Ongoing Process

Just wondering if anyone else Googled the mailing list. 

I find a melon that’s good to eat.  I notice that it likes to grow in a particular sort of area.  I save all the seeds from the melons I eat, and I find a place near my home similar to where they like to grow.  I plant my seeds simply by poking a small hole with a stick for each one, putting the seed in, and then pushing the hole closed.  I notice that birds like to eat the seeds.  Now I have birds to eat!  When the plants start growing, I notice that bugs like to eat them.  Now I have bugs to eat!  When the melons start to grow, I notice that rabbits like to eat them.  Now I have rabbits to eat!  When the remaining melons finally ripen, I have melons to eat!  I save my seeds, and plant them back down again.

I’ve been pondering what it might be like for humanity once civilization finishes its run.  Nobody can really know until it gets here, of course, but I’ve always enjoyed a good round of speculation.

Things that will go away:

Money - Money is the abstraction of value.  It removes value from the things which actually have it (goods, labor, etc) and places it into an idea which has no intrinsic value of its own.  This is catastrophic on numerous levels.  Perhaps a rough parallel could be established with some kind of standardized item of barter that actually had value in itself (the old Roman method of paying their soldiers in salt comes to mind), but money as we know it will be no more.

Large Settlements - The age of towns and cities will be over.  I anticipate we’ll wind up settling in villages of around 100-150 people, as observed by Dunbar’s Number.

Centralized Governments - Government will be at the village level, and relatively informal because everyone knows everyone else.  Styles will vary widely based on regional conditions and cultures, but will tend towards more egalitarian structures featuring more “coordinators” than “officials”.

Agriculture - Farming and livestock as we know it utterly destroys the land.  I imagine some manner of parallel will emerge that involves encouraging the growth of particular plants and animals in their natural environment, but the idea of taking over a plot of land and attempting to utterly control it will be history.

Unchecked Procreation - The “right” to pop out as many kids as you want will be recognized as insanity.  Some manner of taboo will develop around male-female intercourse that dramatically reigns in population growth (not that people will stop having sex, but perhaps something involving the withdrawal and/or rhythm methods of birth reduction).

Non-renewable Materials - Anything that we can’t in some way put back the way we found it will be out.  Metals, oils, gases, minerals, and even stone will become taboo to use in most ways (probably excepting what can be scavenged from the old constructions).  I imagine that cleverly processed plant fibers will become the dominant material for everything from tools to buildings.

Electricity - I suspect that in the end we’re going to find that there’s just no way to convert, store, transport, and use electrical energy that doesn’t wind up costing more than it’s worth in the big picture.  Not to mention that the loss of metal and other non-renewables will render it pretty much unusable anyway.

Mental Illness - What we have come to call “mental illness” is nothing more or less than the psycho/spiritual backlash from convincing ourselves that civilization is “the world”.

Most Humans - Barring some manner of miracle (which I do hold as not entirely impossible), once the infrastructure goes, it seems very probable that most of us are going to die.  The world just can’t support seven billion humans.  To give you a sense of scale, they estimate that we out-populated the hunter-gatherer strategy at around one million humans.  In a dark way, I kind of hope that enough of us go fast enough so that those left have plenty of resources to work with.

War - Believe it or not, war is entirely a product of civilization and overpopulation.  Humans went their first two million years without even the concept of a warrior.  Once the population is sufficiently reduced that we have adequate survival resources and we aren’t subjected to the myriad insanities of civilization, we’ll suddenly find ourselves in the recently novel position of not having anything to fight about.

Things that will hang around:

Specialization - It will probably be dramatically reduced in scale (I doubt we’ll see any more psychoneuroimmunologists), but specialization is one of the single most powerful tactics we’ve ever developed.  Look for it to remain a big player.

Writing - Writing is just way too handy for far too many things to go anywhere.  I suspect there will be a great deal of renewal in oral tradition, so writing may not be quite as dominant, but it’ll keep on going strong.

