Old post/New post

I updated a post from this summer, “Progress progress progress!”, because for some reason I didn’t feel like making the new additions a post of their own.  Basically I’ve gotten some comments on the “Environmentalism as Morality” video I put on YouTube, and since I am tired of any “discussion” coming from there I directed one of the users to the first post (“Progress…”).  Whether he’ll read it or not I do not know, but I added it still.

Anybutt, read it if you want.

Links: YouTube comments, so you can understand what’s up (if you want), and then the updated post.

I don’t think I’ll become a very active YouTuber.

Language: strength and weakness

This is a short post influenced by this video, which I just watched.  Actually it’s just about one short quote; at about the midway point the talking guy mentions just how endangered Sumatran tigers are, and says that “their habitat is being lost and fragmented daily.”

I’m struck by his choice in wording.  Their habitat is being lost?  Technically his use of the word isn’t incorrect, but I don’t feel like it does a very good job (at all) of conveying what is actually going on.  The Sumatran tigers’ habitat isn’t like a set of keys or a remote control; it isn’t something that we can just misplace and then go, “Where is the damn thing?  Did I lose it?”

There are so many words that would have made better choices.  Here are two: stolen, destroyed.  Some might say the land is being “converted for human use.”  The fact is, the land hasn’t disappeared and it’s not going anywhere—but it isn’t suitable for tigers anymore.  Why be coy about what is going on?  If you really want to save the tigers you have to do so by saving their habitat, and I don’t think you can do that if you aren’t honest about what is actually happening to it.

Trees are falling so crops can replace them in the soil that remains.  We need that land so we can grow more food; we need that food so we can grow more people. Cutting down the trees alone doesn’t mean the tigers will disappear forever, but an amazing thing happens when habitat is “lost” to agriculture: everyone who used to live there is now a pest, and pests are open to extermination.  Why do you think ranchers shoot wolves?  (As I quoted in a post quite a while ago, wolves “break the rules” and because of that they can “expect to die.”)

Using these weak, vague words is only a favor to those profiting from the habitat “loss.”  It’s certainly not a favor to the tigers.

Tell it like it is.

Carrying Capacity

I’m finally getting around to reading Endgame by Derrick Jensen (now Volume I: The Problem of Civilization, but I bought both volumes used, so I’ll be reading them back to back) even though I was already pretty thoroughly acquainted with the ideas of the book after watching/listening to Derrick discuss many of things talked about in the book in interviews and talks.  That’s unimportant.  Here are some excerpts from the chapter tenth chapter, “Carrying Capacity,” and a little bit of commentary.

I received additional acknowledgment of the necessary relationship between civilization and slavery today, when I received this note from a graduate student in engineering at Georgia Tech: “Here in the mechanical engineering department, we have a ‘distinguished lecturer’ each semester who comes to give an hour long talk.  These lecturers are usually CEOs of successful global companies, and we students fill the largest lecture hall on campus (about 400 seats!) to hear them speak.  This semester it was Roger L. McCarthy, chairman of ‘Exponent Inc.,’ giving a talk on the importance of innovation and engineering to society, with an emphasis on ‘learning’ from history’s disasters.  My heart pounded during the lecture, as I wanted to stand up like a magician and reveal to the tranquilized audience the well-disguised and tremendously destructive mythology that serves as the foundation for this culture.  Of course, I couldn’t do this this with the twenty to thirty seconds allotted to me in the Q&A session after the talk.  So at the risk of appearing combative in front of my professors, I settled for these simple questions: ‘Has technology done more harm or good for human life, or more to the point, for life in general?  And what metrics will you use in formulating your opinion?’

“I might as well have put the microphone to my ass and farted.  He was baffled at the question, and probably wondered how someone could even think of asking it.  His response was insulting, but typical: ‘You must not know anything about history!  You must not know what life was like two hundred years ago!  Do you even realized what life would be like without technology?  You  have the equivalent of three hundred slaves working for you every day due to the advanced made in technology over the last two hundred years.  You have the benefit of three hundred slaves but without actually having slaves.’  The implication was that I was ‘ungrateful’ even to ask such a question.

“I was even more interested in the questions he didn’t answer than the one he did.  First, he made no mention of whether technology was good for life itself.  He simply ignored the human and nonhuman slaves the world over, as well as the fact that we’re killing the planet.  Such topics are beneath consideration.  In fact, they do not exist.  And though he thought he didn’t answer my final question, about how we measure whether something is good or not, in fact he did: we can measure the success of technology with ‘an equivalent number of slaves’ approach.  If next year, my life is such that I have an equivalent of six hundred slaves as opposed to my meager three  hundred this year, well then, I have something to celebrate, don’t I?  Meanwhile, I’ve become fatter and more clinically depressed while I strap on my jogging shoes and run in a  circle for exercise (but not outside, of course, today is a red alert).  What this means is that if we as a culture have chosen to value ‘enslavement’ in the most general and inclusive way possible, then we have done a tremendously good job implementing our design.”

The rest of this post contains passages that aren’t really related to the last one, and my own commentary.

A short post with no original ideas about why I am disagreeable to a good chunk of the things I see, hear, and read

I liked the idea of a long title for a short post.

