A few decades later, when I became the news editor of another daily newspaper, Al-Hamishmar, the story about this headline still formed a most popular anecdote among news editors. We applauded ourselves for our ability to distinguish the one item that was the most important among all others, the one worth being published at the top of all the newsworthy articles. In truth it was the item that best represented our own world view. Now, a few decades later, it appears that Shazar, the essayist, poet and scholar, had been right and had the upper hand above all of us in accurately depicting the state of the world. All we did, was camouflage the real picture by thrusting ahead our own restricted comprehension, slicing the big image into myriad pieces of information creating a dust storm which actually concealed from view the real image beneath.

A few years ago, in her last printed book, Jane Jacobs pointed to the “long standing North American disconnection from reality: the substitution of image for substance. The idea is that a presentable image makes substance immaterial….. False image making has become a very big business throughout North America and is a staple of the US government. Legions of hired liars labor to disconnect reality from all manners of images – images of personalities, of legislation, of corporations, of places, and of activities….. If that sounds confusing about the reality, it is; that is the purpose of spin-doctoring.” [2]

We news editors, were not spin doctors, not intentionally, and at least not all of us. We believed that we presented the whole picture by throwing light also on small morsels of information [“all the news worth publishing”], but by this policy we facilitated viewing each fraction of information as standing by itself, having a life of its own, omitting its dependence upon the whole. Our policy created an illusion, a reflection of self-delusion, but no longer rooted in reality, especially not in the age of globalization. In 1921 Yeats could write: “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” but now it’s not only the center that is falling but the whole plane, its foundation, its sub- as well as its super-structure.

Now we envision the emergence of a new page in human history. What is interesting currently is not what obtuse Republicans, Democrats, or an incited rabble has to say about President Barack Obama and his plans but rather, the astounding fact that such people could have been elected to the Senate, the House and other distinguished posts. Now it is not only America that is in turmoil but the whole world, and it is an intellectual offense to represent what’s going on as separate events and not as part of a larger whole. The Titanic is sinking but the crew is busy arranging the furniture.

Once there was a young Jewish student in my class who broke his spine while surfing, and all he could control were the movements of his head and hands. Sitting in a wheelchair, unable to control his other bodily functions, he started his presentation in my seminar by telling a story: God looked at earth and seeing what His human creatures made of it, He decided upon a new deluge. The angel Gabriel was sent to earth to inform and warn the people. First he went to the Pope who pleaded with him to give humanity another opportunity, even if it meant keeping the status quo at least for a while; same with the Muslim Imam. Then the angel Gabriel visited a Jewish rabbi. This time the religious leader buried his head between his hands and got immersed in deep thought. “What are you thinking about?” asked the angel, somewhat impatiently. “I’m thinking,” replied the old man, “how difficult it would be to live under water.”

At this point I would like to quote the summation from my own keynote speech from 1989, twenty years ago:

We are now on the threshold of an unknown, mysterious world whose laws are very different from those in our familiar habitat. Yet, we do not come empty-handed [to the four dimensional world] as we bring with us a valuable trove of experience gained through our adventures in three-dimensional reality. We do not know what language to use in this strange world, but we do know that like the old one this too will carry a heavy burden of emotion. We do know that love, compassion, cooperation and consideration do work. But probably the most important insight we bring with us is the awareness that we are at the beginning, not the end of the road, that humanity is very young, that our understanding is scant and that, although we have no knowledge of the future, we are in the privileged position of taking part in shaping it. [3]

Obviously, we are not going to move to a new platform, above or under the water. We shall stay where we are, but also will find ourselves in a completely new decorum in which the old furniture no longer fits. The modern era started when the religious holistic view of the world had been shattered with Copernicus and especially with Newton whose impact virtually shaped modernity. The modern era ended when the cosmos was again viewed as one system. After Copernicus and Galileo, the earth no longer was considered flat, and man no longer the center of the universe nor was he the reason for its creation. In the spherical world there was no central point above all other positions in nature nor, correspondingly, in the human social order. There was no longer a heavenly dictated order that could justify the existence and authority of a supreme ruler, anywhere. An era of revolutions started moving forward, beginning with the Protestant revolution of 1517 (Reformation), continuing with the 1688 Glorious Revolution and so on. With the Newtonian concept that all objects in nature answer to the same laws, the movement toward democracy found its own rationale. Newton’s ideas about the mechanical structure of the universe and its power vectors shaped the Western culture – politically, ethically and socially. It led to the Enlightenment, to the belief in cause and effect and the ability to predict outcomes. The Newtonian world was confined to a three dimensional, invariable world and its laws assumedly were correct for the whole universe. The Newtonian teaching supposedly had the ability to figure out and predict the effects of each action and thus lead to the illusion that it is possible to create an ideal world. Enters the twenty century and the Newtonian teaching lost its hold on physics but not on its effects upon the social sphere. This sphere had become the realm of nostrums such as Nazism, Fascism and Communism that promised heaven and produced hell.

