Evolution
OUR SOCIALLY GIFTED COUSINS
Egyptian vultures, Galapagos woodpecker finches, sea otters, some gorillas, and above all chimpanzees resemble human beings in their ability to use tools. But for much of the twentieth century, the ability to make tools was thought to be a skill unique to man and distinctively a product of human intelligence. In 1960, a young British primatologist named Jane Goodall pushed humanity off this self-congratulatory pedestal. Through arduous field studies in the forests of East Africa, she observed chimpanzees stripping twigs to make rods for termite-fishing. Goodall owed the chance to make this seminal discovery to Louis Leakey, the white Kenyan paleoanthropologist who between the 1920s and his death in 1972 unearthed significant fossil clues to human ancestry. Beginning in the late 1950s, he also promoted the study of primates by others—Goodall with chimpanzees; Dian Fossey, the gorilla specialist; and (in Borneo) Biruté Galdikas, who studied orangutans—which he did by encouraging them, raising money for their work, and arranging official permission for it from various East African governments. For more of this story go to:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/may/15/our-socially-gifted-cousins/
HIGHER ORDER OF CREATION: EVOLUTION OF FORMS IN MY WRITING
There are very different views of life which cohabit in my mind and affect each other. My own personality asserts itself and gives each idea a place in some arrangement of subtle, indefinable and quite individual peculiarity. Writing gives that peculiarity specific colouration. Reading affects this colouration, affects what cohabits my mind. It clearly affects my moral and religious experience as a whole. This is especially true of the Baha'i writings. What I am trying to do in my writing, my poetry, is, among other things, to evolve a new form, to spread over what often feels like a barren landscape of merely social and physical life, the mantle of a rich and varied vegetation and to transform the world by filling it with a higher order of creation, a creation of the mind. In the end this poetry aims to perform a social and cultural function as it did for the Greeks and the Romans in classical times and as it has done in all literary cultures for several millenia. -Ron Price with thanks to Patrick Deane, "A.D. Hope, T.S. Eliot and the 'Counter-Revolution' in Modern Poetry," Australia and New Zealand Studies in Canada 5(1991).
They've been writing about destinations
since Homer and that wisdom literature,1
trying to locate a safe, a golden, harbour,
in those seas of death and sunless gulfs of
doubt, trying to find someone to show them
the way to that perfect, glorious pilgrimage
and celestial Jerusalem.
To find that compass, level and true,
to find the rudder and reef the sail,
to find the port past waves and cruise,
for the toil and task they had to do,
to sail securely and safely reach
the fortunate isles and the beach.....
became for millions disillusion,
dissatisfaction not endangered,
just a goal, an empty zero,
the journey irksome, grotesque,
just some pleasure amidst the quest
and my ending is despair,
unless I be relieved by prayer.2
1 term for certain books of the Old Testament: Proverbs, Ecclesiastices, Psalms, Book of Wisdom, etc.
2 Shakespeare, The Tempest, Epilogue.
Ron Price
22 September 2000
NO STRUGGLE TO INVENT: EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE
Chaucer had a simplicity and directness of style. He was able to step into a child’s mind and an adult’s; indeed, he could take on the life, the mood and the personality of anyone or anything he knew or could know. That is the basis of the vividness, the individuality of his characters. He pleads authenticity, faithfulness to actual life and speech.-Ron Price with thanks to Collier’s Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Britannica.
Oh Father of English poetry-
the King’s English-when English
was finding its East Midland dialect
and first being used in Parliament,
some six hundred years ago, whose(1)
poetry was in the language of the man-
in-the-street, with simplicity, naturalness,
freshness and vitality—which we have
recently rediscovered in our time and
which I strive for in my poems and in
what I write of history and character in
my pioneering tale, pilgrimage-like across
the world, painting realistic portraiture, &
no struggle to invent, only to suit simple
purpose and pleasure, just like Chaucer?
Ron Price
25 May 1997 to 19 November 2011
(1) George H. McKnight, The Evolution of the English Language: From Chaucer to the Twentieth Century, Dover Publications Inc., NY, 1968(1928), p. 18.
Other people's sites who want to be linked with mine:
http://www.darwiniana.org
EVOLUTION IN OTHER CONTEXTS
I could add the results of cognitive neuroscience, drawing on memory research, sleep research, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, to add an evolutionary history of fictional cognition to my own autobiography as Wordsworth did to the origin and development of his work. An accurate, honest and successful unfolding of the imagination, one could argue, is only possible when accompanied by adequate monitoring systems. An author must possess the capacity to distinguish between what originates in his perception and what is the response of his memory. The resulting tapestry must be sufficiently complex to permit the formulation of a hypothesis about the self which may not be scientifically tested but at least possess some sweet reasonableness.