Last week I read My Ishmael and Beyond Civilization back-to-back, and by doing so also (in all likelihood) concluded my reading of works by Daniel Quinn.  I think it was in the latter that he made this point, although it might have been present in some form in the former (and was certainly present in The Story of B).  Anyway, the point is this: no program (system, policy, whatever—use whichever word you find pleasing here) has ever been designed that will save humanity and create a lifestyle that will work for people indefinitely because every program that exists depends on people just being better.  This is stupid.  Obviously people aren’t going to be better, and these programs/systems/policies invariably fail because of it.  Instead of trying something new, the attempt to reinforce them is made—more money, more infrastructure, more rules, more guidelines, etc.—but people still aren’t better, and so the program fails—again.

He also studies laws.  The people of our culture(s) (civilized, globalized, etc.) create laws that are, in a very real sense, made to be broken.  The people of our culture create laws that state thou shalt not, and they are things that people are going to do, no matter what.  These laws are made for a society of people who are just better, and therefore they do not work in the real world, because people are just how they are.

In tribal societies they do the opposite; instead of telling the people of their culture(s) thou shalt not, they outline what is to be done when certain deeds are—invariably—committed, in order to make things right once again.

This examination of our laws, and by extension programs, shows exactly why our laws and programs will not work: they are reality-denying, and thus can never work in the real world.  Thou shalt not kill/steal/commit adultery/whatever depends on people being better; a law that explains what to do when murder, theft, or adultery are committed depends on people continuing to be the way they are now, the way they have forever been.  This view is not reality-denying, but rather reality-affirming.  People will never be perfect—they’ll change, might even get better in a way we cannot quantify, but they’ll never be perfect.

Today’s politicians—at least the American ones I am familiar with, but I’m given the impression that it is much the same throughout the world—want to create programs to “save the world,” and they will therefore fail because they are suggesting a route that is reality-denying and Utopian.  Since this route is at odds with reality it cannot succeed.  Both sides depend on people being better and not remaining how they are, but the left chooses to hate on one side of human nature while the right chooses to hate on the other.  Both miss the point, which is this: hating either part of us isn’t going to help us find a new way to live on this world that works for people—not aliens, not lions and tigers and bears, not super-evolved robo-humans, but people.  The left will hate our potential for violence, which has always been present; the right will hate our potential for lust, which has always been present; all the while, both will continue hating reality and will therefore remain ineffective.

This is what I mean when I say both parties are much the same.  It has almost nothing to do with their policies—their programs—which will always be ineffective, just in different ways, but with their equal inability to embrace reality.  I’m tempted to go on, but I don’t even see the point.  Until the people of our culture(s) embrace what they are, and until those in power see that programs will not save the world, I’ll continue ignoring every fucking thing they say.  That’s all there is to it.

Jeffrey

There was a second chair in place when I arrived on Friday, and I didn’t like it one bit–not the chair itself, of course, but rather the very idea of sharing my Ishmael with anyone, selfish minx that I am.  But at least it was not as nice as the friendly old broken-down one I was used to.  I pretended it wasn’t there, and we got started.

“Among her friends in college,” Ishmael began, “my benefactor, Rachel Sokolow, counted a young man named Jeffrey, whose father was an affluent surgeon.  Jeffrey became an important person in many lives at this time and later, because he presented people with a problem.  He couldn’t figure out what to do with himself.  He was physically attractive, intelligent, personable, and talented at almost anything he turned his hand to.  He could play the guitar well, though he had no interest in a musical career.  He could take a good photograph, produce a good sketch, play the lead in a school play, and write an entertaining story or a provocative essay, but he didn’t want to be a photographer, an artist, an actor, or a writer.  He did well in all his classes but didn’t want to be a teacher or a scholar and wasn’t interested in following his father’s footsteps or in pursuing a career in law, the sciences, mathematics, business, or politics.  He was drawn to things of the spirit and was an occasional churchgoer but didn’t care to become a theologian or a clergyman.  In spite of all this, he seemed “well-adjusted,’ as it’s called.  He wasn’t notably phobic or depressive or neurotic.  He wasn’t doubtful or confused about his sexual orientation.  He figured he’d settle down and marry one day, but not until he’d found some purpose in life.

“Jeffrey’s friends never tired of finding new ideas to present to him in hopes of awakening his interest.  Wouldn’t he enjoy reviewing films for the local newspaper?  Had he ever thought of taking up scrimshaw or jewelry making?  Cabinetry was put forward as a soul-satisfying occupation.  How about fossil hunting?  Gourmet cooking?  Maybe he should get into Scouting.  Or wouldn’t it be fun to go on an archaeological dig?  Jeffrey’s father was completely sympathetic with his inability to discover an enthusiasm and ready to support him in whatever exploration he might find worthwhile.  If a world tour had any appeal, a travel agent would be put to work on it.  If he wanted to try the life of an outdoorsman, equipment would be supplied, gladly.  If he wanted to take to the sea, a boat would be made ready.  If he wanted to try his hand at pottery, he’d have a kiln waiting for him.  Even if he just wanted to be a social butterfly, that would be fine.  He shrugged it all off, politely, embarrassed to be putting everyone to so much trouble.

“I don’t want to give you the impression he was lazy or spoiled.  He was always at the top of his class, always held a part-time job, lived in ordinary student housing, didn’t own a car.  He just looked at the world that was on offer to him and couldn’t see a single thing in it worth having.  His friends kept saying to him, ‘Look, you can’t go on this way.  You’ve got too much going for you.  You’ve just got to get some ambition, got to find something you want to do with your life!’

