I am here to announce a Jubilee Year in 2026. We have 3 years to get it ready — 2023, ’24, and ’25. That’s thirty six-months, not really enough but we can try.
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A biblical jubilee year is one that occurs every 49 years and has to do with preserving the land. That’s not what I’m proposing, though I did get my idea from that tradition.
What I want us to do is focus on the future. At the moment, it’s only an intellectual exercise. Let’s inventory the good possibilities for human life. Sure, the bad stuff will also come into focus as the counterpoint. But the project is generally positive.
I dare nominate only my home country, the US for a jubilee. But it’s patent that this country interacts with many others. I shall make it a rule that the jubilee search for “a better life” in the US cannot include taking advantage of other nations.
In the 1960s, when in college, I read Ruth Benedict’s 1934 book, “Patterns of Culture.” She was in the pioneering group of anthropologists who visited “primitive” societies. When asked which societies are happy, she said the ones in which the reward for a person to do good for himself is well synchronized with the reward for him to do right by the whole society — or something like that. It seemed very clever to me.
If it turns out that I am able to make a significant proposal for a jubilee year, it will be because I was trained in sociobiology from approximately 1976 to 1999. In 1989, I “read a paper” at the first annual conference of HBES — the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. In my audience sat all the “originals” of the field — Richard Alexander, Bill Hamilton, Richard Dawkins, EO Wilson, and George Williams. I believe William Irons and Napoleon Chagnon were there, too. They are all now deceased.
My vision of the future will have a lot of the past in it. I believe we have a lot of the past in us. This is mainly good as it makes us human. Sometimes it’s bad because our traits may have suited the old days, say caveman days, but are a nuisance, or worse, today. Note: I will not be proposing that we change our genetic heritage by making chemical alterations to DNA.
I also will not propose that we rely entirely on our rational nature. Being an American enthusiast for the law and the Constitution, I am in the habit of using the old cerebral cortex, but that hasn’t gotten me very far in helping society. I’ll continue to encourage the expanding of our rationality somewhat, without suggesting that we count on it to move mountains.
I will also be upfront about the population problem. Today I saw a clip of Jordan Peterson say that it was terrible to encourage women to limit their reproduction, and he got great applause from the audience. However, at present, our species is overpopulated; we are unable to look after our habitat. When this happens in nature, as it often does, e.g., to bird colonies, a population crash takes place. Most members die.
We have managed to pollute even the Pacific Ocean, something that used to be considered an impossibility. Perhaps you are unable to detect serious habitat problems in the US, as most of us are protected by an artificial environment which seems comfortable enough. But all its bits and pieces come from nature and the stewardship of nature is virtually non-existent.
The late Russell Hardin put out a thesis many decades ago called The Tragedy of the Commons. The commons he referred to included such things as a pasture (e.g., the Boston Common, centuries ago) where people could let their cows graze. The “tragedy” consisted of the fact that each cow-owner may wish to put one more cow to graze on that Common, which will help his income, but if a hundred people do it, the Common will fail.
So how did that clever observation by Hardin engender a response or a solution? It did not. When we discussed it in academia, it was considered a serious subject, but later it drifted away. No one mentions the tragedy of the commons now. Yet those who are polluting oceans with their daily plastic bottles — me, for example — are doing something tragic. Unbelievably tragic.
Oddly, there is no longer an Academy where such problems could be raised. “Altruism” is supposed to be avoided as a topic. Note, though, that the pendulum might swing back. I wouldn’t rule it out. Ever since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle made their name as thinkers, there has been an Academy. In fact, until the 21st century, it had prestige for its rigor of thought.
I said above that I must correct my prejudice toward rationality. Most persons do not crave intellectual argument. They crave food. They crave status. They crave sex. They crave an outlet for their talent or skill. They crave escape. And so forth. If a jubilee year is to be a goal that we can work towards, I imagine it will be worked-toward by each participant according to his/her preferences. And many will decline to participate, if that’s their preference.
Which brings me to the matter of who leads whom, and who makes the rules. Kind of a big issue, but if you want the jubilee year to be enlightening, I think it’s necessary to go right to the heart of the matter. Maybe some individuals are born leaders and some are born followers. That is kind of different from everyone being a potential leader.
Whatever evolved in H sapiens in regard to leadership, it could only have been for leading small societies. Thus, for Jubilee-planning, there is going to be a circumstance that is not biologically provided for, at least not directly. To wit, one person may have to lead millions or conceivably even a billion. And where the leader of a small society had under his command a bunch of, say, rebels, he did not have people that were raised in a different culture. Now he (or she) will.
