Syria and the U.N.

Those who have systematically blocked structural reform at the United Nations indirectly have the blood of the Syrian opposition on their hands.

From its creation, the U.N. was set up to give power and special advantage to the victors of World War II, an event now almost seven decades behind us. Since then the growing family of nations has changed much in its geopolitical divisions, but infinitely more in the nature and number of its common security challenges. It is in the interest of the entire planet to prevent a descent into instability in the greater region of which Syria is a part. When China and Russia vetoed condemnation of the brutal Assad regime, they demonstrated the grotesque obsolescence of the way the U.N. is organized.

The politics of who gains from Assad’s momentary success (or from the collapse of his regime, which is inevitable in spite of the present agony) in exterminating brave Syrian dissidents are tribal, regional, and very complex, involving consequences for Alawites, Christians, Sunnis, Shia, Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, just to name a few.

Still, one can imagine a U.N. peacekeeping force that had real resources and real teeth, and the kind of backing that could allow a disinterested, independent U.N. commission to set it in rapid motion to prevent or mitigate conflicts like the horror unfolding in Syria.

It is also important to bear in mind that though the media is focusing on Syria at the moment, there are five shooting wars presently continuing in Africa, leaving aside the deeply questionable, hideously expensive and now inconclusive U.S. initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Given how much the U.S. has risked in such unilateral campaigns, why do we refuse to risk ceding just a little power to international institutions that could end up serving our security needs better than we ourselves could? They could do this by helping to stabilize chaotic regions without prejudicing masses of people in other parts of the world against the perceived ham-handedness of the U.S. military.

They could also do it by addressing directly the implicit motivation behind the Chinese and Russian veto: the sale of arms. The shadowy world of the international arms trade does not cause the violence of war, but surely it intensifies it by quantum leaps. Lo and behold, the top five countries profiting from the arms trade are—surprise!—the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the USA, UK, France, Russia, and China (the USA being number one by far). Conventional arms sales complement the much-discussed nuclear hypocrisy of the U.S. and Israel, who are hell-bent on denying to Iran the very weapons of mass destruction that they themselves are deeply reluctant to set aside for the common good.

Hard as it is to imagine it happening, one radical reform of the U.N. would be to give much more power and responsibility in the body to those countries that, by simple indices, are most free of totalitarianism, corruption, and trade in weapons. Were I in charge of the U.S., why would I be afraid of ceding some power to encourage international stability to the leaders of countries like Costa Rica, countries that are not in the crosshairs of terrorists, countries that would be motivated to act disinterestedly in the best interests of the entire family of nations large and small.

One reason the U.S. government may be so fearful of giving over to the U.N. any management of conflicts that bear on its professed interests is that these interests may ultimately be not the welfare of all but the economic interests of a few gigantic multi-national energy corporations and weapons manufacturers and their representatives in the American Congress. But the same goes, surely, for the other permanent members of the Security Council. This may constitute one of the biggest bottlenecks to obvious reforms that would increase everyone’s security on this small planet. It is a choice between citizens demanding common-sense changes that strengthen the U.N., reduce the arms trade, and give new impetus to disinterested peacebuilding and peacekeeping—or more helpless hand wringing and name calling over tragedies like Syria.

Our Trance of Separation

The biggest challenges we face all have their root cause in an artificial separation—between nations, races, religions, classes, between political parties, between humans and the living ecosystem upon which we depend for life—even between our heads and hearts. Such apparent separations represent a kind of global neurosis for which one antidote is what Buddhist philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing”—the recognition of our deep interdependence.

The paradigm of separation narrows the possibilities of international relations down to a few false choices between appeasement and destructive competition. Iran, ignoring the difficult circumstances that brought Israel to birth, asserts that a Zionist nation has no right to exist. Israel understandably sees Iran as an existential threat. Both the U.S. and Israel are considering preemptive war. Whether the Iranians build nuclear weapons or not, it would hardly be unexpected for them to give it some thought, seeing as the U.S. and Israel between them possess thousands. Meanwhile Iran’s threat to close the Straits of Hormuz if they are attacked confirms their distance from “interbeing.” They would only shoot themselves in the foot by reducing the flow of their own oil to China.

