a selection from Philip Taaffe's Anima Mundi series

If you can, stand beneath an apple tree at sunset tonight, down wind. You’ll be enveloped in the sweetness of anima, promise. Close your eyes and breathe. Not only will you feel the anima; you’ll absorb and be consubstantial with it—not metaphorically, but actually. Your lungs ensure you are consanguine w/that sweetness—not literally, but really.

How does such sugar fill the air? Science tells us that the perfume of apple blossoms is sweet because, as a result of eons of natural and artificial selection, apple trees exude chemicals/atoms from the blossom in concert w/the warmth and radiance of the sun that we perceive as sweet. There is sugar in the air, and we are drawn to it. It pleases us, changes our mood, renews our love of life and the world—the mundi.

If you under stand an apple tree around 2 pm today, you’ll be rewarded with the dynamo hum of 100s of bees licking the sugars, collecting the nectars, transferring the anima (real, not metaphorical) from the tree (which collects and concentrates it from the earth, water, air and sun) and into themselves—this is what consubstantiality is (the real, not the metaphorical). And if you’re lucky, you’ll see a blazing orange oriole jumping from branch to branch eating the blossoms!

The world is animated—anima mundi—by animals—spirited (i.e., breathing) beings. By nous, (“we” as the French say), my fellow and sister biocitizens—
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In the previous anima mundi post, we enjoyed a telos, or chronological history of the concept as promulgated in, and by, the “west.” We stopped with Newton, because he is the scientist who proved (in radical opposition to Descartes) that the cosmos is alive, not in some general or random way, but in every single vibrating atom, all of which exhibit empatterned behaviors that follow, as Jefferson and the Founders put it, the laws of nature and of nature’s god.

Our telos of the long body continues; the list is by no means complete, and I would be grateful if you would add to it:

Jonathan Edwards: “He is the eternal God who fills heaven and earth, and whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain. He is the God that made you; in whose hand your breath is, and whose are all your ways; the God in whom you live, and move, and have your being; who has your soul and body in his hands every moment.”

Goethe: “
The World-soul working in Existence,
Lest it should stiffen in resistance,
Works ever live deeds manifest.
And what was not, ’tis now becoming,
To the pure sun, the green earth blooming,
And in no lure it dares to rest.”

William Blake: from The Fly

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?”

William Wordsworth, from Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey:

And I have felt
a presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth . . .

Erasmus Darwin: “would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which The Great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end?”

William Cullen Bryant:

Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolv’d to earth again;
And, lost each human trace, surrend’ring up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements,
To be a brother to th’ insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from The Eolian Harp:

O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in thought, and joyance everywhere -
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so filled. . .
And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all.

Thomas Jefferson: “I hold, (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the universe, in its parts, general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces; the structure of our earth itself, with its distriution of lands, waters, and atmosphere ; animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles; insects, mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or mammoth; the mineral substances, their generation and uses; it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe, that there is in all this, design, cause, and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms. We see, too, evident proof’s of the necessity of a superintending power, to maintain the universe in its course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view; comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets, and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”

Charles Darwin: “There is one living spirit, prevalent over this world … which assumes a multitude of forms according to subordinate laws.”

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. …Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

“We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World. This creature, if its whole structure had been examined by a naturalist, would have been classed amongst the Quadrumana, as surely as the still more ancient progenitor of the Old and New World monkeys. The Quadrumana and all the higher mammals are probably derived from an ancient marsupial animal, and this through a long line of diversified forms, from some amphibian-like creature, and this again from some fish-like animal. In the dim obscurity of the past we can see that the early progenitor of all the Vertebrata must have been an aquatic animal, provided with branchia?, with the two sexes united in the same individual, and with the most important organs of the body (such as the brain and heart) imperfectly or not at all developed. This animal seems to have been more like the larva of the existing marine Ascidians than any other known form.”

Henry David Thoreau: “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?”

Walt Whitman:

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy.”

John Muir:
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow-mountaineers.

