Chimeras & Spells
Does religion and media encourage harmful delusion?
Another summer in the northern hemisphere, and another string of droughts, wildfires, floods, and record-breaking heat waves. Even here in New England, which has been spared the worst of climate change so far, is seeing more frequent droughts and storms. I'm happy to see the US Congress taking some action on this, however pathetic it is, but I can't help but think: "We're seeing all of this suffering at 1.1 degrees of warming -- so what will 1.5 look like?"
But this isn't about climate change. What interests me is the feeling, almost as if under a spell, that we'll get out of this -- that we're bound to. We always have, we always will. Something will happen -- perhaps a kind of deus ex machina. Someone else, or some invisible force, will take care of things.
I see this in myself, I see it in others. It's almost completely unconscious. I put it out of my mind and go about my day. I'm referring to that voice that says something like, "How can the human species die off? Impossible!" It's the same voice that convinces me that I'll never die either. Surely other people die of accidents, cancer, heart disease -- but not me.
It may be a universal human feature. But the last few generations have truly faced the reality of species extinction. Never before has that been true in human history. Yet this level of threat has been met with a "business as usual" attitude by far too many people. Why?
At least in the last few generations, I think some of it stems from the media -- and here I'm thinking television and movies especially, but perhaps also video games (for those of us who have grown up with them). What do I mean? Only this: in every story, there's nearly always a happy ending, a resolution -- or a continuation of some kind, in the form of a sequel. In the case of video games, you just start again -- you get endless lives. This has an unconscious influence.
This spell is also reinforced by certain beliefs, usually associated with "religions," regarding the afterlife. In the case I'm most familiar with, Christianity, there's a sense that you can be wasteful -- not only because you will live forever in the afterlife, but because God will take care of everything anyhow. "It's in God's hands" is a phrase I'd often hear growing up.
Combine such beliefs and the impact of stories and games, and a picture starts to emerge -- a picture of the cultivation of a particular attitude: of chimeras, of nonchalance regarding responsibility, death, and even the possibility of human extinction. Everything will work out, because it always does. In any case, it's in someone else's hands.
Such attitudes may just annihilate us, in the end.
[hide="Reveal"][Footnote: I got the title from a Radiohead lyric.][/hide]
Another summer in the northern hemisphere, and another string of droughts, wildfires, floods, and record-breaking heat waves. Even here in New England, which has been spared the worst of climate change so far, is seeing more frequent droughts and storms. I'm happy to see the US Congress taking some action on this, however pathetic it is, but I can't help but think: "We're seeing all of this suffering at 1.1 degrees of warming -- so what will 1.5 look like?"
But this isn't about climate change. What interests me is the feeling, almost as if under a spell, that we'll get out of this -- that we're bound to. We always have, we always will. Something will happen -- perhaps a kind of deus ex machina. Someone else, or some invisible force, will take care of things.
I see this in myself, I see it in others. It's almost completely unconscious. I put it out of my mind and go about my day. I'm referring to that voice that says something like, "How can the human species die off? Impossible!" It's the same voice that convinces me that I'll never die either. Surely other people die of accidents, cancer, heart disease -- but not me.
It may be a universal human feature. But the last few generations have truly faced the reality of species extinction. Never before has that been true in human history. Yet this level of threat has been met with a "business as usual" attitude by far too many people. Why?
At least in the last few generations, I think some of it stems from the media -- and here I'm thinking television and movies especially, but perhaps also video games (for those of us who have grown up with them). What do I mean? Only this: in every story, there's nearly always a happy ending, a resolution -- or a continuation of some kind, in the form of a sequel. In the case of video games, you just start again -- you get endless lives. This has an unconscious influence.
This spell is also reinforced by certain beliefs, usually associated with "religions," regarding the afterlife. In the case I'm most familiar with, Christianity, there's a sense that you can be wasteful -- not only because you will live forever in the afterlife, but because God will take care of everything anyhow. "It's in God's hands" is a phrase I'd often hear growing up.
Combine such beliefs and the impact of stories and games, and a picture starts to emerge -- a picture of the cultivation of a particular attitude: of chimeras, of nonchalance regarding responsibility, death, and even the possibility of human extinction. Everything will work out, because it always does. In any case, it's in someone else's hands.
Such attitudes may just annihilate us, in the end.
[hide="Reveal"][Footnote: I got the title from a Radiohead lyric.][/hide]
Comments (56)
One is techno-optimism. We are self making gods. Our fate is in our own hands.
The other is old fashioned fatalism. We are the playthings of the gods. It is what it is.
