I think about problems a lot. I suppose I have always been something of a troubleshooter, if not quite a detective. Then again, there are some domains in which I have been able to make fine discoveries... so I have a little of the forensic inclination about my intellect and my predisposition to deploy it. This morning, when I was thinking about our species, and what is broken about us as an evolutionary animal, I realized that we were over-endowed. Wildly over-endowed. Earth is simply far and vastly too luxurious. We’ve been so spoiled by what should rightly be understood as unimaginable abundance that we’ve never had to develop the intelligence that survival in a harsh place demands. We’re stupid because we’re buried in beauty and comfort. Up until now, we could play all sorts of pretend-games with the representations of assets we destroyed. Forests, for example. What this means is complex: firstly, we have been so thoroughly spoiled that throughout our entire evolutionary history, we simply hid the damage from our bizarre addictions and reactive tantrums... in the environment—the part of the living world that has no voice with which to speak or defend itself. Most of the time, the assaults were relatively meager. The planetary ecosystems could sustain this kind of trimming, or even recover. But over the past 500 years... things changed as our methods and numbers grew explosively. We began to burn the planet down. Literally. We became an terrestrial crisis of the highest order. And thus, to this day, we remain. And, mostly, a very small number of people both instigated the destruction and enjoyed the spoils. But now our numbers are so vast that we will wipe out the environment—and, of course, ourselves in the process—by doing what we most adore: making representations. We will kill the environment with the same dedication we have killed our minds: by representing them, madly, in images that grow in size and complexity the faster they destroy what is therein depicted. Our world was so profoundly luxurious, you see, that we could »survive abject stupidity directed at each other and all the other living constellations that comprise it. Now, however, the damage must come home to roost; for we can only hide it in stupidity or time. Or under the earth. Where the water that is the single most precious of all resources... once ran clear and pure... but now runs poisoned... by our crude design. The earth was simply too good. To easy. To comforting to demand the intelligence we might otherwise have developed. So what happened was that, much like the spoiled teens of wealthy magnates, we laid waste to the anciently conserved living assets from which our own minds and bodies are composed and derive their organismal natures. We burned it down ‘because we could’. And now, well. Now we are going to start to get a taste of what it is like on other worlds: worlds where survival is expensive and life is cheap. Maybe we will invite ourselves to become intelligent this way; but our long habits imply otherwise. As a species, as collectives... we are not famous for suddenly gaining the necessary insight to restore what we have obliterated. More likely is that we will divide into competing factions that war endlessly over the remaining ‘comforts’ and ‘products’ that may yet be produced. But the problem was this: we were spoiled. And we still are.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 03:13:10 +0000
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