Taking Things Too Far
I am often branded a Cassandra. Yet reflecting on things that cause us all angst and pain is a profession I did not request. Lighten up. Look around you, my detractors complain. Humans are the only species to have created such an incredible civilization. And when boarding an A380, admiring Frank Gehry’s Neuer Zollhof in Dusseldorf, listening to the intricacies of Liza Lim’s instrumental piece How Forests Think, driving a hydrogen car from Riversimple, or grappling with Stephen Hawking’s explanation of black holes, who could possibly disagree?
Not all our handiwork is so beneficial or refreshing of course. Our intentions are not always that admirable. I do not believe I am taking things too far by suggesting that the harm we inflict on each other and the desecration we continue to wreak on the planet are also a part of the truth of what it means to be human. It gives me no joy whatsoever in censuring the various incongruities which animate the illusion that we are wise and smart enough to survive our own success. But propagandizing the chronicles of human ingenuity as proof of an exceptional power that will surely come to our rescue in more troubling times is to bask in hubris, and to deny the fact that nature actually calls the shots.
The experience of living in a world that is increasingly toxic to humans jars with our romantic notion of nature as mostly bountiful and benign, the doctrine that nature exists purely for our benefit and, of course, the illusion of being separate from nature. Any scenario where we are not at the centre of everything we find deeply disturbing, so ingrained and inviolable are our myths of supremacy over other species, and our control over nature.
Believing ourselves to be invincible we persist in denying any fragility. Should the unthinkable occur we systematically look for information to justify current habits, cast doubt on our guilt, or offer the tiniest scrap of alternative, less destructive, evidence to explain what happened had absolutely nothing to do with us or was beyond our immediate control. We cling to a fantasy of evolving into a state where nature once again functions as ‘mother earth’ with humans living alongside one another in relative peace, all the while behaving in ways that are totally contrary to ever achieving such a scenario.
Unfortunately, the toxicity of which I write is not metaphorical. It is a harsh emergent reality of our own making and, if we are not careful, a curse on future generations.
In terms of a taxonomy of existential issues requiring profound reflection and reinvention, the core challenge facing humanity is not climate change. Nor is it destitution, tyranny, corruption, terrorism, or even the threat of nuclear warfare. These are just symptoms: clues to a far more insidious underlying pathology.
That condition is an ongoing erosion of the moral code in our shared worldview and the small nucleus of beliefs that are hard-wired into this failing episteme – together with tensions arising from the lack of a new, more appropriate, set of principles to replace the old.
If I am correct then a genuine ethical awakening to what it actually means to be human in the digitally-shaped Anthropocene age is needed – along with a concerted effort to ditch the ideological dualism of past political models, where those who deviate, even minimally, from the acknowledged doctrine are too hastily labelled crazy or wicked.
Context
Over the past 200 years, vast amounts of cheap energy have been generated from coal, oil and gas. These low-cost plentiful energy sources powered a rapid rise in resource extraction, manufacturing and transportation. Concurrently the use of chemically synthesized fertilizers gave rise to industrial-scale agriculture. These were extraordinary advances.
Citizens of rich nations found they could gorge themselves on an unremitting cornucopia of material goods - accelerating a dramatic expansion in human production. Growth became synonymous with progress. Today the manic desire for more and more stuff, along with unrestricted access to the latest gadgets, is regarded as a desirable condition to which we are entitled. In truth it has turned into a morbid dependence upon a continuous cycle of desire and consumption, which is beyond our ability to regulate or halt.
Alas, burgeoning consumption, coupled with an exponential increase in population numbers, has had unfortunate and highly toxic consequences - resulting in environmental pollution, a loss of natural habitat and biodiversity, and a dramatic increase in the numbers of those living with anxiety and depression. Paradoxically it has also resulted in more people living on the edge of poverty than officialdom is ever prepared to admit.
Unlimited economic growth also heralded a catastrophic evolutionary problem: ecological overshoot. Societal demands are exceeding Earth's capacity to replenish its own resources. Each year, humans consume the natural stocks of the planet at about 160 per cent of their sustainable yield. By overshooting the long-term carrying capacity of the planet, precious ecosystems on which we depend for survival are in jeopardy.
Cognition
What has yet to dawn on our collective consciousness is that humanity cannot win a battle with nature. Approximately 99.9 per cent of life that once existed on Earth has become extinct. We are just another species heading to an end-game - but this time of our own making.
Our incapability, or perhaps reluctance, to appreciate existential issues like climate change, nuclear threats, or declining sperm counts in context may be our downfall.
Specifically, if we continue to (i) perceive and frame dilemmas from within the constraints of obsolescent conventions, (ii) contrive narratives that continue to deceive and distract us, (iii) neglect to examine the causal connections within a system under duress, and (iv) succumb to flawed logics and default heuristics that lead to incorrect conclusions, we will always struggle to break free from a status quo that has started to kill us.
