i-eclectica.org

Former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell believes in a binary, or dyadic model of the universe in which consciousness must be taken into account as a causal element.

As a scientist and an astronaut, Mitchell has been personally searching for answers to this fundamental dichotomy. He conducted in-flight experiments in extra-sensory perception with professional psychics back on earth and reported a success rate that was phenomenally greater than that predicted by chance. In 1971, while on the Apollo 14 mission, he looked back at the earth from his space capsule and knew intuitively that an intelligence was at work in the universe.

Mitchell’s epiphany in space did not end there. He returned to earth, left the space program, and founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, California. “It is becoming increasingly clear that the human mind and physical universe do not exist independently,” he says. “Something as yet indefinable connects them. This connective link — between mind and matter, intelligence and intuition — is what Noetic Sciences is all about.”

Mitchell chose the word noetic from the Green work nous, meaning “mind, intelligence, and understanding.” The word noetic encompasses the intellect’s ability to reason, the perceptions of the physical senses, and the intuitive, spiritual, or inner ways of knowing. “The psychic part of the intuitive function, that is, the ability to perceive information in ways unexplainable, is a natural part of the universe. It is available to everyone. We have got to experience powerful intuition, psychokinesis, and healing to know that it is real. There is nothing magical or mystical about it. It is only that aspect of the unknown which we cannot explain yet,” Mitchell says.

While most physicists believe that everything can be reduced to matter and energy, and mentalists take the view that consciousness is the causal element, Mitchell believes that both are mutually necessary. “Like the north and south pole, you need both matter and consciousness for the universe to be complete.” Mitchell sees mainstream science as primarily reductionist, breaking the atoms down to elemental particles. Although that is valid for the physical spectrum, he believes that you have to take into account the nonphysical spectrum, as well. You have to ask, “What is the most elemental thing about our nonphysical essence?” For Mitchell, who holds a doctorate in aeronautics and who has spent eighteen years developing this scientific theory, the answer is information - the ability and intent to distinguish between two simultaneous states. Like a north pole and a south pole, energy then becomes the basis of physical reality and information the basis of consciousness.

Mitchell’s model is unique in its integration of the principles of physics with principles of the new science. “Physics says the matter/energy is the creator of all while the religious camp says that the mind is the creator of all. Everyone is trying to create a monadic model, one that posits one or the other as correct,” he says. And he believes that in failing to recognize the binary or dual nature of the physical and nonphysical dimensions, scientists are restricting their own efforts to find answers.

For example, Mitchell points to the difficulty that physicists have had in trying to come up with a unified field theory. Scientists today have one set of equations for subatomic activity and a different set of equations for atomic activity. A unified field theory would allow them to develop consistent equations for both subatomic and atomic activity. “It’s clear that they are interconnected and that the subatomic level affects what happens at the cosmic level. Tiny, subtle effects do have a major impact, but it’s not clear that with the present state of knowledge scientists can write the same equation for both cosmic and subatomic levels,” Mitchell notes.

Until science studies the fundamental interaction between micro determinism and macro determinism no scientist will be able to develop a unified field theory. As Mitchell points out, “Scientists will never find the unified field theory until they look at human consciousness. Mind and mental phenomena are the last challenge of physics.”

The posting above is excerpted from Dr. Laurie Nadel’s Sixth Sense: Unlocking Your Ultimate Mind Power with Judy Haims and Robert Stempson (ASJA Press) available on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk . It was published by The Bleeping Herald.

[Sydney Morning Herald] [The New York Times]

Mark Landler
November 8, 2007

AS the price of oil surges above the symbolic milestone of $US100 ($106) a barrel - with Malaysia’s TAPIS crude hitting $US100.54 yesterday - it is creating new winners and losers across the globe. In southern China, high oil prices forced Wang Pui, a truck driver, to wait in line 90 minutes the other day to fill up, just to be told he could pump only 98 litres, as China faced spot shortages of petrol and diesel. When Vladimir Putin was making Russia’s bid to be host of the 2014 Winter Olympics last July, he reached into the country’s deep pockets, bulging with oil profits, and pledged $US12 billion to turn a Black Sea summer resort into a winter-sports paradise. Russia, which was nearly bankrupt a decade ago, won the Games.

The prospect of triple-digit oil prices has redrawn the economic and political map of the world, challenging some old notions of power. Oil-rich nations are enjoying historic gains and opportunities, while major importers - including China and India, home to a third of the world’s population - confront rising economic and social costs. Managing this new order is fast becoming a central problem of global politics. Countries that need oil are clawing at each other to lock up scarce supplies and are willing to deal with any government, no matter how unsavoury, to do it.

In many poor nations with oil, the proceeds are being lost to corruption, depriving these countries of their best hope for development. And oil is fuelling gargantuan investment funds run by foreign governments, which some in the West see as a new threat. “Five months ago, readers would not have recognised SWF as meaning sovereign wealth fund,” said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, referring to the funds set up by Russia, Norway and others to invest their oil profits. “And yet now,” he said, “they’re recognised as one of the fundamental forces of the global economy.”

The basic calculus of expensive oil still holds: exporters enjoy a windfall and importers bear a heavier burden. But some unexpected countries are reaping benefits, as well as costs, from higher prices. Consider Germany. Although it imports virtually all its oil, it has prospered from extensive trade with a booming Russia and the Middle East. German exports to Russia grew 128 per cent from 2001 to 2006; exports to the US grew just 15 per cent.

Throughout Europe, the rise of the euro has acted as a hedge against fluctuations in the dollar-denominated oil market, while the heavy taxation of fuel has made rising oil prices less jarring to motorists. “For Europeans,” said David Fyfe, a senior oil market analyst at the International Energy Agency in Paris, “$US100 oil is mostly symbolic.”

Elsewhere, it is much more. For developing countries, oil can be a tool of national transformation, whether the goal is a middle-class standard of living or a utopian society. In Venezuela the President, Hugo Chavez, is pouring oil proceeds into a socialist revolution, creating free health care, free education and cheap food; enabling heavy public spending that has helped fuel four years of economic growth.

