ETHICS IN SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 2003, 6–23 Published April 30 ESEP

REVIEW Ethnospherics Origins of human cultures, their subjugation by the technosphere, the beginning of an Ethnosphere, and steps needed to complete the Ethnosphere

John Allen*

Global Ecotechnics Corporation, 7 Silver Hills Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87508, USA

ABSTRACT: With the invention of cultures human populations escaped dependence on a single ecosystem. Human cultures today have become an ecological and geological force equal in scale to the five previous kingdoms of life. Cultural structural forms arise from the recurrent fulfilment of economic and reproductive needs. Gaps not closed by the economic institutions in this fulfilment are universally handled by three metaphysical institutions: (1) magic to instill confidence, (2) science to provide explanations and (3) mysticism to deal with disasters. Linking institutions, such as arts, authority and techne, connect people with these master institutions. The interplay of these three lev- els led to the evolution of the ‘Ten Thousand Cultures’. About six millennia ago the linking institution of techne invented the megamachine (the armed state) and a mode of economic expansion by con- quest, ideology and trade control. By l900 the technosphere and its pampered offspring War had dev- astated whole biomes and their cultures. When the Berlin Wall fell the technosphere unleashed ever more chaotic and unsustainable expansionism. However, a rising ethnosphere now self-organizes the remaining battered cultures. A union of specific cultural roots with universally accessible scientific spin-offs from techne, such as biospherics and geospherics, give their cultures the means to re- organize locally and communicate biospherically. The ethnosphere needs to create a cybersphere that gives immediate feedback on new impacts from the technosphere. A Noosphere can then emerge in which intelligence will end the war on the biosphere and allow cultures to flourish once again, this time armed with hard-earned wisdom and biospheric understanding.

KEY WORDS: Cultures · Memes · Ethnosphere · Biosphere · Technosphere · World market · Cyber- sphere · Noosphere

Resale or republication not permitted without written consent of the publisher

INTRODUCTION: THE EVOLUTION cally ought to be called a new Animalia phylum began AND CONSTITUTION OF CULTURES its evolutionary trajectory by literally walking off from the primate order to form the Australopithecine order. Animals can be conditioned by their stimuli- The first form of the new phylum, Homo habilis, then response patterns being selectively rewarded or pun- split off from the Australopithecines about two million ished by either their ecosystem or human action to years ago (Tattersall & Schwartz 2001).1 This new body develop habitual, individual use of tools, conscious- plan and life history mutation, the criteria for phylum ness, perception, political scheming, even to transmit classification, consisted primarily in an eventual qua- such learned behaviour by imitativeness. Some animal species here and there have essayed the rudiments of 1In their book Extinct Humans, Tattersall and Schwartz (2001) every human behaviour and excelled in some. give a brilliant and detailed account of the several species dis- However, at some point in time-space commencing covered to date which constitute the historical members of what about seven million years ago, what at least heuristi- I call the phylum Neotonia and of their competitive migrations

*Email: [email protected] © Inter-Research 2003 · www.int-res.com 7 ESEP 2003, 6–23

drupling of the relative brain size of the primates panoply of Earth’s biomes: forests, savannahs, deserts which followed upon walking upright and gaining free in their tropic, temperate, and even frigid variations. use of hands. This quadrupled brain size also included Humans could carry these powers anywhere in a a vastly increased complexity in the neo-cortex. very lightweight way with a few tools, household pos- Changes in the brain and pharynx eventually gave the sessions, and their archives of knowledges arranged ability to speak and create symbols and languages. into stories carried by memory. These stories spelled These languages created an infinite world of potential out key behaviours which, by daily, moon cycle, or actions, which can be called the human constant. yearly recurrence, turned into social structures. Humans thereby acquired abilities to direct activities Memes (see glossary), the transmittable elements that of their organisms for great lengths of time with the construct culture, weigh less than genes. They add no faculties of memory, imagination, and reflection, rather gravitational burden in an oral society. Radiating than being directed primarily from outside by instinc- throughout the planet, this new species increased to tive response to sensory releasers. become an ecological and geological force on the scale This much bigger brain drastically changed humans’ of the previous five kingdoms of life. Today this force life history from that of their ancestors. Having grown utilizes half of the biosphere’s (see glossary) net pri- too large to be delivered at more than 20 % of its final mary productivity and has become a geological force size, the human brain had to grow in two phases called rivalling bacteria by mining, refining, and moving bil- endo-womb and exo-womb. These three new evolu- lions of tons of matter annually, creating massive new tionary results (immensely powerful brain, changed deposits of tin, uranium, and iron. Culturally main- pharynx and complex life cycle) exapted to the point tained cattle alone weigh twice the amount of all other that humans had the time and ability to transmit a sys- large mammals. tem of symbols, language, to their offspring during this Once one understands its dynamically massive - exo-womb period and the extended childhood which tary functioning, it becomes clear that this still-expand- followed. This world of signifiers competed with the ing web of cultures should be classified as life’s sixth now signified as well as directly sensed world for the kingdom, Symbolia (Allen 2002).3 However, Symbolia’s attention of humans. With this gift of language, cou- strictly genetic component constitutes the sole species pled with a life history including extended depen- representative of a once extensive phylum, which could dency, Homo sapiens invented by at least forty thou- be called Neotonia because its extended exo-womb and sand years ago a complete new way of adaptation to childhood periods mark a qualitatively different life plan their surroundings. They developed supra-organic life from any other phylum of Animalia. These two coexist- forms, cultures, whose powers of transmitting experi- ing realities, culture and biology, mean that humans and entially learned behaviour directly from one genera- their ecology cannot be understood without both bio- tion to the next allowed them to radiate in a few mil- logical and culturological sciences. Biological necessities lennia over the entire planet, with the exception of set up epigenetic factors that influence the perceptions of Antarctica. Humans alone of all life forms had escaped possibilities read by a human from their symbolic infin- dependence on slow genetic adaptations to an ecosys- ity (Wilson 1998).4 These biological factors cannot be re- tem. Creative groups learned how to deal with new duced usefully further than by identifying them, as did ecosystems, then taught their entire clan or tribe to use the ancient Asian schools of psycho-physical science, as this knowledge to adapt quickly to any environment, the three reaction potentialities of aversion, attraction, from icy blizzards to coral reef hurricanes. and bewilderment. These new powers integrated units of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people into millennia-sustain- 3In my extended paper ‘Humanity: The Sixth Kingdom’ (Allen able modes of life capable of rapid evolution to meet 2002), I give the rationale and need for a reclassification of humanity following the lead of Wallace, Huxley, Lorenz and new necessities or take new opportunities. If these others. Humans were classified when little was known about units grew past the carrying capacity of their local the geologic time scale and nothing about the seven million ecosystem, they replicated and split off new cultures, years of rapid evolution between the chimpanzee evolution each of which migrated to create its own history in a and our own. Our understanding of culture and our new ecosystem (Eldredge 1999).2 These new units neurosystem was minimal. The religiously defended status quo misclassification of humanity has led to dangerous rapidly co-evolved adaptive behaviours by competi- misunderstandings of the subtleties of both evolution and tion and co-operation between themselves to obtain all the scientific enterprise itself. (Paper delivered at the they needed from specific bioregions in each of the Institute of Ecotechnics Conference. Full text available at http://www.biospherics.org/humanity.html) 4Wilson (1998) states that ‘What is truly unique about human 2Eldredge (1999) points out how humans have been the only evolution as opposed say to chimpanzee or wolf evolution, is species in which populations have escaped being part of a that a large part of the environment shaping it has been cul- local ecosystem tural’ Allen: Ethnospherics 8

These cultures, each calling its members ‘The People’, to the demands to increase profits and the security of emulated species’ co-evolution in the ancient and pow- its financial centres. But a counter-force, a meta- erful animal kingdom by highly differentiating key culture based on the ultimate value of the human memes (units of word, attitude, and behaviour) from constant, has begun its autopoesis. Humans need and their neighbours. These differentiations allowed them to are creating an ethnosphere (see glossary) in order to stream their memetic flow down a channel, called tradi- stop destruction of the habitats and therefore the life of tion or history (Benedict 1934).5 Memes arranged in nearly all cultures and most large species. patterned symbolic codes, memomes, played the role in Malinowsky sought and discovered the necessary culture of genes and genome in biology. One’s cultural patterns that generated the ten thousand vibrantly body grew from the expression of the memomes as one’s diverse cultures, identifying organizational units that physical body grew from the expression of the genes and he called institutions, meaning that these sub-units these two bodies interacted with each other to form a had a recognized ‘charter’ that socially sanctioned stimulating diversity of personalities. their task and rules. These institutions included family Each of these self-organizing cultures existed self- structure, kinship system, clan, clubs or societies, sufficiently, but survival pressures also made them live courtship rituals, fishing, hunting, gathering, and craft in ecological balance with their surroundings, includ- groups, age grades, and sometimes tribe and even ing the adjoining cultures. To minimize conflicts they nation, as exemplified in complex inter-tribal relation- developed symbolically saturated or numinous bound- ships such as the Iroquois or Trobrianders. ary markers such as Mount Kenya for the Gikuyu. The These co-ordinated institutions allow groups as science called culturology or ethnology was founded in small as several hundred and as large as tens of thou- the late 19th century with scholars such as Fraser sands to satisfy all the many definite functions that (1996) who looked for underlying patterns in the must work together to produce an independent thousands of cultures. The entities possess definitive culture. These functions include fulfilling economic time, space, historical, ecological, and material vectors, necessities such as food, water, shelter, sex, reproduc- besides some underlying patterns, and therefore were, tion, tools, clothing, and the overarching political- separately and collectively, objects for scientific study. spiritual imperative to operate as a symbolic unity Malinowsky (1944)6 discovered a way to observe and without schisms when educating children, celebrating understand the functional complexities that hold a feasts, surviving famines, and confronting death, given culture together in its unique manifestation of disease, senility, ambition, crime, invasion, passionate the human constant. With some refinements, I use his eruptions, and seductive visions. basic perception that structural forms arise from the Malinowsky discovered three fundamental cultural recurrent fulfilment of functional needs as a golden institutions that can, in quite different ways, integrate key to observing and understanding cultures in their into a symbolic and practicing unity all the heartaches, integrity. With those heuristics, I examine the present headaches, stomach-aches, passions, and glories crisis of cultures that have lost their self-organizing encountered in the daily and seasonal economic life of functional integrity since falling under the careless and humans. These ways he identified as ‘magical’, ‘mysti- impersonal control of the technosphere (see glossary). cal’ (he called it ‘’), and ‘scientific’. These inte- The technosphere comprises the industrial world grative institutions must exist to make good the aches market system run by armed states backing commod- or ‘gaps’ caused by failures to deliver the goods in eco- ity production and consumption, economically depen- nomic institutions such as fishing, hunting, gathering, dent upon extracting free (not accounted as costs) clan, romance, or rearing children. These three institu- resources from the biosphere and its world of cultures. tions, albeit under many different names, must emerge That enforced extraction irrevocably degrades human in each culture to satisfy the three basic human reac- life and impoverishes the rich diversity of life forms tion potentialities of attraction, aversion, and bewilder- and is itself clearly unsustainable since it destroys that ment at points of ‘gap’, in order that the culture vibrate upon which it feeds. However, today this military- at its highest, most unified symbolic level and not industrial-media technosphere controls life on the schism under stress. planet independent of the human will, answering only Magic means effective ways of producing and re- inforcing confidence in leaders when gaps, such as 5Benedict’s 1934 classic makes clear the vast range of differ- a shortage of deer or a border conflict, happen. ences in behaviours and worldviews that can be found in cul- Magic, properly performed with living techniques (and tures magical techniques can quickly become fossilized), 6Malinowsky, because of World War I, found himself confined assures a confident, crystallized organic hope which for two years in the Trobriand Islands with an unparalleled chance to thoroughly immerse himself in one of the most aids in succeeding at any difficult task that needs res- complex cultural systems ever devised olute, attractive, even charismatic leadership, such as 9 ESEP 2003, 6–23