Christianity kind of bridges the two. It claims a personal connection with a singular god and so we can work to achieve an ascent to heaven even if we cant avoid the trials and tribulations of living a life.
What is really going on is an evolutionary competition between two general ways of human life.
The original fate-bound way of life was the one that was lived within the energy constraints of the daily solar flux. Humans lived off renewables, and so had a religion - and indeed a whole moral economy - adapted to accepting this fact. You couldnt just magic up unlimited energy or material resources, so social organisation was focused on being the kind of people who flourished within a restricted sense of the world.
Then humans stumbled into the fossil fuel cornucopia having invented science and technology. A new romantic conception of humanity made sense of this. A way of life was developed that could exploit a world made different by its unlimited supply of energy and material. The idea that our fate is in our own - technically adept - hands took firm hold.
We reorganised the whole planet around this new attitude to existence.
The rest is recent history. Right now is the evolutionary reckoning.
The problem is that techno-optimism hasnt been clearly ruled out yet. Geo-engineering might save us. Fusion energy might save us. Even if the rest of the world burns in hell, we might live in a spot where we are at least the last to fry - and rapid global depopulation is what saves us.
So the problem isnt media in the sense of public misinformation. The problem is much deeper. It is in the mind of the global social organism receiving any message. Our collective identity is predicated on the exponential growth that became a thing with the industrial revolution.
Ideologies in the form of religion, media, politics etc. are society's reproductive organs. And society's primary function is to reproduce itself. So, analagous to biological evolution, any advancements are byproducts of that blind process and there's an inertia there that is not suited to dealing with existential threats. The result is it doesn't matter so much how aware we are as individuals of these threats, what matters is whether they are enough to upset the social reproductive process. If the path of least resistance is to go on pretending to deal with an existential threat then that's the path we'll most likely take right past the point which it's too late to do anything about it. And yes, this manifests in the whole thing becoming a kind of entertainment. The disaster movie and the disastrous headlines psychologically relieve us of the will to act. They do the emotional work for us. We are not going to go out on the street protesting until our crops are dying and we don't have enough to eat because only then social reproduction is really threatened. There's a sense we're under a spell. But we're just scting as social atoms only know how to act.
Yes, thats close enough to what I mean. I wouldnt myself use fatalism, but I see your point. I like that you mentioned technology that our science and technological advances will save the day. Thats a big one I didnt specifically mention.
Quoting apokrisis
Hmm. Im a little unclear as to what you mean here. If youre saying the real problem is the idea of constant economic growth and expansion, I think thats a big part of our problem especially in destroying the environment.
My point in the OP is that we have failed to appropriately react to the unprecedented threats we face, and that one explanation is that of simple hubris we believe we cant die. I think religion and media contribute to this hubris.
Thats my fear, yes. Dancing off the cliff. I think all the greenwashing and talk about net zero falls under the pretending label. As does the IRA, really.
Quoting Baden
Im glad someone mentioned disaster movies. Armageddon the one where Bruce Willis saves the earth from an asteroid is a good example: heroes or superheroes of some kind will rescue us. Its magical thinking; scientist as magician/wizard. There was another one Deep Impact where another asteroid was going to destroy earth and somehow the protagonist survives by riding up a hill with a motorcycle so that the water didnt get to him.
This is exactly what I mean. Its all done with a kind of mock realism, a semi-plausible story, to suck you in. But always with a happy ending. Dont Look Up is the only one that doesnt do that. I consider it the Dr. Strangelove of climate change.
Quoting Baden
And by that point its too late. I feel were all noticing these summers are getting awful already and it affects polling on climate change. But the rate is so slow that at the pace were going, by the time theres real demand for action (when enough people are inconvenienced or killed every summer, or prices on insurance and food becomes too high or water supply gets too low), itll already be far too late. I feel it may be too late now, in fact. May have been too late 15 years ago.
Im saying the problem is deep rooted as modern identity has been constructed around the limitless growth that fossil fuels promised. Our political and social economy is premised on it.
So it is not a matter of confronting folk with the bad news and expecting them to make quite different choices. You are attacking the source of what they think they are. That is why they attack the messenger rather than heed the message.
Thus to fix the problem, it is not just about providing better information. It is about redesigning the very psychology at work in tackling the threat.
Quoting Xtrix
Does anyone really fear death given its inevitability and the fact sleep comes for us every night?
As social animals, if we are hardwired for anything, it is to defend against threat to our tribal identity. We are quick and reckless in our willingness to sacrifice ourselves for that.
