We Must Question Everything (A Challenge to environmental activism)

Preamble: Looking at the world with perspective, it is clear that there are an overwhelming number of issues of concern needing general recognition and action. Most often, people moved to action by these concerns see the immediate need or danger with clarity: people are hungry, give them food; people are sick, give them medical care; a polluting industry is to build next to you, organize against it. Actions that arise in such direct ways address immediate needs and must be supported and have the most immediate benefit on people’s lives. But, where one begins an analysis of a problem or issue can make substantive differences in approaches. Seeing primarily the most immediate and clearly addressable form of an issue can miss ways to address, with essentially the same amount of effort, the problems more globally. We are reaching the point in our social and environmental distress that missing opportunities becomes more and more costly. Some of the time the best place to begin is with questioning everything, and it is often best to begin at the beginning.

We must question everything: Pt 1 (Where to begin)

Humans have lived, in organic communities, with relative ease in well provisioned ecosystems for hundreds of thousands years; our species developed a variety of technologies from projectile devices that extended the reach of the arm by many meters; we captured fire discovering its many uses, many uses completely new to the universe. Since those times we have made millions of ‘new things’ from shovels to computers to space ships.

Now, our vast numbers and myriad inventions have organized into social and economic dependencies utterly disconnected from essential ecological dependencies, dependencies that have long informed all of many many trillions of living things over billions of years. This is simply the recognition of what are the most explosive changes in the nearly 4 billion year history of life on this planet; these recent changes have reshaped the planet’s surface physically, chemically and energetically more quickly and with greater magnitude than any previous biophysical events. Unremitting regular environmental violence has come with our huge human populations and the biophysically influencing pollutants and activities that have characterized the last 10,000 years of human history.

Each year’s production of new humans begins life with the technologies and behaviors of their time as the base experience of what is real. This sets the changes created by our species into a dangerous competition with the biophysical designs of planetary stability, and suggests the need to question everything that we have done.

We need to understand that our species has reached a point, in our numbers and in our powers over material and energy, that our actions compete in major ways with earth’s productive and buffering systems; we have been changing biological systems in major, unsustainable, ways for millenia, but have been able to move on from the damages done to new regions with adequate soil, materials, biodiversity and living space: that period of options is long over.

We need to use our best epistemologies, scientific and philosophical understandings, to try to understand how we have come to this place in our history; and we need to be ready to be surprised by the answers.

We must question everything:Pt2 (If everyone made their mark, there would be no place left to write.)

For millions of years the biological world organized the behaviors and communities of ours and related species. Today, we organize and make judgments not from any ecological informing source, but by what has been accomplished within the designs of social valuing: a community or social system adapts a hierarchy of performable actions for which a variety of practical and social rewards are attained. A most underlying principle of social life in all human societies is to find ways of being valued, to accomplish something, either within the overarching social hierarchies or within the hierarchies of some part of society. It is my argument that this, almost completely unquestioned, social motive has been and remains the most destructive biologically created force in the evolutionary history of life on this planet.

I realize that such a statement is far outside of the central principles of my society, that it is represented by only a very tiny subset of values and ideas, and that such a statement is easily rejected out of hand. But, it should be obvious that the many billions of small and large acts of accomplishment, largely disconnected from ecological realities, result in vast and rapid changes to our world, almost completely without design or reason.

Yet, we, each of us, are moved to ‘make our mark’, to achieve in ways that distinguish us....and, in the process, to add, incrementally, to the impact of the human species on total earth biophysical systems. The human animal has been doing this for all of its time as the dominant species, but for more than 99% of the nearly 3 million or so years that our genus has been tooling up its dominance, the communities and social organizations of the various species were embedded in the feedback systems of their local ecosystems, populations were small and impact was part of evolutionary adaptive processes. And note: there has never been before a single dominant species in the whole 4 billion history of life on the earth!

Today, our present species has rejected both recognizing and responding to ecological feedback information in favor of social and economic feedback; this is the ‘overcoming and defeating the forces of nature’ of which we are so proud. And today, we exist in many orders of magnitude greater numbers than any land animal of our physical size in the history of the earth; each using, on average, many times more resources per individual animal, while returning very little useful to the environment and much that is damaging; this is unlike every other species in the history of life.

The social motive structure of accomplishment is such a deep and ubiquitous expectation in all human societies, that it is almost impossible to imagine organizing human actions in any other way: Humans imagine and invent at a rate and in volumes vastly greater than evolutionary processes of environmental fitness; ours is an entirely new way of selecting, storing, manipulating and implementing information. What I am suggesting is that this ‘new way’ has reached its limit in its present form. The changes we have wrought confront destructively both environmental and social Reality. This is not, by any means, a new observation; what is a bit new is that the social motive of accomplishment is seen as the foundation of our dilemmas; our most revered and cherished motive is the most dangerous and destructive.

Further, the ‘social accomplishment’ of doing as little as possible for one’s self by one’s own direct action is a deeply distorting influence that has increasingly dominated human societies since institutional agriculture became the primary source of human nutrition. It means that wealth must be accumulated as a sort of violence to force others to do the ‘onerous’ and devalued things that ‘must be done’. Rethinking and remaking this institutional structure and expectation of human society, fundamental to all political forms presently on the planet, will require uncharacteristic understanding, selflessness and cooperation…to the point that there is considerable despair that it can be done.

But, accomplishment as human motive will not be removed; social hierarchy with its defining activities will not be removed. The human activities of imagination and invention will not be removed. BUT, changes within these givens must be imagined and must be implemented. ‘Accomplishments’ and social valuing can be measured against projections of long-term destructiveness to social and environmental systems. Material and energy use limits can become society-wide expectations…along with a shifting from personal material accumulation to various forms of personal non-material attainments.

