Do you think it was easy to create the Constitution? Who do you think wrote the Constitution? How do you think they were chosen and do you think other people should have had a say in the writing of the Constitution?
Why or why not? The History. So what does the following mean? Establish Justice: ensures that the new government would treat its citizens fairly, and to avoid the unfair conditions created by the King of England prior to the American Revolution. Provide For The Common Defense: to keep the states safe from the threat of foreign nations other countries by ensuring there was a national military army, navy, etc.
Promote The General Welfare: shows that the new government was concerned with making sure its citizens had their basic needs met like ensuring people had adequate food, housing,and education. The Activities. Create your own Constitution or set of rules or motto for your household. What rules do you think you need for your family to be successful, what do you want your family to stand for?
Ask family members for their input and figure out a way for you to all have input — do all agree or do you need to have some debate and compromise? Back to Program. Accessing this program requires a login. The need for the role of the central government and international agreements to assign responsibility for assuring that the basic ecosystem principles are applied to the industries that constitute our industrial economy should be self-evident. How else can we have the least assurance of the moral behavior necessary to support, sustain and enrich life, in an environment that encourages profit-taking at the expense of life and the living environment?
No amount of management will cause finite resources to become infinite. But the finite aspects of the resources of the earth can be made to assume same of the properties of the infinite through ecosystems management.
Needless to say, more attention must be paid to the information required for this type of management. As Buckminster Fuller has pointed out, wealth is related to information Fuller used the word "knowledge," which to the author seems much too restrictive , and the fact is that wealth production is far more dependent on our information banks than it is on our resource reserves.
A sunbaked, clay washboard studded with rough stones has a certain finite value to the Amazon Indian who uses it to wash her family's clothes. The fact that the stones embedded in its surface are diamonds is of absolutely no concern until it is known that they are diamonds and what diamonds are worth in the world outside her society.
Their worth to the Indian woman lies only in their roughness and the relationship to cleanliness of clothing which her mind has stored as information.
Most things have value after something is known about them in relation to the needs, present or future, real or frivolous of the society which perceives them. Who "needs" a pet rock? Stated in words, the equation says that the sum of all the wealth of the universe W c is the product of the resources of the universe R c when multiplied by the information or wisdom of the universe I c.
In the equation, R is assumed to be finite in spite of its reusability and enormous quantity. I c is represented as the total of cosmic wisdom. It is the information that is inherent in and responsible for the universe as we know it. It represents the basic physics and chemistry that produced what we know to be the earth, sun, moon, stars, etc.
It is on the basis of this cosmic information that sodium reacts with chlorine to form sodium chloride. All of science, the humanities and theology are attempting to discover the properties of I c.
The magnitude of I c cannot be stated. It is assumed to be infinite inasmuch as the rate of its discovery is logarithmic and, like light, shares the property of being everywhere dense. In all likelihood information I c is a fundamental property of the universe, sharing an equal status with energy, matter, tine and space.
It must be recognized that the universe, utilizing cosmic information, evolved very nicely without man, who is only just now in the act of discovering what I c is. If we rewrite the equation as a limit, we have the following:. Since cosmic wisdom I c approaches infinity, cosmic wealth W c would also approach infinity, since any finite number multiplied by a transfinite number is transfinite. If cosmic wisdom I c were to approach zero, then cosmic wealth W c would approach zero, regardless of the amount of resources of the universe R c.
Now, if the resources of the universe R c are greater than zero but still finite, it follows that wealth can still approach infinity. What the equation really implies is that if cosmic wealth is really the product of cosmic resources and cosmic information, then the universe, including the earth, was infinitely wealthy, with or without man. Man is most interested in wealth that relates to man. In this special case, a new information element must be introduced.
First, it must take into account the evolutionary development of all living organisms, including man. This we represent by the following notation:.
It should be obvious the I ev is a subset of I ev , and since it has the same rate of discovery when probed, is also logarithmic, i. It should become apparent at this point that information shares with light the property of being everywhere dense. No matter what the methodology, the search for understanding leads to ever-increasing information. Whether research is conducted toward reductionism or generalism, there is no end to the information it yields.
Each evaluation of research or inquiry seems to lead to a finer approximation of the true situation which in turn leads to yet a more refined hypothesis and a more complete answer, and so on and on without ever a final conclusion being reached. Karl Popper in his Conjectures and Refutations describes this process in great detail.
