked me. “Man UP! The traditional male is an endangered species. It’s time to rethink masculinity.”
My reaction to the title?  Thank GOD someone has noticed! Let us now hope the article takes a sensible direction and not a sensational one.
I’ll let you read the article yourself, and decide what you think of it’s biases:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/20/why-we-need-to-reimagine-masculinity.html
 All I can say is, finally someone is talking about what I have known for years. Men have been as trapped by the sterotypes of masculinity as women have been by those of femininity. The trouble is there has been no first, second or third wave of feminism to help the poor guys out of their own mess.
I am very excited to have recently read a book by Anodea Judith called “Awakening The Global Heart: Humanity’s Rite of Passage from the Love of Power to the Power of Love”. In this well researched and deeply spiritual treatise, she describes our historical evolution through various kinds of power. She points out positive and negative characteristics of dynamic and static eras of time, with masculine or feminine power at the helm. She describes our current evolutionary crisis as needing to move from a static masculine to a dynamic feminine model, and our emotional state as equivalent to an adolescent, moving into adulthood.
It is a facinating book and an exciting theory. In order for us to make this shift, men have to surrender (I use this word with caution) many of the trappings of power that have actually been hinderences to the heart. And in the power of that arresting photo that I saw the shadow that we still carry culturally
It is the emotions evoked deliberately by that Newsweek photo that led me to comment here. Something about the beefcake guy holding the child implied protection and “father”, but the lack of a face and the photo’s deliberate focus on the physical symbol of power (muscles) disturbed me. And that probing stare of the boy child seems to hold an accusation. Something about this boy not having a clear set of  scaffolding for himself, if the roles are changing. There is a bit of a feeling of If you take away my power, WHO AM I?" in the eyes of that child.
Then I remembered an Anne Geddes photo of these huge hands, holding this tiny sleeping child:
http://www.youjustmademylist.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/man_holding_baby_hands.jpg
and the Spencer Rowell photo of a blue-jeaned man and a baby
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/07/magazine_enl_1169145934/img/1.jpg
 And I realized that we have truly done boys and injustice, with very little imagery to offer alternatives to static masculine, "power over" roles.
Google”man and boy” as a subject line and you won’t find many heart warming images. In fact you won’t find many images, at all. That is how foreign this concept of men moving outside their proscribed role of protector into other roles as nurturer, or caregiver, or healer (of the heart-- there is an image of a man later in the Newseek article that implies that he is a NURSE, not a doctor) truly is.
Opening to this conversation may be a dirty and painful process risking cheap shots and silly inuendoes, but finally someone is talking about how scary and threatening new roles for men can be.
Let us keep shifting that paradigm.

--
                        Opeyemi  413-336-1291

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Scientific Argument Against Evolution Lacks Science

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Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D.

Founder, The Clergy Letter Project
Posted: April 9, 2010 11:09 AM


The Nonscience Of The Scientific Arguments Against Evolution


The Discovery Institute (DI) isn't impressed with what I've been writing for The Huffington Post.

On 3 April 2010, DI posted a piece on their website that claimed that "Michael Zimmerman ignores the science that challenges evolution." Written by attorney Casey Luskin, the article was an attack on my essay saying that the evolution/creation controversy was not a battle between religion and science but between various religious perspectives.

Despite there being more fundamentalist ministers than you can shake a stick at who repeatedly claim that people must choose between religion and evolution, Luskin makes the preposterous argument that the "controversy" should be seen solely as a scientific one! Religion, he claims, has nothing to do with the ever-present attacks on evolution.

Let's look at both of his absurd claims, and then let's look a bit more closely at the Discovery Institute itself. You may remember Pat Robertson warning the good people of Dover, Pennsylvania, when they threw out the school board members who required that intelligent design be taught in their schools, "If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city."

Or you may remember Robertson saying that "the evolutionists worship atheism. I mean, that's their religion."

