Bill Ellis writes: For some 2000 years or more civilization has been ruled by a social
paradigm on which all Aspects of the EuroAmerican cultures are based –
the “dominator paradigm.”  In the past 2 decades a new social paradigm
has been emerging  that could have the most profound and fundamental
impact on human civilization since humanids first came down from the
trees.   The old paradigm placed humans in a purposeful universe
created  by some superormal power for the domination and use by man. 
The new paradigm we’ll call “A Gaian Paradigm.” It suggests a
spontaneously self-organizing universe in which humanity is but one of
the created interdependent webs of being.

The “dominator paradigm,” has had a long evolution.  It grew from the
Jewish creation myth that held that the earth was created for the use
of and domination by man.  It was strengthened by Greek philosophy with
its postulate that “Man is the measure of all things.”  The early
Church held that a “chain of being”  put man at the top of a hierarchy
with only a few celestial beings above. Below were women, children,
other races, animals, plants and the Earth, each there to serve and be
dominated by the rungs above.  The “dominator paradigm”  was stamped in
the minds of Europe by the thousand-year Inquisition that burned some
one million people, mostly women, at the stake for believing in Earth
as our creator.  It was spread to the East by the crusades that
destroyed “infidel” humans, cities and nations.  During the Age of
Colonization and Discovery it  was perpetuated and made worldwide by
the sword (technology), the cross (Christianity), and the flag
(nationalism).  Newton’s clockwork concept of that cosmos, and Darwin’s
theory of evolution were interpreted to “prove” the  validity of the
dominator paradigm.  It was fixed in our secular moral system by the
acceptance of Adam Smith’s economy that claims that human
“self-interest,” competition and materialism should, and does, dictate
all human actions.  This abomination as the essence of humanity now
rules the world.

A “Gaian paradigm” not only has many roots but can be, and is becoming,
the underpinning of a new global network of cultures replacing the now
dominant and domineering man-centered industrial cultures.  The new
cultures will be, like all cultures, holistic unified coherences of
interdependent components — religion, economics, social and others. 
The emergence of the Gaian paradigm is resulting in a deep fundamental
transition of our world view, our social institutions and  our
lifestyles.  The need for this transition is being made obvious by the
growing numbers of  dangers inherent in  industrialism.  And the
transition is  happening, and being made real  in the introduction of
many positive and creative  social innovations. This  millennium is
being looked upon as a time of radical and fundamental change.  Minds
are opening to new ideas.  People are looking for new  actions.  It is
in this spirit of a hopeful, deep, fundamental  social transformation 
that this book is addressed. These are the concepts we’ll explore in
the next few chapters. (09/05/08)
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Tom Englehardt writes: It’s now hard to remember that, when the Bush administration arrived in
office in 2000, its hardcore members were all old Cold Warriors who
hadn’t given up the ghost. If the Soviet Union no longer existed, they
were still quite intent on rolling back what was left of it, stripping
off Russia’s “near abroad,” encircling it militarily, and linking
various of its former Eastern European satellites and socialist
republics to NATO, as well as further penetrating and, after 2001, deploying troops to the oil-rich former SSRs of Central Asia.

As Stephen Cohen wrote in a pathbreaking piece in the Nation,
“The New American Cold War,” back in 2006, even as the Bush
administration began to claim that the U.S. had an overriding national
interest in scores of nations around the planet (including Iraq and
Iran), there was “a tacit … U.S. denial that Russia [had] any legitimate
national interests outside its own territory, even in ethnically akin
or contiguous former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia.”As had been true in the 1990s under the Clinton administration, the new
administration was eager to kick a former superpower when it was down
on its luck and just beginning to emerge from its era of “catastroika.”

While George Bush looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and declared him a
soulmate, his vice president and various neocon allies were spoiling
for a fight. And this isn’t exactly ancient history either. As David
Bromwich pointed out recently in a canny piece
at the Huffington Post, Cheney essentially threw down the gauntlet to
Russia in a speech in Vilnius, Lithuania, in May 2006 in which he
“threatened Russia with a new Cold War if Russia did not capitulate to
American demands of cheap oil for Russia’s pro-American neighbors.”

How the worm turns. A very energy-rich worm, as it happens, at a
time when control over energy resources and their delivery is what
makes the world spin. The events in Georgia this August, analyzed below
by Michael Klare, author of the new book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy
(which explains just how the world turns), were but another reminder
that the officials of the Bush administration have proven bush leaguers
when it comes to assessing how power really works in the world. They
were, from the beginning, fantasists in love with the supposedly unique power
of the American military to cow the planet. For all the talk now about
being at the beginning of the Cold War (Act II), this is also fantasy,
as well as “home front” spin in an election year, and manna, of course,
for worried U.S. arms makers. (The brief war in Georgia, reported the Wall Street Journal, was seen by some Wall Street stock analysts as “a bell-ringer for defense stocks.”)

Right now, the Bush administration continues to have its hands
militarily more than full just handling a low-level war in Iraq and a
roiling one in the backlands of Afghanistan (and Pakistan). At the
moment, it couldn’t fight a “new Cold War” if it wanted to. Not only is
the world no longer America’s backyard, but for much of the world, when
an American president says,
“Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign
policy in the twenty-first century,” and the Republican Party candidate
for president adds,
“But in the twenty-first century, nations don’t invade other nations”– as each did in regard to the Russian war in Georgia — it’s only an
indication of just how out of touch they are. (At least UN ambassador
Zalmay Khalilzad was careful to qualify his version of this statement geographically: “The days of overthrowing leaders by military means in Europe — those days are gone.”)

For all their bluster, they now find themselves strangely powerless in a world that is increasingly anything but “unipolar.” (09/05/08)
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