Perhaps the only Solution to the Human Predicament
To face the human predicament and the ecologic crisis, or as Thomas Berry put it, “… to fix our minds on the magnitude of the task before us,” what must we do?[i] What are the behaviors we need to change? Whatever they are, clearly they must fulfill at least one, and preferably, two fundamental goals. Firstly, they must help us to live in balance with the rest of the Earth. We bring our collective ruin otherwise, and all else will be pointless. It takes no great awareness to come to this conclusion. Nearly anyone at whatever stage of consciousness will agree: our planetary home must be able to sustain us. So, to what else can we all agree? Although perhaps less unanimously, a great majority of our human family will nevertheless agree on a second obligation: we must reduce the brutal hunger, violence, and disease suffered by the less fortunate. Billions suffer when others live the life of gods. Perhaps the only ones not in agreement with our reasoning here are the gods, themselves. The “one percent,” as the Occupy Wall Street movement called them.[1] Besides these relatively few (and powerful) people, most of us would agree on sustainability and some measure of equity as bottom-line conditions for our civilization.[ii]
Gustav Klimt
Logically then, given that neither economics nor technology will turn our finite Earth into a planet of infinite carrying capacity, we must—to achieve humanity’s overriding goals—reduce the population of our species and we must (to use a word that admittedly lacks both irony and decorum) consume far less of the Earth’s resources and regenerating capabilities. We must consume in ways in which resources are renewed and in which pollution does not accumulate, and we must share the Earth’s bounty with our entire human and biologic family. These imperatives are so obvious they sound trite. Yet, demographers expect our numbers to rise to eleven billion by century’s end, economists expect a many-fold increase in economic activity, climatologists are concerned with run-away global heating, and we have seen evidence in this website for a horrific population crash. So, to continue the logic of our imperatives: the world’s poor need to have far fewer children, and the world’s affluent need to consume far less. To fulfill those basic goals will require an enormous change in the collective behavior of our family. Unprecedented problems will require unprecedented effort.
Paul Klee: Darkness Visible.
Likely, the very structure of our economic and social systems, of civilization itself, will have to be changed. For we must produce and consume mindfully; that is, in ways in which most of the world have not seen in generations, except in tucked away pockets like Ladakh. But habits are hard to change. So entrenched are our destructive habits and the worldviews that sustain them that any substantial change will require a punctuated leap in our collective consciousness. It would require a complete make-over for us all: in our behaviors, beliefs, values, and worldviews. Thomas Berry put it this way: “It is not simply adaptation to a reduced supply of fuels or to some modification in our system of social or economic controls. Nor is it some slight change in our economic system. What is happening is something of a far greater magnitude. It is a radical change in our mode of consciousness. Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human. It is to transcend not only national limitations, but even our species isolation, to enter into the larger community of living species. This brings about a completely new sense of reality and of value.”[iii] “Otherwise,” he warned, “we mistake the order of magnitude in this challenge.”[iv]
Paul Klee: Magic Garden.
Thomas Berry was speaking of a biospheric consciousness, a worldview that few of us have ever inhabited. Einstein’s dictum again resonates: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Foragers think like foragers, farmers think like farmers, and most of us in First World countries think like inhabitants of an industrial and post-industrial world. We produce, consume, and pollute. And nothing short of death, collapse, or class war can force us to stop. We can, however, stop voluntarily. We can behave with what the scientist Vaclav Smil called “self-serving” altruism, and in a way that the deep ecologists have called “voluntary simplicity” or even “radical simplicity.”[v] Importantly, this self-serving altruism is redefining what we mean by the altruistic act. As Frederic Bender made clear:
“This is not altruism, for three reasons. Altruism is an ethical ideal, according to which I should center my moral concern on others indifferent to my own interests. Obviously, altruism is just as dualistic as egoism, merely reversing the priorities of self and other. Second, the human motivation to altruistic behavior, though not nonexistent, is notoriously weak. Most important, though, the ecosphere is not other, nondualistically conceived. We are the ecosphere…” and “we are completely dependent on the… ecosphere’s robustness...”[vi]
Joan Miro.
In this view, the self-sacrifice being proposed is not altruism in the way Darwinian evolutionists and psychologists have previously conceived of it, because we now perceive the people and the Earth for whom we are sacrificing to be an extension of ourselves, a part of whom we mean when we say “ourselves” and “me.” The sacrifice—downsizing our lifestyles, eating less meat, embracing green alternatives—is profoundly for me, not for some unrelated “other.”
Max Ernst: Woman, Old Man, and Flower.
