How to Save the World

How Most of What We've Been Taught to Believe is False, and How a New Understanding of Our Place on Earth Could Change Everything Introduction:  The Journey This Weblog1 describes a personal intellectual and emotional journey that began for me in 1999.  This journey stemmed from a profound sense that there is something terribly wrong with the state of our planet, and that a mental illness has plagued the Woodstock generation since the heady days of the 1960s (and perhaps our whole species for millennia).  A steadily growing collection of writings in the 1990s, in the arts and sciences and particularly in the new discipline called Cultural Studies, describe both the physical malaise of Earth and the emotional malaise of people oppressed and paralysed by guilt and grief over our species having caused it.  The writers are beginning to articulate holistically the long-term causes of the problem, and that the key solution lies not in religion, or technology, or economics, or politics, or self-improvement, or social programs, but rather in a revolution in the way we think about human culture and our place on Earth, and the creation of a new shared vision for the future of the world. The reason that such a revolution will be so difficult (if it occurs at all) is that it will require each of us to un-learn almost everything we have been taught to believe, both overtly and subtly, since our birth.  That does not imply that there is some great conspiracy at work.  Instead, just as a rumour with the appropriate seeding and cultivation can become so widely accepted that it becomes an unquestioned myth, so have we come to accept as indisputable a huge cultural myth about our species and its purpose.  This myth permeates everything we do, shapes our goals and ambitions, limits us in truly horrifying ways, and is perpetuated from generation to generation. The revolution will require many people working in coordination to persuade enough others why most of what we believe and do is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about who we are.  By questioning and correcting that misunderstanding we could change our culture and hence we would change everything, since our understanding determines what we believe, and what we believe determines what we do.  I'm not naïve enough to believe, despite Margaret Mead's encouraging and often-quoted reassurance: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."  that this fundamental new understanding would be easy or quick to achieve.  This change is not like the Industrial Revolution where a rapid and sudden change of thinking arguably produced rapid and sudden changes in human organization and behaviour.  In fact I seriously doubt that this fundamental change of thinking will occur soon enough, or in large enough numbers, to save our planet from an ugly, brutal and miserable cataclysm.  But there is a chance, and there is now, I believe, a credible set of strategies that could save us from ourselves.  That's what this Weblog is about. My purpose for writing this is two-fold: To clarify my own thoughts on what I now believe and what I think we need to do now, and To persuade you, the reader, to think critically about these ideas and from now on to challenge everything you are told and everything you have come to believe.  I have no pretensions to make anyone think like me, or to start a movement, or a political party, or (even worse) a religion.  All I hope to do is share the thought process I have been through, which has liberated me from a kind of prison that my unconscious acceptance of the pervasive myths of our culture had kept me in all my life.  I am merely planting seeds of doubt about accepted myths about our culture and purpose on Earth.  The two dozen writers and thinkers referred to in this document have independently come to a remarkably consistent understanding from very different backgrounds and points of view.  For everyone this journey must be different - we all think differently and come to believe things differently.  I think it is possible that, if enough people begin to think critically and consider the possibility that our history, our purpose and our nature are not what we've been led to believe, and spread the word, and if enough people start to agree on the goals, roles and processes needed to change our future, and truly believe the change is possible, then by many different, individual journeys we might come to a common understanding and a shared vision, and save the world.  Chapter One:  Full House: Homo Sapiens as a Cosmic Accident In 1999 I read a book by Stephen Jay Gould, a palaeontologist who died recently (May 2002) of a disease that was supposed to kill him 20 years ago.  The book was called Full House 2, and it presented some controversial hypotheses about the history of life on Earth, drawing on our planet's fossil history and on the theory of probability.  Some of these hypotheses are as follows; if you are skeptical about any of them, please read his book: Darwinian selection favours species that are big, fierce, and intelligent over small, gentle, stupid creatures.  That is a simple law of nature.  As occurred with the dinosaurs, or as occurs at a microscopic level with cancers, the cycle of life is inexorable, tragic, and brutal: Big, fierce, intelligent creatures squeeze out the rest, decreasing biodiversity and biocomplexity. The result is fragility of the ecosystem to the point the dominant creatures destroy the system's ability to support other life, and ultimately any life.  The dominant creatures then quickly and suddenly die of starvation, suffocation or opportunistic diseases, taking other species with them.  Sometimes an external catastrophe (like the meteorite that brought the demise of dinosaurs) accelerates the process. The disappearance of the dominant species removes the stress so ecological equilibrium is gradually restored, biodiversity and biocomplexity again explode, and the system thrives in ever-shifting balance until the next big, fierce, intelligent creature evolves. Natural selection favours short-term prosperity of organisms that, in the longer run, are probably detrimental or even catastrophic to the ecosystem as a whole.  There is no reason for this, no spiritual or scientific reason why these rules should apply and not others.  That's just the way it is.  Evolution is not an 'onward & upward' process, but a cyclical one.  Homo sapiens is not the culmination of 60 million years of evolution, but merely a small, extremely recent branch of an incredibly complex profusion of species.  