Walter Lippmann

When I was ten years old, in the summer of 1956, I took a four-day train trip with my maternal grandmother from Los Angeles to Syracuse, New York, where my mother was raised. I can’t recall the thinking behind this trip, but it was memorable in many ways. 

Syracuse was memorable for being hot and not Los Angeles. I walked down my mom’s childhood street, East Genesee, where young Rod Serling (doo-doo-doo-doo/doo-doo-doo-doo) used to greet her. There were strange names of things, like Onondoga Lake, strange at least to me because L.A. has no lakes or onondogas. The city seemed small in my mind because I thought the size of L.A. was normal. 

I stood in front of Syracuse University and watched a young man throw rocks at the lights over the entrance, smashing some. He looked at me and said, “I’m just upset.” 

We stayed with my grandmother’s two surviving sisters, who were memorable for sure. More about them some other time. I’ll just say that Lithuania must have been some place! 

There was another memory- this one from the train ride back to L.A.- that was jiggled into my frontal lobe this morning while I watched a vintage Youtube clip of Noam Chomsky discussing Mikhail Bakunin, 19th century proponent of “collective anarchy.” Can you guess the connection between these random elements and the train trip with my grandmother? Give up? Well, in the Youtube clip Chomsky makes a reference to Walter Lippmann, American journalist prominent from the 1920’s to the 60’s, whom Chomsky refers to as a “progressive intellectual.” Long story longer, on the trip back to Los Angeles, Lippmann was on the train. 

I had been staring out the window at midwest flatlands when my grandmother, an accomplished schmoozer, rushed up to tell me that a famous journalist was on the train, and he wanted to meet me.  Of course I didn’t know Walter Lippmann from Adam, but I dutifully followed my grandmother through several cars, particularly relishing the rocking chaos and noisy intrusion of the elements in the connecting platforms. 

We stopped in the aisle in one of the cars and looked down at a well-dressed and groomed man in his 60’s who was sitting alone reading. My grandmother introduced me to Walter Lippmann, the first famous person I had ever met, though he was not famous to me. I felt the familiar pressure of not knowing how to respond to an adult. Lippmann looked fondly at me, but he did not say anything about progressive intellectualism, which makes sense because I was a dumb kid with no virtues beyond the sweetness of youth, and I would not have understood a word he said. 

I don’t remember what he did say. He probably asked me how I liked school. I would have found that question as hard as any other.  I was near mute in my responses. 

As I watched the Chomsky clip I remembered how frustrating and wasteful the encounter with Lippmann had seemed to young me.  If only I had known anything!   In later years the feeling of waste grew as I learned that Lippmann was a critical political interpreter for millions of people. He was behind President Woodrow Wilson's "14 Points" at the close of World War I.  He coined the term “cold war” and created the modern meaning of "stereotype" (formerly "relief printing plate").  Few people have this much impact on their language, and all I could do was stare at him.  

Well, through the magic of literature, I’m going to attempt something rather daring.  If you will bear with me, I plan to initiate a “wormhole” through which my mentality will travel back to that train in 1956 and infuse my prepubescent brain with the requisite knowledge for a decent conversation with Walter Lippmann.  That’s the theory.  I have a wormhole spell I picked up from a character of my acquaintance. Would you like to try it too?  Ok, here goes.   Repeat this with me and perhaps we’ll meet: 

I call you from a crevice near

Have no regret and have no fear

Oh wormhole mine forever dear

Collapse a distant past to here! 

Man, what’s happening?  Oh yeah, I’m entering the mind of ten year old me!  First observation: No wonder I was uncomfortable meeting Lippmann.  Talk about a blank slate!  My young brain is devoid of understanding or perspective on so many levels.  Any personality in there is a restless sea of emotion and longing.  There is no basis whatever for discourse with Lippmann. 

Now for the delicate operation, as I insert the "stereotype" and “cold war” material into my young head.  Upload complete!  Now to activate voice control.  I’m pushing metaphorical buttons.  Uh oh, something’s happening…did we just lose an hour?  Do you remember?  Here’s what I recall: 

Hello Mr. Lippmann, it’s nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, Douglas. 

My grandmother is beaming.

Mr. Lippmann, how did you get everyone in the world to use the new definition of ‘stereotype’ that you made up?

I don’t know. I didn’t expect that to happen.

Did you expect everyone to start using ‘cold war’ too, after you made that up?

The phrase was from my book, ‘Cold War.’ It’s flattering that so many people found it apt.

Yes, it certainly was apt. 

