CHAPTER II

PLURALISM VIA-A-VIS CULTURAL CONFLICT:

MRINAL K. DASGUPTA

ABSTRACT

Man is both a biological species -- a product of evolutionary biology -- and a cultural entity consciously and not so consciously self-created. He has subjected himself to self-imposed contradictions and has not been able to secure freedom from the forces of nature. Geographic isolation leads to reproductive isolation which diversifies and stabilizes gene pools into strains and races and, further, into species as a continuous process forced by habitat instability, migration, etc. Cooperation within similar entities and competitive exclusion between and within them operate at all levels of biological hierarchy. Social distances encourage cultural and reproductive isolation in human society. The evolutionary process is particularly slow among humans, due to their complex biological and social nature.

The crisis from within and outside society breeds cultural conflict. At all hierarchical and stratified levels, it has been increasingly nurtured by the progress of human civilization, clearly borne out by man's cultural, racial, linguistic and religious, not to speak of political, history. For instance, no institutionalized religion is sympathetic to non-conformists or non-believers. In crises, a centrifugal fundamentalism is promoted within both majority and minority. Tolerance is merely a quiet and transient meeting, feasible without perturbation or stress. Values are created by conscious against subconscious instincts, desires and acts. The value system is created by the beneficiaries of the status quo, only to be dislodged by the newer dominant forces. The biological solution to cultural conflict as a biological problem could be mass interbreeding across all natural and manmade social divisions, toward establishing a common human culture with a common religion of man. But nature and society abhor such homogeneity, and variation emerges as antithesis, as order can exist only in the midst of chaos. Striving for a truly civil society -- pluralistic, moral, ethical, just, stable, equitable, sustainable, and symbiotic -- with nature is and shall remain an unending process for the millennia to come.

THREE BASIC CONCERNS AND THREE BASIC CONTRADICTIONS

Since the earlier days of human culture man has had three basic philosophical concerns: self, creation and nature. Through the pursuance of civilizations from these three basic concerns have emerged three basic contradictions.

(1) social-psychological-ethical -- between man and man -- cooperation, co-existence, reciprocal altruism vis-a-vis dominance, repression, acquisition, and competitive exclusion;

(2) economic-cultural-ecological -- between man and nature -- communion vis-a-vis dominion, exploitation vis a vis integration, and linear development vis-a-vis sustainability;

(3) intellectual between man and manmade -- intellect, creativity, hypothesis-building, intuition, wisdom vis-a-vis their material and non-material technology, knowledge and information. Symptomatologically, these basic and antagonistic contradictions appear as innumerable non-antagonistic contradictions in the social and psychological superstructure operating at the subconscious and conscious levels. In times of crisis they become strongly antagonistic. Some of these can be enumerated as reductionism-holism, mechanism-vitalism, analysis-systems thinking, religious fundamentalism, tolerance, consumerism, etc. Man has lived much less than any extinct species. As in biological evolution, no less often in social evolution successful intruders dominate in a succession that takes place unendingly. Will man excel any of his extinct predecessors that marauded the earth with a collective conscience and consciousness?

Notwithstanding the individual efforts and successes, albeit with limited impact on the society at large, civilization has nurtured all three contradictions.

The trend is not going to be reversed in the foreseeable future unless a superior force sets in -- not merely the possibility of a holocaust but a real danger of extinction of the species. Nature -- the Gaia (read, the laws of nature and society) -- is active and takes revenge. It has not been unknown to the greatest intellects but could never be perceived by more than the few. "All actions take place in time by the interweaving of the forces of nature, but one who knows the relation between the forces of nature and actions, sees how some forces of nature work upon other forces of nature, and becomes not their slave." (Geeta, 3, 27, 28, trans. Juan Mascaro [Penguin, 1962]).

