As I wrote in Part 1 of this series, activism has clearly had an impact on making change.  The package of laws called The Civil Rights Act of 1964 intends to enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide relief against discrimination in public accommodations (including schools), etc.  

First conceived to help African Americans, the bill was amended to also protect women (all women) in courts.  It also started the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  But just as the Wilderness Act of 1964, which was intended to protect, preserve, and expand wilderness areas, did not protect them to the degree necessary to save them, all that really happened with the Civil Rights Act was that the police (and the National Guard), and the courts could now force people to comply; could force people to behave in certain ways.  Clearly something had to be done to deal with the deeply imbedded racial-hatred that I personally witnessed when in the Air Force in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1953.  But a new convention was not created with either of the Acts mentioned above.

This series of essays (posts) is trying to describe the process of producing new conventions.  Specifically a new rational convention that provokes people to take responsibility for their own body wastes when using the remaining wild places, and one that is enforced by the recreating society in general.  I don’t believe that laws produce conventional behavior, period.  Laws expand the use of force to make people behave in certain ways, but they don’t seem to have anything whatsoever to do with whatever it is that makes people put themselves at risk for a stranger - say at an accident scene - or most recently the soldier in Iraq who threw himself on a grenade to save his buddies.  There is something much deeper going on.  Law, all law, except natural law, is very superficial and hangs like a thin mist over the people who rely on it.

Of interest, I know a story of a white man who hated blacks, but coming upon an accident scene he stopped and helped the black family of four out of their vehicle.  During the ordeal he was at great personal risk.  After getting the black family out of their car, they were all hugging each other.  They were all crying - so happy that everyone got out in one piece.  Yet this man who clearly helped save the black family - they could not get out and two of them were badly injured - had no new desire to associate with blacks socially.  Irrational?  Most certainly.  But this sort of irrational behavior is more the norm than rational behavior - everywhere on the planet in 2008.  For that reason I think racial hatred is as superficial, thin as a mist, yet just as powerful, as man-made laws.  And for that reason, I see racial hatred eventually subsiding because I see the need for all mankind to join together in common purpose in order to save itself from extinction as taking the forefront in all human behavior.  Something like a world war against the forces of ignorance that now dominate the world scene.  The survival of mankind, a far deeper and rational purpose, will soon be set before everyone.  The old superficial laws, hatreds, nationalistic and idealistic pursuits, careers, personal ambitions, etc., that now dominate man's behavior will no longer carry any meaning.  Man is on the brink, and it isn't because of global warming.  It's because of global sanitation.

Recall in Part 1 I quoted Admiral Rickover saying, “...it’s rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest denominator of human behavior.  They’re not a substitute for rational thought.”  So perhaps stopping at a scene of an accident to offer assistance is simply the rational thing to do, even if you're an irrational person, which we all are.  But if that’s the answer to this riddle, then why do so many people just drive on by?  A doctor told me that he stops - in spite of the fact that he opens himself up to a lawsuit if for whatever reason the person he may be treating dies or is simply in the mood to sue.   

Imagine stopping to help - only to receive a lawsuit in the mail in a few weeks.  Irrational, ungrateful, about as low on the pole as one can get, yes!  But as we can see, human behavior is as complex in its diversity as anything in the cosmos.  The irrational always dominates, everywhere.  But there is a mechanism in society that does in fact produce new conventions - many of them of course are irrational - and that mechanism is advertising.

In Part 3, I’ll focus on how advertising can be the cause of new [rational] conventions in human behavior, as those conventions apply to recreating in wilderness, back country, and parks.