A friend asked this question, and I wrote an answer.
Wealth
exists because we invented agriculture, which gave us year-round access
to stores of food from which some people can exclude others. This is
why poverty exists, too, incidentally. I see wealth and poverty as two
aspects of the same thing: scarcity.
Foraging societies (like the Hadza in Africa) don't have the
artificial scarcity that we civilized folk have, because every
individual (including even fairly small children) knows how to go out
into the bush and get food, shelter, and friendship (the basics we all
need for survival: they don't call this wealth; it is simply life).
Peace
exists when depopulation (from disease, famine, or war) gives
agricultural societies breathing space to grow their wealth without
having to protect it from other people. I see peace and war as
fundamentally the same thing, complementary expressions of agricultural
demographics. When foraging societies settle down to live in villages
and cities, they become more fertile (producing more people in less
time: this is peace--e.g. the Ara Pacis in ancient Rome, with pictures
of motherhood on it). More humans (the outcome of greater fertility)
means we need more stuff (wealth). Since we are sedentary and can only
get wealth by access to land that we own (fence and work
extensively)--we have to go out of our native habitat (overcrowded and
overworked as it is) and occupy other land (virgin land). Eventually,
we encounter other people--and the outcome of that meeting becomes war
(not just the feuds of individual hunters and clans, which transcend
agricultural society, but the organized genocide that is civilized war:
we don't want mere revenge or justice or whatever; we want your land,
and its wealth).
Mercantilism
and colonialism (or in their latest guise, globalization) allow us to
enjoy peace and war, poverty and wealth, simultaneously. I send troops
to Peter's land to take it or its wealth for me, and then sell that
wealth on a "free" market to Paul,
who has no idea that his diamonds come from the death of child-soldiers
abroad. Poverty and war are outsourced to the frontier of
civilization, so that the rich urban center can enjoy wealth and peace. To
quote one of my favorite historians on the essence of peace: Auferre,
trucidare, rapere falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem
faciunt, pacem appellant.
In sum: wealth and peace exist because somewhere someone died
(often miserably and involuntarily, sometimes voluntarily or otherwise
nobly).
Showing posts with label agriculture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agriculture. Show all posts
Thursday, March 5, 2015
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Honest Economy
I have been reading a lot of Lewis Mumford lately (of which more anon), and as a result I have some more thoughts about solving the problems of civilization (income inequality, class warfare, starvation, imbalanced use of resources -- a whole constellation of ills which can be neatly characterized as "boom and bust," meaning gluttony for some and famine for others). Here are my thoughts (provisional thoughts, not definite conclusions):
(1) It is impossible to create a system in which there is no boom and bust. Nature goes by fits and starts. Animals live (and die) with feast and famine. Systems fluctuate. Stuff changes. Organisms adapt (or die, and dying is nothing to be paralytically afraid of: when it happens, it happens). Ever since the agricultural revolution, humanity en masse has been attempting to build a collective "too big to fail." We have constructed tribes, cities, city-states, federations, nations, states, and the modern nation-state -- increasingly bigger collectives offering a bigger "social buffer" between the individual organism and catastrophic failure (death). In every instance, nature has flouted us: our collectives could absorb some (relatively minor) shocks better by growing larger, but when they fell, they fell harder. My toddlers are little guys. They fall all the time, and they get hurt. Compared with them, I am large. I fall less. But when I really do fall, I get hurt much worse than they do (just as an elephant hurts worse than I when it falls). The fact of nature is that we are all going to fall (just as we are all going to die): the question is not how to avoid this eventuality, but how to optimize it (make falling -- and death -- as pleasant as possible). It is silly to design systems "too big to fail" when history shows us (repeatedly) that every system fails. Some systems do fail better than others, but it can be hard to see that fact when you are not looking for it (as many of us are not, because we are too busy looking for the impossible system that never fails).
(2) When it comes to dealing with failure (death) and success (not dying), people are (historically, understandably) irrational. If the negative driving humanity to civilization is fear of failure (death), the positive is love for life (not dying). While death (failure) is concrete, definite, and somewhat final, life (success) is not so easy to pin down. To put it another way, we all know more or less what too much failure looks like, but we don't have a clue what too much success would be. Another meal means more life. Does that mean we should never stop eating, given the chance? Historically, having things stockpiled can tide us over natural periods of famine: does this mean that bigger stockpiles are always better? A little sex keeps society happy and alive (staving off failure): does that mean we should do it all the time? These are serious questions that most people never ask -- they are too busy trying not to fail to wonder whether there might be such a thing as too much success (i.e. a point at which the bow of Heraclitus -- see frr. B48 and B51 DK -- converts success into failure). As a species, humanity has consistently pursued success as something good by definition (as though it were concrete, known, and pure, such that it never turns into failure and could never, of itself, produce anything bad). And we keep coming up against this brick wall (which we don't see, because fear of death is more powerful than any nagging doubts we might have about our love of life, which after all is the major obstacle keeping many of us from death, as we think).
(3) Irrational approaches to success cause problems. We stockpile way too much stuff, then fight over our piles (and decimate them, sometimes utterly destroying them). We value consumption for its own sake, and actively produce items whose "survival value" is nil (e.g. most plastic toys, sneakers with lights in them, luxury cars, most clothing items). We try to produce all the time, eat all the time, have sex all the time, etc. We are never satisfied (as a species): no matter how much we may have eaten at nature's table, we always want more (collectively). This is an understandable reaction, given our aversion to famine (failure, death), but that does not make it good (for us or the world). Perhaps the worst aspect of the whole process is that we are innately competitive and possessive, meaning that we naturally compete to see who can amass and keep the biggest pile of junk (as though this were the apex of success). Historically, this means that we give war a very high value. Today, we already know how to make nuclear bombs, but our collective knowledge of agriculture (particularly sustainable agriculture) remains pitiful (and in many cases has shrunk, meaning that as a civilization we know less about safe, sustainable cultivation than our forefathers).
(4) Solutions to the problems of civilization have to be organic. While there is nothing inevitable about the way we live today -- it could change tomorrow -- change is not as simple as electing the right politician or voting for the right referendum. The engines that drive the modern nation-state (as an institution) are engines of waste (overproduction, overconsumption) and war (which is the one thing the nation-state does well all over the world). Looking at the historical events that gave us the nation-state, it appears to me that we are unlikely to force it to change by means of sweeping legislative reform (vel sim). Laws recognize sea changes in human morality: they do not cause them. (Lawmakers are emphatically not the teachers of mankind, but poets, novelists, musicians, and other creators of culture -- including scientists -- can be.) Some people will disagree with me on this point, and will want to pursue legislative reform. That is fine. I do not oppose them. But I do not believe in their work, either. Or at the very least, I don't see that I have anything useful to contribute to it. What we need is a not another constitution, another parliament, another nation-state -- but a new way of life. We need a way of life that lets us cultivate success without courting disastrous failure. We need a way of life that emphasizes not "being to big to fail" (overproduction, overconsumption, war) but "being just big enough to survive inevitable failures" (intelligent production, consumption, and competition). We need new definitions of success, and we need to make those definitions so present in the public consciousness that people naturally get behind them (at which point, if we ever reach it, legislators will take note and change their books).
For me, the fourth point above is the most exciting. I think we already have many better definitions of success available throughout the world than appear reflected in the policies of most nation-states. I think many people are already "on the right side" and are working for what will be a better world (if the rest of us don't cut them short by blowing them up, and if nature decides to renew our lease on life). I think there are many good communities rising up that value intelligent approaches to success, failure, and resource management. I don't want to stifle those communities. I don't want to put any kind of damper on their approaches to the problem(s) I have outlined. I think a crucial part of outgrowing the irrational part of our human reaction to failure (death) will be learning to let go of the idea that there must be a single, unitary line in the sand to which all people everywhere must hew to make a better world. The ideal world contains many people, many ideas, many different kinds of communities, and many different solutions to the problems posed by life. It does not demand universal adherence to an imbalanced "good" that all must worship. It knows all kinds of goods, and it sees the reality that any good will go bad under certain circumstances. It frees people to recognize and adapt to their own unique situation in the dance of life that holds us all together. So, follow the beat of your own drummer -- just be sure to listen to him very, very carefully.