Even the dangers of industrial civilization were not intuitively felt by many in the early 19th century. Engels wrote, let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature; for each victory nature takes its revenge upon us (The Dialectics of Nature). The imperfections of reductionism were also evident only to the gifted intellect. The analysis of nature into its constituent parts was the fundamental condition for the gigantic strides in our knowledge of nature during the last 400 years. But the method of investigation has left us as a legacy the habit of observing natural objects and natural processes in isolation, detached from the vast interaction of things (Anti-Duhring). When Rabindrananth Tagore (1922) spoke of (human) race suicide he referred to the contradiction between city and village, the latter being turned into a maid servant from the status of wife, as a consequence of the urbanization, resulting from industrialized civilization. The seminal ideas of the ecosystem cobweb of life, holism (as opposed to reductionism) and sustainability -- are to be found in these writings.

Man himself will put a limit to growth when the currently preferred technological quick-fixes, viz., economic, environmental and cultural imperialism -- sugar-coated in the name of democracy, peace, a uniform and just social and political order throughout the globe -- will be exhausted. Economic growth creates competitors among the exploited in order that the market be not squeezed, and in turn snap the lifeline of the exploiter. Thus the USA is concerned over Japan. The G-7 nations hope boundless markets in China and India will be chilled once these become as industrially advanced as are they themselves. To contain Russia, the political and economic pressures imposed are not in consonance with a pluralistic spirit. By the same logic the exploitation is hierarchical, working in a long tenuous chain -- the rich extorting the poor, the poor searching out the poorer. This is operative between countries, between economic values and social cultural groups in a society, and even between individuals. The evidence is too great to cite. Is there any sign of "pluralism" in practice?

On the other hand, wisdom lays stress on the new realization that seeks harmony and synchrony among three equal and equidistant forces each of which contain sub-contradictions, viz.

(1) Social-moral--psychological factors is ethics and morality vis-a-vis institutionalized religion, social institutions, social goals, social engineering in a holistic system vis-a-vis parochial perspectives; culturally imposed values vis-a-vis instinctive urges, culturally imposed trends and fetishes; pluralism vis-a-vis cultural conflict, etc.

(2) Economic factors -- production systems -- capital-intensive vis-a-vis cooperative market -- multiplying growth and development vis-a-vis sustainable development with distributive justice and social security, energy-exhaustive vis-a-vis energy-efficient systems, etc.

(3) Ecological factors: resource-exploitative and exhaustive vis-a-vis resources preserving and generative; species selective and extinctive vis-a-vis species diversifying and ecologically homeostatic, commodity multiplying and processing intensive vis-a-vis those broadly based on biodiversity, etc.

ECO-SOCIOLOGY

Sociology per se is broadly a reductionism from psychology, while it has much to adopt from ecology in terms of methodology and principles generated in the study of ecosystems. Ecology, on the other hand, views man merely as the secondary or tertiary consumer. Much human sociology and ethology can be invigorated by ecology. Disciplines of science do transgress in principles and methodology.

Cooperation vis-a-vis Competitive Exclusion in Natural Evolution

A biological species is a population non-interbreeding in the case of animals (sterile progenies are produced even if they interbreed) but may be interbreeding in the case of plants. The individuals agree among themselves on exclusively distinctive characters and disagree with those of others. A species originates through several means, major courses among which are (1) adaptation and selection, (2) geographic isolation followed by reproductive isolation, and (3) repetitive imitation. Strains or races within a species also arise in a similar manner, but at a lower hierarchical level. Ecotypes are inbreeding populations, geographically isolated over a fairly long time and favored by the habitat. Prolonged reproductive isolation among ecotypes, races or strains develop into species though non-interbreeding populations through stabilizing selection, chiefly in an unstable habitat.

In adaptation and selection, cooperation operates within a species until the unstable habitat forces selection of adaptable sets of genes which constitute and stabilize into a race(s) that is(are) selected out.

A strain or race is identical to a species in its own level of realm. i.e., at a hierarchial level lower than that of a species. Certainly, however, a race or strain is the progenitor of a species of the future. Interspecific or interrace competition is more pronounced than intraspecific or intrarace competition. In other words, interspecific or interrace cooperation is less pronounced than intraspecific or intrarace cooperation. Strains or species compete among themselves and only some of them can dominate in a mixed population over some time -- the composition of which surges toward homogeneity and stability in spite of spurts of stress from outside or perturbation from within and even under population-genetic systems of control within a multi-race or polyspecific community. Simple races cannot withstand great stress or perturbation while complex races composed of heterogenous gene pools caused by interbreeding among races can withstand greater stresses, and have better chances of survival and surer and faster chances of being organized into a species.