Nor are we (as DNA sequencers are now confirming) a particularly unusual or complex branch.  We just happen to typify the big/fierce/intelligent combination that is the undoing of ecosystems under the rules above. The next cycle will produce (as virtually all others through all time on all planets that support what we call 'life' have produced) species that are so different from us as to be unimaginable: the probability of vertebrates (which most larger Earth creatures and all Sci-Fi aliens improbably are) emerging from any primordial soup is infinitesimally small.  But whatever it looks like (if it's even 'visible' or otherwise discernable by our species), if it's big, fierce and intelligent it's likely to exterminate itself before it visits us in UFOs, or vice versa.  So hoping for aliens to rescue us from our cloddishness, or hoping to find a new habitable world before our time runs out, or hoping to find answers in SETI, are all just foolish wastes of time and energy.  We're in this all alone, and there's no deus in this machina, no matter how much we pray for one. Gould's theories have earned him the enmity not only of creationists and the religious right (for obvious reasons) but also of other evolutionists who would like to believe evolution and the dominance of the human species is a progression with perhaps some deeper purpose, result or guiding hand.  Gould distained what he considered the muddling of natural philosophy (science) and moral philosophy (religion and ethics) as he explained in his final book Rocks of Ages 2, in which he argues there is room for both philosophies but that attempts to integrate them (as Edward O. Wilson did in his book Consilience) are both futile and unnecessary.  Gould 's view is shared by Wade Rowland, who, in his book Ockham's Razor  and in his 2001 radio interview with Rick Vassalo3 says that both natural and moral philosophy have answers to important, but mutually exclusive questions. Many people find Gould's theories cold, mathematical, and unsatisfying, but to me they were a revelation.  Instead of looking for meaning in science, he said we should look at science as an interesting, and sometimes useful, exercise in pattern-recognition and model-building, and an attempt to understand the relationships and nature of the 'natural' physical world.  Nothing more. The obsession with single integrating theories about the physical universe strikes me as way too serious, forced and illogical.  My observation is that the physical universe is incredibly simple (even bacteria can figure out how to cope with it very successfully) and at the same time infinitely complex.  It seems counter-intuitive to me that there should be a beginning or end to space, or time, or any 'dimension' of our universe, that there should be a finite number of universes or dimensions, or that more than a tiny piece of the physical universe should be within our physical perception or our intellectual comprehension.  The perception that the world was made of earth, air, fire & water, and later 'elements', and later 'atoms' and later 'sub-atomic particles', were all valid, useful, interesting models of reality that served us very well.  Each of these models involved a small and finite number of basic constituents of matter, and within our limits of perception accurately described our universe in useful and interesting ways.  But now we have scientists making up staggeringly complex, tortuous theories (like the 11-dimensional string theory) hammering ever-squarer pegs into ever-rounder holes and expounding that theirs is, or will soon be, the ultimate expression and explanation of the entire physical universe.  I don't think so. Scientific observation is human nature and natural to all sentient creatures. Our dog Chelsea will sit alert and motionless for hours on the hill behind our house just observing life on the nearby ponds and wilderness forest.  For her this is an exercise of scientific investigation, not motivated by any survival instinct; the combination of sights, smells and sounds are endlessly interesting, and the data are clearly studied, learned and memorized for potential future application.  So if science is merely an interesting and sometimes useful study of the physical world, I realized I would have to look elsewhere for the causes of, and solutions to, Earth's problems. Chapter Two: When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Life of Animals At the same time I was reading Gould, I was also reading Jeff Masson's work on the emotional life of animals, most notably a book called When Elephants Weep4.  As an environmentalist, and a caretaker and observer of cats and dogs throughout my life, I had always believed that other animals were almost as sentient as humans, and that our bigger brains had led us to be different in degree from other animals, but not unique or fundamentally different.  Until I read Masson I was a bit embarrassed about, and unsure of, this belief, since it seemed romantic and impossible to substantiate.  Masson's extremely scientific, thorough and well-substantiated work not only dispelled my embarrassment, it hardened my position against those who, as apologists for animal testing and pathetically weak animal-cruelty laws, label animal rights as being anthropomorphic and hence absurd.  They do so in total, convenient and deliberate denial of overwhelming scientific evidence that animals are sentient, intelligent and capable of profound emotion, long-lasting memory and astute reasoning. I have since read other works that have deepened my convictions, and applied them to primates learning sign language, wolves, whales and dolphins, ravens and other corvid birds (Bernd Heinrich's book Mind of the Raven 5 , which was brought to my attention by BC naturalist and freelance writer Bill Atkinson, is especially persuasive and hugely entertaining).  At this point I do not know to what to ascribe continuing human ignorance and inaction to improve the lot of our fellow animal creatures on this planet.  When I hear arguments that "we need to solve the problems of humans first" or that "you can't equate the life of an animal with a human life" I am incredulous - such thinking is beyond ignorance and to me represents a deep-seated fear and hatred of all things natural (which to me, since we are part of 'all things natural' is a form of self-loathing).  Or it represents a blind acceptance of religious dogma.  Whichever it is, I can't fathom such a position.  