These things are possible! Humans have the capacity to imagine, invent and implement imaginative thought. Up to this point these powers, while supplying us with literally incredible material accomplishments, have brought us to the brink of environmental and social catastrophe; still these capacities do have the potential to recognize the realities of the moment, can give credence to informed knowledge sources and imagine-invent-implement designs that reorder human habits and expectations. Individual humans and groups of humans have been making decisions that benefit community for as long as the species has existed; in fact, the valuing of the community over individual attainments or privilege has been fundamental to human survival, and can become so again.

A few millions of people are in the process of understanding these things and some of them are acting on them. While no viable solution to the present dilemmas may be forthcoming, we are the only animal that can even make the effort.

We must question everything: Pt 3 (Humans as Ecological Organisms)

All organisms in the history of life on the earth are, and have been, organized in such a way that physical form, physiology and behaviors of each species integrate with these same qualities of every other organism in their space, and with the physical qualities of the total environment, creating the earth’s ecosystems. And in ecosystems, for every taking from the biophysical space there is some complimentary compensation made in return to make for a near net-zero input-output balance (while ecologists recognize that there can be wide deviations from input-output balance in the moment, over time such deviations follow homeostatic principles).

All forms of life on the earth, other than our species, have formed and existed within the designs of these fundamental principles; most, with every immediate exchange of energy and material; and the more complex, with delays of exchange limited to their lifetimes; only our species has, as a consequence of our specialized adaptations, put off the fundamental taking/compensation design for extended generations. It is increasingly clear that putting off the consequences of not compensating for our taking has reached the point of disrupting the services that the environment provides to living things.

In order to properly address how we might re-engage the fundamental designs of the biophysical space, and appreciate the absolutely essential need to do so, we must understand how it is that we came to violate that design as has no other organism in the history of life on earth.

Here is a ‘thumbnail’ sketch: Humans evolved adaptations for taking from the environment with greater and greater ease…as giraffes have adaptations for eating from the tops of trees... and, as we were ‘successful’ at easy taking, the natural forms of compensation attached to the taking fell away. There was, sometimes, recognition of our role in creating damage by our actions, without clarity, and humans made ‘sacrifices’ as a form of compensation, but these were sacrifices of things that humans valued, not actually ecologically balancing compensations.

As humans created new ways of taking from the environment using their expanded capacities of communication, finer and finer levels of detail allowed for individual experience to be shared with family group/community: learning became a group process rather than individual. As the communication of detail developed, the level of the recognition, selection and storage of environmental detail increased; and a new capacity developed increasing the rate of change: the comparison of observed details as speculative elements to be mixed and matched beyond the direct and immediate experience of them…imagination. Since the reader is a human and deeply possessed of this capacity, it is the water in which we all swim, it is easy to miss the incredible powers and changes to the earth’s ecology both implied and actualized.

With this new and powerful capacity to take from the environment, humans competed directly with nature rather than living within nature’s designs. There was no intention or agency in the competition; it arises from the different ways information is selected, stored and implemented and the many forms of previously ‘non-existent’ information that could be accessed. It is this competition that is the foundation of our present dilemmas and deepest deviations from the biophysical and social Realities to which every living thing must, and in our case eventually, answer.

There are three primary elements to our human situation: 1) our biological-physical designs and limitations including emotional, motivational, cognitive behaviors, 2) our human tool kit, which our imagination has actualized, a tool kit that has grown from a few sticks and stones to giant earthmovers, computers, space shuttles and atomic weapons… 3) our consciousness-cognitive capacities for social and economic adaptations to the huge increases of our numbers, our organizations and our relationship with the fundamental necessities of the living state.

The essence of what is needed to readapt and normalize toward an ecological existence becomes clearer from this formulation. The first, our native nature, isn’t optional, even though we have long treated it as optional. The second, our tool kit, is optional which, in the inverse of the first, we have treated as necessity. The third, our unique adaptability, makes clear that we must act with clearer appreciation of our nature and with selective control of technologies. Then it would be possible for our capacities of imagination to be devoted, in reality, to present dilemmas: we can’t act in biophysical reality when we don’t know who we are, what we want or need and when our only solutions are to make more poorly considered technical changes.

But, this is not to say that these are new understandings or that worthy efforts at explicating them haven’t been made; both understanding and explication have a long, long history: as humans began moving out of the neolithic, what was being lost as we moved away from ecological closeness was apparent to many humans and they wrote it down as some of the first uses of written language as seen in some early cuneiform religious texts. Early ‘civilized’ religions addressed these concerns, many times with common themes of restraint.

As each generation succeeded the previous, new life experience, by tiny increments, included more technology and less ecology. Concern for nature became more and more quaint, so that today it is possible to live almost completely within a human designed and created space with all needs and experiences filtered through human and technical actions. We can believe that the whole earth, even the universe, is here for human use. We can assume infinite economic growth without question; we can be told that the earth’s resources and environmental services are being used beyond capacity without any recognition of its meaning. The Reality-organizing property of ecosystems has been lost and not replaced with any comparable or efficacious informing source.

We are, therefore, the first pure contradiction in the earth’s, and possibly the universe’s, history: a biologically evolved creature with a biological adaptation that exceeds the parameters of biological systems and can be, and has proven to be, in direct competition with the fundamental principles upon which life is organized in the biophysical space.

We must question everything: Pt 4 (Issues and solutions)

A seemingly obvious direct and simple mitigating response would be to intentionally design more activities around environmental experiences, especially, though not only, for children. But while a useful and relatively easy start, it is not nearly enough; such experiences tend to be perfunctory at best. We cannot narrowly train or argue our way to changes in our most fundamental habits: as Upton Sinclair succinctly put it a hundred years ago, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” I would add that it is difficult to get a person to understand something when they have no life experience relating them to the understanding: Dare I say that we will not save what we do not love; and we cannot love that which isn’t brought close in our experience.