Young me is getting into it, never suspecting where the useful knowledge is coming from.  Now young me’s enthusiasm for the new normal is taking an unexpected turn, as young me grows neurons which invade my adult mind, making permanent connections to my knowledge base.  The results appear bizarre if not disturbing, as my first more youthful questions are replaced with questions of a more adult cast. 

Mr. Lippmann, are you an elitist?

Hmm, Douglas, do you know what an elitist is?

Yes, it’s a person who thinks they’re better than everyone else.

I don’t think that I’m better than everyone else. Do you think you are?

I…well…. 

Strangely that question is as hard for adult me as young me.

I mean, I don’t know what’s better or not better, Mr. Lippmann, but you wrote that you don’t think the general public can run humanity’s affairs. 

My grandmother frowns. 

Is that so? You read on a high level for a ten year old!

I do? I mean, thank you. You wrote that when people watch the news they are not educated by it.  You said the news constructs a picture of reality that is 'imperfectly recorded,' and 'too fragile to bear the charge as an organ of direct democracy.'

Lippmann glances at my grandmother, who is in a suppressed rage. He looks back at me. 

Very good, Douglas, but you are conflating a critique of the media with a belief that elites should rule. 

I'm feeling something strange happening, a sort of merger of youth and age.  I'm not sure how to form my words.  Lippmann notes my hesitation. 

Douglas, do you know what ‘conflate’ means?

I think it’s when two people fart at the same time. 

What is happening to me?  Is there a hint of smile on Lippmann’s face?  There is no such hint on my grandmother’s face.  I try to salvage the situation. 

Mr. Lippmann, do you think that elites should rule? 

Lippmann is looking at me the way you might look at a chess-playing chicken. 

That’s not a valid question, Douglas, because elites do rule, by definition. You might as well ask if birds should fly. 

Should they? 

 Lippmann laughs.  I feel clever.  I want more approbation, so I continue. 

Mr. Lippmann, you wrote in 1922 that ‘mass man functions as a bewildered herd who must be governed by a specialized class.’

Douglas, I’m just describing reality, not saying it’s good.

Have you heard of Noam Chomsky?

No. 

He said that you believe that 90% of the population are "ignorant, meddlesome outsiders," and that we need to be ruled by "the wise men…you know…the smart people."

Is that so, Douglas? Sounds like Mr. Chomsky is one of those smart people himself. 

He is a professor of linguistics at MIT.

So, is he a member of an elite?

I guess, maybe. 

Out of nowhere I have an intense need to pee, and I'm so restless I long to turn from Lippmann and my grandmother and skip down the aisle, push the heavey metal door open and step through, finally expressing my energies and maybe fluids in the interstitial madness of the coupling platform.  

But my grandmother has had enough. She thanks Lippmann profusely and demands that I shake his hand and thank him, which I do.  A quick glance into Lippmann’s eyes tells me that little harm has been done to the universe.  On the walk back to the restroom and our seats my grandmother is silent.  When we sit, she sighs. 

Dougie, sometimes I don’t understand you. 

I'm too busy trying to unplug the weird connections in my head to reply.  Through the window I see vast plains roll by. 

What controls us?

Why do people do the self-destructive things they do? Why is the human brain, so impressive in its versatility, overrun with dangerous and ill-advised impulses, inducing us, for instance, to build complex civilizations based on fantasies and wishful thinking, then compress ourselves into cramped, frustrating living spaces where we long for violent outlets?   We fancy ourselves to be exceptionally intelligent, as animals go, but much of the time we appear to have no more mental heft than the blindly self-destructive victims of parasites.

Parasites have been on my mind since reading Carl Zimmer's book, Parasite Rex which describes the perpetual struggle between large multicellular creatures like us and the parasites who feed off them. In the course of this struggle, parasites often employ mind control against their hosts.  Zimmer describes numerous instances where parasites invade the brains of their hosts to make them, for instance, forget their fears of natural predators, the intent being to get the host eaten so the parasite can embark on its next life-stage in the predator.  For the benefit of parasitic reproduction, fish float in front of herons, ants wait atop grass stalks for hungry birds, caterpillars leave the safety of their camouflage.  

Some parasites are multicellular, large creatures themselves.  The parasitic emerald wasp injects chemicals into a cockroach's brain that turn it into a "zombie slave," then lays one egg on the cockroach's underbelly.  The roache's brain has been changed so that all interest in caring for roach offspring is replaced with deference to the wasp larva.  As the larva grows, it burrows into the roach, eating its internal organs in a precise order ensuring that the roach stays alive long enough to function as a wasp womb.  After that, the young wasp tosses the shrivelled roach corpse away.