Now we know that we should adapt ourselves to a multidimensional universe that is squeezed between a sphere of tiny particles and other spheres of astronomical dimensions. We know that each of those spheres is subject to different laws, that each is characterized by a different level of complexity and that all those spheres or universes affect the behaviour of each other. Is there a universal law that controls all those newly discovered universes? We don’t know, but we should know that the Newtonian laws that still form the foundation of our social and political systems are no longer valid. We need new guidelines to help us navigate in the new setting that ideally should correspond to what we now know about nature and to that which will be discovered. The social orders that were affected by the Newtonian laws of nature were set in a fixed and invariant universe. The social orders emanating from our new understanding of nature will necessarily be based upon completely new principles.

The invariable world, whose characteristics are still sanctioned in our social systems, no longer exists, or rather it exists only for what we opted to call “primitive societies.” Our existence now has to adapt to a world which is in flux,[4] with continuously changing challenges and changing information, mostly fake information. Nevertheless it is able to affect social movements and the structure of our social systems. Our first educational task is to learn how to filter the bogus from the real. Nature cannot bear the lie but in the social sphere the lie can lead to illusions and revolutions.

My own assumption is that the current world wide economic crisis is not just an outcome of unrestrained monetary policy by irresponsible and greedy people and institutions, but rather a preliminary stage in the self-destruction of the old system and the transfer to the new era. Any attempt therefore, to stabilize the system according to the old outlines is futile and detrimental. The current condition of the United States can serve as a good illustration for this assumption.

Presumably the US is governed according to an outline delineated about 200 years ago in a constitution that had been created for a horse and buggy society of about 3-4 million people (sans slaves), at a time that not only had not yet created the internet but even bicycles were not yet invented, not to mention cell phones, radios, televisions, cars, airplanes and rockets. Another big difference between the present time and then is the fact that now we know that bacteria and viruses, not evil spirits, cause diseases and that doctors should wash their hands before surgery. What is left of that constitution? Not much, with the exception of the viable principle that all people are equal, a principle that now exists also in the preamble to the Constitution of the United Nations. The Congress, the Senate, Supreme Court and Presidency are still here, but no congress nor equivalent institution such as a parliament still fulfills a significant role, not when the concept of globalization is taking over. The roles of such institutions are slowly, but surely, gravitating towards non-governmental, global institutions.

The link between the Presidency and the Constitution was torn apart by the eight years rule of George Bush and Cheney, including (with the “patriot” and similar acts that expunged the rights of the people) the principle that the people are the source of authority. Bush had been elected by a politically corrupt Supreme Court that, if only by this act, lost the moral authority to pass an honest judgment and to exist. The Congress still functions but mostly as an agent of big corporations who, through lobbyists, pay the members immense sums of bribery under the guise of election contributions. Democracy is embodied in elections but “the people” have not much say in the decisions that affect their lives[5]. What happens in China, Russia and the Middle East has much more effect on life in the USA than the ruling of the Congress. The process of globalization drives democracy in the direction of small areas, to be effective in matters such as sewage, roads, bridges, and traffic lights. If we look for the remains of the Constitution in the USA we can see only the rattling bones of a skeleton. What’s more, they are not real bones but rather artificially look alike, fit mainly for Halloween. If we keep looking for an explanation of why so many vile, atrocious, dull-witted and irresponsible people were elected to the House and the Senate, the answer is in the system or in what’s has been left of it.