hunting or initiation of a new age grade into woman- and a taking stock. These meta-languages, intuitively hood. ensconced from the beginning in the culture’s daily People need science, that is, a good explanation to languages, founded six types of key institutions whose produce reassurance in cosmic order when gaps of dis- charters or tasks were to link economic with integrat- order from natural forces such as storms, earthquakes, ing institutions. History with stories, , and leg- famine and animal migration strike them. Otherwise ends told how this people became and remained The bewildering rumours and revelations threaten political People and why the kangaroo was their totem. The schism and economic paralysis. muse of Techne (see glossary) demonstrated by Mysticism deals with gaps that occur with deaths, master-apprenticeship relationships in what manner diseases, sufferings, uncertainties, and brevity of life, their tools, skills, and practical crafts must be applied with every kind of heartache, depression, and para- to hunt and eat the kangaroo. Politics told the how and noia, by inducing healing ecstasy transcending exis- why and who and which of their authority system and tential aversions. By uplifting the downcast physically sanctions enforced the rules of sharing the kangaroo. and emotionally, mysticism directly shows why and Art told how to gain and share delight in the kangaroo how, no matter what, everything still flows and life is metaphor through music, dance, and mask. Philosophy more than worth the living. told wise fables about personal contradictions and dif- Malinowsky adumbrated that inner know-hows of ficulties by using the character of the kangaroo as the magic (doing), science (knowing), and mysticism foil. Adventure praised heroes who displayed their (being) were too difficult to master for more than a few daring and cleverness in overcoming drought, heat, members of a culture, occupied as most members must long walkabouts and surprising catastrophes to suc- be with practical tasks of continuity. In addition, it ceed in the hunt and chase. So all the people grew up takes years of study to wield these know-hows in dan- knowing how to think, feel, and act with kangaroos. gerous discontinuities or gaps. The integrative institu- These linking institutions singly or together assem- tions therefore developed special languages to assist ble the entire people, elites, members, children, at those ready for initiation in learning these highly disci- cyclical moon, solar, or seasonal events, and on extra- plined methods. Societies of these initiates developed ordinary occasions. They reinforce each other. Art ren- in every culture to manage a set of intermediate insti- ders Politics attractive; Politics gives Art a free hand. tutions that linked, in an unbreakable mesh of regular Techne rescues Adventure; Adventure stimulates events, these very different daily economic and only Techne. History gives Philosophy material; Philosophy occasional crisis-integrating functions. shows History meaning. All six linking institutions rely Leaders created linking languages by taking words on metaphor, number, and metasymbolic rites to from the economic language and giving them two or produce unifying media, such as sitting in a circle, more meanings. To the initiate, water, for example, dancing around a fire at festivals, pow-wows, song might mean not only wet fluid, but also psychological trails, or courting rituals, to coalesce their effects. And subtlety. Unpromising literalists could thus be easily The People need these media to enjoy and reinforce sorted out from real candidates. So the language of their culture. By The People’s actions they give feed- magic became metaphor (literally unbearable – to a back on realities to the watchful integrative leaders. straightforward mind). The inner language of mystics These three levels of institutions made life sexy, developed symbolic systems with as many as seven reproductive, healthy, happy, enlightening, and com- different levels of meanings that the initiate must learn fortable most of the time for most of The People before becoming a master. The language of science (ethnos) in nearly all cultures. The integrative institu- became abstract number and form (Rees 1999).7 tions produced reservoirs of experience, creative In practice, a culture proceeded thusly: the economic imagination, and methods that could adapt diverse hunting institution found a specific kangaroo and impacts into their way of life. The linking institutions speared and butchered it for dinner. The magicians made sure that all the people, down to the smallest made a metaphor of the kangaroo hunt, often by danc- child, participated in creating details and vibrations of ing it in direct physical imitation. The mystics made a any new direction. Economic institutions provided story with several levels of meaning about their cosmic happy children, food, shelter, clothing, and security for totem, the kangaroo. The scientists kept counting the all. No one was unemployed or in jail, though real kangaroos caught and explored the geography and problem-types could be ostracized. seasonality of their habitual behaviours. Kangaroo This world of ‘ten thousand’ cultures, ecological dinner, therefore, was also a ritual, an enlightenment, masters of six continents and capable of extensive sea travel, flourished throughout the planetary gamut of 7Rees (1999) points out that ‘just six numbers’ underlie all challenges of an Ice Age, its melting away, and carbon modern physics dioxide changes. It allowed individuals to achieve Allen: Ethnospherics 10

heights of spontaneous experience through direct con- year-old Milky Way, the largest and most untouchable tact with eidetic dreams that could always find an sensual phenomenon, invited them, as it does us, to a objective correlative in the culture’s metasymbolic happy hunting ground for eidetic and autogenic magi- system that manifested in sculpture, painting, costume, cal, mystical, and scientific dreams. They had no idea music, and dance. This young world of cultures bril- that larger phenomena than the Milky Way existed. liantly interacted and prospered with a 4.5 billion- More importantly, they had little idea of where on year-old planet undergoing an ice-age cycle with a sea Earth far-off cultures lived, and, more ominously for that rose and fell four hundred feet, and calibrated in their future, what these distant cultures were doing, intricate cycles with the solar system. although up to six thousand years ago, what far-off cul- These cultures adapted to these changing conditions tures were doing was so similar around the planet that with the other dynamic denizens of their biosphere, tens knowing or not knowing made little difference. of millions of co-evolving species and over ninety phy- By six thousand years ago the cultures had long used lum or basic life forms that weighed a trillion tons. Their key inventions adapted to different bioregions, agri- hardy sustainable population totalled about five million culture or herding, calendars, three basic language in the thousands of cultural units. New Guinea today still families, breeding of genetic lines in plants and ani- claims seven hundred and forty-five languages, Nepal mals, a complex pharmacobotany. Some had invented seventy. Human cultures had exterminated many of the small prosperous, peaceful, classless cities where larger mammals with powerful spears, arrows and chase priestesses presided over wealthy integrative magic, techniques, but had reached an equilibrium state with number, and metasymbolic institutions. Techne was the remaining mammals, and even made partnerships everywhere an honoured linking institution and its with several species from reindeer to dogs. tool, basket, pot, rope, clothes, paint, medicine, and Their geosphere (see glossary) received its radiation boat makers sat in free and easy equality and even through clear skies unpolluted by their activities. On interchangeability with artists, storytellers, and the coasts the sun and moon produced cleansing tides authority figures. In a few desert cultures sussing out whose energy made estuaries and coral reefs irrigation, Techne already was regarded as first among extremely productive. Meteors, comets, moon, and equals. This period’s long presence is preserved in planets enlightened night contemplations and pro- near universal as ‘The ’ or . voked endless emotion, romance, and thought. This paradise was destroyed, its remnants hunted Meteors occasionally contributed special material for down in Mexican deserts, Amazonian jungles, Central tools of power. Time there was in plenty, because the Asian mountains, Southeast Asian lagoons and African cultures moved to different kinds and durations of time savannahs, but it took six thousand years of war and depending on the specific situation, including vertical hubris to accomplish this relentless crime. and volumetric as well as successive times. They had not forgotten that time was sacred, their unique sub- jective, home for their I, from which they competently THE REVOLT OF TECHNE dealt with their sacred space, their unique objective, AND ITS SUBJUGATION OF CULTURES home for their culture. However, these cultures could not locate the solar In the midst of this prosperous worldwide mosaic of system and the Milky Way in the cosmos because the cultures, each priding itself on its uniqueness, six cultures themselves seemed to be the cosmos. Their thousand years ago one of the six linking institutions, linear time began with their founders, who had no idea Techne, revolted from serving the integrating institu- of the billions of years that had been incorporated into tions. Its initiates stole enough magic, science, and mys- their bodies, symbols, bioregion and skies. This depen- ticism to begin their ruthless rise to power over the dence of their logic on material generated by their bodies of ecologically and symbolically balanced eco- senses, activities, and eidetic dreams and visions was nomic institutions. Certain nomadic cultures’ recurrent to leave them stunned when hit by the technosphere’s raiding parties on peaceful agricultural towns gradually panoply of power and knowledges perceived by ‘read- restructured their economic institutions as war parties. ing’ technical instruments and algorithms (Heelan Succeeding in war depended on technical superior- 1983).8 The inspiring appearance of the seven billion- ity and upon making a mystic-, magic-, and science- saturated integrating institution. Venus had to be 8Heelan (1983) shows that the reading of technical instru- persuaded to drop Vulcan for Mars. War parties ments operates all the same perceptual activities as reading extracted annual tribute of livestock and grain from the human sensual instruments, but the thermometer or spec- trometer give data inaccessible to the human senses. There- cultures that produced surpluses. After a millennia of fore, the cultures must all access this know-how or must con- these raids, Techne made its awesome ultimate inven- tinue to deal with more extensive powers from outside tion, a megamachine, an armed state, which, wielded 11 ESEP 2003, 6–23

