The Only Human Crisis
Various pundits have been putting forward candidates for the big human crisis confronting us. They all agree that something is, but can’t settle on one or another.
Throw a dart. Is it human rights? Terrorism? How about “the economy?” Not many people talking about the fisheries, though you could make a good case for a collapse of the ocean biosphere. Or how about one that effects us all — climate change?
The crisis facing humanity is not any of those. The crisis is “waking up.”
We have slept over the past thousands of years, with our little dreams, our amateur class plays of wars and histories and arts. While all this went on, our mother earth uncomplainingly fed and washed and cleaned up after us.
So long as the “house” was big enough and we were small enough so our messes could be absorbed, we have had a lot of room to do what children do – learn and grow and break things. (I have a theory that breaking, burning and cutting things is a indispensable part of childhood. How else can you learn the properties of materials like sticks and vases and your little sister’s hair?)
Well, the clumsy, drooling baby stage is over. The kid’s gotten to be big and strong, destructive, creative, with the flashes of insight and compassion that presage adulthood. The baby is now a teen. Be afraid.
The teen years are the time of maximum health and energy, combined with intelligence, ingenuity, and the tendency to make disastrous decisions. Research has shown that the human brain doesn’t really come fully online until the early 20s. We’re not there yet, believe me.
Luckily, although our species as a whole shows many teen-like qualities at the moment, quite a number of individuals have progressed into adulthood. We know what it looks like. This goes for nations also. In particular, the Scandinavian countries seem to have a grip on the concept of adulthood.
Don’t kid yourself that we will evolve out of this teen stage. As a species, biologically we have scarcely chipped our way out of the eggshell. Instead, the genius of our species is to devise and put in place social structures that preserve a shared memory and channel us towards some behaviors and preferences, and away from others. This genius, unfolding some 40,000 years ago, has allowed us to blanket the world with our species in every niche in every continent except the Antarctic. It’s the equivalent of the baby growing up into a teen who can raid the fridge and enjoy the entire house, coming and going as he pleases.
The last step to adulthood has nothing to do with claiming the privileges of adulthood while still assuming that mom will keep the freezer full and your clothes washed and folded. As we have gotten bigger, mom has got littler. Compared to us, she’s so shrunken now she can hardly keep up with our messes – and man, we have gotten messy.
Here’s our challenge. We need to grow up, and grow up fast, and it has to be done through social structures, ideas, and vigilant consciousness of all the ways it can go wrong. It will require embracing limits and looking far into the future. It will require wars, of some sort, to keep the juvenile delinquents from taking over the house, eating all the pizza and burning the place down in an angst-ridden snit. It will require seeing truly, acting ruthlessly, and living modestly. And damned if I know how we will manage it.
Moving our species smoothly into adulthood will mostly look boring. But taking the path of perpetual teenhood, though it would be very exciting indeed, can easily leave us with no home, just a smoking ruin without even any hot dogs or marshmallows.
the human race is almost finished
Hey this blog is very interesting. very funny…Humain crisis..
Income Tax Preparation
Row row row your boat?
Mixed metaphors?
Humans are waking from a collective dream?
“We” are in a collective teen stage?
Are you sure that we will “evolve” out of the teen stage, and not grow out of it?
Who really knows all that much about evolution or development anyway?
Were the ancient Greeks, Romans, Indians et al. really intellectual and cultural infants?
“In particular, the Scandinavian countries seem to have a grip on the concept of adulthood.”
Adult conclusion: sanctimonious, supercilious, retarded.
noni
as you can see above, we are not out of the drooling stage yet. i would offer, subject to learned opinion that in the past societies were more or less run by grownups who did what they had to do by their lights…. they did not forsee the effects of a huge human population on a planet with limited resources.
but today we seem to ruled by adolescents. consider ken’s claim to fame. or the presiden’t advisors who are still “the smartest kids in the class” without any need to actually understand the subjects they make such brilliant superficial answers about. we don’t need to mention the senators, who have grown but not evolved.
I would have to agree with Mausa. 9/11 was one opportunity for us to grow up and yet leadership implored US that the best thing one could do in the aftermath was “shop.” Unfortunately solely based upon the argument of GDP, he was right. Because for GDP, which is by definition a zero sum game that rewards individual behavior at the expense of greater mankind, to work we must behave like pagans in the marketplace and for all intents and purposes mindlessly consume things willy-nilly. And over the course of the past sixty some odd years “we the people” have been conditioned to behave that way. To paraphrase Rousseau, our needs have been fragmented into elements, real needs have been made indistinct from false needs, and emotions have become ambiguous states. In such an environment mass maturity cannot exist.