Our ecological crises will not be the first time that altruism proves to be advantageous. In The Decent of Man Charles Darwin noted that in conflicts between tribes, one may benefit his tribe more through self-sacrifice “than by begetting offspring with a tendency to inherit his own good character.”[vii] Many acts of altruism have been found to be similarly valuable.[viii] In hunter-gatherer societies, sharing food, information, and decision-making leveled the playing field within a group. So did risking harm to oneself when ganging up on bullies and freeloaders. Survival of such groups reinforced altruism, both biologically and culturally. Christianity’s spread through the Roman Empire and Buddhism’s through Asia was due in part to the compassion[2] and altruism practiced by its priests.[ix] An important story within the saga of Civilization has been the steady institutionalization of individual rights, including suffrage, property rights, civil rights, workers’ rights, welfare, and religious rights. Each one of these was won through the sacrifice of much life and limb.[x] These acts of self-serving altruism curbed gross social inequalities and reduced suffering and social tensions, benefiting the societies.
Red Leaves.
Across time and space, the traditional schools of wisdom agree. According to Tenzin Gyatso, known as the 14th Dalai Lama, “High levels of compassion are nothing but an advanced state of self-interest.”[xi] In Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience, Stephen Hall finds that there exists a “surprisingly universal concept of wisdom. East or West, they all embrace social justice and insist on a code of public morality. They embrace an altruism that benefits the many.”[xii] According to the philosopher Karl Jaspers, for the four people he calls the paradigmatic individuals—Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus—“human love was unlimited and universal.”[xiii] Love is not bounded by family, community, or nation. Given this empathic perspective, a person must act and a society must be structured to benefit the many and not to profit only the few.[xiv] These were the same values espoused by the 19th century utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and the 20th century Peter Singer.[3] For most of the perennial philosophies this idea was captured by the concept of compassion, where one comprehended another’s situation as her own. In the words of the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, we experience the other as thou, reverentially and intimately, as subject and not merely object,[xv] as a deeply conscious being just as I am, not as an It or an idea, not as an ends to my means. To come to this realization and to act in accordance has been considered—cross-culturally East and West, North and South—the ultimate form of human wisdom.
FOOTNOTES
[1] And no, this one percent is not the same as the biospheric one percent, or at least the overlap of their Venn diagram would be small.
[2] Compassion will be defined as the feeling that arises in witnessing or knowing of another’s suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help.
[3] Although philosophy means the love of wisdom, Stephen Hall (2010:37) finds that in “Over the last three centuries, [Western] philosophy has abandoned its function as a source of wisdom, and has restricted itself to knowledge.”
ENDNOTES
[i] Berry,T. (1988:37) The Dream of the Earth Sierra Club Books, San Francisco.
[ii] Gilson, D. and Perot, C. (2011, March/April) It’s the Inequality, Stupid, Mother Jones.Many analysts believe that sustainability cannot exist alongside poverty, because, if for no other reason, the poor will cut down the forest and poach the wild animal as long as they are hungry.
[iii] Berry (1988:42)
[iv] Berry (1988:42)
[v] Elgin (1981/1993), Smil (1994b), Merkel (2003).
Elgin, D. (1981/1993) Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life that is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. Harper, New York.
Smil, V (1994b) How Many People Can the Earth Feed? Population and Development Review, v. 20, pp. 255-292.
Merkel, J. (2003) Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints On A Finite Earth. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC, Canada.
[vi] Bender, F.L. (2003:24) The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Humanity Books, Amherst, New York.
[vii] For example, Darwin, C. (1879/2004:157-158). The Descent of Man. Penguin Group, London.
[viii] Much of paragraph from Bowles, S. (2012) Warriors, Levelers, and the Role of Conflict in Human Social Evolution. Science, v. 336, pp. 876-879.
[ix] Atran, S., and Ginges, J. (2012) Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict, Science, v. 336, pp. 855-857.
[x] Piven and Cloward (1979), Bowles (2012).
Piven, F.F, and Cloward, R.A. (1979) Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. Vintage Books, New York.
[xi] Germer, C.K. (2009:160) The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion. Guilford Press, New York.
Hall, S. (2010:123) Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
[xii] Hall (2010:34).
[xiii] Jaspers (1957:92) Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus: The Paradigmatic Individuals. Harcourt Brace & Company, San Diego.
[xiv] Jaspers (1957), Hall (2010:30).
[xv] Buber, M. (1970) I and Thou. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. The Walter Kaufman translation cited here translates the German “Du” as “You,” and not “Thou” in Buber’s text.