1. Perception is crucial. Contextualizing establishes boundaries and conditions distinguishing what we believe to be relevant or not in a specific situation. For example, if climate breakdown continues to be framed as a discrete problem, for which technological solutions are most appropriate, all economists and policy makers need trouble themselves with is the prospect of shifting investments, setting engineering tasks, and managing the industrial-economic transition to ensure that new jobs in green industries compensate for jobs lost in coal mines.
There will be no need to develop a capacity to think or design in terms of the world-system of our invention. Nor will they need to understand the inherited Earth-system and how human systems best fit into it.
As a consequence whole-system interventions based upon moral imperatives – like carbon drawdown, population stabilization, and environmental protection, for example - will remain in the 'too hard' basket and the errors of the past will be repeated with impunity.
2. Deceptive narratives often act as a protective filter. But such fictions also prevent us from seeing an aspect of reality that could lead to more effective and enduring solutions. Western nations led by the US empire, for example, routinely default to a scornful position vis-à-vis China, belittling the extraordinary accomplishments of that nation and downplaying the likelihood of continued success based upon our own preferred democratic path to salvation.
The truth is that no single political system in a pluralist society is a panacea. Some systems work much better than others, for various reasons. At this particular juncture the Chinese model of people’s democracy is working better than most ‘democracies’ to deliver socio-economic justice for its people. We prefer not to believe that, of course, insisting that our system of democracy is inherently more virtuous than other systems and must be exported to every country in order to rid the planet of evil. We even make up elaborate stories to convince ourselves that we must be right and then fall into the trap of believing our own fictions.
International aid is another topic plagued by deceit. And so we still access ambiguous data in arguing the importance of providing financial aid to underdeveloped countries. By reciting this story we are absolved from guilt without changing the outcome. Poor countries remain poor. Astonishingly, flows of capital from poor to rich nations far exceed the amount of aid these countries receive. So, until we allow the economies of these countries to benefit from the advantages that developed nations take for granted, we simply delay solving the issue of poverty. It is just another form of colonization.
Yet another example is the rebranding of business to sustain the impression of benevolent impact and social relevance. Ventures classified within the conscious capitalism movement, and entrepreneurial start-ups in Silicon Valley, both play to the need we all have for hope in the conventional paradigm. However, I fail to see how a cadre of rent-extracting enterprises, with business models firmly entrenched in feudal ethics, can revitalize capitalism or establish an ethos so different that it would constrain the avarice of predatory capitalists.
3. The causal relationships in any dynamically complex system shape the primary outputs from that system. If different outputs are intended, for whatever reason, some kind of intervention is required. Deciding what intervention is most suitable in any situation can only be discovered from a thorough grasp of the critical factors influencing these relationships. For example, the links between population and economic growth, regulatory policies for industrial production, climate breakdown, resource depletion and pollution, must be investigated in aggregate, and forensically, in order to be confident about enacting beneficial second-order change.
In terms of climate change, we need to find and understand the systemic links between it and other worsening ecological factors - overpopulation, extinctions, water and air pollution, and loss of topsoil and water salinization. Examining these dilemmas separately invariably leads to mistakes and confusion.
4. Heuristics are the short cuts used by the brain to cut through complexity. Because these strategies are derived from previous experiences they can be immensely useful - but also highly risky, and hardly ever optimal. For example, the phenomenon of group think, where people believe others based upon sheer numbers rather than any inherent logic, often lead to the adoption of inadequate or (at best) only partial conclusions. The chief risk is that people will alter their beliefs, even if they know they are true, simply because others around them do not share those beliefs. Another risky heuristic is confirmation bias - the tendency to search for and interpret data in ways that confirm personal prejudices and pre-existing theories.
Falling into the trap of using any of these habits can lead to premature judgements, truncating our ability to imagine alternatives outside and beyond the prevailing paradigm. Instead of reinventing systems so that they work for all humanity, either from first principles, or through the systematic elimination of design flaws that prevent such scope and efficacy, we perpetuate unwanted, and potentially catastrophic, outcomes - all the while suffering from the delusion that we are on the right track and that things are getting better.
Code
The prevailing moral code in our current worldview has evolved from a few self-reinforcing source models - particularly an Occidental cosmology embracing Cartesian rationalism, scientific realism, and the various neoliberal exchange mechanisms within 'free' market capitalism. The resulting archetype has shaped a suite of implicit, self-reinforcing convictions. Particularly emphasizing three tenets:
The privileged individual is the source of a society’s economic vigour and productive capacity.
Competition is not only necessary within the context of scarcity, but imparts a robustness that is critical for both individual and collective advancement.
The objectification of every aspect of conscious reality uniquely allows humans to exercise control of any context, including other individuals, while denying subjective feelings and experiences.
