Sally prin venture towns1/2/2024 An imagined reality creates the illusion that we are connected to a larger group, creating a kind of “virtual” empathic connection which has an intersubjective rather than a biological underpinning.Īn actual genetic mutation, occurring 70,000 years ago (not 15,000), changed the inner wiring of the homo sapiens brain to allow us to use language in a special way. 12 Instead, Yuval Harari shows that “imagined realities” 13 were invented to knit large groupings together and manage them. ” 11īut Shepard would point out that 15,000 years is not enough time for such a significant evolutionary change to take place. Thus, we can “cohere in larger social units ,” 10 first religions, “then the nation state, then even larger entities. Jeremy Rifkin believes our brains have changed in the last 15,000 years, via evolution, to permit us to empathize with more and more people. However, we were not designed to empathize with groups of humans any larger than the hunting and gathering band, about twenty people, and only the plants and animals we directly encounter. 8 These mirror neurons encourage a natural solidarity and cooperativeness among us that is the central aspiration of most of the world’s religions, 9 and orients us to preserve our environment as well as to respect one another. We are born with empathic soft-wiring-“mirror neurons” that cause us to experience the plight of our fellow humans as our own, and even to empathize with plants and animals. As agriculture developed and humans began a sedentary lifestyle based on the domestication of plants and animals rather than roaming 6 and foraging, 7 groupings got larger. 5 It was only 15,000 years ago that things began to change. Paul Shepard, in Coming Home to the Pleistocene, shows that our own species, homo sapiens, has lived in small groups-nomadic, hunting and gathering-since our emergence 200,000 years ago. However, as Jared Diamond points out, the transition from hunting and gathering to “food production” during the Agricultural Revolution required the managing of the large groups of people who participated in the process.4 Homo sapiens is genetically engineered to empathize only with small groups of other humans, no larger than approximately twenty persons. The transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture ,’” 2 Our failure to create a humane, just, or egalitarian society is a result of our almost universal faith in domination, government from above.” 3Ī. According to Marilyn French, author of From Eve to Dawn, a History of Women in the World, “working] on small scale. Moreover, they keep ownership of the movement from migrating to an elite group that disengages the rest, creating a top-down, hierarchical structure that gives orders, but not connection or community.īut they rarely prevail. These small groups turn out to be the best way to engage people in social movements, because they become part of social life, and can thus be sustained. It was only then that I realized that it was the small groups themselves that had the answers I was looking for. I became immersed in the study of small groups struggling for survival, meaning, and joy in the hard-hit urban neighborhoods of Baltimore’s West Side. My first inquiries in this area led me to write Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community, 1 which began as a work of intellectual exploration and became a piece of cultural anthropology. As one after another of these movements dissipated, were co-opted or destroyed, I began to wonder what was going wrong, not only because I sensed there was much more work to be done, but because I missed the energy and camaraderie of the groups themselves. My experiences in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and with various social and intellectual movements in the African Diaspora in the years that followed, acquainted me with the energy and camaraderie of intimate, small groups of people critiquing and challenging an established, oppressive social order. (Santia McLaren, Brooke Oki, Monique Peterkin and Tabias Wilson worked on an earlier version.) Thanks also to Dean Danielle Holley-Walker of the Howard University School of Law for research funding. He says, “I wish to thank my research assistants, Ahmad Ahmadzai, Tiffany Dayemo, Alexandria Randall and Jonathan McDougall for their research and writing contributions to this article. Harold McDougall is a professor of law at Howard University, Washington, DC.
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