with ferocity by the developed war institution (Mum- magicians, mystics, and scientists, resulting from ford 1997), unleashed amoral power upon the planet encounters with these empires. In that record, despite like the infamous genie in the bottle did upon the being partisanly written from a definite fixed idea, one unsuspecting but greedy fisherman. can trace the complete pattern of evils suffered by cul- This megamachine, the armed state and its orga- tures adjacent to expansive megamachines. Drought nized economic expansion by conquest, was Techne’s and famine induced their small ancestral pastoral clan supreme invention that dominated or destroyed the to accept largesse from the superior techne of an integrating institutions in its conquered cultures. From empire (granaries, orderly distribution). As their num- its beginning, Techne’s megamachine enriched its bers increased from one of their clan member’s giving founding raiding cultures by giving them eminent them full access to this food surplus, they formed domain, tax, and flaunt from the conquered cultures twelve tribes which that empire oppressed as a state- that they turned into slaves. But Techne has perfected less and unarmed nation of specialist slaves, makers of its beloved Frankenstein’s power for five thousand adobe brick, hewers of wood, and drawers of water. years since Uruk and Egypt made the first glittering The Hebrews rebelled under a fierce magical and prototypes. Techne has organized theological and mystical leader who led them into an inhospitable ideological indoctrinations to control minds, industrial wilderness for forty years, where he organized their revolution to exploit geological strata of buried carbon, lives with his science of Numbers. There, Moses and thorough medical and psychiatric assessment to regu- his close associates in magic, mystery, and miracle late populations, secret armed police to arrest dissi- invented new linking languages for initiates to re- dents, aerial and space surveillance of cities and integrate this battered people. For them to escape neighbourhoods, censored and corporate-serving being enslaved again, he added Techne’s organized media to control information distribution, mass war system as the fourth integrating institution, but destruction weapons to terrorise, an arbitrary rejected its pride and joy: the armed state. To replace Caesarean calendar with moons eliminated (Arguelles the armed state his new system of metasymbolic and 2002)9 and a treaty-enforced world market to ensure allegorical writings instructed them how to align that its commodities wipe out non-money-based pro- personally and collectively with his jealous and wrath- duction. ful mystic power into an armed religion. His new The new war states quickly made their war parties algorithm scientifically numbered and organized the into standing armies to control the resentful poorer now-warlike tribes into assigned conquered territories classes at home and the seething conquered masses as The Chosen People serving this powerful God. A and threateningly ambitious rival states abroad. new metaphor, The Promised Land, gave The Chosen Strategically gifted war leaders destroyed rival war People a magical program. Its leaders gained confi- states to build empires, super states that exploited not dence and charisma carrying out such a definite pro- only multiple cities and tribes but also smaller client gram, space limited, but eternal in time. states who were spared occupation and even cut in on Carefully planned successive victories over the the loot. eighty cities they planned to occupy transformed them The conquering culture’s war, market, and imperial into a conquering rather than a conquered culture, as Techne directed overall regional integration to which described in the book of Deuteronomy. Killing, as ‘breeds without the (conquering culture’s) Law’ were ordered, all their captives, except for sparing the forced to adapt. Megamachine supervised ‘universal’ young women and infants in order to increase their dogmatic and tried to stamp out local sym- own numbers, the twelve tribes soon occupied their bolic religions by making long lists of laws they called assigned separate areas of the targeted desirable terri- morals to reinforce the state. Naturally, such unjust tory they had depopulated. While they had eliminated and severe exploitations evoke fear and provoke several cultures, they took over their agricultural infra- rebellion, so these empires have risen and fallen with structures intact. regularity for five thousand years from revolution In spite of these conquests, this People did not want within and assault without, but Techne steadily an armed state to rule over them. They decided to rely evolved its megamachine from selective pressures of on volunteer war parties from the armed tribes and these deadly competitive empires. their elected chiefs’ (called judges since they now had The ancient Hebrew culture left us a two thousand a written law) baraka. However, their relative power as year long historical record of drastic and deadly an armed tribal religion declined against an armed changes in their economic functions, lineages, tribes, state to the west whose Techne kept evolving by maintaining its growing sea trade against pirates and 9Arguelles (2002) demonstrates how calendars are a major competitors, and who eventually forced them to pay conditioning device for large-scale human behaviour tribute. Allen: Ethnospherics 12

In response, these People demanded an armed state Independent institutional self-integration of a cul- of their own with kings, priests, standing army, and ture’s own system without a state is almost impossible police, and then they defeated their enemy’s expan- today because the world market, based on marginal sion. But they split into two kingdoms for causes reach- utility profits, aggressively pushes its products and ing back to a feud in their tribal lineages. Defeated armed states’ power into every area of life. Techne totally by a new empire to the east, one of their king- controls key integrative, linking and economic deci- doms and ten of their twelve tribes disappeared from sions in all these areas. their history into servitude. The remaining kingdom The key decisions, which are taken in secrecy since was defeated by a yet newer and subtler empire. The 1974 by seven leading states (the G-7) with the agree- People remaining were then sent into exile to labour ment of an eighth, are enforced on the peoples of the once again as a slave nation. planet by binding treaties signed by a compliant ‘elite’. Yet another larger empire overthrew that empire, and Today, UNESCO lists only seventy very small cultural shipped The People back to their Promised Land as a groups as out of contact with the world market, the last client state to aid in the spreading of its ritual doctrine of remnants of the ten thousand self-integrating cultures good and evil. But with new inventions from Techne and of six thousand years ago. These seventy are forced led by a genius at warfare, a state from the northwest ever further back into the ever smaller forests of with a flair for inventing new battle formations and cities Amazonia to escape their local empire. abruptly conquered that empire. These self-confident This triumphant Techne and its pampered offspring and philosophic conquerors left The People in place in War, the largest business in the world, now cascade order the better to increase its numbers by acculturating invention, production, marketing, and financing them to their fabulous and gleaming civilization. Then through interlocking corporate, educational, and yet another empire, whose God was War itself, fero- military complexes devastating whole biomes and ciously conquered those brilliant masters and extracted their cultures with a single policy directive under the taxes from The People until they revolted and re-armed code word ‘development’. Five thousand years after their religion. After administering a crushing defeat to the first war-based states introduced their no-holds- The People eighteen hundred years ago, that empire barred exploitation of natural and cultural resources as scattered them throughout its cities as stateless exiles, their ultimate science, humans around the planet have not as slaves but as merchants (Josephus 1984). been alienated from most of the creative results of their These types of brutal events, experienced by thou- love, labour and thought. They have seen their ways of sands of cultures by the end of the first three thousand life wrecked by commodity supply and demand cycles years of the megamachine, still lay in the future for driven by profit maximization. Cultures are ransacked thousands more cultures located in high mountains, for ideas, plants and techniques that can be turned into deep forests, far-off islands, and fierce deserts where business for little or no payment. Even sacred cere- Techne still could not prevail against the scientific monies are sold to entertain tourists. guerrilla tactics, mystical unity and confident magic of By the end of the 19th century, this genie of Techne an integrated culture. The New Guinea Highland completely escaped the possibility of control by any clans, for example, fell only in the last half-century to a single culture, even the most powerful. A handful of conquering Techne war, missionary and market. The states armed with battleships, trains, machine guns, tribes of the Congo and Zimbabwe and Zambia fell and dynamite quickly divided the planet into imperial only a century ago. The difficulties of Hutu and Tutsi zones to absorb their production and to supply more co-operating in a state subservient to the world market raw materials. Commodities were now shipped by only replicate the patterns of Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa Financial Capitalism under a handful of imperial in Nigeria, of Chinese, Malays, and Papuans in flags. Indonesia, and of a hundred other neo-states. Techne’s new empires of Financial Capitalism Since Techne already controls their mineral and tim- quickly defeated all previous imperial models of Mer- ber resources and shunts these products throughout cantile Capitalism in which goods were made by local the world for its own profits and progress, the new capital, but which were then exported and imported by states mostly remain too poor to make their own pro- the mercantilists throughout the conquering empire grams. They are strong enough only to guard the new and its colonies. America eliminated the Spanish multinational owners of their cultures’ formerly sacred empire; Japan pushed the Russian empire to revolu- landscapes, now bulldozed to make mines, oil and gas tion; the British looted the Chinese, broke up the Turk- wells, logging devastations, coral reef destroying fish- ish, and exploited the Iranian empires. This handful of eries, tourist hotels, and chemical agricultures. The centres now owned all key means of production and new states are so weak that their masters often change infrastructure. Local capitalists became rare. If they to first one and then another tribe’s war leaders. couldn’t become agents, locals might sit all day behind 13 ESEP 2003, 6–23

