The democratization process that took place, in America and Europe during the period from 1776-1850 was severely restricted by gender, color and class. Numerous intellectuals supported these restrictions for they feared mob rule and the emergence of leaders who would utilize ignorance to lead the mob in directions that both the wealthy and the educated feared.
These predictions became a large part of 20th century history as the names Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Mussolini make clear. Ideological alliances, national socialism and communism has lead to tens of millions of people dying.
It is not a problem that is of easy solution: where the uneducated might be prêt to simple factual understanding: Obama was not born in the U.S. or a panel will decide whether the aged live or die; many intellectuals happily embraced.
Having lived for eight years among the uneducated, I am amazed at what people can imagine or believe. The human mind seems to be a machine for producing continuous nonsense, fed by a popular media that an educated individual can only wonder at.
The trash that so many are eating can only make them ill. What our senses take in is food. We eat sensation and that sensation has more effect upon us than the food we eat.
The TV diet is loathsome. Its effect will eventually be more apparent than the effect of the bad diet that has produced a population of increasing obese people.
We are what we eat: we become what we perceive.

Mothers and others: the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding
By Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Belknap Press, 2009
432 pages

Science proceeds by minute particulars. Every statement must be backed up by a citation. If one is to earn the right to make a radical statement, as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy does at the end of her excellent book on the reproductive success of the human ape, it is necessary to base it on hundreds of pages of cited material/
The research is thorough and up to date as far as a general amateur can tell.
The tonus is that of a caring wise old soul who sees something precious slipping away, just as its value is being recognized.
The focus of scholar is contextual – the function of most early anthropology was to reinforce the patriarchal forces that now are seen to be a product of a particular historical shift away from an economy of hunter/gathering that was use directed and egalitarian in nature with plenty of leisure, to a hierarchical society of acquisition and protection of those acquisitions that generated social forms to protect those acquisitions. That required certainty regarding conception – that son is really my son – heirs and a form of generational transfer that protected the acquisitions.
The patriarchal remnants of these patterns were reinforced by those early anthropologists and later shifted towards historical explanation that reinforced such patterns of control. Hunters were predominant as was the idea of a killer ape.
Most of this is now history as the entrance of women into the academic professions that collect archaeological, anthropological, neurological and bio-chemical data, just to mention a few of the disciplines, that are consulted to write a book such as “Mothers and Others”, that are now replete with new eyes: those of women who as Justice Sotomayor said correctly will see things in a different way.
“But the data”, another voice may say.
Data depends upon categories which are both arbitrary and limited by the context and perceptual history of the collector.
Do not collect information on post-menopausal apes (humans fit into this category) and they can’t figure in the theory based upon facts. Thus a great deal of what Blaffer Hrdy is trying to tell us just didn’t exist until researcher reviewed past data with new eyes and began to include grandmothers and other older women in their thinking.
A new category can often be a strange attractor around which all the old data suddenly coalesce into a new theory.
I must repeat this: perception is transactional and contextual. We perceive and consequently categorise what our history and context conditions us to see. Anyone who spends a bit of time studying the 20th century can immediately see the failure of patriarchal forms and our recent economic mess would add capitalism to the junk heap.
Thus, whether the actual theory and temporal framework that Blaffer Hrdy puts forth is totally correct is not that important.
What is important is the tendency that her work represents: a shift towards a deeper understanding of empathy, altruism and other generous emotions, not as supreme, but as a balance, a dialectical opposition to the selfishness that has guided our theories and actions.
Those who can do this have something missing: a father is led into a torture chamber. A naked adolescent girl is hanging from a hook in the ceiling. She had been brutally flogged. Her face was distorted by swelling and bleeding. She had been slashed again and again by a razor. She is revived by a bucket of water. She is whipped savagely for several minutes. Then raped in front of her father. She was raped again and again in the next cell throughout the night as her father listened to her cries and moans.

They have not been fully inducted into the human family by adequate nurturing and the attachment that flows from such nurturing.
Something has not taken and Blaffer Hrdy is now suggesting that we are creating a world in which the majority will be nurtured this way.
It is another catastrophe to add to the list of indicators that what is upon us is a great transition, perhaps one that will erase us from the earth or perhaps one that will produce a new species by turning on genes that are now inactive and putting our extreme plasticity to good use.

The energy generated by the enthusiasm of the 60s was dissipated in the futile life style and political battles that ruled the 70s and cancelled the warning red flags that the 60s generated.
Almost 40 years have been lost in battles that have produced heat rather than light.
If conservation ha taken hold in the 70s, if we had begun to design all non structures with energy savings in mind and pursued an accounting system that measured wealth more in tune with ecological flows and thought in terms of production that recycled everything, and structured our education system in resonance with such ideas, we would be prepared – possibly – to face biospheric deterioration that is coming with ever increasing swiftness.
An old order is dying and we are blindly acting as if it is going to continue into the life of our children.
It will not as the climatic destruction has passed the point of reversal and is now exponentiating into a future that we can barely imagine, though 114 inches of rain in Taiwan and extreme heat and drought have given us a small taste of what is to come.
Science can only take us so far. It can’t map the changes that are coming. They are not linear, but involve deformation, metamorphosis, transmutation and catastrophe.
To many it will seem biblical, apocalyptic, as radical transformations occur before our eyes. What it will be is a system – planetary in extent – collapsing. The collapse is our feedback, our mess, our failure.
It may take centuries for a new equilibrium to be achieved.
We take sunshine and rain for granted, until the suddenly disappear. By the end of August 2009, there had been no summer in Central Pennsylvania, no settled weather. In my French Moulin, the heat has been off the previous charts. In neither area have the crops done well.
Rapid change – catastrophic climate change, which so many have been denying in its weather form, is now upon us.
Even with great co-operation, the future will be very difficult.
Without it, we will be eating each other sooner than we think.