Aldo Leopold: “Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added by absorption from the air, some is stored in soils, peats, and long-lived forests; but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life.”

Rachel Carson: “I believe this affinity of the human spirit for the earth and its beauties is deeply and logically rooted. As human beings, we are part of the whole stream of life. We have been human beings for perhaps a million years. But life itself – passes on something of itself to other life – that mysterious entity that moves and is aware of itself and its surroundings, and so is distinguished from rocks or senseless clay – [from which] life arose many hundreds of millions of years ago. Since then it has developed, struggled, adapted itself to its surroundings, evolved an infinite number of forms. But its living protoplasm is built of the same elements as air, water, and rock. To these the mysterious spark of life was added. Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.”

Edward Abbey: “Responding to friends who returned from a trip to a canyon ruin, saying they’d been changed forever and now understood why the ancient Indians got religion, Abbey replied: ‘You don’t understand. That land, those mountains, those canyons and rivers. You don’t get religion from them; they are religion”

“The hot radiance of the sun, pouring on our prone bodies, suffusing our flesh, melting our bones, lulls us toward sleep. Over the desert and the canyons, down there in the rocks, a huge vibration of light and stillness and solitude shapes itself into the form of hovering wings spread out across the sky from the world’s rim to the world’s end. Not God–the term seems insufficient–but something unnameable, and more beautiful, and far greater, and more terrible.”

This list is so incomplete! Perhaps you can help?

part of Philip Taaffe's Anima Mundi series

Below you’ll find a list of quotes that illustrates just how “western” the concept of the long body is. I want to stress the “westernness” here, b/c the long body is often discounted by “westerners” as being a foreign, exotic, otherworldly concept—inapplicable to our “western” way of life.
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But 1st, let me tell you how, once upon a time, I had the honor of meeting poet Gary Snyder, and showing him Edwin Way Teale‘s Trailwood homestead in Hampton, CT. I was writing a dissertation on Edward Abbey, the author of Desert Solitaire and the Monkey Wrench Gang, and took the opportunity to ask Mr. Snyder what he made of Abbey’s comment on Snyder’s Buddhist influenced nature poetry. Mr. Snyder had asked Abbey if he would like to strike up a correspondence, so they could share and argue their ideas. Abbey’s response:

“Dear Gary, I admire your work too, except for all that Zen and Hindu bullshit.”

That was the last thing Abbey ever expressed to Mr. Snyder; he ended their correspondence.

Mr. Snyder pretended to ignore my request for a comment on Abbey’s rebuff; I say pretended, b/c even though he said nothing then, about a 1/2 hour later at Edwin Way Teale’s gravesite he tore into me, asking me who the heck I thought I was, a mere grad student nobody.

We’d been talking about the Puritan graves over in the oldest part of the cemetery, and the dreadful Calvinist view of nature as a fallen and wicked realm. I’d asked him if it was possible that authentic monotheism is the same thing as animism—for if God is omnipresent, then God is the same thing as nature. He didn’t like that idea, at all. He rebuked me for using loaded language with unintelligible meanings.

His loss of composure was telling: I was sad to see he, a master, was still bothered by Abbey’s criticism. Where was his ease, with himself and his philosophy? That night he was corrected by an evolutionary biology grad student after he glossed on Exodus 34:13 “But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves”; the grad student, from Israel, took umbrage at his claim that Judaism celebrated the destruction of nature. He reeled off a number of nature-celebrating rituals that have long been part of his religion. The audience was very uncomfortable. After a few minutes of bickering, it didn’t seem like they would resolve their differences, and they didn’t.

Their conflict made me think about Abbey’s last words to him.

Abbey was a nationalist who wanted to cultivate a philosophy that was autochthonous, ie. growing from and rooted in the soils of North America and his own Anglo-American culture. (His nationalism was his greatest strength and weakness as a philosopher.) He argued that, despite the applicability of non-western theology to our understandings of how we fit into nature, the very exoticism of those theologies guaranteed they would be marginalized in the “west.” So, why not speak directly, using the ample resources of western culture to inspire readers to love nature?
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And so, offered if only as proof that authentic (non-dualistic) monotheism is the same thing as animism, here are some key “western” articulations of our shared life in the long body, from Plato to Newton.