As a word description of a theory of approximation of a transfinite series, it implies that the process of discovery is the evaluation or approximation of an infinite amount of information about any given subject.
In a very rough way this insight points to what is another characteristic of infiniteness. Simply put, subsets of transfinite entities are always transfinite themselves, leading knowledge-seekers always to infinity, no matter which branch they elect to pursue. The easiest example out of mathematics says that the subset of odd numbers 1,3,5, N is equal in magnitude to the counting integers 1,2,3, N because for every odd number we can put a counting integer into correspondence with it and not run out of either odd numbers or counting integers.
The paradoxical conclusion is that the number of odd numbers is of the same magnitude as all the numbers put together, because we can count the odd numbers, yet never run out of either odd numbers or the numbers to count them with; but not only that, they match up with no odd numbers nor any counting numbers left out. In a similar fashion the amount of information associated with evolution, while it is a subset of cosmic evolution, again seems to be infinite because like cosmic information there seems to be no end to its discoverability.
If man were to have not developed language or technology but simply evolved as a beast of the field, he would have participated in the wealth of the world simply through:. Self-awareness, a conscious grasp of his destiny, might forever have remained beyond his comprehension, but he would have benefited simply because he was part of the system.
But man has done more. In comparison with all other information, it is the information of design which most crucially affects the survival of man's technology and his "way of life," allowing him to control his environment and, through the concept of property, to accumulate wealth unto himself.
Man can nicely survive as an animal without language or technology, probably much the same as other higher primates. By extension of the biological evolution equation, this relationship can be described in the following way:. Information of design shares with cosmic and evolutionary information the same property, transfiniteness. As a subset of cosmic information, it shares in its properties and characteristics.
Information of design differs from cosmic wisdom I c and evolutionary information I ev in one special way. Since it is the information man uses to regulate his technology activities, it is information directly available to him for the production of his personal wealth. Out of the mass of cosmic information, which is "everywhere dense," man has conceived and carved himself a tool to use to enhance his survival and for his own aggrandizement.
Obviously all of these forms of information are relative, and the process of scientific discovery consists of adapting more and more of the information in cosmic wisdom I c and evolutionary information I ev to the information of design I d. The inevitable conclusion of this analysis is that the world was and is infinitely wealthy. The amount of wealth available to man has steadily increased and seems to have the similar property of ever increasing.
As a matter of fact, it is not difficult to demonstrate that at any given time in man's existence, surplus wealth has been produced, providing ample evidence of the increasing wealth of man's world.
Its production seems to have posed no particular problems; on the other hand, its disposition has proved infinitely difficult.
No "knowledge" is considered "useful," nor will it long remain in the tool chest of any individual human unless it contributes to his survival. Humanity's perception of what is real in itself and its surroundings eventually must prove useful as a means of coping with surroundings and perpetuating self, or it is discarded. Consistent failure to take this step would result, very simply, in an end to humanity, whether it is a failure to come to terms with the environment or failure to come to terms with other men.
It is by such no-nonsense events that the universe even-handedly reveals itself. Wealth is one such basic percept which currently clamors for review. Into it are plugged the problems we call population, pollution, poverty, crime, and war. Resource depletion and poverty is NOT the world's prime problem, nor has it ever been. While civilization's problem is seldom described in terms of surplus wealth disposition, nevertheless, the patterns of ownership of wealth and distribution of wealth clearly demonstrate that the problem of surplus wealth has not been solved.
While it may not have been apparent at the time, it is relatively certain that surplus wealth has been disposed of in public works property from the earliest human times.
The early walls and ziggurat of Babylon must have consumed enormous surplus wealth. The pyramids of Egypt, the cathedrals of Europe, the Great Wall of China, all the great relics of the past, attest to mankind's creative copings with the problem of surplus wealth. We have differentiated and stratified the wealth of nations of the world in infinitely more sophisticated ways since the days of Teotihuachan, Tikal and Copan, but we are still faced with the sane problems that led to their construction long ago.
The GNP of the world continues to increase, despite war, famine and pestilence. In the not too distant past, the myth of the efficacy of war as a creator of industrial, prosperity and technological advancement was highly touted. The unseen relationships included the fact that in wartimes, manpower and money not ordinarily available for problem-solving i.
