Four
concepts have been spinning around in my mind lately. I instinctively
feel that they go together somehow, but until today I wasn't quite sure
how. Now I think I know. The four concepts are:
- What has
allowed human civilization to evolve so quickly in recent millennia has
been the gradual switch-over from reliance on instinctive knowledge
embedded in our DNA and transmitted genetically ("hardware") to reliance on 'rational' knowledge transmitted through language and communication culturally
("software"). Cultures can adapt to changing circumstances much more
rapidly than genes, so evolution has encouraged this switch-over, to
the point that we are, in a very real sense, more what our culture has made us than what our genes have made us.
- Our
civilization has a very thin veneer. What keeps the six and a half
billion of us 'behaving' in a way that allows our now-global
civilization to struggle on optimistically is extremely fragile, and
when it breaks down even slightly, when our culture fails to tell us
what to do and our instincts are no longer listened to, we quickly show
we are capable of staggering atrocities, that we are capable of anything.
- There
is some compelling evidence that some of the most 'advanced' human
civilizations of the past, like those of the Incas and the Anasazi,
ended when en masse the
people of those civilizations quite suddenly gave up on their
'civilized' way of life, concluding that it no longer worked for them,
and just walked away, returning to an 'uncivilized' gatherer-hunter society.
- Thanks to reader Martin-Éric Racine, I became aware of this remarkable post by Kai Krause in response to the Edge "what's your dangerous idea?" question, in which Krause suggests that our civilization may already be falling apart. He says:
On
every scale, the closer I observe it, the more the creeping realization
haunts me: individuals, families, groups, neighborhoods, cities,
states, countries... they all just barely hang in there, between debt
and dysfunction. The whole planet looks like Any town with mini malls
cutting up the landscape and just down the road it's all white trash
with rusty car wrecks in the back yard...Now: I am no longer confident
that [continued conformity of the majority to the behaviours needed to
sustain our civilization] will continue...Seeing scenes of desperate
youths in South American slums watching "Kill Bill" makes me think:
this is just oxygen thrown into the fire... The ants will not play
along much longer. The anthill will not survive if even a small
fraction of the system is falling apart...
Couple that inane
drive for "Super Individualism" with the scarily simple realization of
how effective even a small set of desperate people can become... and
you have an ugly picture of the long term future...So many curves that
grow upwards towards limits, so many statistics that show increases and
no way to turn around...While we look at the horizon, it is the very
ground beneath us that may be crumbling.
Krause is almost apologetic about this "realistic pessimism", but his point (that I completely missed in my earlier review of responses to the Edge
question) is important, perhaps electrifying: Will civilization end,
not with a bang but with a whimper, not by terrorist inferno or nuclear
or bio-catastrophe or economic collapse, but when people just realize
that the intricate software program that is civilization just doesn't
work for them anymore, and rather than fighting it, just walk away? What if en masse
our grandchildren just refuse to accept any longer the grossly
inequitable private 'ownership' of land and resources, or even the concept
that humans or anyone owns the land and the life on it? What if,
perhaps like many of the homeless people on our affluent nations'
streets today, billions conclude that participating in the horrifically
skewed 'market' economy, in the broken, mind-numbing education system,
in the dysfunctional and privileged political system, as consumers, as
citizens, just isn't worth the stress and effort anymore -- that
there's just not enough in it for them?
Derrick Jensen talks
about "the fear of not having enough" being the anchor that holds us,
despite our doubts and misgivings, and its constant disappointments and
failures, to this one, global, fragile civilization. What if, as they
learn more and more about it, many in the affluent nations decide that
that fear is no longer sufficient to keep them supporting an
increasingly incompetent, haywire civilization, and, at the same time,
many in the struggling nations decide that the never-ending promise
of having enough, if they will just stick with civilization a little
longer, is a fraud? Imagine an alliance of the informed and the
disenfranchised, together, helping each other walk away from
civilization, to stop acknowledging the legitimacy of its predatory,
ruinous political elites, to stop acknowledging the legitimacy of laws
that allow huge, irresponsible corporations to despoil the Earth and
steal from the poor and from future generations and which allow the
rich to get away with murder and the poor to get away with nothing, to
stop acknowledging the value of an economic system that threatens us
with starvation and scarcity if we don't obey its soul-destroying rules
of arbitrary hierarchy and wage slavery and which treats every person
as a mere consumer to be addicted to the insatiable demand for more and
newer stuff?
