Look at that glorious thing. It's not pitiful at all. It's not even lonely, spinning around at the edge of the Solar System with her homies Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra, and a million Kuiper cousins not so far away. The Sun is not just a distant star there; it radiates light that is possibly 250 times brighter than the full Moon radiates on Earth. It has water ice frozen into mountains; Charon has a Grand Canyon. Judging from the lack of craterization, there has been geologic activity. It's a a very long way from Earth; it took two years for the New Horizons satellite to reach Jupiter, and eight more years to reach Pluto. nothing that happens there will ever involve Earth.
I also see that there are no sentient beings on that planet, or at least it's very unlikely. Also, I see that water way out there could be quite useful in about 2000 years when people start to arrive, and there must be a lot of minable material there. A few quarries, a little extra methane; who's to complain if we show up and re-fuel and do a little mining, except the Goddess? And she has her own ways of getting even. She'll let us know if she doesn't like us using Pluto and all the other planets as terraria for us.
If we keep on like we are here on Earth, we'll be a heavily-armed brinksmanship fractured society awash as always in ferocious ideological war in a few hundred years, but somehow, like now, we'll be pulling it together enough to continue exploring space. It's logical to think that we will begin to import our wars and feuds out there along with out colonists and miners. Maybe one group of men will war with another group of men over the especially luscious prospects, like Europa and Mars. Is it cruel of me to say that I would prefer to see an unpopulated Europa sacrificed in the next apocalyptic war, instead of Earth? or is it just Realpolitik?
The Earth might have an opinion here. She might say, Great! I need the relief. Human women might echo that, because it is increasingly looking like male violence will never be ended on Earth so long as there are human men - it is part of the XY makeup, and they will continue to make women (and themselves) suffer. This is the large conclusion of scientists and thinkers from every field of knowledge, the best understanding we have, notwithstanding the ideological pressure to pretend violence can be entirely socially engineered away.
We do all agree that biological predispositions can be partially ameliorated, minimized, with social engineering. Freud seems to have argued that this is primary reason for "civilization" and its institutions. One function of human marriage has most certainly been to manage male violence by keeping men as busy and satisfied as possible, offering them their own women servants and sex partners, a chance to reproduce, along with the honor of working for the Man from sunup to sundown, not to mention channeling young men who haven't entered that institution yet into war service as desired by the Man. Add to the rewards of marriage, the duties of family support, conscription, the necessity of working, and the easy availability of prison, and you pretty much have covered the efforts we have made.
It's still not enough, though. One pillar of marriage has crumbled: women's cooperation in these faulty systems of controlling violence. Women are sick of war, sick of being under the thumbs of their masters, sick of an economic system that gives the Man all surpluses and keeps their families artificially poor, resulting in massive crime and misery, and sick of life-destroying crimes like rape and murder that never, ever stop.
None of the mutifarious theories of violence I have read about seem to fully grasp the sources of violence (which to my mind is a stop on the aggression spectrum) or offer a real solution. There is no single cause that explains kicking a cat, dropping Agent Orange on Vietnam, trash-talking the challenger in your next boxing match, shooting your neighbor because his fence impinges on your plot of grass, torturing a fellow student with electric shocks in a research context because you can, shouting down your wife, and fantasizing a horrible revenge on your boss that you don't act on.
It must be admitted too, and this must not be minimized, that aggression in the broad sense is what has brought us bridges and airliners, advanced surgery, and the birth control pill. I am expanding the definition of aggression now to include that driving force to expand outward, to build, to dominate and develop Nature for human benefit. It's Shiva's conundrum; aggression is Creator as well as Destroyer. I think it's safe to say that men will never agree to let go of aggression (with future medicine, for instance) in this larger sense because the loss of the creative aspect of their Aggro God would be too much. If they know they will end both the creation and the destruction, I think we all can assume that humanity will be packing it in as a whole.
Many women may reluctantly agree. Aggression (which, again, becomes violence in its more intense form) will always present these two faces.