The impact of exponential growth seemed a issue that any simpleton could understand when I was doing ecology in the 1970s. By about 2000, I had already concluded that folk werent going to react.
Changing the world seems easy compared with being asked to change your self - to challenge the unconscious roots of your standard issue modern world identity.
:up:
Actually, it's our inherent love of a good tune that will ultimately drown us. Can't blame the pipe or the piper for that.
:up: :100:
There are other things that play into the picture, other than God and humans: nature, natural forces.
There is no definite determination what causes the global warming. We like to blame ourselves, (but leave me out of that please, I take no blame), for burning too much carbon. True, I shan't argue that, it contributes to global warming. But I am not convinced that that alone is the only contributing factor.
The Earth has gone through many ice ages and warming. Life never died out, although species have.
Human species is adaptive enough to survive, even if not in great numbers.
But the heating/cooling is not up to humans alone, not up to god at all, but due to natural forces as well.
So fatalism is not necessarily religion-driven; it may be driven by forces observable (but not discovered yet) by the tools of scientific atheism.
But:
Quoting apokrisis
Any ideas?
This is misleading. Scientific consensus is measurable and quantifiable through the findings of accredited organizations, national and international. Based upon that accepted standard, consensus is extremely high (97-100%) that global warming is human-caused. Whether we solely caused it isn't really relevant. The earth is a system, what we have done is unbalanced it. If a huge rock is balanced precariously atop a hill, and I push the rock, and the rock rolls down and flattens a house, yes, the mass of the stone and the mass of the earth are what actually crush the house, but if I pushed it then I am even more responsible.
edit: Scientific Consensus on climate change
There's stuff
1. We Should do.
2. We Want to do.
3. We Actually do.
When 1 = 2 = 3, we're good.
When 1 [math]\neq[/math] 2 [math]\neq[/math] 3, we're in trouble.
Quote your source, please, otherwise I can't accept this.
And Im sure you have studied the science thoroughly, so your opinion counts. :lol:
So in your opinion, what are the natural causes that play so heavily in these climate gas increases. What percentage of the blame must nature take?
For the purposes of this thread not being derailed, we accept the scientific consensus that humans cause global warming and the focus is on a more specific question. If anyone wants to argue otherwise, try the general climate change thread.
Okay. The operative words are "for the purposes of this thread." Fine. For the purposes of another thread we'll assume that we are all wrong, and for the purposes of a third thread we'll assume we're all right, even with totally opposing opinions.
I can live with that. Thanks for stopping this, Baden.
Another way of putting it is that such arguments are off-topic here because climate change is specifically not the subject of the OP.
Quoting Xtrix
Thanks for cooperating.
Just taxing carbon could have done the trick. But politics is too corrupted by industry. Were fucked Im afraid.
Although Elon Musk will surely be using his rockets to shower the stratosphere with tin-foil, or some other crazy last ditch geoengineering solution crowdfunded by the credulous.
:lol: :cry:
When an army is commanded into front-line battle, and the calculations are that there will be at minimum a 40% casualty rate; and all the soldiers are mercenaries, they each go into battle with the conviction that they will survive, and the guy next to them will die. Okay, this feeling may not be as strong as a conviction, but it is stronger than just hope.
Or take the lotteries. Each person who buys a ticket hopes to win; they don't buy the ticket with the intention of adding to the jackpot of the winner who is not them, but in fact that's what they are doing.
Without this will to survive that comes out as a feeling of invincibility, the species would not face challenges that it otherwise does.
You single out religion and Hollywood as a source of the magical thinking. But consider also the role of high finance. We dont expect rationality from religious belief or entertainment, yet neoliberalism and financial engineering have been far more directly responsible for keeping the global self-delusion of limitless growth going.
The financialisation of the economy achieves the wonderful thing of enforcing maximum short-termism in regard to consumption patterns, coupled to creating the maximum distance from the debts being incurred in the name of that consumption.
Any advanced civilisation would look at us and wonder why we are so crazy. We have built the expectation of permanent exponential growth into every aspect of our society.
Actually it became a religion in Silicon Valley with the Singularity cult.
:up:
Quoting apokrisis
Well this is what I would lump in with religion, in a sense. The beliefs and values we internalize and that become hardened into unconscious dogma I would say is a major problem, yes. Whether that belief is the view of human beings as creatures with needs to satisfy, or in endless economic growth, or in an afterlife, etc. the issue really is a psychological one. So capitalism, Christianity, scientism, and so on, all play a role.
Quoting apokrisis
I think so, yes. Mostly its not thought about at all, but when it is I think its a human universal.