The result was a new spurt of wealth and a temporarily improved human condition. The wealth, resources and information equation does not support the contention that all the problems of man can be solved forthwith and that the return to Eden is imminent. As a matter of fact, to return to Eden, we have to shed the information of design and the language and technology that go with it and return to the information of biological evolution, naked and innocent. What the equation does state is that wealth production is a logarithmic function and that projected into the future, this function will continue to produce surplus wealth.
What becomes of that surplus wealth depends on what man conceives as a desirable world. Man has been described as the toolmaker, the specific epithet Homo sapiens signifying man the wise. Man has also been described as the naked ape. Certainly man is in the mainstream of biological evolution and it is with no difficulty that man can be placed in the kingdom Animialia; phylum, Chordata; subphylum, Vertebrates; class, Mammalia; order, Primata; family, Hominidae; genus, Homo; species, Homo sapiens.
Man shares the genus Homo with several other species of man, all others of which are now extinct; the family Hominidae with other known genera of man, also extinct; and the order Primata with all the great and lesser apes.
Man is distinct; he has highly developed technology; he has language, and he sees himself in dominion over the world. But man did not always have language and he did not always have high technology. It surely can be postulated that at a distant time man must have had little if any technology and was indistinguishable behaviorally from other animals of his given size and shape.
As a matter of fact, man's biological behavior as distinguished from his technological behavior has probably remained unchanged for as long as he has had his present anatomy, morphology and physiology. Since man has had language and technology for at least the last three million years, and since man has considered himself in command of the earth for the last eight to ten thousand years probably since the invention of written language , it is difficult to see from the 20th Century what man must have been like without language and technology.
Yet it is the behavior of man who evolved before he invented language and technology that we must understand if we are to make sense of the creature that is modern man. It is language and technology imbedded in the matrix of man's biological evolution that make him the unique and peculiar beast that he is.
It is the ethological nature of man in the animal social context of his community life that must first be recognized and evaluated before the impact and influence of language and technology can be assayed. And in the context of man's ethological social milieu will be found some of the behavior that is paradoxical in a creature made so powerful by technology.
The question is terrifyingly simple. Is man biologically equipped to handle the vast technological power he has discovered and is now attempting to control? The paradox is why is so powerful an animal as man at the same time so fearful and anxious? Why is so powerful an animal as man at once so cruel and devious, so cunning and sly? Why is so understanding a man so at odds with himself, other men and nature?
Why must all be conquered? This is not to discount the presence of man's humane characteristics. The curious fact remains that modern man is the most powerful animal in the world and yet singly and in groups he is largely paranoid, fearful, anxious and destructive.
The behavior higher animals display characterizes these animals as predators or prey. And within social groupings of individual species, dominance hierarchies are commonly observed.
The dominant animal in such social groupings is frequently referred to as the alpha animal. While the term alpha is used by animal behaviorists to indicate the dominant animal in a social group, such as the alpha wolf in a pack, the use here is extended to the concept of an alpha species. In this context, any animal species, the full-grown adults of which seem to have no ordinary fear of other animals, are considered an alpha species.
Examples are lions, tigers, grizzly bears, badgers, blue sharks, blue whales and elephants. It should be noted that not all these animals are predators. Some are terrestrial, some marine; alphas need not even be carnivores or even omnivorous. In contrast to alpha species, there are beta species. These animals are prey in the food chain. Goats, deer, pigs, sheep and rabbits are examples of this group. Generally speaking, these animals flee when approached and are frequently the prey of most of the predatory animals named on the alpha list.
The question now is, on which list does man belong? On the face of it, this may seem like a silly question, since man can, at will, subdue or tame virtually all the animals on either list, with the notable exception of himself. But this dominance of man was attained only long after he had achieved language and technology. Man with a gun and with extensive knowledge of lethal weapons is a formidable killer, but what of man in his pre-language days, without tools of any kind?
In such a circumstance, man was not a very formidable animal and was in fact at the mercy of groups of animals much smaller than he in size. Even the lowly reptile can be a formidable foe of unarmed, unaware man. It is the man without the gun or without technology reacting to the environment, with only his biological tools, that we must understand in order to understand the mentality that is wielding the enormous power of modern technology.
We again have another paradox where man, biologically, has all the attributes of a beta species, but with technological power, that makes him an alpha. Human life expectancy in pre-language man must have been quite abbreviated, perhaps as short as 15 to 20 years, with 30 constituting a venerable ancient. It is only after the invention of language and the proliferation of tools that man improved his survival potentiality to begin his migrations that ultimately have taken him to all the terrestrial habitats of the world.
