I assess human actions, inaction and decisions through a lens formed by three core aspects of biologically evolved human psychology:
1. Humanity suffers from a pervasive sense of separation: self / other, us / them, body / mind, matter / spirit, humans / resources. This issue is very well addressed in Charles Eisenstein's online book The Ascent of Humanity. I have concluded that this sense of separation is the inescapable Faustian price we have paid for the self-awareness granted by our neocortex.
2. Our brains evolved to favour immediate threats over distant ones. Immediate, visible threats merit a strong, emotional response; distant, abstract threats are ignored. This hyperbolic discount function is a good survival strategy out on the African veldt, but less so in the modern industrial world with its abstract and unseen threats – our cleverness has far outrun our inbuilt caution.
3. Humans are not rational creatures, we are rationalizing creatures. We have a tendency to make most of our decisions at an unconscious level and dress them up with socially acceptable rationalizations only post–facto, after they emerge into our awareness fully-formed.
As far as I can tell, these are universal human traits that spring directly from the physical structure of the brain.
When I combine those three characteristics, I see a rather cautionary picture:
We appear to be creatures that will treat the entire world as a resource base for human use. We will ignore the consequences of the resulting actions until we are directly and personally affected, and we will accomplish this by reframing our decisions and actions as being manifestly reasonable. Even worse, we will resist mightily any attempt to shift our beliefs through the application of reason or the presentation of facts.
In short, we are a sentient species that is peculiarly unsuited to dealing with the results of its hypertrophied cleverness and is unable to respond preemptively to looming disaster.
These are general traits that we all seem to share to a greater or lesser extent. Some of us are particularly fortunate to have escaped the constraints of our discount function. Only a few of us are aware of our sense of separation, and even fewer work to overcome it. Almost none of us escape the effects of our rationalizing thought patterns.
As a result, the box we now find ourselves in, whether it's the box of population, pollution, climate change, ecological degradation, resource depletion or hierarchic instability appears in large measure to have been biologically inevitable. This is why I have concluded that it's largely a waste of energy to try and stop the onrushing trains, to avoid or reverse the consequences of our behaviour. Given the existence of our steep discount function, the mere fact that the threats are now widely recognized means that the trains are essentially on top of us.
Of course it's not in human nature to sit idly by in the face of a threat. The future is rather unpredictable, and anything we can do to mitigate the effects of the damage we've caused is useful. However, I see quite a bit of evidence that points 1 and 3 are still widely in play, even among the ranks of the environmentally and ecologically aware.
One of the things I try to do when I come up with an absolutely great idea is to ask myself, "Is it really a great idea? Why do I think so? What am I getting out of this idea (like status, vindication, self-esteem, pride, etc.) that might be colouring my perception of it? Are there other ways of looking at the question?"
I think it would help if people were more self-critical about the ideas they propose, but given the argument I've already made, I have only limited hope for that.
Comment by: auntiegrav (auntiegrav) (Apr-6-2009)
It got YOUR attention. It also illustrates your absolutist conviction that humans WON'T cheerfully become cannibals. There is another article here talking about the insanity of society. Why would this insanity be so much less likely? We are already eating and driving our home planet out of existence, so eating each other isn't that far off. The invasion of Iraq illustrates how far our corporate deceivers will go to get Americans to do insane things. If someone started putting Soylent Green in our McDonalds burgers but cut the price in half, they would still sell like hotcakes and few would ask what Soylent Green is. There might be outrage on the news, harumphing in Congress, but it would go on for some time before possibly being specifically stopped, and then it would only be shifted to some country that doesn't have so much television. Have you seen "The Yes Men"? I was in the Navy for 8 years and saw some really dark sides of the human psyche in this world. I've seen actual places and behaviors that would make the cannibalism assertion seem like asking you if you want tea with your crumpets. There is no overriding morality to the human being. Morality is statutorily and socially defined, not inherent in the imagination. Humans behave as they imagine they can behave and get away with it. Usually by creating a religion or nationalism to sanctify their 'deviant' behavior. Come one supervolcano or asteroid impact that darkens the skies for 2 years, and sanctioned cannibalism will be the least of our worries. Personally, I'd like to stick with the pet horses and mean dogs, though.
Your absolutist prediction that we will cheerfully become cannibals casts a pall of doubt over your otherwise interesting ideas.
Comment by: auntiegrav (auntiegrav) (Apr-6-2009)
"We do stuff. We have reasons for doing stuff. In that order." -quoted from "The Funny Times"
I put it this way: what we call Mind or Brain or Ego or Id is all just extended capability of something which evolved called "imagination". The imagination is simply a different attribute, as were teeth and claws and body armor. We gained an advantage to adapt and be predators without the tools of a predator. Predators that are very good usually evolved quickly and overshot quickly and were replaced by other predators. Humans invented agriculture instead and thus, could be predators and grazers at the same time, overwhelming the ecosystem. Most predators exist in a small ratio compared to their prey. Humans will eventually figure out how to rationalize eating each other (even without crashing in the mountains).
I am a Canadian ecologist with a passionate interest in outside the box responses to the converging crisis of industrial civilization.
The crisis of civilization is not simply a convergence of technical, environmental and organizational problems. These are symptoms that are themselves being driven by a philosophical and perceptual disconnection so deep that it is best understood as a spiritual breakdown. The disconnection goes by the name of Separation.
Our sense of separation is what allows us to see ourselves as different from and superior to the rest of the apparently non-rational universe we live in. In this worldview the complex mutual interdependence of all the elements of the universe is replaced by a simple dualistic categorization: there are human beings, and everything else in the universe—without exception—is a resource for us to use.
The only way to keep this planet, our one and only home in the universe, from being ultimately ravaged and devastated is to change our worldview and heal our sense of separateness. Unless we can manage that breathtaking feat all the careful application of technology, all the well-intentioned regulations, all the unbridled cleverness of which we are so proud will do little to delay the final outcome, and nothing whatever to prevent it.
My desire is to find ways to heal that sense of separation, with the goal of helping us prepare for ecological adulthood.
Fossil Fuel
chefurka
I assess human actions, inaction and decisions through a lens formed by three core aspects of biologically evolved human psychology:
PT (David Alexander)
