Listening to a podcast conversation between Derrick Jensen and James Van Lanen (anthropologist), I was intrigued by their discussion of the “five worst” inventions. This would get anyone’s gears turning. But I was particularly energized because in the day or two before, I had considered for the first time the terrible power of one invention that I had previously never questioned as being anything but fantastic. I employ it constantly…right now, in fact.
I was excited enough to contact Derrick about this “dark horse” candidate to get his reaction, and he, too, was energized enough to suggest our own conversation on the matter, which has since been recorded and is available on Resistance Radio.
In this post paralleling the podcast conversation, I define what makes an invention bad in my view, preface with a trigger warning about inevitable attachments and fondness, and offer a few provisional “worst” inventions before getting to five that are less ambiguous in my book.
What is Bad?
Before placing an invention on the “worst” list, we need to know something about the driving criterion. For me, it’s simple. The sixth mass extinction that appears to be underway is bad. Maybe it fully develops, and maybe it doesn’t. I would rather it not.
Yes, nature is what it is. Mass extinctions happen sometimes. Humans and our inventions are every bit as much a part of nature as rocks are. Total nuclear annihilation, should that happen, would still be part of nature. But that doesn’t mean we shrug and exempt any part of nature—therefore everything—from the possibility of being considered as good or bad. Values emerge in a living (social) species for a reason, and I—among many others—value biodiversity and the living world. I think its ignorant destruction would be a terrible outcome.
Given my bias toward my own species, I would hope that humans are still present on Earth in 100,000 years. I would also hope that the newt and raccoon and quail and platypus and dragonfly all persist in a biodiverse world, rather than be extinguished by human activity.
Thus, any invention that—on balance—facilitates a mass extinction is something I call bad, in this framing. I especially focus on inventions that greatly amplify biodiversity loss, or inventions without which a mass extinction is unlikely to “succeed.” In other words, I want to focus on the central players. I’ll surely miss important ones (arbitrarily limiting to five, after all), but feel free to add to the list—which quickly gets quite long (while inventions that promote biodiversity and restore ecological balance are rather thin on the ground, yeah?).
Trigger Warning
We—embedded in and raised by modernity—only know one way of living, and it’s a way of ultimate failure. Nonetheless, we have fondness and attachment to many of modernity’s trappings. Even those who agree with the diagnosis that modernity is a cancer that we would prefer be rooted out will have warm fuzzy feelings about some of the items on this list. I know I do.
In this world of living color, few elements are pure good or pure evil (not black and white). Every item on the list offers good things: attributes or outcomes we treasure. Defense of the items on my “worst” list could offer boatloads of “good” attributes. I don’t deny that.
What I am interested in is the net effect vis-à-vis mass extinction. The fallacy is pretending that the good and bad are separable. Strumming a common chord in my posts, what a brain decides in a few seconds of consideration is of no consequence set against the actual, fully-contextualized, interactive reality spanning millennia. Our brains are very good at picking something out and isolating it, but doing so fabricates an internal (partial) “reality” having only tenuous connection to the actual situation.
Provisional Entries
I don’t myself subscribe to these first two provisional entries to the “worst-of” list, but include them for completeness. They might very well belong, and no one can truly be certain.
Humans
Recall that the question is: what inventions lead to a mass extinction? Well, humans—as an invention of evolution complete with intelligence, language, and opposable thumbs—are clearly to blame for the current trajectory. Without humans, this particular threat of mass extinction would not be alive right now.
I’m not a fan of this entry because while humans are clearly capable of initiating a sixth mass extinction, we have three-million years of evidence that they are also capable of not doing so. That’s not nothing. Some people still live on the planet today in a way that does not appear to have mass-extinction potential, actively resisting the allure of modernity. I happen to be persuaded by arguments of determinism and inevitability (opposite counterfactual fantasizing), but by the exact same token it is rather possible that humans are “destined” (by whatever foggy path) to live the next million years in something more closely resembling the bulk of the previous million than the anomalous period of modernity.
Humans living in pre-modernity ways did cause some animals to go extinct—largely as a result of migration as species lacking any co-evolutionary history were brought into contact. This by itself puts a red flag on humans. But even a few hundred species out of ten million does not come close to mass-extinction levels (in which a majority of species disappear).
As alluded to above, it is possible that humans were bound to develop the inventions below that do lead to mass extinction, but the jury is out whether it fully “succeeds” in the end. In any case, the “bad” quality of humans in this regard has more to do with a recent cultural turn than something intrinsic to our DNA. Humans are not modernity. But we made modernity. The jury will continue to argue on this point until the cows stop coming home.
Fire
Like the previous entry, control of fire may or may not mark a distinct-enough departure from the rest of the Community of Life to spell inevitable runaway capability. While fire occurs naturally, and some life is critically-dependent on its periodic appearance, routine use and control introduces a whole new context.
Fire expanded the human menu (ecology takes note), allowed flushing of game in a radically new trick that came on too quickly for evolutionary adaptation, extended the range of humans to colder climates, and was used to clear land of brush very quickly (in regions that may have gone centuries without fire otherwise).
None of this is to say that control of fire per se necessitates a mass extinction. Having used it for 1.5 to 2 million years, this technology has a hell of a lot more track record in terms of demonstrated compatibility than items on the “real” list to follow.
Again, the jury is still out. Having over a million years of proven performance may let it off the hook. But maybe fire made the list below inevitable as a gateway drug. If modernity is a one-time, fling, though—owing to rapid exhaustion of one-time non-renewable resources—maybe fire can be used “safely” in the future without causing mass extinction. The question becomes whether fire is “bad” in-and-of itself. We can’t know for sure. Thus, the provisional status, here.
The Worst Five
I will present these in chronological order, as each built on the previous, and each accelerated the ill effects.
1. Agriculture
What Daniel Quinn calls Totalitarian Agriculture had its beginnings about 10,000 years ago. That’s only 0.3% of human history on Earth, and 3% of Homo sapiens’ time. It’s a new development that radically changed human relation to plants, animals, and our perceived place in the world. No longer seeing ourselves as integrated members of a Community of Life, we sought mastery and control over an ever-increasing zone of influence. Human supremacy was an almost-guaranteed outcome. Once a master race is convinced that the world belongs to them, watch out!
The items downstream from this one all flow from what agriculture enabled (see River post). It is the “original sin” that some have recognized in the story of Genesis.
