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.