The trouble, says Theresa Paiz, a Latin American director for the Fitch ratings agency, is that it’s not really clear how the money is invested. Mr Chavez’s government is steering large chunks of money to development funds and state-owned companies not subject to audits. Transparency International, an organisation that tracks corruption, ranks countries from least to most corrupt, and in its 2007 index Venezuela was at 162 out of 179 countries.

Concerns about corruption are even more pronounced in Nigeria and Angola. Oil-rich Angola is taking in 2½ times the cash it did three years ago. Hotels in the capital, Luanda, are booked months in advance, largely by foreign oil companies. Sales of luxury cars are booming and the International Monetary Fund projects the economy will grow 24 per cent this year, one of the world’s fastest rates. Yet analysts for the Catholic University of Angola’s research centre say two in three Angolans live on $US2 or less a day, the same ratio as in 2002, when the country’s decades-long civil war ended. The Government of Angola is eager to show that oil wealth is benefiting ordinary citizens. It has rebuilt 3800 kilometres of roads, refurbished four airports, and laid 690 kilometres of railroad tracks. But many Angolans take it as a given that oil has enriched public officials most of all. In 2003 a newspaper in Luanda identified the 20 richest people in Angola: 12 were government officials and five were former officials.

Angola’s growing muscle means it is now the biggest oil supplier to China and the sixth biggest to the United States. This is leading it to rethink its global position. It recently joined the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and is limiting its cooperation with the IMF. China has become Angola’s financier, lending Luanda as much as $US12 billion for the country’s reconstruction, in return for guaranteed oil supplies.

The contest among importers to secure access to oil supplies has become fierce. China, a one-time oil exporter that now must import half its oil, is facing politically troublesome shortages of fuel from Shenzhen to Beijing, as Chinese refining companies refuse to supply diesel at unprofitable state-regulated prices. To head off a crisis, China raised retail prices for fuel nearly 10 per cent on November 1.

India is potentially even more vulnerable than China. Although it consumes a third as much oil as China, it imports 70 per cent of its oil. It also has no strategic reserves and demand is growing faster than in any other economy except China’s. Like China, India subsidises fuel, particularly the kerosene used by lower and middle-class families for cooking, a policy that costs it some $US12 billion a year. If oil reaches $US100 a barrel and stays there, analysts say, India will be forced to roll back those subsidies. Sooner or later, prices are going to bite, said Subir Gokarn, Standard & Poors chief economist in Asia. Without an increase in retail prices, officials at the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas warned recently, they might no longer be able to buy adequate supplies of crude for India’s refineries. Unless consumers are paying for what they consume, said M. S. Srinivasan, the petroleum secretary, the ministry is going to be left with a big hole in its pocket. But raising fuel prices could ignite even greater civil unrest in India than in China, where a man was killed recently after jumping a line to buy petrol in the city of Xinyang, in Henan province.

Even in developed countries like Canada, rising oil prices can cause dislocation. The region around the oil sands in northern Alberta is the closest thing the developed world has to a 19th-century boom town. The influx of workers has created a shortage of skilled labour in neighbouring British Columbia, where construction is under way for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

In comparison, the problems faced by other oil producers seem almost benign. For them, the most burning question is what to do with all the money. Norway, the world’s 10th-largest oil producer, wants to guarantee every child a subsidised kindergarten spot by the end of 2008. It has increased spending on kindergarten to $US3.3 billion this year, from $US2.75 billion, partly using money transferred from its $US350 billion State Pension Fund, once known as the Petroleum Fund. Most of the fund is earmarked to pay the future pensions of Norway’s 4.6 million people. The discipline is structural, said Johan Nic Vold, a consultant and former executive at Royal Dutch Shell. Without it, the demands on politicians to use the oil revenue would be almost insatiable.

Dubai has taken a similarly long view. Treating its oil reserves as temporary, it used the proceeds to expand pell-mell into tourism, trade, real estate and construction. The oil sector now accounts for only 5 per cent of Dubai’s gross domestic product.

But perhaps no country has revelled in its oil wealth like Russia. NetJets Europe, the private-jet company, plans to open an office in Russia because the traffic between Moscow and London has become so dense. “Russians have kept London’s high-end real estate market buzzing. There are a lot of Russian buyers around who are prepared to pay a vast amount of money,” said Michael Chetwode of the Home Search Bureau. Back home, Russia’s oil wealth is trickling down. Mr Putin is using it to finance priority national projects, like improved health care and education, and access to affordable housing. Oil may also help Mr Putin cling to power. As he noted recently: “We all remember what state the country was in seven, eight years ago.” (When oil was $US16 a barrel.)

[What this article isn’t talking about are other aspects of oil and wealth: the unsustainability of our dependence on oil, the profit-driven resistance of oil companies and other oil dependent industries to switch to sustainable forms of energy and raw materials, the wars being fought over oil and the suffering they cause to people like those in Iraq, or possible future scenarios arising from a possible more fierce fight over access to oil. It is quite interesting to see how power relationships are redefined or to become aware of which countries care for their citizens, but the real questions are systemic ones -asking them might help guarantee the planet’s survival].

The following is an article by my friend Glenys published in MatriFocus. The paper reflects on a couple of yearly seasonal mythical and mystical celebrations, Beltane and Samhain, ancient events revived in both, the Southern and Northern hemispheres. The aspect I particularly like about Gleny’s thoughts is that she conceptualises the planet as an continuous ‘living’ space, in which life is based on relationship and arises from the ageless processes of passing away and regeneration. Life is constant renewal at all scales, in a place without boundaries and mechanical processes; it is a dance to which every particle is invited and takes part in.