Art - Pre-civilization cultures had some basic forms of art, but civilization took it to much greater heights.  I think we’ll see a lot less absurd “modern” art that doesn’t make sense to anyone but other “modern artists”, but on the flip side I imagine a deeper appreciation for more down-to-earth art in the general population will emerge.

Complex Technology - It’s going to see a major reduction in scale (by several orders of magnitude!), and develop some very serious taboos about responsible usage, but we can’t put the worms back in the can.  Complex technology in its basic concept is here to stay.

Distributed Enterprise - We can do so much with a lot of people working in concert that I suspect we’ll find a way to keep doing it.  I can imagine regional networks among villages coordinating the exchange of goods and labor to produce products of much greater sophistication than any single village could manage.

The creatures of our planet can be roughly grouped into two categories of life strategy: specialists and generalists.  Specialists build their life to a very high degree around a very small number of factors (food sources, hunting tactics, habitat adaptation, etc).  Specialists do very well when the conditions of their environment are very stable, but tend to decline rapidly when the factors they depend upon begin to change.  Generalists build their life around adaptability and are able to make moderate use of a wide variety of factors.  Generalists do very well when the conditions of their habitat are changing, but tend to lose out to specialists when the factors stabilize.  We could suppose that this has been the general way of things as long as there has been life on our planet.

To our best estimate, the first humans came on the scene some 200 millennia ago in Africa.  The thing that made us stand out from our ancestors and all the other creatures was a novel approach to the ancient specialist/generalist debate: we specialized in generalization.  We gained advanced capacities of abstract cognition that made us so incredibly adaptable that we could not only change our life strategies over the slow course of generations, but we could actually make conscious changes within a single lifetime.  Our specialized generalization gave us such efficient problem-solving capacities that we soon found ways to live just about anywhere, finding the needed factors to thrive in practically every habitat.

While the details always changed for each environment, the general tactic that we settled on was what we have come to call hunter-gatherer.  This approach to living was itself highly adaptable, able to be configured to suit most anywhere that had plants and animals (which is, of course, pretty much everywhere).  It was also an extremely efficient method of living, returning a very high yield of resources compared to the energy expended to gain them.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors went about this way of life for most of our entire history.  The methods used and the humans themselves became more refined over time (better tools, more sophisticated language, and so on) and became ever more efficient at their way of living, but the general paradigm of hunting and gathering remained largely unchanged for 95% of our history.  It worked, and worked very well, so we had no need to fix it.

But then about 10 millennia ago something happened, something we could not have consciously predicted at the time.  We outsmarted ourselves.  We were so successful for so long that our population had grown to spread across almost every part of the world.  The hunter-gatherer mode of living requires a certain amount of land per human to work and we had finally run into a problem that even this most versatile of tactics could not surmount: we had run out of room.

Now, overpopulation is nothing new in nature.  Any individual species typically will eagerly grab up all the resources it can and the right conditions can easily cause a population boom. But usually, these are quickly resolved by nature in one of two ways; either the species runs out of resources and the excess population starves off, or a predator species discovers an abundant new food source and the excess population is eaten.  But that didn’t happen to humans (at least not in the typical manner).  We had become the apex species in most of our habitats, so there were no other predators who could hunt us to a significant degree.  So we were faced with starvation, but once again our clever minds set about finding yet another adaptation.  And we soon found one: agriculture.

Agriculture is in many ways a sort of compressed hunter-gatherer strategy.   We continued to eat similar animals and plants, but there was a critical difference.  Rather than utilizing the natural cycles of those species in their own habitats, we created artificial habitats for them.  Habitats we could control.  This allowed us to force much smaller areas of land to produce far more resources.  We took the plants and animals that were most easily manipulated in these ways and began a course of constant refinement of the process.  Our signature adaptability had once again produced an extremely efficient mode of living that would allow us to flourish in almost any habitat.