We have no evidence that familiar human compulsions are caused by parasites, but it's likely they are caused by something other than the human intellect.  What sort of intellect would go to war for no good reason, which our species will do on a dime. Desire for war on its own merits might be diagnosed as abnormal and suicidal by human medical practice, and those suffering from it could well be victims of mind control, whether by parasites or fellow humans (who themselves might be under parasitic control).

If we find however that our thralldom to irrational behavior does not derive from parasites, we might investigate transposons, mysterious genetic manipulators which originated, somehow, "outside" us, and have since taken up residence in our DNA. Geneticists don't know much about transposons, other than that they can edit our DNA and affect our basic structure.  There is conjecture that transposons account for the non-inherited differences between identical twins, and for significant non-inherited behaviors in everyone.  Exactly what those behaviors are and what purposes they might serve is unknown.

Transposon theory provides less explanation than parasite study, because at least with parasites we know the host is forced to serve the survival interests of the parasite.  We don't even know if transposons are alive, let alone promoting an agenda.  We only know they are there, influencing us.

Zimmer describes a theory of sex, including human sex, common among parasitologists, in which the purpose of sexual reproduction is to provide a continual reshuffling of host-species' genes, a process necessary to keep pace with and defend against parasitic evolution.  Reproduction is hardly a non-survival oriented activity- we only survive if we reproduce- but could the system be hijacked?  Our compulsion to sexually reproduce without resources to care for our young, with no concern about overpopulation, resulting in seven billion anxious, pessimistic humans trapped on earth to plot against each other, is clearly not the result of an intellectual process.

Our longing for war could very well grow out of a parasite enhanced obsession with reproduction, after which the parasites lead the resulting oversized human population to war and mass death.  The human die-off may then enable some further stage in the parasite's life cycle.

Our intellects are muffled and controlled by forces we can't see. These forces might emanate from parasites or transposons, or from members of our own species. Maybe our next step will be to truly elevate the human intellect, perhaps meeting parasites mind to mind and working with them. Or maybe we could continue to float on the surface waiting for herons.  

Our shrinking frame story

A frame story is a story within a story.  Maybe the most famous is One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales framed by a story about a sultan who, in order to relieve the pain of his first wife's infidelity, decides to marry a new virgin each day, sleep with her that night, then have her executed the next morning before she has a chance to cheat on him.  After a few years of the sultan's madness, the realm is almost out of virgins.  The court frantically wonders what to do, when Scheherazade, the daughter of the grand vizier and a virgin, offers herself to the sultan.  Her father objects, but she has a plan.  On the night of the wedding, after her deflowering, she beguiles the sultan with a compelling story.  It is too long to finish in one evening, so she promises to continue it the next night.  The sultan is so engrossed by his wife's endless story that night after night he implores her to continue, each time extending her life by one day.

Just like Scheherazade's, our stories interlock with frames that turn like gears, promoting the arrow of time with beginning, middle and hopefully end.

On December 26, 2004, my story was that I was camping in Death Valley, and the frame was the life in Los Angeles I had left behind, but when the car radio reported that a giant tsunami had killed 200,000 people near Indonesia, that became the main story of the world, framing mine and everyone's stories.

The opposite would have happened- my world would have shrunk- if Ubehebe Crater, a few miles from my camp, had erupted that morning, as it did thousands of years ago in a phreatic rage that dug a hole 777 feet deep.  The shock wave would have flattened the camp, eliminating the tsunami entirely from my frame, diminishing the world to a few local square miles.

There was frame shrinkage in Los Angeles after the magnitude 6.7 earthquake in 1994.  Earlier that week, an L.A. Times headline read, "Serbs' heavy weapons pound Sarajevo."  Before the earthquake, that seemed like a relevant topic; after the earthquake there was almost no consciousness of war in Sarajevo because our frame story did not extend beyond our city.

In the last few months a number of events have been powerful enough to attract worldwide attention and frame everyone's story.  Often these frames had the stage to themselves for a few days, so the whole world could think about them and decide what if any action to take.  Some were conflicts, e.g. Israel vs. Palestinians; Russia vs. Ukraine; Armenia vs. Azerbaijan; Myanmar, China and maybe all governments to varying degrees vs. elements of their own people.  Some were slow-moving but threatening, like climate change.  Some were medical tragedies, like India's lack of oxygen for covid victims; some were natural, like several powerful volcanic eruptions.  Each defined a global frame story.

