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By Root 2387 0

and are concerned with security, sustenance, and shelter. Members of the final group, the mothers, the nurturers, want to make sure everyone is taken care of. They process a lot and ask, “How’s everyone going to be affected by this?”348 Members of these four groups will formulate their opinions on the innovation, and facilitators will help the community and its leaders come to an eventual decision. So, let’s say I invent something with both beneficial and harmful uses, depending on who’s using it. We as a community decide whether we want it, whether it will enhance our lives and the lives of our nonhuman neighbors, and how we will use it, if we use it at all.

Now, let’s say I invent this thing, and let’s say it does have serious harmful uses, and let’s say the community tells me not to use it. Let’s say I ignore them. This would be exceedingly strange in the first place. Picture a healthy family that has decided as a unit that they do not want any of their members (or anyone else) to put poisons on their food, nor to toxify the water they drink, nor to toxify the air they breathe. What reasonable member of this family community would be so horrid as to proceed anyway? But let’s say I do. I don’t know why I do. Maybe I’m a capitalist. Or maybe I’m a sociopath. Maybe the former is a subcategory of the latter. Within a healthy functioning community I would be dissuaded from acting such, or if that didn’t work I would be disallowed, or if that didn’t work I would be exiled or killed. I would not be allowed to harm the community in this way.

But, and here’s the point, when your invention moves beyond the local community, when, as Mumford stated approvingly as a purpose of civilization, you “make available to all men [sic] the discoveries and inventions and creations, the works of art and thought, the values and purposes that any single group has discovered,”349 you move beyond face-to-face accountability, which means there are no longer those immediate and vital checks on harmful uses. Further, and even worse, let’s say I invent something we in our community perceive as having only beneficial uses. Our community says it’s great to go. But just as if you have a big enough economy someone is going to come up with a way to make money off bear gall bladders, thus guaranteeing the bears’ demise half a world away, if you have a big enough pool of people with access to the original invention, someone is going to figure out a way to use for ill almost anything you make. Remove accountability, create mass communication, and voila! Suddenly everyone’s harmfully using this previously beneficial invention. And if everyone else is doing it, wouldn’t I be a damn fool to do otherwise?350

Okay, so maybe I’m wrong. Not about civilization killing the planet. That’s obvious. But about the whole Earth Mother/Benevolent God/Santa Claus/Easter Bunny thing. Maybe the Great Spirit is watching over us, and is going to help us out of this mess.

The last few days I’ve been thinking about a parable I heard when I was young. A Christian is walking down a road in India. Suddenly a throng of people comes running the opposite direction. When they get close enough, he hears them cry that an elephant has gone crazy (or maybe sane, depending on your perspective), and is trampling people up ahead. The Christian says, “I am not worried. God will take care of me.”

He keeps walking.

Another crowd rushes by delivering the same message. He responds, “I am not worried. God will take care of me.”

He keeps walking.

Yet another crowd. Same message. Same response: “I am not worried. God will take care of me.”

He keeps walking.

He sees the elephant.

He’s a little worried.

But God will take care of him.

The elephant sees him. The elephant rushes him. The elephant stomps him flat.

As he is dying, he turns against God, curses, and moans, “God, why didn’t you take care of me?”

Then he hears the voice of God, clear and strong, “You idiot! Why do you think I sent all those people to warn you?”

I have no doubt that when the people who are relying on the Great Mother