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It is somewhat difficult to characterize the prevalent form of human awareness because it itself is our frame of reference and base of comparison against which alternative conformations of consciousness are measured. Certain biases appear: that the common form is normal [true, with qualifications]; that it is natural [I will argue below that it is not]; that it extends far into the past [it does not: see Jaynes and Neumann]; and that it will extend without fundamental change far into the future [unprovable but unlikely]. Certain qualities can be proposed based on our knowledge of the history of consciousness. We can assert with some confidence that it represents the highest development of rationality, abstraction and formal operational cognition. We can also laud concepts such as Human Rights and the liberal perspective in general for humanitarianism, distributive justice, etc.
However, all of our compliments paid the normal mode of consciousness and values arising therefrom are really so much patting ourselves on the back. Topics of this degree of abstraction are mostly discussed by highly rational, liberal humanistic urbanites. If one could find a Fundamentalist snake-handler capable of formal operational thought and put the question to them, their perspective might differ. A Cherokee medicine man or Zen monk might provide quite a trenchant critique.
Hopefully we can now agree that to evaluate any state of consciousness from within that state and using criteria which are derivative of it is a tautology. Our likes and dislikes are not germain. We must either assert a set of values such as those mentioned above as a prioris or look for some defensible objective perspective.
I propose that this latter course is the only credible alternative, and that we should stay as close to empiricism as possible in the choice of a metric. Therefore considerations of individual happiness or development are excluded at the start, since there is no objective basis for ascribing value to them other than as viewed by those directly concerned. The utility principle, that we should seek the greatest good for the greatest number, at least has the weight of numbers in its favor, but implies an assumption that the satisfaction of those presently alive, the current generations of the species, is a legitimate point of calibration. In practice it may often be, but there are situations, such as population blooms, speculative bubbles and so forth where the excessive satisfaction of the current generations of a species visits disaster upon future ones. It cannot be proven until the history is written, but there is good reason to believe that the current situation which we as Homo Industrialis find ourselves in is an excellent case-in-point.
So we must leave the walls of the town behind so we can truly see the town. We must root our perspective in the empirical, which means in the historical and biological. We must assert that we ourselves, however unnatural we may have become, are rooted in the natural world and are expressions of natural processes which predate and will likely survive our kind.
Our metric will thus be rooted in evolutionary biology. This is the process which has elaborated us, and provides a clear metric. First, our orientation, which has already had to relinquish the anthropocentric and solipsistic focus upon the presently-existing individual, now focuses naturally on the species as an ongoing process existing in an environment comprising other species and inanimate material. Since we view the species as a process in a context, our consideration must include that context. Thus a property of the species which leads to seemingly-optimal conditions for the present but damages the context or the species itself is most likely a false maximum.
I assert as self-evident a prioris that essentially all species demonstrate, perhaps as a result of what I call Emergent Design, the following goal-like tendencies:
Let us proceed to a quasi-formal statement of the problem. We have a complex process in a complex context constituting a complex system. We can say that the state-space of the system contains [NumberOfProcessStates] * [NumberOfContextStates]. We can rank the states in this nearly infinite set using the above metric. The problem posed by Life as a whole to each species in this system is the searching out of optimal states, which are states in which the species achieves the inherent goals described above without making an unsustainable level of demand on its context. Judging by the multiplicity and variety of species, the topology of the solution-space for this problem is non-linear and non-continuous. It can perhaps be visualized as geologically active mountainous terrain. Each peak represents a species, and it is a local maximum, meaning it is the best solution the species has currently found to the problem as posed above.
We can now say that our species, like all others, is a local maximum: the best solution that has yet been found to the problem of living successfully in our context. Our modern consciousness could be considered the very summit of our peak.
This peak may well be a false maximum. Our urban-industrial civilization, while it has greatly increased our numbers and territory, has not done so without cost. We have had very substantial and apparently deleterious effect on our context, and it is now apparent to any intelligent observer that this is beginning to have a similar effect on our own species. This effect has already become so noticeable that even the Best Politicians Money Can Buy are increasingly hard-pressed to dispute it. One does not lightly perturb a chaotic or complex system (such as, for example, weather) the stability of which one relies on, as those who have personal experience with the results of doing so will attest (Je sens votre peine, Quebec!).
We have further removed our species from natural selection: our very progress and humanism has allowed individuals who in any other species would be culled by "Nature red in tooth and claw" to survive, and more importantly to reproduce. Sexual selection must still be exerting some sort of shaping influence on our species, but there is no reason to believe that the healthiest, smartest, strongest etc. individuals reproduce more than the mediocre or defective: indeed, it would appear that if anything the reverse is true.
The false maximum at which we find ourselves is by definition a transitional state, since it is an untenable position: we are on deadly ground. Decay and collapse are certainly a possibility, but with luck we will undergo a period of instability and chaos as we search the local area of our solution-space for a perhaps somewhat broader-based peak than the perhaps too steep and narrow one upon which we now are precariously perched. This would be an example of Washburn's Regression in the Service of Transcendence (RIST) at work on an evolutionary scale.