You’ll notice that most have a “spiritual” dimension, and this is simply b/c in the “west” God and nature are both credited as the source of human being; since life is sacred, these sources are too:

Plato: “Therefore, we may consequently state that: this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence … a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related” (Timaeus, 29/30).

Epicurus: “The soul is a fine-structured material distributed throughout the body.”

Marcus Aurelius: “Nature is the nature of existence itself; and existence connotes the kinship of all creatures” (Meditations, 9.1, 137).

Plotinus: “Soul is one and many; but the forms in bodies are many and one; bodies are many only; and that which is supreme is one alone.”

Origen: “God…is in reality corporeal.”

Tertullian: “Yet who will deny the God is body, although God is spirit?”

Moses Maimonides: “The Hebrew nefesh (soul) is a homonymous noun, signifying the vitality which is common to all living, sentient beings. (Gen. i. 30). It denotes also blood, as in ‘Thou shalt not eat the blood (nefesh) with the meat’ (Deut. xii. 23).”

Peter Abelard: “The Holy Spirit is the world soul.”

St. Francis of Assisi, (who began for Catholics the annual blessing of pets): “And thou, brother wolf, dost thou promise to keep the compact, and never again to offend either man or beast, or any other creature?”

William of Conches: “The Anima Mundi is the natural energy of the beings from which some get the ability to move, others to grow, others to perceive through the senses, others to judge. … What is the energy? The natural energy is the Holy Ghost, that is a divine and benign harmony from which all the truths have come to be, moving, growing, feeling, living, judging.”

Robert Fludd: “‘God is all, and in all, and above all, and that in Him are all things, and in His spirit and word all things consist. God is in everything that existeth, seeing that from Him, by Him, and in Him are all things.”

Robert Fludd's image of the Anima Mundi

Isaac Newton: “And now we might add something concerning a certain most subtle Spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which Spirit the particles of bodies mutually attract one another at near distances, and cohere, if contiguous.”

Thomas Jefferson at the Natural Bridge of Virginia, by Caleb Boyle c. 1801. (In the Kirby Collection, Lafayette College, Easton, PA.) Jefferson purchased the natural bridge from George the 3rd in 1774, to use for aesthetic, recreational and spiritual purposes.

Meeting Nature’s God: The Jeffersonian Sublime

When: Weds. May 4, 7-8:30 PM
Where: Watson Room, Forbes Public Library, Northampton, MA

Thomas Jefferson’s natural philosophy is distilled in a phrase he wrote to his nephew: “freedom is the gift of nature.” His natural philosophy informed both his political theory and his theology.

At the center of his natural philosophy was the experience of the sublime.

Join us. We’ll read and interpret potent excerpts from Jefferson’s writings for an hour and a half.

You’ll be rewarded with key insights into how Jefferson experienced the sublime at the Natural Bridge of Virginia. You’ll be prepared to understand where his democratic vision and his belief in Nature’s God came from.

And you’ll be empowered to use your religious freedom to increase your happiness—

Click here for our reading.

Cost: free, but tax-deductible donations to fund Biocitizen educational programs are appreciated.

The Natural Bridge of Virginia by Frederic Edwin Church, 1852. (Bayly Art Museum, Charlottesville, Virginia)

part of Philip Taaffe's Anima Mundi series

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A few days ago I celebrated Earth Day with two bright & excitable 2nd grade classes. My goal was to get them to wonder.

I wanted to seed their imaginations with the scientific fact that there is no such thing as the environment; there is only a great big body that ours is part of.

So, we had a breath holding contest. (I pause here, b/c a few students were still holding their breaths after 2 minutes and I didn’t know what to do. “Help. I need some parental guidance.”)

Our fun demonstrated the fact that we are air.