But man spent millions of years developing his survival ethology without tools and without language. His behavior repertory was fully developed by the time he discovered and developed technology, and it has been only in very recent years that his technology has given him unquestioned dominance.
So it is this man, without tools, without language, embedded within the food chain, the prey of many predators, who crouches inside a new and enormous repertory of tools which he can use at will for good or for evil.
It is this creature whose behavior we must understand before we can sort out and make sense of modern man and his society. Modern man lives in a beta body, possesses a beta brain, but wields alpha power. We might begin our sorting out process by trying this fact as an explanation for the popularity of so-called "blood sports.
Perhaps it helps explain why the plains buffalo was nearly exterminated; why even in war most infantrymen do not fire their weapons and why firing for effect is more efficient than firing at targets. And perhaps even more to the present point, it may explain why man is afraid of man. The human race first discovered the control of life and death, and in the millenia-long struggle for individual and group eminence within the species there has ensued a veritable outpouring of creative development, coupled with a destructive streak unparalleled in the history of evolution.
How can these conflicts and paradoxical properties of man be rationalized? How can man come to grips with the fact that he is prone to beta judgments carried out with alpha power revenge on hapless animals and men, torture, mass destruction and genocide? At a number of significant points in human history man has come to the self-realization of his duality and has instituted social orders to reduce the inner conflict of this paradox.
It is likely that the earliest men who had language, millions of years ago, were aware of man's destructiveness and also of his gentleness and compassion. The Flower People of Shanidar are probably the most recent of preliterate man to display a patterned understanding of their own essential humanness. It was in this latter environment of enlightened self-interest, the Age of Reason, that the Constitution of the United States was fashioned.
All those involved, but especially Thomas Jefferson, were completely steeped in the concepts of individual freedom and in the rights of individual men. What had, in fact, happened was that man's right to prey on his fellowman was questioned, and a great effort was made to endow the beta animal with the technological language means to become an alpha animal. The concept rationale was simple: Unless all men had the right to be free, freedom could not be guaranteed for any man the alpha process.
No man is free if any man is enslaved the alpha man. The seeds that made the Civil War inevitable lay in this constitutional concept. The intellectual thrust of the Age of Reason, simply put, was to urge man with his tremendous power for good and evil to adopt an alpha behavior repertoire, and with his "reason" to transform his beta being into the higher order of being which is characterized by the alphas.
A man with enormous power who feels no need to use it epitomizes this mentality. This concept of bound power is common in Eastern philosophical thought but in Eastern philosophy the thought was directed to individuals, not communities.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States direct this thought to the community of man. The glowing statement in American history that most clearly demonstrates this thinking is the phrase in the Declaration of Independence that states "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The thread of history representing this insight began with the Virginia Resolutions, which were the forerunner of the Declaration, and, eventually, of the Bill of Rights. All in all, the Constitution of the United States is a remarkable document, which succinctly enumerates the rights of man, both from an individualistic point of view and from a community point of view. It is the Preamble of the Constitution that is of prime interest in this discussion, for in a very few words it lays out the basis for establishing governments among men.
An ecological analysis of the Preamble then should give us some insights into the basic ecology of government. The Preamble states: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Itemized, the Preamble aspires to 1 establish Justice, 2 insure domestic Tranquility, 3 provide for the common defence, and 4 promote the general Welfare.
The choice of capital letters belongs to the Founding Fathers. To the author's knowledge, the Preamble has never been used to argue a case in law, though he can see no reason why it should not have the same if not more authority than the Articles. Items 1 and 4 of the Preamble are addressed to individuals. There can be no justice unless justice is available to every individual without exception.
Similarly, the general welfare of the nation depends upon the welfare of each individual and, no matter whether the concept of cradle-to-grave socialism is espoused or rugged individualism upheld, the concept of general welfare is meaningful only in the context of the welfare of individuals.
Items 2 and 3 of the Preamble have different properties. They are precepts that apply to the community of man. Providing for the common defense is a matter for the nation as a whole to address, and from the ecological point of view, it is community activity.
