Not much gives me cause for hope these days. What with the paralysis in our political systems exacerbated now by impeachment hearings, the growing authoritarianism/fascism in governments around the globe, the environmental threats including most prominently global warming and species extinction, and the still-present threat of nuclear annihilation, we humans seem to be on a path to catastrophe, chaos, and general collapse. But recently, I have been made aware of some thinkers and movements that do give me hope that perhaps humanity can, in fact, deal with these problems and move to a more sustainable level. These thinkers—most prominently for me, Daniel Schmactenberger—are actually probing deeply into what humans need to do economically, politically, psychologically and spiritually, to save ourselves and our institutions from annihilation. To put it in the way that Schmactenberger does, we need to move out of our current ways of thinking and organization—in short, our civilization—to a wholly new phase that does not lead to self-termination. We need a fundamental and complete phase shift. Partial solutions, half measures like voting new people into office in Washington, for example, or short-term coups, simply won’t do. Because the same systems, the same dynamics that are causing humans to move swiftly towards self-termination, will remain in place.
That phrase that I used—self-termination—is one that I find particularly vibrant, and it is one Schmactenberger uses a lot. By it he means that the peculiarly human gifts that have allowed us to exponentially increase our killing power, say, from simple clubs to arrows to guns to now nuclear weapons, have allowed us to not just out-gun our enemies and predatory animals, but to so decimate our natural prey both on land and in the air and in the oceans that we are well on the way to destroying the fauna and flora that we utterly depend on to survive. We have become capable of clearing away the trees and forests that supply a good portion of the oxygen we need to breathe. We have already destroyed the fish many of us need to nourish ourselves. We have tried to replace these with fish farms, as we have replaced natural game animals with domesticated herds, but the nutritional value of both is inferior, not to mention the waste problems they generate. The same is true of our agriculture, with its use of monocrops and artificial fertilizers that strip and decimate the soil and poison our water supply and us. The side-effects, or externalities that derive from these industrial practices add another unsolved problem: driven mainly by petroleum power, they add to the CO2 that is now generally agreed to be driving the most intractable problem of all—human-caused climate change.
What Schmactenberger and others analyze are the deep substrates upon which all these insults to the natural world depend. It is not just that industrialized farming or fishing or resource extraction are wasteful and short-sighted. It is that they, like the move to systems of destruction such as nuclear weapons, are the natural, inevitable outcome of ways of thinking and acting that have been with us for millennia. These ways are summarized by the words Schmactenberger repeatedly uses: rivalrous dynamics; open- rather than closed-loop systems; reliance on complicated rather than complex systems; capitalism and the madness of constant growth that it demands on a finite planet; and the regarding of the individual self as totally independent rather than an integral part of a planetary and universal whole. All these and more need to be changed or phase-shifted to a new level if we are to survive.
Take the arms race. As Schmactenberger points out, a lion does not, via evolution, improve its killing capacity in isolation. As it gets bigger and faster, the gazelle that is its prey also gets faster, so that the system stays in rough balance. The lion does not kill so many gazelles that its species starves. It is not self-terminating. But humans, with our big brains, accelerate change faster than evolution allows. And so we have wiped out whole species like the bison or the carrier pigeon or cod because of our ability to invent technologies with which bison or pigeon or cod could not respond via evolution. The same is true in countless areas. With our capitalist value system, we are faced with the situation where a live whale is worth nothing to most humans, whereas a dead whale is worth millions. So are tons of dead tuna, or cod, or salmon. And so the incentive is to hunt and catch as many as possible (and with factory ships, this is a lot) because if we don’t, some other nation with equally lethal ships, will. Ditto with forests. Ditto with anything you can name. Rivalrous dynamics dictate that our side must be bigger and faster and more ruthless, because if we aren’t, we’ll be wiped out by our rivalrous neighbors. And so we have the insane situation of mutually-assured destruction, where we have far more nuclear weapons at the ready than we need to wipe out all Russian or Chinese cities, while at the same time, they feel the need to have equivalent arsenals because if they don’t, they risk being overwhelmed by ours. All on hair trigger alert and susceptible to the whims or mistakes of some zealot in charge. And it is almost guaranteed that it will be a defective in charge because the system favors the rise of sociopaths as leaders—not just in government but in corporations as well. They, sociopaths, are the only ones with enough disregard for their fellow humans and the planet to be able to make the “tough” decisions. To be willing to tolerate deadly “externalities” like mutually-assured destruction, like global warming.