As we learned—or did we?—from fifty years of superpower cold war, pursuing security by threats and attempts at military dominance only increases separation—and the risk of regional and perhaps even planetary self-destruction. We can parse the esoteric strategies of nuclear war until the cows come home, and still the only meaning that emerges is mutual suicide.

One way to overcome the schizophrenic separation between “enemies” is to really see that the people of Iran, Israel and the U.S.—and Syria, and everyone else—are fundamentally the same in their longings for security and self-determination.

Which leads to the possibility that, far from being naive, it might be the height of self-interested practicality for any one party to take the risk of foregoing nuclear weapons altogether—offering a more effective way than so-called deterrence to break the no-win cycle of mutual fear that leads only to holocaust down the time-stream.

A symptom of our unwillingness to grapple with a huge issue like global climate instability is that candidates for the leadership of the most powerful nation in the “free world”—including the incumbent—conspicuously avoid the subject in campaign discourse, pandering instead to our addiction to quantitative measures of economic growth, the same growth which threatens to strangle the living systems of the planet.

The eco-philosopher Thomas Berry combined all our challenges into a simple formulation, the need for humans to become a beneficent presence on the earth, contributing to the total life-process rather than degrading it. What if we defined our need for security not by whom we were against, but by a willingness to cooperate, even with “enemies,” to address common planetary challenges?

Cynics who assert that our rigid perceptions of self-interest make such a shift in thinking impossible are ignoring the historical record of surprising positive change, the end of apartheid, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the success of nuclear weapons reduction treaties.

Iran, Israel, America, can we not wake up? The polar icecaps are melting, the seas are 90% fished out, and we remain paralyzed by our fears of each other, wasting billions of dollars on weapons which, if they are ever used, will not resolve our differences, only destroy all we cherish.

What kind of human being is required to foster the immense awakening out of our obsolete trance of separation? Not saints, but the millions of people and organizations who are already working to bring about an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just planet.

These are the goals of an international organization called “Awakening the Dreamer,” which offers interactive seminars that allow citizens to understand the many implications of interdependence. If I had to choose between attending one of those seminars or going to a presidential campaign rally, I know where I’d go. But why not attend the seminar and the rally, to press candidates on how they would help lead us beyond separation toward a new dream of sustainability, fulfillment, and justice.

Occupy Our Fears of Iran

U.S. behavior long ago provided one causal context for our unease about the presumed nuclear aspirations of the Islamic Republic of Iran: the U.S. and Britain messed with Iran’s last authentically democratic election in 1953, fearing communist influence and the nationalization of oil.

Fast forward past the hostage crisis of 1979-81 to the present. The dynamic remains pretty much as it was sixty years ago: strategic jockeying for oil and natural gas, raw exercise of military competitiveness, and now the understandable impulse to acquire nuclear weapons on the part of nations fearing superpower dominance. Iranian leaders were quick to note that Saddam and Khaddafy were vulnerable because the U.S. and friends didn’t have to be concerned about nuclear retaliation (though Messers. Bush and Blair were all too happy to use Saddam’s presumed nukes as a convenient casus belli).

This is the prevailing paradigm in the world, and those in favor of alternatives are forced to accommodate. Thousands of organizations may have put in millions of hours of peace activism, but we also continue to pay the taxes that fund futile wars in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan—and now possibly with Iran.

This paradoxical paradigm, like it or not, also defines our personal context. Humans are born, grow to adulthood, work or perhaps have a family, grub for money or prestige, exercise power over others or have it exercised upon us—and die—dog-eat-dog most of the way. Spiritual leaders past and present call us toward a different story, another set of values, where we are meant to mature into a compassionate identification with the whole earth and all people—a world that works for everyone, and feeds all children.

Too many of us still refuse to see the practical relevance of such values either to international or personal politics. We call them naïve, rationalizing our casual saber-rattling. We assume thousands of nuclear warheads in the control of a democratically elected leader are qualitatively different from the same weapons in the hands of a dictator—denying the reality that fallout from such weapons, no matter whose, would pollute the rain that falls alike on the just and unjust. “Our” nuclear weapons are justified by our need for security, while “theirs” indicate an unacceptable aggressiveness. Even within the existing paradigm of national rivalry they are strategically obsolete, as former high officials like Kissinger, Nunn, Schultz and Perry have eloquently demonstrated.