One thing that is needed is for every actual human hand to be laid to, at least, some of the tasks required for meeting one’s most primary needs in the immediate ecosystem: it is absolutely not enough, actually destructive, to make “workplace jobs”, and fungible currencies, the only way to get water, food, shelter, safety, companionship, etc. So, there is the dilemma: the necessary solution is for a majority of humanity to very quickly change behavior, to act in ways for which they have no foundational experience; in fact, to act in ways directly opposed to much of their life expectations and experience.

While this statement of what might be the only solution that can minimize conflicts over dwindling earth resources, it is not as completely hopeless as it sounds at first, though admittedly dangerously so. In the approximately 300,000 year history of our species and nearly 3 million year history of our genus, only the last several hundred years have “stolen” from the ‘human hand’ its utility to inform the mind of biophysical supremacy; people have long directly supplied many of their own needs and made objects of use directly from ecosystem sources: the fundamental relationships with environment were natural and unavoidable in our development as genus and species and in the greatest part of our time on the earth.

The most fundamental impediments to redeveloping ecologically sustaining ways of life for humanity seem to be:

• Non-adaptive, environmentally destructive, expectations for how life should be lived.

• Belief systems that do not comport with biophysical reality.

• Economic systems that are functionally Ponzi schemes requiring ever increasing population, material production and consumption, exacerbated by these schemes’ unquestioned acceptance.

• Present social and economic ‘communities’ fail in significant ways to meet human needs resulting in a variety of distortions to what I call specieshood (essentially, human nature). The human animal evolved within and to the emotional, motivational and intellectual structure of natural organic communities.

This last bullet point needs deeper consideration and is vital to any truly possible solutions. What we call communities today are not communities at all when compared to natural organic communities. Original human communities were (are) formed by the full variety of all those born into them, and were (are) benefited by having all the inborn and acquired characteristics among their many different individuals. The community was the entity that organized its actions in the environment, supported by the many talents, capacities and behavioral variety of its people. All the learning and experience of its individuals was shared, spread and accentuated by community; the community acted as a coherent unit for its own maintenance, enhancement and survival within the fullness of the living world.

In the broadest strokes, community solidarity needs to be valued over the economic designs of advantage. This is difficult since, when the original organic community's “gravitational” designs of love, respect and mutual obligation weaken, individual advantage takes their place and becomes a new ‘gravitational force of life’, organizing the social order into individual centers of power and influence. But, this is also a place that people can begin, begin to begin again, renewing 300,000 years of habit, a habit seemingly still weakly 'remembered' in an almost universal nagging suspicion that ‘something isn’t right’.

We know how and can create community-like organizations around specific issues, the people who organize community action can be the guides, but ultimately we need diverse communities organized around, not one issue, but rather around the survival of community; the survival of the nurturing community must be, must become again, the fundamental goal and obligation of life, and can become the essential organizing principle for humans readapting as part of the world’s ecosystems. And then, communities of communities where people are respectful beyond their own close associations, not by any demand, but because they have lived the same experiences.

Adapting such designs to the many varied ways that people live would be a considerable challenge, though it seems that increasing numbers are ready for changes that they don’t yet understand, but know need to come. Social, economic and technological innovation need to be evaluated by communities, for benefits or dis-benefits to the community and not only for advantages conferred on a few; the actual meaning of this would be especially hard to make part of social expectation: using less, valuing nonmaterial accomplishments, rejecting technologies and products that weaken community solidarity. Only the integrated experience of people organized in mutual caring and respect could do it.

If none of this sounds new, that is obviously because it isn’t. Humans have tried similar efforts many times. It will remain “too hard to do” until it becomes an option for a significant number of people either through education or necessity.

We must question everything: Pt 5 (Special Case of Environmental Activism)

Only the environmental movement is naturally equipped to take on these challenges. But, because of a natural dependency on the methods of community organizing for its support base, it is easy for energy generated by focused actions, some of which could go to addressing global issues, to slip away. Leadership must consistently make clear to those working with them, and to the media that covers actions, that the focused activities are a singular part of a much larger movement with global concerns directly related to the action being taken; creating a public and media habit of seeing local action as part of a global effort is vital.

The plutocracy is benefited when each individual environmental action can be framed as isolated, weak and trivial. When environmental activism is focused primarily on immediate concerns and not expressly relating local activism to resolute globalist conceptions of purpose, then the ‘dark side’ forces of environmentally destructive plutocratic interests will control events that overwhelm with thousands of individual destructive actions that spread thin the capacities of activists to respond. Social movements can keep attention on issues and make marginal, though locally important, changes, but ultimately the asymmetry of power to influence events is overwhelmingly on the side of the plutocracy.

The whole variety of social, economic and political activist movements need to append environmental issues to their other more focused concerns: because: 1) Environmental issues almost always underlie the issues that they are working on. 2) A broader support system can be formed as the many different activist organizations adopt some common language and bridging interests. And 3) combining the power of many organizations can create the force and energy needed by the environmental movement, on the one hand, and can leverage that energy back to the focused projects of the various groups, on the other. An inhabitable world is the first necessary condition for everything else!

But, the environmental movement, and activists movements generally, have no inherent, naturally motivated powerbase; the base must be created. While the general population has a natural interest in their own well-being, what is to constitute that well-being isn’t at all clear to most people; much of the activist agenda has been framed by plutocratic propaganda as dangerous to jobs, lifestyles, personal safety and beliefs. Activist movements need the strength of centralized organization to challenge that narrative; we cannot wait for environmental failures to convince people of the dangers that we all face. There just isn’t a sufficient powerbase for either the magnitude or the urgency of the changes needed to be made. The public is too fragmented and misinformed; governments have become, especially on these issues, deeply compromised by wealth-power.