So what Schmactenberger and others are trying to figure out is whether, or how we can get to a planet where the opposite of these things can prevail. Must prevail—before we self terminate. Humans must somehow come up with societies, that is, and economies and political systems that foster selves that are not incentivized to be narcissistic and sociopathic, but rather to be aware of our connection to the whole—including all the bacteria that we depend on, without which we are literally nothing. Humans who are not driven by rivalrous dynamics to always beat the other guy and win, but who act in concert with others and do what makes sense on its own; what helps the community of all others, or at least no longer ignores them. This would involve creating systems that are not complicated so much as complex—like the systems that nature evolves. Consider this one difference that Schmactenberger highlights—the difference between complicated and complex. A forest in its natural state is complex. Trees have immense root systems that keep them in contact not only with the soil nutrients and bacteria and fungi that keep them healthy, but often with each other to ward off invading insects. The forest system is amazingly complex. By contrast, a house built by humans is complicated—containing a foundation, siding, windows, roofing, a complicated support system of rafters and electrical wiring and plumbing and so on. But if a fire destroys much of the forest, it eventually grows back. It reconstitutes itself. Its complexity contains within it the seeds for its renewal. A house, by contrast, if burned down by the same fire, does notgrow back. It is only complicated. Once destroyed, its stays destroyed and another must be totally rebuilt by an outside entity, a human. What those anticipating the phase shift look to is making more of our systems complex. Making them more like natural systems. Following nature. Making our world more self-sustaining like the natural world.
This is where closed loops come in. Most of our human-created systems now are open-loop systems. We just forge ahead with no concern for the externalities like the waste and pollution they produce. If hog farms produce tons and tons of manure that eventually flows into nearby rivers and pollutes them, so be it. That polluting waste is simply an externality that doesn’t have to be accounted for. If my manufacturing process produces tons of plastic packaging waste that eventually ends up in the Pacific Ocean vortex, so be it; it’s an externality that someone else has to pay for or solve. And if the transportation system that the whole world is induced to use ends up not only producing tons of tires and metal and plastic that cannot be disposed of, and along the way billions of tons of CO2 as air pollution that leads to global warming, so be it. It’s not my problem as an oil company or car manufacturer and in fact I will try every trick I can think of to prevent people from becoming aware of it. This is open loop—the open loop that allows capitalist systems to thrive.
What Schmactenberger is calling for is a phase shift, and soon, to closed-loop systems. Systems that pattern themselves after nature, where nothing is wasted; where that which is destroyed or discarded is useful, usually as food, for something else. Nature seems not to produce undigestible or unusable waste. Everything is constantly recycled to be used by some other creature or organism. Nothing is wasted in complex systems. And natural systems are amazingly complex; that is what keeps them in balance. Dead matter is useful—as fertilizer or as food for the countless beings that form part of the great system that is life. That is what humans must strive for in designing systems for the next great phase shift that Schmactenberger sees coming. Or must come if we humans are not to self terminate.
Is such a phase shift possible? Elements of it have already started to emerge. And that word, emerge or emergence, again is a constant in Schmactenberger’s arguments. It is a deep biological/philosophical principle that states thatemergence occurs when an entity has or develops properties that its parts do not have on their own. These properties emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole, that is, when the parts act together for the good of the whole. It is like the cells in a human body: alone, they each act to preserve and advance their own survival. But when they come together as a body, they act their part as organs or T-cells to sustain the larger body of which they are a part, even at the risk of their own demise. And importantly, Schmactenberger notes, with no conflict between their individual function to survive and their overall bodily function to preserve the whole. In addition, there would be no way to predict that overall bodily function from observing the individual cells functioning on their own. Just as one could not predict the emergence of a butterfly from observation of the caterpillar from which it eventually emerges. And presumably, just as one could not predict the phase shift that Schmactenberger sees emerging right now from the perilous situation that we humans now find ourselves in. And yet, if the human endeavor is to survive, it or something like it has to emerge. Whether enough humans and cultures can be induced to join such a movement that goes against so many allegedly ingrained human instincts is arguable. But the incentive to do so is as great as anything has ever been: to emerge and survive, or to proceed to self-termination. Is there any real choice?
Lawrence DiStasi
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