I know that, like all species, we are slow to change our thinking and beliefs, but I can only hope that, with people like Masson systematically debunking the myths about our fellow creatures in solid scientific ways, we will at least move to reduce animal cruelty and begin to try to understand what other animals have to teach us, and to say to us. Chapter Three: Saul, Jay, Dyson & Daly: Economists and Political Scientists Explain How We Lost Our Way, and Offer Some Difficult Answers In university I found Economics (the 'dismal science') and Political Science dry, often wildly inaccurate and of limited relevance.  In the past few years I have learned about some new, broader approaches to economics and politics that suggested they might yet be useful, and perhaps even worthy of being called 'sciences'.  I started with John Ralston Saul's The Unconscious Civilization 6, in which he argues the following: Most people are ignorant of the power they possess as citizens to bring about change, and ignorant of their own history and the valuable lessons it affords us.  As a result they have ceded political power to global corporate interests whose agendas (to make profits and minimize the cost of labour and goods) are largely inconsistent with human well-being and the personal interests of almost everyone. We have passively accepted, at least in the Americas, the ideological myth that untrammelled 'free' markets with untrammelled 'free' trade is the best possible model, since we have been somehow persuaded that the only alternative is the opposite extreme (wildly inefficient government-owned and government-run enterprise) and that government is somehow inherently bad. The truth, Ralston Saul argues, is that government-run enterprises are at least as efficient as private organizations of the same unwieldy size, and that the true alternative to 'free' markets and trade is regulated markets and trade, regulated in the interests of people who are often disadvantaged by unregulated markets (since most of the world can't afford to pay world prices for food, energy and medicines, and can't compete with other nations without sacrificing the local environment, social justice and even human dignity).  This point of view is supported by David Korten's When Corporations Rule the World 7, which prescribes getting corporations out of politics and creating localized economies that empower communities within a system of global cooperation, overcoming the myths about economic growth and the sanctification of greed, and focusing instead on overconsumption, poverty, overpopulation, and reining in untrammelled corporate power.  What really resonated with me was the argument that, as a result of the above, we have in fact become helpless slaves of the economic system we created, considered successful only if we do what the groups (companies, parties, religions) we belong to tell us to do, and treated as 'resources' (part of the passive capital of corporations) instead of as it should be, as masters (who create corporations to serve our collective interests). As a senior employee of a large corporation, I can attest that this is not an issue of class struggle: most corporate executives live a lifestyle of servitude to their organizations, working absurd hours to earn more money than they could ever hope to spend, and sacrificing their personal and family lives and often their health to the corporate mission.  The corporations we originally created 500 years ago to improve the efficient flow of goods and capital have become tyrannical masters over all of us.  The result has been massive global physical, psychological, and intellectual poverty. Still, like addicts seeking yet another fix, we believe that more globalization, more 'free' trade and less government intervention will somehow bring humanity the prosperity, peace and freedom that eludes us.  The accountants (of which I am one) are no help either: They define wealth and prosperity for us with yardsticks that take no account of the true costs (environmental and psychological) of material 'success' (the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the AIDS epidemic were both positive contributors to GNP).  They preach a gospel of prosperity through endless growth that, like a pyramid scheme, cannot possibly be sustained.  They measure our welfare by the accumulation of ever-greater quantities of over-priced, wasteful, shoddy junk by ever-more humans crowded ever-closer together, rather than by our health, happiness, the prevalence of peace, justice and learning and the sustainability of our civilization. Ralston Saul's arguments are echoed by other counter-culture social commentators like Noam Chomsky (in Profits Over People and Manufacturing Consent). Though Ralston Saul persuasively diagnoses the political and economic malaise, he is much less successful at suggesting solutions, and the experience of reading his work left me even more depressed than I was already.  So I tried some other economic works, starting with UK economist Peter Jay's The Wealth of Man 8.  Jay takes a novel approach to economics, starting with pre-history instead of ancient Egypt and Greece.  I found his arguments even more disturbing than Ralston Saul's: Jay's timeline parallels that of Gould: When, 60 million years ago a meteorite plunged the planet into darkness, precipitated an ice age, and exterminated the dinosaurs, smaller species got the chance to evolve and thrive, spawning on Earth an enormous and interconnected diversity of life in dynamic equilibrium.  That amazing, Utopian heterogeneity continued until about 30,000 years ago (an infinitesimally small flicker of time before now) when the population of homo sapiens suddenly exploded. Until that time, according to Jay, early humans probably lived an Eden-like existence, easily preying on large, slow and abundant fellow mammals in all corners of Earth, and 'working' only a few hours per week.  As these species became extinct, we turned to new technologies, most notably agriculture and animal herding, to feed our exploding numbers, which rose from 6 million ten thousand years ago to 60 million three thousand years ago to 600 million five hundred years ago and to 6 billion today. Each ten-fold increase from our 'natural' six million population (which prevailed for the first 99% of human history on Earth) increased the effort each individual had to make to sustain his family, competition for land and resources, and in turn cycles of war, famine and disease.  