(1) It is impossible to create a system in which there is no boom and bust. Nature goes by fits and starts. Animals live (and die) with feast and famine. Systems fluctuate. Stuff changes. Organisms adapt (or die, and dying is nothing to be paralytically afraid of: when it happens, it happens). Ever since the agricultural revolution, humanity en masse has been attempting to build a collective "too big to fail." We have constructed tribes, cities, city-states, federations, nations, states, and the modern nation-state -- increasingly bigger collectives offering a bigger "social buffer" between the individual organism and catastrophic failure (death). In every instance, nature has flouted us: our collectives could absorb some (relatively minor) shocks better by growing larger, but when they fell, they fell harder. My toddlers are little guys. They fall all the time, and they get hurt. Compared with them, I am large. I fall less. But when I really do fall, I get hurt much worse than they do (just as an elephant hurts worse than I when it falls). The fact of nature is that we are all going to fall (just as we are all going to die): the question is not how to avoid this eventuality, but how to optimize it (make falling -- and death -- as pleasant as possible). It is silly to design systems "too big to fail" when history shows us (repeatedly) that every system fails. Some systems do fail better than others, but it can be hard to see that fact when you are not looking for it (as many of us are not, because we are too busy looking for the impossible system that never fails).
(2) When it comes to dealing with failure (death) and success (not dying), people are (historically, understandably) irrational. If the negative driving humanity to civilization is fear of failure (death), the positive is love for life (not dying). While death (failure) is concrete, definite, and somewhat final, life (success) is not so easy to pin down. To put it another way, we all know more or less what too much failure looks like, but we don't have a clue what too much success would be. Another meal means more life. Does that mean we should never stop eating, given the chance? Historically, having things stockpiled can tide us over natural periods of famine: does this mean that bigger stockpiles are always better? A little sex keeps society happy and alive (staving off failure): does that mean we should do it all the time? These are serious questions that most people never ask -- they are too busy trying not to fail to wonder whether there might be such a thing as too much success (i.e. a point at which the bow of Heraclitus -- see frr. B48 and B51 DK -- converts success into failure). As a species, humanity has consistently pursued success as something good by definition (as though it were concrete, known, and pure, such that it never turns into failure and could never, of itself, produce anything bad). And we keep coming up against this brick wall (which we don't see, because fear of death is more powerful than any nagging doubts we might have about our love of life, which after all is the major obstacle keeping many of us from death, as we think).
(3) Irrational approaches to success cause problems. We stockpile way too much stuff, then fight over our piles (and decimate them, sometimes utterly destroying them). We value consumption for its own sake, and actively produce items whose "survival value" is nil (e.g. most plastic toys, sneakers with lights in them, luxury cars, most clothing items). We try to produce all the time, eat all the time, have sex all the time, etc. We are never satisfied (as a species): no matter how much we may have eaten at nature's table, we always want more (collectively). This is an understandable reaction, given our aversion to famine (failure, death), but that does not make it good (for us or the world). Perhaps the worst aspect of the whole process is that we are innately competitive and possessive, meaning that we naturally compete to see who can amass and keep the biggest pile of junk (as though this were the apex of success). Historically, this means that we give war a very high value. Today, we already know how to make nuclear bombs, but our collective knowledge of agriculture (particularly sustainable agriculture) remains pitiful (and in many cases has shrunk, meaning that as a civilization we know less about safe, sustainable cultivation than our forefathers).
(4) Solutions to the problems of civilization have to be organic. While there is nothing inevitable about the way we live today -- it could change tomorrow -- change is not as simple as electing the right politician or voting for the right referendum. The engines that drive the modern nation-state (as an institution) are engines of waste (overproduction, overconsumption) and war (which is the one thing the nation-state does well all over the world). Looking at the historical events that gave us the nation-state, it appears to me that we are unlikely to force it to change by means of sweeping legislative reform (vel sim). Laws recognize sea changes in human morality: they do not cause them. (Lawmakers are emphatically not the teachers of mankind, but poets, novelists, musicians, and other creators of culture -- including scientists -- can be.) Some people will disagree with me on this point, and will want to pursue legislative reform. That is fine. I do not oppose them. But I do not believe in their work, either. Or at the very least, I don't see that I have anything useful to contribute to it. What we need is a not another constitution, another parliament, another nation-state -- but a new way of life. We need a way of life that lets us cultivate success without courting disastrous failure. We need a way of life that emphasizes not "being to big to fail" (overproduction, overconsumption, war) but "being just big enough to survive inevitable failures" (intelligent production, consumption, and competition). We need new definitions of success, and we need to make those definitions so present in the public consciousness that people naturally get behind them (at which point, if we ever reach it, legislators will take note and change their books).
For me, the fourth point above is the most exciting. I think we already have many better definitions of success available throughout the world than appear reflected in the policies of most nation-states. I think many people are already "on the right side" and are working for what will be a better world (if the rest of us don't cut them short by blowing them up, and if nature decides to renew our lease on life). I think there are many good communities rising up that value intelligent approaches to success, failure, and resource management. I don't want to stifle those communities. I don't want to put any kind of damper on their approaches to the problem(s) I have outlined. I think a crucial part of outgrowing the irrational part of our human reaction to failure (death) will be learning to let go of the idea that there must be a single, unitary line in the sand to which all people everywhere must hew to make a better world. The ideal world contains many people, many ideas, many different kinds of communities, and many different solutions to the problems posed by life. It does not demand universal adherence to an imbalanced "good" that all must worship. It knows all kinds of goods, and it sees the reality that any good will go bad under certain circumstances. It frees people to recognize and adapt to their own unique situation in the dance of life that holds us all together. So, follow the beat of your own drummer -- just be sure to listen to him very, very carefully.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Meditation on Death, and Nature
The following essay is a summation of thoughts I have had locked away inside for some time. Today they just came pouring out, in an online discussion about ethics (including the morality of humans killing animals and other life in order to feed ourselves).
I am not going to argue that death is always a bad thing. But this means that human death is also not always a bad thing. We cannot make it our practice to keep people alive at all costs, when the cost is destroying the possibility for future generations (of people and all the other life we need to survive).
I don't support "whatever it takes" to keep people from starving, since in my experience "whatever it takes" will amount ultimately to postponing useful death for useless death: nature culls what she cannot support; when we make her support what she would rather not without reservation, we eventually end up on the wrong side of the ledger she uses to maintain the balance that we all enjoy.
Ever since humans invented agriculture (and perhaps before), we have been pursuing the theory that individuals don't really matter. If I drop dead tomorrow, one of my 21 children will pick up the slack (and take my place on the field, in the factory, in the army, doing our bit to keep the human hive alive). Potato farmers in Ireland died not because of fungus, in my view, but because they were expendable resources (whose encroaching presence nature resisted: Ireland is not able to support infinite crowds of people; when we try to make it do so, it defends itself by putting out blights and such, culling the weak). This has always been Nature's way, and it will continue until we destroy her; as we speak, the ruthless goddess we all serve willy-nilly continues to pursue her savage justice, killing weak people all over the world. Trying to make her stop being so mean just throws fuel on the fire, if history is any judge: we beat a small plague so that we can have a bigger one. Smallpox, polio, and measles go down so that AIDS, superbugs, and "diseases of civilization" can take their place. There is no end in sight (for me: I am aware that some people see things differently, and I am content with that; this post is mostly just an exercise in verbalization for me; I have been keeping these thoughts inside too long).
I don't ask for mercy from Nature. I don't think I can control her. I don't think anyone can, really. The most we can realistically hope for, in my view, is finding a somewhat pleasant balance with Nature (by letting her have her own way as much as possible, with our contribution being a mitigation of her most painful "remedies" uncorked against us; let me die of AIDS, or some superbug, or diabetes, but at least I can say goodbye to my friends and go peacefully in a bed, with someone else there to close my eyes and hand my corpse back to the Mother (who resists my effort to last too long or leave too many descendants: she loves the individual, the small group, more than I do, perhaps).