Quoting unenlightened
Im not exclusively blaming them, but I do highlight religion and media in this thread, as I feel the influence of the combination is generally overlooked at least by me.
But Id take issue with your characterization. The problems arent exclusively scientific or technological either. Whos guiding this science and technology? Who packages it and monetizes it? Even the scientists themselves arent devoid of beliefs, being humans themselves. I did mention scientism and belief in infinite growth earlier all those are factors too.
Lastly, Im not claiming the insane are destroying the world. In fact I dont really touch on the causes of nuclear weapons or climate change I simply take it as a given that they are problems, and want to focus (in this thread) on our collective response to these problems. So I would ultimately agree those who have degraded the world arent insane.
Quoting god must be atheist
True. But were also capable of solving complex problems and revolting at intolerable conditions. If an asteroid was headed towards earth, would we be so cavalier? Probably not.
Again, it could just be how human beings are. But imbibing messages mentioned above has an impact.
I agree wholeheartedly. Again, here I would include this as religion, using a fairly broad definition. In the OP I mentioned Christianity especially, but only in response to the problem. The problem itself is also caused in large part to religion of the kind you mention: neoliberal doctrine, capitalism writ large, etc.
And when the power runs out, we'll just hum.
To give up on one's self-confidence?? To give up on one's sense of entitlement?? No, better to die!
Quoting apokrisis
:up: Successfully taxing carbon would've worked I think. When regulation's actually been enforced, production tends to catch up right? And as you say, regulatory capture's fucked that avenue. I don't think there's a viable political project at this point to "save us" from the climate catastrophe.
Maybe the conditions for such a movement will evolve when climate refugees become sufficiently commonplace in the global economic centres, and the greenery in those lands becomes prohibitively on fire. Basically, we're fucked at least until the fucking starts, then there'll be a period of collective trauma which is an opportunity for us to refashion ourselves.
Unfortunately, brazenly and forcefully sticking to previously established routines is a common response. If the bookies would offer odds on such a thing, and be able to pay out, 'during the middle of the end', I'd bet a chunk on the creation of privately owned but state managed 'climate safe havens' being developed with quite restrictive access. An intensification of the climate risk disparity over the globe.
I don't know if the climate change will prohibit the mass production of food required to keep industrial civilisation running, and it may already be beyond that tipping point. I envision fenced corporate-state communities protected by renewably powered drones as those inside are the last to starve and burn.
Edit: With reference to the OP, yes religion and media causes harmful thought habits, but they aren't a primary driver of the biggest harms. They're symbionts for a bigger systemic clusterfuck host.
So the Church of Self-Actualisation and Limitless Growth? :smile:
Im just not sure what calling it religious buys you in terms of rational analysis here. My own view is founded in biological science and indeed biosemiosis. This is all about an ecosystem acting naturally to maximise its entropic throughput.
We are the mould spore that landed on the Petrie dish of fossil fuels. Explosive growth to exhaust this huge energy store followed.
The Earth had a carefully evolved Gaian balance. A carbon cycle had been built up to recycle the waste products of O2 and CO2. Life had earlier stumbled on another explosive energy pathway in photosynthesis. The over production of oxygen damn near made life extinct.
But then a balance was created where autotrophs used CO2 to make O2, and heterotrophs used O2 to make CO2, and the whole planet settled down to a rhythm of life tuned to the daily solar flux. A biofilm with feedback mechanism stabilised the climate of the Earth.
Humans are in the process of blowing up this balance by burning all the ancient phytoplankton that got accidentally buried in sediment strata as part of the global carbon cycle.
My point is that the big picture of why this is rational - explicable in a natural evolutionary sense - is understood within biological science. Fossil fuel had to be entropified if it was technically possible.
It was just sitting there waiting for a suitable speck of the right organism to land on it.
What this organism thought it was about - its religious beliefs - were quite irrelevant. An enabling fiction.
Homo sap just stood on a steep slithery slope and nature took its course. A mass extinction event will follow and even the Gaian climate regulation cycle might never come back quite right. But in the wider evolutionary view, it is what it is.
I like it. Many followers indeed.
Quoting apokrisis
Fair enough. It's my own idiosyncratic usage -- which is why I'm never upset if people don't care for it. I only mentioned it to let you know that I hadn't ignored capitalism or the sense of infinite growth -- I just consider them quasi-religious dogmas. Instead of "God did it," you have "the free market did it" (viz., the efficient market hypothesis).
