It is a call to humility to point to certain almost universal delusions contained in words and their linked concepts which we, in our arrogance, think we understand. We are not "wise Man" - Homo sapiens. We are talking chimps - Pan lingua. We mistake arrogance for optimism and despair for humility. One such delusional word is "economy." This concept arrogantly assumes that the planet is a wholly owned subsidiary of "The Economy." Unlimited and cost-free “resources” (another misused and misunderstood word) enter into the materials flow at one end and “waste” (ditto) is deposited in unlimited and cost-free dumpsites. When this system grows everyone benefits and there are more jobs. A better term for this system would be "collective suicidal insanity." "The Collective Suicidal Insanity" destroys huge swaths of natural beauty in pursuit of materials which generate wealth for a few and, in this process, generates 100 times more waste than "goods" and creates lives of misery for millions of people reduced to grim, underpaid lives in the factories whose primary output is piles of waste. This gross misunderstanding is 180 degrees opposed to reality. In reality the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the planet. If Homo sapiens were really "sapiens" we would understand this and act accordingly. Since we don't, we don't deserve the name. It has been proposed by scientists that the two species of chimp, troglodytes and paniscus be reclassified into our genus based on DNA similarities. This is a very reasonable proposal since the genetic differences between us are smaller than other species placed within the same genus. I'm fine with that greater level of accuracy but my point is that if all three chimps are going to be grouped together we need to step down off our self-erected pedestal and join the chimps. We simply don't deserve Homo sapiens. "Talking chimpanzees" is more accurate when you take our actions and behavior into account.
So, on this Earth Day 2011, I want to argue for a little humility in what follows. I've borrowed (sometimes quite heavily) from some earlier diaries. So, Pan lingua... Most of the genetic variations between us and chimps are those differences centered around our ability to communicate using complex grammar and language. These are differences centered in the brain, larynx, tongue and mouth. What really separates us from the other chimps is our ability to talk. We have developed wonderfully complex ways to lie to ourselves and to others. As Talleyrand was rumored to have said:
Humans invented language so they could conceal their thoughts from each other.
While this may be a major development in our speech - as in how we use the word "economy" - Aristotle thought there was more to speech than this sort of lowly manipulation. He thought speech led to our higher concerns with morality and justice.
For we assert nature does nothing in vain and man alone among the animals has speech. While other species may have voice, may have sounds and be able to distinguish pleasure and pain, speech [Logos] is more than the ability simply to distinguish pleasure and pain... logos serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful. And hence the just and the unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad, just and unjust and other things.
He realized as well that 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. I particularly like the idea of an "animal soul" as 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. I mean no insult to animals in bringing this up but I think the support behind this concept is very large and growing. The difference our language has produced between human consciousness and those of other animals is a large area of well-regarded scientific research. I take Aristotle's "animal soul" to mean 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. My observations of my fellow humans have convinced me that my case is far from unique. The question I'm really asking is: How much time do we spend absorbed in the pursuits of our animal souls? It saddens me to say that I have come to believe that it is most of the time. 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 bit of language – “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”)
Corporate marketeers understand the animal soul very well. They know that American citizens don't buy as much stuff as American consumers. 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. 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. These are not the activities of Homo sapiens "wise Man" they are the activities of Pan lingua. Talking chimpanzees. 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? Will we some day deserve the name Homo sapiens? 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" )
As talking chimps we are poorly suited to dealing with the enormous problems we, ourselves, have caused by our unwise behavior. For example, the problem of our exponentially increasing numbers. Wisdom would dictate, in my humble opinion, that we find some way of limiting our numbers. But delving into population control leads one into amazingly twisted pathways involving anti-immigration, racism, eugenics and other twisted creations of the human mind. One of the best and most promising ways of dealing with the population problem is the education and empowerment of women and girls. But, alas, even this eminently reasonable solution to the problem runs up against the powers of the patriarchal religions to amass passionately stupid armies of opposition. Women are to be baby-making vessels and nothing else. (This abysmally stupid philosophy is practiced by many wealthy white fundamentalists in our country, so don't try to claim it is something practiced only by poverty-stricken, backward members of "other" religions.) Here's a graph which 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 that, as a species, we are completely absorbed in reproducing and consuming. There is little evidence of rationality or wisdom in this particular measure. And it is the Titanic upon whose deck we argue about big words like "economic growth," "unemployment," "energy policy" and "climate change."
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. Overpopulation is relative. When consumption is factored into the equation the United States is the most overpopulated nation on the planet. It's not, as many might have it, simply a problem of huddled (non-white) masses in countries far, far away. The problem is us. 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 our brilliant reasoning minds will save us, I think a more complete representation is the following graph (of yeast cell growth in a closed environment). Yeast cells, I would note, 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 - 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 exponential) until the environment becomes so toxic with their excrement (alcohol - which we often enjoy consuming) that they all die off (the death phase). Self-restraint does not exist in yeast cells. But then, it doesn't seem to exist in Pan lingua either. Population biologists like to 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. Iron is a limiting factor in the population growth of phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean. But what if they 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 and Zyclon-B. Naturally, the first and primary consideration for these advances by those in power was as ever more advanced ways to kill each other.) 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 brains 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 exponential 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. 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. This is self-inflicted "environmental resistance," which is really, really dumb.
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 "Environmental Resistance," which war is creating it's own self-inflicted limiting factors on top of the naturally occurring ones. Those who have clawed their way to the top of our civilization by their skillful use of the language faculties possessed by our species, our leaders who should be addressing these serious problems, continue to primarily use these faculties to, as Jenkins says, "maintaining positions of relative privilege and success." To garner ever increasing amounts of wealth, or to win elections and keep their wealthy donors happy. Consequently, their proposed solutions to these problems do nothing to limit wealth gathering and election winning behavior. Growth is good. It's fabulous! Problems caused by excessive growth can be solved by more growth. Specifically, economic growth. Anything that grows at x%/ year is growing [http://abstrusegoose.com/218 exponentially.] This means in a certain amount of time it will double and double again and so on. The famous old story about this is about an inventor whose invention helped the Persian King. The king desired to reward him with anything he desired. The inventor, being a crafty old fart, asked for one grain of wheat on one square of a chessboard and then a doubling of the amount of wheat each day on each of the 64 squares. The king was shocked when he discovered he would not be able to fulfill this request – even with all the grain in his kingdom. In fact, square 64 would contain [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem 461,168,602,000 metric tons]. The people who have struggled mightily to obtain positions of power in our civilization are in denial about these simple mathematical facts. They wax lyrical about economic growth - exponential economic growth, you know x% per year - but are silent about the consequences of that exponential growth. Deafening silence about the direct correlation between exponential economic growth, exponential growth of [http://www.storyofstuff.com/ garbage] and planetary destruction. There is no wisdom, 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 stop our destruction of the world we are going to have to find a way to make a major course correction. 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. We are going to need to learn and practice humility in a profound and deeply integrated way.
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
We always seem to hurt those we love the most. If we were wise this wouldn't happen. 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. But 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. A system that causes us to use language to rationalize our destructive behavior in service to that machine rather than humbly admitting the error of our ways and dismantling the arrogant, ignorant, monumental stupidities we have built. 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.