Given that natural forms and motifs seem to recur at different temporal and/or spatial scales (as adduced by the saying that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"), one would expect something like RIST to occur at various points in a view of a life-form scaling from cell to individual to group to species. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any other way a process of any kind, be it species or algorithm, could leave a dead-end local maximum in search of a more optimal point in the solution-space, barring some kind of discontinuous quantum-leap which at the very least is not commonly observed. Neumann has already suggested that the individual's formation of mental-egoic consciousness is not only portrayed in the Heroic mythic cycle but is also recapitulated in the evolution of culture, and has alluded to the sort of social instability that can be expected if a cultural equivalent of weakened primal repression occurs, using Nazi Germany as a prime example. One would expect such mass psychosis to be one manifestation of a collective Regression in the Service of Transcendence on a cultural level. Wilber's Structural/Hierarchical paradigm (this is Washburn's description of it: I am not aware that Wilber has named it) does not, in my opinion, sufficiently account for or predict what appears to be a basic natural motif.
While, viewed with speculative optimism, the mutually-reinforcing, tightly-coupled and highly interdependent oganisations of psychic content, social structure and economic activity which collectively constitute Western Culture and more particularly the current Pax Americana can be seen as unstable and transitional, the fact remains that it in itself is pathological.
A blanket condemnation of what most readers of this will think of as both themselves and their world immediately demands careful elaboration and close reasoning. In attempting to do so, I will make the following general points:
My intention is not to dispute that industrial civilization has been brilliantly successful in improving the material comfort, safety and abundance of those who have been its beneficiaries, but rather to point out that we have succeeded too well. Our very success has allowed our numbers to swell to the point that even a frugal per-capita level of consumption in combination with clean, efficient industrial processes would probably still not reduce our impact to a sustainable level. If we had been less successful or less fertile and were merely a few hundred million strong upon the planet, we could probably indulge ourselves in profligate fashion without great consequence. As things stand, our population bloom, fueled by a limited and dwindling supply of fossil energy reserve, bids fair to follow the typical course of collapse and die-back: the population equivalent of a burst speculative bubble. By overshooting the carrying capacity of our environment, we will most likely leave it permanently diminished and our total resource availability lowered.
We must not underestimate human ingenuity: the very thing that got us into this trap will find an escape if escape there is. There are very bright, highly motivated individuals doing their utmost to avoid global economic collapse, pandemic plague, catastrophic climactic disruption and so forth, and doing a very creditable job of it. But there seem to be more of these balls being juggled all the time. The outcome at this point can at best be called indeterminate.
I have described above the fact that the insulation of our species from natural dangers and hardships has freed us from the harsh but salutary discipline that prevents the genetic material of other species from devolving into randomness. To that we add the influence of mutagenic materials by-produced by industrial processes. In fairness, we must allow that global travel and cosmopolitanism has greatly increased the interchange of genetic material between populations formerly isolated by geographic or cultural barriers. Outbreeding of this sort is generally beneficial, just as inbreeding is generally deleterious. One cannot but wonder at the fact that ancient humankind came to behave as if they understood this, practicing exogamy and developing incest taboos.
Still, on balance, our species would appear to be on the genetic equivalent of Skid Row.
By building for ourselves an artificial world, we have cut ourselves off from the natural world. Most urbanites have never even drank creek water or eaten anything more wild than the odd berry. We exist in a manner suitable for social insects, but of doubtful suitability for primates. Most urbanites provide for themselves by performing activities which in isolation are meaningless, yet by which they earn the ability to have their needs met. Yet there is no connection between the two: they do not have anything but the most passive participation in the meeting of their survival needs. One price of modernity is thus the loss of self-reliance and instead a complete dependence on the collective. Most urbanites are no more equipped to survive a disruption of the industrial system than a cell is to survive the death of the body. If our destiny is to become "the Borg", to further lose our primate heritage and individual identity in some sort of collective organism, then the above conditions are unavoidable. I myself do not find this a desirable outcome.
Just as modernity requires that we abandon exterior nature, so it also requires that we deny and submerge our interior nature. Our heritage is that of primates existing in hunter-gatherer groups of probably well under one hundred individuals, encountering strangers rarely and crowds of any kind almost never. Being the most plastic of species (I defy any other species to dispute this!) we have mostly managed to adapt to the increasingly large gap between our old natural habitat and the unnatural habitat we have constructed. It appears, judging by the increase in road rage, mass murder, fundamentalist revivalism and similar examples of breakdown and collapse, that this adaptation may be approaching a limit.