Quoting apokrisis
Are you arguing that this problem -- namely, global warming -- was inevitable, given the availability of the resources and the appropriate technology?
Quoting apokrisis
I like to focus on actions and behavior as much as anyone. But on the other hand, attitudes, beliefs, values, intentions, etc., are nevertheless very important to factor in. Going forward, therefore, I think determining where to direct our energies is vital, and so recognizing beliefs as an issue is important -- because then we can dedicate the appropriate resources to rectifying that problem. In this case, I think it's largely a matter of education.
There was all this buried coal and petroleum left over from super abundant plant growth in an era of "too high/too warm" oxygen and temperature levels. Dinosaur conditions. Lovelock argued the planet does best at a cooler 15 degrees C global average with lower oxygen levels the balance established after the asteroid did for the dinosaurs. A world with 70% ocean to make for a cold energy sink that balances out the atmospheric CO2 sink in a way that maximises productivity.
So you could see fossil fuels as biomass that got shoved under the carpet as the Earth was still finding its global biological balance and didn't have the means to recycle everything with maximum efficiency at the time.
Locked in the ground, it was out of sight, out of mind. But life continued to evolve above the ground. It developed increasing agency as it gained new energetic advantages like being warm-blooded and more sophisticated in its understanding of its environment.
Then along came Homo with big brains, language, social organisation and tool use. The keys to unlock the goldmine of fossil fuels.
So it is inevitable in the sense that if it could happen, it would happen. The probability was 1, especially once the semiotic means to "objectively stand outside biological nature as a sociocultural organism" came along.
In the fullness of time, fossil carbon may have got slowly degraded by being geological exposed to bacterial recycling. Either that, or recycled by the earth's hot geological core itself the cycles of plate tectonics. So genetic level semiosis would have been the "brains" adapting itself to this entropic mop up chore. Other outcomes were possible there.
But the Gaian biofilm continued to exploit the "technology" of semiosis life's code-based approach to constructing dissipative structure. Genes led to neurons. With humans, this led on to first language sociosemiosis. A code based on words. That then led to technosemiosis codes based on the complete abstractions that are numbers.
So above ground, the evolution of semiosis was continuing, helped by the ideal conditions being created by the Gaian biofilm.
First we had an era of "climate stress" the glaciation age which acted as a filter on hominid intelligence and sociality with its rapid cycles of change and the abundant herds of horse, deer, elephants and other big game that roamed the open grass plains that resulted across much of Eurasia.
Again, we have a "energy bonanza" just asking to be over-exploited. Large herds of yuumy bison-berger. And this drove an arms-race among the varied hunter-gatherer hominids that evolved to be top predator during this ice age. Homo sapiens came out on top, having developed the best linguistic software. But also, the large herds were pretty much wiped out in the process. It looked like Homo sap was out of a job.
But then the climate clicked into a longer stable interglacial period. Agriculture could be invented as the Homo tribes being shove about the landscape by shifting glaciers could instead settle down to tend and defend their patch of soil. Grow their own bison-bergers, and the buns and spices to make them even more delicious.
Again, other outcomes were possible. Language-equipped Homo might not have been lucky with a shift in climate. They may have eaten the last mastodon and gone extinct soon after.
But agriculture became a new energetic bonanza although one now demanding a very organised and measured approach to its exploitation. Homo had to build a culture around working with the daily solar flux and annual farming rhythms. We had to become experts at recycling even our own shit to keep the paddy fields going, or burning the cow dung to heat our huts. We had to really take care of the ecology of our environments. They became the gods, the ancestors, that we worshipped and revered.
Roll the clock forward and we have the rise of agricultural empires. Then this turns into the age of expansionary empires Rome and European nation states as societies are reorganised from being farmers to being soldiers. If you are 15th C Portugal with a fleet of ships, there is the whole world to start raping and colonising. Again, an entropic bonanza just begging to be exploited.
And now the military technology - in the form of the Greek hoplites that invented the Western notion of all out war based on self-actualising "democratic" control had been refined to the point that ships, muskets and cannon could really project focused power. Again, gunpowder. An entropic bonanza that followed its own logic all the way up to nuclear warheads. The shit that actually worried us in the 1970s and so probably pushed climate change down the list of concerns at the time especially at government response level.
Anyway, you can see the pattern. Entropic bonanza. Semiotic control. Put the two together and you get explosive growth, like a spore on a Petrie dish, until the system hopefully finds some kind of homeostatic long-run balance.