Geographical isolation effected by any means from active or passive dispersal to continental drift or landmass movement or microhabitats or microniches within a habitat, leads to reproductive isolation from the ancestral race and then to species over a few to hundreds, thousands or millions of years depending on the level of complexity of the race or species and the level of biological organization, genome size and heterogeneity within in the genome.

Dialectics of Nature from Subhuman to Human

Nature has the opposing forces -- conflict and competitive exclusion, and syntheses for mutual benefit and cooperation. A species originates by consolidation of the gene pool, stabilized by reproductive isolation, ecologically by the forces of adaptation, and, in the process, results in evolution. Cooperation operates within a species until the unstable habitat forces selection of adaptable sets of genes which constitute and stabilize into a race that is selected out. A strain behaves identically to a species but only in its realm, which is the progenitor of a new species. Man himself has partially taken over from nature, and has started steering or at least interfering in the course of evolution, including his own. Nature, however, opposes the conscious and not-so-conscious acts of civilized men.

As the races and species originate, they stabilize through geographical and reproductive isolation and other processes of stabilizing selection (read also cultural isolation) in human society. Further diversification takes place with destabilizing forces, such as the need for survival in an unstable habitat. Stabilization-destabilization is a continuous process.

The rules of opposing forces -- between symbiosis, cooperation and competitive exclusion operate in the evolution of human societies with necessary modifications. The major differences are: (1) increasing human interference in biological evolution, including that of man; (2) the population-generatic and ecological-adaptational processes that help originate species are too slow to be recognized in the scale of thousands of years of known history of modern man, but there is evidence that similar processes do operate in man; (3) the barriers of geographic and isolation were never absolute human history (i.e., migration, mixture of ecotypes and cultures, more through battles won or lost and less often so through acculturation or intermingling of cultures, particularly when the minority cultures are insignificant compared to the majority culture); (4) with increasing transcultural contracts across nations, continents, religions, races and cultures, cultural, geographic and reproductive isolation are being transgressed, but are too insignificant in size to be of any massive impact at global level toward building a singular human society.

Nature, however, seems to be operating opposed to the conscious and not so-conscious acts of the civilized man. The Gaia theory speaks of natural revenge against the ecological crisis perpetrated by man upon himself.

Pluralism is Commensalism in the Ecological Context

Commensalism is non-interactive (both non-antagonistic and non-integrative) association between species in a community. It does not imply symbiosis (original meaning -- living together) for mutual benefit. A multi-species community may have lived for millennia unless and until there is sufficient perturbation to force competition between the members. Under such exigences the survival instinct of a species calls for adaptation to new changes in its environment. A gene pool is selected out within the species, and, if it can, a new race appears and stabilizes, as a population, and constitutes itself into a new strain or species. Diversification of races or ecotypes, due to instability in the habitat or threat from the species, does operate, but only at an increasingly reductive scale, as man changes his physical environment (man has conquered nature!), and is capable of changing social environment, too, through evolution or revolution.

A heterogenous, commensalistic human association is a geographic entity -- community/society/nation -- which has populations that do not freely "interbreed" (not has imposed cultural restrictions), resulting in cultural tolerance but no integration. On the occasions of a crisis imposed from outside, the cultural integration coalesces further, and the geographic entity/community/society/nation acts as a homogenous population acting in unison in order to meet the crisis, but only thus far. Whether it succeeds or not, the integration achieved dissipates into heterogeneity only too soon, but at a different level of operation. On the occasions of crisis from within, either there is numerical, political, economic, social or intellectual dominance enforced by one or a group over the other(s), or competitive exclusion in the form of driving out the weaker ones, not necessarily the minority, from the territory/habitation/cultural hierarchy.

The nature of crisis in a human society is principally economic, but can also be manifested in the cultural and social superstructure, such as religion, language, race/stock difference, caste, i.e., any group formed by inbreeding and delineated by lack of outbreeding. Any such group may have a dominant-recessive relation with respect to others by way of economic power which is readily converted into political power. Horizontal and vertical uplift or cultural oscillation is a counterforce, but is necessarily weak.