In a commentary on the first period of his literary composition Wordsworth wrote that his autobiographical self-as-being arose as a virus within his source monitoring system. This investigation by Wordsworth of his early years is a complex one and I don’t want to go into any more detail here. I find the same is true of the origins of my own imaginative function: its unfolding is complex. And the monitoring systems that existed at the time of its earliest unfolding are difficult to trace. I hope that readers find at this website at least some of that sweet reasonableness even if I do not elaborate on the theme I have introduced here dealing with imagination and memory.
Biologists estimate that there are about 5 to 100 million species of organisms living on Earth today. Evidence from morphological, biochemical, and gene sequence data suggests that all organisms on Earth are genetically related, and the genealogical relationships of living things can be represented by a vast evolutionary tree, the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life then represents the phylogeny of organisms, that is, the history of organismal lineages as they change through time. It implies that different species arise from previous forms via descent, and that all organisms, from the smallest microbe to the largest plants and vertebrates, are connected by the passage of genes along the branches of the phylogenic tree that links all of Life.(1) In the broadest of senses, then, my autobiography would be one encompassing all of life. I must, of necessity here, limit my analysis and discussion. I do some assimilation: the personal to the historical, the individual to the societal, the psychological to the sociological. I tell what certain events have meant to my mind and my heart, events in the Baha’i community and the wider society, but I do not tell what I think should have been done. I do, though, point the way, attempt to engage serious minds whereever I can to the unity, the universality and the new ethos, the new system of values inherent in Baha’u’llah’s vision that are relevant to the challenges of the next stage in human and social development on the planet.(2)
(1)Tree of Life Project, 1995-2004.
(2)Douglas Martin, “Humanity’s Coming Encounter With Baha’u’llah,”
AGREEMENT ON PRINCIPLES AND HUMANITY'S FUTURE
The Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith, my role models, indicate that there is a map for my journey, humankind’s journey; there is a goal in the journey and vague sentiments of good will, however genuine, are not enough. The map and the goal has been elaborated in the first century and a half of the existence of these Figures and their authorized interpreters, in a massive body of print. My role models circumambulate, skirt around this body of print. I could, and I do, select scientists and writers in the arts for my models and many do serve as such models for the exercise I am involved with. Some of those that have made a sustained effort at popularizing science and literature and commented on a larger scene, a large sphere, and created a significant niche have played an important part in the evolution and elaboration of my own ideas, values and beliefs. But these people from the sciences and arts are not my models for fundamental philosophy and value systems that I share with others in community, that are my reasons for community. For agreement on principles in writing what I write comes from community and, even when there is agreement on principles, coordinated action is not easy.
THE FIRES WILL RAGE
AMIDST
A WONDERFUL AND THRILLING MOTION
In his The Metaphysical Club Louis Menand writes: “the Civil War discredited the beliefs and assumptions of the era that preceded it.” It had taken a century or more to build American culture and it took nearly half a century for the United States to “develop a culture to replace it, to find a set of ideas, and a way of thinking, that would help people cope with the conditions of modern life.”(1)Menand follows the lives and ideas of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey during the shaping of this new basis for culture. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 2001.
A similar thing happened after WW1 and WW2. Traditional belief systems took a hammering, a hammering from which they have not recovered. In the sixty years since WW2 there has been a long series of episodic crises, another sort of destruction, far more drastic than those of the earlier wars or so American writer Henry Miller argues. “The whole planet,” wrote Henry Miller, is in “the throes of revolution. And the fires will rage until the very foundations of this present world crumble.”-Ron Price with thanks to Henry Miller in The Phoenix and the Ashes, Geoffrey Nash, George Ronald, Oxford, 1984, p. 55.
A wonderful and thrilling motion,
quiet and undisturbed as a seed is
permeating the whole world. I am
caught in the net of its influences
and forces like the infinite immensity
of the stars which brighten the sky
and I have only to exist, simply but
ardently, persistently, pervasively
as the dust of that threshold which
covers the earth and my eyes take it
in--this visible ground, soil, always.