Humans - once equipped with the sociosemiosis and technosemiosis to take a view from outside "nature" outside even the Gaian Earth as a biofilm regulated entropic enterprise - could start to look for all the new loopholes it might exploit. Our busy minds and hands were pushing and probing every crack for a seam of advantage an ability to concentrate semiotic power in ways that topped whatever already existed.
Whether we kill ourselves with nuclear fission or a blanket of trapped CO2 is still perhaps a close-run thing. Overpopulation and ecosystem destruction are still also in the game. All the exponential curves still intersect circa 2050, just as we saw they did in the 1970s when the Club of Rome offered up its first still dodgy computer simulations of the trends.
So it is all one Hegelian historical arc. The relentless upward climb in an ability semiotically to project power. The bigger the entropy store, the more dazzling the semiotic structure that arises to exploit it.
If ecologists governed the world rather than the engineers who run the communist bloc and lawyers (or more lately, the derivative traders) who run the free west, then the burning need to establish a new Gaian planetary balance would be top of mind. But no one ever wanted to vote for hair-shirted greenies. They offer no fun at all.
I mean this soap opera world where absolutely everything teeters on the brink in mad self-destructive fashion. What more exciting and interesting time is there to be alive?
There is so much metaphysics and epistemology wrapped up in that sentence segment.
Except here the twist is that the cosmos seeks its finality in dissipation rather than power - power being work in the thermodynamic context. Power is how the means of dissipation get constructed. Power is how nature smashes through the barriers that stand in the way of its desire for maximum entropy production.
So you can see why the Cosmos indeed dooms Humanity to the burden of doing the work that might achieve its concealed purpose.
Someone stuffed up about half a billion years ago and left this great pile of flammable organic chemistry - black gunk - buried under layers of earth crust. We are the poor buggers condemned to now get down there with shovels, dig it out, and find some creative way of burning it all as fast as possible.
As consolation for our labours, we then build a rosy fiction around it. A modern religion of Romantic self-actualisation. We have to make our unchosen fate bearable enough to continue to procreate and complete the given task. And so we distract ourselves with empty idolatry - like F1 racing. Worshiping at the fake altar of fast cars as symbols of the ideal human condition. Nought to 100 in a couple of seconds. The dopamine hit of sitting on top of an explosion of fuel.
Oh how meaningless this existence we are condemned to live!
Hey, there is definitely an antinatalist telling of this story for you to enjoy too. :starstruck:
Except for angiosperms (flowering plants), the older plants (the gymnosperms) don't actually need animals (for pollination/seed dispersal via fruits). Furthermore, plants also respire i.e. they use O[sub]2[/sub], completeing the CO[sub]2[/sub]-O[sub]2[/sub] cycle. In short plants don't need us animals but we sure do need 'em! Fascinating!
Bacteria invented photosynthesis - but first it was sulphur rather than oxygen based. It was a low power reaction dependent on the acid oceans and dissolve rock.
The respiratory part of the equation was evolved by other bacteria - the ancestors or the mitochondria. Some ancestral eukaryote put the two bacterial innovations together to create a high powered respiring-photosynthesising Frankenstein organism. The terraforming of a new atmosphere commenced. Life created its own pool of gases mixed in the right proportions. The oceans were also part of this pool, becoming less acidic in the process.
This new arrangement was so powerful - such an entropy bonanza - that eukaryotes went ballistic, becoming megafauna like plants and plant eaters.
If one organism does both jobs, it risks being at war with itself. It has two sets of genes in competition. This is an everyday story when it come to keeping control over our own mitochondria with their little packets of mitochondrial DNA.
So evolution likes to divide and rule. Set up plants and animals as CO2 emission in competition with O2 emission. Encourage a Darwinian free for all in terms evolving better genetics for gas consumption and waste production. Competition between the two sides then will produce a self-correcting balance in terms of supply and demand from both points of view.
Nature believes in the capitalism of free markets! And it works as - until humans came along - there was no one to put a corrupt finger on the scales.
I see. I still feel plants have a card or two up their sleeve. Given the rising CO[sub]2[/sub] levels, if it harms them too, they should be reacting/responding but all sensors show that they're, well, suspiciously ok with it all.
So its all under human thumb. Vaclav Smil can provide you with the numbers. Plants are either dependent on us for their growing conditions or are shivering in the corner as rainforest is converted into beef pattie pasture.
It would be funny if it werent so literally true.
I dunno! I guess no one's done studies/conducted research on how plants have responded (genetically/physiologically) to increasing CO[sub]2[/sub] level in the atmosphere. They should, right? Perhaps the timespan of the greenhouse effect is just too short for plants to mount an appropriate response evolutionarily speaking that is. It's happening too fast for 99% of living organisms except for certain microbes that have very high reproductive rates. Are we all doomed?