In the ecology and population genetics of lower organisms, an environmental crisis in an unstable habitat is confronted by the stabilizing selection of a gene pool concentrating on the necessarily required components of the genome. The alternative, but rarer, possibilities are the introduction of new and environmentally and adaptively necessary genes for survival but nonexistent in the parental gene pool, through imitation or natural hybridization. The higher the organism, the looser are such possibilities, and they should be rarest in man. Parallel to this phenomenon, in a human polycultural society, a social crisis forces a centrifugal tendency toward fundamentalism in both majority and minority communities and cultures.

The loss in the gene pool operates during violence, rebellion, revolution, epidemics, famine, war, pestilence, social negligence against female children, infant death, abortion, population control, etc. They have neither been assured nor can they be precisely measured with the knowhow available to science. It removes sections of the gene pool in human societies more vertically than horizontally, across the society at large, along economic lines within and across the nations, and the ebullient and brilliant youths in one extreme aid the lunpen proletariat on the other. It results in more males than females in most cases.

ETHNIC HISTORY OF MAN

Basic human ecotypes and cultures are largely isolated both geographically and reproductively. The geographically adjacent areas with some features of cultural homogeneity, however, tend to ignore the isolation imposed by political or administrative boundaries. In spite of these marginal cases, racial conflict and mutual hatred are more cultivated than ideologically discouraged. Emigrations continue to take place since the beginning of history. In most cases the emigrants come into conflict with the aboriginals or preceding residents. Who dominates or suppresses, or if and when the two peoples culturally intermingle, depends on the number, military power, and political or intellectual craftsmanship. Old cultures which have been the melting pot of races, as on the soil of the Indian subcontinent for some 2000 to 5000 years, cannot forget the memories of being a superior victorious race or of having vanquished or culturally dominated the aboriginals in the remote past, and identify themselves with a vague origin which has little relevance in the current context of indiscriminate mixtures of "blood" and heterogeneity in the gene pool that has developed through time.

Nature also has more often permitted ethnic identity than not, in the form of continuance of morphological and even skin-deep, race-specific features. Incomplete dominance and quantitative patterns of inheritance of racial morphological types would have obliterated race identities. This can be achieved by frequent outbreeding with indifferent stocks without any backcrossing. In other words, a few inter racial marriages do not change the complexion or morphology, and a common human species and culture remains unachievable in a few millennia to come.

Language developed in diverse Stone Age settlements before the prominent human ecotypes had evolved. Distinct linguistic groups migrated in large scale and assimilated indigenous groups or language, religion and culture, and became single, inbreeding cultures, or left other strong minority groups. The colonialism of the recent past occasionally succeeded in linguistic domination. Language remains a strong national bond and a line of conflict as well, further emboldened by other differences like religions and ethnicity, both of which usually are stronger than language difference, but any one or two of these three forces may determine the course of conflict. Hardly, if ever, are they reconciled.

RELIGIOUS HISTORY OF MAN

(a) Before Judaism, Islam and Christianity could battle out their dominance in their land of origin, their believers spread their cultures further afield. Wherever they are not territorially or geographically isolated they continue to conflict, one with the other, for dominance in settlements, trade and culture. They also uniformly cultivate aggression against nature which has a theological origin, which in its turn had its origin in living against the odds of nature. At the same time all these sets of believers, particularly the Christian and the Muslim, have bonded with strong intra-religious cohesion. Further, the Baconian-Cartesian system of science is also exploitative of nature. Marxism, having principally originated as an antithesis to the paradigm of the industrial revolution, had elemental tenets of holism but these were lost due to being overburdened by political economics and in the exigency of emancipation of the working class. Thus, Marxism was anti-theological, but could not afford to be non-deterministic and natural.

(b) Zoroastrians, are a nomadic population who spread to the fertile East, and, having been a small population, actually flourished through avoidance of attrition -- taking to nonagricultural occupations -- and continued largely as a non-interactive community. As a result, they have not multiplied but, nevertheless, survive at a lower ebb.