Does agriculture provide some perks we like? Absolutely? Can we have these perks without all the negative consequences? What evidence possibly suggests so? Being able to separate likes from dislikes in your head has little to do with a much messier reality.
I’ll return to some exploration of agriculture’s role and consequences at the end of the post.
2. Writing
The first records of cuneiform writing show up in Mesopotamia around 3500–3000 BCE (just over 5,000 years ago). Writing takes our spare mental capacity (not as impressive as we imagine) and allows us to preserve thoughts in an “external,” non-volatile super-brain repository, so that we might array in front of us a much larger set of durable fragments than is possible to hold at once in our meat-brains. We thus amplify greatly this spare capacity and accumulate knowledge (often for purposes of control/power) in ways that were impossible before. This item was the “new” epiphany that rippled into the associated podcast conversation, also elaborated in the posts on Spare Capacity and The Writing on the Wall.
Writing was first used for accounting in the context of grain agriculture (thus the direct heritage to the previous entry). Not too long after this, written law became a thing. Humans began to rely more heavily on these novel, artificial, and rigid structures (strictures?) than on the actual world—and Community of Life—they lived within. A paper deed asserted ownership over land and everything in it, as if even possible.
Do good things come from written language? For sure! And I utterly depend on it. But in a sense, what we like most about it is what makes it extinction-level-dangerous: it amplifies human mental capacity tremendously, setting us well outside the evolved Community of Life and giving us super-powers. The central question becomes: would we have been capable of fostering a sixth mass extinction without written language? It’s possible that the expansionist, controlling, separatist practice of agriculture would have been sufficient on its own, in due time, but written language doubtless enhanced our effectiveness and speed at getting “the job” done. The complementary question is: can one have writing without triggering mass extinction? It would not appear so.
3. Money
Money came quickly on the heels of written language, as both relate to accounting. The “fictional” construct of money had the ruinous effect of objectifying—commodifying—pretty-much everything. In the hands of human supremacists (perhaps a pre-requisite for the invention of money in the first place), this objectification of living beings and the land supporting them all gets ugly. Decisions are based primarily on money. Since valuation is necessarily narrow and short-sighted, decisions become unsurprisingly narrow and short-sighted—using dollars as a deeply-flawed crutch for more complete ways of evaluating worth.
Today, financial considerations dictate many (or all) of our biggest decisions in life. No one is faulted for making their hardest choices primarily in economic terms. Countries look to GDP as the defining metric of how well they are doing. Most devastatingly, people make money by exploiting and destroying healthy ecological communities. Virtually every economic gain is connected to ecological loss somewhere. Money is at war with life, and usually wins—because we place such tremendous value on money and its “optionality.”
Would the sixth mass extinction happen without money? Maybe, but not as assuredly. Most importantly, money is likely as much a symptom as it is a cause of objectification. A culture thoroughly opposed to objectifying their ecological community would never dream of instituting a monetary system. Agriculture (and writing) set the attitudes that ushered in money.
4. Science
I know: Oof. With the possible exception of writing, this one hurts the most. Humans—as keen observers—have always been natural scientists, but the powerful methodology of modern science really emerged about 400 years ago, and therefore is frighteningly recent. Science extended our mastery and control by orders-of-magnitude over what agriculture and writing had done. It was a total game-changer. The ecological record can attest.
Science exposed many of nature’s subtle and hidden secrets, opening up new lines of manipulation, control, and exploitation (lubricated by money/profit). Techno-apologists are fond of saying that science/technology is neutral, which is basically the same argument that guns (or nuclear weapons) don’t kill people. Such logical statements can be true in an isolated mental playpen, but in practice…in the real world brimming with context…it is very far from true.
This relates to a favorite point about intent. If a man rushes at you with a hammer, intent to do you harm, the technology is of secondary importance to the intent. Science in the hands of a human-supremacist, ecologically-ignorant, egregiously-objectifying culture is a devastating implement.
While seeming to support the “neutral” argument for the technology itself, the actual, realized technologies of modernity are oozing the intent in which they are marinated. Importantly, science is pursued and developed completely within this context. Most science is performed with the intent of improved manipulation and control for human (only) benefit. Most science is not aimed at tearing down modernity and the science that enables it. Far from being neutral, its team is abundantly clear. A solar panel is not aiming to save the planet, but to power modernity’s engine. Ask yourself: “what science/technology does the Community of Life applaud?” A truly neutral balance would produce plenty instances of applause.
Has science produced some good outcomes? Absolutely. Where’s the net effect, though? So far, it’s been a tool of ecological destruction, on balance. Forgetting or ignoring that damning fact is a fatal mental flaw.
5. Energy
The universe has always operated on energy, so here I mean “mechanical” energy of modernity rather than the energy crucial for all life: I speak of fossil fuels, dams, wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear plants, etc.
Like science, these energy technologies have made many human lives comfortable (temporarily, while contributing directly to misery and death of many species, including many humans). But within the entire Community of Life the effect has been catastrophic. Not only does the acquisition of the energy (and/or the materials required to capture energy flows) do direct damage, but the purposes to which we apply energy are even worse. It is access to substantial energy that drives rapacious global material extraction, transport, manufacturing, pollution, disposal, and all the ills of modernity. Pull the plug and much less harm to the natural world would ensue. The sixth mass extinction becomes much harder (though not at all impossible) without the enormous leverage supplied by industrial energy.
Matter of Opinion
I offered two provisional and five explicit “worst” inventions, in chronological order. Where one draws the line in terms of mass extinction will vary by individual, and no one is either demonstrably right or wrong. Some would say that all these are fine, and biodiversity loss is overblown: talk of mass extinction is hyperbolic. Maybe, but I ask such folks to consider timescales, and look at this nosedive plot. Is there any reason other than wishful thinking (or short-term extrapolation) to believe we could continue recent practices for timescales that stretch centuries or millennia?
Others may sense that humans—the fire apes—are fundamentally incompatible with ecology, and may be correct. I myself take millions of years of evidence seriously: the experiment ran for a long time without calamity. Was a calamitous modernity inevitable? That’s a somewhat separate matter, when it’s the future we’re talking about. The real question is whether all future modes of human living are fundamentally incompatible with ecological sustainability, and I very much doubt we can make such a strongly definitive statement.