Of course this is researched. For example .
Anyway, CO[sub]2[/sub] is gonna hurt us animals more than plants?! Am I right?
But, then what about the "third world"? Are they not entitled to enjoy the fossil fuel extravaganza, just as we have for the last 100 years or so?
Democratic governments will not promote energy frugality, because they know it will be unpopular. Who wants to be told they can't drive their massive SUV, run the air-conditioner whenever they want, or travel as much as they can afford overseas? Besides if we all stop consuming so much the plutocrats' profits will plummet! :roll:
No one wants to contemplate. let alone endure, a diminished lifestyle, eroded prosperity. We are creatures of habit, and once we are used to something we enjoy the last thing we want is to let it go. Modern civilization is like a juggernaut, and the idea that anyone is at the helm and in control of its trajectory is a mass delusion.
I meant more, big brains, language, social relations, and tool-use are vast areas of study as exactly how that happened, and ideas about the mind/body problem...Also, what makes humans cognition "human" etc. What caused the language to evolve in the first place (bigger brains? social relations, tool use, or vice versa, or both?).. What does it mean to be a brain that thinks in mainly language? How does that change the perception of the world? Free will/deliberation versus instinct... Preference-utilization, social organization, tool-use, etc.
Quoting apokrisis
I would of course, say suffering itself creates antinatalist ethics, but yes, the suffering of our own environmental making can certainly be part of that. And the ethics of not putting more carbon-creators onto the planet, though not central, is a nice byproduct of the philosophy.
But the trajectory isnt inevitable. We got here, and are staying here, because of decisions made by human beings human beings with power. Leaders in governments and businesses have made these decisions, and continue to.
Theres nothing inevitable about any of it. We could very quickly decarbonize if our leaders wanted to. If we can shut the world down for several months, as we did during COVID, or radically transform our manufacturing as we did during WWII, we can do this as well.
The future trajectory is also not something thatll just happen. There are many paths we can take. So while no one person is in control, the choices still lie with human beings particularly those in power.
If the influence of dogma from market fundamentalism to Christian fundamentalism to the happy endings in movies has got us here, then changing that can get us out. Not an easy task. But it does no good being defeatist or fatalistic.
The problem with this is not so much the inequality per se (which is a problem, to be sure), but the extremely lopsided distribution of power. And given this imbalance in power, it is all too easy for the rest of the world, not belonging to .1%, to realize that they can change society if they make government actually do what they want.
To prevent this for happening, power will (and has) done everything to stay where it is. A tax on carbon? Mass transportation? A green transition? Are you crazy, if they get that, what else will they ask for? So, we get bombarded by distractions, disinformation and petty gossip instead of doing things that matter.
From this very broad picture, much can be derived. But, as I said, society is more complex than this, so there are too many factors to analyze to make this into a "theory" or explanation. The factors listed in the OP certainly are legitimate.
This is the very important point where we disagree; I just don't believe this is true.
Quoting Manuel
Well of course I agree with all of this...
Quoting Manuel
Quoting Manuel
That's obviously true, but I'm not really intending for it to be a theory or explanation of society. I'm highlighting two factors, the combination of which has influenced me personally (and perhaps many others) and -- from what I see -- have been generally overlooked when we talked about responses to the unprecedented threats we collectively face.
So it's a pretty specific, and personal, reflection -- but I think interesting nevertheless.
Well we can hash that out some time on the climate change thread perhaps.
Interestingly - and while agreeing with you mostly about Zizek, he actually discusses this. It's an idea in psychoanalysis called fetishist disavowal: "I know very well, but...", (insert topic here). "I know very well that, human beings and most complex life on Earth will burn, but, how could it, given what I am seeing with my eyes right now..."
Just pointing this out, one of the interesting things I got out of engaging with Zizek for way too long, not all was wasted.
I dont hate Zizek, I just never feel I learn anything from him. If hes discussed the topic here than thats a credit to him. I havent seen it done often.
:up: A quick solution, I like it; quite unfortunate that it doesn't appeal to you or to me.
[quote=Janus]But, then what about the "third world"?[/quote]
The 3[sup]rd[/sup] world will have to be the bigger man so to speak.
[quote=Janus]Democratic governments will not promote energy frugality, because they know it will be unpopular.[/quote]
There it is, the dark side of democracy.
I'm following Smil and what seems plausible given the immense size and complexity of the fossil fueled energy infrastructure. I'm always open to counterarguments, of course, and in fact I would love to be wrong.