If I could sum up my attitude in one sentence, it would be something like this: "Nature is beautiful, and she is trying to kill you; for your own good, you had better come quietly."
I am not going to argue that death is always a bad thing. But this means that human death is also not always a bad thing. We cannot make it our practice to keep people alive at all costs, when the cost is destroying the possibility for future generations (of people and all the other life we need to survive).
I don't support "whatever it takes" to keep people from starving, since in my experience "whatever it takes" will amount ultimately to postponing useful death for useless death: nature culls what she cannot support; when we make her support what she would rather not without reservation, we eventually end up on the wrong side of the ledger she uses to maintain the balance that we all enjoy.
Ever since humans invented agriculture (and perhaps before), we have been pursuing the theory that individuals don't really matter. If I drop dead tomorrow, one of my 21 children will pick up the slack (and take my place on the field, in the factory, in the army, doing our bit to keep the human hive alive). Potato farmers in Ireland died not because of fungus, in my view, but because they were expendable resources (whose encroaching presence nature resisted: Ireland is not able to support infinite crowds of people; when we try to make it do so, it defends itself by putting out blights and such, culling the weak). This has always been Nature's way, and it will continue until we destroy her; as we speak, the ruthless goddess we all serve willy-nilly continues to pursue her savage justice, killing weak people all over the world. Trying to make her stop being so mean just throws fuel on the fire, if history is any judge: we beat a small plague so that we can have a bigger one. Smallpox, polio, and measles go down so that AIDS, superbugs, and "diseases of civilization" can take their place. There is no end in sight (for me: I am aware that some people see things differently, and I am content with that; this post is mostly just an exercise in verbalization for me; I have been keeping these thoughts inside too long).
I don't ask for mercy from Nature. I don't think I can control her. I don't think anyone can, really. The most we can realistically hope for, in my view, is finding a somewhat pleasant balance with Nature (by letting her have her own way as much as possible, with our contribution being a mitigation of her most painful "remedies" uncorked against us; let me die of AIDS, or some superbug, or diabetes, but at least I can say goodbye to my friends and go peacefully in a bed, with someone else there to close my eyes and hand my corpse back to the Mother (who resists my effort to last too long or leave too many descendants: she loves the individual, the small group, more than I do, perhaps).
If I could sum up my attitude in one sentence, it would be something like this: "Nature is beautiful, and she is trying to kill you; for your own good, you had better come quietly."
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Cave Apes ... et Lupum
Alex Gibney. "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room." Jigsaw, 2006.
Andrew Ross Sorkin. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves. Viking, 2009. ISBN: 0670021253.
Daymon Smith. The Book of Mammon: A Book about a Book about the Corporation That Owns the Mormons. CreateSpace, 2010. ISBN: 1451553706.
All of the ideas represented in these sources have been important to me over the past several years as I have slowly started coming to grips with the way things work in the modern world (including my corner of it in the United States of America). If I could summarize what I have learned so far, I would say something like this.
Since the dawn of recorded history (sometime after the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago), human beings have been gathering in groups too large to function as small hunter-gatherer clans. Agriculture creates caloric surfeit, which leads to more people: eventually, there are so many people that we need a way of relating to others whom we do not know personally. So we come up with laws, by-laws, and loopholes (for the times when laws and by-laws don't apply, apply badly, or thwart us in something we really want to do, for reasons that may or may not be justifiable). In short, we invent corporations (governments, companies, mafias, and everything in between). Corporations, like people, create culture. They are themselves alive, after a fashion--with their own habits, their own ways of being, and their own desire to survive and thrive (no matter what: they are not necessarily hostile toward other corporations or people, but their primary goal is to survive for themselves: at the end of the day, bees exist to protect the hive). There is always a tension between the individual person and the corporation(s) to which he belongs. The individual is an ancient clansman, with habits, culture, and ideals suited for relating well to people he knows personally. The corporation subverts his clannish sense of honor and integrity--of necessity, since corporate business cannot happen unless people give up or at least suppress the kind of egalitarian individualism characteristic of hunter-gatherer clans. The beehive and the wolf-pack do not work alike: the bee has no life outside the hive (versus the proverbial lone wolf), and conformity to the "rule" of the hive is largely beyond contention (adult worker bees do not become queens, while a low-ranking wolf-cub might easily end up ruling the pack).
Human beings are both bee-like (in their corporate activity) and wolf-like (in their relationship with themselves and people that they know personally). Laws, by-laws, and such work for us the way pheromones and such work for bees (and other social insects that have to live in enormous groups, like ants). But underneath the blanket of corporate pheromones lurks the werewolf, desiring nothing more than the simple life of his less civilized, less socialized forefathers. When the hive breaks down, he comes out. When the hive decides that he is not worth saving, or that he must be sacrificed for the common good without what he recognizes as due process, he rebels--and all good servants of the hive rush to condemn him out of hand, for his existence constitutes a perpetual threat to their lovely Deseret. I grew up under the mistaken idea that the hive is only ever responsible for good things. "God save the Queen!" was a mantra that I lived by. For better or worse, however, I imbibed a lot of wolfish values to go with this apian ideal. At a relatively young age, I became committed to things like individual freedom, civil disobedience, and constructive criticism. As I grew older, I became more involved with the business of the hive. My grandparents gave me some stocks (and maybe a bond or two) for birthdays. I joined the Boy Scouts and wrote letters to congressmen. I committed myself body and soul to the Corporation of the President (more commonly known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), dedicating two years of my life to proselytize in northern Spain. I signed up for the draft. I enrolled in several universities and took degrees. But the more involved I became with learning and preaching apian values, the more troubled my allegiance to the Queen became. I saw her hurting people--people I knew, people that the wolf buried deep in me could not forget. These people were not always aware of how the Queen hurt them. Sometimes they welcomed the pain, as any good worker bee would. I sometimes wondered whether I was not horribly deviant for objecting to their suffering (particularly when they took it up so gladly).
At some point, the turning point of my life thus far, it dawned upon me that the Queen was not acting alone. She was not an almighty Other, living apart from ordinary humanity in some exalted state of being where moral decisions are clear and everyone always gets his just deserts. She was just another wolf like me, and she was using me to do her business with others. This was not bad in itself. We absolutely need things like law in order to deal with other people, and we have not managed to create a law whose sanctity requires no guard (no Queen). But now the Queen was using her position to get me to do things that did not feel right, things that the wolf in me found downright degrading. As an American and a Mormon and an academic, I knew I had certain "rights" (on paper), rights to which I had often given lip service in the past. I realized that I did not have to take all of the Queen's orders lying down. If she ordered me to do something that I did not approve, I could protest. I could refuse. I could stand for something I really believed in. In theory, I should even be able to do this without getting myself killed. (Modern society has progressed beyond the point of burning werewolves at the stake; today we adopt a more passive-aggressive approach, which on the whole I find much preferable. I have no objection to being ignored or shunned when the alternative is violent death.)
I still stand for many of the things that the Queen supports. But I take exception to a lot of what she does. I think her proselytizing is often bad business, whether it is Mormon missionaries going door to door or American soldiers meddling in the affairs of foreign countries. I am fortunate in that most of my academic advisors have refrained from using force or lies to have their way with me, but I am aware of others who have not been so lucky. I want to gag just about every time I hear any kind of political advertisement, no matter what party or candidate it represents: the man who would be Queen sends out pheromones that say, "I'm cool! Put your faith in me and it'll be OK!"-- expecting me to be a good little bee and take him seriously (letting someone else, probably some crackpot with a wolfish grin, do a serious background check on his bona fides). Don't get me wrong. I love the sound of words like faith, hope, and charity. But the wolf in me wants them to stand for something more than the Queen's latest scheme for fleecing me and using the proceeds to save her drones on Wall Street (not to mention the Ivy League or downtown Salt Lake City, or any other place where a few plutocrats sit in judgment over the lives of their "less fortunate" fellows, shifting them around like so many pieces of chattel without bothering to ask permission or doubt themselves or even tell the public what they are really doing).