I put my own line at (totalitarian) agriculture. This is so novel on the planet and ruins land in such a flash (thousands of years or far shorter) that it strikes me as an unambiguous ecological loser. It also results in dangerous mental shifts and a sense of separation from the Community of Life. These are untested waters. Would agriculture alone (somehow without the later developments) lead all the way to a mass extinction? Possibly: that’s when a runaway positive feedback process started. As detailed elsewhere, the rate of human population growth initiated by agriculture would still put us at 8 billion people within another 10,000 years—which is ecologically short—and may well be all that is needed to trigger ecological collapse. We don’t know.
As I keep hinting, another consideration is whether the other items on the list essentially must follow the first. Could one grow the agricultural enterprise for 10,000 years without developing writing, money, science, and mechanical energy? It’s a tough counterfactual to argue. The same can be said for fire or the human animal, which is why I put them on the list. Maybe this had to happen. Again, I take millions of years of it not happening as a reason to be more circumspect on these two, especially when considering the viability of a post-modernity phase involving humans (and fire).
Microcosm
Maybe shrinking to an ecological microcosm is a useful way to evaluate items on this list. Start with a small hunter-gatherer tribe in the rain forest, who would ordinarily follow ancient cultural practices (using fire) and live in approximate ecological balance as long-standing members of the local Community of Life, essentially indefinitely.
Now give them the control of agriculture: no longer dependent on or caring explicitly about the forest community, except insofar as to eliminate opportunistic forest-dwelling thieves of “their” food. Surplus, storage, and increased land “productivity” allow the tribe to swell in numbers. The tribe now replaces biodiverse forest with planted mono-crops and has a radically different relationship to the forest: no longer appreciating its gifts but bemoaning its resistance to conquest. How will the forest ever survive this expansionist force operating outside of ecological norms? The forest and its denizens lack the evolutionary tools to keep agriculture at bay.
Add written language and the tribe now has even more dangerous mental capacity to manipulate and control. Will the forest fare better, or accelerate its march to oblivion?
Add money, formalizing an existing attitude of objectification and moving decision making farther from asking what works for the Community. How will that go for the forest health?
Bring in science, so that the tools of control and exploitation carry tremendous power. The forest already stood little chance, and now seems utterly hopeless.
Arm this band with weapons of mass energy and forests are leveled with impressive speed and efficiency. This day was already coming, but now far sooner than anyone anticipated.
It’s like giving an adolescent ever-increasing powers and expecting them not to be put to use.
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This reminds me of the famous debate about whether math is "discovered" or "invented." Your top five, with some room for argument, all seem to me more like discoveries than inventions in the sense that just randomly jostling around DNA and human social networks is bound to produce them sooner or later—and once you have unlocked, for example, money and all the benefits that come from it, there is seldom incentive to go back to what you were doing before.
From a mass extinction viewpoint, I would submit "(human, heterosexual) sex" as #6. This is like your "humans" but dodges the chicken/egg question a bit more effectively because, at some point, some human(s) had to decide to have sex instead of not.
Perhaps nothing is truly invented by humans, but stumbled upon as discovery. Either way…
Humans wouldn't be here without sex, so it's not a "decision" as much as a mandate, and has always been in place. The anomaly would be *not* having sex. Don't hold your breath on that. I'm not sure I'd even label it a decision: we're wired to have it happen from the start—exactly as the chicken and egg have always been two aspects of a single phenomenon.
It does seem an inevitable consequence of humanness – somewhere along the line humans would probably have turned to some kind of agriculture and then the rest would have followed. So "Human" seems to be the starting point of the destructive path the planet is now on. Depressing really, as the rest of the biosphere looks on and fears its own destruction.
I agree. We only have one example of a species with the capabilities of Homo sapiens and history shows us that it did learn to control fire, it did turn to agriculture, language, money and so on.
If humans, especial our form of human, hadn't evolved, mass extinctions would likely still happen, as they have in the past. But humans did evolve and they did spread out and invent all sorts of things which helped them prosper, but at the expense of other species. Sure, some groups managed to continue to live in a less impactful way but it's impossible to tell if even those groups would not eventually succumb to modernity, if resources continued to support such a condition. The fact that, for the vast majority of our species' time on this planet, that time was not spent in enabling a mass extinction does not mean that it possible for our species to live indefinitely in that way.
I'm not sure that anything is to be gained by labelling some inventions as particularly bad. It's an academically interesting pastime, perhaps, but that is all.
While your objections to the current state of human affairs are valid, I have noticed you have a tendency to romanticize indigenous cultures, peoples, and practices.
In my experience indigenous cultures offer no more salve against the avarice's destructive impact than our modern culture. The difference really comes down to quadratic scaling with population size.
In my own country, time and again, I have seen indigenous communities adopt destructive practices as soon as their community size grows beyond the regulatory capacity of their internal organic governance systems.
The Law of Large Numbers combined with quadratic scaling of impacts in population size is really the problem. Drive the population large enough and all cultures limit towards the same behavior. The impacts scale with the square of population, because the impacts scale with the number of interactions between people, not the number of people.
It is really as simple as that.
I am well aware that our culture forbids *any* positive statements about non-modernity cultures (hunter-gatherers, prehistoric people). Usually such strong objections do not come from a place of intimate familiarity. The phenomenon says a lot about our mythology.
Group size is certainly an important factor, but I reject the "really as simple as that" diagnosis. Take 100 moderns and set them in isolation and they will not suddenly have the cooperative "instincts" that indigenous cultures deliberately instill from birth. Small indigenous groups are highly vulnerable to the lures/baubles of modernity well before swelling their size, owing to new *cultural* influences. Culture is incredibly important, and is not *just* a quadratic function of size.
I suggest the books "We Will be Jaguars" and "Don't Sleep, There are Snakes" as windows into actual traditional cultures to see that a lot more goes into shaping habits than crowd size. Theorizing only gets us so far.
I strong disagree. Culture is not some special distinguisher between humans. All that matters at a truly global scale is raw physical and chemical thermostatics. Culture is just the highly correlated noise we perceive on top of the raw physics and chemistry of our planet. Remember, the battery charge on planet Earth is only a meta-stable equilibrium. Eventually something would come along that would discharge that stored chemical potential. For better or worse it was you and I.