Beltane/Samhain @ EarthGaia

by Glenys Livingstone

The Sacred Reciprocity of EarthGaia

On the surface of it, Beltane celebrates sex and Samhain celebrates death. A great contrast, yet these events are tightly coupled in language, science, and the reciprocity of our respective holidays. The French word for orgasm literally means “a little death” — the felt experience seems similar. In evolutionary science, the advent of meiotic[1] sex is connected to the advent of death.[2] Across the globe, we celebrate both at the same moment. It is Beltane in the Southern Hemisphere, the season of sweet desire for being. That desire is the Cosmic “glue” which holds all form together and allows the dance of life. In the Northern Hemisphere it is Samhain, the season of celebrating the falling apart of all form, the end of desire which allows death and transformation.

At these cross-quarters “the veil is thin that divides the worlds.” Traditionally, both holidays have been times of high revelry and deep intimacy with our place. One celebrates a genetic fertility and the other a trans-genetic/imaginal fertility[3], becoming aware that form and formlessness actually are continuous. As Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky expressed it early last century:

At each moment there are a hundred million million tons of living matter in the biosphere, always in a state of movement. The mass is decomposed, forms itself anew…. Generations are thus born at intervals of time from ten minutes to hundreds of years … through death, birth, metabolism and growth … unceasingly. [Vernadsky, p.34]

This place that we live within is a constant interchange, a reciprocity, like a breath. We live within a sensuous “breathing landscape,” as ecologist David Abram writes, a “field of intelligence in which our actions (and whole beings) participate.”[Abram] Our bodyminds and all bodies exchange substances with the Earth, though the disembodied, and sanitized mainstream culture tries to flush those substances “away.” Aboriginal cosmologies have never forgotten this: The exchange of bodily fluids with land is a valued and significant participation in the very flow of life and relationship with the ancestors.[McDonald] We may recognize this today in the context of the Gaian exchange — local, global, and perhaps beyond.

Biologist Lynn Margulis, co-author of the Gaia Theory, describes how the biosphere evolved into a continuously changing habitat:

The oxygen we breathe, the humid atmosphere inside of which we live, and the mildly alkaline ocean waters in which the kelp and whales bathe are not determined by a physical universe run by mechanical laws; the surroundings are products of life interacting at the planet’s surface. Fundamentally, life on Earth owes its long and continuing existence to these metabolic, physiological, behavioural, and evolutionary interactions. [Barlow]

“Natural selection,” so often understood as a merciless law imposed on creatures, is actually a communal reality.

EarthGaia is not a fixed environment to which organisms must conform. She does not dictate outcomes. “Natural selection,” so often understood as a merciless law imposed on creatures, is actually a communal reality — and perhaps Darwin himself meant it that way. Organism and environment are in a constant communion of decomposition and renewal, a mutual receiving that never fades away — and that is essentially erotic.

Gaia-Universe, Earth, Self: A Unity of Being

EarthGaia is not separate from UniverseGaia. There is no “out there.” Gaia is “in here,” as much as anywhere. Earth floats in the “heavens” — the “heavens” are where we are. We know that Earth is a jewel in the womb of space — we have seen Her. We know that She is stardust; Her dirt is transfigured stuff of the stars. Ten percent of our bodyminds is original hydrogen, recycled many times over. The rest is born in stars, as Earth herself is.[4] Earth is a small seed, a cell, whole in Herself yet a small particle. And so it is for any single being, self, articulation of Her. We are a nested reality. It is simply a matter of perspective.

In 1926 — long before the human eye had actually seen Earth from space — Vladimir Vernadsky was able to hold a vision of Her in her “cosmic surroundings.”[5] He developed a hypothesis of the biosphere “as a unitary agent molding the earth’s crust as a primary geological force” that was in relationship with the cosmic energies of radiation, particularly solar radiation. Vernadsky scientifically and poetically describes a holistic vision of Cosmos and Earth, and at times refers to humankind as a “geological entity.” For him, the biosphere is “a place of transformation” of cosmic energies. He says:

The biosphere is as much, or even more, the creation of the Sun as it is a manifestation of Earth-processes. Ancient religious traditions which regarded terrestrial creatures, especially human beings, as ‘children of the Sun’ were much nearer the truth than those which looked upon them as a mere ephemeral creation. [Vernadsky, pp.iv-9]

Vernadsky asserts that the phenomena in the biosphere can only be understood in the context of the entire cosmos: “related to the structure of atoms, to their places in the cosmos and to their evolution in the history of the cosmos.”[ibid.]

Where in fact, do we make the cut between self and other, animate and inanimate, human and habitat, earth and cosmos? Nothing seems to be exempt from the dynamics of relationship, the energetic flow of coming into being and passing away, These dynamics are our constant companions — in both an everyday and an ultimate way. Perhaps the Universe is subject to the same dynamics. Some indigenous religious traditions have stories of the whole Cosmos coming into being, passing away, and regenerating. Recent Western scientific research supports this too: “…an ageless and self-renewing Universe” whose stars, even ancient ones, are “like short-lived fireflies in the grand scheme of things.”[Than] The flux of being appears to be reiterated at all scales.

The thinness of the veils between the worlds, the sentience of that space, the cyclical connection of the old and the new are supported from a scientific point of view, and in a multivalent way — for example, recent scientific studies indicate that organic life may be born from inorganic matter[6]. Particles of plasma, normally considered inorganic, can undergo self-organization resulting in helical structures that become charged and are attracted to each other, thus taking on qualities of living matter — they are “autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve”.[WorldScience] In a recent interview, cosmologist Brian Swimme gave a short version of the whole story of evolution. He said:

You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans.… The reason I like that version is that hydrogen gas is odorless and colorless, and in the prejudice of our Western civilization, we see it as just material stuff. There’s not much there. You just take hydrogen, leave it alone, and it turns into a human — that’s a pretty interesting bit of information. [Bridle]

The Dance of Life

The tangible and visible dance of life celebrated at Beltane clearly grows from the dissolution, the dance of death and transformation at Samhain. The veils are thin, and globally it is all one dance. Perhaps those who have gone before are closer than we are sometimes wont to feel, as close as the taking in and letting go of breath — we may receive them more deeply in heart and mind.