In the process, our resourcefulness led us to industrialize and urbanize to improve productivity, and, more recently, to so horribly foul our environment that its ability to support non-human life is quickly vanishing, due to stress from global warming, exhaustion of arable land, fisheries and forests, desertification, overpopulation, shrinking of the water table, and a host of other man-made threats. I had hoped Jay would have some better answers to these problems, but he, too, harked back to Darwin and the inevitability of where we had come and where we were going: "Keynes' dream of subverting the bourgeois world by bursting through onto a higher plateau of affluence in which greed and thrift and toil are superfluous is unrealizable not because such levels of output are unattainable...but because the propensity to go on striving for yet higher peaks will continue in the breasts of enough members of the human race to ensure that it is they and not those who opt for the 'economic bliss' of cultivating the 'arts of life' rather than 'the activities of purpose' who will dominate the subsequent story.  In that sense Darwin always wins in the end." Jay concludes his book by hoping (rather than predicting) that future generations will be much more astute at political management than generations past, if economic disaster is to be averted.  In other words, unless we are able to better control human nature, we are lost.  Since the book was written before the full reality of the 1994 holocaust in Rwanda had been revealed, when the savagery in the Balkan states and the Southern ex-Soviet republics looked as if it might finally end, and before the horrendous events of September 11, 2001 allowed countries everywhere to justify any acts of war against any enemy real or imagined as 'anti-terrorist' activities, I was not reassured. Still looking for solutions, I read a brilliant interview in Wired magazine with scientist/futurist Freeman Dyson9, by Stewart Brand.  Dyson was upbeat: Three political & scientific developments, he said, could revolutionize human society, redistribute power and wealth much more broadly and equitably (and globally), lead to renewal of impoverished areas and a natural reduction in population growth (perhaps even to ZPG), and enable innovative revolutions in tools and technologies that would truly benefit mankind and our planet.  These three developments were: Development of inexpensive solar energy (which he believes is close) Development of biotech solutions to improve medicine and agriculture Re-commitment of society to the welfare and self-sufficiency of local communities (i.e. radical decentralization of political power and a commensurate interest in making local communities really work, and be really responsive to people's wants and needs, unlike the massive, centralized bureaucracies they would replace) I was, and am, sceptical that these developments will come about, because of all the vested interests that would be obviously opposed to them, and because of the meekness of ordinary citizens to see through the myths they are fed about how well off they are and how powerless they are to change anything anyway.  But more importantly, I was not sure how development 3 could come about even if there was political will to do so.  Only an enormous dissatisfaction with the status quo could produce such a change.  I began to wonder how such dissatisfaction could be fomented. In the meantime, I read some of the work of another dissident economist, Herman Daly, most notably an interview with him on the Developing Ideas 10 website, about his new book For the Common Good.  His major arguments are: Economics needs to learn to deal with the reality of communities, disparate collections of people with collective interests, where it now treats every consumer as a separate, disconnected individual.  Until it does so, there can be no way to account for and hence improve the stock of common goods (like parks, clean air, security etc.) Economists need to become engaged in making the world better, not just developing descriptive models of capital and capital movement, and need to expand their scope to measure and optimize the throughput of matter and energy, not just capital There are three problems that economics addresses, and the free market only optimally deals with one of them.  They are: Effective allocation of scarce resources (how and where goods and commodities should be produced) - free markets are much better than planned economies at optimizing this Equitable distribution of resources (to whom goods and commodities should be sold or given) - this is an issue of fairness and justice, and countries must intervene in markets to optimize this (the fact that Africans devastated by AIDS are unable to afford available medicines to halt it illustrates that free markets don't solve this problem) Scale of resource production (how many goods and commodities should be produced in aggregate) - this can only be optimized through sound ecological management, by nations working together in the global interest A reasonable solution to over-population would be a 'North-South contract' where developed countries in the North would agree to reduce resource consumption per capita (leaving more for the South) and in return the less developed countries in the South would agree to reduce their population growth rate (leaving more for everyone) Tax systems need to become ecological and responsible by taxing 'bads', not 'goods', i.e. by taxing the consumption of resources (especially if non-renewable) instead of taxing the use of labour and efficient, low-consumption profits My reaction to Daly's ideas was the same as my reaction to Dyson's: The solutions make good sense, but what will it take to bring about the enormous changes needed to make them happen? Chapter Four: In My Own Words: The Role of Innovation in Achieving Change One of my roles in the company I work for is Director of Knowledge Innovation.  To fulfil this role I had to discover what innovation is, at least in a business context, how it occurs and why it's important.  As a result of my research I wrote a paper in March 2000 entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation: Creating Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs 11, which is published on my website. In addition to being a critical success and very helpful in my job, this paper was uplifting because it led me to believe there was a process that could be followed to create important new tools and technologies that could in turn bring about major social change.  