As a sidenote: People who derogate in such a manner tend to use derogatives that they most fear being…At least in this case, the usage only further buttresses this post’s arguments.
Americans think we can fix anything. Whatever is wrong with some other country, we can fix it by selling them movies or buying their oil or taking over their government thereby saving them from themselves. What’s wrong with our country we will solve by abolishing whatever it is, denouncing it from the pulpit, or declaring war on it with annual off-budget costs in the trillions. We are quite content to think we have solved a problem when we make it a capital crime. Well, depends on what you mean by solve, doesn’t it?
Ms. Noni points out that all of this infantile, destructive behavior is destroying us and the world. This is surely true now on a larger scale than ever before. But, this is a process that began almost as soon as civilization began. Two thousand years ago, people were well on the way to turning the Garden of Eden into a desert. They cut down the cedars of Lebanon, dug all the gold out of Spain, and exhausted the arable land in Italy. They did all this in what amounts to a nanosecond in geological time. None of this is surprising. If it weren’t our species, it would be another.
We are never going to grow up as a species. Ain’t gonna happen if it hasn’t already. We have to learn that there is no recipe for salvation of the earth, our souls, or anything else. We just have to do the right thing, one problem at a time, for as long as we continue as a species. Alright, folks. Nothing to see here. Time to move along.
Yes, but are you talking geologic time.
nancy
of course i agree with you, but one caveat
when you denounce denouncing from the pulpit you are denouncing from the pulpit.
granted the prevalence of false prophets, the pulpit has probably done more in the past ten thousand years to restrict human (animal) excess than any other single institution.
who was it, after all, who said “you cannot serve two masters… god and mammon.” i am not sure (previous commenter) that what has changed in the past sixty years has been the propaganda to cosume… as much as it has been the at last the opportunity to consume for the most of us. there has always been an evolutionary advantage to take what you can get now because you don’t know what tomorrow may bring. only now we do have a pretty shrewd idea of what tomorrow may bring, and we need to school ourselves to go back to the disciplined consumption that used to be preached from the pulpit. our friends on the right have some misgivings about this that need to be taken seriously…. and more likely would be if they would just learn to talk sanely about it.
Nancy opined: “…We are never going to grow up as a species. Ain’t gonna happen…”
And in fact we haven’t changed much as a species if at all, in the last 100,000 years. The hardware isn’t going to change very quickly, that’s the bad news.
Now for the good news — the software — ah, that’s where we excel. Stories, laws, holidays and habits, schooling, things revered and things despised, are all powerful variables. They are easily changed (that’s part of the problem) created, built up and undermined. But in a lightning flash of time, a generation or less, they can become “what we’ve always done.” Look at people talking about the “olden days” — which days are only 80 years back.
A big part of our victory will require we see the predictable outcomes of different pieces of social software, and then choose accordingly. Changes to social/financial software has steeried the US away from the accepted norms of the 50s, 60s and early 70s, and into a system that strips citizens of their intelligence and their wealth. Those who profit from these changes understand this perfectly well. We should, too.
As a species, we have been on this road to awareness, moving by fits and starts, for a few thousand years. But now it’s important to move just a little faster.
We like to think of ourselves as the world’s dominant species. However, in ecological terms the dominant species of an ecosystem lives in energy balance with its environment, something that we do not do. Of course, such a species is ecologically mature. So to call us teenagers is not a bad metaphor.
Sooner or later we will come into energy balance with our environment, assuming that we survive. Our ancestors lived in closer balance with their environment than we do, so we have the ability to do so. However, unless we make conscious efforts to do so, our descendants will live in a much more depleted and polluted environment than we have now.
As for evolution, we are already seeing how humans are evolving in tandem with society. For instance, many humans have evolved to digest cow’s milk. There is no reason to think that we will cease to evolve, and to evolve to fit the environment as we alter it.
not really…did you read the post? im talking about an immediate need for the human species to replaced by a superior species…
I recommend this Alternet piece on “abuse syndrome”. I think it’s a bit closer to the bone than analogies based on growing up.
Ack. Naked Capitalism
this is what im talking about: the moral imperative of our future evolution
Noni,
I thought you were being a Canadian,
a
Pardon? Not sure what you’re saying here.
Min: …in ecological terms the dominant species of an ecosystem lives in energy balance with its environment, something that we do not do…
Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?
This sounds a lot like Edenic assumptions of equilibrium — “climax forests” and so on — that most ecological scientists I know have been moving away from for ~40 years.
What does it predict (retrodict, actually) that doesn’t follow equally well from the assumption that all species grab as much energy and biomass flux as they can — with apparent “balance” as a local and transient eddy?