What are women to do about this intolerable situation for them? Many men too are well aware that violence is directed more at other men than at women, and would gladly find some very narrow solution other than locking up every able-bodied man from the ages of eighteen to twenty-four.
I have an idea, but first I would like to make one more observation.
In my lifetime (and I still have living to do), my country, the United States, has experienced a speeding-up of technological and social progress that causes us all to live barely holding on by our fingernails. I saw the Equality Revolution; I was there as animal rights, children's rights, Earth's rights, women's rights, disabled people's rights, and yes, trans people's rights, became serious issues of human discourse for the first time. I saw the Information Revolution lurch into being and rapidly smooth itself into a whizzing marvel that has changed every traditional social paradigm I can think of. I saw the Globalization Revolution begin and develop despite the resistance.
And I saw in my lifetime, I believe more importantly than any of these revolutions, every single planet in our Solar System explored by human-made instruments. I have looked upon the surface of Pluto this week.
So here is my idea: make this exploration humankind's mission. Stop wasting money on Earth wars, extracting depleting ores from an exhausted planet, playing stupid resource-wasting consumer games. Spend all our spare money on the future. Spend it on getting us out to the other planets. Spend the money used for bomb research on looking for a faster-than-light drive. Colonize. Dominate. Extract. Rape. Do your thing, Aggro God. Focus men on something huge and wondrous, the aggressive conquest of space. Space won't mind (at least not our local planets, they're unpopulated).
And we, the collateral damage in the old wars, the inferior sex, the unaggressive, the haters of suffering, the historical objects of the sadism that comes from frustration and unsatisfied longing, will benefit. Point men toward space and away from controlling and dominating this planet and its inhabitants, who really can't take much more. Get started now, because with the way progress is speeding up, those new weapons currently in development will swiftly put an end to men and their exploits (and collaterally, women).
The only way out is Outside this little box of domestic violence, rape, control, discrimination, and all-around dominating that will otherwise only get worse.
Many women may reluctantly agree. Aggression (which, again, becomes violence in its more intense form) will always present these two faces.
What are women to do about this intolerable situation for them? Many men too are well aware that violence is directed more at other men than at women, and would gladly find some very narrow solution other than locking up every able-bodied man from the ages of eighteen to twenty-four.
I have an idea, but first I would like to make one more observation.
In my lifetime (and I still have living to do), my country, the United States, has experienced a speeding-up of technological and social progress that causes us all to live barely holding on by our fingernails. I saw the Equality Revolution; I was there as animal rights, children's rights, Earth's rights, women's rights, disabled people's rights, and yes, trans people's rights, became serious issues of human discourse for the first time. I saw the Information Revolution lurch into being and rapidly smooth itself into a whizzing marvel that has changed every traditional social paradigm I can think of. I saw the Globalization Revolution begin and develop despite the resistance.
And I saw in my lifetime, I believe more importantly than any of these revolutions, every single planet in our Solar System explored by human-made instruments. I have looked upon the surface of Pluto this week.
So here is my idea: make this exploration humankind's mission. Stop wasting money on Earth wars, extracting depleting ores from an exhausted planet, playing stupid resource-wasting consumer games. Spend all our spare money on the future. Spend it on getting us out to the other planets. Spend the money used for bomb research on looking for a faster-than-light drive. Colonize. Dominate. Extract. Rape. Do your thing, Aggro God. Focus men on something huge and wondrous, the aggressive conquest of space. Space won't mind (at least not our local planets, they're unpopulated).
And we, the collateral damage in the old wars, the inferior sex, the unaggressive, the haters of suffering, the historical objects of the sadism that comes from frustration and unsatisfied longing, will benefit. Point men toward space and away from controlling and dominating this planet and its inhabitants, who really can't take much more. Get started now, because with the way progress is speeding up, those new weapons currently in development will swiftly put an end to men and their exploits (and collaterally, women).
The only way out is Outside this little box of domestic violence, rape, control, discrimination, and all-around dominating that will otherwise only get worse.
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