a small stash of coconuts or bananas to sell a few. ‘You The technosphere finished organizing its planetary can’t stand in the way of Progress.’ structure to exploit the entire biosphere and all its cul- Magical leaders, mystical symbolists, and scientific tures when the last of the imperial total wars backed pattern discoverers of the Ten Thousand Cultures fled off before reaching its apocalypse by settling on a com- to fringes to escape disgrace or worse by relentless promise in Korea in 1953. It finished its prime symbol conquerors. None of the three ancient integrative insti- and operating base, the New York World Trade Cen- tutions could handle the chasms gouged into tribal ter, in 1973. Cities growing at exponential rates to tens economics by Techne’s planetary-scale War Finance. of millions of people became its main product and The end of the old systems became clear to all when power base. Swarms of computers and a blizzard of Kitchener with his railroad supplies obliterated the oil-using vehicles took care of their demanding trans- intense mystical power of tribal Dervishes at Omdur- portation and communication systems. Energy ex- man, and the imperial magicians and brilliant martial cesses polluted and heated the skies (Snyder 1984). arts scientists of the Chinese Empire were machine- The Pentagon and NATO provided expertly armed gunned down in the Kung Fu War. states to put down secession from and rebellion against This new force can well be called an unleashed the world market’s commands. The Berlin Wall fell in genie, for it proudly operates independently ‘of human 1989 and the Soviet Russian empire disappeared. Rus- will’ under an ‘invisible hand’. Conflicts over which set sia and China joined the world market and unchecked of empires should run the world’s War Finance Techne ruled the planet with ever more chaotic and machine in the name of Techne ignited two world wars unsustainable expansionism. One of its apologists in the first half of the 20th century. Germans, Japanese, declared that history had ended. Russians, English, French, and Americans, each The terror in this shoddy triumph of the anonymous hoping to establish their New World Order, threw their profit-maximizing Crassuses aspiring to be Caesars is superbly disciplined industrial machines into these that they consider nature and cultures as free and in- Total Wars, devastating to all but Techne. Techne exhaustible goods. Techne does not include Nature’s flourished, developing atomic bombs, biological and and cultures’ losses in its profit and loss accounting chemical warfare, missiles, nerve gas, the global systems. So every ‘raw’ material, wood, fish, mineral, market, electronic funds and information, the World soil, rock, oil, gas, coal, animals, plants, idea, piece of Bank and the World Trade Organization. scenery, and colourful costume that Techne discovers, Techne’s world market financiers, organized armies inventories, and turns into a commodity, becomes risk- and advertising-controlled media now openly claim that free game to hunt down and devour. ‘Ten Thousand’ they are the integrating institutions, although disinte- Corporations rule the ‘Ten Thousand’ Cultures. All grating cultures and war on the biosphere are their main newspapers have a thick business section. None has a occupations. Nonetheless, two total wars between su- human cultures section or a biosphere section. Driven perbly organized empires made clear that the last two off their homelands and farms, nearly all the able- would-be world empires had themselves become too bodied among the 6.5 billion humans, headed toward small to handle this infrahuman power of turning nature ten billion in twenty years, struggle for jobs with and cultures into money. Of the last two world empires Techne keeping the cost of labour commodities low left, the Russian fell when its own deprived peoples dis- and replacements of missile fodder easy. assembled the deadly façade, only to be immediately co- Thus, the Technosphere, writing and enforcing its opted by the world market system. infra-human will, wages its ruthless market wars The American imperium, pretending to its people to against the biosphere under its own dynamic laws of still exist as an independent force by executing a series growth and change, contemptuous of cultural and of expeditionary campaigns, directly serves dictates of ecological context. One dynamic law, for example, is the world market by protecting a ruthless lot of that computers will double their speed every eigh- transnational oil and mineral producers. Its leaders, teen months until they reach their physics-deter- elected in mercenary circuses, cynically offer up their mined maximum. When I was working on part of own people and ecology as tariff-free guinea pigs to Admiral Rickover’s atomic submarine projects, he Techne’s merciless test of new products, many pro- insisted that we design our metallurgy on properties duced by poverty-stricken refugees from ecological that extrapolation showed would be available when disaster zones. So-called American international the submarines went into production three years corporations take their money off-shore to avoid Amer- later, not the properties at the time of design. He ican taxes that might benefit American people, while insisted, and rightly so, that the increase of these insolently demanding American lives to defend their properties could be extrapolated and counted on like high-handed oil, mining, logging, and manufacturing gravity, without knowing who would produce these operations that have alienated local peoples. results. Allen: Ethnospherics 14

Of course, the Technosphere needs a people also, rai, nor fearless Dervishes could keep out commodities however unfulfilled they might have to remain. It has backed by artillery. created its own worldwide supporting culture, Global- These explosions of power, which easily defeated Tech, whose experts ‘fix’ any gap by ingenious mea- imperial cultures with large standing armies, merci- sures including subsidies, loans, derivatives, two lessly exploited from tribes who had no state at all, only bought-and-paid-for Tweedledum and Tweedledee magical warriors to deal with World Finance and its parties which split voters into interest blocks, bank- take-over schemes. Aborigines in their dreamtime, ruptcy, blockades, mass firings, mass immigration, and Trobrianders and their Kula ring, Hopi with their kiva dispatching elite volunteer armies when all else fails. and rain dances, Bora with their jaguar and anaconda Those who fill GlobalTech roles originate from any one visions, and Buganda with their lovely shambas were of the Ten Thousand Cultures or from within. In either forced to watch sacred land seized. case, they must be acculturated at a tested university to Leaders of their integrative institutions were discred- fill specialist roles to the letter (‘professionally’). ited, exiled, jailed, even killed. Their children were If any retained too much of their local culture they often removed to a technospheric mission or state might not act with professional impartiality in crises centre for re-education. Some cultures were not only carrying out financial orders, but with their own rendered headless while being forced to give up their values. The Lakota at Wounded Knee or the Zapatistas resources but were then physically destroyed. None- in Chiapas or the Frontiersmen at Ruby Ridge in Idaho theless, for two hundred years Techne’s century-long or the women in Nigerian oil regions fought without predictions that the last member of x or y tribe will calculating the present value in dollars of such actions have been seen in twenty years have mostly proved against arbitrary power, and so do many others. false. The rise of the Lakota a second time at Wounded GlobalTechers have to hire, fire, prosecute, jail, Knee is only the tip of the iceberg of these ingenious supervise and know how to call in backup power, and heroic, though incomplete, survivals. always staying ‘objective’. But to perform these oper- Techne cannot rid itself of the need to pretend to ations in cold blood on people, they must be possess a science of community, magical confidence, conditioned or seduced to see cultural opposition as and mystical mastery of hardships and losses. Techne ignorant, backward, and preferably evil. They have to must secure the consent of some humans to rule, and be induced to see destroying forests, coral reefs, and each human, no matter how professional, encounters wetlands as something ‘we all have to live with.’ staggering gaps in life that only these three methods Bankers, security experts, production bosses, reduc- address. To deal with these gaps and at the same time tionist researchers, city planners, and chief executives extract its profits, Techne produces scientific pills to must build no local loyalties. They must pack up to split dull every pain. Its magic puts out roaring metaphors elsewhere when so ordered or fired. They never know of Thunderbirds and Cherokees, Giants and Bears, to when they may be ordered to move or when their jobs deal with any doubts. Its mysticism gives massages for will be terminated. On arrival wherever, whenever, emotional horrors and Prozac and astrological expla- they must support whatever has been done by nations for life problems. whomever. They will be evacuated by military aircraft My own culture, integrated by institutions led by if the invasion becomes suddenly untenable. masters of Franklinian inventive science (the tooled-up Modern Financial War first shattered the thriving barn), Thoreauian mysticism (wilderness areas), and cultures that hosted it. This explosion of steam Jeffersonian magic (checks and balances on the state), engines, national banks, and specialist division of shrunk as did its most worthy opponent, the Plains labour operations first blew apart the cultures of Eng- Indian alliances. Both took savage hits from the chem- land, France, and the Netherlands. A bitter proletariat, ical clouds of the farm factories and the Commodity a divided nation, was created from this process and Exchange that smogged and paved over American spread to the United States and Germany, which both landscapes after the Total Wars. began to build world navies to gain entrance to China However, total extinction did not usually occur when and other desirable markets and raw materials. Rival- the technosphere took over a given culture. ‘The ries between these states’ expansionist activities human varmint is the cleverest varmint there is,’ said destroyed the old-style mercantilist imperial mosaic Old Man McCoy when asked how he had survived a cultures in Spain, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, China, and savage feud. Food, shelter, clothing, and sexual oppor- Japan. Russia (1905) and Japan (1868) were taken over tunities continued to be obtained, though at huge by revolutionary converts to Techne before their capi- costs. Sometimes they came in greater quantity, with tals were occupied and their new governments enthu- much less quality. Sugar, flour, and alcohol replaced siastically joined in the race to take over ‘backward’ meat, roots, and herbs; prostitution often replaced regions. Neither Cossacks, nor Great Walls, nor Samu- complaisance. These necessities, once thought to 15 ESEP 2003, 6–23