Our minds are accustomed to alternating between global frame stories and local ones, but disasters of a type that formerly might have captured world attention are hitting the human sphere with such regularity and frequency that everyone's frame story is at risk of shrinking down to their immediate environment.  If the time comes when every place on Earth hosts a catastrophe such that everyone's frame story becomes local, we will experience mass, unconscious censorship.  

Such censorship happened in a limited way on January 6, 2021, when Business Weekly broke the news about possibly dangerous covid variants.  The story was urgent enough, you would think, to frame and reorder our lives, but because of the D.C. insurgency on the same day, covid news seemed trifling, out of the frame.

In most populated areas it wouldn't take more than a disabled Internet to shrink everyone's frame story down to their visible world.  Adding a few more calamities- like failure of a power grid or a new pandemic- could force a reversion to the provincialism of the agricultural Middle Ages, when most people stayed within forty miles of home their whole lives, and information about the world was rumor.  

The tendency of disasters to limit broader perspectives renders them useful to those who might want to curtail the population's worldview and ability to influence events.   Even earthquakes and hurricanes are suspect, at least if you believe magazines available in City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco which claim that the CIA has an earthquake producing machine and that China can control the weather.  I have not seen allegations that volcanic eruptions can be induced, but how hard could it be?

We seem poised to enter a period of increased catastrophes and shrunken world-views.  At its most extreme, a shrunken world-view translates to a total lack of influence on one's surroundings and society.  For now, through voting and regular pummeling of newspapers with letters to the editor, we have the illusion of influence.  The illusion may pass.

People will look for ways to stay sane as our frame stories shrink.  Some will find solace in religion and worship.  Some will read novels or watch movies.  Some will study their own dreams.  

In my case, I have a fantasy that there will be a new American political party based on the reality of our shifting world.  This party will expand people's frame stories beyond the purview of local catastrophe.  It will produce strong feelings of trust.  People will think the party is speaking to them, that it is authentic.    I know what you're thinking: "Don't hold your breath."  But I am holding my breath.  

The future of the alpha male

Early Hollywood films often featured cute baby chimpanzees who mimicked human behavior with infantile gestures, grimaces and clownish antics.  But, although there are plenty of adult lions, elephants and giraffes in early movies, there are no adult chimps.  Adults were retired to "reserves" far out of the city.  Chimp handlers knew why, but the general public did not.  

That changed over recent decades as a series of horrifying attacks by adult chimps on humans were reported in the media.  Adults can weigh up to 200 pounds and are generally twice as strong as the average adult human male.  The attacks entailed faces and genitals torn off, hands amputated and other targeted attacks that appeared designed, not necessarily to kill, but to permanently debilitate the victim both physically and psychologically.  The victims typically were taken by  surprise.  Often the chimp had been raised by the victim from babyhood, or the victim might be a friend of the owner who knew the chimp well, or thought so.  The trigger for many of the attacks appeared to be jealousy, or a sense of betrayal.  One woman brought a birthday cake to a captive adult chimp (removed from her custody for dangerous behavior) in the company of two other chimps.  One was so jealous of the cake that he bit off the womans lips and nose and destroyed one eye.  A man who brought a toy to a chimp he knew lost his genitals when he tried to take back the toy.  It is now illegal to own a chimp as a pet.

While our society was learning about the nature of adult chimps in captivity, scientists were learning about chimps in the wild.  Search "chimp attacks in Africa" and you'll find beautifully shot narratives by producers like Discovery and Planet Earth-BBC Wildlife depicting a murderous species, often out to expand its territory.  In one program, a band of adult male chimps, led by its alpha male (the dominant male animal in a particular group- Webster) silently creeps through the forest, stalking a neighboring colony of chimps.  The alpha, who not only determines the group's behavior but defines its virtues, deficits and moral tone, brings the group to a halt as the "enemy" comes within earshot.  The males huddle together in intense, intimate concentration.  The group attacks and manages to capture a baby chimp from the neighboring group, which they kill by pulling off its limbs, after which they sit in a circle, gnawing on the limbs and sharing them with each other. 

More recently, the Netflix documentary "Chimp Empire," directed by James Reed, presented a strikingly intimate look at Chimp society in which they appear to be types of people.In fact chimps are our closest relatives.  Human DNA differs from chimps' by only 1%.  In contrast, human DNA differs from dogs' by 75%.  The difference between apes (like chimps) and monkeys (like capuchins) is 7%, meaning that we are closer to chimps than chimps are to monkeys.