“Jeffrey graduated with honors but without a direction.  After hanging around his father’s house for the summer, he went to visit some college friends who had just gotten married.  He took along his knapsack, his guitar, his journal.  After a few weeks he set out to visit some other friends, hitchhiking.  He was in no hurry.  He stopped along the way, helped some people who were building a barn, earned enough money to keep going, and eventually reached his next destination.  Soon it was getting on for winter and he headed home.  He and his father had long conversations, played gin rummy, played pool, played tennis, watched football, drank beer, read books, went to movies.

“When spring came, Jeffrey bought a secondhand car and set out to visit friends in the other direction.  People took him in wherever he went.  They liked him and felt sorry for him, he was so rootless, so ineffectual, so unfocused.  But they didn’t give up on him.  One person wanted to buy him a video camera so he could make a film of his wanderings.  Jeffrey wasn’t interested.  Another person volunteered to send his poetry around to magazines to see if anyone would publish it.  Jeffrey said that was fine, but personally, he didn’t care one way or the other.  After working at a boys’ camp for the summer, he was asked to stay on as a permanent member of the staff, but it didn’t appeal to him that much.

“When winter came, his father talked him into seeing a psychotherapist he knew and trusted.  Jeffrey stuck with it throughout the winter, going three times a week, but in the end the therapist had to admit that, apart from being ‘a little immature,’ there was nothing whatever wrong with him.  Asked what ‘a little immature’ meant, the therapist said Jeffrey was unmotivated, unfocused, and lacked goals–everything they already knew.  ‘He’ll find something in a year or two,’ the therapist predicted.  ‘And it’ll probably be something very obvious.  I’m sure it’s staring him in the face right now, and he just doesn’t see it.’  When spring came, Jeffrey went back out on the road, and if something was staring him in the face, he went on being unable to see it.

“The years drifted by in this way.  Jeffrey watched old friends get married, raise children, build careers, build businesses, win a little fame here, a little fortune there . . . while he went on playing his guitar, writing a poem now and then, and filling one journal after another.  Just last spring he celebrated his thirty-first birthday with friends at a vacation cottage on a lake in Wisconsin.  In the morning he walked down to the water, wrote a few lines in his journal, then waded into the lake and drowned himself.”

“Sad,” I said after a moment, unable to think of anything more brilliant.

“It’s a commonplace story, Julie, except for one fact–the fact that Jeffrey’s father made it possible for him to drift, actually supported him while he did nothing for nearly ten years–put no pressure on him to shape up and become a responsible adult.  That’s what made Jeffrey different from millions of other young people in your culture who in fact have no more motivation than he did.  Or do you think I’m mistaken in this?”

“I don’t understand you well enough to say whether you’re mistaken.”

“Thinking of the young people you know, do you find them burning to be out there becoming lawyers and bankers and engineers and cooks and hairstylists and insurance agents and bus drivers?”

“Some of them, yeah.  Not especially to be the things you mentioned, hairstylists and bus drivers, but some things.  I know kids who wouldn’t mind being movie stars and professional athletes, for example.”

“And what are their chances of becoming these things, realistically speaking?”

“Millions to one, I suppose.”

“Do you think there are eighteen-year-olds out there dreaming of becoming cabdrivers or dental technicians or asphalt spreaders?”

“No.”

“Do you think there are a lot of eighteen-year-olds out there who are like Jeffrey, who are not really attracted to anything in the Taker world of work?  Who would be glad to skip it entirely if someone gave them an annual stipend of twenty or thirty thousand dollars?”

“God yes, if you put it like that, I’m sure there are.  Are you kidding?  Millions of them.”

“But if there isn’t anything they really want to do in the Taker world of work, why do they enter it at all?  Why do they take jobs that are clearly not meaningful to them or to anyone else?”

“They take them because they have to.  Their parents throw them out of the house.  They either get jobs or starve.”

“That’s right.  But of course in every graduating class there are a few who would just as soon starve.  People used to call them tramps or bums or hobos.  Nowadays they often characterize themselves as ‘homeless,’ suggesting that they live on the street because they’re forced to, not because they prefer to.  They’re runaways, beachcombers, ad hoc hookers and hustlers, muggers, bag ladies, and Dumpster divers.  They scrounge a living one way or another.  The food may be under lock and key, but they’ve found all the cracks in the strongroom wall.  They roll drunks and collect aluminum cans.  They panhandle, haunt restaurant garbage cans, and practice petty thievery.  It isn’t an easy life, but they’d rather live this way than get a meaningless job and live like the mass of urban poor.  This is actually a very large subculture, Julie.”

“Yeah, I recognize it now that you put it this way.  I actually know kids who talk about wanting to go live on the street.  They talk about going to specific cities where there are already a lot of kids doing it.  I think Seattle is one.”

“This phenomenon shades off into the phenomena of juvenile gangs and cults.  When these street urchins are organized around charismatic warlords, they’re perceived as gangs.  When they’re organized around charismatic gurus, they’re perceived as cults.  Children living on the street have a very low life expectancy, and it doesn’t take them long to realize that.  They see their friends die in their teens or early twenties, and they know their fate is going to be the same.  Even so, they can’t bring themselves to rent some hovel, collect some decent clothes, and try to get some stupid minimum-wage job they hate.  Do you see what I’m saying, Julie?  Jeffrey is just the upper-class representative of the phenomenon.  The lower-class representatives don’t have the privilege of drowning themselves in nice clean lakes in Wisconsin, but what they’re doing comes to the same thing.  They’d as soon be dead as join the ranks of ordinary urban paupers, and they generally are soon dead.”

