There is a drive in all living things to consume, to compete for scarce resources and to populate the planet with offspring. Aristotle called this the "animal soul." He said,
the nutritive soul belongs also to the other living things and is the first and most commonly possessed potentiality of the soul, in virtue of which they all have life. Its functions are reproduction and the use of food; for it is the most natural function of living things [DeAnima 415a24]
Aristotle's definition of "soul" could be considered very close to "life." It wasn't a religious concept; it was based upon the observation that when a living thing died something very fundamental changed - the body was still present in its original form but it was lifeless. Aristotle realized there was something unique about the souls of humans. People were alive like plants and animals but they also had something he called "reason." But, he realized, reason was not always in charge. People could be moved, like animals, on a basic level by their animal soul
because their reason is sometimes obscured by passion, disease, or sleep [DeAnima 429a6].
Aristotle was writing this about 2500 years ago. It's nothing new. Lot's of people these days talk about the "reptilian brain." I prefer the term "animal soul" because reptiles can be seen as quite distant from humans on the evolutionary scale. It's easier to distance oneself from "reptilian brain" thinking as an unusual, lowly sort of human functioning. The "animal soul" is an integral part of our make-up. We - well, I can at least speak for myself - I spend a lot more time there than I'd like to admit. The animal soul is that part of us that is concerned with immediate gratification; the drive to eat that donut even though our reason tells us it's bad for us. In addicts it's completely in control - like the guy smoking through the tube in his throat. There have been many, many occasions when I have heard the voice of reason, quite clearly, and still done otherwise. Aristotle thought that people, if they had been properly raised and trained, could rise above this animal soul and actually practice virtue. They could forgo that donut and pick the celery instead, they could learn to ride and direct their animal soul instead of having it ride them. And it was these kinds of people that could create just societies:
..we call those acts just that tend to produce and preserve happiness and its components for the political society...This form of justice, then, is complete virtue, although not without qualification, but in relation to our neighbor. And therefore justice is often thought to be the greatest of virtues, and ‘neither evening nor morning star’ is so wonderful; and proverbially ‘in justice is every virtue comprehended’. And it is complete virtue in its fullest sense because it is the actual exercise of complete virtue. [Nichomachean Ethics 1129b - 1130a]
This is why we pay taxes to support public education. We hope to raise up young people who can practice virtue, forgo instant gratification and work together to create a just society. We hope to help them become good citizens with well developed abilities to think critically and a willingness to give of themselves to help make the world a better place. But what is it that keeps our hopes from being realized? Well... for much of our history the residents of our country were referred to as “American citizens.” This was an acknowledgement that we were a representative democracy ruled by the elected representatives of citizens who took their civic rights and duties seriously. Now “consumer” has replaced “citizen.” This is a curiously ironic reference – “consume” being defined by words like, “squander,” “waste,” and “destroy.” President Jimmy Carter alluded to the development of this new creature when he said,
Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.
The “American consumer” is bombarded by billions of dollars of “education” appealing not to reason but to the animal soul. And this “education” begins at a very young age:
We take the toddler audience very seriously… and brand recognition is something they see, watch and recognize (Kim Bremer, Earth’s Best “Director of Infant Feeding”)
American citizens don't buy as much stuff as American consumers. Corporate marketeers understand the animal soul very well. They know all about selling the feeling not the product. They know about neuro-marketing and psychological manipulation of the lower parts of our natures. They know how stimulate the "nag factor" in kids so they will wear down their stressed-out parents. They know how to change brands into needs. They focus billions of dollars every year into psychological research with the goal of more effectively short-circuiting our reason and stimulating our animal souls. You don't sell someone a car by appeals to reason, by going over the engineering specs, you sell a car by appealing to the more anti-social competitive drives in your customers. This cynical understanding of human nature is what has made corporations, through the money they make from these manipulations, the most powerful forces in modern politics. They have spear-headed, financed and supported this change from American citizen to American consumer. We are at a tipping point. Will we continue to behave as irrational consumers or will we rise to our higher potential and follow our reason to create a just world? It is something I hope for but I would not bet on it.
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We are still basically a biological species, despite all our cultural and technological inventions. Most of the basic events involving our species essentially still transpire independent of our unique status as intelligent beings. Our populations is in a growth phase little different from that of deer when wolves are removed from their habitat. Resources are still allocated among members of our population on the same sort of competitive basis as prevails among songbirds. Our social hierarchies are homologous with peck orders among chickens. Therefore, some individuals benefit disproportionately from the products of growth, and if intelligent decisionmaking comes in at all, it is primarily by way of maintaining positions of relative privilege and success. (Robert E. Jenkins, "!Kung vs Utopia" )
In trying to understand these things it helps me to look at things graphically. So here are some graphs. This first one is pretty simple and obvious. It shows our situation with regards to population growth. Numbers of human bodies. It's nothing new, but this graph, I maintain, is the Mother of All Hockey Sticks. It's the one the other hockey sticks arise from and move together with. It is an objective numerical measure that shows me that, as a species, we are completely absorbed in reproducing and consuming. There is little evidence of rationality or justice in this particular measure. And it is the Titanic upon whose deck we argue about health care, unemployment and pollution. . .