Vedic Hinduism arose in the Aryan stock driven by nature and circumstances to India. The vast expanse of fertile land and easy victory over the non-Aryans have left little memory of conflict, which is why they had no difficulty in theologizing communion with nature and between men. As the Aryans further intruded and spread out beyond the Sindhu-Ganga basin they integrated the non-Aryan dominance (Sanscritization, more recently, in the cultural context of the earlier non-Aryans who had fled). The present Indian stock is basically heterogenous (containing perhaps all original human races and ecotypes), but the so-called glorious memories of the Aryan ancestry have built up a psyche with a superiority complex among the Hindus that constitute a numerical majority, but one that is not too comfortable to be an absolutely dominant on the Indian subcontinent,

(c) The Hindu, Buddhist or Mughal empires in India, vis-a-vis those strongly imperialist ones in Europe and Central Asia, did accumulate surplus capital, by way of Machievellism administration and extraterritorial colonialism, although not enough, and thus failed to give impetus to capitalism, science and manufacturing. This may be one of the major reason why the impacts of empires could not be felt in the country at large. (This adds to the popular, but now widely rejected, concept of man of the so-called Asian mode of production or of Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi that "India grows in villages unaffected by political changes in religious creeds").

(d) Hinduism first tasted conflict within itself from the Buddhists, represented at the core by the Kshatriyas at first, but later on a wider scale. This was accepted as the popular religion in contrast to the strongly ritualistic, caste-ridden and caste-oppressive Brahminical Hinduism. Buddhism was physically rejected through vandalism, annihilation and persecution. It itself eroded through vertical split and horizontal fractionism and lack of royal patronage. No less a role was played by the centrifugal egalitarian and reformist consolidations strengthened by fundamentalist codification of the socio-religious order so long guided by dictate and tradition, by the numerically much greater Hindu society at large. The religious institutionalization in the Hindu community gave it new religious importance for the first time. However, Buddhism proved philosophically superior, more coherent than the merely moralistic pre-Buddhist concepts prevailing in the rest of South Asia and throughout East Asia.

(e) The only major religious confrontation that Hinduism faced was from Islam that entered on Indian soil more by transformation forced by caste hatred perpetrated on the majority within the loose congregation that called itself or was known as Hindu society, than by migration or any political-cultural imperialism. In spite of being one of the largest empires, the Mughal empire spread through north India virtually without any opposition. But the more significant singular feature is that there had been no state patronage of mass conversion to Islam or no major suppressive acts inflicted on the Hindu majority. The cults -- the Bhakli movement by Chaitanya in Bengal and several in the south. Sufism from the north and numerous other folk cults throughout India -- acted to impede the drifting of Hindu non-Brahmins of the lowest strata toward adopting Islam. Such were the features of Indian religious and cultural history that Rabindranath Tagore was inspired by the hypothesis that the Eastern civilization grows in villages, not with the empires. Perhaps that is why in his Religion of Man he drew more on the elements of folk religion than on institutionalized and legitimate religions.

(f) Overall, religious conflicts continue throughout the world since the major religions have developed in West Asia and spread to Europe and Asia, except where a religion is politically and numerically dominant. Both majority and minority communities have been lulled into belief in nurturing fundamentalism -- the root of the worst form of conflict, as Tagore said. Communal conflict remains commonplace, be it in the India subcontinent, Jerusalem or the former Jugoslavia, or throughout central Europe between the two World Wars or back in history during the crusades.

Religious pluralism is an idealization -- highly desirable, but far from reality. Whenever a religion is institutionalized, codified and practiced by believers in the form of rituals, essential codes of conduct and life style, it becomes much different from a religion as a way of individual emancipation from consciousness to supraconsciousness, from a realization or feeling which is purely individualistic rather than achievable en masse. This is manifest by an analysis of all religions -- major or minor, institutionalized or not, or as religious divided into sects, believed by large numbers of people across countries or by small tribes or communities from less than a handful to a few hundred, to millions and billions of followers throughout the world, over space and time.