The software program of human civilization was
written 30 millennia ago, when we were persuaded by the (then very
real) fear of scarcity to trade in our freedom as gatherer-hunters for
tedious, grueling lives as malnourished ('better underfed than dead')
wage slaves stooped in uncooperative and fragile fields of monoculture
grain. That program was modified only slightly when, in the most recent
millennium, a minority were given back a small say in how their own
lives were governed, and the right to 'own' a small amount of
'property' instead of being property themselves, and more recently
still were given some machines to make some of the daily toil of their
lives less physically exhausting. But the last century has shown this
software to be subject to spectacular failures, and all the furious
work to patch it seems merely to have made it more messy and vulnerable
and inflexible, kind of like Windows, precisely when huge changes seem
to be desperately needed. Is
our civilization, this 'proprietary' software, the only program we
still have available for our 6.5 billion humans, about to crash -- a
global cultural analogue to the Blue Screen of Death? And, by walking away from civilization soon en masse,
might our most informed and most disenfranchised be recognizing this
impending crash and looking, hopefully in time, for another, 'open
source' program, another way to live?
I've already
described a bit what this 'walking away' would mean -- the rejection of
the legitimacy of, and refusal to recognize the authority of, existing
political and economic and other systems, laws, rights and claims.
Think of it as analogous to the seizure and occupation by its workers
of a manufacturing plant previously run by tyrants. The laws giving the
tyrants absolute ownership of the plant, and the right to the profits
from it, and the right to hire and fire and treat 'employees' as they
want, would no longer be recognized. The authority of the police to
eject the workers would not be recognized, and would be resisted at all
costs. The workers would treat the plant as shared property and do whatever they agreed communally to do with it
-- tear out the machines and make shared housing for their families,
sell off or give away its 'assets', or operate it as a commons for the
benefit of the workers. This is to some extent what happened in
Argentina during the recent economic collapse.
Now imagine that
several billion people agree and announce that they no longer recognize
the laws, the rights, or the property of anyone, and consider that
everything in the world is a shared resource. It has usually been much
easier to walk away from civilizations that had become dysfunctional
past the point of no return -- there were 'uninhabited' frontiers,
usually not too far away, where you could 'restart' (to continue the
software analogy) the society. In fact there's some interesting new
speculation by anthropologists that the Great Wall of China was built not to keep out the 'Mongol hordes', but rather to keep in
the suffering slaves of the Chinese empire working in horrific poverty
and disease and misery in the rice paddies that were the hallmark of
our civilization's early days. To keep them from walking away.
We
no longer have any habitable frontiers, despite the longing looks at
outer space by the technophiles enraptured of the new religion of
technology-as-saviour. So even if we were to decide to escape this
bankrupt monolithic civilization culture while we could, where would we
walk away to? How do you plan
a prison break when the whole world is your prison? You can escape into
alcohol, drugs, other addictions, mindless violence, insanity, abuse of
others and other self-destructive behaviour, and there's lots of
evidence that that's a pretty popular path these days. But the
alternative is, while difficult, still quite simple:
- Form
small Intentional Communities of people and learn the essential life
skills for community self-management and self-sufficiency.
- Establish
egalitarian, community-based 'subsistence', not-for-profit 'Natural'
enterprises that provide one or more essentials of life (food, shelter,
clothing, learning, recreation, communication, transportation). That
requires re-learning how to
provide those life essentials first, as few of us today have ever
acquired these skills. Our culture has deliberately made most of what
we learn in school useless, to keep us dependent on it.
- Trade,
without using currency, any surplus essentials produced by the
community for those surplus essentials produced by other 'Natural'
enterprises of other nearby Intentional Communities. Never
let your community become dependent on such trade, and never buy the
pretty trinkets or the dangerous, poisoned foods produced by
corporations in civilization culture -- they'll only get you addicted
to that culture again.
- To the extent you need resources
(especially land) that your Intentional Community does not have, follow
the honourable tradition of the squatter -- occupy and claim it,
liberate it from those who see it as their right to 'own' (and to
preclude others from accessing) property vastly in excess of what they
need. This is the hard part, even harder than it was for the Argentine
factory-workers (the plants they occupied in Argentina had been largely
abandoned). It is the community-based equivalent of nationalization --
returning the resources of the Earth to the Earth, to be equally shared
by all. To do this will require a great deal of courage and passive
resistance. It will be violently opposed by the rich and powerful, and
by the sniveling lawyers and politicians and law-enforcers at their
beck and call. But every act of liberation that is opposed by brutal
violence will merely show more people the moral bankruptcy,
unsustainability, inequity and dysfunction of civilization culture.