Chimps pre-date us by almost 5 million years, so we appear a spin off from them, appearing about 300,000 years ago. Maybe it was the chimps who drove us from the forest.

[Note: Our DNA is likewise only 1% different from the chimps' nearest relation, bonobos.  In the 70's and 80's, bonobos were touted as "flower-children chimps" because of their uninhibited displays of affection- including social conventions like handling each other's genitals or rubbing them together- and the lack of male combat.  The hippie association was dropped after researchers noticed that many males were missing thumbs, which had been bitten off by females in this matriarchal alternative to chimp patriarchy.]

As with humans, not all chimps are murderous.  A Discovery UK episode tells the story of two peaceable chimps, Hare and Ellington, who, though members of a large warlike group, spent their days together in tranquil strolls through the forest.  One day Ellington was beaten and mauled to death by members of the group.  Hare then wandered alone, depressed and distracted, finally finding his place taking care of baby chimps orphaned by his group.

Are we like chimps in behavior as well as DNA?  A study of human history suggests that we are.  Many anthropologists speculate that homicidal impulses in our ancestors explain the absence today of any other types of humans than our own.  There is fossil evidence that there were other types of humans, notably Neanderthals and Denisovans.  Genetic analysis indicates that we interbred with these humans, but we also witnessed their extinction.  There is no evidence that we intentionally eliminated them (an action we would now term "genocide"), but the question remains, where are they? 

We are proud of our hunting heritage, but unlike, say, lions, who after millions of years of hunting and eating impalas and giraffes have not caused the extinction of those animals, human prey tends to disappear.  There is plenty of evidence that needless killing of fauna and megafauna has recurred throughout human history.  A prehistoric example that is generally left unsaid in deference to a need to idolize early North American cultures (science writer Jared Diamond is one of the few to refute this idealization) all large mammals on the North American continent- like giant ground sloths and wooly mammoths- disappeared shortly after the arrival of the first humans, 10,000-12,000 years ago. The later settling of the American West by Europeans provides further examples of animals slaughtered in numbers far exceeding people's need to eat them.  When Europeans arrived in North America, passenger pigeons comprised up to 40% of the bird population, their migrations filling the sky.  "Sportsmen" would fire straight up and revel when dozens of birds fell to the ground.  From an estimated 3 to 5 billion pigeons when the Mayflower docked at Plymouth Rock, their numbers fell in two hundred years to zero.  The American bison (commonly called the "buffalo") numbered around 30 million before Europeans came.  Horace Greeley wrote in 1860 that, "Often, the country for miles in all directions had seemed quite black with them."  The railroads sold tickets for bison killing excursions to New Englanders looking for adventure.  When herds of bison ran across the prairies near the tracks, rifles were issued to passengers so they could shoot them from train windows.  The train did not stop to recover the mounds of carcasses for any sort of use.  Today the bison is designated "near threatened."  "How the West was won" should be rephrased as, "How the West was cleared of lifeforms that suggested humans are not the dominant species."

Back to genocide- the modern term for humans intentionally killing (or attempting to kill) entire groups of other humans- we often treat it as a recent aberration stemming from Adolf Hitler (the term "genocide" originated in the 1940's), but far from being unique to World War II, genocide (which continued after the war and is ongoing today) has occurred repeatedly since the dawn of humanity, starting, possibly, with the disappearance noted above of any other sorts of humans than us, the Denisovans going extinct about 80,000 years ago, the Neanderthals about 40,000.  

Moving forward, there is archaeological evidence that the Indo-Europeans (from whose language group almost all current European languages derive) committed genocide in the course of their expansions starting around 4,000 BC. 

Something genocidal appears to have struck ancient Britain, as there is genetic evidence of a 90% population turnover in the 3rd millennium BC.  This could help explain how genetic analysis of "Cheddar Man," a 10,000 year old skeleton found in Somerset, England, could suggest that he had "quite dark skin and blue eyes" (The power of archaeology and genetics, NewScientist Magazine, 5/29/21).  We've been wondering for a long time who built Stonehenge.  Surprise!

In historical times, both the Athenian city-state and the Roman Empire, to take two examples, achieved much of their stature through genocide.  The list of genocides after the Romans is long, covering all continents.

