optimism of destiny

John Winthrop in 1630 on manifest destiny, the expression of an idea about America’s providential uniqueness and divinely ordained mission, in which if they are faithful,“we shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when tens of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and a glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the lord make it like New England, for we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us.”

…The revolution in the science of psychology since Freud has been disconcertingly troubling. If a historian stands with Ivan Pavlov, they will believe that control of environment and education easily reshapes whole nations as Nazis and Communists tried to reshape theirs; but if one believes as Sir Charles Sherrington did, that ineradicable spiritual instincts are built into the brains of people, they will offer a quite different view of much of history.

---Manifest Destiny is a phrase used by leaders and politicians in the 1840s to argue for the continental expansion by the United States. Writing in the Democratic Review, the editor John O’Sullivan stated it was “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”  This slogan revitalized a sense of “mission” and national  God-given destiny for Americans. It was used as a justification for the first foreign war–against Mexico– fought by the newly formed United States---painting John Gast. 1872. click image for source...

—Manifest Destiny is a phrase used by leaders and politicians in the 1840s to argue for the continental expansion by the United States. Writing in the Democratic Review, the editor John O’Sullivan stated it was “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” This slogan revitalized a sense of “mission” and national God-given destiny for Americans. It was used as a justification for the first foreign war–against Mexico– fought by the newly formed United States—painting John Gast. 1872. click image for source…

The American context of course, begs to differ through an exhibiting of two fundamental traits. They are the optimism always common to most Americans; the optimism natural to an energetic stock planted in a rich environment without crippling feudal institutions, and secondly, the sense of a special purpose and destiny that can be traced back to Plymouth and that became rampant in the Revolution. These characteristics persist.

---John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, gave the clearest and most far-reaching statement of the idea that God had charged the English settlers in New England with a special and unique Providential mission. “On Boarde the Arrabella, on the Attlantick Ocean, Anno 1630,” Winthrop delivered the blueprint for what Perry Miller has dubbed an “errand into the wilderness” which set the framework for most of the later versions of the idea that “America had been providentially chosen for a special destiny.” Winthrop delivered his lay sermon just before he and his fellow passengers disembarked on the shore of Boston harbor, the place, Winthrop proposed, to which God had called them to build up a model Bible commonwealth for Protestants in England and elsewhere to emulate.---painting:Eastman Johnson’s 1859 Negro Life at the South ---click image for source...

—John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, gave the clearest and most far-reaching statement of the idea that God had charged the English settlers in New England with a special and unique Providential mission. “On Boarde the Arrabella, on the Attlantick Ocean, Anno 1630,” Winthrop delivered the blueprint for what Perry Miller has dubbed an “errand into the wilderness” which set the framework for most of the later versions of the idea that “America had been providentially chosen for a special destiny.” Winthrop delivered his lay sermon just before he and his fellow passengers disembarked on the shore of Boston harbor, the place, Winthrop proposed, to which God had called them to build up a model Bible commonwealth for Protestants in England and elsewhere to emulate.—painting:Eastman Johnson’s 1859 Negro Life at the South —click image for source…

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Yet sacredness and meaning pervade the musings of many neuroscientists. Writing in Man on His Nature, Sir Charles Sherrington, the discoverer of the synapse, by which one brain cell can influence another, gave us, or at least popularized, a metaphor that is widely used for the complex set of electrical patterns in the brain:

Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns (emphasis mine).

How do we understand the “enchanted loom” in a way that promotes enchantment, and not disenchantment, in day-to-day life? The first step is to liberate neuroscience from the confinement of an orthodox form of Darwinism.

The orthodoxy in biological science is that natural selection explains everything. The noted geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky said “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” In particular, evolutionary biologists and psychologists, including Edward O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, and many others, have tried for a long time to explain human behaviors in terms of advantages they gave over competing possible behaviors for survival or for ability to reproduce. Evolutionary arguments have been advanced for war, for economic oligarchies, and

gender roles and double standards, but also for cooperation, reciprocity, and altruism.

If all human behavior is evolutionarily determined, this can easily make one believe that because war, social inequality, and environmental damage are part of our biological adaptations, all actions of ours to prevent those things are doomed to failure. Indeed, one of the sources of some religious people’s opposition to evolution, such as William Jennings Bryan’s, has been a feeling that evolution somehow makes ethical standards obsolete.Read More:http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/toward-a-sacred-brain

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