My real problem with the Queen is not so much what she does as the manner in which she does it. She likes to hide. When making really important decisions, she always avoids public scrutiny (retreating into the boardroom with only her closest flunkies, who are always kept in strict confidence). She does not like talking to the company rank and file in anything other than rhetorical cliches ("I know this company is the best ever: we stand for hope, growth, and a better future!"), which sound hollow even when things are going well and ridiculous when they are not. Whenever anyone gets a whiff of her books being cooked (as they more or less always are), she puts a drone on the TV to deny it (and accuse short-sellers, terrorists, rogue scholars, or anti-Mormons of seeking to ruin her beehive with base slander). She never admits any wrong on her part, preferring to pass the buck to "bad" drones, whom she then offers for public humiliation: two recent examples are Dick Fuld (the only banker who was actually allowed to fail) and Randy Bott (who is currently taking heat for expressing out loud what some more powerful members of the Corporation of the President have long believed). John D. Lee is another example, and anyone who blames Bush or Obama solely for any of the decisions made by their army of handlers (not to mention incredibly powerful associates, like the chairman of the Federal Reserve) comes close to making them scapegoats as well. In short, she is not very good at being honest.
So transparency is not something she does, until she has to, and even then she fails to come fully clean, blaming one drone for a mistake that implicates all of them along with the culture of crazy groupthink that their mistress cultivates--a culture in which the greater good requires worker bees to make any sacrifice, no matter how great, to keep the company alive in its current state. (That is the Abrahamic sacrifice, right there. Do this awful thing because God demands it. Hold your nose, and it will all turn out right.) Unfortunately, sacrificing scapegoats does not always work. Wall Street is still teetering, even though Dick Fuld's Lehman Brothers went bust. (Other businesses also needed to go down, and the more we keep them alive on life support, the weaker our "recovery" is going to be, before we are once again in the emergency room.) LDS doctrine on negroes is still historically racist, even if the Corporation of the President has excoriated Randy Bott. The Democratic and Republican parties are both out of touch with reality, no matter whom the voting public elects to sit in the White House and hold press conferences. (Clinton? Gore? Bush? Obama? Santorum? Romney? These guys all look remarkably similar to me. All of them are plutocrats. All of them pander to me with words that sound nice. All of them are Queen's men.) Nazism was certainly bigger than Adolf Eichmann, who represents perhaps the most famous individual instance of the problem created by human hive culture. Suppose that some historical fluke had allowed us to extract him alone, try him solo, and punish him somehow for his callous attitude toward human life. Would Nazism then have been perfectly benign? Was Eichmann (or the other Adolf, for that matter) the only reason thousands of bureaucratic Germans went berserk in the mid-twentieth century? No. The problem is bigger than any one person. It comes from the hive. It comes from too many people burying the wolf too deep.
The wolf knows that there is no such thing as a greater good that does not do irreparable harm to somebody. The wolf knows that truth is always better than lies, if you want to run a business that does not go bust or trample on the people it aims to serve. (On the other hand, if you are a worker bee dealing with a cut-throat Queen looking for somebody to scapegoat, you had much better lie than tell the truth. The Queen always claims the right to lie to you as much as she wants: why does she throw a royal fit when someone pays her back in her own currency?) The wolf knows that only men without honor suppress truth that is not "useful" -- coaxing workers into the hive with promises that don't match reality. If you want to do business with the wolf, you have to stand for something yourself. You have to be more than a company drone. The wolf is not always polite. He does not always dress posh. His accent can be off-putting. He often has habits that others find distressing. But he is honest about them. He doesn't play the Queen's game of Jekyll and Hyde, wearing one face in public and another inside the boardroom. If he wants to lie to you, or take your cash (or the livelihood and life that that cash represents), or assassinate your character, then he will do it to your face. He won't stab you in the back and then come calling with some story about how the degradation is good for your character development (but bad for his, it would seem: why does the greater good always mean workers doing more for drones? the Queen hates questions like this). If he pays taxes, it is because he either fears retribution (e.g. from the IRS) or believes in the services that he actually securing (e.g. federal agencies, with everything they do for the common good). If he pays the Corporation of the President their 10% of his income, it is because he believes in what that corporation does: he wants his money feeding a church that just spent some $5 billion on the most expensive mall in the world (at $2500 per square foot, the City Creek Center in Salt Lake City is more expensive than the Burj Khalifa, which only cost $450 per square foot, or the much larger City Center of Las Vegas, which came to $655) while offering a mere $1.2 billion (or so) in humanitarian aid over the past 25 years (1985-2009). (Shopping is great! And we should give some change to the beggars, too. That's what Jesus would do, right? Some wolves probably believe this. The bees just bring their honey into the hive because that is what bees do. They don't care what happens to it afterward. That's someone else's job.)
The reason that we need to keep closer touch with our inner wolf is that the beehive is never as safe as the Queen wants it to seem. Eventually, it is going to topple over. (Every hive in history has fallen. Why should ours be any different? Others were no less convinced of their special invulnerability than we are, and look where that hubris took them.) When it does fall, we need people able and willing to put up a new one. We need people who know how to take risks, how to lose (without blowing up), and above all, how to connect with other people and convince them not to go berserk. It takes a wolf to talk a wolf down. Some of the Queen's top drones are just wolves patched over with a thin layer of beeswax: they are actually not as scary as those whose wolfish nature is wholly dormant. These jokers believe in their own mythology, to the point that they cannot accept correction. (Dick Fuld is one of these folks: to this day he thinks that he did nothing wrong, that his bankrupt business was fundamentally sound.) These are the guys who cannot see reason, no matter how it dresses up and dances for them. Drunk on their own righteousness, they will go to their graves refusing to doubt themselves no matter how ruthlessly reality tarnishes the fantasy that they are masters of the universe. ("Just give me a chance!" they tell whoever wants to hear, "This time, it will be great! Profits are going to go up!" The proper wolfish response is, "Whatever, dude.") Following such philosopher-kings is dangerous, to the individual (especially) and to the group as well. I hope there are less of them in power than I sometimes fear.
Andrew Ross Sorkin. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves. Viking, 2009. ISBN: 0670021253.
Daymon Smith. The Book of Mammon: A Book about a Book about the Corporation That Owns the Mormons. CreateSpace, 2010. ISBN: 1451553706.
All of the ideas represented in these sources have been important to me over the past several years as I have slowly started coming to grips with the way things work in the modern world (including my corner of it in the United States of America). If I could summarize what I have learned so far, I would say something like this.
Since the dawn of recorded history (sometime after the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago), human beings have been gathering in groups too large to function as small hunter-gatherer clans. Agriculture creates caloric surfeit, which leads to more people: eventually, there are so many people that we need a way of relating to others whom we do not know personally. So we come up with laws, by-laws, and loopholes (for the times when laws and by-laws don't apply, apply badly, or thwart us in something we really want to do, for reasons that may or may not be justifiable). In short, we invent corporations (governments, companies, mafias, and everything in between). Corporations, like people, create culture. They are themselves alive, after a fashion--with their own habits, their own ways of being, and their own desire to survive and thrive (no matter what: they are not necessarily hostile toward other corporations or people, but their primary goal is to survive for themselves: at the end of the day, bees exist to protect the hive). There is always a tension between the individual person and the corporation(s) to which he belongs. The individual is an ancient clansman, with habits, culture, and ideals suited for relating well to people he knows personally. The corporation subverts his clannish sense of honor and integrity--of necessity, since corporate business cannot happen unless people give up or at least suppress the kind of egalitarian individualism characteristic of hunter-gatherer clans. The beehive and the wolf-pack do not work alike: the bee has no life outside the hive (versus the proverbial lone wolf), and conformity to the "rule" of the hive is largely beyond contention (adult worker bees do not become queens, while a low-ranking wolf-cub might easily end up ruling the pack).