For the same reason I do not think any of the self proclaimed "intersectional feminists", "anti-imperialists", or "de-colonialists" are actually any of those things. Taking one group, culture, or gender from the pedestal of "good" and placing them onto the pedestal of "bad" only reinforces the established power structures. You can only confront the power structures by getting rid of the pedestals completely and embracing the "original sin" that is fundamental in all humans.
Interesting study
Violence and
Sociality in Human
Evolution'
by Bruce M. Knauft
look for it in sci-hub
I have to agree with tmurphy here. Culture *is* important. To say it's "just noise" is to overlook the impact the last ~10,000 years have had (especially modernity).
That humans existed *relatively* peacefully with other life for so long is significant. People then were not 'primitives' (indeed their brains may have been larger than those of modern humans). The 'culture' of modernity rewards greed, psychopathy, narcissism and other undesirable traits. It only sees nature as things that can be used to benefit humans – unlike indigenous groups, who see it as having its own intrinsic value (spirit) independent of humans (as it does).
"Drive the population large enough and all cultures limit towards the same behavior." Do they? For starters, it's unlikely that indigenous populations would grow 'large enough' without all the excesses of modernity (industrial agriculture, healthcare, mining, manufacturing etc) that allow such growth. Also, no matter how large their population grew, I can't see (eg) Native Americans deciding nuclear weapons are a good idea (in fact, they've suffered horribly due to nuclear tests carried out on what was their land).
No need to conflate matters ("group, culture, or gender") It's hard to see how calling out a rotten culture (modernity) reinforces established power structures, when they're based on it.
Again I disagree. I think you and Tom are seriously underestimating the power statistical determinism. At a planetary scale the statistics are by far large enough that culture is irrelevant, and a mere symptom of the process. The Law of Large Numbers is an extremely strong effect, especially at the scale of astronomical bodies.
Once the planet reached a threshold of stored solar energy, sequestered over hundreds of millions of years in chemical potential, it was inevitable that an ecological tipping point would occur, dramatically releasing that potential. The messy details was really around which species would be the cause of that release.
The truth is humans are ugly little enzymes. We catalyze the release of stored chemical potential and do little else of worth.
Even more sobering is that this released chemical potential was a one shot deal. The Earth will never again store those amounts of fossil fuels. The atmospheric, geological, and biochemical conditions of the Devonian, Carboniferous, and Permian will never be replicated. Just as the conditions around which our major metal deposits were precipitated will never occur again.
This was it. This was our one kick at the can. And what did we choose to do with all this wealth? Send mean Tweets to each other.
Once the planet stored so much chemical potential then – so what? No 'release' was inevitable. There may be planets out there with similar properties to Earth's but on which 'intelligent' life never evolved. Such planets might end their days being fried by their sun – along with all the unmined coal.
As to the mere detail of which species would cause the release of Earth's chemical energy, if it wasn't humans who mined and burned the fuel then who would it be? Badgers?
Saying 'it was all inevitable' implies that complex intelligence was inevitable – almost a quasi-religious statement.
To say 'it's all just chemical gradients' is to grossly oversimplify reality, something the mathematically/technically minded seem more prone to do (though everyone does it, to some extent).
You can't leave an unsteady boulder at the top of the hill and expect it not to come crashing down on your head. That stored chemical potential was only meta-stable. It was not in any sort of global minima. In fact there is a considerable geological record of previous volcanism burning off regional sedimentary fossil fuels,
The reality is more nuanced. It's one thing for volcanism to ignite FF or for sulphur clouds to cause die-offs, but it's quite another for modernity to convert 'natural resources' into refined chemicals that are harmful to life for millions of years.
In the case of volcanism etc, that's chance events. In the case of refined chemicals/pollution/nuclear radiation etc, the harm done is *not* down to chance but is deliberate.
Ultra-rationalist types seem to see it as a badge of honour to make no distinction between 'good' and 'bad' though, in which case there's no such thing as 'harm'. To them, maybe a huge oil spill or chemical leak is neither good nor bad. For the rest of us lifeforms however, for all practical purposes, 'good' and 'bad' are concepts that can be usefully applied to things and processes in the physical world.
Abstract away 'good' and 'bad', or 'happy' or 'sad' and you might end up abstracting away reality altogether. Once you've peeled away all the layers of an onion, what are you left with?
I agree that logic/abstraction is *a* tool that only gets one so far: complete nuclear annihilation met with a logical shrug? No thank you. Values like good and bad have a different but no less legitimate source—tied to survival and holistic health.
Even if "nature" fated previous mass extinctions and modernity, it is possible to react to potential "bads" in such a way as to mitigate the worst outcomes. Life has evolved to do exactly that, though with no guarantee of success (magnitudes also differ immensely, and a potential sixth mass extinction is indeed an immense predicament). Perception of good and bad, however baffling to the logic circuits, is a necessary element.
An aside on the previous note. Superficially, I have come to reason about the aggregate behavior of any system, including human civilization through my graduate training in Mathematical Statistics. However, the true seeds of my methods of reasoning come from tackling the infamous problem sets in "Thinking Like a Physicist" in my first year of my undergraduate back in the early 1990s.
To add to the list: large, complex societies and the institutions, especially sociopolitical, that they ‘require’ for their organisation.
There’s also the fact that, starting with totalitarian ag, the most narcissistic and self-aggrandizing of humans would be encouraged rather than repressed, in their behavior and then reproduction. Hierarchy develops and they’re at the top, so each subsequent invention ends up amplifying this further and honing discoveries toward those ends, along with increasing rage that the developments, while increasing comforts for a minority, ultimately fail in their goal of control. Not only is the adolescent being given ever-increasing powers, they’re psychologically regressing further every time, so now we’ve got the equivalent of a hulking monster outside with the internal regulation of a toddler. Yay!
Though not competition for this top 5, I’ve been toying with another that’s probably a stretch but I’m throwing it out there anyways: fermentation, primarily in relation to alcohol. Anything outside of ritual use would have been impractical for hunter-gatherers. Not sure of historical accuracy, but I’ve come across speculation that a desire for more regular drunkenness led to settlements and agriculture. Plus, it would have increased capacity for food/drink storage, and enabled more surpluses. Psychologically, would those at the bottom of the pyramid have tolerated their place as much if not rewarded with beer for hauling their daily stone quota? as well as allowing people from all levels of civilization to (temporarily) feel less trapped by it. Between farming, selling, and dealing with the fallout and consequences, its always been a big part of the economy and economic growth (I just got a priceless AI summary full of contradictions when I searched “alcohol economy global”). Just some food (and drink) for thought.