Today’s leaders have many mixed groups under them. This is very significant in that it thwarts unity. Some human emotions are colored by group attachment. There are positive emotions, generally referred to as love, and negative emotions — willingness to insult or harm others. I assume they are controllable by a leader who can rely on symbols such as a flag or a mention of past heroes, which easily bring all the individuals into a state of imagined unity.
Note: Paul Craig Roberts said this on December 27, 2022: “Countries that constitute the West are no longer nations. They are conglomerates of populations that have nothing in common. There are no common mores, no common values, no common religion. There are no unifying forces…. Democracy, free speech, and accountable government are being replaced by tyranny. Tyranny is the only possible outcome. A divided people — a Tower of Babel — cannot hold government accountable.”
Before continuing here to outline how we might make good use of an understanding of evolution, let me point out that some Baddies are very much in that game already, making wicked use of it. They can play us. They do play us. Just on the issue of unity, they can increase unity or stir up disunity quite easily by manipulating the symbols. I have often note that soldiers who may oppose war policy can hardly get a listen from the American public, as the sentimental side of “sacrifice” is always pushed by the media. It grips the minds of the audience.
Ah, war policy, shall we go there next? There is a very real possibility that the instigation of the two world wars, and many previous wars, was not “as advertised.” Tens of thousands of men can be sent off to deal in a horrific situation, on the belief that their work is for the sake of their nation when it’s really to benefit someone else.
Two examples: a leader may start a war to increase his reputation at home (!), and he may start a war so that weapons manufacturers can try out some new weapons. In the novel 1984, British writer George Orwell (born Eric Blair, an Eton graduate) went so far as to say that leaders would keep wars going endlessly, for no purpose other than to distract the population from looking at the wealth of the leaders.
Now this brings us to property and to money. In some animal species, there is “possession” of goods, however minor. In humans, it is well accepted that I own my stuff and you own yours. As the opportunities for wealth-creation increase, a huge imbalance of possession follows. Today 1 percent of the world population is said to own 85% of everything. (I am not sure of that as fact.) Whatever we plan, in regard to a jubilee, must deal with that unhealthy situation.
As soon as a human possesses great wealth, he becomes concerned with keeping it. He may see the threat of losing it as equivalent to theft and see the person who is eyeing his wealth as a thief that deserves constraining. Or deserves dispensing with altogether. I think our genes can adjust us, both to a situation where goods are shared or a situation where goods are fought over. There are plenty of instances of either, in history.
Money is the form of wealth that came about to replace barter. Coins were first used in 700 BC and paper money came about in Europe in the 1600s. Coins may have actual value as metal, but paper money relies on the existence of a guarantor. Right now, you probably have wealth that is entirely based on hope, hope that someone such as “government” will do the right thing.
Another thing about great wealth is that it engenders ecological damage. A corporation that sees a way to take in high profit by acting socially irresponsible to, say, trees, is unlikely to worry about the long-term effect on society of that tree loss. Corporations emphasize the bottom line.
Of course they don’t have to; they could emphasize social responsibility.
Think back to Ruth Benedict’s insight: the happy society is one where rewards to an individual tie in with the behavior of the individual as a good helper of society. I suppose it is not completely out of the question for the super-rich to take on a new attitude about helping the whole society. But their new attitude would make them question their “entitlement.” Or it would make others question the rich folks’ “entitlement.”
Which brings us to the subject of reputation. It does seem that each human values his reputation highly. Any “knock” to it can be devastating. In today’s America, apparently cooked up by the mass media, we have a whole profession of smearers. The US military assigns thousands of “soldiers” to make comments anonymously on social media. These either glorify a bad idea or bad person or dump on someone who has a good idea. At taxpayer expense.
And that brings us to the whole issue of mind control. All human relationships have been altered by the modern techniques of getting another person to want what you want him to want. I think we naturally exploit each other when we get the chance, and some exploiting arrangements become permanent, as with slavery. That’s bad enough, but truly getting into the other person’s brain so she will fulfill your orders is to turn humanness upside-down.
Ah, that probably made you think of the incredible chutzpah of Yuval Noah Harari, “son” of WEF, saying, in 2021, that humans have no right to their mind. I note that Dr. Jose Delgado had already said that, boldly, around 1980. There really is only one way to deal with such a theme, and that is to oppose it entirely. Seriously you can’t take it on board in any way, that would be species suicide.
That is my Introduction to Jubilee Year, 2026. It will be our nation’s 250th anniversary if we consider 1776 as the founding. A lot can be done in the next three years 2023, 2024, and 2025 to improve the human situation.
— Mary Maxwell lives in New Hampshire. At the moment she is in need of singers with guitars, banjos, or fiddles. Please email her at MaxwellMaryLLB@gmail.com if you have a musical urge.