Human beings are both bee-like (in their corporate activity) and wolf-like (in their relationship with themselves and people that they know personally). Laws, by-laws, and such work for us the way pheromones and such work for bees (and other social insects that have to live in enormous groups, like ants). But underneath the blanket of corporate pheromones lurks the werewolf, desiring nothing more than the simple life of his less civilized, less socialized forefathers. When the hive breaks down, he comes out. When the hive decides that he is not worth saving, or that he must be sacrificed for the common good without what he recognizes as due process, he rebels--and all good servants of the hive rush to condemn him out of hand, for his existence constitutes a perpetual threat to their lovely Deseret. I grew up under the mistaken idea that the hive is only ever responsible for good things. "God save the Queen!" was a mantra that I lived by. For better or worse, however, I imbibed a lot of wolfish values to go with this apian ideal. At a relatively young age, I became committed to things like individual freedom, civil disobedience, and constructive criticism. As I grew older, I became more involved with the business of the hive. My grandparents gave me some stocks (and maybe a bond or two) for birthdays. I joined the Boy Scouts and wrote letters to congressmen. I committed myself body and soul to the Corporation of the President (more commonly known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), dedicating two years of my life to proselytize in northern Spain. I signed up for the draft. I enrolled in several universities and took degrees. But the more involved I became with learning and preaching apian values, the more troubled my allegiance to the Queen became. I saw her hurting people--people I knew, people that the wolf buried deep in me could not forget. These people were not always aware of how the Queen hurt them. Sometimes they welcomed the pain, as any good worker bee would. I sometimes wondered whether I was not horribly deviant for objecting to their suffering (particularly when they took it up so gladly).
At some point, the turning point of my life thus far, it dawned upon me that the Queen was not acting alone. She was not an almighty Other, living apart from ordinary humanity in some exalted state of being where moral decisions are clear and everyone always gets his just deserts. She was just another wolf like me, and she was using me to do her business with others. This was not bad in itself. We absolutely need things like law in order to deal with other people, and we have not managed to create a law whose sanctity requires no guard (no Queen). But now the Queen was using her position to get me to do things that did not feel right, things that the wolf in me found downright degrading. As an American and a Mormon and an academic, I knew I had certain "rights" (on paper), rights to which I had often given lip service in the past. I realized that I did not have to take all of the Queen's orders lying down. If she ordered me to do something that I did not approve, I could protest. I could refuse. I could stand for something I really believed in. In theory, I should even be able to do this without getting myself killed. (Modern society has progressed beyond the point of burning werewolves at the stake; today we adopt a more passive-aggressive approach, which on the whole I find much preferable. I have no objection to being ignored or shunned when the alternative is violent death.)
I still stand for many of the things that the Queen supports. But I take exception to a lot of what she does. I think her proselytizing is often bad business, whether it is Mormon missionaries going door to door or American soldiers meddling in the affairs of foreign countries. I am fortunate in that most of my academic advisors have refrained from using force or lies to have their way with me, but I am aware of others who have not been so lucky. I want to gag just about every time I hear any kind of political advertisement, no matter what party or candidate it represents: the man who would be Queen sends out pheromones that say, "I'm cool! Put your faith in me and it'll be OK!"-- expecting me to be a good little bee and take him seriously (letting someone else, probably some crackpot with a wolfish grin, do a serious background check on his bona fides). Don't get me wrong. I love the sound of words like faith, hope, and charity. But the wolf in me wants them to stand for something more than the Queen's latest scheme for fleecing me and using the proceeds to save her drones on Wall Street (not to mention the Ivy League or downtown Salt Lake City, or any other place where a few plutocrats sit in judgment over the lives of their "less fortunate" fellows, shifting them around like so many pieces of chattel without bothering to ask permission or doubt themselves or even tell the public what they are really doing).
My real problem with the Queen is not so much what she does as the manner in which she does it. She likes to hide. When making really important decisions, she always avoids public scrutiny (retreating into the boardroom with only her closest flunkies, who are always kept in strict confidence). She does not like talking to the company rank and file in anything other than rhetorical cliches ("I know this company is the best ever: we stand for hope, growth, and a better future!"), which sound hollow even when things are going well and ridiculous when they are not. Whenever anyone gets a whiff of her books being cooked (as they more or less always are), she puts a drone on the TV to deny it (and accuse short-sellers, terrorists, rogue scholars, or anti-Mormons of seeking to ruin her beehive with base slander). She never admits any wrong on her part, preferring to pass the buck to "bad" drones, whom she then offers for public humiliation: two recent examples are Dick Fuld (the only banker who was actually allowed to fail) and Randy Bott (who is currently taking heat for expressing out loud what some more powerful members of the Corporation of the President have long believed). John D. Lee is another example, and anyone who blames Bush or Obama solely for any of the decisions made by their army of handlers (not to mention incredibly powerful associates, like the chairman of the Federal Reserve) comes close to making them scapegoats as well. In short, she is not very good at being honest.
So transparency is not something she does, until she has to, and even then she fails to come fully clean, blaming one drone for a mistake that implicates all of them along with the culture of crazy groupthink that their mistress cultivates--a culture in which the greater good requires worker bees to make any sacrifice, no matter how great, to keep the company alive in its current state. (That is the Abrahamic sacrifice, right there. Do this awful thing because God demands it. Hold your nose, and it will all turn out right.) Unfortunately, sacrificing scapegoats does not always work. Wall Street is still teetering, even though Dick Fuld's Lehman Brothers went bust. (Other businesses also needed to go down, and the more we keep them alive on life support, the weaker our "recovery" is going to be, before we are once again in the emergency room.) LDS doctrine on negroes is still historically racist, even if the Corporation of the President has excoriated Randy Bott. The Democratic and Republican parties are both out of touch with reality, no matter whom the voting public elects to sit in the White House and hold press conferences. (Clinton? Gore? Bush? Obama? Santorum? Romney? These guys all look remarkably similar to me. All of them are plutocrats. All of them pander to me with words that sound nice. All of them are Queen's men.) Nazism was certainly bigger than Adolf Eichmann, who represents perhaps the most famous individual instance of the problem created by human hive culture. Suppose that some historical fluke had allowed us to extract him alone, try him solo, and punish him somehow for his callous attitude toward human life. Would Nazism then have been perfectly benign? Was Eichmann (or the other Adolf, for that matter) the only reason thousands of bureaucratic Germans went berserk in the mid-twentieth century? No. The problem is bigger than any one person. It comes from the hive. It comes from too many people burying the wolf too deep.
The wolf knows that there is no such thing as a greater good that does not do irreparable harm to somebody. The wolf knows that truth is always better than lies, if you want to run a business that does not go bust or trample on the people it aims to serve. (On the other hand, if you are a worker bee dealing with a cut-throat Queen looking for somebody to scapegoat, you had much better lie than tell the truth. The Queen always claims the right to lie to you as much as she wants: why does she throw a royal fit when someone pays her back in her own currency?) The wolf knows that only men without honor suppress truth that is not "useful" -- coaxing workers into the hive with promises that don't match reality. If you want to do business with the wolf, you have to stand for something yourself. You have to be more than a company drone. The wolf is not always polite. He does not always dress posh. His accent can be off-putting. He often has habits that others find distressing. But he is honest about them. He doesn't play the Queen's game of Jekyll and Hyde, wearing one face in public and another inside the boardroom. If he wants to lie to you, or take your cash (or the livelihood and life that that cash represents), or assassinate your character, then he will do it to your face. He won't stab you in the back and then come calling with some story about how the degradation is good for your character development (but bad for his, it would seem: why does the greater good always mean workers doing more for drones? the Queen hates questions like this). If he pays taxes, it is because he either fears retribution (e.g. from the IRS) or believes in the services that he actually securing (e.g. federal agencies, with everything they do for the common good). If he pays the Corporation of the President their 10% of his income, it is because he believes in what that corporation does: he wants his money feeding a church that just spent some $5 billion on the most expensive mall in the world (at $2500 per square foot, the City Creek Center in Salt Lake City is more expensive than the Burj Khalifa, which only cost $450 per square foot, or the much larger City Center of Las Vegas, which came to $655) while offering a mere $1.2 billion (or so) in humanitarian aid over the past 25 years (1985-2009). (Shopping is great! And we should give some change to the beggars, too. That's what Jesus would do, right? Some wolves probably believe this. The bees just bring their honey into the hive because that is what bees do. They don't care what happens to it afterward. That's someone else's job.)