“I see all that,” I told him.  ”What I don’t see yet is the point you’re making.”

“I haven’t really made a point yet, Julie.  I’m drawing your attention to something the people of your culture want to pretend is of no importance, is irrelevant.  The story of Jeffrey is terribly sad–but he’s a rarity, isn’t he?  You might be concerned if there were thousands of Jeffreys walking into lakes.  But young riffraff dying on your streets by the thousands is something you can safely ignore.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“What I’m looking at is something the people of your culture feel sure doesn’t need to be looked at.  These are drug addicts, losers, gangsters, trash.  The adult attitude toward them is, “If they want to live like animals, let them live like animals.  If they want to kill themselves off, let them kill themselves off.  They’re defectives, sociopaths, and misfits, and we’re well rid of them.”‘

“Yeah, I’d say that’s how most grown-ups feel about it.”

“They’re in a state of denial, Julie, and what is it they’re denying?”

“They’re denying that these are their children.  These are somebody else’s children.”

“That’s right.  There is no message for you in a Jeffrey drowning himself in the lake or a Susie dying of an overdose in the gutter.  There’s no message for you in the tens of thousands who kill themselves annually, who disappear into the streets, leaving behind nothing but faces on milk cartons.  This is no message.  This is like static on the radio, something to be ignored, and the more you ignore it, the better the music sounds.”

“Very true.  But I’m still groping for your point.”

“No one would think of asking themselves, “What do these children need?“‘

“God no.  Who cares what they need?”

“But you can ask yourself that, can’t you?  Can you bring yourself to it, Julie?  Can you bear it?”

I sat there for a minute, staring at nothing, and suddenly the goddamnedest thing happened: I burst into tears.  I exploded into tears.  I sat there completely overwhelmed in great, huge racking sobs that wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t go away, until I began to think I’d found my life’s work, to sit in that chair and sob.

When I began to settle down, I stood up, told Ishmael I’d be back in a while, and went out for a walk around the block–around a couple blocks, in fact.

Then I went back and told him I didn’t know how to put it into words.

“You can’t put the emotions into words, Julie.  I know that.  You put those into sobs, and there are no words equivalent to that.  But there are other things you can put into words.”

“Yeah, I suppose that’s true.”

“You had some sort of vision of the devastating loss you share with the young people we’ve been talking about.”

“Yeah.  I didn’t know I shared it with them.  I didn’t know I shared anything with them.”

“The first day you visited me, you said you’re constantly telling yourself, ‘I’ve got to get out of here, I’ve got to get out of here.’ You said this meant ‘Run for your life!’”

“Yeah.  I guess you could say that’s what I was feeling as I sat here crying.  Please!  Please let me run for my life!  Please let me out of here!  Please, let me go!  Please don’t keep me penned up here for the rest of my life!  I’ve GOTTA run!  I can’t STAND this!”

“But these aren’t thoughts you can share with your classmates.”

“These aren’t thoughts I could have shared with myself two weeks ago.”

“You wouldn’t have dared to look at them.”

“No, if I’d looked at them, I would’ve said, ‘My God, what’s wrong with me?  I must have a disease of some kind!”‘

“These are exactly the kinds of thoughts that Jeffrey wrote in his journal again and again.  ‘What’s wrong with me?  What’s wrong with me?  There must be something terribly wrong with me that I’m unable to find joy in the world of work.’ Always he wrote, ‘What’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with me?’ And of course all his friends were forever saying to him, ‘What’s wrong with you, what’s wrong with you, what’s wrong with you that you can’t get with this wonderful program?’ Perhaps you understand for the first time now that my role here is to bring you this tremendous news, that there’s nothing wrong here with YOU. You are not what’s wrong.  And I think there was an element of this understanding in your sobs: ‘My God, it isn’t me!’”

“Yes, you’re right.  Half of what I was feeling was a tremendous sense of relief.”

The chapter “My God, it Isn’t Me!” from My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

The only stuff I’ve been wanting to blog about are things I also don’t really want people to read, so posting will be sporadic and irregular throughout the winter.  Maybe I’ll throw up some of the drafts I haven’t finished yet eventually.  Maybe not.

More Evolved, part 2

Richard Dawkins, mentioned in the first part, for those who don’t know (of) him, is an evolutionary biologist whom I respect and whose work I respect.  He is, however, quite plain about how his work relates to his personal worldview and philosophy.  He has said evolution is incompatible with how he feels the world should work.  Basically I take this to mean that he is for a divorce from biology, put in the most basic way, but since I’m not sure which political points he says this in reference to (because frankly I’m more interested in his explanations of how natural selection works than his (lack of) religious views and more interested in his religious views than his political views) I can’t say for sure if this is indeed the case.

I, on the other hand, am 100% in favor of embracing every bit of our biology and not working against it.  I feel this is relevant in at least three different ways, but I’ll break the rest of this down into reproduction, vice, and modern medicine.