. . . There are a couple of things to note about this graph. First of all, a straight measure of population does not capture the true impacts of population. As Bill McKibben says, the amount of energy used by the average American in a day and a half equals the amount used by the average Tanzanian in a year. And [http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/03/the-overpopulation-myth/ Fred Pearce] says:
The idea that growing human numbers will destroy the planet is nonsense. But over-consumption will.
I don't agree completely with him, I don't think it's "nonsense" but I do think it's more complex than presented by the population graph. Secondly, that part labeled "Future" is incomplete. It shows population continuing at a steady, very high level on into the indefinite future. I don't think that is an accurate picture of the situation. While there are some who might maintain that our population can keep growing forever because somehow our brilliant minds will save us through technological breakthroughs, I think a more complete representation is the following graph (of yeast cell growth in a closed environment). And yeast cells are not known for their abilities to reason. . .
. . What happens to the yeast is that they first settle into their environment (lag phase) then, upon finding it favorable for growth, consume and reproduce as rapidly as possible (logarithmic phase - exponential growth, the logistic curve - which is where we are now) until the consequences of that consumption and reproduction begin to cause their environment to deteriorate to where the death rate begins to overtake the birth rate (the stationary phase, which is only temporary because the death rate begins to go logistic) until the environment becomes so toxic with their excrement (alcohol - which we often enjoy consuming) that they all die off (the death phase). Byebye.
If, somehow, the yeasties were able to manipulate their environment - like produce more sugar to consume and introduce more water to dilute the alcohol - they could put off the inevitable and extend the logistic growth phase, for a while. Only temporarily. Because they are driven to eat and reproduce as quickly and efficiently as their biology allows them. Self-restraint does not exist in yeast cells. Population biologists talk about "limiting factors." For example, phytoplankton growing in the Southern Ocean have a very favorable environment in which they could grow much more than they do. It is why the waters are so rich in life. However, they can't grow past a certain point because the quantity of dissolved iron is limited. (Some have considered, as a solution to CO2 pollution, artificially introducing iron into this environment to accelerate the growth of the phytoplankton and thus increase the amount of CO2 absorbed from the atmosphere by them.) Iron is a limiting factor in the population growth of phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean.
But what if the little greenies figured out how to manufacture their own iron? In the early 1900's all agriculture was organic. Human population was under 2 billion. All nitrogen in human bodies was produced by natural systems of nitrogen fixation or, later, the mining of large nitrate deposits, like in Chile . Then along came Fritz Haber who figured out how to capture the vast quantities of nitrogen in the atmosphere into usable ammonium-based fertilizer by using fossil fuels (natural gas primarily). Along with Carl Bosch they created an industrial process which gave rise to the manufacture of enormous quantities of artifical fertilizers. (Along with explosives.)
Previous to professor Haber the human population was facing a food crisis. Nitrogen was a limiting factor which was showing all the signs of transitioning the human population into the "stationary phase" of population growth. But we used our reason and intellect to figure out how to keep our population growing. Instead of considering the consequences of continued growth we went hell bent for leather into removing nitrogen as a limiting factor. Now, about 80% of the nitrogen in human bodies is produced industrially and we've managed to prolong our logistic growth phase by about 100 years. And, as we've managed to expand the carrying capacity for humans, it has become increasingly clear that that expansion has been at the expense of innumerable other species. For many species, some now extinct, the limiting factor of their population growth has been the presence of increasing numbers of humans. . .
. . That part called "Environmental Resistance" is all about limiting factors and predation. (But I'm not going to talk about predation here. This is already long enough.) The human species is facing "environmental resistance" in major ways. Nitrate pollution from all that industrial nitrate we put on our increasingly sterile land to grow larger quantities of industrial food is wiping out many other sources of food in the ocean, other chemicals like pesticides are building up everywhere and CO2 levels in the atmosphere are causing serious shifts in climate. (To name just a few of the major consequences of our logistic growth.) It seems that those hundred years or so of postponing our appointment with "Environmental Resistance" have been purchased mainly by burning fossil fuels - primarily the stored energy of 500 million years of photosynthesis. And now it is the burning of those fossilized photosynthetic residues that is showing every sign of being the limiting factor that draws that dotted line of carrying capacity and shuts off our logistic growth. . .