With The People and government compromised, a cold-eyed, critical analysis leaves the uncomfortable conclusion that only a coalition of activist movements and great wealth remain with a chance of organizing “humanitarian” solutions to coming environmental and social crises. Activists have the knowledge and activist base. Great wealth has impunity level power-control over the widest array of human activities . Of course, the activist community must make every effort to inform the public and to influence governance, but with the clear understanding that these efforts, while necessary and power creating, are insufficient on their own.

We are watching, in our own and international politics, authoritarianism, opportunism and demagoguery taking political power as human actions are disconnected from the real environmental dangers facing us. Such self-serving governance only increases the stresses on economic, social and environmental systems; assuming that we survive these command-control totalitarian responses to our present confusions, what comes next will be determinative.

It must be taken as reality that the plutocracy has so fortified the ‘power of wealth’ that there is no effective challenge possible. The only option being talked about – when options are talked about at all – is taxation; however, the fundamental design of the tax code puts the writing of taxing legislation largely in the control of the rich. What we have seen up to now is great wealth organizing to maintain the industrial-level domination of environmental and social concerns. With only regard for short-term gains, these powerful economic interests create a plethora of seemingly incomprehensible humanitarian and ecological disasters.

But it seems almost inevitable that some wiser elements of the plutocracy will realize (are even at this moment realizing – even green-washing is a beginning: here, here) that only by engaging with the relevant activist movements can the more devastating consequences of social and environmental collapses can be minimized; it must be increasingly realized that there would be no protection for anyone in an uninhabitable world. Great wealth has hands on the real levers of power and activist movements have essential knowledge and a dedicated workforce.

As uncomfortable as it may be, the power of great wealth in the present world is ubiquitous and overwhelming. If that power stands in the way of ecological stability, it will not happen (except as an extinction event). If elements of wealth-power can have sufficient overall influence, in combination with academic and activist powers, the need for humanitarian solutions (in the Panglossian sense!) could, at least, be possible. Given the time frame of environmental degradation, every other potential action appears to lead either to violent revolutions from which there can be no recovery or resource wars from which there can be no recovery.

The environmental movement is uniquely positioned to respond to and guide such coalition efforts (there are a number of international organizations well positioned for such an effort, e.g.: WWF, IPCC, IUNC). While it is completely unclear how a coalition of a cabal of plutocrats and the most farsighted environmentalists could directly address the three great challenges: destructive wealth inequity, dismal worldwide state of social justice and the destruction of the environment, the power/control of great wealth and the knowledge/social base of the environmental movement could potentially be organized on an international scale with sufficient real power/control over government and business interests that the most essential changes in human impact on the environment would be made possible. If this sounds both unlikely and very dangerous for a beneficent future, it would be both! There would be many ways that those kinds of forces for change could go very wrong; but reflect, there would be no greater danger than the consequences of going on as we are.

Meaning of Specieshood

What is it that we should aspire to in life? What could possibly compare to completely manifesting the potential of our specieshood?

Every species is evolved both in and to an environment.  It is important to understand “environment” correctly; it is not a static set of conditions, but a dynamic presentation of all the events and processes of a region and a time.  From a human point of view (that is, a very limited conceptual structure) this means all things, known and unknown.

Each individual of each species is formed from an informational template created by the evolutionary process in completely interpenetrating integration with environment – the “two” are really a common process.  As a result, every species has (is) an ecological and behavioral description as defining as the structure and physiology of its body.  In other words there is a way that each species lives; the term that I am using for the total physical/ behavioral/emotional formation of a species is specieshood.

While we recognize the truth of the above assertions for all other organisms – amply evidenced by any collection of taxonomic data: ecological relations and behavioral descriptions are included as diagnostic – we are confused as to our own specieshood: we seem, to ourselves, not to have diagnostic environments and behaviors.  There are reasons for that spurious observation.

The most obvious and therefore the most difficult to recognize (studying all of those Zen Koans has taken its toll) is that we are embedded in ourselves – fish, should they be sufficiently intelligent, would have a devil of a time realizing the ocean.  It is in the perception of difference that our talents lie.

The environment, in the largest sense, in which and to which we evolved – and therefore in which our full specieshood could find expression – has been replaced in our formative and functional experience by the consequences of our exceptional adaptations.  We increased our numbers and our modifications of environmental relations more rapidly than any other creature in our beginnings and have continued that process following the unrelenting mathematics of the positive exponent to the condition today where we have been doubling world population and technological capacity in terms of a few generations and, more recently, even single generations.

We, therefore, have been convinced by the combination of our limitations and our vast capacities that we make our own behaviors.  The greatest thinkers have struggled with this problem (it is not new) largely concluding that our experience creates our worldview and behavior, that there is no human specieshood per se; it is a difficult conclusion to avoid – except for the fact that it is untrue.

In a sense we are like a complex layer cake made of very ordinary and not terribly interesting batter, but covered over with the most delicious frosting (that would be for me a variety of lemon frosting, you may chose for yourself).  We are so absorbed in the covering that we fail to realize that, without the cake structure, the frosting would be a somewhat sickening mess on the plate.  We take this structure for granted – until it fails.

But we are far too busy today to get it right.  We have wars and famine, climate change and Godliness, my power verses your power, obscene wealth and obscene deprivation.  Indigenous people have the audacity to live, and to have lived for thousands of years, on the land that has ‘our’ minerals and oil.  We seem confused by the fact that a few thousand people have amassed control of more material possessions and the power to gather such possessions than over half of the world’s people (billions of people); we cannot seem to understand the obvious, that a few having almost everything denies the many having anything.