Is this a weird porn flick or a b-movie? You decide! Googled "doctors and drug addicts and prostitutes oh my!" (no quotes) for this one.

Reproduction

I’ve heard from various people and at many times that they will not have children of their own because there are already millions of children in this world that need care and that it is selfish (therefore, I can extrapolate, that it’s also immoral, no?) to have children of your own just so we can have “a little biological copy of us running around.”

Let me be perfectly clear about something here: The only reason you are alive is because you have the biological urge to reproduce, but in some people, the ones that say it’s selfish to have kids, that urge is hidden within their genes in such a way that they have limited psychological access to it.  And let me be clear about something else: It’s OK to want to reproduce.

Why are we here?  To reproduce.  It really is that simple, and we really are alive for no other reason.  I believe it was actually in The Blind Watchmaker that I came across a simple truism that stated, goofily, DNA prefers replication because it has the makeup to make it so.  If DNA didn’t insist that we reproduce, we wouldn’t, and we would die off.  Every species that exists today has the biological urge to reproduce or else it wouldn’t exist today.  A mutation that would result in a diminished or non-existent urge to reproduce would quickly remove itself from the gene pool.  This is such a simple idea to understand, yet many people refuse to understand it, opting instead to reject and demonize their biology.  The only people I’m willing to believe truly don’t have a reproductive desire are the ones that abstain from sex altogether.  Having sex in any fashion, even masturbating, is a reflection of the desire to reproduce.

You’ve got a ready response.  “I don’t want to reproduce, so ha!” you say.  “Sex just feels good so I have sex anyway.  I use a condom/birth control, so that’s positive proof that I don’t want to reproduce!  Neener neener, ha ha!”

My answer to this is simply to first re-read the last few paragraphs, and after you’ve done that, I’ll point out that intercourse only feels good because of the biological necessity for it.  Is that a bold assertion?  Perhaps to some, but when framed properly it shouldn’t be all that shocking.  I once read a biologist’s response to a query about why, in terms of evolution, sweet foods tasted sweet.  His answer was rather simple, but surprising in a way.  Sweet foods have high sugar contents, and foods that have high sugar contents generally yield high amounts of energy.  The sweet taste, therefore, was because of the high energy content.  As it is commonly understood, we like sweet foods because they taste good, but that’s not the real story.  It’s not that we like sweet food because it is sweet, but that we developed a taste for these high-energy foods because of their energy content.  When humans foraged exclusively, sweet, sugary foods weren’t nearly as easy to get a hold of as they are today, but because of the high energy they were a sought after food; this has carried over to today and it’s why we still like sweets, even with their adverse health effects.

It is the same deal with sex.  People don’t have sex because it feels good; rather, sex feels good because of the biological need for it.  This does not apply in the reverse—that is, we did not evolve the biological need for sex because it felt good—because that doesn’t make any damn sense.

Vice

Here is a hypothetical situation: A forager develops a heroin addiction.  Somehow he also has easy access to a large supply—an infinite supply—of his new drug of choice.  He feels good all the while he  is high, but his biological needs are not any less valid because he likes being high.  He is now on junk all the time, and since he has an infinite supply and it feels infinitely good, he has stopped foraging.  Since his heroin addiction has started to conflict with his everyday habits, the ones that keep him alive in a real sense, he eventually dies (but much sooner than he would have were he to live into old age).

Civilization created the possibility of drug and alcohol abuse, and by its doing so also perpetuated these behaviors by safe-guarding the addict.  This is especially so in modern times, when addicts are saved from themselves, sometimes time after time after time, whereas in non-civilized cultures he probably wouldn’t have developed an addiction in the first place due to limited access and would have died while out in “the wild” because being high is not conducive to continued survival.  This is why it is said that addiction runs in the family; people who are substance abusers are not allowed to eliminate themselves from the gene pool, and therefore the genes that cause them to abuse proliferate.

This is one of the ways by which natural selection is being very obviously avoided.  Where humans are still actively participating in the process of natural selection, addictions do not occur, and if they did they would only occur for a little while.  Simple, really.

Modern Medicine

In much the same way, modern medicine is a way to actively avoid being naturally selected against.  I’m sure that is a controversial statement, and I’m not sure of its popularity, even among anti-civ folks.  The reality of it is, still, undeniable.

Is this to say that I am “against” modern medicine?  The answer to that question would be convoluted.  Am I against people having sex because it feels good?  No.  Am I against addicts?  Oof.  I think they should be able to self-destruct—I’ll put it that way, and I suppose that could be taken as either a yes or a no.

My answer is a difficult one to formulate because on the one hand is the biology, and on the other the fact that civilization is actively creating new conditions that it then treats people for.  In a sense, then, civilization should bear the responsibility of healing the ills it has created.  But is it acceptable to treat people for cancer which industry has given them while refusing to treat someone born with a chronic illness due to a genetic mutation?  I’m not willing to answer that question.  Even if I answered yes, would that be an effective solution?  Certainly not, since the source of the ailment—industrial civilization itself—will never be treated voluntarily.  As far as the presence of modern medicine is concerned, I cannot make a judgment.  I can, however, still see the ways in which it is running civilized humans away from natural selection.

In the same way addicts would die out in “the wild,” so too would folks with chronic conditions that impeded their survival.  Beneficial traits tend to have a higher representation in the gene pool because those traits aid in survival, but detrimental traits have a lower, if not non-existent, representation because they do the opposite of aiding survival.