If I’m right in my assumption that the present economic crisis is but a fraction of a bigger problem, a consequence of turning the page from one historic era to the next, then we should assume that the crisis could be overcome only by a globally mutual effort, with the intention not to return to the known but to be ready to approach the yet inexplicable next stage in the history of Homo Sapiens. I have no idea what might be the content in the next page but it’s clear that in order to do the switch we should act as an interconnected global system, akin in many respects to a human body, akin to Adam=Mankind=Gaia. The need to get to a global solution calls therefore for a global emphasis on holistic dialogue. Our own bodies adapt to consistent changes, emanating from inside as well as from outside stimuli through a continuous dialogue between parts of the system, will it be the components of my inner body or my body’s exchange with the outer world. We are unable to consciously isolate and be aware of the content and intention of most of the ongoing communication and it’s not yet completely clear whether much of what we are aware of is not just a rationalization of a way of action that had been decided before reaching consciousness. When I took my first class on the brain, about sixty years ago, we started the session by looking for a master, a skipper that navigates both our thoughts and actions. Of course we found none. There was no headman who when confronted with any question of executive function, be it planning or answering a practical or theoretical question, looks for the right answer in a gigantic tome or a computer-like apparatus, and instantly decides upon the right response. If not such a master figure, who then decides upon the right answer? A religious person may think that it’s God or some pagan deity that makes the decision, but religious beliefs are outside the realm of science, and in my own opinion – also outside the realm of reality. There may be a God or a procession of Olympic-like gods that presumably affect our behavior, but as far as I’m concerned it’s clear that the response is decided by me. I’m in charge, but where exactly is this master, the God-like deciding “I”? According to what my teacher Hugo S. Bergman called the Dialogue Philosophy[6], the “I” become aware of itself in answer to a call directed personally to him. According to Martin Buber the first self-revelation occurred in the Garden of Eden when God asked: where are you? And Adam answered: here I am. According to Buber, in his I and Thou, this kind of a dialogue in answer to a call is going on permanently while the call may come from other people or from objects like trees or stones. Such a dialogue with trees, stones, rivers and clouds is the domain of poetry and it reminds us on the famous saying by Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, that the only way to relate to the world of Quantum Mechanics is through poetry. According to Eugene Rosenstock, the awareness of the self arises when one answers a call directed to him, personally, in the vocative “you”, while the indefinite terms, “he or they, terms like “the workers of the world” or “the American people” are responsible for the creation of a faceless mass or mob. In other words: in order to be part of a dialogue you have to hear it personally. In the chaotic world of current communications of all sorts of messages in umpteen channels, those who hear a certain message that relates to their condition and react to it, form what we might call – non- or extra-government groups. Such groups react to the messages that relate to them or their interests and that is more or less how the human brain works. Of course, these assumptions are schematic and greatly simplified; however, the current political structure reflects the Newtonian mechanical model that is responsible for the creation of the horrendous systems of sovereign states that, like the Newtonian power vectors, consistently confront each other. The brain/mind analogue, on the other hand can fit a social and political model able to relate to modern science and fit for a global era without a “master” in which man is more of a thought producer than a tool maker.

The world is in turmoil, to a large extent, because the old social and political road signs lead no where, except to chaos. Because the landscape has completely changed there are no road signs fit for a transition period and no instruction manual for the new destination. The vehicles that supposedly represents the people and their interests, parliaments or congress, are presumably there but they are kept alive mostly for the benefit of inept or corrupt representatives who too often work for the benefit of large corporations, rather than the people. It therefore is in their interest to keep the artificial structure of a sovereign state because such a structure presumably justifies elections within definite borders that allow the individual members of political institutions to legally accept mammoth [election] donations that enable the existence of the traditional, but now, inept institutions. Instead of defining individual nations by their unique culture, language, literature, folk traditions and history, the concept of sovereign states drives them in the direction of jingoism, xenophobia and armed conflicts.

We are fast moving towards globalization but there is a mismatch between the wholeness of the global body and the component pieces, the so called, national states. The challenge before us is to find the form that will enable the integration of humanity into the multiple hues of the global network, into the dialogue that we all can access, but interests only directly affected groups. By learning from the way the brain works we can keep this dialogue going and keep humanity alive.

[1] A somewhat similar opening headline, “ Disasters Rock the Globe” appeared in the Huffington Post, Sept. 30.2009
[2] Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead,  Vintage, Canada, 2005,  p. 136
[3] “Ethics for the 21st century.” A keynote speech presented at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington on the occasion of the awarding of the International Albert Schweitzer Prizes, March 1989. On this webpage.
[4] See my “Society in Flux and Changing Values,” in The Southern Journal of philosophy, Vol. 8, 1970
[5] Please read my “Democracy Demoded ,” on this site.
[6] In the mid sixties I attended Bergman’s lectures on the Dialogical Philosophy From Kierkegaard to Buber. The lectures were published in a book under the same title (Hebrew) in 1974, by the Bialik Institute, and in 1991 had been translated to English by Arnold Gerstein and published by State University of NY Press, Albany, under the same title.