The reason that we need to keep closer touch with our inner wolf is that the beehive is never as safe as the Queen wants it to seem. Eventually, it is going to topple over. (Every hive in history has fallen. Why should ours be any different? Others were no less convinced of their special invulnerability than we are, and look where that hubris took them.) When it does fall, we need people able and willing to put up a new one. We need people who know how to take risks, how to lose (without blowing up), and above all, how to connect with other people and convince them not to go berserk. It takes a wolf to talk a wolf down. Some of the Queen's top drones are just wolves patched over with a thin layer of beeswax: they are actually not as scary as those whose wolfish nature is wholly dormant. These jokers believe in their own mythology, to the point that they cannot accept correction. (Dick Fuld is one of these folks: to this day he thinks that he did nothing wrong, that his bankrupt business was fundamentally sound.) These are the guys who cannot see reason, no matter how it dresses up and dances for them. Drunk on their own righteousness, they will go to their graves refusing to doubt themselves no matter how ruthlessly reality tarnishes the fantasy that they are masters of the universe. ("Just give me a chance!" they tell whoever wants to hear, "This time, it will be great! Profits are going to go up!" The proper wolfish response is, "Whatever, dude.") Following such philosopher-kings is dangerous, to the individual (especially) and to the group as well. I hope there are less of them in power than I sometimes fear.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Jared Diamond. "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race." Discover Magazine, May 1997, 64-66.
I discovered Diamond's essay for the first time several years ago, while I was reading up on human health (in an ongoing quest to improve my own). I was intrigued, and eventually convinced, although I know that there are important points to be made against Diamond's pessimistic take on agricultural civilization (e.g. the arguments raised by Steven Pinker). That said, this post is going to be my version of Diamond (dumber, shorter, and with less references). I wrote the original version of the post in response to a friend, who forwarded an article lamenting recent decline in the birth rate among nations of the First World. I have seen several such articles, all of them implying that social upheaval (broken economies, crime, etc.) is owing to a lack of babies, a lack that these writers (if I understand them correctly) seem to ascribe to widespread laziness. My fellow First Worlders are not "putting out" as industriously as they should, and will be rewarded with the implosion of their padded social safety nets (as fewer kids exist to care for more and more parents, aged and helpless). I doubt this. Following the train of thought developed by Daniel Quinn, I further doubt that a reduction in human population worldwide would be a bad thing (necessarily: I am not saying that it would be great, either; it might, however, be natural -- as good or bad as rocks, waterfalls, and bacon). Here is what I wrote, with a little minimal editing.
I think population reduction is a healthy response to imbalance in resources. We simply don't have the goods to fuel endless growth (in people or the things they require to exist, things like food, water, shelter, clothes, entertainment -- unless we are willing to drastically reduce our expectations in these areas). We are adjusting to several environmental factors, e.g. globalization (and concomitant competition for increasingly scarce resources), climate change (which may or may not have anything significant to do with us), and technological revolution (which has addicted increasing numbers of us to luxuries like running water, food that someone else prepared, housing that someone else built, gadgets that someone else invented and mass-produced, and lifetimes spent working narrow careers with companies that don't go belly up).
Historically, the agricultural model for human survival has been to reproduce like insects: we made lots of people -- lots of sick, blind, stunted, relatively weak people -- and took over from the hunter-gatherers (who were healthier, sharper-sighted, taller, stronger, and even more mentally capable than we) by sheer force of numbers. One familiar episode in this ongoing saga is the displacement of the American Indians by boatloads of European riff-raff (whose guns, germs, and steel paved the way for them to become a dominant force worldwide). Indians were healthier (as individuals), more sustainable (as communities), and less numerous than the immigrants who replaced them. We were the mites and moths and hornets who overran their beehive. Now, it's our turn to be overrun. Maybe the result will be just another opportunistic parasitism, but I don't know. I get the feeling that other societies are collapsing too: people are living shorter and sicker lives all over the world; standard methods of producing the energy modern civilization requires to exist are failing; economies are imploding (not just in Europe and North America: India, China, and their neighbors are also looking less than robust these days). I think we may just have to learn to live with less; and that may mean that there will be less of us. Our old methods for solving these dilemmas are (1) plague and (2) wars: the last century saw us pushing (1) away while embracing (2) with all our might. I think we might be due for a switch, with (1) returning (in the form of rampant diseases of civilization: diabetes, syndrome X, autoimmune disorders, obesity, failure to thrive, infertility, heart disease, stroke, cancer, etc.) and (2) fading (as we stagger away from a century of vicious fighting). I could be wrong, of course.
I discovered Diamond's essay for the first time several years ago, while I was reading up on human health (in an ongoing quest to improve my own). I was intrigued, and eventually convinced, although I know that there are important points to be made against Diamond's pessimistic take on agricultural civilization (e.g. the arguments raised by Steven Pinker). That said, this post is going to be my version of Diamond (dumber, shorter, and with less references). I wrote the original version of the post in response to a friend, who forwarded an article lamenting recent decline in the birth rate among nations of the First World. I have seen several such articles, all of them implying that social upheaval (broken economies, crime, etc.) is owing to a lack of babies, a lack that these writers (if I understand them correctly) seem to ascribe to widespread laziness. My fellow First Worlders are not "putting out" as industriously as they should, and will be rewarded with the implosion of their padded social safety nets (as fewer kids exist to care for more and more parents, aged and helpless). I doubt this. Following the train of thought developed by Daniel Quinn, I further doubt that a reduction in human population worldwide would be a bad thing (necessarily: I am not saying that it would be great, either; it might, however, be natural -- as good or bad as rocks, waterfalls, and bacon). Here is what I wrote, with a little minimal editing.
I think population reduction is a healthy response to imbalance in resources. We simply don't have the goods to fuel endless growth (in people or the things they require to exist, things like food, water, shelter, clothes, entertainment -- unless we are willing to drastically reduce our expectations in these areas). We are adjusting to several environmental factors, e.g. globalization (and concomitant competition for increasingly scarce resources), climate change (which may or may not have anything significant to do with us), and technological revolution (which has addicted increasing numbers of us to luxuries like running water, food that someone else prepared, housing that someone else built, gadgets that someone else invented and mass-produced, and lifetimes spent working narrow careers with companies that don't go belly up).
Historically, the agricultural model for human survival has been to reproduce like insects: we made lots of people -- lots of sick, blind, stunted, relatively weak people -- and took over from the hunter-gatherers (who were healthier, sharper-sighted, taller, stronger, and even more mentally capable than we) by sheer force of numbers. One familiar episode in this ongoing saga is the displacement of the American Indians by boatloads of European riff-raff (whose guns, germs, and steel paved the way for them to become a dominant force worldwide). Indians were healthier (as individuals), more sustainable (as communities), and less numerous than the immigrants who replaced them. We were the mites and moths and hornets who overran their beehive. Now, it's our turn to be overrun. Maybe the result will be just another opportunistic parasitism, but I don't know. I get the feeling that other societies are collapsing too: people are living shorter and sicker lives all over the world; standard methods of producing the energy modern civilization requires to exist are failing; economies are imploding (not just in Europe and North America: India, China, and their neighbors are also looking less than robust these days). I think we may just have to learn to live with less; and that may mean that there will be less of us. Our old methods for solving these dilemmas are (1) plague and (2) wars: the last century saw us pushing (1) away while embracing (2) with all our might. I think we might be due for a switch, with (1) returning (in the form of rampant diseases of civilization: diabetes, syndrome X, autoimmune disorders, obesity, failure to thrive, infertility, heart disease, stroke, cancer, etc.) and (2) fading (as we stagger away from a century of vicious fighting). I could be wrong, of course.
Since this is a topic of recurring interest to me, there will be more about it on the blog. I am not done with it yet by any means.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Modern Apocalypse
"Prophets of Doom." History Channel, 2011.
As I prepare to hunt for a job puttering around like most academics, it is interesting to take a look at the big picture of what is going on in society. The world as we know it is crashing, as it always has, only it is bigger now, so it falls harder. I hope I can prepare myself to live in a world without all the things I depend on subconsciously.