Obvious genetic “defects” therefore relate quite obviously to survival, but even the classic without modern medicine you would break a leg and die can be scrutinized in a similar fashion.  Those who are most prone to break legs (or, more accurately, those most likely to break legs before reaching an age they can reproduce at) will have a lower representation in the gene pool.  But of course this is just extrapolation since the broken leg argument is actually a moral argument—that is, an Oh no! How terrible! argument.  The world doesn’t care if you’ll die because of a broken leg—we do.  It’s the one that broke your leg in the first place.  That doesn’t mean the world is a total dick, though, because it also let you exist.  I once came across a quote from Mr. Dawkins that fits here.  “Nature is neither kind nor cruel,” he says, “but indifferent,” whether you are experiencing jubilation or suffering.  He might want nature to be indifferent only to our jubilation while our suffering is eliminated, but I’m OK with its indifference at all points.

More Evolved, part 1

A while ago I put my “Environmentalism as Morality” post on YouTube for two reasons: (1) after seeing an article somewhere suggesting that reading your own writing aloud can help you work through common errors I’ve long wanted to experiment with recording stuff I’ve written, and (2) I wanted to make a video response to a particular video.  The sole commenter on my video responded with praise, but was obviously confused by something.¹ She also requested that I voice my opinion on modern medicine, so this will be a roundabout response.  Due to the fact that I’m still trying to keep my posts short-ish, this will be a two-part post.

Rather early in Ishmael the narrator, the student, is asked to identify and tell the myth of his culture.  He has a lot of trouble doing this because as far as he knows there is no such myth.  After some prodding and Ishmael telling him to just explain how things came to be this way, he covers the origins of the world, the birth of life, and then, finally, the emergence of Man.  This is where things ended; with the emergence of Man there was no reason to tell anything more.  The teacher and the student then identify the premise of the Taker story—that the world was made for Man and Man was made to rule it.  That’s what I’m going to get at.  There is an unquestioned belief that Man is the end product of evolution.  This belief is stupid and wrong.

I have mentioned evolution, either off-hand or directly, in a handful of my recent posts.  Here are some quotes: From “‘Nature,’ Part 2″: “So long as humans go on changing environments to suit them instead of changing themselves to suit environments, which is what every other evolving species does, we do need to represent the world without human influence.”  From “Cavemen”: “The fear of becoming ‘cavemen’ is a knee-jerk reaction that comes from the belief that we are more ‘highly evolved’ than cavemen.”  Finally, three notable instances in “Environmentalism as Morality”: “I’ll put it this way: The Universe and Life were perfect before humans intervened and started to do things their own way,” “I want the Universe and Life restored to the state they were in before humanity hijacked evolution,” and “People like seeya … believe in linear models … of ‘progress,’ which is reflected both in their beliefs that humans are better than all other animals and that ‘primitive’ people are inferior to civilized people.”

In the wrong context, or poorly framed, I could understand how one might assume from some of these quotes that I am saying Humanity is the Devil! Only without Man can the world exist in peace!  I’ll try to provide the proper context.

First point: Evolution isn’t a process characterized by constant improvement, is not linear, did not start from Bad and will not end at Good.  This is followed, very quickly, by a second point: Evolution does not have a goal, an end point.

When put thusly the truth of these statements is as plain as day.  Obviously evolution doesn’t always end up in things going from worse to better (some might even point to the continued existence of “lesser” creatures after the emergence of man, but that would be dumb).  Obviously evolution doesn’t have an end point—it isn’t a process that just starts and stops whenever it pleases.  The obviousness doesn’t mean these aren’t beliefs held dear by a great many people, however, if not explicitly then at least implicitly.

I’ve had a handful of discussions about this in-person; the most recent and the one that immediately comes to mind occurred this spring between a friend and I when both of us were rather drunk.  (I might be the annoying “thoughtful drunk,” although another friend has told me, during a moment of sloshed philosophizing, that it was “why [I'm] awesome.”  I guess, since I’m rarely intoxicated, that I’m OK with this.)  I made my points and he still went, and I’m paraphrasing, Yeah, but you  have to admit that we’re better than the animals.  Put another way: It all started with the primordial slime and after a few billion years Man appeared—this is the exact story told in the beginning of Ishmael, and indeed the exact same story you’d get from many people if you asked them how things came to be this way.  I don’t remember where the conversation went from there; it’s also quite possible that this was the end of the thread.

The points I made were basically those two I just spelled out.  I could, today, amend those ideas slightly.  I put it this way more recently:

Evolution isn’t defined by improvements; it’s defined by changes. It just happens that the changes that end up with a larger representation in the gene pool are improvements because the negative changes hinder survival, thus these genetic changes eliminate themselves.

This is explained quite well and at length in The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.²

Evolution, the generically-referred-to process which has shaped the lives of every organism to ever exist, is characterized by changes.  Natural selection, the mechanism by which evolution operates, is what selects the beneficial changes and does away with those that are a hinderance to survival.  We could technically say that evolution produces “better” species, but I think that’d be ill-advised.