There is a reason why the neocon corporatist ideologues are currently
obsessed with trying to sell the concept of the Ownership Society. Just
as they would have you believe that the Ponzi Scheme stock 'market' and
housing 'market' are opportunities for everyone to participate in the
obscene redistribution of wealth from poor to rich (but they will both
crash soon, and it won't be the rich who will suffer), they would now
have you believe that the process of sticking ownership title on everything
-- every piece of intangible property, every idea, every seed that is
planted, every new form of life -- and charging rentals for every 'use'
of such 'property', is something more than another rapacious grab by
those with the power to patent and enforce such ownership from those
without such power. It would be much easier if we could create another
society without having to confront the oligopolies of power and
'ownership' over the Earth's resources. But if it were easy it would
have already been done. It is only when enough informed and
disenfranchised people are ready to take this step, only when the fear
of civilization's Blue Screen of Death becomes greater than today's
fear of not having enough, that the trickle of those walking away will
turn into a torrent. But at some point the coming depression, the end
of oil, bioterrorism, desperate nuclear attacks from the growing
ecological cesspools and deserts of horrifically overpopulated Asia,
waves of epidemic disease attacking us and our fragile,
undifferentiated global foods, will combine to push us to the other
side of this equilibrium point.
- As civilization culture and
its economic and political artifacts collapse (more due to their own
unsustainability and the impact of the above crises than to the growing
numbers opting out), we will find ourselves in a world of chaos that is
analogous to what the Internet is today -- a world of millions of
(hopefully connected and Intentional rather than isolated and despotic)
communities and millions of (hopefully Natural) community-based
enterprises that will be self-organizing and redistributing wealth and
power much more equitably. It is then and only then that we will come
face-to-face, like the hero at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey,
with the ultimate reality: the unsustainability of our human numbers.
There is simply no way that our planet, under any system, can support
and sustain 6.5 billion humans -- even living a radically simpler
lifestyle. There are not enough resources to go around, let alone
enough to pass on to future generations. And by the time we reach this
state, if past death tolls of wars and disease are any indication, we
will not have just 6.5 billion people but somewhere between 9 and 14
billion people. Then what? Here is where I become an optimist. Most of
the more complex creatures on this planet, when they appreciate
instinctively and see personally
evidence that their numbers are too great to be sustainable, quickly
and automatically reduce their birth rate to restore their numbers to a
sustainable level. We have 'forgotten' how to do this because we have
been taught to ignore and suppress our instincts and because the
evidence of our numbers' unsustainability has been deliberately
suppressed by the rich and powerful in their self-interest, so we do
not see it. As soon as we see it -- as soon as waves and waves of
destitute people from ruined struggling nations come pounding on our
doors telling us that they are squatting on, occupying and claiming the modest amount of land we
had claimed for our subsistence Intentional Community, we will have to
face the truth at last that there are not enough resources to go
around. And we will stop breeding, instinctively and voluntarily, by
community consensus, just as most other creatures on this planet do,
until there are enough resources to go around comfortably.
Messy, eh? I'd love to lay out a scenario that was neater, cleaner, less bloody and less difficult, easier to sell,
but that's not how life works on this planet when one species gets
wildly out of balance. We fool ourselves when we think that our
software programming, our culture, makes us somehow exempt from the
rules of nature, and the laws gravity and thermodynamics. We need to
get past the "magical thinking" that there is a better, neater, more
peaceful way out of our current situation, through the Rapture or
technology or social self-transformation or escape to distant planets.
We have managed to survive as well as we have since our relatively
recent arrival on this planet because of our adaptability, and that is
why I believe we will not just
plunge headlong the way we are headed now, into the civilizational Blue
Screen of Death. At some point we will bail out, messily, in something
like the scenario I have laid out above. To me the only question mark
is whether the last bullet will play out the way I suggest, or whether
instead some set of natural and man-made disasters will sufficiently
cull our numbers that we'll avoid having to face and adjust to this
final, grim reality. Looking at the death rates from the worst wars and
plagues in the past, would suggest that these would not be enough to do
the job for us. But perhaps I underestimate the ability of nature and
of human technology to make this part of our job, at least, a little
easier. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