Rarely if ever do we think of, or envision, ourselves this way.

Yet, to the extent that we rely on it to be alive, we are air; we must incorporate it in us; and thereby be it. & vice versa.
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We discussed how +- 60% of us is water.

“I challenge you to become aware of this part of yourself,” I said, “because when you get mastery over this 60%, you can make it do your homework while your other 40% goes out and plays.”
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We agreed that the earth that we are is made of the food we eat.

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The last element, fire—

“Where is it?” I asked, pointing at an ohohohing young girl.

With a suddenly worried look b/c the room hushed and all eyes were on her, she pointed, too, right into her chest.

“Right here in our hearts.”

“Bingo! A plus! That’s exactly where it is!”
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Thomas Jefferson:

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.

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“Where does air come from?” I asked. Hands like flying kites, Frantic smiles, furrowed brows and “me me’s.”

“The ground!” yes

“Lawns!” yes

“Trees!” yes

“Plankton!” yes
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Researchers studying the origin of Earth’s first breathable atmosphere have zeroed in on the major role played by some very unassuming creatures: plankton.

In a paper to appear in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Ohio State University researcher Matthew Saltzman and his colleagues show how plankton provided a critical link between the atmosphere and chemical isotopes stored in rocks 500 million years ago.
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Scientists believe that phytoplankton contribute between 50 to 85 percent of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere.
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Plankton gave, and gives, us air.

And since (as we have agreed by continuing to breathe) we are air, we owe our lives—these reading eyes—to plankton.

The extent to which we rely on plankton for our lives, is the extent to which we are plankton. (>50%)

Sounds crazy.

If it wasn’t a scientific fact, it would be.
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We don’t have words to describe the ways we are air or plankton.

Such words would allow us to appreciate the larger life that we are actually part of. We could share, far more consciously, the reality that our bodies are consubstantial with other bodies.

Knowing this “long body” requires work that has not really been undertaken, and it has not been taken because the work is not, by industrial capitalism, highly valued. There is no money, or not enough money, to be made in trying to work out the system of values that prizes plankton above, say, the NFL, any national flag & currency, or luxury automobiles.

Knowing the long body is the most important task our species is undertaking.

Newton, upon whose work the Enlightenment began

Here are the readings for our discussion in the Watson Room @ Northampton’s Forbes Library on Weds. night from 7—8:30 PM, Jefferson’s Roots: Stoicism, Deism and “the laws of nature and of nature’s god”; I believe it will take two or three hours to complete them. Click all links!

To understand what Jefferson meant by “the laws of nature and of nature’s god,” we’ll be investigating what he was getting at when he told John Adams this in 1823:

Of the nature of this being [God] we know nothing. Jesus tells us that `God is a spirit.’ 4. John 24. but without defining what a spirit is {pneuma o Theos}. Down to the 3d. century we know that it was still deemed material; but of a lighter subtler matter than our gross bodies.

Jefferson got his idea of “material spirit” from the Stoics, who got it from Epicurus:

Read about Epicurus (341 BCE – 270 BCE), then read “The Soul” from his Letter to Herodotus.

Read about Marcus Aurelius (AD 121 – 180), perhaps the most revered of the Stoics. Then read this and this and this.

Deism: Thomas Paine wrote the best summary:

“do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the Scripture, which any human hand might make, but the Scripture called the Creation.”

Deism is based upon Newton’s Principia Mathematica. In its conclusion, he wrote about “a certain most subtle Spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies“; this “spirit” unites all things in the universe.

Read Jefferson’s “I too am an Epicurean” letter (sent to William Short, his natural philosophy professor at William and Mary, who was Erasmus Darwin’s (Charles’ grandfather).

He mentions Pierre Gassendi, whose defense of Epicurean Atomism against the Platonic Dualism of Rene Descartes deeply influenced Newton.

Indian Removal Act map

Over there on facebook, a friend wrote: “I’m curious to hear your take on Jefferson’s ideas in practice toward the Indians and their land.”

