The Greatest Threat of All: Human Instincts Overwhelm Reason

[GliderGuider]

As always, our evolutionary history rules our daily behavior...

The Greatest Threat of All: Human Instincts Overwhelm Reason

An updated review of Planetary Boundaries, a survey of nine basic systems critical to life on Earth as we know it, finds that human activity has pushed past the boundary of what’s safe and stable in four of those categories; climate change, loss of biosphere integrity (things like genetic diversity because of species loss), land-system change (soil and forestation loss, etc.) and altered biogeochemical cycles (how the biosphere uses and replaces the critical elements of phosphorus and nitrogen).

But here is my question; did you notice any of those changes? Did those changes impact your life in any meaningful way? Did you wake up in the morning on any day last year worried about the global nitrogen cycle, or historic global temperature records, or deforestation in Indonesia? Probably not. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem that has all but guaranteed the serious crash for Life on Earth as We Know It.

But chances are pretty good you cared more about fulfilling your needs than anybody else’s. And you cared about now and today more than tomorrow. You didn’t Think Globally. You thought, and acted, and lived your life and fulfilled your needs, locally. PERSONALLY. As did most of the seven BILLION human animals on the planet, taking from the system the resources necessary for safety and survival, and putting back into the system both their products and their wastes. Each us us satisfying our own needs but cumulatively taking from a system more resources than it has to offer (the once abundant New England cod fishery was finally closed by government fiat last year because of overfishing), and putting back more waste than it can handle (air pollution in Beijing recently got so bad it was “off the charts” rising beyond the highest and most dangerous levels on the health scale designed to measure such things.

Right now the global temperature records are making all the news. But climate change is just one symptom of the larger problem that makes very little news but which lies at the heart of why we, and all current Life on Earth, face an unavoidable crash. We are compelled from the deepest level of our genes and survival instincts to taking more from the system than it can provide and put back in more waste than it can handle, and no amount of human brain power outwit the natural instincts that are driving us 150 miles an hour toward a cliff.

[chervilant]

1. One of the most compelling reasons for continuing to

post information like this: many of our younglings are saying "People have been predicting the end of times for thousands of years!" As though this negates all that we're witnessing...

[The2ndWheel]

2. Short term always wins out

Not because we're dumb. Just because it has to. That's how life works.

There are 7+ billion people on the planet. If we see someone dying, what do we do? Allow them to die, knowing there are 7+ billion people on the planet, and in the big picture, their death isn't important? No. We try and save that person. Today. Right now.

[happyslug]

3. Thus why religion was invented...

The main purpose of Religion is to address problems caused by people thinking personally when all would benefit if they think as a group. Yes, religion is used by people to benefit themselves, but the main thrust was to benefit the group by giving the group sense of being one.

This comes up when outsiders go into a "Primitive culture" and see of the "Taboos" of that culture. In most cases the outsiders can NOT see the reason for the Taboos for the Taboos seems to hurt the individual from maximizing his resources. On the other hand once you look into the Taboo, most are clearly directed to max benefit to the GROUP not the individual.

Some example of this. The Ancient Jewish and Islamic ban on Pork. When I was young people claimed it had to do with trichiniasis, but trichiniasis does NOT occur in the Middle East, it is to dry for the parasite to survive outside a body, and such survival is required for it to spread. On the other hand Pigs use as much water as a Human being. Horses, Cattle, Sheep and Goats use much less, thus in a desert community where water is limiting factor, that for every pig you keep you have to get rid of (or not have) a person. That is NOT true of Sheep or goats. Cattle had the advantage of being able to haul heavy wagons, Camels were liked for low water usage (horses were NOT Arabic pre-Islam, Arabs HATED horses for they use to much water, but Muhammad saw in the hose the ability to move quickly in combat and made it a requirement of every Moslem to have one, thus a break with pre-Islamic Arab ways. On the other hand Pigs were NOT viewed as having any military use and they demand for water made any desert community that would NOT tolerate pigs, able to have more people and thus more soldiers then a desert community that kept pigs. Thus Pigs became "Unclean" to the Jews and Arabs, both of whom started out as Desert herding tribal groups.

The concept of "Community property" where anyone could kept his or hers cows and horses. Technically there was no limit, but in most cases the local priest was the person who told people to limit how many animals they could keep on such common lands (and thus when England turned Protestant, "enclosing" such lands and selling them to one owner accelerated for the local priest had lost the ability to regulate how many animals could be kept in the common lands, a right the local priest had exercise for over a 1000 years by then, through officially not on the books, but given the power of such priest done anyway).