Meanwhile candidate Romney demagogues the security issue by advocating more “full-spectrum dominance,” or candidate Santorum waxes bellicose about doing more to stop Iran’s nuclear program; Obama is forced to maintain his own cred by dubious if popular ventures like high-tech extra-judicial assassinations. Nuclear weapons, potential or actual, become mightily convenient to the perpetuation of these circular adversarial systems, built upon fear, that prevent leaders from breaking beyond the status quo—a status quo that is not static. As more and more nations acquire these weapons, the possibility of error or deliberate misuse (as if there could be a “right use”) steadily increases.

The existing paradigm pits governments against each other under the misapprehension that nuclear weapons can produce clear winners and losers instead of universal catastrophe. The emergent paradigm pits thoughtful, active citizens in every nation against war itself, demonstrating personal and local models of how nations can resolve their inevitable conflicts without violence. That is only the route to real security. Its source is the practical, beyond-politics Golden Rule, variants of which are found in every major religion—but also in the conclusions of ruthlessly realistic psychological insight. Back in 1964, the Freudian analyst Erik Erikson, worried about nuclear weapons, called for application of the Golden Rule to the international scene:

“Nations today are by definition units of different stages of political, technological and economic transformation . . . Insofar as a nation thinks of itself as a collective individual, then, it may well learn to visualize its task as that of maintaining mutuality in international relations. For the only alternative to armed competition seems to be the effort to activate in the historical partner what will strengthen him in his historical development even as it strengthens the actor in his own development—toward a common future identity.”

In an already dangerous world where nine countries of diverse political persuasion possess the bomb, it matters little whether a tenth does. What matters is that the people of the world occupy and reanimate with a spirit of good will the tired tropes of bellicosity—good will based on a common understanding of the evils of war, especially nuclear war. The 80 million citizens of Iran long for the same prosperity and liberty that most Americans enjoy, and many of them risked life and limb to demonstrate their yearning. Superpower leadership on disarmament initiatives, along with more people-to-people exchanges, would consolidate Iran’s security and strengthen our own far more effectively than military threats.

Our Monster

In the Republican presidential debate on November 12 focusing upon issues of foreign policy, former senator Santorum, speaking of Iran’s efforts to obtain nuclear capability, said “we should be working with Israel right now to do what they did in Syria, what they did in Iraq, which is to take out that nuclear capability before the next explosion we hear in Iran is a nuclear one, and then the world changes.”

With all respect, Mr. Santorum, the world has changed. We are 66 years beyond the moment when nuclear weapons were first used—by the United States—to kill actual people, and 49 years beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the planet came unacceptably close to thermonuclear annihilation.

A mutual nuclear paroxysm between Iran and Israel would be a repeat of the holocaust of World War Two, this time in minutes rather than years, incinerating not only the Jewish state but also millions of Iranian men, women and children. More pre-emption might delay that unthinkable possibility, but it will also only intensify the hate and fear that could make holocaust 2.0 inevitable further down the time-stream.

Unless the family of nations changes its approach, somewhere, sometime, there will be a terrible error, or accident, or a slide down the slippery slope into nuclear war. One recalls the gripping climactic scene in “Bridge Over the River Kwai” where British prisoners of war complete the great bridge, only to watch British commandos blow it up. Looking on, the camp medical officer cries out “Madness! Madness!”

In 1979, the father of the “Muslim bomb,” the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan, gave the German magazine Der Spiegel one of the saddest and most revealing interviews ever published. In it he questioned “the bloody, holier-than-thou attitudes of the Americans and the British. These bastards are God-appointed guardians of the world, to stockpile hundreds of thousands of nuclear warheads and have the God-given authority of carrying out explosions every month. But if we start a modest programme, we are the Satans, the devils . . .”

Whether or not Khan had a point, he was so lost in his enraged response to what he saw as colonial condescension that it never occurred to him to look objectively at the utility of nuclear weapons and the impossibility of victory in a nuclear war. Instead, his sense of having been patronized intensified his tragic desire to produce a weapon as a source of national pride. Meanwhile both the nuclear nations and the wannabees maintain the illusion, confirmed by the selective behavior of the superpowers, that possessing nukes will keep them from being overthrown like Khaddafi, and assume that gradual proliferation worldwide contains no downside. Madness!