The purpose of religious practice is to help us know in our bodyminds the deep truths we believe to be so. We strengthen those truths by speaking and enacting them, spelling ourselves. The root of the word “religion” is religio, meaning to bind or connect (in a positive sense of belonging).

The Sabbats mirror each other. Both celebrate an Erotic relationship with our place, this Earth and Cosmos, a deep attraction to knowing that we are She, and that we desire Her.

From all eternity the Beloved unveiled Her beauty in the solitude of the unseen. She held up the mirror to Her own face. She displayed Her loveliness to Herself…. All was One. There was no duality, no pretense of ‘mine’ or ‘thine.’ [Jami][7]

A Planetary Samhain Moment

We live in times of the passing of so much — it seems to be a planetary Samhain Moment. Huge transformation is afoot. Evolution biologist and futurist Elisabet Sahtouris has used the metaphor of the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly to identify the situation. She says:

If you see the old system as a caterpillar crunching its way through the ecosystem, eating up to three hundred times its weight in a single day, bloating itself until it just can’t function anymore, and then going to sleep with its skin hardening into a chrysalis. What happens in its body is that little imaginal disks (as they’re called by biologists) begin to appear in the body of the caterpillar and its immune system attacks them. But they keep coming up stronger and they start to link with each other. As they connect, as they link with each other, they mature into fully-fledged cells and more and more of them aggregate until the immune system of the caterpillar just can’t function any more. At that point the body of the caterpillar melts into a nutritive soup that can feed the butterfly. [Sahtouris]

Then drawing upon the story of Gaian Unfolding, of how we ourselves as multi-cellular bodyminds morphed into being, Sahtouris draws an analogy between this great leap — of single cells evolving into co-operative bodies, to the present challenge of us multi-celled humans evolving into a “multi-cellular” type global body.[Sahtouris] She believes we are ready to make this great leap into a co-operative global body in harmony with other species and our Earth as a whole: that the “rapidly oncoming Hot Age may well be the evolutionary driver pushing us into co-operation.” She says, “There will simply not be enough time and resources for both war and cooperative survival: we will be forced to choose.”[Alberti]

It seems that our times call for the casting away of the old in a radical way. At Samhain we can become conscious of participation in the evolution of consciousness, to fashion a myth/story that will be of service to our time. And at the same time, the concurrent Moment of Beltane may make us conscious of what we most deeply desire, conscious of Desire itself as a power of the universe[8] — as a Holy Lust for birthing the new, a Holy Lust for ongoing Creativity.

The magic of both Moments being celebrated at the same time on EarthGaia is new in our time — Her whole body is the sacred site for these stories[9] that we tell.

Notes

1. meiotic — pertaining to meiosis: cell division by which eggs and sperm are produced
2. An explanation of this by Elisabet Sahtouris can be found in the “From Protists to Polyps” chapter of her (online) book <http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Erthdnce/chapter8.htm accessed 10/27/2007> or by Ursula Goodenough in the abstract of her article, “The Sacred Depths of Nature: Excerpts,” at <http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0591-2385.00298?cookieSet=1&journalCode=zygo accessed 10/27/2007>
3. Beltane celebrates a fertility based in biological conception, whilst Samhain celebrates a fertility based in imaginal conception. Thomas Berry uses the term “trans-genetic” to describe the passing on of cultural information. I mean it to describe conceiving the new with our imaginations.
4. For a full poetic and scientific version of the cosmic unfolding, see Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story, NY: HarperCollins, 1992.
5. Elisabet Sahtouris questions whether Vernadsky really did perceive Earth as a whole live entity (Earthdance p.118), and refers to Scottish scientist James Hutton as having such a view in 1785 (Earthdance, p.69).
6. Webster’s dictionary definition of “valence” is “relative capacity to unite, react or interact”. By “multivalent” I mean “many different possible interactions” across apparent boundaries. Another example would be the phenomena of particles emerging into a quantum vacuum, or the birth of new solar systems out of supernovas.
7. This is similar to the Creation story of the Faery tradition of Witchcraft: see Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, SF: Harper & Rowe, 1988, p.31-32.
8. Brian Swimme refers to Allurement as a “power of the universe” in “The Powers of the Universe” DVD series, 1994.
9. I acknowledge the inspiration of Rachel Pollack, , Element Books, 1997.

References

• Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous, NY:Vintage, 1996. p.260.
• Alberti, Anna. Interview with Elisabet Sahtouris, Caposervizio Salute e Società, Redazione di Marie Claire ITALIA, in relation to Sahtouris’ position on the World Commission for Global Consciousness and Spirituality.
• Barlow, Connie (ed.). Quote from Lynn Margulis in From Gaia to Selfish Genes: Selected Writings in the Life Sciences, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994, p.237.
• Bridle, Susan. “Comprehensive Compassion: An Interview with Brian Swimme”, What Is Enlightenment? No. 19, p.40.
• Jami, Sufi poet 1414.
• McDonald, Heather. Blood Bones and Spirit, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, p. 20-21.
• Sahtouris, Elisabet. After Darwin - Reuniting Spirituality with Science in Order to Form a New World View <http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/AfterDarwin.html.accessed 10./27/2007>
• Than, Ker. “Greatest Mysteries: How Did the Universe Begin?” LiveScience, August 13, 07. See <http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/070813_gm_universe.html accessed 10/27/2007> This article was brought to my attention by “rosewelsh” on pagaian.org forum.
• Vernadsky, Vladimir. The Biosphere, London: Synergetic Press, 1986 (1929)
• WorldScience. “Alien Life… from Dust Particles?” August 14, 2007. <http://www.world-science.net/othernews/070814_dust.htm accessed 10/27/2007> Quoting research published in New Journal of Physics, August 14, 2007. This article was brought to my attention by “rosewelsh” on pagaian.org forum.

Graphics Credits #D22929

• connection, © Gretchen Small. All rights reserved.
• belief, © Gretchen Small. All rights reserved.
• this pearl, © Gretchen Small. All rights reserved.