I don't think technology is the solution to all our problems (as I say in the paper, it's the cause of many of them).  But technology (defined broadly as the application of knowledge) can be part of the solution.  Specifically, I believe innovation could develop important new technologies that could do the following six things: Prevent & remedy environmental damage and non-sustainable consumption:  e.g. solar and clean-exhaust energy technologies, reusable paper, building & production materials Prevent & remedy human cruelty & aggressiveness: e.g. herbs and pharmaceuticals that reduce stress, anxiety and violence Prevent the need for cruelty to other animals: e.g. engineered vegetable-based proteins that eliminate the need for factory farms and battery cages Reduce human fertility: e.g. RU486 Facilitate communication with other animals: to learn how other animals think, adapt, learn, feel, sense, and communicate with each other Help people fight polluters: lists, measurements, and communications tools that let people effectively recognize, boycott and sue polluters These scientific & commercial measures, when combined with four social and political measures: Preserving natural habitats Eliminating technologies that threaten the ecosystem Giving rights and protection to all animals, and Taxing and restricting pollution and waste, together constituted my first prescription for healing the world by reducing our impact on Earth and allowing our ecosystem to re-establish its natural, rich and diverse balance. At this point I began to sense that we have an emotional need to heal ourselves as well, to re-attune ourselves to nature and re-integrate ourselves back into the ecosystem of which we are inextricably a part.  As a result of our disassociation from the rest of nature we were, I concluded, suffering a kind of mental illness on a grand scale, possibly the same kind of mental illness that one human separated for too long from other humans suffers.  I had a sinking feeling that without this major large-scale healing of the human psyche, all attempts to persuade people of the need for massive political, social, scientific and commercial changes to heal our planet would prove futile.   Chapter Five: The State of the World The WorldWatch Institute issues an annual report called State of the World 12.  In the year 2000 report, the authors identified seven environmental trends that, uncorrected, could lead to ecological disaster.  They were: population growth, rising temperature, falling water tables, shrinking cropland per person, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and the extinction of plant and animal species.  That report also described the 50% decline in life expectancy in much of sub-Saharan Africa due to the scourge of AIDS, illustrated the cascading effects of ecological disruptions, described the massive impact on marine populations resulting from destruction of coral reefs, and explained the alarming persistence and accumulation up the food chain of toxic chemicals.  This report is only one of a massive number of recent credible studies of the cataclysmic effects of our 'management' of the planet.  Recognizing all this evidence, in 1992 a World Scientists' Warning to Humanity 13 was signed by 1600 senior scientists from 71 countries.  It stated "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.  No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished.  A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated."  A decade has since passed and the warning has been ignored (in fact it was not even covered by most news publications).  The opportunity to begin to address these problems was squandered as George Bush and other leaders reneged on their countries' commitment to ratify the remarkable Kyoto Accord in the face of powerful corporate interests that pressured them to abandon the legacy for our children in favour of short-term profits.  Highly compelling, actionable reports on how and why to improve our environment quickly, efficiently and without economic hardship were ignored as business leaders and the media instead irresponsibly and gleefully glommed onto the unsupportable, unscientific, head-in-the-sand denials of so-called 'skeptical environmentalists', even after their claims had been debunked by mountains of evidence and hundreds of credible experts.  There seems to be something perverse in human nature, a 'holocaust denial syndrome' that causes us to prefer to pretend that difficult and tragic events didn't happen and aren't happening, instead of facing them and dealing with them.  Perhaps that's borne out of our sense of helplessness to do anything about these events - if we can't do anything, what's the point in knowing?  I believe that many corporations and political machines encourage this sense of helplessness to stifle dissent, stabilize markets and entrench their power. And sometimes knowing is just too terrible to bear: if most consumers saw what happens in slaughterhouses and factory farms they would become vegetarians.  But to some extent this sense of helplessness is valid.  To get a massive ship to change direction takes enormous patience and skill and a lot of time and effort, and, as in the case of the Exxon Valdez, sometimes there is just not enough time, and there is nothing to do except get drunk and turn away. In his book The Sacred Balance 14, David Suzuki says there are some things you can do, and one of them is to not feel guilty, since guilt just saps energy, creates and deepens mental illness, and accomplishes nothing.  What is needed now, he says, is "exchange of ideas, to spread the word as we all work towards reducing our effect on the planet, so we can live sustainably and create public support that will ultimately change political priorities."  He also says we need to put new effort on a fourth -R- (in addition to reduce, reuse and recycle) - redesign to produce things using less resources, things that in turn use less resources in operation. In addition, he recommends that we spend more time 'out in nature'. And he also quotes an unorthodox theologian, Thomas Berry, from his book The Dream of the Earth 15:  "We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story.  We are in between stories.  The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective.  Yet we have not learned the new story." The old story is about man being the centre of a god-created universe, about the Earth and its creatures being here for man's benefit, and about the constant struggle between good and evil and the chance of salvation through living right and working hard.  