In the Republican debate, Representative Bachmann and former senator Santorum affirmed their support of foreign aid for Pakistan, saying it must remain an ally because it has nuclear weapons. So policy debate ties itself in knots: Iran must be pre-emptively bombed to prevent its becoming nuclear, and nuclear Pakistan, whose intelligence service aids groups who are killing American soldiers just beyond their borders, must continue to receive billions of our aid dollars because it is nuclear.

It is long past the time when we, the “we” of any particular nation, need to set aside the illusion that because we are the good guys, we have the right to our nuclear weapons, and “they” (who also may be convinced they are the good guys), must be prevented from getting them.

This does not mean that the international community should give up unflagging efforts to prevent more nations, let alone non-state entities, from possessing nuclear materials and weapons. What we need to do now is include ourselves as example setters and renounce our exceptionality. Instead the United States (along with other nuclear nations) is allocating vast sums to renewing and diversifying its nuclear arsenal.

Realizing at last with such luminaries as former Secretary of State Schultz that these weapons have zero strategic value to any nation, all nuclear states should join negotiations toward zero in numbers.

The monster in our midst, before it is a deployed weapon capable of reducing a modern city to ash in seconds, is a scientific principle which cannot be unthought. It is with this little planet forever from now on, an extraordinary achievement which challenges our species to come up with an understanding of our interdependence that is equal to its destructiveness. If it does that, perhaps it will have served a genuinely useful purpose.

It is not an Iranian monster or a North Korean monster or an Al Quaeda monster that can be conquered by clever and ruthless pre-emption. It is a monster created by human minds, and only human minds will conquer it—together. It is our monster.

Social Psychosis and Collective Sanity

Winslow Myers

We know from the sad experience of Nazi Germany or Khmer Rouge Cambodia that it is possible for whole nations to become mentally ill, with horrendous consequences. At the time, however, the Nazis or the Khmers had no idea that they were deeply out of touch with the reality that all people are equally worthy of respect and care.

The population of the earth recently surpassed 7 billion. As we move further into the condition of global villagehood, it becomes more important than ever to assess our shared mental health. Collectively we can less and less afford the distortions that afflict the psyches of individual persons, such as denial, regression into infantile rage, fantasy ideation, or blind projection outward onto “enemies” of our unresolved inner tensions. Everyone is aware of the potential horror, for example, of a nuclear weapon falling into the hands of someone not in the clearest of minds.

The social psychosis of denial is one of the greatest of our temptations. As I write I’m sitting outdoors on my back porch in Boston. It is November 8. The “expected” temperature for an average day at this time of year might be around 40. Today it is 70. News stories in the last week have once again sounded the alarm of the amounts of CO2 going into the atmosphere being much greater than previously estimated. The displacement of millions of people by climate instability has the potential to be the primary cause of future conflict.

No upstanding citizen from whatever country will find it congenial to be lumped together with the coldly murderous Nazis or the ruthless Khmer Rouge—or even with the notion of the “good German” who professed not to know what was happening to the Jews around him. It is painful enough merely to think of ourselves as people who, because we did not do enough, accelerated untenable conditions with which our children and grandchildren will have to cope down the time-stream. No previous generation has had to make prospective judgments about what they needed to change or sacrifice to ensure the distant future for the entire human species.

Few of our national figures are leading on such issues. Instead, the value-ideal of consumerist economic prosperity built upon models of endless growth continues to dominate the marketplace of ideas and determine the criteria for political success.

This growth model has a momentum of its own, not necessarily connected to our best interests. Take nuclear weapons. Almost 60 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States is still planning to spend 700 billion dollars on new and upgraded nuclear arms, including building 12 new ballistic missile submarines. But the U.S. is not alone. Russia, China, India, Israel, France and Pakistan are all setting aside vast sums for nuclear missile delivery systems of various sizes. Each nation rationalizes its actions on the basis of what its supposed rivals are doing. The net result will not be the intended increase in security, but a gross diminishment of collective security potentially ending in disaster.