This code can appear to be harsh and cold-hearted – lacking spiritual substance, empathy for others, and any sense of altruism – a human experiment manifesting as some godless myopic schema rather than any genuine attempt to evolve a benevolent and sophisticated society.
This is no accident. The social theory of individualism, which favours freedom of action for individuals over the collective, dictates and promotes free enterprise and the pursuit of profit above all else. This reflects a profoundly ingrained, scarcely conscious, self-censorship that has intensified over the past 50 years or so - in alignment with the ascendancy of neoliberal political and economic dogma – a credo constantly reified by the logical positivist mantras of an uninhibited technocratic elite.
These tenets are especially problematic in the friction they inadvertently generate: celebrating the individual on the one hand, while dehumanizing any form of communicative inquiry, fostering the outrageous notion that individuals can be owned, bought and sold, and treating human beings as interchangeable instruments of labour but little else, for example.
The illusion of control, too, is an alarming aberration. Somewhat sobering is the fact that Friedrich Hayek - the father of neoliberal economics - when accepting the Nobel prize for economics, made an astonishing admission. Not only were economists unsure about their predictions, he noted, but the tendency to present their findings with the certainty of the language of science was misleading and might have deplorable long-term effects. In this regard, at least Hayek was correct.
But this moral code - if indeed there was any justification for claiming morality to be present - is also moribund. Over centuries we have unrelentingly exploited our home and each other. Now, we have reached a point where a privileged few own most of the wealth created by billions, and we value only that which can be monetized. Meanwhile the planet is not playing by our rules, and those in whom we blindly place our trust are still frantically replicating the mistakes of the past.
We have gone beyond the limits to growth, so famously predicted in 1972 by the Club of Rome, in an utterly irresponsible manner - as have the limits to advancement of any kind. Indeed, the same head-long stumble in politics, economics, governance, and environmental stewardship, are all cul-de-sacs.
Despite an exponential increase in, and easy access to, freely available information, collective wisdom seems to be waning – arguably to be found only in a few dwindling artefacts and the fading memories of indigenous elders. Rivalry and conflict have become ingrained. Anxiety and depression are forcing thousands into lethargy and premature suicide. Millions more are cut off from what it once meant to be alive and human.
Songlines
We have reached an intersection in societal development but there are few safe paths and no retreat. The future story of Homo sapiens will require us to frame the human condition in ways that appeal to our most innate moral sentiments if we are to avoid the likelihood of collapse. In that regard, moving to a different set of values will be paramount - particularly in the ways we choose to relate to each other and to the planet.
Our civilization is addicted to growth, competition, capital and control. The combined impact of all four impulses are having terrifying consequences for our continued security and peace of mind. We need to change our shared and individual behaviours – to give up that which we have been told generates prosperity: power and dominion over nature and each other.
We cannot abandon this moral struggle, although many would have us do so, purely on the grounds that humans desire a vision of the future that is positive and uplifting - one that does not require any sacrifice, and that can be guaranteed not to take us back to the dark ages.
Meanwhile the establishment, true to an obsolete code, claim that only a combination of their continuing leadership, new technology, and austerity offer any hope to a world in crisis. But even if the moral argument fails to get traction, it is unlikely technological solutions alone can work, so far have we departed from our core principles.
As for the climate, a massive investment in next-generation fast-spectrum nuclear power and solar radiation climate engineering projects are now being planned. Portrayed as our last hope by some these are, in fact, the most desperate of speculative schemes.
Acknowledgement and acceptance of the conditions we ourselves have created exposes the brittle nonsense upon which many of our most recent shared understandings are based. If we can confront the most perilous of these fallacies we may, in time, be able to appreciate what it really means to be human - independent of the need for constant competition, conflict and growth. We might even learn to transcend our irresponsible inclination to characterize everything that is not human as a lesser object to be managed or manipulated.
A new narrative must be capable of interrupting the central organizing principles of industrial society, which are also its Achilles heel: the tenacious pursuit of economic growth at all costs, powered by an incendiary mix of avarice and fear, within an assumed context of scarcity, and performed in fierce competition with one another.
New stories emphasizing the need for transparent cooperation should also inspire informed action across all levels in society. In a globally-connected world we are not powerless, though we are provincial and timid.
There is no need to wait for a galvanizing sea-change from incumbent power brokers or our governments. By and large the impulse for conscious structural change derives from a deep sense of community unrest and activism. So, we can start, as many already have, by adjusting our personal choices and pursuits. By working together locally it is possible to cause ripples of transformation that eventually have regional and potentially global repercussions.
Even if these efforts cannot prevent the collapse of an industrial society that has become bloated by overindulgence and greed, they can at least seed a regenerative human culture worthy of our most aspirational moral principles, while informing an altogether distinctive, more abundant, destiny.