Can We Save Ourselves?

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

Soft Shell Crabs

Last night’s (Oct. 9, 2018) PBS Newshourfeatured several segments that were enough to drive a sane person mad. I’m not sure I can get to them all, but the one that sticks most vividly in mind is the one about the tiny island of Tangiers in Chesapeake Bay. It consists of mostly fishermen who for generations have plied their trade in the rich waters of the Bay, earning most of their income from the abundance of blue crabs to be found there. I believe this is the same crab that is used, at specific times of year when the crabs are molting, for the soft-shell-crab sandwiches that I loved when I lived in Connecticut. It’s far and away my favorite shellfish, if not my favorite seafood overall. It was not the food, however, but the crab fishermen of Tangier Island who were the subject on the Newshour. 

            John Yang interviewed several people for the piece, mainly Earl Swift, who has written a book, Chesapeake Requiem, about the disappearing island, and James “Ooker” Eskridge, a fisherman who’s the mayor of Tangier Island. Swift explained the main problem: the island is literally disappearing because of the rising ocean to which Tangier is exposed. Using several different methods to show this, Swift demonstrated how huge portions of the island have already been flooded, with the remaining parts increasingly invaded by the encroaching sea. Since 1850, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, Tangier Island has lost fully two-thirds of its land mass. Swift describes the devastation clearly:

The uninhabited marsh island that forms the northern third of Tangier was a pretty solid expansive marsh. Today, it’s a loose macrame of strands of marsh just pocked all throughout with water.

In other words, there can be no doubt that Tangier Island is losing usable land rapidly, with the loss clearly documented by aerial photographs, graphs and simple visual evidence as cited by Swift. The cause is hardly in doubt either: the sea rise that has long been predicted as a result of climate change, especially for low-lying coastal areas such as Tangier Island. Like large portions of Miami Beach, these areas are the ‘canaries in the coal mine’ when it comes to the dangers posed by the rising oceans. 

            And yet. The residents of Tangier Island refuse to believe the evidence. They know something is happening—which is why they want the Army Corps of Engineers to spend $30 million to build a seawall to surround their island (the Engineers have refused, saying it would be cheaper to move everyone to the mainland). But they won’t credit rising seas as the cause. As Mayor Eskridge says, 

…we can see the effects of erosion daily, weekly for sure. But the sea level rise, things just look the same to me as they did when I was a boy. I have been working the bay for 50 years, and pretty much day in, day out. And I just don’t see any difference in the sea level. 

In other words, for the mayor of Tangier Island, and presumably for most of his constituents, climate change and the predicted sea level rise is a chicken-little hoax cooked up by government bureaucrats. As Yang points out, “no less than 87 percent of the island’s voters went for President Trump, a climate change skeptic.” Indeed. Earl Swift adds that among islanders, as among their hero, President Trump, “there’s a great distrust of expertise, of scientific expertise.” 

            This just boggles the mind. Here is an island which informed sources with empirical data say is clearly in danger from encroaching seas. The evidence seems to confirm that the main livelihood of the island’s people stands to collapse. And yet, they would rather believe their anecdotal impressions of the water (things just look the same), confirmed by a fraud like Donald Trump (Eskridge says: “I love Trump as much as any family member I got”), than those who base their predictions on cold, hard science. 

            This really summarizes the problem of the United States as a whole. Entire segments of our population have decided that they cannot trust the data of experts, especially if they work in government. Whether this is because the ‘experts’ are believed to be ‘eggheads’ with no practical experience, or because these ‘experts’ have an interest in faking evidence to protect their cushy government jobs, or because what the ‘experts’ are saying is inconvenient to those who don’t want to believe that their lives must change to avoid catastrophe, the opinions of scientists seem to carry no weight with these people. They would rather believe the ravings of an idiot, a proven fraud and con-man, who has convinced them with his comforting message that he has their best interests at heart. So when Donald Trump said during his campaign that Tangier Island would survive fine, they believed him and voted for him en masse. 

            This is our problem, folks. People are too stubborn or too stupid to see the danger bearing down upon them, even when it is the ocean which is gobbling up the very ground upon which they stand. They refuse to believe what is difficult for them to comprehend. And since most of the dangers in our modern world are almost impossible for the average person to comprehend, a huge percentage would rather ignore them; ignore the evidence coming from their godless science. Or better still, be diverted to problems with apparently simpler solutions, like immigration, or abortion, or crime in the streets. Build a wall. Simple. Put a sexual predator on the Supreme Court to get rid of Roe. Simple. Give the police more power to shoot the bad guys. Wonderful. Kill ‘em all. 

            So when, on this same program, we learn that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (those damn scientists again) has just issued a report warning that if governments around the globe don’t cut carbon emissions drastically, millions of people in low-lying coastal areas will suffer dire consequences, we can predict the skeptical reactions from Trumpworld. Just more blather from self-interested, UN-sponsored eggheads. And when, on this same program, we learn from journalist Michael Lewis, as noted in his new book The Fifth Risk, that Trump has been literally gutting the civil service so that U.S. government agencies are and will be for the future too crippled to take the action that is needed to avoid catastrophe, we cringe even more. Because what Lewis demonstrates is that in critical agencies like the Department of Agriculture, the chief scientist who has just left (Cathie Woteki, a distinguished agricultural researcher) has been replaced by a right-wing talk show host from Iowa with no background in science at all, nor any idea what his Department’s mission is. His qualifications for the job? He was a loyalist who backed Trump in the election. Lewis points out that this same pattern has been repeated throughout the government: people with expertise are being replaced by know-nothings. And what makes this worse is that the dedicated bureaucrats who run many of these agencies have become so discouraged that fully twenty percentof them have simply resigned or been fired. This leaves the most important agencies of the United States government—the agencies that do the critical work of government without which a nation cannot function—crippled at their core. Agency websites like FEMA and the EPA and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and many others have been ‘cleansed’ of controversial data—FEMA removing data about electricity and water in Puerto Rico after the hurricane, for example; climate change data removed from the Department of Energy. In short, in the face of some of the greatest challenges the world has ever faced, the Trump Administration and its minions have responded by burying their heads in the sand. If we don’t know about it, if we ignore it, then it doesn’t exist. 

            I don’t know about you, but this is the kind of thing that makes me question how long the whole corrupt mess will even last. Because corruption is one thing. This kind of willful ignorance is a mess of a deeper, more pervasive kind. It suggests that people simply don’t have the stomach to face the deep-seated problems that human greed and hatred and ignorance have created. It suggests that even if some courageous souls are willing to confront such problems, most of humanity would prefer to dig a deeper hole in which to bury its collective head. If that is truly the case, then we may find our true kinship with those blue crabs whose soft shells during molting season make them delicious to us, but very, very vulnerable indeed when it comes to species survival.   

Lawrence DiStasi

Fatally Flawed?

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