If this is not a form of social madness, of collective insanity, what is? If the weapons are ever used there will be no victory, and the money spent on these useless weapons becomes unavailable for meeting challenges like global climate change. Perhaps most importantly of all, there are new models and processes that humans can use to diminish the original tensions that motivate the proliferation of such weapons. We know more than ever about how to overcome the fear within our own psyches that drives the engine of international hostility. At the same time there are enormous new opportunities for people to meet either virtually or face-to-face and learn how much they have in common—in short, to change from imaging others as enemies to interacting as friends, because survival and the greater good demands it.

The hope of reconciliation has its roots deep in a past that we tend to forget. Few among us recall the Kellogg-Briand pact outlawing war. Written by the great diplomat and poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960, St. John Perse, enthusiastically endorsed by hundreds of thousands of citizen-activists around the world, the pact was signed in 1928 by the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, Weimar Germany, and many other nations. It is still the law of the land in the U.S. today—clearly honored more in the breach than the observance. It may be as Keats asserted, that poets really are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

The fate of peace lies more now with ordinary people than with the Gandhis and Nobel Prize winners. Carol Daniel Kasbari is an activist-citizen in the Middle East—a Palestinian scholar, writer, wife, and mother. This accomplished facilitator of change suggests a number of actions to help end potential or actual war: Cross borders to successfully engage perceived adversaries in authentic, face-to-face, ongoing dialogue; tell your story to the world. Invite news professionals to document what you experience and what progress you create with others; Expand the circle to include vastly more interested citizens and, yes, also the skeptics and the unconvinced—all the voices; Strengthen your own support system at home by involving people who matter most to you, so they also experience how easily the ice of alienation can be broken.

Both the Arab Spring and the global Occupy movement are at least potentially geared in the direction of this understanding of interdependence and relationship. There are thousands of non-governmental organizations that are working to build friendships and break down barriers of alienation and misunderstanding. These too could benefit from an infusion of funds presently delegated to the insanely wasteful upgrading of nuclear weapons systems. If we are going to have a growth model, let it be growth in breaking down artificial barriers of tribe, race and religion, growth in the deep realization that all seven billion of us are in this together. That way lies collective sanity.

Moving Beyond War in the Middle East—and Everywhere

The seemingly intractable discord between Israel and Palestine not only continues to cause enormous suffering and anxiety, but also to reverberate around the planet as a kind of symbol of all our conflicts in what we might call the post-nuclear age.

The mid-20^th century superpowers were forced to admit, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis, that war at the nuclear level was self-defeating, a victory only for war itself, not for the participants.

Isn’t that ultimately true for all wars, large or small? Yet the world, including the superpowers, continues to divide along the Israeli-Palestinian fault-line, almost as if one had to have an adversary to be clear in one’s identity.

The conflict has functioned as an iconic symbol of general feelings of fear or powerlessness or injustice, let alone claims to the same territory, that give rise to the best or the worst in us as we humans try to resolve our endless differences.

It is symbolic in a darker and more specific sense for the Arab world, where—even as the Arab Spring flourishes—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has encouraged anti-Semitic stereotypes and still energizes the hatred of extremist groups like Al Quaeda.

Not all conflicts involve sides with equally legitimate aspirations. Few would recognize the legitimacy of drug cartels to dominate and corrupt the governments of whole nations like Mexico or Afghanistan.

And in the United States, there is a growing recognition that some financial institutions have profited obscenely by betting against markets and throwing millions into poverty, avoiding criminal prosecution through their power over elected officials. Even now a new “Arab Spring”-like protest against insufficiently regulated corporate power is growing in many cities across the United States.

It is the rough equality of the legitimacy of the Palestinians’ and the Israelis’ demands for security and land that makes that conflict particularly difficult. The Jewish people have a history that has earned them the right to a certain realistic paranoia about adversaries. The Palestinians are legitimately concerned by the expansionist impulse of Jewish settlers who create more “facts on the ground” as each year passes without resolution.

The issue has tied the United States government in ethical knots as it tries to maintain its traditional support for Israel while not condoning Jewish expansion into territory that might lie within a future Palestinian state.

President Obama, caught in a difficult political position, nevertheless said one true thing in his latest appearance before the United Nations: “Each side has legitimate aspirations—and that’s part of what makes peace so hard. And the deadlock will only be broken when each side learns to stand in the other’s shoes; each side can see the world through the other’s eyes.”