And yet the one thing that we all have and that would make all of the difference in the how we live our lives, both personally and ecologically, we almost uniformly ignore or deny possessing at all.

I recently read an essay by a well-known and consistent contributor to the debates about our present condition.  His essay offered a number of suggestions for actions that were needed to begin the process of recovery from our present troubles.  I wrote to him suggesting that, while his suggestions were excellent and necessary ones, he had left out the most essential, that we know where we hope to go before we begin our trip; otherwise we will end up right back where we are now, only with different players.

He kindly wrote back to say, in essence, that this was too difficult a question and would make his essay unwieldy.  I understand his point of view, but reject it. 

Discovering specieshood individually gives the person an attachment to realities that can sustain a sense of wellbeing and purpose in times of comfort and adversity – doing in Reality what religion does in illusion.  And discovering specieshood as a social process would allow populations to recover themselves, as well as reattach elements of our behavior to environmental realities.

As with any species, humans have only a limited number of ‘ways to be’ that can fully express the biological, instinctual, intuitional and consciousness order processes that we are each born with.  But today there is no one way to discover/recover how to make these processes manifest.  We are each tossed at random into situations that challenge and distort the developmental sequences and mature conditions that support specieshood, and so, all have unique ‘beginnings.’

But we humans are all of the species, share 99.99% of our genetics with the rest of humanity, 97-98% of our genetics with the great apes and over half of our genetics with dandelions.  The DNA in your own personal body has been in continuous and unbroken replication from the beginning of life on the earth nearly 4 billion years ago (if there had been a break in the sequence of replication, that which has become you would have ended then and there).  Such an understanding can help.

Every human infant born ‘expects’ – has the biological/instinctual preparations to receive – the primate pattern of developmental experience: being held for a year, life in a close community of relatives, orderly patterns of discipline and instruction.  This understanding can help.

An individual human being alone in the ‘wild’ (natural) world without community and without tools (tools are but one form of community) is almost certainly doomed to a quick end from predators, starvation or madness.  This understanding can help.

Finally, however, it is the feelings in one’s own body, the recognitions of unrightness, that are most convincing.  Once the infantile confusions have eroded away – Santa Claus and God are recognized as controlling stories and not as living truths – we are faced with being a remarkable animal living in beliefs and actions that violate the unique magnificence of each life.  The instant that that sensation is felt the insistence of specieshood is (re)formed.

It doesn’t matter that others may not be convinced; the more the merrier, but proselytizing is not a goal.  Again a Koan: you cannot find specieshood without a community and if you try to find specieshood in community you will fail [1].

So, how is specieshood to be recovered? This is not a new question.  With the invention of writing, just about the first subject was the problem of living and acting correctly; there is no reason to wonder about how to do something right unless doing it wrong is an issue.  We humans have been at this for a long time with very limited success.

Perhaps a place to begin is to look at a time when people didn’t wonder about how to live correctly.  I am not suggesting living in a tepee, people often make the mistake of form as a substitute for substance.  The question is what were the salient conditions of specieshood.  Here are a few of them:

•A largely meditative existence in which several hours in a typical day are spend paying close attention to everything at once, to the wind, the smell of the air, the sounds, the movement of the light – these were the detail of a Reality from which came every good and bad thing.  The human nervous system is designed for this integrative, meditative function.

•A daily life in which each person both feels and is competent to act on life’s big and little issues.  Individual needs are meet with actions completely interconnected with community needs.  And community needs are integrated into the ecology in ways that make so much sense that they go completely unnoticed.

•It would be a great help to be raised from birth on the primate pattern in intimate communion with human community and nature, but since most of us don’t have experiences that meet that goal, it needs to be reproduced to some extent.  Being properly parented is the salient condition, but failing that we need to reparent ourselves.  There is a large literature on the subject; I am uncomfortable with it, but recognize both the necessity and utility of the activity.

•Being personally in charge of one’s community relations. This means not just being a part of a community, but being integrated into community.  Most groups, organizations and collectives, today, do not have the necessary properties because they are special purpose entities rather than the primary human structure in interaction with the world at large.  My own community includes both living humans and dead ones whose thoughts are of the greatest immediacy in my relationship to the world.

•A daily intimacy with Reality: weather, diurnal cycle, exercise, exertion.  These are the expression of the earth’s processes in our immediate experience and are not to be avoided.

•Regular challenges combining the physical and mental worlds.  An example is getting lost and finding one’s way.  I like to do this in wild country; walk for a couple of hours or more, exploring the country off of established trails and then return by some alternate route, discovered during the exploration.  Some of the same effect can be had by getting lost in a city.

•There is more.

These things and more can to be done in “modern” life.  Humans have gathered much valuable information about the world.  I would not do away with science, philosophy, literature, art or the basic nature of modernity; though we must also learn to live with these discoveries, not by denying our specieshood, but by rediscovering, fully embracing and learning how to integrate our specieshood as a guiding principle of modernity.

This is the cusp upon which we sit at the moment.  The present trajectory has only been guided by the position of the last instant energized by some unprecedented new discovery or event – like the whirligig fireworks from a roman candle.  No species of life can long survive on such a ‘plan.’  We will either come into (re)possession of our specieshood, individually and collectively, as a guiding principle or we will burn out like a firework.  All of our other options are fantasies.

[1] I believe that the origin of the Koan is recognition of the loss of specieshood 3 thousand years ago in China and India, and the attempt to find ways (Tao) to recover.

