A few days ago, Tom Engelhardt wrote an excellent piece for TomDispatch that 'joined the dots', first on global epidemic of fires and droughts, and then on the melt-down of the Global Monetocracy. [ Burning Questions: What Does Economic "Recovery" Mean on an Extreme Weather Planet?]
He quotes Tim Flannery at length, and Flannery has a fascinating review in the NYRB about the evolution of ant-organisms at NY Books, The Superior Civilization
Flannery ends the review by hoping that
"we shall find ourselves living sustainably in a global superorganism whose own self-created intelligence has been bent to the management and the maintenance of its life systems for the greater good of life as a whole."
My immediate reaction was "That sounds like a biologist's version of the global network of Gaian Democracies that John Jopling and I proposed back in 2003."
Taking up another of Tom's points, he laments the fact that when there's a need to join the dots, leading TV and print journalists never seem to be able to see what's in front of their noses.
Remembering the editors and producers I worked for in TV newsrooms, it is clear that the inability of people in the MSM (Main-Stream Media) to connect the dots stems from their need for high-level encouragement in order to give themselves permission to think a new thought.
Most senior journalists and executives in the MSM are what Robert Altemeyer calls "Right Wing Authoritarians" regardless of their notional political allegiences. RWAs tend to be psychologically incapable of breaking ranks with their perceived 'superiors', and, as Altemeyer puts it:
. RWAs ... "submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want--which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical and brutal.
And, as RWAs, most journalists in the MSM,will allow their superiors to set their intellectual and professional agendas no matter how "liberal' their public position and reputation. Indeed, in my experience, Marxists and Trotskyists were the most rigidly conformist in their approach to any issue.
That is why Tom Englebert set up Tomgram, and so many independent thinkers set up their own blogs, such as http://truthout.com and why, when people ask me why I stopped working for network TV, I reply, "The lobotomy wore off."