Religion, at its best, is an individual creed, a way of life, an enquiry into birth and death, a seeking for ideals and values in life. It is debatable if, for any goals, "belief" is a must, but there can be no harm so long a religion remains an individual feeling, practice, enquiry or understanding. As a religion is institutionalized -- which it must be -- things go awry. It must be because, like any idea, a religion is conceived to be universal, and its author(s) seek(s) to found a set of followers and believers. Thus, religion, conceived, codified and practiced as an institution, is more than a set of universal ethics and values. Those who have relied heavily on the noncoerciveness and tolerance of religion have overemphasized its content of ethics and values and too much ignored its power of bondage within believers and antipathy or even hatred against non-believers. While most religions are theistic, non-theistic religions also prescribe a code of religious conduct and have elements of regimentation.

Conflict arises principally from the attitude toward nonbelievers of one's "own religion" and, more aggressively, against a non-believer if he or she slightens the role of religion in individual or social life. When the Church interferes with the state the results have been disastrous. Even now republics have religious identities, and political parties seek religious names for republics. Religious bondage is the strongest of all centrifugal forces in a society; no religion is kind to non-believers. The Geeta calls nonbelievers to set aside all religions and follow the Lord Krishna. Hindus love to believe that theirs is the most tolerant of all religions. But Hinduism is the most stratified of all religions. The right to worship, to temples, to texts and to free mixing are taboo for various sections of the people. In spite of being fundamentalist at its core and thereby the strongest of all cultural bonds, a universal brotherhood across religions is a utopia for which idealists have spoken volumes for thousands of years and for which humanity will need to wait a few thousand years more.

COOPERATION CONFLICT THROUGH CULTURAL AND ECO-HISTORY OF MAN

From the cultural and eco-historical events throughout the progress of civilization since hominoids appeared, it can be argued that more intersocial conflict than intrasociety cooperation has been habitat-enforced and culturally acquired through "civilization". In biological language, conflict implies competitive exclusion for dominance and intrasociety (mono-specific community) cooperation implies greater coherence, inbreeding and stabilization of the gene pool in the process of selection (table I).

CONCLUDING REMARKS

1. Pluralism in human society is equivalent to a multispecies community, where tolerance is a precondition. Tolerance is far from integration -- at best communalism -- feasible in a society without perturbation or stress, hence transient. Sources of perturbation from within and stress from without are too many in human societies -- the worst being economic, religious, racial, linguistic, etc. Pluralism or cultural diversity is akin to species diversity in nature. Species diversity can flourish without stress only when microniches exist within a habitat.1 In the context of a human society, when economic classes or social groups (ethnic, religious, linguistic or cultural) do not compete between themselves for their needs and are separated, they do not come into conflict. Thus, feudal societies were apparently more peaceful than newly developed industrial societies. Egalitarian and consumerist desires are fostered as the industrial societies increase and accumulate wealth, but social tensions continue to increase within and across the nations linearly and with an exponential enhancement of disparity. Discontent turns into dissent. Human society tends to break down microniches as civilization advances, wealth becomes transparent, luxury becomes an eyesore, differences become naked. The forces that break down microniches are consumerism -- an attitude encouraged by industry due to its need to thrive; egalitarianism -- the aspiration of people for what they understand they have not; and communication which has "internetted" the globe, uncovering the vices of society long shrouded in mystery.

2. Values are created by conscious rather than subconscious thoughts, desires and acts. While the subconscious level is the result of, and bears the imprints of, natural evolution, the conscious is a creation of cultural evolution, which aspires to become or achieve a superconscious -- godly or suprahuman -- state of mind. Gifted individuals have, or will, reach the superconscious level of mind or state of a Yogi. This is an ontogenic development of consciousness. On the other hand, the cultural evolution of man is in the process of development and my take thousands of years. Evolution of consciousness must be the slowest -- slower than cultural and far slower than biological evolution. Cultural evolution operates by the transformation of the value system through social evolution or revolution, or is brought on by the changes in material culture through industrial and technological changes. A value system is also created by the privileged -- the beneficiaries of the status quo -- against, and imposed upon, the underprivileged, the dispossessed and the depredated. When social structures change, newer contradictions appear and the newer value system is generated -- partly naturally and partly created by the keepers of the society.

The older value system is also destroyed by aspirants, reformists, rebels and revolutionaries. Should they succeed, it takes time to build up a new value system over the old. A value system does not work in a perturbed or stressed society. It is overtaken by the fundamental centrifugal forces that lie concealed in the subconscious. In most cases, the political powermongers throw over the value system first of all. Wisdom can be concurrent even with illiteracy. The political aspirants are triggered to violence and barbarism by their masters, and pluralism is thrown to the winds and seas.