If Gould was even half-right about how idyllic and simple life was for millennia before man 'learned' this story, it is not surprising it has lost its appeal.  The question, then, is what is the new story? Chapter Six: A New Story: Ishmael and the Story of B David Jones, who like me works in the field of knowledge management, read my Website and suggested I read the book Ishmael 16 by Daniel Quinn.  Quinn has spent most of his life trying to find answers to the problems that this Weblog has described.  He chose to document his assessment of the problems, and suggested solutions, in stories, which I found somewhat disingenuous: If you have something important to say, say it, don't beat around the bush or cloak your message as something else.  Ishmael   tells the story of a telepathic gorilla who explains how humans have got their own history terribly wrong, and offers his services as mentor to rewrite that history.  The sequel, The Story of B, re-tells the story, only this time the hero/mentor is a disgraced theologian, and the messages are at last packaged up in straightforward form in an 80-page appendix called The Teachings of B. To those of you that are not put off by the convoluted delivery, I would highly recommend either book, since the messages in both are profound, important, and provocative.  Following is a flat and unjust simplification of these messages, which should at least give you a sense of how they answered several of the questions I mention above: From the earliest days of man three million years ago, until just 30,000 years ago, humans lived very differently from the way they do now.  Prior to the development of agriculture and animal domestication human population was stable (at about 6 million) and life revolved, as it still does in a few remaining tribal cultures, around small communities.  Human life was nomadic, dependent upon foraging, and totally intertwined with the rest of life on Earth.  Life was not particularly hard (there was an abundance of slow, large prey) and conflicts between communities (although fierce) were short and only occurred when one community invaded the territory of the other (the same way almost all other animal species fight, and for the same reasons).  These conflicts served to keep human communities separate and prevent interbreeding and cultural homogenization, thus maximizing human diversity and therefore (as Gould explained) resilience in the face of disease and other outside threats.  These communities followed the Darwinian law of limited competition: You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors (human or other species consuming the same food) or destroy their food, or deny them access to food.  This law, adhered to by all non-human life on the planet, leads to optimal survival, diversity and resilience of all creatures in the web of life on Earth.  Humans followed this law until the most recent 1% of our history. About 30,000 years ago, in several places on Earth but notably in the Near East, small human communities emerged that began, possibly in response to massive famine brought on by sudden climate change, to defy the law of limited competition.  These communities, like cancers, were remarkably successful because what they did was totally foreign to, and hence unchecked by, all other communities on Earth.  What they did was: Introduce intensive (i.e. producing more than what was immediately needed) agriculture, the growing and harvesting of plants and animals for food.  This allowed the land to support far more people per acre, and produced a population explosion, which in turn required more intensive agriculture, and required conquering or conversion of neighbouring communities. The results of this sudden explosion of food and people were: the end of human leisure (agriculture requires far more labour than foraging, even more so to feed rapidly-expanding numbers), the first large-scale human wars (to obtain more land to feed more people) the first famines (due to the vulnerability of large concentrated populations to agricultural failures) the emergence of large-scale crime, torture and substance abuse (as increased stress, competition for food and other resources, and dependence on others made individual survival harder), slavery (an efficient agricultural system), plagues (due to concentration and homogeneity of crops), slums (a product of growing inequality of wealth), and joyless work.  Over the past 30,000 years, these cancerous communities have conquered and displaced all other human cultures with a single homogeneous culture, introduced the civilizations, religions and social, political and economic structures that prevail everywhere on the planet, and in the process annihilated most of Earth's life species and severely depleted the resources that support all life, bringing us to the brink of economic, social, ecological and cultural collapse (stage 2 of Gould's brutal and inexorable 3-stage long-term cycle of life).      Quinn proffers some solutions, and some good news, about all this: This culture that is on the brink of disaster is only one of many human cultures, and it's not too late to supplant it with one of the many other forgotten and destroyed human cultures that worked so well for the first 99% of human existence, examples of which still exist today in remote areas of Earth. An immediate ecological solution is to gradually reduce the supply of human food, by say 2% per year.  Quinn argues extensively (and this is his most controversial and complex argument so I can't summarize it in a few bullets - please read pp. 287-304 of The Story of B) that this will actually alleviate, not aggravate, human suffering even in poverty- and drought-stricken areas of the world. Birth control, and programs to consciously reduce consumption per capita and the human footprint, while helpful, cannot reasonably be expected to work because they're unreliable, counter-cultural, and inherently inefficient solutions (the above-cited pages of The Story of B explain this argument as well). Beyond this, Quinn believes that simply by 'changing our minds', re-learning our forgotten history and studying the full breadth of human cultures (beyond the current prevalent one), we can find the way to change our behaviour, perhaps in time to save the world. I found Quinn's re-writing of history very credible and useful, and devoid of the dubious romantic 'back to nature' rhetoric that pervades most radical environmentalists' work.  