The (main) clip below is remarkable in many ways (apart from being long). It shows a person who is facing death in probably a few months time, giving his last university lecture in a in a lively, upbeat, humourous and wise-cracking, while exemplifying a deep sense of humanity, a passion for learning and helping others to learn and looking back at a visionary life whose contributions to entertainment technology will live on as a foundational legacy. This video is a moving and at times very emotional contribution to life - as a fountain of opportunities and a providore for brick walls that often need to and at the same time can be overcome, on the roads to making dreams a reality. Despite the length of the clip and some of the references to American culture, it is more than worth watching it for its passion, wisdom and touching portrayal of a remarkable human being. (The first clip is an appetiser, a brief Wall Street Journal summary of the lecture).

Pausch received his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Brown University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He has been a co-founder of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He has done sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts (EA), and consulted with Google on user interface design. Pausch is the author or co-author of five books and over 70 articles, and the founder of the Alice software project.

The article below was published by The New Republic and is a brilliant reflection on why we use swear words. Unfortunately, it already seemed to have disappeared from the original publisher’s website, and my friend Harry luckily was able to track it down again on the authors website, thanks to the sometimes beneficial all-powerfulness of Google. Due to the ephemeral nature of the web I decided to reproduce it here in its whole length - for my own benefit.

The article is a superbly rich investigation into swearing, looking at the issue in an unemotional, matter-of-fact way, yet not without a sense of passion and stylistic eloquence; in fact, Steven Pinkers’ articulate power of expression is in itself truly inspiring.

Why we curse.

What the F***?

by Steven Pinker
Post date: 09.28.07
Issue date: 10.08.07

ucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. Bono, lead singer of the mega-band U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his euphoria exclaimed, “This is really, really, fucking brilliant” on the air. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is charged with monitoring the nation’s airwaves for indecency, decided somewhat surprisingly not to sanction the network for failing to bleep out the word. Explaining its decision, the FCC noted that its guidelines define “indecency” as “material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs or activities” and Bono had used fucking as “an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation.”

Cultural conservatives were outraged. California Representative Doug Ose tried to close the loophole in the FCC’s regulations with the filthiest piece of legislation ever considered by Congress. Had it passed, the Clean Airwaves Act would have forbade from broadcast

the words “shit”, “piss”, “fuck”, “cunt”, “asshole”, and the phrases “cock sucker”, “mother fucker”, and “ass hole”, compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).

The episode highlights one of the many paradoxes that surround swearing. When it comes to political speech, we are living in a free-speech utopia. Late-night comedians can say rude things about their nation’s leaders that, in previous centuries, would have led to their tongues being cut out or worse. Yet, when it comes to certain words for copulation and excretion, we still allow the might of the government to bear down on what people can say in public. Swearing raises many other puzzles–linguistic, neurobiological, literary, political.

The first is the bone of contention in the Bono brouhaha: the syntactic classification of curse words. Ose’s grammatically illiterate bill not only misspelled cocksucker, motherfucker, and asshole, and misidentified them as “phrases,” it didn’t even close the loophole that it had targeted. The Clean Airwaves Act assumed that fucking is a participial adjective. But this is not correct. With a true adjective like lazy, you can alternate between Drown the lazy cat and Drown the cat which is lazy. But Drown the fucking cat is certainly not interchangeable with Drown the cat which is fucking.

If the fucking in fucking brilliant is to be assigned a traditional part of speech, it would be adverb, because it modifies an adjective and only adverbs can do that, as in truly bad, very nice, and really big. Yet “adverb” is the one grammatical category that Ose forgot to include in his list! As it happens, most expletives aren’t genuine adverbs, either. One study notes that, while you can say That’s too fucking bad, you can’t say That’s too very bad. Also, as linguist Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out, while you can imagine the dialogue How brilliant was it? Very, you would never hear the dialogue How brilliant was it? Fucking.

The FCC’s decision raises another mystery about swearing: the bizarre number of different ways in which we swear. There is cathartic swearing, as when we slice our thumb along with the bagel. There are imprecations, as when we offer advice to someone who has cut us off in traffic. There are vulgar terms for everyday things and activities, as when Bess Truman was asked to get the president to say fertilizer instead of manure and she replied, “You have no idea how long it took me to get him to say manure.” There are figures of speech that put obscene words to other uses, such as the barnyard epithet for insincerity, the army acronym snafu, and the gynecological-flagellative term for uxorial dominance. And then there are the adjective-like expletives that salt the speech and split the words of soldiers, teenagers, and Irish rock-stars.

But perhaps the greatest mystery is why politicians, editors, and much of the public care so much. Clearly, the fear and loathing are not triggered by the concepts themselves, because the organs and activities they name have hundreds of polite synonyms. Nor are they triggered by the words’ sounds, since many of them have respectable homonyms in names for animals, actions, and even people. Many people feel that profanity is self-evidently corrupting, especially to the young. This claim is made despite the fact that everyone is familiar with the words, including most children, and that no one has ever spelled out how the mere hearing of a word could corrupt one’s morals.

Progressive writers have pointed to this gap to argue that linguistic taboos are absurd. A true moralist, they say, should hold that violence and inequality are “obscene,” not sex and excretion. And yet, since the 1970s, many progressives have imposed linguistic taboos of their own, such as the stigma surrounding the N-word and casual allusions to sexual desire or sexual attractiveness. So even people who revile the usual bluenoses can become gravely offended by their own conception of bad language. The question is, why?

he strange emotional power of swearing–as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures– suggests that taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo word and its genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking and making love, is an extreme example of the distinction. Curses provoke a different response than their synonyms in part because connotations and denotations are stored in different parts of the brain.

The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words’ denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.

A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the amygdala “lights up”–it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans–when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word.