It Is Really Pretty Simple

For all the complexities that we face in this crazy world, there are still general patterns of simplicity that can be discovered.  There are many examples, but these two give the flavor:

•The millions of substances of the universe are combined from the 90 or so natural elements by quite simple rules systematized for clarity in the Periodic Table of Elements.

 

•Millions of extant and billions of previous species of living things are, or were, organized into integrated systems of interaction called ecosystems, and all by the very simple and easily comprehended principles of natural selection functioning through the DNA/protein information nexus.

But what about the political and economic confusion that we presently endure, to which we respond in an ad hoc process that seems to carry us deeper and deeper into trouble and uncertainty?  Might there be an understandable organizing principle, a comprehensible simplicity that, while it may not give us the tools of control, could help us avoid the gravest dangers?  I think there is, though it is not so simple as the theories of electron structure and evolution.

Comprehending the overall simplicity our human muddle can come from understanding that every species has characteristic behaviors, often as, or more, defining of the species as physical characteristics.  Therefore humans have an expected behavioral set.  Secondly, the behavioral characteristics of a species are evolved to a defined environment.  Therefore humans have expected conditions of environment to which and in which their behavioral set is evolved.  And thirdly, organisms living in environments to which they are not evolved either die outright or adapt their evolved behaviors in ways that almost always are destructive of both the species and the environment.  Therefore humans, by creating their own ‘environments,’ are adapting a behavioral set evolved to the environments of their origin in ways destructive of themselves and the earth.

This is really pretty simple.  What makes the application of such simplicity very very complicated is the aberrant behavior that forms as adaptive product from evolved behaviors in inappropriate environments; there are no real limits to the variety of such adaptive behaviors, these are behaviors that arise without orderly underlying principles.  Sociology and psychology find patterns, correlations, but no satisfying unifying principles.  Freud tried.  Skinner tried.  Maslow tried.  Others tried.  But they were attempting to organize aberrant behavior into coherent species-consistent principles.  This would be like trying to find the underlying principles that generate baseball, poker, field hockey, chess, clue, chicken, marbles, war, ‘cowboys and Indians’, etc.  Wittgenstein tries to explain this one: we “know” that there are combining qualities, just not what they are. 

In a perverse symmetry, the more complex the understanding required the more numbingly empty the attempts to understand.  So that today’s thousand generations of efforts and distortions are reduced to “God is in his Heaven” and “greed is good.”  We must do better.

Often a metaphor helps: Imagine a regulation pool table with 16 balls on it.  With sufficient accuracy of measurement, the behavior of the balls could be well described through many changes.  If the size of the table were to be increased to that of a basketball court with the number of balls corresponding, detailed description becomes more difficult, but only by the addition of the number of interactions; each interaction remains in the strict service of the laws of motion.  Nothing is changed by moving to a ‘table’ the size of a city, a small nation or a continent. 

But what if somehow the balls contained a ‘memory’ of the regular sized pool table, if table size and ball number were important in developing the orderly response to the laws of motion, and that the ‘memory’ influenced the way that the balls performed the motion laws – with great accuracy on the regulation table, but less and less so as the table grew larger and larger.  On the basketball court sized table the balls began to ‘forget’ how to exchange momentum, began to vary the elasticity of collisions and vector collisions developed subtle confusions of angle.  These affects increased with increasing ‘table’ size until regions of the ‘table’ functioned by regional pragmatically adopted rules of motion attempting to give order to less and less well ordered interactions.  The ‘memory’ was sufficient to realize that there was something to remember, just not what it was. 

In such a situation there could be only one form of solution; to recreate the essential cues of the regulation size table.  The most obvious way would be to cut the huge tables down to “natural” size, but there would be other ways also.  Balls could spend a certain amount of time on regulation tables, return to the big tables with the restored ‘memories’ for a time until they began to forget how to perform the physical laws again.  The big tables could be sufficiently demarcated into regulation sized areas that most of the balls most of the time retained reasonable behavior.

It is possible that some balls, once having lost the capacity for exact correspondence with the physical laws of motion, might never recover; they would need to be kept away from the others on the table since orderly interactions would always be disrupted by them.  They would be easily identified on a regulation-sized table, but not necessarily recognized at all on a huge one.

If the metaphor is appropriate, then we need to define the size and nature of our human informing space.  It is becoming clear that our present expanded world will not give up its secrets of order – because it has no secrets of order.  I believe that we must begin by looking at the Paleolithic and prePaleolithic forms of human organization and at the patterns of behavior that are found in those primates most like us.  If that informing space can be reasonably guessed at and tested for its consequences, an option to our madness is possible.

This, of course, has already been done and for thousands of years.  Looked at in terms of the metaphor above it can be imagined that some balls, by chance, would find themselves in appropriate spaces and regain the capacities for “normal” function; then try to ‘report’ (interact by the rules) this to others.  But the telling of ordering and purpose is not feeling it and only the feeling of it is informing; the telling is just another story among a thousand stories.

This is so important that I am going to, perhaps, over explain.  If you are confident that the meaning and application of the metaphor are clear to you, then just skip to the end.

What are the parts of this metaphor in the natural and unnatural history of our species?  We are, of course, the balls and are generally of common form and function. Humans are formed by the same biological process of development as every other living thing: a set of instructions stored in the form of a DNA/protein structure.  But, and this is vital, no information that is stable and readily available from other sources will be stored as the DNA/protein instructions, but will be ‘stored’ in the stable and consistent surrounding conditions.  In terms of the metaphor, there is no reason for the memory of the balls to include the dimensions of the table if tables were always of regulation size; however, the information for properly relating to physical laws would require the regulation sized table to be properly expressed. The table is the environment in which our form and function are expressed.

When we make large and self-generating changes in the environment, we remake and remove the essential conditions for the development and expression of our specieshood.  And so, our relationship to the very conditions that inform and allow life to exist begins to fail.