require whole apparatus of integrative and linking and proselytes, and often these people find their lives institutions co-operating with the economic functions easier and better off in the Techne world. Also, many in a local nexus to assure their satisfaction, now cultures offer comparatively limited lives to women, appeared to arrive from powers both unknown and who often feel they do much better to find some posi- unknowable to the village leaders. Cargo cults arose tion or man in GlobalTech than accept a culturally that waited for airdrops. Sacks of flour appeared some- ordained lower status. At times greedy chieftains, how to those who co-operated. Shoes, shirts, pants, whose powers are limited by their local integrating dresses, underwear, and baseball caps arrived in the institutions, are offered a tempting deal or face per- Mato Grosso; tin roofs gleamed in New Guinea high- sonal threats or both and may sign away the rights of lands; affairs, marriages, and children continued, med- their culture for payoffs. icines came to treat old deadly diseases. Those who After the culture’s land has been sold or stolen, its fought for a nostalgic return to the old ways often came magically and mystically obligatory maintenance to seem somewhat fanatic and out of touch with reality. duties end. The limitations of its local ecoscience Techne thus conquered the world of peoples and become all too clear when the highway, power line, recruited reinforcements for its GlobalTech culture, dam, or radioactive waste arrive, but anyone can still the human increase from the pick of ever more do well materially if they practice the GlobalTech refugees from bulldozed homelands. Techne began its science of discovering causes that effect money. In the own ecology for its new people with intercontinental old integrated culture one learned through a continu- jets being the centrepiece. Being an inveterate adven- ous apprenticeship many skills, like how to carry out turer in cultural matters, I once travelled around the reciprocal obligations and deal intuitively with world without leaving GlobalTech’s hermetically surrounding nature and people to make one’s living quantified system just as if staying in a local village and help the clan. that you could walk around. I kept my costs and But industrial-engineered job operations can be incomes balanced. You never have to get out of the quickly learned without apprenticeships, and if you Transit area at the airport or an adjacent free port. You get hired to repeat these simple operations, some of can go to meditation, sleep in a hotel, buy, sell, consult, this money magic arrives weekly. Walk to the city and communicate, read, write, publish, work out, meet in hustle odd jobs. Move around to hot spots. Here today your club, make friends, flirt, loaf, obtain medicines, and gone tomorrow. Some learn how to do business whatever you wish. deals. Cut down trees and sell them, re-plant the clear Techne requires no remembering of lengthy kinship cutting with one imported species of faster-growing systems, clan obligations, vision-inducing ordeals, or trees, let machines dig deep into your land, let big inescapable rites and ceremonies to perform, except ships cyanide and dynamite your fish out, let branded being always ready to prove your innocent non- hotels brand your beaches or mountain ridges, raise terrorist identity and to make some money. As a credit cash crops, and buy packaged food. And there’s card carrying member with a computerized identity always burglary for guys and nightclubs for girls. from one of its accredited member states, you have no Those first to adopt these attitudes and take these worries and access to a lot of action. Just don’t get fired, actions become leaders who, backed by the local state laid-off, war-damaged, depressed or wrecked, fall into or one of the world market’s corporations, are often a stress-induced terminal illness, be abandoned by larger and better-paying than the cash-strapped state. your significant partner, betrayed by your stock broker, It becomes dangerous to question these new leaders or break down and turn to heroin or alcohol. since they are officers of the new economics and the How did the technosphere get into these targeted new law and police system. The neo-state, being vul- cultures to recruit members? It found openings into nerable to civil war, is hostile to local cultures and their every culture like a flood leaks into every basement passionate nostalgia for the past. because every culture has its basement, its chandalas, GlobalTech tourists arrive to bask in well-advertised those who find the local norms too difficult, unreward- ruins which confirm that history is on their side. They ing, even oppressive, and who have therefore been grimace at the poverty-stricken and smile back at the socially stratified at the bottom of the heap or else beaming smiles of the new success stories. They turn thrown outside. To get a job in the market system, a sacred land into cheap photographs. In Sulawesi, the chandala need only produce the eight hours a day new leaders build low-wage factories that make low- appearance of minimum conformity because the life- cost clothing. In pueblos, tribal leaders build a busy time village check-out of give and take and being cool casino. They move to a world city for their primary does not prevail in the genie’s cities where out of sight residence if they can make their get-away, otherwise is out of mind. Advance scouts for Techne seek out they move to their local state’s capital. Send back some chandalas and outsiders in order to gain information money to the kindred to keep things going for them till Allen: Ethnospherics 16

they wake up to reality and get a job. Practically every- save and improve the best of their culture with data one in the culture by this time lives on money, not the and insights from the Mars explorations, their distant land, and buys nearly all they need. As poverty and friends on the Internet, the theory of information, insecurity increase, the World Bank’s gross national works of the avant-garde, and contemplations of other product shows an increase in wealth since it counts worldviews and exotic divinities. They discover world only wages, not growing and weaving your own! history, where their culture forms but a single thread, With each luxury tourist hotel, the technosphere but discover also that each thread gives its colour to the adds another hundred or so square miles to its domain weaving. They discover the amazing throng of human- and GlobalTech gains a thousand new members. Only ity in which each shares the human constant. a relatively few square miles remain on the planet that Techne’s new uniform public schools, devoid of the genie does not control. Even in hold out areas air apprenticeships and dull with indoctrination but with and waters change their equilibrium composition in all student types, allow them to experiment in relating step with the chemical additions from the technos- with others and with themselves. Techne’s pace of phere’s spew. innovation forces the young to think and feel for them- Linking institutions that connected the culture’s selves and to question out-of-it authority figures to get economic institutions with its integrative institutions in touch with what’s really happening. Some partici- lose their purpose in the general disintegration. Their pate in the mysterium tremendum aroused by the most promising members must seek jobs or essay a qualitative implications of stupendous images in the small enterprise in the world market where they must media, contemplative fallout from the technosphere’s follow the fashions rather than commune with the ceaseless probing of space, time, and matter for archetypes. These thinkers, artists and doers now exploitation. Some find their subconscious constellat- watch their bottom line and not the faces of their ing new archetypes of desirable desire, perhaps trig- audience to judge their work. gered from Hollywood films or by far-out behaviours Techne has transformed from delightful muse to the emanating from strangers passing through, eager to most destructive god. It refuses to share power, and study their culture. Some try out bizarre and even therefore every culture of a people now knows Techne violent cure-alls. must be toppled from its supremacy to save itself. Some now access their superconscious more easily Many of its own acolytes realize that Techne consumes due to the market’s dissolution of tight secret societies their lives to fuel its careening path even as it con- of mystics and their consequent releasing to the sumes nature and cultures. Their lives, like the rest of marketplace of distillations of their many methods. nature, are considered a free good except for their Somewhat freed from mullahs’ arbitrary decrees, able labour costs. Though they get paychecks, they too are to move freely throughout the world, authoritative paid only marginal utility prices and are callously dis- Sufis reveal the meanings hidden from inquisitors and carded the moment they cost too much on the present torturers by seven locks in ancient texts. Freed from value charts. the restrictions of tribal sanctions, shamans show aspiring and promising part-time apprentices from wherever how herbal knowledge, a special space, and EMERGENCE OF THE ETHNOSPHERE mind discipline can heal and enlighten. New sub-cultures openly challenge the market However, many people, though diminished by these mano a mano, creating technical innovations to assist losses of a rich and varied inner life, outer companion- its own forms. One of these created the personal com- ship and a beloved ecology, have expanded their geo- puter and another the Electronic Frontier Foundation. graphic and cultural horizons by exile and migration One created the Haight-Ashbury cauldron of experi- for survival. Always on the lookout for help, they vastly mental lifestyles in 1967. One, the situationists, put increase their intellectual horizon due to Techne’s new energy into France in 1968. Greenpeace made a spin-off discoveries of cosmic realities. They contem- place for thoughtful direct action on the ecological plate the quantum, quark, atom, molecule, microbes, front line. A few crashed sensationally before they took evolution, biosphere, geosphere, billions of years of off, but designers went back to work, utilizing the time, and billions of light years of space. They learn to learning curve. The energy and know-how that cre- ‘read’ thermometers, telescopes, GPS, and computer ated the Ten Thousand Cultures era still bubbles up systems and thus discern scientific entities like total from the human constant, manifesting spontaneously systems from their enriched perceptual hermeneutics in right times and right places with right people with (Heelan 1983). right skills. Porto Alegre in Brazil held the first world Under survival pressures, their minds open and grow social forum on ethnospheric issues such as sustain- rapidly. They sharpen and deepen their struggle to ability and cultural justice in 200l, the same weekend 17 ESEP 2003, 6–23

that the world market’s Economic Forum on profit life-long dramas that transmit the renewed culture on growth met in Davos, Switzerland. Porto Alegre drew many levels. A Rama festival on the Ganges will last a over l0 000 self-organizing participants from around month. Succeeding in the many-sided scenes and the planet and it needed no extra police protection. themes of the Kula ring makes a central drama to Cultural institutions can be precisely studied by enlighten and enrich all the years of manhood for a means of recurrent phenomena analogous in function Trobriander. Many dramas last all night. In themes, to genes in the biosphere. These elementary units, propositions develop into fields of discourse. called memes, might be a word, an idea, a value, a Among the Huichol, the dancers at the annual three- quality, an emotion, a gesture, or a sensation. Memes day sacred unifying ceremony are choreographed by compose the organized complexities of cultures, just as Artists and harmonized by Authority and Philosophy genes of various kinds direct the creation of the manifesting as the Marakame sitting in the midst of the innumerable types of organisms in the biosphere fractal swirl. Unarmed but strong and skilful warriors (Blackmore 1999).10 All the memes of a culture could of a stateless Techne protect these Artists and Philoso- be called a memome, an analogy to genome. phers. The whole ceremony is authenticated by their Individual meme carriers activate their meme vocab- legendary History, whose initiates bury their ulary to interact briefly in choreographed exchange. mnemonic talismans beneath the sacred fire in their ‘Hi.’ ‘Hi.’ Or with a three-phase handshake. However, stone temple so the mementos can be brought out sometimes meme carriers meet to make a scene. before the tribe once every five years to verify the old Scenes are higher-level phenomena that meme car- and polished stories. riers create to achieve an objective. Scenes commence The several great themes or dramas of the culture, and end when the number of carriers changes, by car- guided to their all-out limits in wildly different aspects of riers making or ‘splitting’ the scene. Two carriers might the human constant by their brilliant directors, must be meet to use memes charged with emotional energy to integrated on the highest level by producers of scientific, attain different objectives connected, say, with love. mystical, and magical dreams. These dreams, without The entrance of a third carrier with the objective of which a people withers, have the power to spark a par- revenge leads to a very different scene. Scenes vary ticipation mystique unifying individual, group, and ani- widely from culture to culture, each drawing on a mate nature, no matter how diversely and strangely the given culture’s store of memes. The exigencies and dramas may manifest in minds, on a stage, or in the midst flairs in scenes often spontaneously create new memes of lives. The Eleusinian Mysteries celebrated the most where needed or desired. In a scene, word memes contradictory tragedies, satires, and comedies. This ex- develop into propositions. traordinary unity in diversity made Athens the school of Scenes form the nuclei of actions deployed by a cul- Greek cultures. ture’s institutions to attain overall objectives of produc- The actual dream masters usually don’t reveal them- tion, reproduction, and significance, the yet higher selves directly but are content in their daily rounds to level of dramatic themes. The Theme of Fishing in appear as actors and/or directors in scenes and dramas Komodo now includes the drama of conserving and taking place in functional or linking institutions. These enjoying their glorious reef competing with cashing in masters act in the dream worlds of their culture by on fishing with dynamite and cyanide and marketing invisibly contacting geometric dreams of knowledge, to Hong Kong. The Theme of the Lineage in most cul- multi-valued dreams of total cosmic symbols, focused tures now includes dramas of separations caused by dreams of total analogic magic, and then bringing migration to the world cities and the struggle over about the proper unifying celebration. In these dreams, returning to the home village to set up a school with fields of discourse are gathered into concentrated the earned money or of disappearing into the world of knowledges. business. A theme’s uncertainty and conflicts necessi- Cycles, not growing profits and populations, had tate creating complete dramas whose through-line been the integrators’ talisman from the beginning. builds all its scenes to climaxes that cathart pity and They always closed their magic circles except, terror or dispense bacchanalian laughter and love. perhaps, for a small chalked line, leaving the circle A composer or director first masters by living open to some necessary but occasional adaptation to through a suite of scenes of sufficient raw material to the new. However, these profound cyclic knowledges weave one of these ‘in-life’ dramas. Skilled directors left the dream masters almost helpless when Techne compose these scenes into satisfying hours, days, even hurtled humans toward a Faustian infinity which turned into hyperbolic disaster. Both the universe and dream masters prefer spirals to circles and hyperbolas. 10Blackmore (1999) shows how memes and genes are similar not only in function but in being shaped by the same evolu- Integrative dreams exemplified in living masters and tionary processes institutions emerged and coalesced to brilliant coher- Allen: Ethnospherics 18