Some of the ancient writings show other such "traditions" for example in biblical times, one could NOT destroy the water works around a city one was besieging, even if that would help you take the city. It was viewed as a religious requirement but it was tied in with the concept that once you took the city but the city had loss access to its outside waters, the city was no longer the prize it had been before the destruction of the water system.

Now sometimes religion can accelerate loss, for example many native Americans thought any animal that cross their path was a gift from the Great Spirit and they had to kill it. Thus why a Iroquois Indian killed the last Eastern Elk in Pennsylvania in the 1860s (trough a white man said he killed one in the 1870s):

http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=622078&mode=2

My favorite Religious restriction was the Catholic ban on marrying your cousins. In most of the world marrying cousins is not only permitted BUT is the norm. In the "Dark Ages" the Catholic Church (and that includes the Orthodox and Protestants churches for both would break with the Catholic Church later) doubling the jewish ban on marrying, to include marrying cousins. This is still the law in many US States but most, if not all of Europe has dropped the ban (more do to the fact most Europeans have internalized the ban so they do NOT even look at their cousins as in the marriage pool. i.e. the problems solved by the ban are no longer a problem so the need for the ban no longer exists). The purpose behind the ban was NOT in breeding in a genes sense, but in breeding when it came to economic power. When a family marries its own cousin, the money stays in the family (in those European AND American Families noted for marrying their cousin, this appears to have been the main reason in those families for rejecting what the rest of Society embraced).

Thus the purpose of the ban on marrying cousins was to spread out the wealth, and avoid concentrating the wealth in a same handful of people (I read one estimate that when the Roman Empire lost Egypt to the Arabs in the 630s, almost all of the lands of Egypt was owned by 6 to 8 people, whose family had owned the land for centuries). Thus the Catholic Rule was to end this concentration of wealth in certain families AND to prevent such concentration from occurring again.

The ban on cousin marrying worked at reducing the concentration of wealth till the raise of the Middle Class in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the parallel Industrial Revolution. The ban still existed, but the pool of people who were "Rich" increased to be about 10% of the population. This increase in wealth also lead to these middle class merchants to sending their children to School not open to the peasants (Peasants were still 90% of the population). Thus the children of these Middle Class Merchants did not marry their cousin, instead they married their school mates sisters and kept the family wealth within their new "Class" instead of in their "Family". This decision to send their sons to Schools geared to the Middle Class (the upper 10% o the population excluding the top 1%) lead to those students seeing themselves as different from mere peasants and they decided to dress differently than peasants.

In the subsequent "Wars of Religion" one way to tell Protestants (Who where lead by the then new Middle Class, what we in the US would call the "Upper Middle Class" i,e. people making more then $120,000 a year) from Catholics was by the clothes they were wearing (Please note while the Protestant Reformation was lead by the Middle Class, most Protestants would be considered Peasants). The Protestants and Catholic, both leadership AND Peasants, divided themselves into two societies within the same country (and often City) and wore different clothes depending on which group you were in and people from each group had little contact with people of the other group. Thus the subsequent "War of Religion" was in many ways a Class war, with the Middle Class (Mostly Protestants) fighting against the old nobility AND the peasants (Mostly Catholics). The end of the "Wars of Religions" ended with a compromise, the Middle Class were given a huge say in society, the nobility retained a huge say and the Peasants were isolated (Which is one of the reasons that the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 was rejected by the Vatican, while accepted by the rest of Europe).

This lead to concentration of wealth during the later 1600s and during the 1700s that was undone to a degree by the French Revolution. The subsequent industrial revolution lead to concentration of wealth based on "Connections" not blood (Connection developed by having gone to the "Right schools" the power of such schools accelerated during this period. please note this was Power NOT in the sense that new things came out of those schools, but that people of power came out of those schools). In many ways Harvard, Yale and the rest of the US Ivy League joined this list of schools during the 1700s, but fully accepted by the 1800s (one of the comment about the Harvard Classes of the 1860s, was NONE of the Students served in the Civil War, going on while they were graduated, they headed straight to Wall Street instead).

