Ongoing Process

The following is rampant speculation, though it is informed by academic study, personal experience, and inspiration of vision.

It seems like a fairly consistent attribute of masculine, left-brain perception that it works in terms of “known-ness”.  It deals primarily with either what is directly known from sensory input, or what can be indirectly “known” via abstract thinking.  It is fundamentally a strategy-maker, so only that which can be sensed or predicted with a high degree of accuracy is really relevant.  Simply put, you can’t plan for the truly unknown, so the unknown becomes of little importance.  So hunting/killing becomes a series of large, succeed-or-fail sort of undertakings.  They are the specialists of the human species.

On the other hand, feminine, right-brain perception works quite routinely with the unknown.  Whether gathering food or nurturing children, instead of knowns one works with probabilities.  A rich understanding of the factors involved will give them reliable guidelines to follow, but ultimately they can’t strictly plan for a good plant to be found where it often is, or a child’s needs to be what they usually are.  They operate by leaving a lot of room for unknown variables, so their process becomes highly dynamic and more in-the-moment.  So gathering/nurturing becomes a constant, ongoing process of moment-by-moment perceptions, decisions, and adaptations.  They are the generalists of the human species.

Now, this arrangement worked very well for a very long time.  Between the men specializing and the women generalizing, they really had all their bases covered.  They could flourish just about anywhere.  But eventually they out-populated this setup, and they needed something new.  As usual, the generalist women were the first to adapt, expanding their knowledge of the life cycles of plants and of nurturing creatures to produce agriculture.  This was wildly successful, and for a while women gained a new prominence in the importance-for-survival arrangement.  Conversely, between decreasing need for hunting and increasing demand for labor on the farm, men had lost their previous role.  They were now secondary to human survival and the skills they had honed over millions of years were becoming irrelevant.

But things didn’t stay that way.  While the specialist men are much slower to adapt, when they do it is with characteristic potency and precision.  Eventually they tuned their strategy-making minds to agriculture, where they found that abstract thinking was enormously useful.  Indeed, once they had sorted out all of the central “knowns” of growing plants and animals, they turned out to be more successful at it than women.  In the short term, men’s narrow focus and disregard of the unknown turned agriculture into a boom-or-bust affair (much like their old hunts), but in the longer term their keen strategies produced food to a level of surplus that humanity had never before known.

But now, something critical had shifted for the very first time in humanity.  While women had gained prominence in the early days of agriculture, men had still been very important.  Their hunting skills readily adapted to the early needs of capturing game for domestication, and their strong bodies were of great use for labor on the farm.  But once an agriculture based on men’s strategies was fully established and providing for almost the entire spectrum of survival needs, women lost their prominence to men.  But in the hunter/killer nature of the masculine mind, prominence becomes dominance.  The only central survival role that remained for women was the bearing and raising of children, which to the analytical eye of men reduced them to mere baby machines.  Patriarchy had been born.

Now that men were dominant in humanity, it rapidly began to take on left-brained characteristics throughout its culture.  And, crucially, men still fundamentally thought in terms of hunter/killer, so violence became a basic tool to be applied to most any problem.  So the products of abstract thinking and might-makes-right rolled across humanity, and across the planet.  Technology and war became the primary axis of survival, and with their vicious efficiency, humans very quickly became the dominant power of the entire world.

Or so we thought.  Remember that men’s strategy-making had a central, profound limitation the whole while.  It does not make room for the unknown.  Indeed, the masculine-dominated perspective that we have developed does not even permit the unknown to exist.  Science has become the religion of the day, and absurdly declares that we already know almost all of the whole of reality, and that the relatively small amount left is without a doubt knowable and will soon be brought into the light of reason.  To the masculine mind, “the world” can only possibly be the sum of its senses and abstractions.  The world becomes the “universe”, the mechanical, mathematical realm of dead matter and cold calculation.  But this is the highest order of hubris.  The World is indefinitely larger and stranger than our perceptions can contain, and indeed infinitely larger and stranger than we can even imagine.

And so now we have come to the truly long-term effects of the masculine, left-brain perspective dominating human life.  Hierarchical, patriarchal, homophobic, xenophobic, technology-obsessed states make constant war against one another and against the World, each trying to finally win the hunt that eternally slips just out of grasp.  Humanity has reached staggering levels of population “success”, but individually our mental and/or physical suffering is ever-growing.  All the while, we have ravaged the body of the World and the lives of so many of our fellow species.  Our ignorance of our ignorance has brought us to the very brink of our destruction, and if unabated, will soon send us irrecoverably plummeting over the edge.

We desperately need to recover our relationship with the unknown.  We dearly need to recall our profound and permanent ignorance of that which lays beyond our senses and abstractions.  We absolutely must exchange our hubris for humility if we are to continue to survive.  We, men and women alike, must root out the masculine-dominated world-view and resurrect the feminine understanding of self and World.  Only when the two perspectives are allowed dynamic interplay with one another can we be fully human, and only then will we survive.

Best.  Thing.  Ever.

Just wondering if anyone else Googled the mailing list. 

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.

The Vermont legislature just voted to override the governor’s veto of the marriage equality bill!

The freedom to marry is coming to Vermont!!!

I knew there was a reason I put up with the winters here.