ence more than ten thousand times over fifty thousand sure (magic), wealth (science), and daily program years from the heart’s desire of millions of humans. (mystical unity): kama, artha, and dharma. The three Living in the synergy of a vibrant culture’s dreams, a dreams integrate in a radiant dream (), or true human lives happiness. One attains the rank of being knowledge about all phenomena, namely, that each recognized by your fellows as a real Lakota, or real perception notifies the arrival of reality, even the Tibetan, or real Berber, or in my case, a real Frontiers- screams accompanying the occasional balcony sway- man. All cultures have some variation of the saying ‘it ing from the juggernaut’s impact. takes one to know one’. And, at this level there is no But this powerful work of Newari art is as nothing East nor West nor North nor South when exemplars compared to the technospheric juggernaut controlling from different cultures meet. a population of billions, wealth of trillions, dams creat- Beyond that wonderful stage, some realize that deep ing inland seas, atomic bombs and poison gases, space emergencies activate this coherence in every member ships monitoring opposition, and cheap flour and elec- of their culture. Thus incredible cultural feats rise in tronic circuses to divert incipient revolts. This new glory, such as Dull Knife of the Northern Cheyenne, juggernaut bulldozes multitudinous experience-laden who returned with his whole people to his homeland cultural byways into a few monotonous superhighways despite ferocious imprisonment and battles. Such as populated by machines whose dreamless proliferation Xenophon who brought his Ten Thousand safely to the poisons our skies. Black Sea fighting the massed power of the Persian However, millions of aroused humans struggle Empire. Such as the recent destruction of the Black against this litany of darkened but once shining cul- and Red Empires of Destruction by The Peoples of the tures designed by and for the human constant and Earth. Such as the dauntless escape of Tibetan culture endeavour to create a world synergy of cultures. This over the Himalayas. ethnosphere is composed of those from any culture, However, these marvellous dreams, dramatic new and old, who understand that hatred of a foreign themes, life-drenched scenes, significant memes of the culture paves the way to one’s own demise and who Ten Thousand Cultures, have been thrown on The have developed a common language to see the total Market which coldly assesses them as well as lands, system, planet, biosphere, and cosmos in which they people, forests, and coral reefs for their exact marginal exist. They also see their common threat from the utility to investment. Even legendary dreams are cari- remorseless market whose devouring of nature and catured to wring out profits in stage sets for Club Titil- culture is protected and enforced by armed states. lation. New disciplines like Ecotechnics – the ecology of tech- Techne does not recognize eidetic dreams springing nics, and Ecolonomics – the ecology of economics, help forth from the human constant aligned with biospheric them work out a common field of action. They aim to conditions to guide a people in an integrating action, coordinate the ten thousand centres of meaning with but calculatingly designs illusions based on standard- the life-enhancing portion of Techne while stopping its ized sense impressions, which are dependent upon wanton destruction. branded industrial geometries to sell alienated individ- This ethnosphere is now self-organizing, catalysed uals compensatory images carried by its products. by disenfranchised masters and apprentices in the old Techne’s market masters determine the rate of style integrative institutions, aided by many experts in exile changes needed to keep frustrated humans ever shop- from the old linking and economic institutions in their ping for happiness in their fabricated fantasyland. cultures and by disillusioned drop-outs from Global- These statistically calculated illusions produce a clever Tech who tuned up, turned off, and dropped in. This simulacrum of a real culture: CEO’s hawking magical synergy has evolved in an accelerated manner since fixes and formulas, bankers mystically aligning every- 1967, when significant new memes, based on percep- thing by present value ratios and marketers scientifi- tually dealing with Techne’s wilful disasters at the cally measuring buyers’ susceptibilities to a new Logo same energetically conscious level that one must deal by using formulas discovered by Jung, Freud, and with hurricanes, volcanoes, droughts, first developed Pavlov: archetypes, libido, and conditioning. on a planetary basis. San Francisco, Prague, Tangier, The Newari in Patan construct a formidable wooden Paris, London, Katmandu, Oaxaca, Goa, Ibiza, Cuzco, juggernaut by using memes and scenes from their sus- New York, Kyoto, and Bali were some key concentra- tainable economic institutions. Artists decorate and tion points. Movements and attitudes (cool), percep- choreograph and adventurers pull it careening down tions (dig that), emotions (groovy), thought (far out), narrow streets of brick houses to demonstrate the mys- diet (organic), clothing (with it), education (unforced tical dream of Shiva-Kali, creation-destruction. This but carefully observed), life (green), style (hip), heuris- demonstration assists all the people in accordance with tics (grokking), technics (eco), and music (rock and their understanding in realizing the dreams of plea- roll) could and did travel anywhere on the planet 19 ESEP 2003, 6–23

within hours. Meme transfer around the planet’s apart- als from these cultures regained their freedom of self- ments, studios, parties, estates, and remote areas by determination. This intense school of life gives pro- electronics backed up by jet travel took no more time found and cosmically ranging experiences. than it did in a 10th century Sussex village, or an l800 These new kinds of heroes and heroines transcend the circle of Lakota tepees, or a 1900 circle of Bemba old bioregional isolation and empirical local scientific thatch huts. ideas that, however useful in their original context in The ethnosphere synergy, as a new level of complex- architecture, medicine and agriculture, could not mea- ity beyond the technosphere, dates from McLuhan sure cosmic time, space, fields, and energies. They (1967) perceiving a Global Village (as distinct from the quickly understood that old cultures lacked the global Global Market) acting with its new maxim: think know-how to deal with ruthless intrusions from mili- globally, act locally.11 Tens of thousands engaged in tarised commodities and apparatchniks. These limita- creating the ethnosphere bought his books recogniz- tions of local knowledge and history, no matter how deep ing exactly where the author was coming from. their roots, had proved the downfall of those magnificent McLuhan recognized that the Media was the real Mes- powers when confronted by GlobalTech, which, operat- sage, not the market’s specific advertising. Techne ing on a planetary level, always outnumbered and out- debased language itself, quantified to cost per second, massed any local counterattack. Resistant centres were with its marketing euphemisms. Advertising decon- reduced or destroyed one at a time. The independent structs to a basic virus commodity spread to weaken cultures were divided informationally from each other resistant cultures. and therefore ripe for conquest. ‘Making the scene(s)’ with these interesting new Furthermore, the old Ten Thousand Cultures, for all memes became a planet-wide norm of behaviour com- their extraordinary achievements, could not perceive peting in every region with ‘buttoned down’ Global- past the natural powers of humans and their local Tech norms. Gaining skill by making a vast array of cultural and bioregional framework even though their experiential scenes, many groups began to create from masters knew how at the right time and place to raise these scenes an ensemble of thematic dramas for the themselves to godlike radiance, delight, and discrimi- ethnosphere such as saving endangered cultures, nation. At special ceremonies they could even raise species, forests, coral reefs, artists, neighbourhoods, entire communities to a transcendent state. None- waters and airs. Others created synergistic moods, theless, even in the highest states of consciousness and ideas and behaviours that increased awareness of delight, they had no technical instruments to see Techne’s text, pretext, subtext and context. Thousands beyond their local bioregions to the biosphere. They of artists such as Hendrix, the Beatles, Burroughs, could not see past the sky to the galaxies and quanta or Coleman, Garcia, Warhol, Fellini, the Living Theater past their orally transmitted history to include the total and Theater of All Possibilities seceded from Global- human enterprise. They could not see past kinship to Tech’s ideological and emotional strictures. free association. They could not see the infrared and Artists, philosophers, and explorers’ tireless touring hear the ultrasonic and thus tune in on the entire ani- of the emerging ethnosphere gave it a planetary style. mal kingdom’s environment. They could not see the Coleman spoke of a new world music and incorporated total world of cultures of which they were members. elements of Yoruba, Jajouka and Baroque into his Only the technosphere’s sense-extending instru- compositions. Philosophers like Fuller (Idea and ments take humans past percepts limited by their Integrities, 1969) and Shah (The Sufis, 1971) showed organisms. Techne’s profit-driven expansion created how apparently opposing conceptual schemes, if as a by-product this common worldwide scientific attuned to reality, could synergize. Adventurer- language about previously undreamed-of cosmic enti- scientists like Shultes, Davis (2001),12 Earle, Alling, ties and forces such as biospheres, electrons, quanta, Sullivan, Head, Titov, and Aldrin showed how to and galaxies. Now, every questing member of the explore the entire world ocean, world rain forest and ‘rainbow of cultures’ (Levi-Strauss 1961) can share in a solarsphere space and bring back needed knowledge cross-cultural synergy and free thought of scientific to humanity without becoming a commodity. understanding while fighting for his/her essential By fighting in thought and action against industrial- bioregional magic and participation mystique. military-spiritual aggressions, free-thinking individu- Many of the young in battered cultures now operate on the Net and clue themselves in on pearls hidden in matrices of hype. They wise up to creative implications 11 McLuhan (1967) emphasized that new planetary communi- of the new science evolved within the matrix of Techne cations systems allowed oppressed local regions to break out of their ghettoes as well as to sinister implications of its economics. They 12Davis (2001) brings out in a way that cannot be evaded the see that cosmic principles, discovered by profit and ravages being inflicted on the most poetic of cultures war-funded science, can be exapted to help a common Allen: Ethnospherics 20