Now come the late 1800s revolution was in the Air, but no one even tried to stop the growing concentration of wealth within certain families, mostly families whose children went to Ivy League Schools in the US (or similar schools in Europe). This was partial undone subsequent to WWI (The Russian Revolution scared a lot of the rich) and accelerated after the Great Depression (Where the rise of the workers scared the rich again), and again during the 1960s (Where the Rich decided internal reforms were NO longer preferred to the risk of revolution and started the present return to 1800s economics).

In his recent book, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty pointed out that concentration of wealth has been headed for the last few decades and will end up within 20 years being mostly inherited. Thus undoing the ban on marrying cousins. The ban on marrying cousins only worked when both the peasants and nobles of an area saw each other as being one people. With limited movement, the option of who to marry was limited and the ban on marrying cousins force many a noble to look into the ranks of the peasants for a spouse (which had the side affect of dispersing wealth). While the Kings and Queens married each other during the Middle Ages, once you get down to the county level it was all local people. Thus the ban on cousin marrying worked as long as people did not travel far, but once transportation increased starting in the Middle Ages, the pool of non-cousins increased so, outside of the peasants, the rule no longer was effective.

I bring up the concept of the ban on cousin marrying for it is an example of using religion to solve an economic problem, to much concentration of wealth in to few families. In more "primitive" societies you see other "Taboos" at work, and if you see them over generations they work to keep the society working while restricting individuals. Religion seems to be what separates old Stone Age people from the larger population New Stone Age people. Religion was a way to get the people to work together and follow rules that made their lives easier as a whole. Historically that has been the main purpose of religion and why most society did not tolerate dissent, for dissent meant the rules imposed by their religion would not be followed and the group as a whole would be worse off. Sometimes these rules survive a time where they were needed (trichiniasis is the classic example) but as a whole these religious rules survive because they work.

One of the problem with Climate Change is that it is a challenge to the Religion of Growth that most Americans have embraced over the last 100-200 years. The best way to handle Climate Change is to reduce the use of fossil fuel, but the increase use of fossil fuel has been the chief ingredient to 20th century economic growth and thus such increase in fossil fuel usage is good under this dogma of economic growth. Any attack on the use of Fossil Fuel is an attack on the Religion of Growth and thus heresy, and a heresy that can NOT be tolerated and thus MUST be attack (the previous heresy was the heresy that Capitalism was NOT good, thus all advocates of that heresy had to be search out and destroyed, thus the Red Scares of the 1890s. 1919-1921, and 1946 and into the 1950s). So far no one is calling Climate Change a heresy so bad that it has to be handled like communism was in the 1940s and 1950s, but they have come close.

Religion, since its invention at the start of the New Stone Age, has been how to get a people to think as one and do things as one. Thus Religion is how we have to handle Climate Change, that is to get people to embrace the idea that they must sacrifice individual benefits for the common good. Some of the Churches have adopted this policy but others have rejected it. Scientists have embraced Climate Change as something that has to be addressed (thus is part of their "religion" as how the world should operate). We need to get more people to embrace this concept, which will take a good bit of persuasion. We have to reduce Carbon emissions and the best way to do that is to reduce the use of Fossil Fuel, even if that means personal sacrifice. That is what we need to get people to embrace and we have to direct out efforts to get them to embrace it, like their embraced the concept that burning more fossil fuel was the best way to improve the overall economy and thus their own lives in the long term. Yes, we have to get people to abandon one set of beliefs (that increase burning of fossil fuel is good) to one that personal sacrifice is the best way reduce Climate Change. It will be a tough road to follow, but no one who wanted to get people to change their core beliefs have ever found that change easy to do.

[Nihil]

4. Thanks for posting that - fascinating reading ...

I've been reading "Subliminal" (by Leonard Mlodinow) on my train journeys home
and have just got to the section on "in-groups & out-groups".

It is fascinating to see how trivial (i.e., baseless) such groupings are and yet how
powerful their unconscious effect.

Your comments on the benefits of "religious" taboos to the community tie into this
in that the "in-group" who believe/obey/adhere to (whatever) taboo would tend to
not just keep the community healthy (or equal or whatever subject it addressed),
it would provide another thread to unite the members against the out-group who
oppose that concept. A group of individuals who have a common purpose or common
ideals will be stronger than the same number of fragmented individuals (unless there
is a different and more powerful uniting influence on the other 'side').

But, as you say,
> no one who wanted to get people to change their core beliefs have ever found that
> change easy to do.