The important question is: In what way are organisms made better by natural selection?  Every lifeform alive today is “highly evolved” because each has adapted to its role in its ecosystem and continued to exist.  The only real sense in which we can say a creature is highly evolved is when we consider its specialized tasks.  A bird—hell, even a fly or a mosquito—is more evolved than a human when it comes to flying.  A chimp is more evolved than a human when it comes to climbing trees (we do an OK job of it, but a we’re not in the Chimp Tree Climbing League by any means).  A fish is more evolved for swimming.  A white oak is more evolved for, well … treeing.  I could go on, but I won’t.

A while ago it was thought that the last common ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees, nicknamed Arni, may have been found.  It was more similar in appearance to a human than it was to a chimp, which surprised many people.  The question arose, then: Are chimps more evolved than humans?  It’s a loaded question, but the man I saw answer the question answered in a way I found rather admirable.  He said that since chimps are more specialized at the tasks important to their survival they were, indeed, more evolved.³ But of course humans are highly adaptable and there isn’t any one lifestyle—the One Right Way to Live—that we must be suited for.  Are humans more evolved for adaptivity?  I think yes, but also for bipedality, the wearing of clothes, and so on.  (I don’t think any species is evolved for the specialized task of sitting and staring at a computer screen.)

These are my first and most basic thoughts about evolution, which should provide a better context for previous mentions.  When I said humanity hijacked evolution I didn’t mean that every human is a devil and that our species must continue evolving because people are icky and stupid the way they are now.  My point is that humanity—a portion of humanity, currently the largest portion and an ever-growing one at that—cannot and should not attempt to divorce itself from biology.

Notes and Links

1. Comments on Environmentalism as Morality at youtube.com
2. Comments on My Genes Ride The Short Bus at submittedthought.wordpress.com
3. The Last Common Ancestor at podcasts.discovery.com [mp4 video]

Strategic growth(!!!) in strategy video games

For the past few days I’ve done little else beyond these three things: eat a little, read a little, and play many hours of Medieval II: Total War, another three-year-old video game that I’m playing for the first time now.  It’s fun but, for many reasons, awful.

I just Googled "total fucking annihilation" (no quotes) looking for pictures of battlefields or something and totally forgot that there actually is a strategy game called Total Annihilation. Hhh.

Last week I also played another game in the franchise for the first time, Empire: Total War, which is basically just about the conquest of North America I guess, and I commented to my friend how completely unapologetic the game is for its premise—and that premise is, I would say, a total bummer.  The premise is basically Here are the Indians; go kill them! Of course you and your good Europeans justify this slaughter by deeming the Indians as threats that therefore need to be dealt with, but any player should be privy to this falsification.  Those threatening savages were the ones that let you occupy some land to begin with, dummy.

Medieval doesn’t have quite the same premise, but … well, I’ll put it this way: the “win conditions” for the Grand Campaign mode are to hold 45 regions of the map—most of Europe and a bit of Africa and the Mid-East—including Jerusalem.  That’s basically it; you go about pursuing that end however you feel necessary.

Every strategy game I’ve ever come across has had this implicit imperative for growth built into it, and even when I was younger this didn’t quite make sense to me.  I remember when my mom’s ex-husband, my step-father at the time, bought Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, and I just got bored with it the few times I played it.  You start from nothing and expand  your empire—but why? what’s the point?  There really isn’t one—other than that being the only point of the game.  A few years ago I bought the game Black and White because a few years prior to the purchase I thought it was an interesting premise.  I installed it and played it for a little while two different times, but the most recent time (which wasn’t actually very recent at all) I just got so fed up with the growth premise that I couldn’t bring myself to play it anymore.  (I was also fed up with the idea of being a god who must constantly intervene in the lives of his subjects, but that is a different story).

So back to Medieval—the whole point is to conquer all of Europe; there is, seemingly, no other reason to play the game.  What if I just want to create and run a nation that runs smoothly and deal with my enemies whenever they pop up?  Well then I can’t win the game.  As opposed to games like those in The Elder Scrolls series, as well as most other RPG games, this isn’t a game based in fantasy where the only real point is to have an adventure with your character, where the main storyline isn’t even necessary, but just there as a sort of interesting quest to complete if you want.

No, this one is based in history.  Of course the whole point is to rewrite history in a manner that satisfies you—or many different ways, since you’ll probably play the game as more than one nation—but the manner that would satisfy me would be to eliminate the growth imperative that’s implicit in each of these nations.  Instead of letting people be with their nature-based pagan religions I have to spread Catholicism; instead of peacefully coexisting with my neighbors and allies and dealing with threats as they pop up, the douchebags betray alliances and march their armies to my castle walls.  And all of the rebel tribes?  How am I to know what they are rebelling against?  I’ve tried to be a good king—indeed, my reputation is “Reliable” versus “Mixed,” or “Dubious” like the jackass Danes who just betrayed my alliance for no reason, and the dick-hole French are continually marching into my territory and saying “give us 600 florins or we’ll gut you, bitch” and just straight up attacking me for no god-damned reason—but it’s preposterous to assume that each tribe has done something so unacceptable as to warrant their outright elimination.  The premise of this video game is insane, but still people enjoy it.  I am enjoying it.  What is wrong with us?  What is wrong with me?

I do see one potential outcome in which I achieve the victory I desire—that is, stopping the growth imperative and allowing people to live as they wish to live: conquer all of Europe, all of the growth-nations, and then say “Nuh uh, motherfuckers” by refusing to expand anymore, because my nation will not be a nation that worships growth.  And so we come to the trilemma presented by the parable of the tribes (join the violent tribe, fight the violent tribe, or run away from the violent tribe—in all three instances the paradigm of the violent tribe expands), and in this case the only way to defeat the growth imperative is to become the growth imperative yourself.