There is no way to recover our true understanding or integrating behaviors by “understanding” our present functioning.  Only by having a sense of specieshood can a perspective be had and maintained that will guide the Many toward the behaviors of organized demand and sacrifice that can restabilise both our material and behavioral relationships with the planetary surface.

The first and most important step is to localize power.  The consequent distortions of national and international power relations cannot be incorporated into any meaningful action for the recovery of either environmental stability or psychological health.  A new book, A Perfect Moral Storm, by Stephen M. Gardiner (Philosopher, Univ. of Washington) purports to struggle with these very issues.

Somehow a significant number of us must discover ways of ‘returning to our roots.’  You see, we have known this all along!  The ‘easy way’, like taking up the plow and raising chickens, however, will not do for enough people to make a difference beyond those that actually raise the chickens.

We have overshot too far for the landing to be soft.  But that doesn’t mean that we must despair as the only or even first emotion.  There are ways to discover how to live the life the human animal was born to; given the press of the future perhaps some of us had best get to it.  It is only in the act of real self-preservation, as a functioning member of the human species, that there can be a future for our species and for many others.

Such a way of life sees the present Randian capitalist/fascist thinking for the insanity that it is.  Being fully human is a community based life, meditative and active.  And today it must be scientific – not supplicant to the science establishment – in respect for the processes of skepticism and discovery.  

A species values, that is, evolves its behaviors and material actions for, its young above all else; even a digger wasp has a longer functional ‘sense’ of generations than modern human institutions.  The most difficult concepts to put into action in the present economic environment (a very big pool table), concepts of present restraint in support of generational fecundity, are natural to communities of affection and responsibility (the regulation table).

It is really pretty simple after all.  We can understand and we can decide for ourselves to make the effort to become sane and retain sanity.  Build and find community.  Seek the clues and guides to living as a human, what I call specieshood.  And if there are enough of us, we might even become the barbarians at the gates of the Mad Empire.

The Wealth Wars

I hate that this essay has to be written.  I hate what it says.  I don’t want to believe it and hate that I do believe it, even in the face of all my desires for my children, for all children, and myself. 

In the long years of our human history there has been a constant theme from the earliest days, and in all lands, of what we call civilization.  It is the formation of an elite that gathers to itself the wealth created by the many people and adapts and manufactures the stories and conditions that allow them to maintain their power over the many.  Our history is the history of the struggles of these elites to dominate the masses and each other [who the elites are is considered at the end of this essay in an addendum]. 

For almost all of these last 8 thousand years there has been a great deal of room on the earth for the powerful to expand their influence – even if there were other humans and other species living simply on the land, they were easily removed.  Throughout this time there has been one primary process cutting through and across all and every complexity: the powerful take what they want without scruple. 

Looking back in history these conclusions seem obvious, but we are loath to see our present world in these terms.  Each period of time in history seems to see its own solutions as better and more nuanced than the crude power plays, wars and ego-driven cruelties of the past.  

But we can no longer enjoy that conceit.  The times, they are a-changin’!  There is no place left to go and the attention of the elites has of necessity turned fully to the form of the relationship that they wish to have with what they consider to be the captive populations that produce their wealth and whose sycophancy sustains their power.  The Great Many must be completely managed, in the new paradigm, for the elites to live on in the style to which they have become accustom and as the world goes through the unprecedented changes driven by human impact.  The consequences of the coming troubles are to be delivered onto the masses, not the elites. 

To that end a segment of the wealthy elite have declared war on the rest of humanity – not so much directly, rather on an ‘as needed’ basis.  It is a preemptive war; a war to prevent the masses from coming to a coherent understanding of the destruction that the elites have wrought on individual well-being, the social order and physical world in the process of accumulating and advancing their grip on power.  The second great movement of the war is to develop (through infrastructure, private or governmental, the distinction is of no consequence to the elites, law and common practice) the physical, coercive and information-control powers to dominate the masses as they respond reflexively to their worsening condition – even if they can’t organize effectively due to the first wave of the assault. 

This is not to say that clear lines can be drawn between the elite and the masses.  There are people who live in the domain of the elite and generally share their values and attitudes, but who retain a sense of the species relationship to the living earth. They are, however, beholding to the same processes that maintain the militant class-warring elites; and if they remain uncertain of their allegiance for too long, their potential for amelioration will disappear.  In general they cannot be considered in our understanding for the possibilities for our future. 

And there are those whose allegiance is to a bastardized version of elite values.  It is a typical human error: they see the mansion and other physical accoutrements of the elite lifestyle and assume it to be just a toss of the dice away; and so support their understanding of elite needs, fed to them by propagandists (who are them) bought by the elites for the purpose. 

Given the forces working to subvert our understanding, we must struggle to take a cold-eyed look at the events and their meanings that surround us.  There are first some simple tests to make. 1) Are the economic elites applying their vast economic resources to improve the lives of the people who have created that wealth: the miners, the forest and field workers, the mechanics, the day laborers, construction workers and on and on for hundreds of thousands of jobs from which the wealthy take, from each and every one, some percentage?  2) What are the most agreed-on projections for the future of human activity and impact on the earth and what are the responses to those projections by the economic elite?  3) Are there any meaningful (measured by success) efforts to use the vast accumulations of wealth to educate and inform (and reform) the world’s “civilized” peoples, to protect indigenous people and to support our understanding of the needs of the earth’s biophysical systems?  4) Is there any reasonable evidence that “we” are all in this thing together? 

