TUESDAY, FEB 21, 2023: NOTE TO FILE
The Idea of a Union of Concerned Elders
Hit what you aim for
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: NOT THE UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS, FROM THE WIRES, WE ARE ALL ELDER TO SOMEBODY
Intro: For a Union of Concerned Elders to exist, 1,700+ ecolate elders must be able to agree on a warning to posterity. The release of the signed warning will be the occasion when each elder becomes known to the public or to one another. Until then, each works anonymously reach a consensus warning message. Only then, by signing, do each take a stand.
COOS BAY (A-P) — The idea of a Union of Concerned Elders (UoCE) is to create a more inclusive group than the Union of Concerned Scientists who came up with the first World Scientists' Warning to Humanity in 1992. What they did was something that needed to be tried, but given the lack of response, humanity wasn't/isn't/can't listen. What we hominins need to do is listen to Nature who "has all the answers" and not to any human group.
To try something different, the proposed warning is directed to posterity, specifically to 13 to 19 years olds inclusive of today's 10 year olds in three years or those born in 87 years a century from now.
For those who may still recognize their personal limits (e.g. 13 to 19 year olds), some may be able to realize that those who may know and understand more than they do, those who are endeavoring to listen to Nature (in all due recognition of the difficulty) may have information to consider. Systems ecologists like H.T. Odum and his student Charlie Hall (who recently told me he still reads Odum and Vaclav Smil for a better understanding of how the world really works) are examples of elders to almost everyone, certainly to me, and not just chronologically.
They are developmentally, in their understanding of Gaia, elder to my understanding. I, however, am elder to most 15 year olds.
Using the word 'elder' is problematic as to some it implies chronological achievement by living longer than another, but in cultures that value elders, it is understood that merely living longer isn't what is valued, but such sapience as may come over a lifetime of endeavoring to understand the nature of things (Nature), which I think may once have been the norm among our pre-expansionist ancestors.
So the idea is developmental elderhood, as in a 15 year old is developmentally older than a 10 year old who, in a problematic situation, would and probably should go along with a 15 year old's best guess as to what to do.
So 13 to 19 years olds, those who know that they don't know everything that matters (some perhaps small percentage of them), may be able to recognize that they are posterity, and that they don't know enough yet to have an opinion about how to go about avoiding a ghastly future they may inherit from us Anthropocene enthusiasts.
Every faction out there will offer, and do offer, posterity guidance towards their group's political or religious solution to any concerns posterity may have. The first fork in our road, however, is to ask who you're gonna listen to? To prattling primates? Or to Mother (Nature) who "has all the answers" (H.T. Odum)? 'Choose wisely' as the two pathways lead to different outcomes.
If there were a 1,700+ member UoCE, they would have to compete with QAnon groups of elders, and CCP (Chinese Communist Party) groups of concerned elders, and Woke groups of elders.... All traffic in belief-based certitudes as asserted, which allow for the possibility of a group that traffics in something else.
The something else would involve evidence, i.e. listening to Nature, and while there will be disagreement over what Nature is saying, there is a selection process that selects for the group iterating towards one (likely better) view as the centuries pass (instead of fragmenting endlessly).
Some may persist in viewing the planet as a flat illimitable plane allowing for endless expansion, but that view, if evidence and reason mattered in a form of civilization (in one that is not the one we live in), then flat-earth expansionist views would be held by ever fewer as the years go by.
Endless and evermore fragmentation may not have to be the norm as it is and must be in belief-based cultures that cannot enforce one consensus narrative for long.
If asked/confronted to go one way (by belief-based ways of alleged knowing) or by a path less traveled by (evidence-based ways of alleged knowing), some humans (those not yet committed to serving the economy), some possessed of some foresight intelligence, some who would iterate towards sapience, might take the path currently less traveled by.
A disproportionate number of their fellow travelers may be or become scientists, but not all or even most scientists today stray outside the silo they were trained in to serve modern techno-industrial society and its economy. And not everyone outside of STEM interests are insapient. As James Lovelock noted, ‘you iterate towards truth, you don’t know it’.
So the UoCE would endeavor to iterate towards truth as guided by the tea leaves of evidence. This would be in contrast to all alternative ways of knowing. I seek to confront 13 to 19 year olds (and those older or yet born who may eventually be 13 to 19 year olds) with a fork in their road. I would point out that one exists, that they do not have to live a life such as modern society (the economy) would have them live in service of.
As everyone who can speak is elder to someone (e.g. toddlers), an adjective is needed. If, as is the intent, the UoCE were to issue a warning, it could be called the World Elders' Warning to Posterity, but not all elders will write or agree to sign the warning.
Garrett Hardin viewed an educated mind as having three pillars: literacy, numeracy, and ecolacy, and the modern economy serving education systems, formal and informal, as producing somewhat literate, marginally numerate, and wholly inecolate humans. That is why humanity isn't/can't listen, and maybe those at risk of a higher education may be able to listen to a better story than the MTI/BAU (Modern Techno-Industrial/Business-As-Usual) story. I view ecolacy as the central pillar, the only essential pillar if humans are to persist. Not surprising, but so far as I know, all ecolate elders agree.
The question is, can two, or even more, UoCE members agree to tell a consensus narrative? Can they at least agree on enough story elements to tell a coherent enough story? Bertrand Russell offered a warning in 1933 that included: 'Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points. This was not always the case...'.
There may be a possibility of it not being the case again in the near future. We have to agree on the rules for storytelling and to endeavor, for posterity's sake, to iterate towards a better view (and give expression to it). Each member would help the others to so iterate and endeavor to keep their eyes on the ball (human persistence as evolvable subsystems of Gaia) and minimize being too individualistic.
So, the rules for iterating towards truth are pretty much those of science such as those who have endeavored to listen to Nature over the last 300-400 years have learned to obey. But in the last 150 years too many have been paid to do science such as profits those who pay them (and everyone prospers by joining in the telling of consensus narratives).
Those who endeavor to listen today may well not be professional scientists. I avoid using the word 'science' too much. George Mobus, a systems scientist I've met at Biophysical Economics conferences, uses 'sapience' to denote what is lacking in modernity, and so that may be the broader term to use and combine with 'ecolate'. Elders and those who would become elders need to be sapient enough to do more good than harm.
