I keep thinking these days about
the terrible facts that confront us as humans. We have, at the head of our
so-called democracy, a man so obviously unfit for the office he holds that it would
have beggared belief to imagine him lasting a year. And yet he has. How could
this be? How could Trump have even won, which is to say, how could millions of
adults have actually voted for such a boorish, vulgar, criminal fraud? And that
is the question I’m really interested in here. We Americans are a putative
democracy, but our people are not alone in displaying a preference for
demagogues who promise to revive a narrow nationalism that will seal us off
behind ridiculous walls to exclude the rising number of migrants flooding the
world. Hungary has made the same kinds of moves against migrants. So has
Germany. And there are even rumblings of discontent in those bastions of
tolerance, Sweden and Denmark and Norway, with France, Italy and Spain
following suit, and the nations from whom we expect such policies not
disappointing in this regard either: India has a right-wing Hindu nationalist
in Narendra Modi; Japan has one too; and even the Buddhists in Myanmar are
implementing one of the most vicious campaigns of ethnic cleansing ever seen
against the Muslim minority known as the Rohingya. More than half a million of
these Rohingya migrants have now decamped for refugee misery in a nation,
Bangladesh, that can barely keep its own people alive. In fact, a recent
article about authorities in Bangladesh considering a sterilization program for
Rohingya refugees (“Bangladesh Eyes Sterilization” by Shafiqul Alam, Agence France Presse, reprinted on Reader Supported News) is an indication
of how serious the problem is, how much, because Rohingya Muslims reject the
idea of birth control and purposely have large families to ‘secure their
survival,’ it is a harbinger of the future. And worse, for all the signs
indicate that this massive global movement, sure to be exacerbated by global
warming and its attendant disasters, has only just begun.
With
a world population of 7 billion threatening to increase to 9 billion (one of
the Rohingya women interviewed admitted to having 19 children, for security),
and 14 million additional migrants each year roaming the globe without a place
to live and survive, what are we to imagine? (See the Lancet of October 31, 2017: “Lancet Study warns of Global Health
Crisis and 1 Billion Climate Refugees by 2050,” reprinted in Reader Supported News.) With more and
more nations closing their borders and shutting down their empathic responses
to these desperate millions, and with ever greater signs that artificial
intelligence and robotics will be decreasing rather than increasing jobs
normally done by such workers, what are we to conclude?
I
have to tell you, I begin to wonder if humanity, if all life, isn’t somehow
constructed amiss. This is no idle exercise of the imagination. A recent book
I’ve been reading, Why Buddhism Is True, by Robert Wright, outlines a
conflict that puts the burden on evolution itself. Very briefly, what Wright
tries to emphasize (and many others agree) is that human behavior is driven by
natural selection to perceive and behave in the way that best ensures the
survival of its particular gene pool, regardless of its validity. In short, our
brains have evolved feelings to drive us to find desirable that which best
guarantees the procreation and survival of our genes, and, at the other end, to
consider as hostile any outside entity that would appear to threaten the
survival of ourselves and/or our progeny. Here is one of the ways he puts it:
Good and bad feelings are what
natural selection used to goad animals into, respectively, approaching things
or avoiding things, acquiring things or rejecting things; good feelings were
assigned to things like eating and bad feelings to things like being
eaten…Feelings tell us what to think about, and then after all the thinking is
done, they tell us what to do (Wright, p. 124).
In this way, we are emotionally driven to perceive eating,
sex and the like as good, and to perceive those outside our group competing for
such things as fearful and bad (actually, as Beau Lotto points out in a recent
book, Deviate, our perception is even
more solipsistic than that: “All perception is just your brain’s construction
of past utility… our senses rely
very little on the external world, but more on our internal world of
interpretation” [p. 110]). It should also be noted that the neural system that
rewards our desires, the dopaminergic system, rewards (with dopamine) our anticipation of a goal such as sex more
robustly than its achievement. In this way, we are kept always slightly unsatisfied,
and hence always hoping for the next hit. The corollary is that we are prone to
cast our vote for demagogues who promise to a) expand our chances of thriving
(make our businesses less regulated and more profitable, even if it means
polluting the air we breathe and the soil we need to grow our food) and b) lessen
the danger from predation or competition by outside “others” (even if that
means risking nuclear holocaust for our enemies or ourselves or whole sections
of the planet). For Robert Wright, this means that Buddhism represents the
chance to objectively examine these feeling-driven impulse-perceptions and to
see, eventually, that they are illusory. To see that there is mostly suffering (the
Sanskrit word dukkha is also
translated as “dissatisfaction”) and nothing substantial or essential at the
heart of this protective reactionism; that the responses it initiates are often
premature and unnecessary; and that, ultimately, there is no separate, enduring
self to really protect, no separate “other” to revile or destroy. But I do not
here intend to get into the details about whether such insights would “solve” the
problems we are facing in our world. What I am interested in is the analysis of
natural selection and its logical outcome with respect to homo sapiens in general.
