TUESDAY, APRIL 2, 2024: NOTE TO FILE
How Do We Moderns, Collectively, Save the World From Ourselves?
Understanding why we cannot, but some could
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: WE, FROM THE WIRES, DOMESTICANYS, FLOW OF SOLAR EMJOULES
Intro: This 'missive' combine serveral major themes such as the past lives of humans and possible future, if any, with John Livingston's issue of human domestication. So ideas offered may be of the front and center sort. Some modern humans may be abile to consider them. Maybe some should.
Coos Bay (A-P) — The view of humans and humanity as one form, as one species, is the default premise of idealists. But collectively we may be a chimera (a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve) of forms. Goats are evolvable subsystems of Gaia. Lions are too. Together, the chimera of form and function is not viable, is absurd, monstrous, pathetic.
“The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!”
Actually, Lord Man is only a riddle unto himself. There are no true images of us. The traditional image is of a male lion with a goat’s head grafted on having a snake’s head at the end of his tail. A more telling image would be of a female goat whose head (culture) has been replaced with an immature male lion’s head. Two is enough to a chimera make, so no snake.
Goats are domesticants too, so becoming goat-like would be only a first step towards renormalizing.
The female goat represents the last six million years of hominin evolution away from alpha-maleness towards Mother. The immature male lion’s head represents the return of the culture of dysfunctional five-year old males with a machetes (and more recently cars/guns) that conflict among takers has selected for over the last 75 thousand years of empire building (under the lion’s head is still a goat’s head overlaid with a new culture/worldview/mindset of the omniscient conqueror, Lord Lion). The head dominates, but only for a time. That which is non-viable passes away.
For a chimera there is no pathway back to a viable form or forward to a new form unknown that doesn’t involve its ending. We can iterate (evolve) towards a viable form. If we cannot return to a moment on earth and in mind when we did not have our dividedness, can we mutate into a new form and function that is not monstrous (or go extinct).
Many (41) species of animals that have an extensive relationship with humans beyond simple predation have come to be domesticated whether by human agency or not. The species include pets (dogs — whose wild ancestor is extinct, cats, ferrets, rats, mice, hamsters, etc.), livestock (cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, chickens, honey bees, silk worms, etc.), and beasts of burden (horses, camels, donkeys, etc.). There are in addition 212 partially domesticated, captive-bred animals (Asian elephant, reindeer, carp, pheasants, mink, American bison, emu, mealworm, etc.). Hundreds of plants have also been domesticated by the first domesticant and number one invasive species who has introduced many others.
The first domestic animal did not serve humans, but technology. As 41 species depend on humans as mutualists, humans have come to depend on technology from fire…, to weapons…, to internal combustion engines, and so have adapted to serve technology, to have and be had (obligately possessed) by technology (the original Faustian bargain for short-term benefit).
As the storytelling animal, humans also have come to depend on shared beliefs for group identity and organization (command and control) of larger than band-size groups (20–50, range 5–85) able to persist temporarily or over multiple generations until overcomplexity/density overshoot, or other forms of overshoot (e.g. ecological) leads to dissolution of the group.
All competitive, hierarchical, complex societies depend upon and serve a consensus narrative (ideology) that coheres, unites groups for a time, allowing them to displace smaller groups. The cognitive mutation required was a belief in belief, the ascendancy of worldview over world, of Self over system, and an US over THEM/IT (e.g. nature) mindset that ideological belief-based cognition allows for so as to achieve conquest. Without this, a conquest culture could not arise. With it, even a militantly non-conquest culture committed to peace (e.g. Islam) can become its opposite. Eschewing belief-based cognition is curative.
As dogs are a denormalized wolf species (extinct) who have no place in Nature (have “forgotten their place”), human domesticants have forgotten the life of their pre-expansionist ancestors. Just as dogs have changed genetically in the last 33k years, expansionist humans have been altered by 75k years of domestication.
As a predominately memetic or culturing (“culture” is not a noun) species, it took disacculturation to denormalize us and any renormalization will require cultural physicians to diagnose and treat our condition of mis-taken mis-civilization.
Our core cultural meme is the “primacy of the human enterprise,” a kind of ultimate “trump card” which “carries its own moral authority and, like any other absolute, requires no explication or justification.” What humanists think of as our greatest triumph, “our expanding capability to manipulate nature instrumentally” [John Livingston, Rogue Primate], is our fatal failure.
Our central dogma allows us to sever the ecological basis for our existence even as we declare that we, as the central figures in time’s drama, are simply following through on our evolutionary predisposition to dominate nature as the maximum power principle (MPP) dictates we must. E.A. Poe had a different vision of we puppets who come and go, we who are so clearly but a little lower than the angels.
“If we are so much as to use the language of ethics, then we are bound to contain our arguments within the domesticated metaphysical dome of zero-order humanism. Conventional arguments can take us no further than the power-based human political structures of interests and obligations, rights and duties, and the primacy of the individual…. This simply is not good enough for Nature, [which] does not appear to be organized along the sociopathological lines of hierarchical dominance, and thus requires no form of antidote. Nature is of other stuff. It is wild” [John Livingston, Rogue Primate]. But if you believe that “in wildness is the preservation of the world” then you are a misinformed eco-fascist of the sort that have invented the concept of “wilderness” which doesn’t exist, never has and never will.