I desire not to be at rest1 in anything
save that net of forces for the greatest
drama in the world’s spiritual history
is taking place as we build a world
and our eyes soon to be filled with
dust as we hasten away to the country
of light and will, in generations yet
unborn, learn to behold that light
in a gleaming City, white, past
imagining, with labour put away,
and pain, and an evanescent grace
with June forever as we walk
through a door where we will attain
all good ness and astonishment.2
1 Letters of R.M. Rilke: 1892-1910, J.B. Greene, trans, W.W. Norton and Co. Inc., NY, 1945, p.316.
2 Roger White, “Last Words,” One Bird, One Cage, One Flight, Naturegraph, 1983, p. 127.
Ron Price
April 15th 2006
SUZUKI BEGINS TO TRAVEL BY BROADCASTING IN 1962
I BEGIN TO TRAVEL TOO
In the late 1950s and early 1960s the Canadian Broadcasting Company, CBC, was finally linked from coast to coast and the first science programs were televised. My parents had sold our TV by the mid-fifties when I was still in primary school to help keep my mind focussed on my studies and not on the box. When David Susuki made his broadcasting debut in 1962, therefore, I knew nothing about him. He was not a part of my world back then in 1962/3 I was working on my grade-13, my matriculation studies, in Ontario. Nine matriculation subjects consumed my mind and emotions from September 1962 to June 1963. When I began my travelling-pioneering life for and in the Canadian Baha’i community that same year the future celebrity-environmentalist was nowhere to be seen: environmentalism was not on my agenda. My small town perspective in southern Ontario was filled to overflowing with school, a repressed-suppressed libido, and an embryonic, a developing enthusiasm for a new world religion .-Ron Price with thanks to cbc.ca internet site, “CBC TV History,” 23 October 2010.
I enjoyed listening to you today, David,(1)
talking about that most quintessential
interdependence and interrelationship
between all forms of life on our planet.
They will one day realize these relationships
to the full extent of their capabilities; all of the
species are subservient to the requirements of
all the natural processes that sustain all of life.
Hence:
the world requires a federal system ruling the whole earth and exercising unchallengeable authority over its unimaginably vast resources blending and embodying the ideals of both the East and the West, liberated from the curse of war and its miseries, and bent on the exploitation of all the available sources of energy on the surface of the planet, a system in which Force is made the servant of Justice, whose life is sustained by its universal recognition of the one source of Life and by its allegiance to our common humanity. Such is the goal towards which humanity, impelled by the unifying forces of life, is moving.
Who can doubt that such a consummation, the coming of age of the human race, must signalize, in its turn, the inauguration of a world civilization such as no mortal eye hath ever beheld or human mind conceived? Who is it that can imagine the lofty standard which such a civilization, as it unfolds itself, is destined to attain? Who can measure the heights to which human intelligence, liberated from its shackles, will soar?
Science and religion, the two most potent forces in human life, will be reconciled, will cooperate, and will harmoniously develop. The press will, under such a system, while giving full scope to the expression of the diversified views and convictions of mankind, cease to be mischievously manipulated by vested interests, whether private or public, and will be liberated from the influence of contending governments and peoples. The economic resources of the world will be organized, its sources of raw materials will be tapped and fully utilized, its markets will be coordinated and developed, and the distribution of its products will be equitably regulated.
National rivalries, hatreds, and intrigues will cease, and racial animosity and prejudice will be replaced by racial amity, understanding and cooperation. The causes of religious strife will be permanently removed, economic barriers and restrictions will be completely abolished, and the inordinate distinction between classes will be obliterated. Destitution on the one hand, and gross accumulation of ownership on the other, will disappear.
The enormous energy dissipated and wasted on war, whether economic or political, will be consecrated to such ends as will extend the range of human inventions and technical development, to the increase of the productivity of mankind, to the extermination of disease, to the extension of scientific research, to the raising of the standard of physical health, to the sharpening and refinement of the human brain, to the exploitation of the unused and unsuspected resources of the planet, to the prolongation of human life, and to the furtherance of any other agency that can stimulate the intellectual, the moral, and spiritual life of the entire human race.(2) --Ron Price with thanks to (1)David Suzuki on “The Science Show,” ABC Radio National, 23 October 2010; and (2)Shoghi Effendi, World Order of Baha'u'llah, Wilmette, p. 204.
“The more we ponder the matters of evolution and history,” wrote Teilhard de Chardin in his book The Future of Mankind,(1) “the more must we realize that, scientifically speaking, the real difficulty presented by Man is not the problem of whether he is a center of constant progress: it is far more the question of how long this progress can continue, at the speed at which it is going, without Life blowing up upon itself or causing the earth on which it was horn to explode. Our modern world was created in less than 10,000 years, and in the past 200 years it has changed more than in all the preceding millennia. Have we ever thought of what our planet may be like, psychologically, in a million years’ time? It is finally the Utopians, not the ‘realists’, who make scientific sense. They at least, though their flights of fancy may cause us to smile, have a feeling for the true dimensions of the phenomenon of Man.”(1)Harper and Row, 1959.