The simplest response is that Jefferson tried to prevent the Euro-American genocide of Native Americans by getting them to become farmers; however, this did not work.

A deeper response exposes how Jefferson used the reasoning found in John Locke’s The Second Treatise of Government, (the same text he drew some of the central ideas of the Declaration of Independence from). Locke:

As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it from the common. … God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man also to labour, and the penury of his condition required it of him. … He that in obedience to this command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him.

(Note: This passage contains Locke’s “labor theory of property“—which Lincoln, in 1862, codified as the Homestead Act.)

Jefferon’s address to the Cherokee, expressed as president (3 yrs. after the Louisiana Purchase), shows how Lockean he was:

You are becoming farmers, learning the use of the plough and the hoe, enclosing your grounds and employing that labor in their cultivation which you formerly employed in hunting and in war; and I see handsome specimens of cotton cloth raised, spun and wove by yourselves. You are also raising cattle and hogs for your food, and horses to assist your labors. Go on, my children, in the same way and be assured the further you advance in it the happier and more respectable you will be…. To go on in learning to cultivate the earth and to avoid war. If any of your neighbors injure you, our beloved men whom we place with you will endeavor to obtain justice for you and we will support them in it.

Jefferson made the same promise to most of the indigenous peoples he communicated with. These promises were not kept because there was little support in Washington to use federal troops to protect Native Americans’ property rights.

William Wirt, who Jefferson assigned “to be the prosecutor in Aaron Burr’s treason trial” and who served as the Attorney General for the Madison and Monroe administrations, represented the Cherokee people before the Supreme Court in 1830, when they sued the federal government for not protecting their property rights. The case—The Cherokee Nation vs. The State of Georgia—was tried and the Cherokee lost.

This same year, president Andrew Jackson enacted the Indian Removal Act. Jackson was acting in accordance with federal law. In 1823, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall legalized Euro-American genocide against the Native Americans when, in Johnson v. M’Intosh, he ruled that “Conquest gives a title which the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny.”

From then on Lockean principles were abandoned as legal arguments, and “might is right” became the (or a) recognized basis of our legal system. Today, Johnson v. M’Intosh’s “continuing prominence is reinforced every year in law schools, where it is the very first case most beginning students read in their required course in Property. The best-selling property casebook calls Johnson ‘the genesis of our subject’ because it lays ‘the foundations of landownership in the United States.’”

To the end of his life, Wirt defended Jefferson’s solution to the problem of colonization, because it assumed that Native Americans had the same natural rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as Euro-Americans. Said Wirt:

Jefferson’s “colonizing plan proposes to place the Aborigines on the same footing as ourselves; to place before them the same opportunities of improvement that we enjoy, and the same inducements to improve those opportunities.”

You decide: which history would you have chosen if you had the choice, Jefferson’s or Marshall’s?

(Do you think there was any way to stop the western migration, and land-grabbing, of Euro-American colonists?)

To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul.

Trumbull's Declaration of Independence—you can see it at Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford

As we waited to land, the airliner hung over the sprawl that, from above, looks like a computer chip: close enough that we could see the golf carts meandering the courses, could see the pleasure boaters gunning the engines up and down the coast just off the silken beach that extends from the Everglades to Panama City and beyond.

I was looking for solar panels, but never saw one:

where's the solar power, Naples?

A few weeks ago, Evergreen solar fled Massachusetts because our socialist tax $$ weren’t supporting it. Chinese socialism pays better!

Also, we aren’t buying solar panels b/c they are expensive. We need to do for solar what we do for Big Oil—which is subsidized by your socialist tax $$, beyond your wildest imaginings. Let’s spend the next 12 months getting Big Oil off of welfare, and out of the war business. At the same time, let’s demand that “green energy” get our socialist tax $$: it will help us stop buying oil, stimulate engineering & manufacturing jobs, and enliven our post-2ndary education sector which will train our next generation of green industrial revolutionaries.