Or perhaps Albert Mohler's comments in Time, will come to mind: "You cannot coherently affirm the Christian-truth claim and the dominant model of evolutionary theory at the same time." In case you don't remember, let me remind you that Mohler is president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

I could go on ad nauseam, providing you with similar quotes from high-profile fundamentalist clergy members, but I see no need to do so; clearly these folks regularly claim that they cannot accept evolutionary theory on religious grounds. I have no problem with these people saying what they believe, but I am completely opposed to them implying that all who are religious must agree with them. As I've said so often, the very existence of The Clergy Letter Project and the more than 13,000 clergy members who have affirmed that they are fully comfortable with both their faith and evolution makes a mockery of such ridiculous claims.

Despite what Luskin asserts, those promoting one narrow religious perspective are entirely responsible for the ongoing evolution/creation controversy.

What about his contention that I've ignored "the science that challenges evolution?" I'm sorry to be so blunt, but there's simply no way to be polite about this: his claim is utter garbage. And he must know it because he doesn't direct his readers to a single piece of scientific evidence supporting his charge.

Thousands of peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts extending, testing, and refining evolutionary theory are published each and every year, but there aren't any calling the basic premise of the theory into question. And yet Luskin has the nerve to say that there is "overwhelming evidence" of a "scientific controversy about the importance of evolutionary theory."

Luskin does go out of his way to praise the Texas State Board of Education for their recent stance on evolution, a stance that was in conflict with the recommendations offered by their own experts and which has been widely criticized by scientific and educational groups.

What's going on here? Why is Luskin, on behalf of the Discovery Institute, so eager to publish such absurd statements? Not surprisingly, it all comes down to religion and money. The Discovery Institute and its main supporters, supporters who have pumped millions of dollars into their efforts, want to remake both science and the United States into their religious image.

As both Steve Benen and Max Blumenthal have shown, Howard Ahmanson, Jr., one of DI's biggest donors, has expressed extreme views about the role religion should play in America. And that's putting it mildly, since he's said, "My goal is the total integration of biblical law into our lives." He's also helped bankroll the Christian Reconstructionism movement, a group that, according to Benen, "seeks to replace American democracy with a harsh fundamentalist theocracy."

As frightening as all of this might be, it is fully consistent with the reason the Discovery Institute gives for attacking evolution and promoting "intelligent design": "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

Luskin and his DI colleagues have created a well-funded public relations machine which they use relentlessly to mislead the public about evolution and to encourage school boards and state legislatures to take steps to destroy high-quality science education. They get what seems to be unlimited air time on Fox to promote their dangerous message.

Interestingly, for a group that pretends to be about openness and professes to want to look at all sides of the issue, the pieces they post on their site permit no comments. Instead, they attack me and expect that theirs will be the last words -- as incorrect as they are. But here on The Huffington Post, readers who form a robust community will have the last words. Those words may well demonstrate exactly what the Discovery Institute is all about and how offensive most people find their actions.

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Is this the meaning of life?

John Stewart argues that despite the perception that science has stripped the meaning from life, recent developments in evolutionary theory suggest that humans have a central role to play in the future of the universe


Driving the evolution of intelligence across the universe gives meaning to life. Photograph: Corbis

It is often assumed that the science-based worldview implies that life on this planet is a meaningless accident in a universe that is indifferent to our existence. Humans struggle to find purpose within this purely naturalistic understanding of reality, and so they supplement it with beliefs in supernatural processes and entities.

However, recent advances in our understanding of evolution are revealing a bigger picture that can, by itself, give meaning to life. This new worldview locates humanity within a much larger evolutionary process that appears to offer us a meaningful role to play.

This new understanding of evolution is founded on the recognition that evolution is headed somewhere – it has a trajectory. In particular, evolution on Earth has repeatedly gathered small-scale entities into cooperative organisations on a progressively larger and larger scale. Self-replicating molecular processes were organised into the first simple cells. Communities of these simple, prokaryotic cells formed the more complex eukaryotic cell. Collections of these formed multicellular organisms, and organisms were organised into cooperative societies.

A similar sequence appears to have unfolded in human evolution: from family groups, to bands, to tribes, to agricultural communities and city states, to nations, and so on.