understanding arise between all cultures. These peo- wishes, and labours to attain somatic power, psycho- ple form the avant-garde of the effort, while many social intelligence and personally coordinated net- elders fight brave rearguard actions to preserve works in order to create the next generation and its continuous manifesting realities of the Ten Thousand milieu. Elders need, aspire to, and ripen wisdom to Cultures. These visionary youth and wise elders are transcend and shape their entire cycle from beyond creating a planetary transvangardia that gifts their death to before conception and thus channel cosmic local cultures with cutting-edge sensibility. challenges into local goodness and beauty. Scientists increase who accredit themselves by The market now exploits all these stages of the securing independent means and setting up their own human life cycle as product opportunities. Techne does corporations which integrate with nature and cultures. not recognize much use for the final life stage except to They enlighten their local communities, building new sell costly painkillers and, on this count alone, is con- informational sciences to serve self-organizing com- victed as a supreme traitor to humanity. In fact, it force- plex systems like the biosphere and ethnosphere. fully retires humans entering this stage out of mean- These new actors multiplied when direct coercions ingful roles into hangers-on, casting them to act out like the Berlin Wall, the Politbureau’s KGB, and the isolated and desolate scenes as idle and expensive Maoists that directly suppressed cultures in nearly a consumers until they disappear. Techne does not third of the planet were peacefully overthrown by their encourage humans at any stage to realize that they are peoples led in unprecedentedly sophisticated and ends-in-themselves, the essential task of human cul- peaceful revolutions by cultural dream masters like ture. The old integrative institutions had magical ways Havel and Sakharov. Networks linked institutions, to achieve youthful life-long personal identity. That artists, historians, adventurers, non-governmental identity reached back long before birth and forward organization leaders, and free thinking philosophers long after death. They had scientific ways to order nat- such as Gilmore, Barlow, and Kapor at the Electronic ural processes to satisfy metabolic Techne. Their sages Frontier Foundation, Lanier who envisioned virtual generated mystical algorithms to unify all life and reality and Lugari who made the Columbian commu- dreams and to make visible in their flesh prowess that nity Gaviotas from life-based technical breakthroughs. served to guarantee objective hope to those still strug- All are leaders in ethnospheric integration. Heuristic gling on their hazardous paths. projects such as Biosphere 2, the Eden Project, and As the ethnosphere began to self-organize over coral reef and rainforest reserves began to span the the last fifty years, resourceful and desperate people planet. Realization spread that a genuine option exists began to mate the new cosmic knowledges spun to restore Techne to her dance as a thrilling Muse to off by Techne with golden wisdoms from their dam- deepen human perception, while ending her chilling aged but resilient cultures. Skilled practitioners of dictatorship over nature and dreams. these ever fresh dreams now explore and practice Techne exacts its highest price from humans by dis- reciprocal maintenance with their counterparts from rupting and truncating their life cycle (Erickson whatever culture. They mutually explore the new 1982).13 Humans that fall under its ceaseless pressures cosmic-planetary-biospheric-social ocean revealed by no longer have the time to generate the psycho-sexual, Techne’s legerdemain without forgetting that they psycho-social, and spiritual skills needed to create ful- each have different home ports. New eidetic dreams filling lives. Enough for Techne that humans serve as a now directly show adept humans ways to adapt the labour commodity, intellectual or manual, no matter technosphere’s discovery of great entities of the physi- how they are ‘nickel and dimed’ out of leisure and cal universe to the human constant. instinctual well-being. Skilled harbingers are introducing into the world of A human’s psycho-sexual stages, oral, anal, and cultures their almost fatally missing element, a practi- genital, and the latency period of games, groups, and cal understanding of their common interests, the development of competencies by mimicry need unreg- ethnosphere. The Bora shaman analyses oil industry imented time, space, and cultural resources to develop behaviours with the Harvard anthropologist while he without excessive repressions, denials, and splittings. initiates her into the powers of the Jaguar’s world. The Youth needs, longs for, and strives for a romantic world New Guinea clan leader discusses sustainable agricul- of intimacy, comradeship, and individual quests to dis- ture with a visiting Australian ecologist and teaches cover an identity and fashion a lifestyle that can him hospitality. A Middle Eastern Sufi sheik learns integrate the projective ecstasies and transference information theory with a philosopher at Cambridge dynamics of full oncoming sexuality. Maturity needs, and clears up the metaphysics of archetypes for him. An Aboriginal elder studies geological formations 14Erickson (1982) details the vulnerability of the human to with a French geophysicist and shows her how to manipulation in early life stages walkabout through a harsh desert. A Russian atomic 21 ESEP 2003, 6–23

physicist discusses quantum phenomena in light with a nese society are not allowed to disappear but are kept Zen master in Kyoto who shows him quanta in mind in balance with the rupiah money economy (B. Lietaer action. Such fascinating meetings are threshed out in unpubl.). Ethnospheric economics aims for topline eager conversations with friends by the principals. No profits in biomass and biodiversity and for the peoples one who has sampled these delicious fruits ever forgets doing the work or supplying the resources, as well as the taste and searches for more. for bottom-line profits needed to maintain and improve This rapidly self-organizing world manifests its capital stock. Ethnospheric peoples, aiming to exist as growing powers in hundreds of tribal and cultural an end in themselves, become consciously co-operat- leaders cooperating in actions to create communities ing partners with the biosphere. Productive and high- and collective institutions to counter takeovers and morale small teams, creative task groups, know where wreckage of their lands and lives. It throws up inspired and how their products are used and they responsibly leaders of non-governmental organizations such as guide the probable cascade of consequences from their Nature Conservation, Save the Orang-Utang, Save the actions. Rainforests, The Planetary Coral Reef Foundation, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, and hundreds of others. It consciously rivals the intensity and unity of STEPS NEEDED TO COMPLETE THE the greatest events of the past by producing self-coor- ETHNOSPHERE dinating people’s events such as The Oregon County Fair, Glastonbury gatherings, commemorative vigils in The ethnosphere’s evolution is subject to all the pre- Mexico City and Johannesburg, great Amerindian viously emergent selection processes: catastrophic, nat- pow-wows, the gathering of Mountain Clans in New ural, sexual, cultural, and economic. Its selected muta- Guinea, and peaceful demonstrations for no pre- tions are intentional humanity-wide dissemination of emptive war by millions synchronized on the same day inventions and modifications in memes, scenes, around the world. themes, dreams, and ecolonomic and ecotechnical sys- The ethnosphere communicates in planetary networks tems aimed at making a meta-culture capable of re- of affinity on The Net and cell phones that go around of- turning Techne to serve humanity and its biospheric ficial channels, punctuated by celebratory ‘meatspace’ matrix. Those mutations that can’t meet those criteria get-togethers in special clubs and outdoor locations. are selected against by the ethnosphere. Thus integra- Alert witnesses activate it with handheld digital cameras tive masters in old and new cultures, from ten thousand recording moments of Techne’s brutality to be put on traditions, escape ancient curses of self-isolation and The Net and rectified by ethnospheric condemnation. limitations of local empirical science. By recurring Culturally diverse coalitions of millions of unpaid indi- again and again to work in this manner, they create viduals activate it to stop devastations of dolphins, rain- new integrating structures devoid of fossilized magic, forests, and humans from impoverishing its future. superstitious mysticism, and reductionist science. Many members of the dominant GlobalTech culture The driving force for these masters are their peoples’ revolt from being exploited and wasted. Although hatred of the divide-and-conquer processes of an obtaining high pay and perks, they must huddle from imperial commodity system that devalues and destroys the worst impacts of their master in leafy gas-guzzling humanity’s non-monetary achievements and possibili- suburbs, gated communities, security-intense labora- ties. Nearly all cultures now try, by all means available, tories, mines, oil rigs, underground communication to exchange alerts with others, to assess technical centres, tightly-guarded hotels, remote islands, and threats and opportunities, and to co-operate with fenced free ports. Its key members endure unceasing whom they can to liberate the human constant. pressure. Even top executives are often tossed on the Creative groups endeavour to create a complete scrap heap at an arbitrary age or as a scapegoat or for science, a knowledge including the developing sci- illness. Even top capitalists are often defrauded from ences of complexity like astronautics, geospherics, their fortunes. Realizing this silent desperation and biospherics, and technospherics. For example, bios- finding their conscience, the best often drop out or pherics can integrate genomics, ecology, pedology, work from within to join the ethnospheric processes. botany, zoology, bacteriology, culturology, linguistics, Confronting the issue of runaway economics climatology, palaeontology, archaeology, evolution, directly, inspired people have begun forming new physiology, epidemiology, biochemistry, biophysics, institutions such as tribal corporations, small loan catastrophe theory, and other specialties into a power banks, farmers’ markets, and sophisticated bartering greater than their sum, a grasp of life’s synergetic func- and auction systems to replace the purely profit-ruled tioning. Then dream masters of science can once again world market where ‘every man has his price’. properly serve humanity as the guardian of Techne, Time/money systems such as Nayahan Banjar in Bali- rather than its slave. Allen: Ethnospherics 22