And
homo sapiens is really the problem.
For most other species, any over-development that results in its overwhelming domination
of a given environment, and hence an explosion in its population, generally
runs up against natural laws (as lemmings or locusts do). The population in
question consumes too much of its prey, outruns its vegetal or animal resources,
and sooner or later must retract or collapse for lack of food and habitat, or
due to balancing outside pressures from expanding predators responding to its own expansion. For humans, however,
the capacity our species has evolved to alter the environment itself to the
point where it can overcome natural limits and the normal feedback threats, has
led, as everyone knows, to a population explosion of alarming proportions. At
the time of the Buddha in about 500 BCE, for example, there were an estimated
800,000 to 1 million humans on the entire
planet. And that population, driven by early agriculture, was already a
substantial increase over what had been able to survive previously; disease,
starvation, and natural shocks, including the vulnerability of children
starting with their birth, cooperated to keep the population of
hunter-gatherers well below half a million for millennia. But in the years of
our era, and especially in the years around 1750 beginning with fossil-fuel-driven
machines and industrialization and modern medicine, the human population has
expanded so rapidly as to cover even what had previously been uninhabitable
parts of the globe. Human population, in short, has been doubling every few
years, and that can only mean—even with advances in agricultural productivity,
which, ironically, tend to increase population even more—more conflict over
resources and habitat. Which is to say, increased use of what natural selection
has equipped us with: emotion-driven desire for increase of our kind, and
aversion to the increase of others. And, perhaps most important, a tendency to
view these imperatives in the short term: it is always “good” to increase our gene pool, and to do whatever is
necessary to decrease the gene pool of “others,” no matter what we are told or
see in our rational moments about the dangers in the long run. The long run is
always discounted. The long run always loses out to short-term survival. And
that is why we choose a demagogic imbecile to lead us: he promises those
irresistible short-term advantages (fewer regulations; more coal jobs; more oil
jobs; more pesticides; more mining and fishing and tax breaks to benefit ‘our’
businesses) that natural selection predisposes us to feel as favorable to “us”
and unfavorable to “them.” And there seems no help for it. The appeal to the “fast”
parts of the brain that do most of the decision-making, such as the amygdala,
simply overpowers (in sufficient numbers to make the difference) the
inhibitions that under favorable circumstances can come from the pre-frontal
cortex—those parts of the brain dubbed “slow” by Daniel Kahneman, parts which can
carefully consider things from a more rational perspective (does it make sense
to elect a lying racist? to further poison our air and water and soil?).
To
be sure, this is over-simplified. But the population figures, and the
projections about the coming damage to planetary resources like oceans depleted
of fish, and forests shrinking to make way for cattle or crops, and the
fast-developing resistances of natural pests and bacteria to our best efforts
to destroy them, leave us little room for doubt. Our stone-age brains have not
had time to evolve more rational responses (we are, after all, only a few
thousand years from hunter-gatherer ways and ethics). Short of an unexpected neuro-shift
in huge portions of the population, our emotion-thoughts seem well on the way
to driving us to irreversible disaster.
This
is not to say, of course, that the project of life on earth will fail. The
planet will survive our best efforts to fuck it up as it has survived countless
times in the past. Yes, the earth will survive until, several billion years
hence, the dying sun expands to engulf it in a fiery end. Indeed, life itself
will survive, having no particular need of a brainy ape to continue. And even
the brainy ape will probably survive in some form or other, in some quantity or
other—perhaps less driven by its short-term good/bad centers, perhaps more
chastened with an expanded cortex that will be more adept at seeing long-term
consequences. But the civilization that we have created in the last 10,000
years, and the industrial-electronic-agricultural complex we have forged in the
last few centuries—that may well be doomed. And perhaps that is as it should
be. We have come, like many civilizations in the past, to expect our inevitable
progression as the “crown of creation” to continue forever. But we may soon discover that nothing is forever, not even so
supremely-adapted a gaggle of primates as we think we are. One wonders, though,
if there will be an aware one like Ozymandias
in Shelley’s poem, to provide our epitaph:
My
name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look
on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing
beside remains. Round the decay
Of
that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The
lone and level sands stretch far away.
Lawrence DiStasi
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