La cerveza es anterior a la agricultura totalitaria
Los monos conocen plantas que les causan, placer, alucinaciones….
Y las usan conscientemente
Nosotros hace 15.000 años ya nos juntábamos (Göbekli Tepe) para emborracharnos
El problema no sería nuestro deseo de diversión, sino el control de todo el proceso y del producto final por una minoría. Como decía Daniel Quinn por boca de "Ishmael" la civilización de los Tomadores, la única que pone llave a la comida, en este caso…a la bebida.
Google Translate: Beer predates totalitarian agriculture.
Monkeys know plants that cause them pleasure, hallucinations…
And they use them consciously.
We were already gathering (Göbekli Tepe) to get drunk 15,000 years ago.
The problem isn't our desire for fun, but the control of the entire process and the final product by a minority. As Daniel Quinn said through the mouth of "Ishmael," the civilization of the Takers is the only one that locks food, in this case… drink.
"Beer predates totalitarian agriculture."
This fact has fascinated me, and while I'm not an anthropologist I think this actually holds the key to the reason agriculture got started in the first place.
There is archeological evidence that early agricultural settlements were really miserable affairs. Compared to hunter-gatherer contemporaries the farmers seem to have suffered much poorer health, and failed harvests almost certainly meant famine. So why did they do it?
Then I realized one day that there are two things that seem to be shared by many cultures and which go back all the way to the neolithic. One is beer and the other is big dogs, formerly wolves.
Then it hit me, suddenly the misery of early agriculture made perfect sense. The guys with the big dogs forced everyone else to grow the grain for their beer! Early agriculture was slavery! Plain and simple.
Added bonus: Throw some of that leftover fermented grain mash into a campfire and now you've just invented bread.
Since you listened to a podcast with a real anthropologist (James Van Lanen), I suggest you follow the lead that basic Anthropology 101 courses provide. For example, Leslie C. White was researching energy use in human cultures long before M. King Hubbert looked at US peak oil production (conventional; not including fracked oil, lease condensates, by the way). Another critical anthropologist is Ellman Service, who codified human social organization into bands, tribes, chiefdoms and state-level societies in the 1950s. The structure of state-level society is far more dangerous than a simplistic view that "agriculture is bad."
I have been researching "what went wrong with humans" since 1968, when I was forced to address the very real question, "Why is the US waging war against Vietnam, a country that poses no risk to the US?" Since I was doing archaeology at the time, I naturally looked to anthropology to provide a lens for study. The answer is multi-faceted and should be no surprise. One of the drivers is the need for the US to have forever wars to keep the US economy pumped up and continue its global hegemony. Indeed, a good case can be made that the US never shifted from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy after WW II. Another driver is state-level society itself. Per Service, the most salient feature of state-level society is the monopoly on violence. When a state loses its monopoly on violence, it is a failed state. Examples are Libya and Afghanistan. An example of a "failing" state would be Mexico, because it has lost a percentage of its monopoly on violence to the narcocartels, but still maintains a centralized state structure. In this context, one may say the centralized structure is more important than the monopoly on violence, but that requires a much deeper dive, which I don't want to go into at this time.
The point of all this is that there are truly dangerous structures in human social organization. To my mind, the state itself is the most dangerous. Others may disagree. But to simply blame agriculture and even cast aspersions on fire is just silly. People are dying in Gaza and the Sudan and all over the world – for no fault of their own. The reason they are being subjected to this is the greed and mendacity of the ruling classes who are enabled by state-level societies around the world. There are plenty of wrong turns in the last 5,000 years that can be blamed. Going "back to the beginning" and looking for some "signal event" is just intellectual impotence.
I would hope it's more than silly to try understanding the conditions that promote state organizations. The lack of state *without* agriculture is surely significant in a causal sense (and also no stable examples of agriculture without state). I have also been reading anthropologists like Woodburn and Hayden on human arrangements, especially noting the transition state of complex hunter-gatherers, where material realities (in the food domain, typically) allowed settlements, food storage, and (causal) emergence of hierarchy. The state is then a system that "maximally" expresses hierarchy. In contrast to complex hunter-gatherers, immediate-return hunter-gatherers are fiercely egalitarian, meaning they are well aware of the dangers of hierarchy and deliberately stomp it out whenever it shows the first signs of arising. What shifts the balance is material (i.e., not immaterial): food availability. Thus agriculture is important. It's not coincidental that this paved the way to state. It's a matter of how far upstream one is willing to look.
Of course, pointing out that agriculture is bad is extraordinarily threatening to a culture critically dependent on the practice, so attacking it can be (mis)interpreted as misanthropy against billions of people. My beef is with a sixth mass extinction, which also stands to wipe out billions of people. We don't always get what we want.
I think the conjecture that human access to energy surpluses inevitably leads to war is strong. For some detailed anecdotal evidence consider the following Nature article that demonstrates a relationship between Mongol expansion and rain driven grain abundance.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-04344-z
War is an effective way to thermalize stored chemical potential. Inventions and societal organization are really just the foam on top of the deeper thermodynamic sea.
If you think there are inventions or societal organizations that are the problem or are bad you are missing the point.
The deep, and perhaps unanswerable, question echoes Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", why in all the universe do we grieve this Sixth Extinction?
I know I am deeply grieving the myriad of loses we are experiencing, including in my own backyard of the Canadian Rockies. However, my question is: what is the point of experiencing all this grief, particularly for something that so clearly seems inevitable in hindsight.
Great article, I agree about all the items on the list. As modernity lumbers on, the number of nature-harming gadgets seems to grow exponentially. A glance at shopping channels shows numerous plastic & metal appliances for cooking, exercising, gardening, driving… almost any activity now has mountains of associated, landfill-destined tat to buy for it. 'Insect zappers' (ffs), to allow the spoiled meatsacks to dine outside without having to endure the presence of non-human lifeforms (as if arthropods didn't have enough on their plate with leafblowers, vehicles, insect sprays etc).
It's long past time to stop inventing.
