Q. Aren't the ideas of human and planetary just more mental limits?
A. They are important mental tools. We have urgent planetary problems in all domains of society. We need to live up to our duties on the broadest useful political stage where the most massive effects occur.
Q. What about non-human and extra-planetary situations?
The articulated concern for "all sentient creatures" is so far only a human event. It is by amplifying our humanity and our shared culture that we will increase our power to understand and care for the greatest range of creatures, both on this planet and wherever the sphere of cosmic humanity might expand into relationship. The cosmic embrace of tomorrow depends upon our work today to produce and stabilize the global human environment.
Q. Are humans a common nationality?
A. We share a basic electronic language into which all our natural languages are translated. Additionally we have the historical default language of new English. Also we have a common territory in the Earth and a shared history of globally significant events.
Q. What events are globally significant?
Distant events from general human history like our "witnessing" the total annihilation of the Neanderthal species, the discovery of fire and symbol language, the invention of the city, etc.
Recent mass history such as World Wars, the attempt of global organizational bodies (UN, G20, IMF, Greenpeace, InterPol, Nuclear Treaties), the fall of the Berlin Wall, the World Court, 9/11, 6-4, etc.
Also personalities which have provoked strong international media response such as Princess Diana of Britain, US President Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama, Hadron Collider, Gandhi, Stalin, etc.
Recent humanizing technologies: a/c current, internet, international space stations, human genome project, etc.
Q. Why does global human nationalism require a patriotic emotion?
A. Smart, well-meaning people often don't do what is necessary to prevent the effects of corrupt social systems and to create more effective and benevolent systems. The patriotic feeling is the fuel which builds a potent nationality and drives those who understand to take real ethical action.
Q. Won't people naturally gravitate to old and local nationalistic sympathies?
A. This is a great danger but it describes already the world we are living in -- rather than a possible danger of tomorrow. What we realize is that older nationalities are largely the result of education and cultural experiences -- a fluid a shifting process that is constantly building and dissolving national boundaries. The danger posed by local nationalities IS and WILL BE massively dangerously and virtually un-policable unless it is countermanded by an equally strong set of commonly shared images, ideas, experiences and communications.
Q. Aren't there more pressing problems that establishing a Terran Nationalism?
A. No. Our pressing concerns are biospheric mismanagement, toxic and irresponsible diet, nationalistic militarism between and within countries, global economic mismanagement, human rights horrors, violent disagreements about the custodianship of bioregions and cultural traditions, mass displacement, slum cities, collateral damage from mass-scale habits of industry, the threat of 'redneckery' and fantacism in all nations, etc. All the most pressing problems must postulate solutions at the level of global social organization, holistic ecology and specifically human ethical dilemmas. The vision and motivation with which to solve our most urgent difficulties all depend upon the intensity of widespread feeling for the total 'terrestrial' frame.
Q. But don't people hate each other?
A. The natural and learned patterns of antagonism between disparate and similar human beings must be subsumed in the image of the global commons. Those you cannot stand are still tolerable as long as they are working on the same 'project' as you. The worth of participatory membership is extended and exerts a cooling effect on the normal dislike which arises between strong stylistic and capability discrepancies.
Q. How important is this?
A. In order that we do not perpetually face a destructive divide between those with progressive global/human sympathies and those with nationalistic emotional sympathies we MUST do everything in our power to produce an epidemic of planetary nationalistic sympathy which will align both all levels of political and intellectual complexity in human individuals.
Q. Isn't the development to a "world-centered, humanistic" outlook a function of individual self-cultivation and evolutionary refinement rather than indiscriminate political concerns?
A. No. The natural 'upwards' migration of individual sensibilities, evidenced by many individuals and small groups in the past, does not occur on its own. Rather it is always supported and enabled by the cultural situation in which it emerges in terms of resource surplus, education, moral encouragement, protection from attack, artistic richness, science, etc. Those who have fluked into such a benevolent circumstance are obliged to return the favour by doing everything in their capacity to create such situations for others -- especially by promoting the emotional and symbolic frame out of which to maxime this events. The necessities of the world and the potential for mass effects mean that 'elevated concerns' cannot afford to be the privilege of the most internally sophisticated. There must be an alliance between all levels of sophistication in the human species and a willingness to accept that pro-human stupidity, while not ceasing to be stupid, is superior to sub-human stupidity and reinforces the demand of a higher vision.
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