THURSDAY, JULY 14, 2022: NOTE TO FILE
Gaianism?
A new story for true believers
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: MODERN TECHNO-INDUSTRIAL CULTURE, FROM THE WIRES, WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY
Abstract: Gaianism is "a religious philosophy that grants the living Earth (Gaia) its rightful place at the center. Humans are not the pinnacle of evolution but just a small (and not necessarily essential) part of the living Earth." Gaianism is "a devotional religious practice with Gaia at its center," a "view that the whole world constitutes a living organism, all of whose components have equal and intrinsic value”. A claim can be made that Gaianism is naturcentric or Gaiacentric, but that is an illusion based on error and ignorance. Earth is not at the center of the Cosmos. Modern humans allow "millions of tons of plastic to pollute the oceans... we’ve deforested, we’ve paved over..." and GMOed and monocropped..., hence, we alledgedly need a new belief system not different in kind from all the others that contend to save us hubris ones (hu-mans) from ourselves. "And thus we must heal and restore this planet," but Anthropocene enthusiasts, including those who believe themselves to be Gaians, will not heal nor restore Gaia. We too shall pass away either as a species or a form of civilization, the current believing mind based one being not remotely viable. In 10 million to 20 million years species diversity will likely be restored, but modern techno-industrialized hu-mans will not restore the biosphere nor convert biomass into fossil fuels stored in the planet's crust. The geo-biosphere may do so. To heal and restore Nature, Gaians (assuming all humans convert to become Gaian) must work to rapidly degrow Gaia's human population to 7 to 35 million humans within 80 years who, during the transition, consume just enough per capita without using most clever ape technologies on a Gaia harming scale (e.g. no one drives a car), but not enough will likely do so to change our trajectory measurably, hence Gaians who see themselves as solution (and Gaianism) are a distraction.
COOS BAY (A-P) — What is Gaianism? A belief in a religious philosophy that appears to be naturcentric may seem like a step in the right direction to save humanity from its hubris ways that are remorselessly humancentric and unsustainable (select for our failure). This seems like an unquestionable good. If we can stop believing in human supremacy/exceptionalism (to avoid a ghastly future) by believing opposing/alternative claims, salvation seem assured or at least likely. But all verities have this effect on believing minds (which so far as we know, only humans have and therefore are had by).
And what is a Gaian? “A person who believes that Earth (Gaia) is a living being and the root of our being, and of which we are a part. Gaia has an inherent right to life above all else, and it is Gaians’ duty to restore and protect Gaia from harm.” Hence all true Gaians must work to convert all humans to the truth of Gaianism, as all true believers in all -isms know they must and therefore do. "Rights" are as humans assert, they are nowhere to be found on the face of Gaia.
And the Gaian creed? “We believe that the Earth, Gaia, is a living being. That Gaia is at the same time composed of the vast diversity of life and is alive in Her own right. We understand that we depend completely and utterly on Gaia and are part of Gaia. We recognize that current human actions are fundamentally altering Gaia and that if pushed too far, Gaia will shift from Her current state to one inhospitable to humans and millions of other species. Therefore, we commit to living radically sustainable lives—even to an extent that it may alienate us from our kin, our communities, our cultures. We commit to sharing our philosophy and bringing others to understand and embrace their relationship with Gaia and help heal Gaia—and in the process, themselves, their families, and their communities.”
Actually Gaia is metaphor for Earth's geo-biosphere system, vastly more complex than we can know, that is not a being, living or otherwise, but a complex adaptive dissipative system of living (evolvable) subsystems. Gaia is not a being, nothing like a Sky Father (but being generative, is more like Earth Mother). Gaia does not evolve, but dissipates an energy gradient to maximize empower by means of living beings (organisms that evolve).
From the beginning, Gaia has never died, and without death there is no evolution. Gaia is unkind. The believing mind, in any manifestation, is a cognitive pathology at the root of our psycho-social pathologies, our humans of NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) behavioral sink that normalizes the abnormal (for a time). Gaians sing of themselves and can offer no viable alternative to our dissolution.
"Once the current crisis is over, we can redirect our energy back to higher callings, from art and cultural works, to deeper fundamental understanding of Gaia and the universe, and even, perhaps, the birthing of Gaia’s children, seeding other planets with the beginnings of life." We are the crisis. Ending humans is one outcome.