. . And how are we dealing with this situation? Robert Jenkins again:
Even were the decision on growth determined by a rational and democratic process, a majority might opt for the continuation of growth. There are admittedly many advantages to living in a growing society, most of which can perhaps be summed up by generalizing that the growing society deficit-finances against the future. The labor force of today produces the inventory for a larger market tomorrow and is rewarded accordingly. Families and individuals amass and accumulate more material goods this year than they did the last. Next year's population and the one after that are continually expected to finance the inflated returns of today, and the fact that there must eventually be a payout point is assiduously ignored, in some instances even denied... Thus, there are tremendous pressures to continue growing, for the very reason that the generation that stops will have to be the generation that begins paying for yesterday's luxuries.
(from "!Kung vs utopia")
I see little sign that we are using our higher natures, our reason, as anything other than tools to continue our war against the "Environmental Resistance" to our logistic growth phase. It looks really, abysmally stupid from this perspective. And it seems no one is really addressing this issue. Those at the top of our civilization, our leaders who should be addressing these serious problems, continue to primarily use their intelligence to, as Jenkins says, "maintaining positions of relative privilege and success." To win elections and keep their corporate donors happy.
In fact they seem to believe that the solutions to these problems caused by excessive growth can be solved by more growth. Specifically, economic growth. This craziness is standard operating procedure. There is no justice in the exponential growth of our species and consequent exponential growth of our consumption of resources. Increasingly we are seeing marginal, malnourished and massive populations collecting in slums around big cities barely surviving from day to day.
And those who are best at "maintaining positions of relative privilege and success" in our privileged country can go from our comfortable homes, into our garages, into our cars, into our workplaces, into the comfortable supermarket to buy any kind of fancy food we can afford, back into our cars, back into our homes to be entertained by the best entertainment money can buy and never have any contact whatsoever with the real, natural world. We can come to believe that we are exempt from the laws of nature. All that stuff about "limiting factors" and "Environmental Resistance" is what happens to other people somewhere else. And yet, by many measures of things like "Well Being" or "Happiness" things like the GPI from [http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm Redefining Progress] this privilege and success is not making us happy. Even though GDP has continued to rise, the measure from Redefining Progress, the Genuine Progress Indicator - which measures such things as amount of leisure time available (when leisure time goes up the GPI goes up) and costs of crime (when the costs of crime go up the GPI goes down) - has not changed for thirty years. . .
. . If we are going to create a world with justice for all we are going to have to find a way to make a major course correction on this ship. We are going to have to find a way to stop worshipping growth and find a way to sustainably retreat from our excesses. We are going to need to learn to conquer our animal souls - even in the face of corporate propaganda that seeks to hyper-stimulate them.
the modern economist... is used to measuring the 'standard of living' by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is 'better off' than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.
--E. F. Schumacher,"Buddhist Economics," from Small Is Beautiful
It's going to require a tremendous economic paradigm shift. Basic economic assumptions about constant and forever growth are, well, insane. These assumptions commit us to ever more productively trash the planet at an exponential growth rate in order to keep up with unsustainable population growth. It is what happens when the economic system is 180 degrees opposed to reality.
In reality the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the planet. Our present economic system assumes just the opposite: the planet is a wholly owned subsidiary of the economy. Unlimited and cost-free “resources” enter into the materials flow at one end and “waste” is deposited in unlimited and cost-free dumpsites. When this insane system grows everyone benefits and there are more jobs. Of course, openly admitting this insanity is political suicide. Growth is good. No growth is a recession and is very bad.
Anyway, as Bill Mckibben said in a diary here, "physics and chemistry don't really bargain." We can assume all we want but, physically and chemically, our present “growth is good” economic system is doomed. It has only a few decades left. Ah well...
We always seem to hurt those we love the most. We all have an emotional bond with the earth. We’ve all had experiences when the beauty of this planet we inhabit filled us completely and swept away all the cares and worries we normally carry. We remember them vividly. From mountain peak to fertile valley our earth is bountiful in producing such moments of communion. These moments remind us that we have forgotten too many of the essential elements of life.
We have forgotten that we are merely a small part of the great rhythms and cycles of this sacred living planet we share with all beings. That we are animals and share that fierce vibrant connection of blood and bone with all who hunt in dark forests, scale mountain crags and run in packs on the tundra.
We have become a part of a machine that teaches us to bury these memories; that encourages us to become addicted to a linear system of support that is causing great harm to living systems in the process of extracting “resources” at its beginning and dumping “waste” at its end.
We have forgotten who we are.
May we come to remember that which we have forgotten.
May we become modest, smaller in numbers and deeper in wisdom.
May we learn to walk lightly upon the earth in a humble and sacred manner.