But there was a problem.  The mindset for hunter-gatherers required the utmost integration into their environment.  Any significant deviation from the basic rhythms of nature would result in less food to eat.  But the mindset required for successful agriculture was radically different.  Having food to eat required specific conditions to be met, conditions that were frequently directly at odds with nature’s larger system.  For the very first time, we looked out at the natural world and called some things “good” and other things “bad”.  Rather than having an implicit understanding that all things were just as they should be, as our hunter-gatherer ancestors did, we began to think that some things should be and other things shouldn’t be.  We had just made the first ever moral judgments.  We had just invented violence.  We had just learned to hate.

In much of Western culture, this monumental change of perspective is remembered in the story of Adam and Eve.  The primal human couple, representative of all others, lived in Eden, a primordial paradise where all was provided and nothing lacked.  But then they ate of the forbidden fruit of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and were banished from the garden, condemned to a life of burden and toil in the fields and farms.  They, and we along with them, had fallen from grace in our original sin.  The sin of cutting ourselves off from the living world of nature and attempting to make it our own.

This original sin grew and grew.  As our populations grew and complexified, ever more resources were needed and ever more things fell into ever sharper distinctions of what we saw as good and what we saw as evil.  And as our conceptual abstractions grew to keep up with the demands of our agriculture, so did the things we saw as good and evil become more abstract.  It was not just uncooperative weather or hungry insects that became evil, but even gender, lineages, beliefs, and appearances.  Our societies quickly became stratified and divided against themselves, with the most “good” at the top and ruling over the “less good”, and the “bad” condemned to slavery or slaughter.  Entire other cultures became “bad” and so we created armies to destroy them and take their resources.  Yet we churned on, our ever-efficient population growth demanding ever more violence.  We came to call this civilization.

This brutal and tragic cycle of increasing violence continued unabated until around 3 millennia ago.  Then something began to happen. The prophets began to come.  There are many ideas as to why and how, but in whatever manner a few remarkable people began to speak about the desperate problem at the heart of humanity, and to call for the putting aside of our clever creations and look again to the larger world, and the cultivation of love and reconciliation where there had been only division and violence.

But there was still a great problem.  Humans had been relying on their abstract creations to sustain them for hundreds of generations.  Even the oldest wisdom could not fully recall anything else.  We had become so completely immersed in things of our own making that it had become for all practical intents and purposes our reality.  Few could truly understand the calls of the prophets because they lacked any context to give them meaning.  The changes the prophets called for seemed as nonsensical to the typical human mind as trying to change the brightness of the sun or the length of a year.  And so, while the prophets resonated with something deep inside almost all people, after their deaths their teachings were quickly turned and corrupted, adapted by either the well-meaning but mistaken, or by the powerful to their own ends.  And religion as we know it today was born.

Tragically, religion quickly became one of the greatest forces of civilization, and consequentially one of the greatest sources of violence.  This has been more or less the general state of things since then.

But now we have reached another great turning point.  Civilization has run its course.  Once again, we have out-populated our basic life strategy.  Our adaptability has done its very best, and the requirements to maintain our current system have grown to truly staggering proportions and complexity.  But there is little else we can do to keep it up.  The world is very simply running out of resources we can use to maintain civilization.  Sometime very soon, probably within the lifetime of most people alive while I write this, we will run out entirely.  The system will collapse.  Civilization will end.

Yet there is still hope.  Humanity is, after all, the most supremely adaptable of creatures.  I do not doubt that we will survive the end of civilization.  The question is, how?  That is what we must decide.  You and me.  And soon.  Very soon.

So let us reach down inside ourselves for new inspiration.  Let us try to peel away our layers of human abstraction and see the living world again.  Let us consider the words of the new prophets who speak all over the world.  Let us find a new way.  A better way.  A way to save ourselves from ourselves, and to save the world we have so abused.

Blessings and bravery to us all.