Though modernity depends on it, many (most?) are still oblivious to the extreme damage caused by mining. This article shows some of it: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/HowMiningHurtsCommunities_Spreads.pdf
Also, a good article here, echoing one of tmurphy's, on the horror of roads & vehicles: https://radfembiophilia.substack.com/p/our-world-is-paved-with-indifference
Was it all inevitable? That's an impossible question really. Anything that has happened was *therefore* inevitable. The future remains unpredictable, but the past is visible. The benefit of this *hindsight* can be used to inform future behaviour.
Here is one to possible invention that often flies under the radar of most moderns as harmful :
“ nature” see the work of Jeremy Narby , for a short intro on this see his talk https://bioneers.org/jeremy-narby-living-responsibly-biosphere-ztvz1802/.
I’ve been trying to think what might be on the “good” list as well , social technology that evaluates tools/ inventions before they are given license ? I think Tyson Yakaporta has something to say about this,
“Metaphor” also comes to mind as an good tool after reading G Bateson
Interested what others might put on the “good” list. As you can’t have “ bad” without “good”. In the sense that. Peter Galison pointed out that the invention of Objectivity gave rise to Subjectivity
I think the invention of slavery is one of the main seeds that started off modernity. Tribal groups can have labor levies but the surplus labor created is limited. Until the development of the heat engine powered by fossil fuels, slavery tended to play a big part in the development of large complex states.
Mythology has it that man once lived in a manner compatible with existence of the natural world and wildlife. In fact, there is no fossil evidence to support this myth. None.
Man (and our ancestors) lacked the population size, technology, and energy to exploit the Earth for millions of years, as you note. So the destruction he inflicted was limited.
But there is simply no evidence in the fossil record that man ever lacked the will to exploit wildlife to the point of extinction, or the Earth to the point of its destruction.
The fact that the fossil record lacks a mass extinction caused by humans sort-of *does* provide evidence that humans "lived in a manner compatible with the existence of the natural world and wildlife"—mythology-free.
Not true. Humans were at the very least a significant contributors to the Late Pleistocene Extinction of large mammals; which were easy pickings for tribal hunters.
Megafuana extinction is far far far short of mass extinction, and most due to migration (happens in evolutionary history). Magnitude counts. Africa is where megafauna largely survived, having co-evolved with pesky humans.
A second note on the paleontological human record. There is strong evidence that humans used fire to make dramatic alterations of landscapes and ecosystems throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene. Hardly examples of balanced indigenous co-existence.
This is, however, more evidence of early human activity releasing the chemical potential of the Earth-Space battery. Possibly, even then, beyond the recharge rate of the system.
If you're interested, there's a paper that explains it all:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4534254/#s8
Thinking about your thermodynamic sea and cultural froth, it is pretty clear that culture forms from but also shapes the dissipitive structure and is therefore critical to its ability to discharge a gradient. To say that culture is not important is to say that the patterns which energy and matter form themselves into is also not important. Culture is clearly part of the picture, even if it is driven and shaped by the discharge of gradients.
Unfortunately, claiming that there's no fossil evidence of a lack of will doesn't make much sense. At the risk of being pedantic, there's no fossil evidence that ancient people had beliefs of any kind because beliefs (much less a lack of them) don't fossilize. Only the behaviors those beliefs motivate might possibly leave behind artifacts that we can interpret and, as Tom Murphy said, the lack of a mass extinction is proof that humans didn't cause one for whatever reason.
As for lacking the will to exploit wildlife to extinction, there is plenty of anthropological evidence of indigenous cultures that valuet he community of life, egalitarianism, and kinship with the nonhuman world. Indeed, these kinds of beliefs appear widespread geographically and temporally among indigenous cultures. These beliefs would seem to preclude the kinds of behaviors that regularly drive other species to extinction. Moreover, these beliefs absolutely preclude the kinds of intentional policies we see in modernity that have the eradication of biodiversity as a goal. One of the steps in mono-cropping, for instance, is to, as much as impossible, kill off all other living things in an area to ensure a monopoly on resources for our favored plant.
It feels like a lack of imagination not to mention arrogance for modern people to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of ancient cultures with our own culture's values (control, objectification, dominance, human supremacy) by assuming that our values represent "universal human nature". Unfortunately this practice is all too common and in doing so we imply a kind of helpless, foolish hypocrisy in indigenous cultures that hold beliefs in opposition to that "universal human nature".
Totally on board—thanks for articulating this!
Nope. That is backwards. The beliefs are irrelevant. Action precedes motivation. In the case of your examples, their scale was sufficiently small that ecological processes provided sufficient feedback on human behavior that the system achieved meta-stability with a characteristic time scale of millennia. Those belief systems, like all other forms of human rationalization and thought, arose after the "sustainable" behavior was established.
If there is one thing humans do excel at, it is post-hoc rationalizations. The indigenous belief systems that you espouse are no different than the rationalizations that we apply to our own emotions. Like emotions, the actions came first, followed by the rationalizations.
If you are truly a humanist and egalitarian then you will recognize that there are no special differences between humans. Given the opportunity all humans will behave with the same decrepitude.
Please note this is just as much an indictment of modernity as anything else. The problem is fundamentally with humans. There is no fixing us, because the bug is the feature.
Careful about categorical certainty…
I am arguing the exact opposite of categorical certainty. Rather that there are few distinctions between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. Let alone between humans. Not only am I vociferously cautioning against romanticizing indigenous communities and natural ecosystems, I am calling into question the whole concept, and utility, of classifying systems into categories of good and bad. Neither an avalanche, a lion, or a pre-contact Polynesia headhunter give one lick for our disdain of the impacts of modernity, and all three of them would be equally lethal.
Have you ever watched magpies take pleasure in eating a live sparrow? Orcas torturing seals for fun? Cats playing with mice while eating them? The seeds of human awfulness existed long before modernity industrialized the scale of that awfulness.
Human behavior, including modernity, did not magical appear as a special case, or arise in isolation. It is an organic and evolutionary development from traits shared across the animal kingdom. This is why we anthropomorphize, because we recognize our own origins in the behaviors of other animals.
On a planetary scale the only difference between modernity and the rest of nature is the ability of modernity to accumulate large enough energy reserves to be able to buffer itself from the most immediate harm it causes. In all other ecosystems poor behavior is punished within a couple seasons, let alone years. But the punishment modernity is due will take up to a century to met out.
Whether there is evidence of groups of people who value the community of life above all else (if it's not above all else, then it will not persist, I think), those cultures either didn't persist or didn't spread. We've done the experiment and this is what we got.
