[Updated JULY, 2009]Welcome to the [John] Garrett Jones Website
YOUR PEOPLE WILL JUDGE YOU ON WHAT YOU CAN BUILD, NOT ON WHAT YOU CAN DESTROY
[President Barack Obama, Inaugural Speech, 2009]The question is not one of “surrendering” national sovereignty. The problem is not negative and does not involve giving something up we already have. The problem is positive—creating something we lack … but … imperatively need—the extension of law and order into another field of human association which heretofore has remained unregulated and in anarchy.
Emery Reves, The Anatomy of PeaceI had my 80th birthday last May. When Emery Reves' book was first published in the UK, as a Penguin Special in 1945, I was 16 and I devoured it. At last someone was talking sense. The war had just ended. After five years living through the blitz and the doodlebugs and the rockets (we were living a couple of miles from Northolt aerodrome, just outside London), here was someone telling us what we had to do if we wanted to put paid to this kind of barbarism.
We thought we knew better than Reves. We created the United Nations with a Security Council having, as its permanent members, the main powers who had defeated Hitler. Surely they would see us right? What idiots we were! In no time the former allies were at each other's throats and we had a cold war. The resulting nuclear arms race still threatens to be our undoing. If it prevented WW3 - just - it did nothing to prevent a disgusting trade in arms which fuelled endless little wars, which slaughtered endless little people. The latest applicants to join the nuclear club do nothing to boost confidence in the future.
To add to our stupidity, we in the West became wedded to a market economy which made growth its god, encouraged wealth creation (however inane and eco-unfriendly the source of the wealth). It made a few million people more affluent than they had ever been but many billions poorer than ever before. It has done such damage to the planet that much of it is already beyond repair. The nightmare of escalating obesity is a fitting monument to the god of growth.
In the UK, confidence in the government has been undermined by the revelation that many parliamentarians had for years been milking an expenses 'system' of their own devising which they had been anxious to keep secret. The latest round of 'little' wars has resulted in thousands of hapless refugees pouring out of the Swat valley and the far North of Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, we now know that the polar ice cap is melting at a rate at least four times faster than was predicted a few years back.
Time is running out very rapidly. If we are not now determined to pull ourselves together and do something sensible for a change, we are most unlikely to be given another chance.
Consider this:
During the war years, we in the UK had a national government. In view of the pathetic failure of the existing party political system to deal with the scale of our present predicament, why do we not insist on a non-party national government?
If other governments around the world act in similar fashion, they can collectively work to establish a global authority which can devise and enforce the ecological agenda for survival.
This has to include the surrender of all national armies and privately owned weapons to a global command, committed to use its massive military power only to ensure peace and the protection of human rights. We already have more UN peacekeepers than ever before but this single step would lift the whole business of peacekeeping to an entirely new level.
Educationists need to realise that there are more pressing matters than knowing our maths or our geography. Such things might be useful for compiling school league tables, but they show no sign of making enough students aware of the unprecedented global crisis looming over us or the scale of the measures which have to be implemented within the next decade if we are to have a ghost of a chance of healing the wounds we have inflicted on the planet.
What can we as individuals do about all this? Each one of us must decide where we stand and what we intend to do - and we must all keep an eye on the clock.
If you have time to linger, you might like to ponder the following:
Sigmund Freud, in almost his last published work, wrote:
"After long doubts and vacillations we have decided to assume the existence of only two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct ...the aim of the first of these basic instincts is to establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus - in short, to bind together; the aim of the second, on the contrary, is to undo connections and so destroy things [Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Hogarth/Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1949, pp5f.]
Freud attributed the destructive instinct to the pull of the primal chaos. If we yield to that pull, we need strive no more. We can just let the world go hang.
He found the other instinct, eros, difficult to account for. He would not use terms like "the irrepressible thrust of evolution" or the "eternal life-force" because they explain nothing. He preferred to allow eros to retain its secret - but had no doubt about its reality.
The ethos we have cultivated over recent centuries has done a great deal to devalue love and creativity. Look at the way our Western tradition has viewed maleness: men who fight are heroes - "real men" - whilst men who love each other warmly and physically are pathetic - "queers". Could this have anything to do with the current upsurge of knife stabbings on our streets?
Freud often used the Greek word for death (thanatos) to denote the destructive instinct. As we all know, thanatos is unstoppable; it happens to all of us sooner or later. The last thing we need is all the war games and nuclear warheads which only speed thanatos on its way.
Our creativity, our love, our constant striving to improve our lot, is an unending struggle against the pull of the primal chaos. We may be tempted to ask if it is worth trying to fight the tide. It might seem simpler just to go with the flow and eat, drink and be merry. This is not an option if we mean it when we say we love our children. We have reached the crucial moment for decision in the whole history of our species. If we persist in making the wrong choices, we shall very soon have reached the point of no return.
One way in which we can make a positive contribution is to harness our bisexuality. Again it was Freud who insisted that the basic constitution of every human individual is bisexual. In spite of this, bisexuality is often regarded as a problem area, more of a liability than an asset. In fact, an informed, responsible approach to this central issue of our sexuality may well be the most hopeful pointer to the future for our species. You will be in good company if you read or download the following book:
COMING CLEAN ABOUT BISEXUALITY
(visitors from Holland will find a Dutch translation of Coming Clean about Bisexuality at http://www.bikring.nl This can also be freely downloaded
.)In September 2008 I started a group for men who want to share their sexual attraction to and for other men but want to do this without getting involved in anal sex and without closing their heterosexual options. The group is called MEN LOVING MEN - AS MEN. If you want to take a look, click on the link below:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/menlovingmenasmen/?yguid=351832306
If you would like to know a bit more about me go to:
If you want to contact me, I would be glad to hear from you. You can email me at:
jngjones@msn.com
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