Could humans renormalize to again become evolvable animals? No one knows, or can know. In our current form of overcomplex society we cannot. Gaianism is part of the business-as-usual form of society's storytelling ways that is not remotely sustainable. We cannot choose to change. Some, perhaps even enough, may choicelessly mutate to self-organize a form of complex society that is viable long term (as the millennia pass). Hu-mans: understand or die. Gaia says, "persist... or not". Choosing to believe in persisting is other than persisting. Gaia doesn't care what you believe in or do not believe in, so good luck with that. The Gaian system (an unperson) selects for outcome, humans don't.
And as for Gaian cosmology, theodicy, ethics, rituals, and so on, clearly there is but one God, Allah. Muhammad is his last and true prophet, and 1.9 billion Muslims (2.38 billion Christians of which 1.33 billion are Catholics, 1.2 billion Hindus, 506 million Buddhists, 430 million Folk Religions, 14.8 million Jews, 5 million Jains...) are humancentric. Add all political animals (secular forms of religion including humanists and neoclassical economists) and together they trump all naturcentric humans who actually live as subsystems of Nature (maybe 10 thousand totaled, excluding any refugees from Modern Techno-Industrial monetary culture who believe they are or can become normal humans in their lifetime by believing in their preferred story). Some products of modern society may transition over a multi-generation period (8 to 20 generations) to renormalize with information packages intact to understand Gaia and iterate towards living with the world system properly, in such a way as works to persist as Gaia (the nature of things) alone determines.
If currently predominant systems of beliefs, founded on a belief in belief, select for a ghastly outcome, contending with them to replace them with competing beliefs is one strategy. Alternative is to question all belief-based ways of alledged knowing, is to end the condition of our belief in belief. Replacing one set of beliefs with another is to tweak the dynamic. To cease to belief in belief would end the dynamic. The condition of being true believers may be recent (last 10k years recent), and may be the death of us. If so, the only way out of our fly bottle would involve loosing our capacity to believe or not believe anything. Our believing minds may be our distal wicked problem to whom the solution appears to be supremely wicked (loss of belief).
If currently predominant systems of beliefs, founded on a belief in belief, select for a ghastly outcome, contending with them to replace them with competing beliefs is one strategy. Alternative is to question all belief-based ways of alledged knowing, is to end the condition of our belief in belief. Replacing one set of beliefs with another is to tweak the dynamic. To cease to believe in belief would end the dynamic. The condition of being true believers may be recent (last 10k years recent), and may be the death of us. If so, the only way out of our fly bottle would involve losing our capacity to believe or not believe anything. Our believing minds may be our distal wicked problem to whom the solution appears to be supremely wicked (loss of belief).
Hence hu-mans can understand or die. Any who come to understand could renormalize with respect to the nature of things or die. Gaia won't care whether we persist or not, but will determine the form we come to take as a complex, dissipative, adaptive, and evolvable species of memetic animal (a Gaian subsystem) if we do persist.
Could there be a form of religion without belief-based thinking? By Zhen, perhaps there could be. But I don't know. Can humans change by consciously and meta-reflexively co-creating a viable form of civilization? Does change involve mutation? Can a majority of modern techno-industrialized humans transformationally change?
Deep transformation means to subject the content of consciousness, everything we've been taught, formally or informally, and everything we've thought, to the flames of an all consuming doubt and inquiry to see if anything is left. Realizing that everything we think we know is an expression of error, ignorance, and illusion is to enter into the humility of not knowing. To stand down from our hubris heights is transformative. Deep transformation is the condition of never recovering from the condition of not knowing, the condition of not believing in belief, to get right with Mother.
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), created in 1969 to act on the world community’s concerns about population growth, observed World Population Day (WPD) on 11 July 2022 by noting that, “engineering population numbers has not proven successful in the past. Rather, it only serves to undermine human rights...”, so decades of successful family planning programs have proven unsuccessful. Per UNFPA, “focus should be on people, not population. Reducing people to numbers strips them of their humanity.” So does feeling compelled to eat someone or be eaten.
The UNFPA proclaims, “In 2011, the world reached a population of 7 billion. This year, the number will hit 8 billion.” So to celebrate, “in an ideal world, 8 billion people means 8 billion opportunities for healthier societies empowered by rights and choices.” Meanwhile, the pace of planetary destruction has not slowed.