He argues persuasively that there is no way back to the garden (and in fact the garden is the perfect symbol of the problem). I'm even willing to buy some (but not all) of the 'cut food production' prescription, for reasons I will relate later in this Weblog.  I'm just not patient enough to buy the rest of the solution: spread the word, and just as the Industrial Revolution transformed society from the seed of a radical new idea, so can we save the world by collectively re-learning a radical (millions of years) old idea. So with the problem and its causes better articulated, but still in search of more plausible solutions, I journeyed on. Chapter Seven: The Axemaker's Gift and the Fight to Be Oneself Another book that David Jones recommended to me is James Burke (the Connections guy) and Robert Ornstein's The Axemaker's Gift17.  This book avoids all issues of moral philosophy and lets the science tell the story, a story much like Quinn's: It wasn't agriculture that changed human culture, it was the even earlier invention of the axe, a technology that nevertheless ultimately led to the same population explosion and all the behaviour changes, consequences and problems that Quinn ascribed to agriculture. Burke & Ornstein compellingly argue that our tools (like language) actually change the way our minds work, narrowing them into deductive, linear, building tools themselves.  The challenge of learning about the pre-technology human cultures is therefore compounded because, not only was there no written record of these earlier cultures and a 30,000-year-old unawareness that there ever were other 'pre-historic' human cultures (as Quinn argues), but also our technological culture has actually shaped the structure of our brains and the way we think, making other human cultures virtually unimaginable. The book prescribes four ways forward, since there is no way back: Use the Internet and other new communication technologies to enable the world's best minds to collaborate to devise solutions to our current crisis. Use the massive intellectual power of new networked computers to devise solutions objectively, using neural network techniques and other non-linear methods not limited by the human mind and our preconceptions. Educate future generations to understand that this is the greatest problem in human history, and give them all the tools at our disposal to solve it. Do everything we can to decentralize society and move power and resources to new small communities that are collectively much more likely to find answers than today's massive, homogeneous and slow-moving infrastructures. I don't have any objections to any of these solutions, except that they assume that enough of the people who have the power and resources to do these things actually understand the problem and have the will to commit their power and resources to doing these things. I wouldn't bet my life, or the life of our planet, on this assumption being true. The argument about how our culture and our technologies actually change the way we think recalled to me some arguments I had in my youth about how our culture (in those days we called it 'society') has so effectively brainwashed us that we are all now inmates of a vast human cultural concentration camp (or asylum).  Our culture also effectively prohibits escape from this prison: suicide and mind-altering drugs are sins, non-conformity results in being shunned or treated medically, and radical ideas are scorned and their perpetrators jailed (a prison within a prison).  Our culture attempts to indoctrinate us all ever-deeper into homogeneous zero-diversity group-think, or, as e. e. cummings put it more articulately: to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting I see this not only as a problem of imagination (as Burke & Ornstein demonstrate) but also a problem of cultural agility: How can we expect enough of the 7 billion brainwashed, constantly-indoctrinated people of this world to be able to overcome the massive social, political, cultural and religious dogma that has been drummed into their heads since birth (to the point where the physical structure and patterns of the brain have actually evolved to better store that dogma), to see the problem and to have the courage to take unpopular action? My sense is that each of us will have to fight two huge cultural struggles at the same time:  The first struggle is to unlearn human history and re-learn our species' true place on Earth, and the second is to courageously, tirelessly and actively counter the (both deliberate and innocent) misinformation we are fed every day, about everything from globalization and corporatism to genetic engineering to terrorism to the state of the world, and re-couch the corrected information in our new sense of who we are and why we are here.  Only through these twin struggles, only by reinventing our sense of ourselves and at the same time challenging everything and thinking critically about everything can we hope to overcome the intellectual poverty that pervades our world and draw together the resources and creativity and energy needed to do something. That's what I think moral philosophy is all about: not what is right and wrong, which to me are nonsensical and culturally biased constructs, but about what needs to be done to make our world better, or at least well.  In other words, an Agenda for Action. Fundamental to this is the need for a new benchmark to replace 'progress' (another culturally biased construct).  I'd vote for the term 'well-being', which, although it's awkward is less ambiguous and more inclusive than the term 'health'. If the presence of more and more material wealth (in aggregate and per capita) is the current barometer of the current benchmark of progress, I'd nominate absence of suffering and diversity of life as the new barometers of the 'well-being' benchmark. And perhaps since the goal is to minimize one and maximize the other, the ratio of (diversity of life / extent of suffering) could be the replacement for GNP.  Anyone for RWB, the ratio of well-being? Chapter Eight: How Bad Is It?  A Language Older Than Words The Ishmael website led me to another book, A Language Older Than Words 18 by Derrick Jensen.  Here clearly was a fomenter of dissatisfaction:  This dangerous book is a relentless and overwhelming account of all kinds of human atrocities throughout our history, interwoven with stark revelations from Jensen's own unhappy past (repeatedly abused by his father, and later victimized by Crohn's disease).  