A pencil sketch of our predicament

[GliderGuider]

Last edited Tue Feb 10, 2015, 08:15 AM - Edit history (1)

As some of us have noticed, the human experiment is in a bind. A predicament, a clusterfuck, call it what you will. However, there are some very interesting things about this noticing.

• Not all of us notice the predicament - in fact most of us don't notice anything of the sort. While things may be a little messed up here and there, in general things seem pretty normal. As a result, these people have no interest at all in fixing what they see as a non-existent problem - especially since doing so might limit our opportunities for future growth. They tend to be resentful and dismissive of attempts to do so.
  
• Those who do notice it tend to see only parts of it. Most of these people see a set of soluble Problems, not an insoluble Predicament.
• The problems tend to be blamed on proximate causes like politics, religion, short-sightedness and greed, rather than true root causes.
  
• Those who do notice some of it and try to take remedial action tend to be remarkably unsuccessful at straightening any of it out.

Yes indeed, there is cognitive dissonance and the mangled wreckage of good intentions strewn all over Growth Highway #1. That's what you get when you let a species that's barely out of chimpanzeehood drive the planet.

This cognitive dissonance and functional ineffectiveness is the reason that COP15 blew its brains out in Copenhagen at the end of 2009. That grim milestone was what drove me to look for factors that might underlie the apparent irreversibility of the human growth-mania. After five years of root cause analysis I've ended up in an odd place. I have a firm conviction that our growth fixation is a direct consequence of how the Second Law of Thermodynamics operates in open systems, specifically non-equilibrium thermodynamics as implemented by living organisms.

The growth of other species is eventually limited by energy availability and predation. However, homo sapiens presents a special case. This is due to our social nature, self-awareness, intense abstract intelligence, and our ability to conceive of non-obvious uses for things in our environment (like flint arrowheads, coal and uranium, for example).

Because survival and growth are the prime evolutionary imperatives of all organisms, our special fitness traits have all been channeled towards achieving survival and growth. To have done otherwise would have violated bedrock evolutionary principles and ensured our early extinction. In order to preserve our overwhelming evolutionary advantage we ignore, marginalize and devalue the ideas of anyone who tries to stand between human activity and the use of any required resources, whether those resources are animal, vegetable or mineral - or other humans.

Of course there are many other factors involved, such as our anthropocentrism, our short-term thinking, and our social nature that divides us into tribes and nations. But I trace the whole predicament back to thermodynamic and evolutionary roots. On a planet populated by a species of hyper-intelligent social animals with thumbs, blessed with an ample surplus of stored carbon-based energy, a bad outcome was inevitable, IMO. The details of how it has happened are largely window dressing.

There is a popular, near-universal belief that we can reverse this course by using our consciousness and our conscience, by applying technology to what Dave Pollard rightly points out is a social rather than a technological problem - one which I believe has deep, irreversible biophysical roots.

The collective delusion that we can reverse our course through conscious choice has to be one of the most ironic jokes ever played on our species by a Universe with a morbidly twisted sense of humour. This delusion, which was perhaps first intuited by the ancient Greeks, is what has turned the last 200,000 years of modern human experience into a planetary Greek tragedy, the denouement of which is now in view.

For more background, see the recent essays at http://www.paulchefurka.ca

[Nay]

1. Thank you! I don't often get to read something like this -- it's been my

contention for years that the biophysical roots you refer to, since they are the overarching cause of our astounding 'success' as a species, are also going to be the cause of our demise. If nature forces living things to compete for eons, we are gonna get a lot of fighting and jockeying for position. It is impossible to imagine the species switching over to complete cooperation to solve a problem because this has never been done, except in very small groups. And those groups are always overrun by more aggressive groups in the end.

So, we're stuck where we are. It certainly doesn't help that yowling RWers and libertarians have the floor; we'd be better off if there was at least one large social democracy to help out with a decent philosophy, but oh, well.

The most the human race can hope for is that we won't be totally wiped out. A few million may live to reproduce. In total misery, of course.

Edit: If you haven't already read them, you may enjoy the essays at http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/.
He has a very similar take on things.

[GliderGuider]

2. You're welcome. It's not a popular view in progressive circles.

Progressives prefer to believe in human agency. This worldview takes that off the table.

Yes, I know Greer. He's a good, deep thinker. Another person worth following is Dave Pollard: http://howtosavetheworld.ca/