This trajectory has applied regardless of whether evolution proceeds by gene-based natural selection or cultural processes. It is driven by the potential at all levels of organisation for cooperative teams united by common goals to be more successful than isolated individuals.
Cooperation trumps selfishness

Mainstream biology has been slow to accept that evolution moves towards increasing cooperation. The view has been that selfishness, rather than cooperation, is favoured by evolution. But this objection has been overcome in the past two decades by a large body of research on the evolution of cooperation. In short, this research shows that complex cooperation will emerge among self-interested individuals if they are organised so that they benefit from their cooperative acts – and if free riders and other non-cooperators are restrained or punished.

Crucially, this removes any conflict between self-interest and cooperation.

(Readers interested in a more detailed discussion of why biologists have been so slow to accept that there is a direction to evolution should read my pre-press article for the journal Foundations of Science.)

Where will evolution go from here? Extrapolating the trajectory into the future is reasonably straightforward, at least initially. The next major transition on Earth would be the emergence of a sustainable and cooperative global society. As with cooperatives at all other levels, the global society would curb internal conflict and destructive competition, including war and pollution. Past transitions demonstrate how this might be organised.
Universal trajectory

Extrapolating the trajectory further would see the continued expansion of the scale of cooperative organisation out into the solar system and beyond. Wherever possible, this expansion would be likely to occur through cooperative linkage with other living processes, rather than by "empire building". The possibility of life arising elsewhere seems high, and while the details of evolution on other planets are likely to differ, the general form of the evolutionary trajectory would be universal.

If the trajectory continued in this way, the scale of cooperative organisation would expand throughout the universe, comprised of living processes and intelligence from multiple origins. As it increased in intelligence and scale, its command over matter, energy and other resources would also expand, as would its power to achieve whatever objectives it chose.

What might organised life and intelligence do with this increasing power? One possible answer was developed as an attempt to solve the "fine-tuning problem" – the enigma of why the fundamental laws and parameters of the universe seem to be fine-tuned to support the emergence of life, with even slight changes leading to a universe in which life is unlikely to emerge. Supposing the trajectory of evolution eventually produces life and intelligence with sufficient power and knowledge to reproduce the universe itself? This intelligent universe would fine-tune "offspring" universes so that they are even more conducive to the emergence and development of life and intelligence. And so on.

According to this scenario, our universe itself is embedded in larger evolutionary processes that shape universes. And life (including humanity) has a function and purpose within these larger processes in the same sense that our eyes have a purpose within the evolutionary processes that have shaped humanity.
Intentional evolution

Not all organisms that evolve to humanity's current stage will go on to participate in these large-scale evolutionary processes. Up to our stage, evolution has been driven along its trajectory by competition and selection. But these pressures weaken as a global society begins to emerge, because this society will not be in direct competition with other global societies.

From this point on, evolution will continue to advance only if the emerging global society decides to advance the evolutionary process intentionally. The society must awaken to the possibility that it is living in the midst of a directional evolutionary process, realise that the continued success of the process depends on its intentional actions, and then commit to actively move the process forward.

Organisms that complete this transition to intentional evolution will drive the further development of life and intelligence in the universe. Those that do not will be failed evolutionary experiments. They will be eggs that never hatched. Humanity is fast approaching the threshold of this critical evolutionary transition.

John Stewart is a core member of the Evolution, Complexity and Cognition Research Group of the Free University of Brussels, and the author of Evolution's Arrow and The Evolutionary Manifesto. This is a condensed version of his paper "The meaning of life in a developing universe" which is in press for a special issue of the journal Foundations of Science

Further reading
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright (Vintage, 2001)
Evolution's Arrow: The Direction of Evolution and the Future of Humanity by John Stewart (Chapman Press, 2000)
Nature's Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind by Peter Corning (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Wilson, DS, Wilson, EO (2007) Rethinking the theoretical foundation of sociobiology. The Quarterly Review of Biology; 82 (4): 327-348.
Biocosm, the New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life is the Architect of the Universe by James Gardner (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2003)

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