I wish universities studied this stuff. I feel like this is really what I am interested in. What I really want to learn is how to live happily like the people in "less developed" economies, which are more sustainable than the cancerous, obese behemoth that is the imploding First World. My research into antiquity is an attempt to get back to something better than modern civilization, without making the same mistakes that were made. I want to return to the Bronze Age (or earlier), without being stupid the same way my ancestors were back then.
My journey into the past is also a journey into the future. It is not a "restoration" (in the Mormon sense) really; it is more of a cautious reformation. There is no Eden to return to. But there is a purgatory before the modern hell, and right now that purgatory is looking like the place to build if you want to last.
As I prepare to hunt for a job puttering around like most academics, it is interesting to take a look at the big picture of what is going on in society. The world as we know it is crashing, as it always has, only it is bigger now, so it falls harder. I hope I can prepare myself to live in a world without all the things I depend on subconsciously.
I wish universities studied this stuff. I feel like this is really what I am interested in. What I really want to learn is how to live happily like the people in "less developed" economies, which are more sustainable than the cancerous, obese behemoth that is the imploding First World. My research into antiquity is an attempt to get back to something better than modern civilization, without making the same mistakes that were made. I want to return to the Bronze Age (or earlier), without being stupid the same way my ancestors were back then.
My journey into the past is also a journey into the future. It is not a "restoration" (in the Mormon sense) really; it is more of a cautious reformation. There is no Eden to return to. But there is a purgatory before the modern hell, and right now that purgatory is looking like the place to build if you want to last.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
In Search of Human Ethics
Marvin Harris. Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures. 1977. New York: Vintage, 1991. ISBN 067972849X.
Daniel Quinn. The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. New York: Bantam, 1996. ISBN 0553379011.
Losing the perspective brought by Mormonism meant losing the ostensible purpose of my life ("I am here to serve God and his church in whatever way I may decide and/or church leaders may require"). When I no longer had this as my ultimate "reason" for everything (the final "because" to the toddler's "why?"), I had to take a step back and ask myself why I did things. What was I trying to do? What were communities (like the church) trying to do? Part of my faith crisis involved looking intensely at human communities and discovering that they exist to perpetuate themselves (not fixed moral codes); this became problematic when I realized that the church was no different: its leaders said what they said, did what they did, so that we would all keep on "keeping on" as members, regardless of what Joseph Smith really said or did (maybe he was a bit crazy, but that's not worth looking at too carefully), or what the reality of man's destiny was (your purpose is to build our society with work and offspring: don't get distracted by other stuff). Unfortunately for me, I really cared about these things (especially the latter), and found I had little interest in the LDS church without them. So I was left wondering why people do what people do (i.e. create societies that must go on and--ideally--get bigger to the point that they fill the earth)?
Enter Marvin Harris. My interest in human fitness led me eventually to the "paleo diet," the premise of which was that the agricultural revolution that occurred some 10,000 years ago paved the way for the introduction of many anti-nutrients into the human diet, leading ultimately to the set of "civilized" diseases currently plaguing much of the world (metabolic syndrome, diabetes, auto-immune disorders). Knocking around the Internet in search of "paleo" information to flesh out this thesis, I found the immense website of Ricardo Carvalho, which is named after Harris' book title (translated into Portuguese). (Carvalho also recommends the book on his extensive Amazon reading list, which I have consulted several times when searching for good reads.) I was intrigued and checked the book out from my local university library. Its thesis is relatively simple: human societies shape their behavior to match the quality of the resources available to them, changing behavior as the surrounding environment succeeds (or fails) to supply what they need to survive (adequate food, shelter, and reproductive possibilities). Most interesting is his explanation of Aztec cannibalism, which he traces back to a chronic lack of animal protein (a precious resource): in the absence of domesticated herds or wild game, the Aztecs were reduced to eating other people. They did not eat people because they were any more "wicked" than others; what they needed was not "repentance" but food. Contrary to everything I would have thought in my life as a Mormon, their problem was not one to be remedied by civilization (the "gift of the gods"). Instead, civilization (and the exploding population that has always accompanied it since the agricultural revolution) was the problem (Harris, Cannibals and Kings, 165):
Harris' thesis was a compelling analysis of human community, for me, but I was left rather stranded by it: after several thousand years in living in constant debt (to the earth, other species, and ourselves), how are we supposed to transform ourselves back into productive mode (a way of living that does not inevitably kill everything around us)? Harris was the doctor who informed me that I had an incurable disease, dissecting the disorder minutely when all I could really hear was "incurable." In addition, I now had way too much "technical" information to share whenever people asked me about my increasingly odd opinions regarding diet, religion, and politics. A simple question deserves a simple answer, not a litany of jargon. I had a worldview that made sense to me logically. What I needed now was a simple narrative for relating to it more personally (and pro-actively) and sharing it with others: in short, I needed a myth. Enter Daniel Quinn.
Quinn tells an engaging story, a fictional account of a modern Catholic priest sent to Europe to spy on someone who may be the Antichrist. Upon making contact, the priest discovers that the Antichrist (a mysterious character called "B") is preaching against civilization (the agricultural revolution and everything that has followed from it), which he regards as a disease inasmuch as it reduces complex, beautiful reality (life) to simple, ugly reality (death). The book is extremely interesting (with an ending which I will not give away), and I will not attempt to summarize it here. Instead, let me offer one of my favorite passages (Quinn, The Story of B, 159-161):
Quinn's solution to the problem of civilization posed by Harris (and Malthus) is conceptually very simple. Stop increasing human food supply every year. We already produce more than enough for everyone; our problem is not lack, but something else (the inevitable inequality in distribution created by civilization). Quinn illustrates his solution with a story about mice. A population of mice fed more than it needs to survive always increases in number (even as some mice starve to death because others don't let them at the food), while a population fed no more than it requires to survive inevitably (without any form of birth control whatsoever) remains stable, replacing itself without growing any larger. To top things off, you can slowly cut down the overall population of the mice by gradually decreasing food supply, without starving any of them (Quinn, The Story of B, 300-301):
Daniel Quinn. The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. New York: Bantam, 1996. ISBN 0553379011.
Losing the perspective brought by Mormonism meant losing the ostensible purpose of my life ("I am here to serve God and his church in whatever way I may decide and/or church leaders may require"). When I no longer had this as my ultimate "reason" for everything (the final "because" to the toddler's "why?"), I had to take a step back and ask myself why I did things. What was I trying to do? What were communities (like the church) trying to do? Part of my faith crisis involved looking intensely at human communities and discovering that they exist to perpetuate themselves (not fixed moral codes); this became problematic when I realized that the church was no different: its leaders said what they said, did what they did, so that we would all keep on "keeping on" as members, regardless of what Joseph Smith really said or did (maybe he was a bit crazy, but that's not worth looking at too carefully), or what the reality of man's destiny was (your purpose is to build our society with work and offspring: don't get distracted by other stuff). Unfortunately for me, I really cared about these things (especially the latter), and found I had little interest in the LDS church without them. So I was left wondering why people do what people do (i.e. create societies that must go on and--ideally--get bigger to the point that they fill the earth)?