This rough equality is why, in spite of the contortions candidates for high office in the U.S. must undergo to stay in the good graces of a powerful Israeli lobbying effort, and also in spite of the fact that Hamas still refuses to accept Israeli’s right to exist, President Obama had it right when he said that each side must learn to see with each others’ eyes.

Seeing with each other’s eyes must begin with self-examination, because the conflict also represents the universal human propensity to externalize what some Islamic scholars have called the Greater Jihad, our struggle with ourselves and our own shadow-side, into a Lesser Jihad, a zero-sum game in which we simplify “enemies” into stereotypes who are different from us and wish us ill. This is happening not only between Israelis and Palestinians, but also Pashtuns and Tajiks, Shias and Sunnis—and let’s not forget Democrats and Republicans.

The insight, or inter-sight, of empathy is not a political act in the usual way we think of politics as competitive jockeying for power. It is something that takes place on a deeper level, within and between individual people. It requires the sharing of separate stories that take their place in the common story of what everyone wants for their children—a world without genocidal weapons, drug violence, militarism, or financial institutions that have forgotten their obligation to the common good.

Empathy as a principle can seep into politics as a refusal to take sides, a refusal to define ourselves negatively in terms of whom we fear and hate, an embrace of global citizenship that looks for what is best for the whole.

The world we want for our children, for all children, cannot and will not be a world without conflict. But we can build a world where, from the time they are very young, children grow up understanding that conflict and difference are not negative, but an opportunity for examining ourselves in the spirit of Greater Jihad, for learning the skills of everyday peacebuilding, and for moving toward creative resolution of conflict on the basis of common aspirations.

The ultimate implications of the Arab Spring for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are still unclear. The paradigm of violence, “an eye for an eye,” still holds our world in the balance, but as citizens both in the Middle East and our own country turn increasingly to non-violent assembly and protest, we are witnessing the possibility of something new that is both political and beyond politics—a movement into the mainstream of Gandhian tactics of non-violence and creative initiative. May everything we think and do further this new spirit of true reciprocity, the dawning realization that we are all in this together.

Who Are We? Where Are We? Where Are We Going?

One way to say where we are is that the human population has become so pervasive on the Earth that it is rapidly shutting down the viability of the living systems that support us. Species are going extinct at ever more rapid rates. Because of the effects of our human presence, the Earth is coming to the end of a 65 million year explosion of life and diversity, the era geologists call the Cenozoic, an era that began with the demise of the dinosaurs. That is very hard for us to get our minds around, distracted as we are by other issues in the foreground of our attention—terrorism, presidential politics, the growing divide between rich and poor.

Religious and cultural sectarianism, immediate political advantage, and narrow, short-term economic self-interest drive almost all present human planning and decision-making, rather than objective consideration of what is best for the health of the total system of which we are only a part. Here and there lie pockets of new thinking, such as provisions in the constitutions of some South American countries giving rights to natural systems like rivers and animals, or successful sustainable energy systems being operated in Scandinavian nations. But the governing paradigm remains unchanged.

The most pervasive value-example is our global fixation upon quantitative economic growth. The finest political and economic minds around the world define increased growth as the royal road to genuine prosperity. At the same time, everyone knows that untrammeled quantitative growth has extraordinarily destructive ecological outcomes, such as ocean-changing oil spills, soil exhaustion, drought, flooding, the melting of the polar ice caps. All of these are even now negatively affecting the lives not only of millions of humans, but also of other parts of the living system upon which humans depend.

It is extremely difficult for our species to grasp that we are not dominant over the total life-support systems of the earth. We have had to absorb previous shocks to our notions of dominance, such as that the earth is not the center of the universe or even the solar system, or that we are the descendents of ape-like creatures, or that we are motivated by unconscious drives—scientific disillusionments to our puffed-up sense of ourselves brought to us by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud respectively.

Contrary to the divine promises found in the book of Genesis, we are not the stewards of creation. Our present behavior indicates at best very ineffective attempts at stewardship. We are not somehow “above” nature. We came from it and are totally subject to its laws and limits. Nonetheless our success as a human species has a clear implication: there are now so many of us that the decisions we are making are determining the fate of the whole earth and everything on it. It is impossible to imagine a more challenging responsibility than that.