The quest for empire and hegemony- straight from the chimpanzee playbook- seems a prime factor in human genocide.  Since the advent of large civilizations around 3,000 BC, it's been one alpha male ambition after another, producing brutal, genocidal empires that are then toppled by the next empire-building alpha, which is toppled by the next.  It seems never to have occured to people that one might just live happily munching leaves, replacing glory and bloodlust with the simple pleasures of a satisfied existence, not unlike the lifestyle of another of our close ape relatives, gorillas (whose DNA differs from ours by 1.75%).  

In fact the idea of just existing is repulsive to many people; we call it "vegetative," as if we know what it's like to be a plant.  We think we are supposed to manage everything, maybe even dominate everything, as our choice of comic book "superheroes" shows.  

I see the tendency in myself, at least in my childhood taste in fictional heroes, such as those from the TV series Star Trek.  Was it the spectacle of James T. Kirk, captain of the starship Enterprise and cutting edge of the human race, landing on one planet after another, subduing its inhabitants, always winning?  Or First Officer Spock (half-human, half-alien, a hybrid alpha) who matched Kirk's ability to dominate the environment but went beyond it by also dominating his inner self?   Of course Kirk and Spock were depicted in each episode as gaining the moral high ground by adhering to Starfleet's "Prime Directive," that none of the ship's missions would interfere with indigenous cultures.  That's why it's called science fiction.

Returning to the real world, President Trump was lauded by his tribe as the mean alpha, jumping up and down, hooting and fulminating throughout his four years as the dominant male of America.  The other night, when people watched President Biden address the nation about his $1.9 trillion covid relief plan, there was widespread relief that Trump had been replaced by Hare, the gentle chimp who cares about children (of course Biden is a facade; the wheels of war turn more quietly now, but as relentlessly as under Trump).

Where does the chimp and human animus come from?  What happened in the ancient forests of Africa, to us and to chimps?  As William Blake phrased the question (though addressing a tiger):

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Scientists are not asking that question, but they are tangentially finding out interesting things about alpha males, in particular that there is a correlation between alpha males and a high level of the "flight or fight" drug serotonin, produced in a cluster of cells in the human brainstem called the raphe nuclei.  When the raphe nuclei send a large dose of serotonin into the amygdala- a brain center that controls our emotional state- the amygdala directs us to become alphas and run the show.  Submissive mice have been transformed into alpha's after injections of serotonin, and alphas have been demoted when their serotonin is decreased.  

Interesting, but the question becomes, why did the ancient raphe nuclei feel the need to squirt so much serotonin into men's amygdalas?  We get a shitload, which is probably why we can't stand a sky full of pigeons.

There's not much evidence to explain what the raphe nuclei were so afraid of, so once again we must guess.  My guess is that we and our chimp cousins feared non-belonging.  The forest had rejected us in some fundamental way.  We did not fit.  Chimpanzees reacted to this ostracism by terrorizing each other into a structured existence.  People fought back by becoming smarter and more resourceful.  Some of the response was practical, bringing development of improved hunting implements and use of fire.  Some was psychological, as when ancient Egyptians built giant pyramids to inflate the standing of the ruling alphas and humble the slaves.  Some was suicidal, as when, in our time, we learned how to blow up and poison the planet, threatening the alphas along with everyone else.  Perhaps we secretly hate the Earth and resent Creation for sending us here.  

Genesis tells the story metaphorically.  After Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, the Earth was revealed as inhospitable, requiring people to build artificial environments lest they starve and freeze.  We're not the only creatures who have to do this: birds build nests; beavers build dams.  But humans need to reconstruct the whole forest, the whole world. 

There is growing understanding that our quest to reform the Earth under the guidance of the alpha male (and an enabling Eve) has gone awry.  As the dream of a compatible Earth flounders, we turn to space- with its endless planets full of monsters to defeat, hellscapes to terraform and indigenous cultures to leave in pristine condition- hoping the effort out there will go better than it has here.

The question this essay asks is, what is the future of the alpha male who has guided us to this point?  We are acquiring biological tools that will enable us to recreate ourselves.  Through CRISPR technology we will be able to assemble our DNA into any combination of characteristics we want.  If we envision a new way, one that seeks co-existence rather than dominion, we could, if we choose, phase out the alpha male and seek a softer, more cooperative humanity.

The fly in the ointment is that the people in charge of our re-creation will likely be alpha males (and alpha females, since we fluctuate now between chimp and bonobo) who are motivated to make vast fortunes and dominate the humans around them.  The chimps will be in charge, driven by their terror of not being in charge.

What can we do about this?  Cut off the supply of serotonin?  It's unclear.  Stay tuned for Part II of this post: How to ensure that the new humanity is not as homicidal and generally berzerk as the current one.