The answers to these questions are uniformly negative.  There is a ‘race to the bottom’ in wages for productive work.  The rate at which both real and phantom wealth is collecting at the top is increasing.  Unemployment has been increasing, which means increasing by design as a way of reducing wages.  The elite publicly reject and deny the projections for human suffering and ecological damage and have spent huge sums, far in excess of philanthropy, to confuse and weaken mass opinion.  Elite preoccupation has been the domination of land and people for economic gain. 

No other conclusion will be possible a 100 years, 200 years, in an objective future than that the elites were, at the beginning of the 21^st century, conducting a war on the rest of the humanity and the environment, trying to get as much of what they considered wealth as possible and to protect their status in a dangerous world. 

As a military commander would study maps, evaluate forces, allocate supplies, estimate the opposition and generally try to develop both factual detail and fact-based intuitive comprehensions of the situation, so we (in this case meaning those who wish to appreciate the strategic position of the great mass of human beings in the world) must determine the nature of the field upon which we are to struggle, what and who we are struggling for and against (even if it is sometimes ourselves), what talents and tools are required, what are our primary advantages, what are our primary disadvantages and how are we to maximize the former and minimize the latter. 

It is to the advantage of an opposition to remain invisible or at least shape shifting.  If the entities (people, organizations or processes) that are afflicting the Great Many can be clear to themselves what their goals are, control the arena of “action” and maintain order in their own ranks while at the same time keeping the rest of us, their targets, squabbling among ourselves, confused about the origin of our difficulties and disorganized, then the game is over.  We must actively begin the process of seeing through the feints and deceptions. 

Advantages and disadvantages 

The Elites’ advantages:

-wealth

-institutional control of governance and media

-influence on sources of deadly force

-clarity of purpose

-small numbers that allow for conspiring communications and groups

-emotional distance from those who are harmed by their actions

-confidence in their privilege and superiority

-core groups of the elite are fully aware of the war, its terms and conditions 

   disadvantages:

-small numbers, requiring large numbers of the masses to serve their interests

-the constant attention needed to keep the masses misinformed and controlled

-lack of connection to biophysical Reality

-the inherent dishonesty that must be maintained in the relationship with the masses

-dependence on fragile systems often based in illusion 

The Masses’ advantages:

-vast numbers (both advantage and disadvantage)

-actual hands-on relationship with all of the tools of production, security and militarism

-capacity to withhold all behaviors and services that function the society

-capacity to outlast the elite in a direct contest of austerity

-capacity to physically overwhelm all protections that the elite might employ 

    disadvantages

-vast numbers

-fear of disorder and system breakdown

-confusion of purpose

-lack of education and organization

-lack of infrastructure that could force consideration of interests

-Immediate biological needs are met by existing, and elite controlled, economic systems

-the masses are largely unaware that there is an organized assault on them 

In summary, the elite has power, wealth and control, as well as organization of purpose supported almost exclusively by the illusions that they hold about themselves and different illusions that they depend on perpetuating in the masses.  They are few in number so would be helpless without the support of a significant percentage of the masses; they are obsessively aware of this fact.  They are willing to visit unlimited suffering and death on people and ecosystems to maintain and grow their power. 

The elite cannot exist without the masses; there would be no productive activity to extract wealth from.  There would be no one to work for them and no one to adore and cater to them. 

The masses have the actual power in the form of all, literally all, direct productive activities, all food and water gathering, construction, transportation, manufacturing, etc.  But they have almost no national or global organizational strength.  The moment the masses realize that they can still do all the jobs that need be done and discard the illusions forced on them by the social and media power of the elite will be the moment when the elites sue for peace in the culture war; it will also be the moment when the masses realize with whom they have been at war. 

The masses can exist without the elite.  What they cannot do is live like elites and be without the elites.  May it not be a lesson too late for the learning. 

[Addendum] Who comprises the elite is not the major interest of this essay.  They are, however, people who find themselves in possession of what those around them value and are willing to use that momentary excess and advantage for themselves and against others; they are, in other words, people who would be considered anti-social and in need of guidance and watching in an egalitarian community.  All communities have had them and managed them as just one of the wide and complex varieties of human types that give  texture and adaptive strength.  The “civilized” world, with its large populations and great capacity to make wealth, has offered opportunity for such people to gather outside of the moderating influences of a heterogeneous community and to see their avariciousness as virtue, drawing many others into excess and loss of specieshood. 

First of all the elite are people who wish to be wealthy and powerful and who are willing to do what is required to be so.  This is certainly not everyone – the world is littered with the “remains” of those who were supposed to ‘attain these heights,’ but in some combination of not wanting and being unwilling were pushed aside; the profligate sons and daughters of great wealth are but one form of example; unwealthy writers of philosophical essays another. 

A major ingredient of power (and less obviously wealth) is convincing the main body of the population that its apparent possessor actually has it, and that the form of power and, by implication, the possessor are to be deferred to.  A telling example comes from an observation of chimpanzees in the wild.  A rather small and unimposing adult male discovered that a large metal can, when dragged violently through the forest and slapped, so impressed his community that he was treated with the deference due a dominate male – and so was, for a time, the alpha member of his group, until they saw through the ruse.  

Those of us without much power are seldom aware of the obsession with which the powerful watch for even the smallest opportunities to enhance the impression of their authority.  The corollary for wealth is the obsession with even the smallest opportunity for gain (the wife of a billionaire I knew always took all of the condiments from the table when eating out). 

*Obsession is a major symptom of mental illness.  The elite are obsessed.  The elite have, at least, one major symptom of mental illness.  

*Mental illness is disqualifying for responsible leadership.  The elite have symptoms of mental illness.  It is unwise to allow the elite into positions of authority. 

These two arguments set the stage for much of the behavior of the core elites; they must control reality if they are to fulfill their obsessions.  And so one of the reasons for the multi-millennial obsession with “human reality” defeating nature’s Reality.