I agree that we have what we have, but context matters, and context changes. What is the future context? Might humans (be forced to) shed these inventions because the material conditions currently supporting modernity's hegemony? Given that we have seen examples of human culture deliberately avoiding harmful fates, might they again dominate when the current "experiment" is spent? We have no basis on which to rule it out.
"Dominate," to me, implies that there is another way, and that it can't be more successful, for its adherents, than deliberately avoiding harming the environment. I just can't see that being the case. If humans can again start on a path to modernity, they will. If they can't because the conditions for doing so do simply not exist, then, yes, humans will be forced to live like other species and eventually be part of climax ecosystems.
Have I got something wrong, here?
Looks like you're taking a bit of flak from both the "left" and the "right" here: those who want to find a place for human agency and therefore see the problem as something gone wrong with societies, states, capitalism, militarism versus those (more fatalistic) who basically see this as the froth on top of the 2nd L of T churning away. Not wanting to add to the barrage, but not sure if a million years of hominid existence without a mass extinction can really be used as evidence against the likelihood (inevitability?) of that happening, any more than the dinosaurs might have reasonably cited a few hundred million years of the earth's relatively peaceful coexistence with asteroids as grounds for optimism.
What we *do* know is that we're barreling toward a mass extinction owing to human modalities. So I'm fine calling that essentially inevitable. What we don't know is whether it will fully play out or self-terminate before a majority of species are lost. Meanwhile, we do have evidence that humans *can* live for millions of years without causing mass extinction, so the possibility is certainly on the table for something similar after the modernity kick. Modernity is very unlikely to "rinse and repeat" within the million-year timeframe as one-time resources are "done plundered." By the time Earth resets (to the extent that it does/can after maybe 100 Myr), the human line is perhaps unlikely to still be around.
[Substantially reduced this post, which the author admitted was blog-sized initially]
I’m amazed at how “agriculture ruined everything” has become a dogma in this corner of the internet. Although in science the idea that “agriculture was humanity’s worst mistake” has held sway since Jared Diamonds 1999 article with the same title, recent science tells us that it is (of course) much more nuanced.
It for instance turns out that the idea that farmers had worse health than hunter-gatherers isn’t as clear-cut. The same goes for the idea that agriculture necessarily leads to cities and states. The supposedly clear connection between agriculture and a mindset of control, to which I will come back later, is best left for storytellers like Daniel Quinn, Yuval Harrari and Daniel Schmachtenberger. The connection between agriculture and the destruction of wilderness isn’t that simple either. The kind of plow that allowed farmers to make non-arable land productive, was invented just 2000 years ago, only to be modified to be effective in the heavy European soils in the 17th century.
[…]
I recently watched your Metastatic Modernity series (thanks for that!) and I’ve spent enough time in this space to subscribe to almost all of it. I just don’t think that agriculture was the clear breaking point you (and many others) claim it is. For me, it is definitely part of the road that got us into the current mess. But there is nothing inherent in agriculture that makes it more of an inflection point than say fire or stone tools. Of course, it’s more convenient to have a clear Bad Guy in the story, but I don’t think your framing would lose any power if agriculture was just one of the many forces that got us here, weaponized by developments that came after.
You make good points (also in trimmed material). For me, as reflected in the post, timescale carries a lot of weight. Fire and stone tools definitely changed our relationship to the Community of Life (and may have put us on an inevitable path to agriculture, in due time), but millions of years against a few millennia? I can't ignore the three-orders-of-magnitude (stark!) difference in scale. I am essentially forced to assign much greater impact to agriculture.
Thanks for your reply and still posting the most relevant parts of my overly long comment. Rereading the original, I think my tone could in some places be interpreted as harsh, which was not at all my intention. I think that my main point was that even a casual look at the current relevant science tells a very ambiguous story.
That said, you are totally right that agriculture has in a matter of only a few thousand years become utterly unsustainable (with, in the West, an EROI of 0.1!) and extremely destructive. I just wonder whether this is inherent in agriculture, or whether agriculture can just really easily be hijacked by weaponizing forces (possibly due to the higher degree of organization than hunter-gather societies). Maybe if agriculture had been able to keep to a certain core, it would've been sustainable over far longer time scales.
I think this core can be found in the writings of for instance Wendell Berry and possibly Wes Jackson (haven't read him yet). It speaks of humility, of learning to listen to the land and of being tied to a place that takes care of you if you take care of it. Being aware of the fact that your knowledge of the land will always be limited, you have to act carefully and with respect. Now to me, that doesn't sound all that different from what indigenous cultures tell us.
I have wondered if *all* forms of agriculture have been unjustly tarred by the terrible impacts of the totalitarian style monocultures, and if the presence of surplus (which has resulted in hierarchy in hunter-gatherer societies at times, though obviously nothing like modernity’s scale or level of complexity) is underestimated as a culprit in Takerdom. Are there examples of egalitarian subsistence farming cultures that stay that way long-term, and that respect the life around them? Looking at the recent discoveries around the Amazon that imply tribes tended it as sort of a giant garden – it doesn’t look like agriculture to modernity, but maybe there’s grey area or wiggle room in the permaculture/regenerative agriculture arena? I’m at a loss otherwise in dealing with the immediate reactivity and dismissal of all things hunter-gatherer as a bridge too far or “we can’t go back” (besides suggesting “Beyond Civilization”).
Good discussion everyone.
Some people don't like it when I'm critical of Daniel Quinn for being so dead wrong (because of his human supremacy, LOL). But it really was foolish of him to narrow it all down to “It’s not man who is the scourge of the world, it’s a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. Our culture”.
All life on earth (if capable) would be following Homo sapiens current path towards a self-induced mass extinction. Culture has absolutely nothing to do with it. Turns out that "life" is the bad guy in this story. But the only possible way for life to earn “scourge of the world” status is if it figures out how to control fire.
Controlling fire doesn't explain it enough though. To paraphrase Rob Mielcarski, "Most people don’t see that something big and unique happened very quickly and needs an explanation. If you think a species that believes in god and that emerged in a big bang from a small tribe after 3 million years of banging 2 rocks together is no big deal then I guess there is no need for an explanation."
The (simplified) explanation is this; cooking food led to bigger brains, which led to this unique sapien-level awareness, which led to the sixth mass extinction.