Jensen credits his own experiences with making him aware of how both perpetrators and victims deal (poorly, in both cases) with violence, and giving him an understanding of its root causes and tragic effects: I hated reading this book - it was depressing, hopeless and grim - but its message was so important that I got through it, as quickly as possible.  As I read I understood why no one wants to hear the endless bad news about our world and our nature, and why therefore the task of persuading others of the urgent need for action is so difficult.  Referring to a conversation with a friend, he relates: "'Everything we're talking about here', he continued, 'is very threatening, to the culture, and to people's basic ideas about how the universe works.  The trick is to talk about it without shutting people down.  How do you breach their defenses?  What is your schtick to be able to get them to listen, and to make it so that you can continue?  I'm trying to change the culture, trying to change the way people perceive their place in the world, but I'm also trying to make a living.  How do you do that?  It would be very easy for me to get lumped into a box, as someone who just plays music with whales."  I understood where he was coming from, but the same phrase kept coming into my head: we're screwed' We know that by definition any activity that damages any other community - human or non-human - isn't sustainable.  We know there's no way in the next twenty years we'll make a transition to a sustainable culture.  The best we can hope for is that we begin to throttle down, to bring ourselves to a soft landing instead of a full crash." The book exaggerates the violence and damage we have produced, deliberately piling one example of mass murder, rape, genocide, torture, ecocide and mindless brutal destruction on top of another.  His goal is to make you so sick and angry that you are provoked to act.  At the same time he shows our natural propensity as powerless victims of all this horror to deny it, inure ourselves to it, lie to ourselves and others about it, shift blame, give up hope, procrastinate, hide, stop listening and watching, and even enter into a guilt-ridden 'complicity of silence' with the perpetrators, denying the existence of, tolerating and even enabling continued violence. The truth therefore threatens us - we are forced to either guiltily admit to complacency, complicity and denial, and do nothing, or take up arms in a seemingly hopeless, unpopular and frighteningly radical battle to do something. The model of behaviour of our culture that leads to this sorry state is that our fear and hatred of the rest of nature (keep reading for a discussion of what leads to this) causes us to try to own and control, or destroy, everything in nature (i.e. everything, period).  We cloak the need for this violent behaviour in the clever apologist's 'claims to virtue': we had to do this because-  Our institutions reinforce this ethic: education systems are designed to break the will of children to be different, critical thinkers, at peace with the world.  Once we're broken in, the business world, and our legal, economic and political systems coerce us into conformity, job slavery, imprisonment and alienation.  Jensen quotes Adam Smith saying "the real purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens".  He doesn't condemn the power elites that run these systems - like the staff of concentration camps, everyone is a victim of systems with no envisionable, viable alternatives, so we all just go along and do the best we can to survive amid the misery.  Recounting another conversation with a friend he says  "When I become too theoretical, when I ask with too much vehemence why people work jobs they hate, why so many earn their living by deforesting, or mining, or working other destructive jobs: 'Sixty days', he says.  'That's how long it takes before people begin to die of starvation.  Dave can't quit his job because in sixty days his children will die' Those two altogether too short months are a primary reason most of us do not rebel.  We have too much to lose"" There you have it.  The needs of mass production - a funneling of resources towards elite producers - is in opposition to the needs of the community - a siphoning of resources toward everyone else.  In one sentence the failure of egalitarian dreams. So long as we value production over relationship, so long shall we follow our current path of ever-increasing immiseration for the ever-increasing majority." A caveat:  I almost quit reading when I reached the chapters where Jensen (brought up Christian fundamentalist) confesses a belief in good ('decent') and evil ('indecent') people and cultures.  I almost quit again when I read his strident chapter on the Zapatistas.  If you're like me, and distrustful of this stuff, and of the deliberate exaggerations throughout the book designed to provoke you to action, please bear with these weak passages and persevere.  This is important stuff. Some of Jensen's writing is sheer poetry and quite moving.  At the end of the book he tries to suggest some possible solutions, what he calls 'the road home':   "If words alone could bring down our culture, I would write them.  If actions by themselves would stop the atrocities, I would commit them.  If a change of heart would bring back [lost and dying species] I would change my heart again and again and again.  It is not enough at this point to merely right ourselves from trauma, to dismantle the walls we've so laboriously and necessarily constructed to constrict our broken hearts, and then to try to pick up the shredded and scattered fragments of our experience to reassemble like a precious vase that won't quite g back together no matter how we try, or like the lifeless body of a loved one who is never coming back" "Does anyone really believe that a pattern of exploitation old as our civilization can be halted legislatively, judicially, or by any means other than an absolute rejection of the mindset that engineers the exploitation in the first place, followed by actions based on that rejection?  This means if we want to stop the destruction, we have to root out the mindset." "It is customary when winding down a book about the destruction of the planet to offer tangible solutions for readers to pursue.  After learning about the apocalypse, we are told to write our senators, send faxes to CEOs, and especially send money to those who delivered the message.  For several reasons I can't and won't be more specific than to tell people to fight like hell- None of this is to say that we shouldn't work to revoke corporate charters, revest c