Caring and stuff
So, what’s the matter with this SUSTAINABILITY gibberish anyway?
How about this: sustainability is the issue which sets apart man and animal.
Animals DON’T CARE about sustainability above the level where they sustain their individual genes.
Ecological- or resource-sustainability issues don’t matter to them – as far as they are concerned, these issues don’t even exist.
Not even consciousness itself distinguishes us from animals in a comparable way. I think it is accepted fact in the science community that capacities for suffering and awareness are gradual effects, which emerge with growing complexity of the nervous system and brain. Thus, consciousness is not a black and white kind of thing: a cat, dog or pig may have less of it than a human, but they do have a lot more than zero.
So, animals don’t care about sustainability. That’s why animal species DIE OUT. Always.
As it appears, there’s a fork ahead in the road for mankind. Man and Woman will decide to care about sustainability – or else. Sustainability is just a POTENTIAL after all, not a given.
To be human means to CARE about that potential not being wasted. To strive to rise awareness of the human condition to the level where sustainablility of the species is recognized as a central and critical issue. To pursue focus-shifting from throw-away baubles to goals and products worth being CARED about by beings sporting a human brain with a pulse.
Sorry to spoil the idyll, but that Prius we bought for peace of mind and the compost heap at the back of the garden where we always deposit those soaked and delicious tea leaves which had been flown in from India for us, they are surely nice and impress the neighbors to boot, but they’re also mostly show business, reinforcing cosiness in PRESENT HABITS.
FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES are great inspirators, though. So let’s get a little dreamy about this for a while: man as a species has the POTENTIAL TO LIVE and not die off like every other worm which ever existed. Hmmm!
Pouring a little more of that nice warm tea.
What’s this RUCKUS now? Doesn’t anybody on this rotten planet respect a dreaming philosopher any more?
The irritated mob’s screaming at me, furiously red-faced: I’m no stinkin’ worm you headblock, I’m the pride of creation and there’s a nice pie up there in the sky which will cuddle and save me, if I make goo-goo eyes at it long enough!!! Me and my friends we are telling this to each other all the time, so it is true!!!
Ah yes. The stuff in the sky allright.
Let’s take a look: stuff in the sky
June 22nd, 2009 at 2:14 am
Interesting post
I recognize my own thinking paths when reading this. Then there’s a small critical voice wondering – can any of this be an excuse for not acting carefully with our surrounding?
I do think that our own ego becomes one of our biggest enemies when it comes down to living ecologically. Why do I wear disposable contact lenses while I could easily last for 3 years with the same pair of glases? The ego does play an important role that’s for sure.
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:08 am
Some animal species – especially reptiles and insects – have in fact survived longer than humans (in any form) have been around, and will no doubt persist longer than homo sapiens, because they will adapt better to changing climate conditions than we can.
The pressures of ego, fitting in, enjoying the moment rather than worrying about how to use immediate context to engage with long-term impact are real social and cultural factors that we have to confront.
As the Star Size Comparison video illustrates, we’re beyond miniscule as far as the universe is concerned. Here’s a link to another way of establishing perspective on the urgency of the moment, from Seed: a video experiment in scale.
June 26th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
@a dark ally:
“The pressures of ego, fitting in, enjoying the moment rather than worrying about how to use immediate context to engage with long-term impact are real social and cultural factors that we have to confront.”
Very well spoken!
I once read an interesting post on the Greenpeace site, where a girl was asking something along those lines: “I really care about the environment, but then on the weekends we take the car and drive to the countryside..” and quite a few people responded with things that they were doing, while still being aware that its not so good. Somebody answered that it is great to be environmentally concious, but that at the same time we cannot stop all not-so-green habits, we only live once. And I think there is a truth in that, if we were to go too radical, we would never be able to sustain it.
June 26th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
@ally
Your video is interesting as it shows another scale: time. Basically, we are living in the midst of a complexity explosion. As Jared Diamond showed in Collapse, complexity is detrimental to flexibility. Like our bodies are more complex and adapted than insects’ bodies, our societies are more complex as well.
Question is, can these complex societies and cultures endure as they are directed by cockroach level hormones, or will it be possible to motivate people to focus on higher level values and goals for further development?
A cockroach with a TV is still a cockroach. HA!
June 30th, 2009 at 5:16 am
@sylvia & hans
Are “too radical” and “too complex” opposite ends of a spectrum? What I find most useful is trying to pinpoint the situational context in which we (any random individual) invokes the argument of (for instance) “we only live once” or (paraphrasing) “we’re limited by biology.”
If we take “only living once” as the baseline, then ANY experience in ANY moment is as worthy as any other. The dichotomy between living green and finding pleasure is constructed by desire.
If we resign ourselves to the historical (past) limits of sociobiology, we deny the presence and possibility of evolution.
I’m not arguing these tensions aren’t real! I struggle with them too: short-term gustatory pleasure with adverse health consequences fits both supposed dilemmas (of sensory gratification and social habit). The challenge is to learn or create other paths than the established “choices” of surrender (to cravings and traditions) or reactive resistance – which adds power to the problem instead of shifting the energy to solutions.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
@ally, sylvia
Well, hedonism is always an issue of course, and an integral part of the subjective world and feeling of every individual. Would emotions without hedonism even make sense?
While I think that hedonism should not be repressed per se, I think we have a certain ability to choose general directions for projecting our hedonistic efforts and escapades.
There is that german saying: “he who doesn’t enjoy is unenjoyable”
“If we resign ourselves to the historical (past) limits of sociobiology, we deny the presence and possibility of evolution.”
Well, we surely can deny evolution. It won’t care though.
With language and everything that comes with it, we do have the unique ability to transcend biological evolution with symbolic evolution in that we can develop complicated social and physical technologies over several generations. Market economies are the economic frameworks for this, they are chaotic but also allow for innovation to drive symbolic evolution.
The challenge is aggravated by conflicting aims: flexibility and openness to a certain amount of chaos is necessary for innovation to manifest itself at all, but certain developments can grow like cancers, consuming all resources, etc., and they need to be checked in order to keep them from killing sustainability and humanity (or at least our civilization) with it.
Exponential times, interesting times
July 13th, 2009 at 6:20 am
@Hans, do you have any sources or inspirations for “symbolic evolution”? I like the phrase, did you come up with it?
I wonder if it’s a term actually in use, whether it been theorized by anyone or put to practical descriptive use…
July 13th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
@ally
>> “symbolic evolution”? I like the phrase,
>> did you come up with it?
I probably picked it up somewhere, I guess
The best backgrounder on the subject I know of is “The Symbolic Species” of Terrence W. Deacon, which describes the evolution of cognition from various perspectives (neurological, social, etc.), recommended!
The other side of the time vector (the future part), is the focus of the transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil. Being speculations regarding the future this is more on the inspirational side, but much better than hiding under a rock and not thinking at all, I would say … you could try “The age of spiritual machines”, for example for Kurzweils take on the future.
Have a good one
Hans
July 24th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
thanks Hans
I’ll definitely check out Deacon, and I’ve heard of Kurzweil, may even have read something before. I have some trouble with the religious/evangelistic presentation of this type of knowledge – yes, we need inspiration and geez, are we so taken with consumer packaging/marketing?!
At any rate, between the notions of symbolic/cognition evolution and future time, I’m reminded of a blog post I wrote last fall: http://www.reflexivity.us/blog/archives/2008/10/expressing-the.html
Would be curious your take on it, if you have the time?
best,
steph