To survive and flourish, the human species needs a compelling, unifying context in which to nest our various challenges. As we understand the depth of how much we, we who are fiercely fighting each other over ultimately illusory differences, have in common, we move forward with more creativity and more compassion.

What does contemporary science contribute to this need for context? One amazing and fundamental fact is the precision of the expansion rate of the universe itself. Astrophysicists tell us that if this rate had varied a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent in either direction, we would not be here. Just a hair slower, and creation would have drawn back in upon itself. A hair faster, and there would have been dispersal into an undifferentiated gray fog, no bursting forth of galaxies and stars—and planets, life, consciousness, love, music and art.

What might be some implications of this precision? It gives the lie to facile notions of the randomness of creation when one realizes that everything that exists is directly and causally emergent from that precision. It can change how we see things. The good (what leads to the survival and flourishing of the total system and all life-forms), the true (our scientific understanding of what actually is, from which we derive our ethical convictions), and the beautiful (intervals in music; alluring proportions in natural and human-made forms; allurement itself) all arise from this precision; how could they not?

It brought everything forth in magnificent complexity. To open to this single scientific fact is to breathe the atmosphere of its optimism, to participate in its ultimate hopefulness; how could we not?

And on all levels, macro and micro, as the great cosmologist Thomas Berry wrote, three laws operate: differentiation, autonomy, and communion.

Things and beings differentiate into more and more diversity and complexity. We see this in the diversity of life forms on our planet that have evolved in millions of years of experimentation— microbes, dragonflies, lobsters, orchids.

And then on every level, autonomy is a pervasive, fundamental principle. Acorns grow reliably into oaks. Neutrons have a distinct identity as neutrons and behave reliably as such. Elements like carbon and hydrogen can be counted upon to follow invariable laws.

Thirdly, all things and beings from atoms to galaxies are in communion with each other. Neutrons interact with other particles. Oak trees must commune with water and sun to grow tall. Humans cannot exist without relationships, first of all the mother-child interaction. We exist in a community of beings in which communion is continuous, unbroken, on every level from atoms to galaxies.

Berry saw these laws as an ethical foundation and guide for our behavior: what encourages further differentiation, autonomy, and communion is good. What truncates these three is evil.

What does this mean in practical terms of what people call “the real world,” the world that we digest through the corporate media: the “lead story” on the television news; the large headline in the newspaper? Clearly politicians haven’t yet tried to get elected by establishing the practical relevance of the story of the unfolding universe—so it is up to voters to try to help seed such ideas into the mainstream political dialogue.

It is humbling to our materialist values, but once understood and accepted, this fundamental change of paradigm from illusions of dominance to membership within a diverse community of whales and hawks and bees, can work in favor of our survival: our values will adjust to the need for our human presence to cease to become a drag on the total system. We will ask what is the position of the candidates for high office, not only in our own country but also around the world, on this crucial issue of interdependence, at the same time we are newly examining our own behavior. We will look for ways we can contribute to the health of the system rather than assuming that we can flourish by dominating, consuming, and devastating it.

Why couldn’t this include creating a Marshall Plan for the earth to stabilize its population? So many other issues “nest” within the population growth issue, including the nature of future conflicts and the assurance of sustainable food, water and energy sources for all. Somewhere nine or ten layers of “nesting” down, we find the political conflicts that presently dominate our media—issues like the debt ceiling, or where to try alleged terrorists.

But even our huge population challenge, at the same time a sign of our success and a present danger, nests within the ultimate success of the unfolding universe-process, a process that connects back seamlessly to the primal seed out of which came all that is—with such a perfect assurance of unfolding, creative possibilities. It tells us that we humans have infinitely more in common than we have differences to separate us. It submerges all the diversity of our religious convictions in a fresh and unifying sense of what is truly sacred—what is worthy of our most persistent efforts of care and preservation. And it tells us we possess the inherent capacity to meet all our challenges, no matter how great.

The astrophysicist Brian Swimme and the eco-philosopher Mary Evelyn Tucker have recently completed a landmark book and film, “Journey of the Universe,” that explores these questions, issues and hopes with a satisfying simplicity and depth. Read the book, and look for showings of the film on PBS. It will change you.