Passivity, reduced sensory acuity, docile acceptance, tolerance of crowding, and homogeneity are selected for among domesticants. They lose their natural penchant to auto-organize into stable, complex, adaptive, evolvable social structures able to respond appropriately to eco-social constraints. What is profoundly abnormal is normalized. The corn domesticant cannot even reproduce without its domesticator. Some humans require technology to reproduce. All modern humans require it to persist in their metastatic form.
To again be viable would be to go back to a condition that will come anyway — if we persist by not going extinct. But we cannot go back to the veldt as doing so would be to repeat the pattern. Technology and abstract concepts will not go back into their bottle. We will need to have technology but not be had by it; have concepts but not believe in them’ have models of the world but know they are not the world.
Overcomplex hierarchical social systems self-generate complexity by forming multiple subsystems responsible for different areas of communication (media/schooling) and action (governance/enforcement). These “function systems” take on a virtual life of their own, quite apart even from the mental workers who supply the supporting narratives. Such subsystems pursue their own internal goals blindly, as if in ignorance of their context (the condition of being context blind). An ecosystem to planetary life-support system is that which does not communicate with the consensus narrative of what is, and so is humanity’s “other,” the not self.
Modern society’s scientific subsystem is based on a distinction which seeks to divide communications about the world into either “true” or “false.” Science construes itself as a kind of organism that feeds itself on truth and casts off falseness. Its only rationale as a social subsystem is to maintain its organization by continuing to process internal communications to inform policy makers and citizens in democracies to autocracies, but sees no other service to offer, hence “solutions” are above the scientific subsystem’s pay grade (not what they are paid to do), hence undoable. (That policy makers, public servants, and the public fail to listen to warnings is not good news for posterity, but the science literate view their social role as severely constrained — civilization collapses, humans go extinct, but don’t blame me — I did what I was paid to do).
How a theory of social systems can help us is to allow us to see the limitations of all calls for “solutions,” for consciousness-raising, for action by forcing us to consider the relationship of individual to social system. The modern techno-industrial economic, legal, political, and scientific blindness to the health of the environment cannot be overcome simply by a renovation in conscious, individual behavior, or society.
The various function systems of contemporary society will not respond to any calls for a paradigm shift in consciousness. It is evident that calls for change, for doing “the right thing,” to “save the world” has no more influence on the world socioeconomic-political system than it does on the weather. Moral concerns are for religious subsystems to internally consider, but the socioeconomic-political system does not recognize morality as a functional consideration.
Each social subsystem defines their domain and their problems to consider, hence we don’t have an overshoot problem, nor could there every be a too many people problem. The first step toward any real solutions is to understand what it is that the various social subsystems “think” about the world, e.g. the world according to the economy is always reducible to no more than a positive or negative exchange of money and those who legislate see only new laws as solutions which then become new problems (Sevareid’s law).
Then we realize that the narrow perspective of the world socioeconomic-political system can only be combated through a change in the form of civilization, then the challenge at hand is vastly more complicated than we imagine or likely can imagine collectively. The problem with the deepest of deep ecological solutions may be that they are not remotely deep enough.
A new paradigm may not be enough. If ideology per se is a foundational mis-take, then changing from one to another is a distraction. Shifting from one paradigm to another may seem radical, but far more so would be shifting to a paradigm of no paradigms, to a paradigm of no true paradigm, of focusing on “the world” and not our view of it by “listening” to Nature who has all the answers.
At this point I may be expected to make a call to action to save humanity from itself and Nature too. Pray, I beseech thee, look within and find an inner child gently holding an unfledged robin that has fallen from its nest. “Look into that child’s eyes. The sweet bondage of wildness is recoverable” [last words, Rogue Primate], and it is, therefore be ye renormalized.
But to skip to the painfully obvious, no domesticants will choose to renormalize, no, not one. No normal dog will abandon its food dish and walk away from all that it knows and depends upon.
A few (0.00001%?) humans may understand the imperative to so seek. And some may understand something of the challenge, but each is one domesticant who would walk away without knowing to where, surrounded by a million who, in all steely determination, will not (cannot).
But foreseeably, at some point 0.0001% will so seek out the condition that will come anyway. If any humans are to persist, or whether they are too few or too late, cannot be known. What 0.01% of humans might do, nor the outcome of their endeavor to renormalize, is knowable, but some possibilities can be foreseen. For domesticants, the path less traveled by is to consider. Those who walk away cannot do so by choice.
We do not know enough to declare that abandoning our food dish will be easy or impossible. Those who declare that they know anything (apart from tautologies) assert merely that they are true believers — let them pass away. Those who do not know (believe) may renormalize. The secret of doing so awaits for the insight by eyes unclouded by knowing. Bliss, O ye believers, is abelief, whether alone in a world of wounds or not.
To walk alone.
No choice or preference implied.
Confucius summarized his life’s work this way: “At 15, I began my study; at 30, I knew where to stand; at 40, I had no delusions; at 50, I knew the mandate of Heaven; at 60, my ear was attuned; at 70, I followed my heart’s desire without overstepping the boundaries of right.”
I was slower on the up take. At 17 I began my study; at 60 I found myself standing and took notes; at 70 I didn’t know I knew nothing. So far as I know, I’m not 80 yet, but the condition of believing you have no delusions is delusional, and what follows is worse.
Humans will love and understand to persist. Or not.