3. What is a civil society? How is it defined? What are the cannons of judgement? In a way, it must be very uncivil to brand any society uncivil. The model and self-styled civil societies are replete with social tension, throttling dissent. Idealistically, a civil society is a stable but utopian society, conceived like the heavens in mythologies, democratic pluralism in capitalist societies, and communism in communist societies, when the state withers away. Not to speak of practice, can such societies be achieved, even theoretically? Collective human wisdom and good sense will continue to strive for a civil society that will be not only pluralistic but also moral, just, ethical, stable, equitable and sustainable. But again, stability is thermodynamically inconceivable, unless a stable and ordered system is surrounded by chaos and instability all around. In order that the world become stable, where can this chaos be?

4. Cultural conflict is essentially a biological problem and calls for a biological solution. Cultural conflict arises in terms of economic, racial, religious and linguistic pluralism(s), everyone of which has to be addressed.

The biological solution is interbreeding en masse across all sorts of natural made and manmade divisions toward a common human society, a common religion of man complete with a common culture. On the one hand, this is impossible to achieve in the conceivable future. On the other hand, we would lose the variety that is the spice of life. The world becomes monotonous; nature abhors monotony and homogeneity. Heterogeneity and contradictions will appear from within such a society. Social and cultural conflicts will remain endoparasitically inherent with human culture.

5. Well-meaning thinkers, philanthropists and minds of all descriptions have advocated cooperation and tolerance, but civilization and culture have moved in the opposite direction through the entire course of history and have nurtured conflict through cultural isolation. Unless there is a grievous crisis that puts human existence or survival at stake and such a crisis is squarely felt, the communities, cultures, societies, and particularly those that rule the world from the secured ivory towers of epicurean comfort will not change their modus operandi. Conflicts are created by the chauvinists, mischief mongers, schemers and aspirants of all humans at international, regional, national, subnational, provincial or local levels.

6. To sum up, what I have said above is not against pluralism, but to make its advocates take cognizance of the ground reality as well, of the hard truths in the laws of nature and society. In spite of all, odds, man is to strive for the utopia for which generations to come will struggle. In all societies of the past and the present, those who understand are too few to reckon with, because "A strange darkness has engulfed the world, where the blindest are those that claims to see the most" (Jibanananda Das).

Table I

Trends through the Cultural and Eco-History of Man

Age

120 MYR

20-30 MYR

2.5 MYR

1-2 MYR

0.4 MYR

70-30 TYR

53-27 TYR

50-25 TYR

12-8 TYR

5.5-4 TYR

1000-800 BC

600 BC-100 AD

1650

1600

1800

1800-1850

1850-1900

1900-1950

1950-2000

Population

0.125M

3M

5M

0.25B

2.5MYR to reach

0.5B

1B; 150 yr. to reach

1.1B; 50 yrs to reach; Growth curve turns exponential

1.8B; 50 yr to reach

2.24B(1930)

3B(1960)

4B(1975)

5B(1983)

6B(2000)

12B(2045)

Event/Ecology/Intellectual traditions

Tropical Forest

Ground Apes; African mother

Hominoids, Objects as tools

Homo sapiens in East Africa; Pathetic existence; other Homo spp. failed to survive; Food-gathering and hunting

Ecotypes - Neanderthals in Europe and Cro-Magnons in Europe and Asia

Fire invented; Forest destroyed

Homo erectus in Java; Survives for 2000-5000 yr and extinct, and interaction with H. sapiens not known

Food storage; sharp tools; mass emigration; building colonies; exotic fight with the indigenous

Domestication of animals, plants; origins of agriculture; food and nutrition security first achieved; big game hunting with fire and by group drive; bronze discovered; bydraulic, exclusively farming (EFS) and nomadic mer - change societies (NMS) formed; emigration, domination, acquisition of private property; battles fought for settlements, pastures and animals progenitors of modern societies appeared; exclusive farming societies better nourished

No marked biological evolution, empires by nomadic merchant pastoral societies, horse cartage; urbanization channel irrigation; preservation for future, granaries