The response is not only emotional but involuntary. It’s not just that we don’t have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word is seen or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise; we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including its connotation. The classic demonstration is the Stroop effect, found in every introductory psychology textbook and the topic of more than four thousand scientific papers. People are asked to look through a list of letter strings and to say aloud the color of the ink in which each one is printed. Try it with this list, saying “red,” “blue,” or “green” for each item in turn from left to right:

red blue green blue green red

Easy. But this is much, much, harder:

red blue green blue green red

The reason is that, among literate adults, reading a word is such an over-learned skill that it has become mandatory: You can’t will the process “off,” even when you don’t want to read the words but only pay attention to the ink. That’s why you’re helped along when the experimenters arrange the ink into a word that also names its color and slowed down when they arrange it into a name for a different color. A similar thing happens with spoken words as well.

Now try naming the color of the ink in each of these words:

cunt shit fuck tits piss asshole

The psychologist Don MacKay has done the experiment and found that people are indeed slowed down by an involuntary boggle as soon as the eyes alight on each word. The upshot is that a speaker or writer can use a taboo word to evoke an emotional response in an audience quite against their wishes. Thanks to the automatic nature of speech perception, an expletive kidnaps our attention and forces us to consider its unpleasant connotations. That makes all of us vulnerable to a mental assault whenever we are in earshot of other speakers, as if we were strapped to a chair and could be given a punch or a shock at any time. And this, in turn, raises the question of what kinds of concepts have the sort of unpleasant emotional charge that can make words for them taboo.

he historical root of swearing in English and many other languages is, oddly enough, religion. We see this in the Third Commandment, in the popularity of hell, damn, God, and Jesus Christ as expletives, and in many of the terms for taboo language itself: profanity (that which is not sacred), blasphemy (literally “evil speech” but, in practice, disrespect toward a deity), and swearing, cursing, and oaths, which originally were secured by the invocation of a deity or one of his symbols.

In English-speaking countries today, religious swearing barely raises an eyebrow. Gone with the wind are the days when people could be titillated by a character in a movie saying “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” If a character today is offended by such language, it’s only to depict him as an old-fashioned prude. The defanging of religious taboo words is an obvious consequence of the secularization of Western culture. As G. K. Chesterton remarked, “Blasphemy itself could not survive religion; if anyone doubts that, let him try to blaspheme Odin.” To understand religious vulgarity, then, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of our linguistic ancestors, to whom God and Hell were a real presence.

Say you need to make a promise. You may want to borrow money, and so must promise to return it. Why should the promisee believe you, knowing that it may be to your advantage to renege? The answer is that you should submit to a contingency that would impose a penalty on you if you did renege, ideally one so certain and severe that you would always do better to keep the promise than to back out. That way, your partner no longer has to take you at your word; he can rely on your self-interest. Nowadays, we secure our promises with legal contracts that make us liable if we back out. We mortgage our house, giving the bank permission to repossess it if we fail to repay the loan. But, before we could count on a commercial and legal apparatus to enforce our contracts, we had to do our own self-handicapping. Children still bind their oaths by saying, “I hope to die if I tell a lie.” Adults used to do the same by invoking the wrath of God, as in May God strike me dead if I’m lying and variations like As God is my witness, Blow me down!, and God blind me!–the source of the British blimey.

Such oaths, of course, would have been more credible in an era in which people thought that God listened to their entreaties and had the power to carry them out. Even today, witnesses in U.S. court proceedings have to swear on the Bible, as if an act of perjury undetected by the legal system would be punished by an eavesdropping and easily offended God. But, even if these oaths aren’t seen as literally having the power to bring down divine penalties for noncompliance, they signal a distinction between everyday assurances on minor favors and solemn pledges on weightier matters. Today, the emotional power of religious swearing may have dimmed, but the psychology behind it is still with us. Even a parent without an inkling of superstition would not say “I swear on the life of my child” lightly. The mere thought of murdering one’s child for ulterior gain is not just unpleasant; it should be unthinkable if one is a true parent, and every neuron of one’s brain should be programmed against it.

This literal unthinkability is the basis of the psychology of taboo in general, and it is the mindset that is tapped in swearing on something sacred, whether it be a religious trapping or a child’s life. And, thanks to the automatic nature of speech processing, the same sacred words that consecrate promises–the oath-binding sense of “swearing”–may be used to attract attention, to shock, or to inflict psychic pain on a listener–the dirty-word sense of “swearing.”

s secularization has rendered religious swear words less powerful, creative speakers have replaced them with words that have the same degree of affective clout according to the sensibilities of the day. This explains why taboo expressions can have such baffling syntax and semantics. To take just one example, why do people use the ungrammatical Fuck you? And why does no one have a clear sense of what, exactly, Fuck you means? (Some people guess “fuck yourself,” others “get fucked,” and still others “I will fuck you,” but none of these hunches is compelling.) The most likely explanation is that these grammatically baffling curses originated in more intelligible religious curses during the transition from religious to sexual and scatological swearing in English-speaking countries:

Who (in) the hell are you? >> Who the fuck are you?

I don’t give a damn >> I don’t give a fuck; I don’t give a shit.

Holy Mary! >> Holy shit! Holy fuck!

For God’s sake >> For fuck’s sake; For shit’s sake.

Damn you! >> Fuck you!

Of course, this transmutation raises the question of why words for these particular concepts stepped into the breach–why, for example, words for bodily effluvia and their orifices and acts of excretion became taboo. Shit, piss, and asshole, to name but a few, are still unspeakable on network television and unprintable in most newspapers. The New York Times, for example, identified a best-seller by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt as On Bull****.

On the whole, the acceptability of taboo words is only loosely tied to the acceptability of what they refer to, but, in the case of taboo terms for effluvia, the correlation is fairly good. The linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge have noted that shit is less acceptable than piss, which in turn is less acceptable than fart, which is less acceptable than snot, which is less acceptable than spit (which is not taboo at all). That’s the same order as the acceptability of eliminating these substances from the body in public. Effluvia have such an emotional charge that they figure prominently in voodoo, sorcery, and other kinds of sympathetic magic in many of the world’s cultures. The big deal that people ordinarily make out of effluvia–both the words and the substances–has puzzled many observers. After all, we are incarnate beings, and excretion is an inescapable part of human life.