Justice and general welfare are reasonably well understood concepts from the political and economic point of view. Justice has been formalized in government for a very long time at least from the time of ancient Sumer and is perhaps the better understood. The general welfare has only recently been formally accepted into the structure of government, and while the broad concept of general welfare is accepted, the details of carrying it out do not have universal concurrence.
Providing for the common defense is similarly a well understood concept, particularly since the nation was born in a contest of arms and into a world which has had wars too numerous to enumerate before its founding. The fact that insurance of the domestic tranquility is the least understood of the great principles of the Preamble is easily seen from the fact that the other three are ensconced in full-fledged departments of the government.
The Justice Department and the Judiciary have been erected to establish justice. The Departments of the Navy and War, later combined into the Department of Defense, provide for the common defense. The National Guard is the "well-ordered militia" of the Bill of Rights. And the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare is wrestling with the great notions involved in providing for the general welfare.
We are left to wonder what agency of the government has been established to insure the domestic tranquility. To understand the problem we must first understand domestic tranquility. In its simplest aspect, domestic tranquility relates to the quality of life and of the human environment.
It is most concisely epitomized in the Declaration of Independence where it is stated that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is the pursuit of happiness that forms the first principle of tranquility. Tranquility is a state or a condition. Tranquility is not possible to individuals unless it is a property of the community. They can be quiet, and submissive, but they are not tranquil. Tranquility is a property of communities that devolves upon the families and individuals living in them.
It is specifically the quality of life which is directly related to the quality of the human environment. Tranquility is not placidity, nor is it torpor or stupor. Tranquility is healthy and vigorous pursuit of happiness. It is manifest by physical fitness, the love of man and nature, a full realization of the virtue of life and the virtue of the human environment and their relationship to each other and to all the habitats that form the biosphere.
Tranquility means having fun as well as pursuing serious interests; it is the opportune setting within which to work hard at productive labor. At its most basic, tranquility is freedom from fear and anxiety. Tranquility encompasses all those aspects of the human existence that are achievable through the highest motivations of man's intellect, and it is the necessary adjunct to the rigors of survival.
It is the ideal environment in which to raise children. In short, the creation of tranquility in human communities and in the wider environment of man is the manifestation of the essential humanness of man.
Tranquility is the principal characteristic of a free society. It is no accident that a synonym for tranquility is peace. Of the four major precepts of the Preamble to the Constitution, we have seen then that two, justice and welfare, relate to individuals; and two, defense and tranquility, relate to communities. It is of interest at this time to consider these four precepts as ecological factors and to consider to what extent they affect the stability of the communities which value them.
From an ecological perspective, it is convenient to consider communities as processors of energy. Mature, steady-state communities are those that can process large amounts of energy and use them to maintain and stabilize themselves. The achievement of a desirable steady-state results from the interaction of various environmental factors and it is the ability of the mature community to channel its energy into productive and maintenance functions that lead to its stability.
This is not to say that the mature community is static. Far from it. The mature community is dynamic, capable of changes and improvement, and able to extend its boundaries. It does all these things, however, without changing its principal characteristics or purposes. From our previous discussion of wealth, the question is, where should increases in wealth increments be applied? If substantial new increments of wealth are applied to justice, this means one of two things: either more funds are available for police and police work and to the practice of law and the judiciary, or more money is made available to individuals to exercise their rights under the law.
The former case carries the disturbing implication of tendency toward a police state; the latter as recent experience has shown results in large numbers of people suing for their individual rights in the courts. In the latter case, the system of jurisprudence is overwhelm, and more importantly, the status quo of existing communities is severely disturbed.
This happened in the OEO legal programs for the poor, where cities and states were respectively challenged by previously impotent citizens. The net result was pressure to kill the programs. Large grants to police departments, far from preventing crime, seem primarily to intimidate the law-abiding citizenry, further inhibiting the healthy exercise of expression and dissent.
Quite obviously, the channeling of large amounts of additional money into "justice" has a destabilizing effect on communities of free men, since its use on behalf of the disadvantaged tends to tip the power in favor of individuals over the community, and its use on behalf of law enforcement tends to make the community repressive of the individual. Neither pursuit leads to the kinds of communities envisioned by the founding fathers.
This is not to say that justice is not of paramount importance. What it says is that justice is not an appropriate sink for substantial increases of the national wealth without risking revolutionary change in society.
If large amounts of wealth increments are dedicated to welfare, again the effect is to upset the status quo and to destabilize the community by upsetting the relationship between private property and public wealth.
