Blazing Light, Love's Song

網頁版本  |  更新喜好  |  取消訂閱 讚 Tweet 轉寄 http://worldlove333.blogspot.com Ripple 4: Conformity Posted by Donna Mitchell-Moniak on 7 December, 2012 At some point in the last ten thousand years, human beings began to use control as a way to make their lives better. In doing so, an over-arching model was established: conformity and thus control because conformity renders something controllable through predictability. For example, a hunter-gather has no control over assuring food for himself or others on any given day, but if the gatherer becomes a planter then there is more assurance that a predictable source of food will be where he or she expects. Having witnessed Nature’s cycles, we try to repeat them in hopes that abundance with result. If we ponder this idea, conformity in order to control and control for improvement or a better, easier way of life, it soon becomes obvious: that the improvement is not universal (not everyone or everything experiences betterment. Tragically the opposite is quite often the result.); that control is a response to a set of circumstances. Change the circumstances while locked into an established response and there is inertia and an inability to change to the new circumstances; that in Nature conformity is not isolated or separated from chaos and dynamism. The two are necessary for adaptive and newly stabilizing functioning of the whole and its parts. Separated from dynamism, conformity becomes stagnation, torpor, and death to any system of life. Equally, dynamism without temporary periods of stability and pattern is unending chaos and cannot sustain life. It also becomes obvious that conformity will, at some point, require uniformity. Ah, tricky waters there. Stop and think about it for a moment and look out your window. Depending on where you live, you will see the impact of man and conformity or the variations and looseness of Nature. If you are fortunate, you live where both are functioning well which means that, where you live, people have understood the value and necessity of Nature’s “wildness.” Take a moment and consider all the conformity that you can itemize right now. Remember to include your clothes, haircut, windows, chair, computer or mobile device, any streets that might be in your view, the cars or modes of transportation on them, and so forth. Then consider the amount of control that gives you (where you can go and how to get there, for example), the amount of control others have over you, and the control that you personally no longer have because of the established norms of conformity and uniformity that pervade our human life. Some ripples: Domestication of all animals began with the wolf following and preying upon hunters and small clans of people. Wolves are smart. Some determined that it was easier to get a meal from the humans than to try to take down a baby mammoth. And humans are, by nature, curious and caring. They would adopt found or abandoned wolf pups. One thing led to another. In addition to the beginning of the age-long relationship of man and his best friend and all the breeds of dogs that have come from the one prototype, there also is the domestication of all other animals that human beings have tamed. As a result, food source (eggs, cheese, milk, meats), clothing (hides, sinew, thread, wool), labor (elephants, horses, oxen, mules and donkeys, etc), pets of all kinds, and sport are part of human life. In each case, the animal was made to conform to the human need or desire. Ultimately, animals were bred for uniformity with characteristics of size, color, even reason for being refined through breeding processes. Planting of the grain kamut along the Nile river valley was an experiment in living that eventually established agriculture and a settled, agrarian way of life. It has been suggested, and I agree, that women took note of the cycles of Nature and were the first to cultivate produce. Long before kamut was grown in expanded and irrigated patches along the Nile, there were strawberry patches tended by nomadic people within ever smaller more predictable and known established territories. Women learned the herbs and edible vegetation and gathered it. Men learned to identify edible plants when gone for days on the hunt. But once grain began to be cultivated and thus conform to human need and desire, humanity began the long and current journey of its own conformity into settlements and societies, and cultures at first based on the fertility of the land, the cycles of the Earth, and the spirits that brought the food forth. Territories, ownership, need and greed established themselves as people conformed to an agrarian-settlement-protect and keep way of life. This also meant that soon, uniformity of culture, dress, language, and societal norms established a codifying separateness that would undermine the possibility of pan-culturalism. Note how peoples and cultures that retained a largely nomadic way of life (Mongols, African tribes, Sioux for example) were deemed “savage” or “barbaric” culturally by the rest of the world. Of course, they were and are not but simply a different culture not predicated upon keeping, hoarding, and “mine.” Conformity requires that people conform. And since conformity ultimately means control, then any attempt at conformity is actually an attempt to control. Consider slavery, prostitution, the breaking and binding of women’s feet, control of education (who is educated through history and who is not, access to it, and its end results), or religious conformity and its part in great wars, genocides, racism and bigotry, and eradication of indigenous or pre-established belief systems. Consider political conformity and how alternative views are usually deemed crazy or radical. They do not conform. This list could go on. All we have to do is look at the mobile device in your pocket (if you have one). Is it an android or an iPhone? Conformity. And consider the control that Apple has on the technology market now that it is top dog. Is conformity a bad thing? That would be simplistic. Yet if we consider Nature, she uses repetition to accomplish the goal of perpetuation of a form and species yet the variety of both (form and species) is astounding. Difference and mutation have driven Nature to be the thriving whole that it is. Similarly in physics. Routine or repetition are closed loops of non-creative activity. Where there is simply repetitive doing there is no creation being generated. Creation requires the volatility of difference; dynamism is generated with difference. So although an elm tree is not an oak, they are both trees. Uniformity, conformity, and difference interact and the species thrive. But at some point in the human mind, conformity tilts into uniformity. There is danger in both. Reflect on modern western medical practices: cookie cutter drug answers for individual people with a set of symptoms. The symptoms are a complex set inter-dependently acting upon one another and the person is a set of circumstances of life, love, work, environment, and more. There is little cookie cutter and the same about two people, just as the elm and the oak. Both are trees, and two people yes, but they are also unique and requiring more than the surface view of uniformity and the conformity in order to truly thrive. The ripples of conformity and the at-one-time drive to control has created our current world situation in every regard. Again, think about it. The only way to change the current set of interlocked connected problems currently facing humanity is actually to break free of our tendency to make things controllable. Our species is due for some dynamism and life-necessary change. 修改訂閱 | 取消訂閱

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