Nipawin - Monday, September 24, 2001 - by: Mario deSantis
   

civilization

"The Globalization of humanity is a natural, biological, evolutionary process. Yet we face an enormous crisis because the most central and important aspect of globalization-its economy-is currently being organized in a manner that so gravely violates the fundamental principles by which healthy living systems are organized that it threatens the demise of our whole civilization." -- Elisabet Sahtouris

 

 

centres of training

It was sometime ago that Timothy Shire, Publisher of Ensign, was mentioning that our universities have become centres of training for the corporations rather than learning centres of education. I have reiterated more than once that we need to speak the same language to understand each other, and today's language to communicate with each other includes always room for misunderstanding.

 

 

natural
way

Aware of this misunderstanding, I have learnt to include in my communication the wording "it is my understanding that..." I am trying to convey the message that we have lost our natural way to communicate with each other; for instance, I can make reference to the misappropriation of language when Nike has the copyright of the saying "Just do it."

 

 

fragmentary world

As President Bush's speech has been hailed as a masterpiece to rally the American people against the war against terrorism, so the same speech has been partially criticized as providing a message of division among people in the world. We must relearn how to communicate with each other, and use a human language rather than constrained languages as artificially created by our fragmentary world.

 

 

Languaging

Humberto Maturana, a biologist, explains that languaging is our natural way to coordinate our behaviour and become more intelligent. A language (say English) is part of our languaging, and we know that we can understand each other by the way we look, by the way we move our hands and our bodies, by the way of our culture. Languaging means to provide a common understandable meaning for our actions to each other. This is why for instance, I got so irritated one time when a teacher told me that one of my sons was failing phonetics. I mean, what do we need phonetics for when we may construct a wider vocabulary by reading, conversing and writing.

 

 

uncivilized

We need a new language, and today's language of emphasizing money as a the supreme means of coordinating our behaviour is faulty. Sometime ago I was explaining how uncivilized it was to find the culprits of crimes by providing monetary rewards to anonymous informants. The bounty for Osama Bin Laden has been raised from $5-million to $25-million. I ask if this bounty is net of taxes, and if Osama Bin Laden himself would agree to turn himself in, for the market price, by conjuring with a friend of his who would receive anonymously the reward.

 

 

ideology

I have heard that some U.S. politicians have called on investors to undertake patriotic buying to prevent a free-fall in stock market prices; and I question what this Free Market economy is all about. The Free Market ideology has hijacked the human rights of people to feel free, for instance from ignorance, and I am happy that the Bush's Administration has relearned Keynesianism, and put lives before money in America. But that is not enough as we are becoming citizens of this planet rather than citizens of a nation.
   
------------------References
  Life Web, Web page of Elisabet Sahtouris http://sahtouris.com http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/globalize.html
   
  Humberto Maturana, http://www.pnc.com.au/~lfell/in.html
   
  About dividing the world into two camps: a new Vietnam looming ahead, by M. Ali Ibrahim, The Egyptian Gazette, September 24, 2001 http://64.124.221.202/algomhuria2/gazette/1/3.htm
   
  RECKONINGS: A Bad Week, by Paul Krugman, September 23, 2001, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/opinion/23KRUG.html?todaysheadlines