Enter Marvin Harris. My interest in human fitness led me eventually to the "paleo diet," the premise of which was that the agricultural revolution that occurred some 10,000 years ago paved the way for the introduction of many anti-nutrients into the human diet, leading ultimately to the set of "civilized" diseases currently plaguing much of the world (metabolic syndrome, diabetes, auto-immune disorders). Knocking around the Internet in search of "paleo" information to flesh out this thesis, I found the immense website of Ricardo Carvalho, which is named after Harris' book title (translated into Portuguese). (Carvalho also recommends the book on his extensive Amazon reading list, which I have consulted several times when searching for good reads.) I was intrigued and checked the book out from my local university library. Its thesis is relatively simple: human societies shape their behavior to match the quality of the resources available to them, changing behavior as the surrounding environment succeeds (or fails) to supply what they need to survive (adequate food, shelter, and reproductive possibilities). Most interesting is his explanation of Aztec cannibalism, which he traces back to a chronic lack of animal protein (a precious resource): in the absence of domesticated herds or wild game, the Aztecs were reduced to eating other people. They did not eat people because they were any more "wicked" than others; what they needed was not "repentance" but food. Contrary to everything I would have thought in my life as a Mormon, their problem was not one to be remedied by civilization (the "gift of the gods"). Instead, civilization (and the exploding population that has always accompanied it since the agricultural revolution) was the problem (Harris, Cannibals and Kings, 165):
Mesoamerica was left at the end of the ice age in a more depleted condition, as far as animal resources are concerned, than any other region. The steady growth of the population and the intensification of production [two things that always come with civilization in the wake of the agricultural revolution] under the coercive managerial influence of the classic highland empires virtually eliminated animal flesh from the diet of ordinary people. The ruling class and their retainers naturally continued to enjoy such delicacies as dogs, turkeys, ducks, deer, rabbits, and fish. But, as Harner notes, the commoners--despite the expansion of the chinampas [floating gardens]--were often reduced to eating the algae skimmed off the surface of Lake Texcoco. While corn and beans in sufficient quantity could provide all of the essential amino acids, recurrent production crises throughout the fifteenth century meant that protein ratios were frequently depressed to levels which would have biologically justified a strong craving for meat. In addition, fats of all sorts were perennially in short supply.Mesoamerican cannibalism was just one extreme example of the kind of crisis of availability that has defined human civilization from the agricultural revolution. (As an aside, the astute reader will notice that this protein-starved Mesoamerica looks very different from anything in the Book of Mormon, whose theories of cannibalism and "Lamanite" life in general are clearly folklore from nineteenth-century New England.) The crisis works as follows: (1) a society produces crops (usually some kind of grain, i.e. grass seed); (2) grain production allows for a higher birth rate; (3) more numbers provide the resources necessary to take over more land, dispossessing people and animals living in a less "civilized" (and more ecologically sustainable) way; (4) the cost of having more people is that many are under-nourished, especially as the rest begin putting major dents in the best non-agricultural food sources available; (5) in the end, society is either saved by technological revolution (a farming break-though that allows us to sustain the burgeoning population) or falls prey to warfare (which agriculture fosters by creating hordes of people) or famine (which agriculture fosters by creating hordes of people). Basically, Thomas Malthus was right (though he did not know that grain is poisonous to humans individually as well as collectively).
Harris' thesis was a compelling analysis of human community, for me, but I was left rather stranded by it: after several thousand years in living in constant debt (to the earth, other species, and ourselves), how are we supposed to transform ourselves back into productive mode (a way of living that does not inevitably kill everything around us)? Harris was the doctor who informed me that I had an incurable disease, dissecting the disorder minutely when all I could really hear was "incurable." In addition, I now had way too much "technical" information to share whenever people asked me about my increasingly odd opinions regarding diet, religion, and politics. A simple question deserves a simple answer, not a litany of jargon. I had a worldview that made sense to me logically. What I needed now was a simple narrative for relating to it more personally (and pro-actively) and sharing it with others: in short, I needed a myth. Enter Daniel Quinn.
Quinn tells an engaging story, a fictional account of a modern Catholic priest sent to Europe to spy on someone who may be the Antichrist. Upon making contact, the priest discovers that the Antichrist (a mysterious character called "B") is preaching against civilization (the agricultural revolution and everything that has followed from it), which he regards as a disease inasmuch as it reduces complex, beautiful reality (life) to simple, ugly reality (death). The book is extremely interesting (with an ending which I will not give away), and I will not attempt to summarize it here. Instead, let me offer one of my favorite passages (Quinn, The Story of B, 159-161):
Let me begin with the great secret of the animist life, Louis. When other people look for God, you'll see them automatically look up into the sky. They really imagine that, if there's a God, he's far, far away--remote and untouchable. I don't know how they can bear living with such a God, Louis. I really don't. But they're not our problem. I've told you that, among the animists of the world, not a single one can tell you the number of the gods. They don't know the number and neither do I...What's important to us is not how many they are but where they are. If you go among the Alawa of Australia or the Bushmen of Africa or the Navajo of North America or the Onabasulu of New Guinea--or any other of hundreds of Leaver peoples [as opposed to Takers, the agriculturalists] I could name--you'll soon find out where the gods are. The gods are here...I mean here. Among the Alawa: here. Among the Bushmen: here. Among the Navajo: here. Among the Kreen-Akrore: here. Among the Onabasulu: here...
This isn't a theological statement they're making. The Alawa are not saying to the Bushmen, 'Your gods are frauds, the true gods are our gods.' The Kreen-Akrore are not saying to the Onabasulu, 'You have no gods, only we have gods. Nothing of the kind. They're saying, 'Our place is a sacred place, like no other in the world.' They would never think of looking elsewhere to find the gods. The gods are to be found among them--living where they live. The god is what animates their place. That's what a god is. A god is that strange force that makes every place a place--a place like no other in the world. A god is the fire that burns in this place and no other--and no place in which the fire burns is devoid of god. All of this should explain to you why I don't reject the name that was given to us by an outsider. Even though it was bestowed with a false understanding of our vision, the name animism captures a glimmer of it.
Unlike the God whose name beings with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis. Can you imagine that? Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb--silenced, driven away, enfeebled. Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin. Feeble, but not dead, not wholly extinguished. Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days the place will be pulsing with life again. Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons. The god knows how to take care of that place. It will never be what it was before--but nothing is ever what it was before. It doesn't need to be what it was before. You'll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived. This is nonsense. What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time. There is no such form and never will be any such form. Everything here is on the way. Everything here is in process.
Quinn's solution to the problem of civilization posed by Harris (and Malthus) is conceptually very simple. Stop increasing human food supply every year. We already produce more than enough for everyone; our problem is not lack, but something else (the inevitable inequality in distribution created by civilization). Quinn illustrates his solution with a story about mice. A population of mice fed more than it needs to survive always increases in number (even as some mice starve to death because others don't let them at the food), while a population fed no more than it requires to survive inevitably (without any form of birth control whatsoever) remains stable, replacing itself without growing any larger. To top things off, you can slowly cut down the overall population of the mice by gradually decreasing food supply, without starving any of them (Quinn, The Story of B, 300-301):
Someone says, here's what to do. Yesterday five hundred kilos of food went into the cage. Today we'll reduce that by a kilo. Oh no, another objects. A kilo is too much. Let's reduce it by a quarter of a kilo. So that's what they do. Four hundred ninety-nine and three quarters kilos of food go into the cage. Tension in the lab as everyone waits for food riots and famine--but of course there are no food riots and no famine. Among sixty-four thousand mice, a quarter of a kilo of food is like a flake of dandruff apiece. Tomorrow four hundred ninety-nine and a half kilos of food go into the cage. Still no food riots and no famine. This procedure is followed for a thousand days--and not once is there a food riot or a famine. After a thousand days only two hundred fifty kilos of food are going into the cage--and guess what? There are no longer sixty-four thousand mice in the cage. There are only thirty-two thousand. Not a miracle--just a demonstration of the laws of ecology. A decline in food availability has been answered by a decline in population. As always. Semper et ubique. Nothing to do with riots. Nothing to do with famine. Just the normal response of a feeder population to the availability of food.To me, this looks like the most painless way to accomplish what we are already doing anyway. If we do not find some way to keep our civilized growth in check, we will run out of food eventually. We can wait for nature to fix that problem with diseases, real famine (sudden withdrawal of all sustenance), or something worse, or we can put ourselves on a diet (and get back to something like health: I have a feeling Quinn is right to say that involves a radical transformation in the way we live, the things we value, and ultimately what it means to be human). This does not mean that we should all begin living in caves, hunting wild animals for food, or going naked all the time (though some of us might choose to do this: good luck to them--they'll need it in spades). What we need is a way forward, a road that leads beyond agricultural civilization rather than back to whatever existed before it. Quinn provides a very easily accessible account of the best route I have found to date, proving that all other alternatives are really just so many ways of ignoring the same problem: civilization, or modern life as we know it since the agricultural revolution, is killing us, de-stabilizing our moral values, destroying our homes, and inexorably taking away with one hand what it pretends to offer with the other.
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