We cannot say for sure what the natural or wild person is like, but we can be reasonably certain that their destiny in modern society would be prison, madness or at best a marginal existence. They might perhaps survive among neo-tribal groups such as Rainbows, Deadheads and the more counter-cultural of the religious cults, who despise industrial culture and seek a return to the natural. They would neither desire nor be capable of taking a place at our table, which is so full and at the same time empty. We are all on some level of aware of this wild, natural Other within us, and know that if we should come too close to it, we would lose our place in society and gain only a very uncertain future.
I am not suggesting that we all abandon the Persona and the Superego, dress in animal skins and scatter into the woods. For one thing, our numbers are at least two orders of magnitude too great for this to be feasible. At anything over a very moderate population level, any movement of the masses "back to nature" could be expected to destroy both. Even if factors were such that this was an option, a planet almost devoid of trees except for windbreaks and woodfarms, full of peasants living a sustainable but static lifestyle, strikes me as at the very best extremely boring. While a temporary regression to an agrarian or Paleolithic lifestyle might be needed to climb down off our local and false maximum in transition to a new situation (and a few thousand years or so of Nature Red in Tooth and Claw might be the perfect physic for the "couch-potato" condition of our species [hopefully some End Timers out there are burying some good CDs along with their muskets and Bibles]), I do not feel that such a condition would be desirable as an end in itself, despite my opinion that earlier, simpler social forms were quite probably more pleasant for their inhabitants than those now extant.
More importantly, the world and the species show no sign of concern for individuals, and most honest readers must needs admit that with the exceptions of their own personal extended tribe, they feel about the same. Change and motion, particularly forward, do seem to be favored. Tactical retreats are often the only way forward, but retreat as a strategy can be more simply called defeat. When regression in the service of transcendence fails and becomes simple regression, the result is madness, decay, collapse: defeat.
I am also rather fond of formal operational thought, which in my experience is difficult when one is immersed in the full power of one's sensory and affective perception, not to mention when one is in contact with more profoundly nonegoic potentials. I feel that the ability to stand apart from and try to comprehend things, which we call rationality, is useful and still quite new and should not be lightly discarded. The degree of understanding and appreciation of not just the world but the universe that the scientific community has developed is a thing of beauty and nobility. It should not be lost.
I do recommend that those of an adventurous nature make their own exploration of both the exterior and interior wilderness. I would suggest making oneself as light as possible; those with dependents must look to their responsibilities. If one has a few years to spare, the trip is as rewarding as it is perilous. Bear in mind that those who seek to save their lives will lose them, yet try to choose the time and place of the battles that await you, and there will be many, with fell fiends both within and without. You seek to follow the Hero's road: cultivate the virtues of the Warrior and try to ignore the bones. You seek the Grail: your honor is your sword and shield. Try to leave a trail of bread-crumbs, but know that the way leads only forward.
I do not pretend to know the shape the future should or will take. I remain convinced that if our species has an apparent purpose in Life's Emergent Design, it is to know, visit and bring life to as much of the universe as possible. If Mars, for example, has some remnant of life of its own, we should blow on the coals; if it is dead, we should set it ablaze with our own Green Fire. We can pay our debt to the aggrieved society of our coinhabitant species a thousandfold by carrying them to the stars. This is what I hope is our destiny, and I feel that if we fail to achieve it in a timely manner, there is even now some lowly species scampering about underfoot whose descendents will chronicle our meteoric rise and fall as we now catalog the more stately passage of the Terrible Lizards. Time is short.
Accordingly, were the power mine, vast resources would be channeled into the space program, a worldwide space program, and associated areas of research. Those once working and studying in the Former Soviet Union's space program would once again apply their talents to better things than begging and bomb-building. Wars would stop, because I would use all means means of coercion necessary to convince the leadership and if necessary the population of belligerents that I had better uses for their resources. All military personnel, materiel, production and talent would not be idled, but simply redirected to the new purpose. I would find the luxury and waste of the rich and the expenditure of resources on the support of ever-expanding overpopulations equally frivolous, and both would cease. Development assistance would still be made available to those who might in future be able to contribute to the space effort, but life-support for the terminally incompetent would end. I would see those capable of participation completely caught up in the spirit of service and sacrifice normally only found in times of war or revolution. For the masses, of course, life would go on in an ordinary fashion, with the difference that the proceeds of the burdens laid on them by war taxes and corporate greed would be used for something worthwhile in which they would come to see the greatness as landings were made on Mars, on Europa and beyond. Artists of all kinds would walk on the Moon and in space, that they might share these things with those earthbound.
Equally aggressive measures would be taken to reduce our ecological footprint. These measures would be constrained by the need to maintain industrial production and social stability to sustain the space program. Nonetheless, they would be draconian in comparison to anything the Best Politicians Money can Buy contemplate. For example, logging of old growth forests would cease. Logging in general would be severely curtailed. Strict Scandinavian-style environmental policies would be enforced worldwide.
I believe that despite austerity and discipline, such a time would be an age of greatness and heroism beyond compare. We need a goal. Mere survival and opulence are unworthy if not contemptible. To spread the Green Fire ever wider is the most noble and natural of goals. May it be so.