Back to the global historical context. Our friends in Egypt are doing what we couldn’t do here in the US: turning the neocon/Oil Crusade agenda upsidedown, with a pantskick to the goalposts. The tyrants we have been subsidizing w/our socialist tax $$ are quaking in their Gucci loafers. They are learning what our present crop of corpoliticans have forgotten and ignored: force cannot give right.

That’s what Jefferson told George.3 in A Summary of View of the Rights of British America: (an excellent read!).

Gary Hart is a couldashouldawouldabeen, but yesterday he nailed it. From 1900 on

we adopted a policy (some called it political realism; I call it unprincipled expediency) described as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Thus, regardless of how repressive and anti-democratic a potentate might be, if he were anti-communist, he was our friend. We gave dozens of these types a lot of money and political support even though it was used to build up security services that locked up and tortured anyone who quoted our Declaration of Independence in the national square. [Bold mine.]

Curiously, we failed to notice that everyday people in these countries remember these things.

If only our corpoliticians believed in democracy—which means equality—we’d have been spreading it for a century. Well, we’re going to reap the whirlwind heading our way now.

One of the more vicious gales is higher oil prices.

Which gets me back to looking for solar, & finding none, in Naples FL. If there was ever a place that is perfectly suited for solar energy, it’s right here:

this is where solar energy is supposed to power everything

That there is little or no solar energy here is a testament to us, who we are, what we think, how we behave, what we believe in, how much we care about our children. How much we care about ourselves, for goodness sake.

It’s never too late to wake up and change the regime: the lesson our Egyptian friends are teaching us.

With humbleness and joy, may we enact environmental satyagraha, today and tomorrow and forevermore for ourselves, our children and their/our future unborn.

Creation is the best resistance. Let us put our minds and muscles this summer to the task of decoupling our lives from Exxon and Halliburton and the welfare-queen dictators they demand our tax $$ pay for.

“Force cannot give right,” said Jefferson. He also said “freedom is the gift of nature.” Nature is on our side, not Exxon and Halliburton’s. Never has been, never will be.

Jefferson in 1786, when he was Washington's Secretary of State

In parts 1 & 2 of this meditation, I’ve shown how our over-the-top consumerism makes us hog the world’s natural resources and invade nations so we can continue the hogging, and how our hoggishness corrupts our political, economic and legal culture.

Now let’s consider Thomas Jefferson’s definitions of citizenship and freedom. Volumes have been written about these subjects, yet by focusing on the Declaration of Independence we can understand what his views were.

Very recently, scholars discovered that when Jefferson began drafting the Declaration he used the word “subjects” to describe the people, like him, who lived in England’s North American colonies. This word is of ancient usage, because it describes the position of an unprivileged person in a monarchical system of government; according to established law, the person is “subject” the decrees of a king. Given that Jefferson’s task was to explain why the colonists were not obliged to obey the king’s laws, he “sought quite methodically to expunge the word, to wipe it out of existence and write over it.” In its place, he wrote “citizen”:

“No longer subjects to the crown, the colonists became something different: a people whose allegiance was to one another, not to a faraway monarch.”

Jefferson explained that this new-and-improved approach to governance required people—citizens—to create and institute laws by consent, through a process of open debate and collective decision-making. Moreover, and of profound import, these laws would be instituted to protect the natural rights of all human beings:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Jefferson foresaw that even governance-by-consent would, over time, tend to invest a minority with great powers over the majority, and that—if they were not vigilant in protecting their natural rights—citizens would find themselves being turned into subjects. For this reason, he said that citizens had the right to re-establish their rights by overthrowing oppressive governments:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Jefferson believed that citizens must be creative and active. The citizen had a character, a kind of identity, that was key to governance-by-consent: ie., democracy.

Already we can see that this quality of character contrasts with that of the consumer, who is served, and pays someone else to be creative and active for them. To put it bluntly, Jefferson would not/did not approve of “couch potatoes”—because they made fine subjects.

Tomorrow: Jefferson’s definition of freedom.