How is this possible? Let me try to show you. Last night I wrote about the Winter solstice asking How will you celebrate the Winter Solstice? In a very helpful comment veritas curat sent us to a diary from 2011 written by grains of sand and entitled The Real Meaning of Christmas. This diary is a treasure and there were some (I'm quite sure) unintended consequences.
I am excited about this because it is a way to try to get the core message of my book with Jim Coffman into a context that pulls everything together. If you are curious read on below the break.
First of all, I'm not writing this to sell books. We do have a message that we think is of fundamental importance and I'll try to show why that is true as we look at the connection between the Winter Solstice and Global Warming.
Here's a summary of the book:
The Global Economy that sustains the civilized world is destroying the biosphere. As a result, civilization, like the Titanic, is on a collision course with disaster. But changing course via the body politic appears to be well nigh impossible, given that much of the populace lives in denial. Why is that? And how did we get into such a fix? In this essay, biologists James Coffman and Donald Mikulecky argue that the reductionist model of the world developed by Western civilization misrepresents life, undermining our ability to regulate and adapt to the accelerating anthropogenic transformation of the world entrained by that very model. An alternative worldview is presented that better accounts for both the relational nature of living systems and the developmental phenomenology that constrains their evolution. Development of any complex system reinforces specific dependencies while eliminating alternatives, reducing the diversity that affords adaptive degrees of freedom: the more developed a system is, the less potential it has to change its way of being. Hence, in the evolution of life most species become extinct. This perspective reveals the limits that complexity places on knowledge and technology, bringing to light our hubristically dysfunctional relationship with the natural world and increasingly tenuous connection to reality. The inescapable conclusion is that, barring a cultural metamorphosis that breaks free of deeply entrenched mental frames that made us what we are, continued development of the Global Economy will lead inexorably to the collapse of civilization.
The key to the connection I have posited is the evolution of systems in general and the human mind and social systems in particular. Darwinian evolution is a systems idea even though Darwin never expressed it that way. Biological evolution and the way species come to be is really only a beginning of the evolutionary story.
We have a chapter on The Logic of Development and we spell things out in detail there. I will summarize here.
Let me use some ideas from grains of sand's diary to get the ball rolling. First he observes:
It is ironic that a man who spoke such things as "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven" came to be the prophet of a wealthy and powerful - and very materialistic - Roman Empire. And more ironic that, as the Saturnalia devolved into the Feast of Fools and a celebration of equality between masters and slaves, the Church that proclaims itself in his name was instrumental in abolishing it. And when this failed, the Church participated in the reinvention of a Christmas which celebrated the material security of middle class family life, with the active cooperation of the very materially concerned burghers and merchants of middle class England.
This observation is very important. It sets the stage for what followed.
The link between social class and the new religion is but part of the story. As time went on the Church and "science" were to have an apparent falling out. One of the consequences was the way Descartes handled his role and made things work to the apparent satisfaction of the Church. Two major things were the product of Cartesian thinking. First was the mind-body duality. As Lewontin was fond to say, the deal gave the Church the soul and science the body. The body that was given to science to study was also tainted by Cartesian reductionism and the machine metaphor was the result.
Let us take a good look at what has evolved to this point. The Church moved Christmas to the time of the Pagan Winter Solstice celebrations. Gradually this paid off and something very important became established in the human world view. It happened gradually up to this point but this solidified it. Nature was no longer the object of religious practice but some supreme being was now the focus.
In particular, the Judeo-Christian bible and its creation myth and the whole story of the fall now dominated in the budding Western culture that would also give rise to modern science and technology. Here's where a systems perspective pays off because the common belief that science and religion are at odds ignores their evolution together as part of a systematic world view in the Western mind. Nature not only gets a back seat but it becomes tainted along with the humans who caused the fall. We can thank the Native American author Vine Deloria Jr whose book God Is Red: A Native View of Religion makes this point very clear.
When you see the way Cartesian science treats life you get the picture quite clearly. Couple those ideas with the way reductionism became the dominant way of thinking and you have our present situation in a nutshell. The very science that religion is at war with is the intellectual motivation for accepting a crippled view of nature.
The rest follows in a straightforward way. We live at a time when science has produced wonders and a technology that has a life of its own driving consumer economy as far as it can. Meanwhile we watch the planet heat up and species go extinct and are helpless. The dominant world view has evolved so far from the simple recognition that the Solstice is explainable if we understand nature. The science we developed is intended to control nature and yet is has no hope of doing so.
The economic system that is also a product of this world view in a systemic way is one that worships growth and consumption. It produces waste in harmony with its greedy growth.
In the Chapter on development we look at what evolution means in the long run. It is based on options. Adaptability is the making use of options. However there is a price. Evolutionary change is not reversible and as a system matures it looses options and becomes rigid. This is why so much of evolution has to do with extinction.
Our system is locked in. It is failing. The simple view humans had of nature before Western thought evolved is no longer one we can hope to go back to. We look at our problems as "issues" breaking the important links that make reality a system.
So as the Solstice nears I have a lot of sorrow for our species and its future. The system that has evolved has turned the season into one of greedy lust for material things and will simply drive us to our demise that much faster. It should be a time to renew our bond with the planet that nurtures us. It is not.