Yep. If we treat big oil in particular as an organism, just think how much resilience it has had to develop to sustain itself during a century of geopolitical turmoil. It understands the institutions of power intimately. It astounded everyone - in greenie circles - by chugging straight through peak oil by new tricks like fracking. Its existential threat is instead the arrival of peak demand.
Blue hydrogen - a way to cling on to its investment in pipes and forecourts - is evidence of its deep resourcefulness and knowledge of how the world works.
And up against big oil is what? Hippies with their flimsy PV panels and wind turbines. No viable infrastructure to back up the generation.
Big hydro and big nuclear are also in the corporate game. But small and scattered compared to big oil in terms of being the social organism with the experience of perpetuating its way of life against all the odds.
This means that politicians won't tell people that if we want to somewhat ameliorate (probably the best we can hope for) what seems likely to be the catastrophic effects of human induced global warming, then the best solution would be to use as little energy as possible, and in general consume as little as possible.
But then, it's also kind of like the "prisoner's dilemma" in that no one wants to be the bunny who sacrifices, when they think that hardly anyone else will, a fact which would also render the sacrifices of the willing impotent, almost useless, given the scope of the problem.
The problem is only really that the heat cant escape if we wrap the planet in a carbon blanket. So official thinking is not anti-growth. It is about how to maximise growth rates given this physical constraint.
So even rational politics wants the freedom to use as much of this cheap and handy fossil fuel as possible. And in itself, that is a balanced social setting.
The irrationality lies in politics allowing big oil to kill off its future renewable competition with market manipulation.
As you know, renewables were going to be big with the Arab oil crisis of the 1970s. The US pumped real money into researching alternatives. A bit of geopolitical price fixing followed - the price of a barrel was stabilised with a deal that played the Saudis against the Iranians - and that wave of starts up was forgotten history. The conditions for a benign period of endless neoliberal growth was constructed.
Greenies were all fighting against the spoiling of natural ecosystems at the time anyway. And Smil tells us just how badly they lost that battle too.
Again you will know that most folk actually want a domesticated landscape not virgin forest and grassland. Nature too has to pay its way if it is to share this planet with our anthropomass. :grin:
Right, that is the specific greenhouse problem. But there are many others which have arisen due to the fossil-fuel given capacity for exponential growth: impoverished soils, destruction of habitat, extinction of species, depleted fisheries, general industrial chemical pollution of soil, water and air, diminishing water resources, the likelihood of pandemics, and of course, the likelihood of ongoing resource wars.
Even if we could instantly solve the global warming issue; there would remain a whole host of other problems. The basic problem is there are are just too many of us, all aspiring to the high life now.
Of course. The greenie calculation was that the carrying capacity of an ecologically pristine Earth was a max of around half a billion - living on permaculture and PV panels.
But what is the politics of selling that equation to the masses?
Doesnt it become rational to say instead what the fuck, lets jam the foot to the floor and just blast the rig through this shit, honey, in best Hollywood style.
If you just looked at the tech, it was always possible to believe we could outrun fate.
Remember the green revolution after the discovery that petroleum was good for fertiliser as well as plastic consumer crap. History showed we could feed the world and so heading for a 15b population was really just a logistics issue. If you ran a nation, it was way down your list of existential concerns.
Im looking for moments in history when politicians really had no excuse not to barrel on. Every problem seemed to have a tech solution given a Manhattan project scale social and political effort.
The delusion still persists. I mentioned Musk and geoengineering. That is only going to be a scaled up version of the private enterprise escapade where a fishing boat dumped iron sulphate in the cod fishing grounds off Canada - an ecological win-win in increasing plankton growth and carbon capture.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-iron-fertilisation-geoengineering
It's a hard sell to be sure! I don't know about "rational" but the "jam the foot to the floor" attitude, although not the one consciously held, seems to be the unconscious underlying motivation.
Yes, the "tech", the "tech", the bleeding, fucking edge "tech"; we may still "outrun fate", but at what cost?
Quoting apokrisis
Yep, unthinking, uncaring, reckless profiteering. :roll:
Quoting Agent Smith
It would appeal to me greatly if it was doable. And I'm not saying it shouldn't be attempted; and a slow transition made; any diminishment of energy derivation from fossil fuels should help to some degree.
Quoting Agent Smith
Right, tell them that.
Quoting Agent Smith
In moments of crisis (which with humanity seems to be more or less most of the time) the best governance would seem to be enlightened autocracy, but where, o where is such a rare beast to be found?