This tremendous task of restoring human tempo objectives (Vernadsky 1986).15 Its task groups will and biospheric regard requires creating a compre- reconstruct the technosphere in the interests of the hensive feedback system, the cybersphere (see glos- peoples who will form a freely thinking humanity, the sary). Cybersphere must synergize essential informa- ethnosphere. However, cybersphere without noos- tion affecting the ethnosphere and biosphere from pheric guidance might be seized by GlobalTech wherever it emerges, but its basis will be the per- states to monitor and suppress the evolving ethno- sonal enjoyment of robust freedom in conversation, sphere. speech, music, movies, theatre, and publications This Noosphere, so needed by the peoples, will be abetted by the power of The Net (Brown 2001).14 helped to arise by prototyping and establishing a Above all, building the cybersphere will depend on biospheric base on Mars, because that environment individual humans, guided by necessity and opportu- will tolerate only the most intelligent design and life- nity, continuing to develop new perceptual capacities enhancing behaviours. Conserving Antarctica, coral whose memes are widely spread by marvellous and reefs, rainforests, wetlands and diversity everywhere revelatory documentaries of cultures, species, ecolo- will also help to form this bold and compassionate gies, and planets. intelligence. The cybersphere must more than mirror the on-going The creative abilities of Ten Thousand Cultures actions of Techne. It must comprehensively anticipate fighting with new strategies to regain their vitality difficulties and catastrophe and sound wake-up must not be reburied from within by quixotic endeav- alarms. Measured effects must include climatic ours to return to hermetically sealed and heavily change, sources of poison build-ups in the atmosphere armed cultures. Transforming into the synergistic and water, dumping of wastes, spread of diseases and ethnosphere, local cultures must gain and maintain invasive life forms, dust bowls, deforestation, and trig- easy access to cosmic science and to world history. In gering of earthquakes. All uses of force and finance to some cultures distorted by conquest and fears basic eliminate cultural and individual evaluations and feed- human rights must be restored to women. Much of the back need planetary alarm procedures. For example, violence that recurs towards all women arises from a Biosphere 2 demonstrated a proto-cybersphere contin- few cultures that keep women non-educated and uously reporting its atmosphere, hydrosphere, wastes, forcibly ghettoed. ‘Perceive cosmically, think biospher- biomass production, species status, system chemistry, ically, feel historically, act locally’ will be the motto of waves, winds, diets, health, and workload. this multi-centred synergetic civilization. The planetary cybersphere must especially give The American frontier freedom-and-fun lovers land- direct feedback to ethnospherians on what goes on ing on their own two feet wherever catapulted, the during large-scale projects, even those underwritten Lakota sundancer’s vision quest and resolute identity, by the peoples’ consensus. The inevitable occurrence the Balinese daily achievements of beauty and com- of catastrophes when even well-intentioned projects munity, the Tibetan sage’s radiant continuity of are not continuously and publicly monitored led to the phenomena, communication, and situation, the engag- discovery of the Law of Unintended Consequences. ing French savant’s savoir faire and connaitre, the Therefore forecasts of the range of effects of all large- Afghan Sufi’s free-wheeling self-alchemy and poetry, scale projects must be continuously recalibrated. The the Huicholes’ choreography and mystery, the introduction of a single new molecule, water drilling Yoruban cool and passion and thousands of resplen- technique or genetically altered species to the market dent exemplars of humans-at-their-best exist as price- can initiate a tidal wave effect tensing the biosphere’s less ends in themselves. These lifestyles continue to be web of causation and threaten serious breaks. This cherished and nurtured, but now vibrate their unique- completed cybersphere will enable the geo-bio- ness to a planetary beat. Out of many, one. techno-ethnosphere ‘physicians’ called for by Lovelock This ethnosphere is now the patri-matrimony of all (2000) to go into action. I would rather call them plane- us humans. Fluid culture after fluid culture, perme- tary trouble-shooters, but it’s the same idea. able, evolving by stern competition with unleashed Beyond the cybersphere, whose creation will be a Techne, win ever-new cohorts by their free and easy defining task for the ethnosphere, glimmers a func- ways. Techne cannot destroy the human constant and tional world of intelligence, utilizing all findings of therefore new adepts continually spring forth. Humans art, science, and history, the Noosphere (see glossary), grow ever more skilful to enjoy and defend their which will embody the ability to achieve necessary synergy.

14The annual Worldwatch Institute reports are forerunners of 15Vernadsky (1986) believed that only a Noosphere could Cyberspheric-type books that will give an accurate ‘big fully protect the biosphere from Techne picture’ 23 ESEP 2003, 6–23

CONCLUSION Like antibodies, these multitudinous actions heighten human immunity to cancerous expansionism. Creating Necessity creates new organs of perception, so both this fulfilling co-evolutionary meta-culture, a sky-fed experience and ancient wisdom tell us. With the meta- reservoir of ways of life, restores the epic arc and poetic culture a new organ of perception is now available to aura to us humans. It gives us a realistic way of life, pro- all humans. More of us see the unity of aspiration and cesses in which our ethics, our esthetics, our episte- creativity underlying ethnic diversity. More of us mology, our cosmology, our dharma, our way, our zen, morph about the planet in more cultural situations with our savoir faire, our mana, our tao, our taraqat, our more grace and less bumbling. More of us cannot be science, our technics, our common sense can flower. bought and sold and more work out flourishing ways to Creating a working ethnosphere with Techne as its ser- live. More of us form lively corporations, not to sell vant is humanity’s grand opportunity and historic task. them out to exploiters after a good start-up, but to use these versatile inventions for beneficent aims in a relaxed market aiming only for profits compatible with Acknowledgements. Elements of this essay were originally sustainable ways of life. This competitive and co- prepared for discussion at the 2002 Institute of Ecotechnics operative system can gradually replace the armed Conference on the Ethnosphere at Les Marronniers, Aix-en- states and bank-controlled corporations. Provence, France.

GLOSSARY LITERATURE CITED

Biosphere — About 3.8–4.0 billion years ago, a sphere of Arguelles J (2002) Time & the technosphere. Inner Traditions life began to be formed around the geosphere, penetrat- Intl Ltd, VT, available at www.growinglifestyle.com/ ing throughout the lithosphere, atmosphere and hydros- psearch/Manufacturer/Book/Bear_and_Co/ phere. Vernadsky (1986) considered this entire volume to Benedict R (1934) Patterns of culture. Houghton-Mifflin, Boston, MA be the biosphere. The biosphere’s activities greatly affect Blackmore S (1999) The meme machine. Oxford University the composition of water, rocks, and air, which in turn Press, Oxford influence the evolution of the biosphere. Brown L (2001) State of the world 2001. WW Norton, New York Cybersphere — The rapidly emerging penetration of fact Davis W (2001) Light at the edge of the world. Douglas & and value-based feedbacks about what is happening on McIntyre, Vancouver planet Earth and inner space throughout the ethnos- Eldredge N (1999) The pattern of evolution. WH Freeman & phere, composed of artifacts and networks. Co, New York Ethnosphere — The planetary system of intercommuni- Erikson E (1982) The life cycle completed. WW Norton, New York cation between human cultures that the technosphere Fraser J (1996) The golden bough. Touchstone Books, rendered not only possible, but also necessary. The Eth- Carmichael, CA nosphere or human value system and patterns of new Fuller B (1969) Ideas and integrities. MacMillan, New York behaviour penetrates throughout the previous planetary Heelan P (1983) Space-perception and the philosophy of sci- spheres. ence. University of California Press, Berkley & Los Angeles Geosphere — While the earth is actually an oblate Josephus F (1984) The Jewish war. Viking Press, New York pheroid, the word sphere has been universally adapted Levi-Strauss C (1961) World on the wane. Hutchinson & Co, to indicate its approximate geometry. Geologists consider London that the geosphere has three external physical spheres: Lovelock J (2000) Gaia: the practical science of planetary an atmosphere (of air), lithosphere (of rock), and hydro- medicine. Oxford University Press, Oxford sphere (of water). Malinowsky B (1944) A scientific theory of culture. University Memes — Units of behaviour including ideas, words, of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC skills, and gestures, that operate in cultures much the McLuhan M (1967) Understanding media. New American way genes do in organisms. Memes are transmitted by Library, New York instruction and imitation. Mumford L (1997) Myths of the machine. MJF Books, New York Noosphere — Vernadsky (1986) defined the Noosphere Rees M (1999) Just six numbers. Orion, London as the planetary operation of human intelligence (ethnos- Shah J (1971) The Sufis. Anchor, New York phere and cybersphere) permeated by all knowledge of Snyder TP (1984) The biosphere catalogue. Synergetic Press, arts and sciences. The Noosphere has not yet emerged, Santa Fe, NM but since intelligence means the ability to achieve goals, Tattersall I, Schwartz J (2001) Extinct humans. Westview the creation of such a sphere is the primary task facing Press, Boulder, CO humanity today. Vernadsky VI (1986) The biosphere. Synergetic Press, Santa Techne — One of the nine inspirational muses of Greek Fe, NM metaphysics. Used here as the personification of the Wilson EO (1998) Consilience: the unity of knowledge. Alfred genius of the technosphere who has tried to promote her- A Knopf, New York self from the co-operative muse to a runaway goddess. Technosphere — The sphere of human-made artifacts, in- Editorial responsibility: Mary Batson (Managing Editor), cluding molecules, throughout the Biosphere with the Oldendorf/Luhe, Germany Agricultural Revolution. Today the Technosphere, like the Biosphere, penetrates throughout the upper spheres of the Submitted: March 3, 2003; Accepted: April 4, 2003 Geosphere and affects the composition of all life forms. Proofs received from author(s): April 30, 2003 Published on the web: April 30, 2003