I don’t know why I’m letting this game bum me out.

Today is Blog Action Day 2009?

Well, I don’t exactly have anything to say about climate change. Instead I’ll post a clump of links about how climate change isn’t the worst thing we have to worry about.

• Let’s Reduce Consumption
• Climate change isn’t the only problem
• “Progress Is Our Most Important Product”
• Progress progress progress!
• Skyscrapers
• Freedom of the Bathroom
• Ishmael: The Takers and the Law of Limited Competition
• English transcript of Arithmetic, Population and Energy – a talk by Al Bartlett
• The mission of the Foundation for Deep Ecology
• The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future
• An unholy matrimony
• Population and consumption: both major players
• Thesis #4: Human population is a function of food supply.
• Thesis #12: Civilization must always grow.
• Thesis #13: Civilization always pursues complexity.
• Thesis #14: Complexity is subject to diminishing returns.
• Thesis #15: We have passed the point of diminishing returns.
• Thesis #16: Technology cannot stop collapse.
• Civilization – an excerpt from Endgame by Derrick Jensen
• Return of the population timebomb

Many of these I’ve already linked, though a few I haven’t.  I could go on and on, but this is a pretty decent list.

Environmentalism as Morality

Today I finished In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations by Jerry Mander.  It was mostly interesting, specifically the second half of it, but at one point I wanted to throw it down and stop reading it for good.  It was eye-opening in many ways, since I really had no idea of the extent to which native people all over the world have consistently struggled in the past centuries, and still struggle today.  Among the most interesting things in the book were explanations about how Indians have been tricked into signing their land over to whatever-colonial-government in just the last few decades, and also that 60-70% of underground uranium is underneath Native land—which raises a whole new reason to oppose nuclear energy development that I had not previously been aware of.  But this post will not be a review of that book; I only started with this paragraph to illustrate that it was the inspiration for this post.

In one chapter, rather early in the book I think, Mander just kept on pushing a this is morally wrong point, and I always find these arguments difficult to buy—especially in a book that, later on, makes the point that moral codes accommodate particular cultures and do not suit all of humanity.  I haven’t said anything “is wrong” in years, and I never argue anything by making moral justifications.  It shouldn’t be done.

I’ll put it this way: The Universe and Life were perfect before humans intervened and started to do things their own way. Besides the absolute insanity of it, this is where my objections to modern society arise, not in the “wrongness” of it.  I can explain where modern society is functionally wrong, how it doesn’t work (or can’t work long into the future), and how it is its very own antithesis. What I can’t explain is how it’s morally wrong, because there are no moral absolutes.  One might say that this is my moral code, these my spiritual beliefs, and while I wouldn’t fully disagree, that’s not what I call it.  Even if I did, that wouldn’t matter; arguing a global morality is simply preposterous, and by labeling an act wrong one unknowingly declares knowledge of a moral absolute that applies not only to all people but all living things.

I want the Universe and Life restored to the state they were in before humanity hijacked evolution. If others don’t agree, this doesn’t matter; they don’t have to share my view of the world. But there is a caveat: If those who disagree with me follow the path they are on, those who share in my belief won’t be able to continue existing. We aren’t actively trying to destroy those who disagree with us, but they are. We are, therefore, literally at war—and we’re on defense. This is a war they are winning. This is a war that, if we refuse to fight, they will win.  This is not a moral argument, but an argument simply for the continued existence of diverse peoples.  But if the people of one dominating lifestyle are permitted to continue on as they are living, the end of all who oppose them—or just don’t agree with them—is surely imminent.

People like seeya (the antagonist in my “Skyscrapers” post; see his comment about my “primitive brain”)—indeed, most if not all techno-dogmatists—believe in linear models (or exponential models, the important thing being that both show constant increase) of “progress,” which is reflected both in their beliefs that humans are better than all other animals and that “primitive” people are inferior to civilized people.  This belief of superiority will cause them, just like it has caused others in the past (or maybe, if it hasn’t caused them to, it just hasn’t impeded them in their desire), to dominate all others they feel are inferior in order for their worldview to prevail.  Just like the Whites killed off the Natives in the Americas the techno-dogmatists will kill off all “primitives” who stand in the way of their envisioned techno-Utopia.

Let me restate this point: Even though I think the ideas of techno-dogmatists are silly and in many cases stupid, I’m not against them believing the things they believe.  People who believe in the Singularity, or people who believe they’ll be able to upload their minds to computers and who find this possibility desirable (Jerry Mander talked briefly of these people in Absence), even though I find their view of the future repulsive personally, can upload to a hard drive if they want.  But where we stand opposed—most importantly, about the state of the planet’s ecosystems and the need to find, or rediscover, a long-term sustainable lifestyle—our worldviews are irreconcilable.

How do you reach compromise with someone when you’ve determined that more technology will not solve humanity’s “problems” of limited space and resources and he believes humans can just eradicate every non-human species and every non-civilized human population in order to make room for himself and his ultra-evolved brethren?  You can’t.  You’re talking to a person who literally wants you dead.  Telling him he’s immoral won’t change his mind.  You’ll have to fight him just to continue on with your life.