The biologists Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran identify the reason. It can’t be a coincidence, they note, that the most disgusting substances are also the most dangerous vectors for disease. Feces is a route of transmission for the viruses, bacteria, and protozoans that cause at least 20 intestinal diseases, as well as ascariasis, hepatitis A and E, polio, ameobiasis, hookworm, pinworm, whipworm, cholera, and tetanus. Blood, vomit, mucus, pus, and sexual fluids are also good vehicles for pathogens to get from one body into another. Although the strongest component of the disgust reaction is a desire not to eat or touch the offending substance, it’s also disgusting to think about effluvia, together with the body parts and activities that excrete them. And, because of the involuntariness of speech perception, it’s unpleasant to hear the words for them.

Some people have been puzzled about why cunt should be taboo. It is not just an unprintable word for the vagina but the most offensive epithet for a woman in America. One might have thought that, in the male-dominated world of swearing, the vagina would be revered, not reviled. After all, it’s been said that no sooner does a boy come out of it than he spends the rest of his life trying to get back in. This becomes less mysterious if one imagines the connotations in an age before tampons, toilet paper, regular bathing, and antifungal drugs.

he other major source of taboo words is sexuality. Since the 1960s, many progressive thinkers have found these taboos to be utterly risible. Sex is a source of mutual pleasure, they reason, and should be cleansed of stigma and shame. Prudery about sexual language could only be a superstition, an anachronism, perhaps a product of spite, as in H. L. Mencken’s definition of puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

The comedian Lenny Bruce was puzzled by our most common sexual imprecation. In a monologue reproduced in the biopic Lenny, he riffs:

What’s the worst thing you can say to anybody? “Fuck you, Mister.” It’s really weird, because, if I really wanted to hurt you, I should say “Unfuck you, Mister.” Because “Fuck you” is really nice! “Hello, Ma, it’s me. Yeah, I just got back. Aw, fuck you, Ma! Sure, I mean it. Is Pop there? Aw, fuck you, Pop!”

Part of the puzzlement comes from the strange syntax of Fuck you (which, as we saw, does not in fact mean “Have sex”). But it also comes from a modern myopia for how incendiary sexuality can be in the full sweep of human experience.

Consider two consenting adults who have just had sex. Has everyone had fun? Not necessarily. One partner might see the act as the beginning of a lifelong relationship, the other as a one-night-stand. One may be infecting the other with a disease. A baby may have been conceived, whose welfare was not planned for in the heat of passion. If the couple is related, the baby may inherit two copies of a deleterious recessive gene and be susceptible to a genetic defect. There may be romantic rivals in the wings who would be enraged with jealousy if they found out, or a cuckolded husband in danger of raising another man’s child, or a two-timed wife in danger of losing support for her own children. Parents may have marriage plans for one of the participants, involving large sums of money or an important alliance with another clan. And, on other occasions, the participants may not both be adults, or may not both be consenting.

Sex has high stakes, including exploitation, disease, illegitimacy, incest, jealousy, spousal abuse, cuckoldry, desertion, feuding, child abuse, and rape. These hazards have been around for a long time and have left their mark on our customs and our emotions. Thoughts about sex are likely to be fraught, and not entertained lightly. Words for sex can be even more touchy, because they not only evoke the charged thoughts but implicate a sharing of those thoughts between two people. The thoughts, moreover, are shared “on the record,” each party knowing that the other knows that he or she has been thinking about the sex under discussion. This lack of plausible deniability embroils the dialogue in an extra layer of intrigue.

Evolutionary psychology has laid out the conflicts of interest that are inherent to human sexuality, and some of these conflicts play themselves out in the linguistic arena. Plain speaking about sex conveys an attitude that sex is a casual matter, like tennis or philately, and so it may seem to the partners at the time. But the long-term implications may be more keenly felt by a wider circle of interested parties. Parents and other senior kin may be concerned with the thwarting of their own plans for the family lineage, and the community may take an interest in the illegitimate children appearing in their midst and in the posturing and competition, sometimes violent, that can accompany sexual freedom. The ideal of sex as a sacred communion between a monogamous couple may be old-fashioned and even unrealistic, but it sure is convenient for the elders of a family and a society. It’s not surprising to find tensions between individuals and guardians of the community over casual talk about sex (accompanied by hypocrisy among the guardians when it comes to their own casual sex).

Another sexual conflict of interest divides men from women. In every act of reproduction, females are committed to long stretches of pregnancy and lactation, while males can get away with a few minutes of copulation. A male can have more progeny if he mates with many females, whereas a female will not have more progeny if she mates with many males–though her offspring will do better if she has chosen a mate who is willing to invest in them or can endow them with good genes. Not surprisingly, in all cultures men pursue sex more eagerly, are more willing to have casual sex, and are more likely to seduce, deceive, or coerce to get sex. All things being equal, casual sex works to the advantage of men, both genetically and emotionally. We might expect casual talk about sex to show the same asymmetry, and so it does. Men swear more, on average, and many taboo sexual terms are felt to be especially demeaning to women– hence the old prohibition of swearing “in mixed company.”

A sex difference in tolerance for sexual language may seem like a throwback to Victorian daintiness. But an unanticipated consequence of the second wave of feminism in the 1970s was a revived sense of offense at swearing, the linguistic companion to the campaign against pornography. As a result, many universities and businesses have published guidelines on sexual harassment that ban telling sexual jokes, and, in 1993, veteran Boston Globe journalist David Nyhan was forced to apologize and donate $1,250 to a women’s organization when a female staffer overheard him in the newsroom using the word pussy-whipped with a male colleague who declined his invitation to play basketball after work. The feminist writer Andrea Dworkin explicitly connected coarse sexual language to the oppression of women: “Fucking requires that the male act on one who has less power and this valuation is so deep, so completely implicit in the act, that the one who is fucked is stigmatized.”