If there has ever been a contentious issue in the United States, it has been that of welfare. Gainful employment is, of course, the alternative preferred by both the government and the welfare recipient, but no plan has yet been developed that can provide full employment under conditions acceptable to all.
And the use of public money to purchase housing that the poor could own is anathema, in spite of the fact that the same money allows the "slum lords" to become wealthy. It is more than obvious that large increments of future wealth dedicated to welfare will have a destabilizing effect upon present communities, since they will be given with large amounts of resentment. They are revolutionary rather than evolutionary. Revolutionary changes are almost always accompanied by fear and repression, whereas evolutionary change usually carries longer term impact and is perceived over time as "progress" by those either viewing or involved in it.
Providing for the common defense plays a unique role in the ecology of the human communities of the world. Not only does the channeling of wealth into defense strengthen the community through feelings of pride, patriotism, and solidarity, it perfectly expresses the paradox of man with his beta brain and his technologically alpha power. The economic and the ecological coincidence is the simple fact that money spent on defense does tend to stabilize communities as opposed to money spent on a police state.
Citizens enthusiastically do support the defense needs, and there is just enough latent and justified paranoia in part due to the evolutionary development of man himself so that the defense budget can and has become the vast sink for all the excess wealth that can be generated in human societies.
Defense budgets become untouchable. There seems to be no limit to the funds that defense can absorb. Since the means of waging war and mounting defenses for war is a highly specialized technological process, the information needed to wage offensive and defensive war grows at a geometric rate.
As a result, the demands to translate this technology into hardware will require matching geometrically increasing amounts of money. Since the GNP is increasing as a power function, a simple deduction tells us that funds for defense are increasing geometrically.
Since defense as an activity has a substantial research and development phase, it would be valuable to look at the relationship between research and product or system development. The estimated increase in expenditure necessary to translate research and development into products is roughly 1, to 1. This is not an argument to reduce defense research. It is merely a demonstration of the relationship between increases in technology which are logarithmic and the concomitant logarithmic increases in expenditures.
In addition, the current spectacle of underdeveloped nations spending huge sums on armaments. In the present condition of the world there is no choice but to maintain defense budgets.
However, to date there have not been many acceptable alternatives to defense, at least not to the vast numbers of people who would have to be convinced of their efficacy.
Nevertheless, as much as defense spending has disrupted the community of man, the technological development that occurs as a result of such hostility-based expenditures must be given its due for the many lives it has saved and the human good it has done.
A partial answer must be "no," as long as the threat of war and worldwide paranoia feed the impetus to make war. Tranquility differs from defense in being a positive rather than a negative approach to life. It is the other side of common defense, the community stability coin. Probably for that reason it has been hard to define, much less to implement. There seems to be something fundamental in human perception that makes negative logic easier to understand than positive logic.
An obvious example in high technical application is the null balance indicator and the null hypothesis of statistics. In either case the logic dictates that what is observed are differences that are "not different" from zero. The assumption that two observations are the "same" is not susceptible to the conventional logic of statistics.
The three-year old that uses the word NO repeatedly has simply discovered that the word NO is a control device that is extremely effective. The word YES under such circumstances would not even receive attention, but with the word NO the three-year old is in charge.
The defense arguments are similar. Fear and anxiety are negative emotions, and they seem to go along with the negative approach to defense strategy; fear and anxiety are used as PR tools in the debates over budgets. If we do not do so and so, such and such catastrophic events will occur. To insure the domestic tranquility then is to pursue the positive side of man's being.
This results in a stable society that encourages creative diversity rather than one that buys ease of social control through insistence on conformity.
As a matter of fact, the pursuit of domestic tranquility promotes diversity among the individuals of communities and as it does in all biological communities, diversity promotes the stability of human communities. One of the simplest approaches to domestic tranquility is in terms of recreation. This in spite of the fact that recreation, as a word, has such vital roots. In the context of promoting the domestic tranquility, the concept of recreation takes on important new meaning.
If the activity time of man is envisioned as a pie diagram, then recreation is that time necessary to complement work, sleep, eating, etc.
All work and no play not only make Jack a dull boy, but may seriously impair his health and well-being, subjecting him to numerous systemic dysfunctions, heart disease, stroke, mental illness, and somatic illness produced by hormonal-induced psychic imbalances.