"Global biodiversity decline is best understood as too many people consuming and producing too much and displacing other species. Wild landscapes and seascapes are replaced with people, our domestics and commensals, our economic support systems, and our trash. Conservation biologists have documented many of the ways that human activity drives global biodiversity loss, but they generally neglect the role of overpopulation. We summarize the evidence for how excessive human numbers destroy and degrade habitats for other species, and how population decrease opens possibilities for ecological restoration....
During the past hundred years, Homo sapiens' population increased from 2 billion to nearly 8 billion and the United Nations (2019) projects an increase of 3 billion more by 2100, unless steps are taken to reduce this population growth. Ignoring this projected increase means ignoring a major driver of the unfolding biodiversity crisis; accepting current
bloated human numbers as an appropriate status quo means accepting a biologically impoverished planet. A scientific, evidence-based conservation biology needs to acknowledge the manifold ways overpopulation darkens the future for biodiversity. It should closely examine the impacts of increasing and decreasing populations on biodiversity and broadly share this information to enable informed decision making. In the political realm, conservationists should advocate for smaller families, universal availability of modern contraception, and smaller populations in their own countries and around the world. That is the way forward toward a just and sustainable future for all." Overpopulation is a major cause of biodiversity loss and smaller human populations are necessary to preserve what is left 2022.How much smaller the human population needs to be is not mentioned. For humans to live on the planet without causing any species extinctions, nor preventing the evolution of new species to replace those already lost and foreseeably soon to be lost to the ongoing Anthropocene mass extinction event, human populations would need to be reduced significantly to perhaps a global population of 7 to 35 million living well with planetary life-support system carrying capacity to avoid overshoot. Limiting our ability to think about the human population to the question of what is the maximum population of humans that diversion of all planetary primary productivity to humans, domestics and commentualists? is to ensure continuation of the Anthropocene until there are no Anthropocene enthusiasts left.
Population Policies that are Thinkable:
1. No unwanted births. Universal right of the pregnant to end unwanted pregnancies.
2. Legally allow the Mothers to decide if, when, and how many children a community, typically of 20 to 50 people, can have with patriarchal societies who repress Mothers isolated from global trade and travel benefits.
3. Universally available contraception. Subsidize/demonetize contraception by making it free.
4. Normalize small families where low death rates are possible. No forced child bearing and normalize child bearing post full physical and psycho-social maturity as the Mothers assess.
5. Normalize adoption of children post parental death or failure to parent subject to guidance of the Mothers, a human biology norm for 375k years (with atavistic exceptions prior to the expansion of empire building societies that denormalized all prior forms of complex society).
Currently, our population growth rate is about +1.1% per year, adding some 85 million humans every year (of 140 million births, 55 million replace current deaths). If we could reduce our growth rate to -1% per year, subtracting rather than adding, we would reduce human population to 4 billion in 70 years assuming no change in the death rate, or to 2 billion in 140 years.
What is not thinkable to modern techno-industrialized humans is that reducing the human population to 2 billion in 140 years is not nearly by enough nor fast enough to avoid a chaotic collapse of global monetary culture and subsequent die-off of citizens of our Modern Techno-Industrial form of civilization. Nor are there any credible pathways yet discovered whereby modern humans could choose to degrow their population by -1%, much less by a perhaps adaptive enough -7% per year. Calls upon individuals or groups to have no children or one child per couple at most is to urge them to self-select out of the system to slow the pace of planetary destruction by Anthropocene enthusiasts for a time who cannot limit themselves in their pursuit of short-term self interests.
Assume all humans become Gaians and agree to a zero or an at most one child per couple policy except for Muslims (1.9 billion) and Catholics (1.33 billion) who cannot agree. How long would it take for (8-1.9-1,33 billion =) 4.77 billion Gaians to become a minority? How long before they are less than 1% of Earth's human population if permitted to persist?
Although policies 1 through 5 would be blocked at every turn by about 99% of citizens of modern society, including well-meaning but ignorant humanitarians who don’t believe population is a problem, the condition of vastly fewer humans on the planet will come anyway. Noting that we humans are not smart enough to overcome our genetic programming or the Maximum Power Principle is to note that we haven't been able to put memes over genes yet despite believing we have, and that by 'we' we mean modern techno-industrialized humans who are about as normal a human as Calhoun's rats were normal rats as they neared the climax of their density overshoot trajectory.
//