Though people are seeing, talking about, and having sex more readily today than they did in the past, the topic is still not free of taboo. Most people still don’t copulate in public, swap spouses at the end of a dinner party, have sex with their siblings and children, or openly trade favors for sex. Even after the sexual revolution, we have a long way to go before “exploring our sexuality” to the fullest, and that means that people still set up barriers in their minds to block certain trains of thought. The language of sex can tug at those barriers.

hich brings us back to fucking–Bono’s fucking, that is. Does a deeper understanding of the history, psychology, and neurobiology of swearing give us any basis for deciding among the prohibitions in the Clean Airwaves Act, the hairsplitting of the FCC, and the libertinism of a Lenny Bruce?

When it comes to policy and law, it seems to me that free speech is the bedrock of democracy and that it is not among the legitimate functions of government to punish people who use certain vocabulary items or allow others to use them. On the other hand, private media have the prerogative of enforcing a house style, driven by standards of taste and the demands of the market, that excludes words their audience doesn’t enjoy hearing. In other words, if an entertainer says fucking brilliant, it’s none of the government’s business; but, if some people would rather not explain to their young children what a blow job is, there should be television channels that don’t force them to.

What about decisions in the private sphere? Are there guidelines that can inform our personal and institutional judgments about when to discourage, tolerate, and even welcome profanity? Here are some thoughts.

Language has often been called a weapon, and people should be mindful about where to aim it and when to fire. The common denominator of taboo words is the act of forcing a disagreeable thought on someone, and it’s worth considering how often one really wants one’s audience to be reminded of excrement, urine, and exploitative sex. Even in its mildest form, intended only to keep the listener’s attention, the lazy use of profanity can feel like a series of jabs in the ribs. They are annoying to the listener and a confession by the speaker that he can think of no other way to make his words worth attending to. It’s all the more damning for writers, who have the luxury of choosing their words off-line from the half-million-word phantasmagoria of the English language.

Also calling for reflection is whether linguistic taboos are always a bad thing. Why are we offended–why should we be offended–when an outsider refers to an African American as a nigger, or a woman as a cunt, or a Jewish person as a fucking Jew? I suspect that the sense of offense comes from the nature of speech recognition and from what it means to understand the connotation of a word. If you’re an English speaker, you can’t hear the words nigger or cunt or fucking without calling to mind what they mean to an implicit community of speakers, including the emotions that cling to them. To hear nigger is to try on, however briefly, the thought that there is something contemptible about African Americans and thus to be complicit in a community that standardized that judgment into a word. Just hearing the words feels morally corrosive. None of this means that the words should be banned, only that their effects on listeners should be understood and anticipated.

Also deserving of reflection is why previous generations of speakers bequeathed us a language that treats certain topics with circumspection and restraint. The lexical libertines of the 1960s believed that taboos on sexual language were pointless and even harmful. They argued that removing the stigma from sexuality would eliminate shame and ignorance and thereby reduce venereal disease, illegitimate births, and other hazards of sex. But this turned out to be mistaken. Sexual language has become far more common since the early ’60s, but so has illegitimacy, sexually transmitted disease, rape, and the fallout of sexual competition like anorexia in girls and swagger-culture in boys. Though no one can pin down cause and effect, the changes are of a piece with the weakening of the fear and awe that used to surround thoughts about sex and that charged sexual language with taboo.

Those are some of the reasons to think twice about giving carte blanche to swearing. But there is another reason. If an overuse of taboo words, whether by design or laziness, blunts their emotional edge, it will have deprived us of a linguistic instrument that we sometimes sorely need. And this brings me to the arguments on the pro-swearing side.

To begin with, it’s a fact of life that people swear. The responsibility of writers is to give a “just and lively image of human nature,” as poet John Dryden wrote, and that includes portraying a character’s language realistically when their art calls for it. When Norman Mailer wrote his true-to-life novel about World War II, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, his compromise with the sensibilities of the day was to have soldiers use the pseudo-epithet fug. (When Dorothy Parker met him, she said, “So you’re the man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck.”) Sadly, this prissiness is not a thing of the past: Some public television stations today fear broadcasting Ken Burns’ documentary on World War II because of the salty language in his interviews with veterans. The prohibition against swearing in broadcast media makes artists and historians into liars and subverts the responsibility of grown-ups to learn how life is lived in worlds distant from their own.

Even when their characters are not soldiers, writers must sometimes let them swear in order to render human passion compellingly. In the film adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies: A Love Story, a sweet Polish peasant girl has hidden a Jewish man in a hayloft during the Nazi occupation and becomes his doting wife when the war is over. When she confronts him over an affair he has been having, he loses control and slaps her in the face. Fighting back tears of rage, she looks him in the eye and says slowly, “I saved your life. I took the last bite of food out of my mouth and gave it to you in the hayloft. I carried out your shit!” No other word could convey the depth of her fury at his ingratitude.

For language lovers, the joys of swearing are not confined to the works of famous writers. We should pause to applaud the poetic genius who gave us the soldiers’ term for chipped beef on toast, shit on a shingle, and the male-to-male advisory for discretion in sexual matters, Keep your pecker in your pocket. Hats off, too, to the wordsmiths who thought up the indispensable pissing contest, crock of shit, pussy-whipped, and horse’s ass. Among those in the historical record, Lyndon Johnson had a certain way with words when it came to summing up the people he distrusted, including a Kennedy aide (”He wouldn’t know how to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel”), Gerald Ford (”He can’t fart and chew gum at the same time”), and J. Edgar Hoover (”I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in”).

When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration, meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our attitudes, both thinkable and unthinkable. It engages the full expanse of the brain: left and right, high and low, ancient and modern. Shakespeare, no stranger to earthy language himself, had Caliban speak for the entire human race when he said, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.”

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. His new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature, will be published by Viking in September.

Copyright 2007, The New Republic