Recreation is not luxury activity; it should not be restricted only to those able to pay for it; it should be available in a wide variety of forms in almost all places. Viewed in its widest context, recreation complements work in providing the environmental circumstance for the full realization of the genetic potential of man.
Activity and productivity are not related only to work. They are the combined products of work and recreation. His nervous system, particularly his musculature, require exercise, change of pace, and challenge.
Physical exercise is a direct necessity for mental health. Men do not live by work alone, but by an admixture of all that balances the energy flow through his own body with his nutrient intake, enhances his musculature development, and the contributions to the full realization of his physical and mental power.
Critical mental activity is significantly enhanced by physical fitness. The administrator-negotiator to be effective has to train like an athlete. The physical and biological environment of man provides the simplest and most direct access to recreation. The fitness of the environment for the activities of man will depend largely upon how man perceives the environment and how he reacts to it.
It is not accidental that well-ordered environments characterized by the properties of well-ordered ecosystems provide the optimal opportunities for recreation. It follows that in a well-ordered ecosystem of which man is part, tranquility will be a principal feature. This is how recreation has to be interpreted. It is in this way that tranquility must be related to the recreational activities of man.
To be sure, tranquility is not limited to just recreation but must permeate all the activities of man. However, it is in the area of recreation that tranquility is the most easily perceived and, consequently, the best understood. The viewpoint must be holistic. It can be no other way. The whole man must be served or the whole man will perish Some of the ugly "pieces" are very much on display in our inner cities right now.
Longevity, contentment, felicity, well-being, serenity, comfort, the positive sense of achievement and of creativity, are fed and nurtured through these processes.
To provide these properties in man to their fullest, recreation in the fullest must be provided to all citizens, and must be guaranteed under the equal protection of the law. This is the true meaning of domestic tranquility. The founding fathers had a picture of America as strong and vital and creative. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are brilliant and universal testaments to their faith in a strong and free America.
It is no accident that domestic tranquility was seen by them as among those principles necessary to form a government among free men. In the long run, it provides the basis for all principles they named. Justice is seldom served in times of stress and anxiety; court records are numerous that point to mass injustices due to paranoia-inducing environmental circumstances the internment of the Nisei comes to mind immediately. The common defense is best mounted by a nation that is not only physically strong but mentally committed to creative thought and the freedom that inspires it.
And, of course, the common welfare would be greatly aided and abetted in an environment that promoted the opportunities for the total well-being of man. The promotion of domestic tranquility, then, is a community-related factor that has the ecological property of promoting the stability of communities. Since it is directed at bringing about community change by evolution rather than revolution, it supports the status quo. Of all the methods to promote community health and solidarity, creativity and well-being, the promotion of domestic tranquility has the largest unused potential of all the major tenets of our governmental systems.
At present it is the most under-exploited mechanism we have to create the ideal quality of life for man and for all the multitudes of biotypes which share the biosphere. A quick examination of the Federal budget will indicate the following expenditures for the four topics of our discussion. We have previously noted that justice, defense and welfare have been structured as major organizations of the Federal government. Domestic tranquility, while equally important, has not been identified at a major organizational level.
As a matter of fact, at the Federal level it exists only in bits and pieces of several bureaus in several Departments. Of all agencies involved in domestic tranquility, the National Park Service is the most strongly identified in the area and has the clearly exercised leadership. But our best national effort for domestic tranquility is meager when compared to the need. It is neither surprising nor alarming, however, since it has been only in the recent decade and a half that enough understanding has been gained of the environment, the ecological principles that govern it, and its relationships to man to apply this understanding to insuring the domestic tranquility.
It is not "too late. Since the domestic tranquility is community-oriented, it can readily utilize large amounts of wealth without creating revolutionary changes in society. Change will occur, but it will be predictable, orderly, and evolutionary in nature. Increased increments of future wealth production can be dedicated to domestic tranquility with the full realization that our economic system will not only be stabilized, but will grow in an orderly fashion.
Justice will be served, since increased social and economic opportunity should reduce crime. Defense will be served, since the benefits of tranquility will be strong moral and physical fiber and a sense of dedication and rededication to the principles of liberty and freedom and the rights of man. The nation as a whole can be transformed ecologically, biologically, morally and economically into the land of the free and the home of the brave, where the quality of life of all citizens can be improved to such an extent that we can truly say we are evolving to the humane society.
0コメント