Iron plough in Europe

Large hydraulic societies trading empires; Protagorus, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Socrates, Epicurus, Euclid, Lao-tzu, Confucius, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed

Crop rotation, over production, fall in price, capital transfer to industry

Bacon, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, Graunt, Dalton, Kant, Hegel, Malthus, Leewoenhoek, Beethoven, Cromwell, Linnaeus, Rousseau, Voltaire, Mozart, Adam Smith, Jennerl, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Microscope, Economics, Colonialism

Lamarck, Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Verhulst, Leibig, Spencer, Mill, Dickens, Shelley, Genetics Evolution, Microbiology

Einstein, Freud, Marx, Engels, Planck, Dewey, Bergson, Ramakrishna, Le Corbusier, Pavlov, Fleming, Imperialism

Lenin, Mao, Keynes, Rabindranath, Gandhi, Picasso, Sartre, Wittgensteinl, radio and wireless; World Wars

Watson and Crick, Camus, Chomsky;

Electronics revolutions, satellites, telecommunication, information and cybernetic revolution, technological revolution; fall of the USSR; biotechnology

Cultural Evolution

No man, No culture

Behavior learning; Personal skills

As above; Fight out survival

Competition with large animals -- their extinction. Any interaction with other Homo spp?

Interact in Europe; Earliest and largest reproductive and cultural integration -- makes the current stock of the West white man

Intense struggle for existence (1) Conflict across groups leads to acquiring domination, aggressiveness, acquisition, selfishness, intolerance, cruelty, etc. (2) Cooperation within groups, reciprocal altruism, searching, guarding, saving, storage and concern for the future; Synthesis of traits -- both good and unwanted.

1. Conflict between man and nature -- 40 percent big game eliminated, soil erosion through agriculture

2. First feeling of having conquered nature

3. Conflict between groups/societies -- NMS conquer EFS; miming with vanquished groups

4. Cooperation within a group and settlement, more the external threat felt, more the coherence; isolation and inbreeding within settlements and social groups; better tools; females from vanquished farming societies integrated into victorious nomadic societies; exploitation of natural resources; family; magic, myths and rituals built up avoiding food and nutrition by rituals

Social control to state; city-village and bureaucracy; gap between people beginning to form

Agriculture more destructive of nature

Religion, philosophy, observational science, logic, idea; To conquer `nature' and `other cultures' forms the foundation of society; anthropocentrism; Asian societies -- fertile land, wide land: man ratio little conflict -- more tolerant, metaphysical, but violence remains a part of creed as in any other society; little impetus for growth in manufacturing industry but developments in science, particularly medicine for health; Europe synthesizes knowledge from different cultures; manufacturing economy; feudal societies face destruction; organic agriculture; slavery; theory of spontaneous generation.

Industry becomes less risky and more capital generating enterprise than agriculture or trade.

Scientific methodology to `conquer nature'; Values formed in Europe can be identified as the values of the modern civilization (1) Intensification of human endeavor;

(2) Over-exploitation of nature and competitive exclusion of other cultures, other peoples

(3) Technology considered key to growth

(4) Cooperation within and conflict across considered key to national property.

Industrial revolution; slackening of church; mechanization, chemicalization and breeding revolution in agricultural technology

Atomistic Society, high-rise building in metropolis, automation, alienation

Economic crisis and resurgence in capitalism, freedom from colonialism, megapolis

Pesticides, plastics and polymers, superfarming, ecological crisis, megacorporations, new tactics of imperialism-ecological, economic, cultural; new value systems being formed -- concern for future, green movement;

Man is at the crossroad -- facing the greatest crisis in human civilization -- ecological crisis the choice is between the beginning of the end or a new world order, a new thought process, a new value system; greater than ecological crisis is the intellectual crisis;

Capability needed to decipher, discrete, discriminate, and to adopt a course of action for man as a biological and cultural species.

B = billion; M = million; MYR = million years ago; TYR = thousand years ago; Yr = year(s) Yr* = May be 0.5B yr. earlier as the new evidences suggest.

1 = 8 years to reach; minimum doubling time of population in this period ever in human history (35 years).