You could well be correct, but I do not have enough authority to proclaim it so. I would also be reluctant to proclaim culture as irrelevant. Some cultures deliberately build in restraint (see the comment by Carnival Wilson, for instance). I'm not ready to deny that differences exist and can be important (more than irrelevant).
Catching Fire – How Cooking Made Us Human, Richard Wrangham
Cooking was a large part of the initial bootstrapping through chemical barriers to release large amounts of stored chemical potential. Each barrier to combustion got higher, but offered greater return rates: small fires -> cooking -> forest and brush clearing fires -> agriculture -> animal fat -> peat -> coal -> oils and gases.
Humans are really just generalist combustion enzymes. We are talented at mediating combustion reactions that are external to our own homeostatic metabolism.
Humans are the only species known to wield fire, but they did not discover it. As Billy Joel's song says, "We didn't start the fire." Early humans, including species such as Homo erectus, were adept at controlling fire but did not initially know how to ignite it. They likely learned to keep fire alive by transporting embers from natural fires. The control of fire was crucial for human evolution, providing warmth, protection, and a means to cook food, which in turn influenced dietary changes and social structures.
Is the idea that Life/evolution is essentially just a process that “seeks to discover” the most efficient way to dissipate energy/increase entropy?
Can it not be a bit more complicated/nuanced than this? I mean, there is at least a semblance of recognition amongst some of us (indigenous peoples, but now also many modernites) that for humans, and many other species, to continue living for a longer time (regarded as a “good” thing), we need to somehow learn to rein in our society/tribe’s base urges (rampant energy use, etc). So it seems to me that life/evolution is actually (potentially) capable of delivering organisms that are capable of a degree of self control for the sake of longer term survival of the species. Is the counter to this idea then that even though there might be some that ascribe to seeking a more balanced state, life/evolution will always produce people/organisms that end up overwhelming these “self-limiting” people/creatures and continue the process of mercilessly trying to eat everything (deplete all energy reserves) as quickly as possible?
Lively discussion. I am reminded of a Donella Meadows lecture on system dynamics and overshoot where she references a Rappaport book about a New Guinea people who reach some equilibrium population state, and their culture definitely played a factor.
In fact, when the Australians told them to stop their post pig-fest skirmishes, it removed an important negative feedback that was keeping overshoot from expressing.
Whether culture matters with respect to the overall arch of humanity is debatable. For the ability of any particular tribe to thrive over many thousands of years, culture seems to matter, at least that was one takeaway that I got from Meadows' lecture:
https://youtu.be/f9g4-5-GKBc?
Yes, these technologies facilitate mass extinction. But I find myself wondering – At this point, won't modernity's unraveling also drive extinction? This relates more to your interview with Jensen than to this post around 48:30. I understand that societies can definitely afford to "take their foot off the accelerator" on AI etc, but it seems that, *in practice*, certain elements of modernity are *already* being eroded, and these are more fundamental to citizens' (short-term) survival and to keeping us from taking ecologically-harmful desperate measures.
For example, populations who faced drought and food shortages resorted to culling wildlife (Namibia and Zimbabwe). Meanwhile, fossil fuel turned to deforestation (Syria and Mali) – unless biomass is too scarce or expensive… in which case they burn trash (Nigeria and Indonesia). Habitat destruction and endocrine disruption chemicals cause further biodiversity loss.
Unfortunately, the "we" facing a predicament seems to include not only for Homo colossus but all the creatures who share the planet with us. If I were a tree or small mammal, I'd be dreading the breakdown of systems as much as their continuation.
So: When it comes to the extinction *as it's actually playing out*, and to the (uncontrollable) unraveling of modernity, it seems to me that major losses are inevitable. I agree that it would be nice if we could fall out of love with the "icing on the cake" and slowly transition to food forests etc, but I wouldn't want to confuse this with evidence that there's hope for other species. (To use your river/shore metaphor, this feels like a strong, unanticipated undertow.)
Do you foresee a scenario where the anecdotes that I describe above DON'T become more widespread, thereby guaranteeing significant further biodiversity loss, at least until human numbers drop substantially?
I agree with your assessment: that the inevitable failure of modernity will itself continue—or even amplify—ecological destruction for the (short) duration in which it transpires. We have the wolf by the ear. Neither hanging on nor letting go are harmless options. Modernity will exact heavy tolls on its way out, tragically.
The question is one of magnitude and speed, which is anybody's guess. The demographic phenomenon getting underway could take tremendous pressure off, reducing the harm of withdrawal. Disruptions (supply chain, energy) could diminish efficacy of destruction (e.g., run out of bullets?). I suspect that on balance, the death throes of modernity will be a net harm to the community of life. Will it be enough to seal a sixth mass extinction? I can only hope not. Somehow continuing modernity seems sure to finish the job, though, so I'd rather take the path that *might* work out better for Life.
One thing that worries me is that every doubling period of an exponential is more than all previous periods combined. Thus when you're at the halfway mark quantitatively of a finite resource being depleted exponentially, you're at one minute to midnight in practice. Probably this is where we're at with oil, as no doubt we're all aware, I'm not saying anything new.
But I am worried on the ecological front as well. The fact that all anthropocentric mass now outweighs all living biomass gives another exponential concern. This is beyond the half-way mark, does that mean that we're at one minute to midnight with respect to the sixth mass extinction?
There are so many of us now with so much built capital imbued with destructive potential. It is daunting to think of how much damage has been done already and how much future damage is baked in. I still hope that as much healthy tissue as possible survives, but we've unlocked some serious tragedy.
Some more from me:
The Nation-State.
Representative democracy.
The stock market.
Air conditioning (trivial but it really bugs me).
Patriarchy, as opposed to the matricentric (not matriarchal) societal organisation described by Murray Bookchin.
Religious patriarchy is the worst, as it gives 'divine' approval to the mindset of dominion in all dimensions of human agency.
Tom,
I think you are trying to have your cake and eat it too. You have posited two arguments that are deeply contradictory. First, that human concerns are nothing special. "a big fat nothing burger" to paraphrase. And second, that modernity holds a unique place as especially bad. Those to lines of thoughts cannot be reconcilled.
The first argument is the correct one. Humans are not special, and have no distinguishing place in the Universe or on this planet. If you follow that to the logical conclusion, then so to is modernity not particularly special in any way.
In fact, at least half of the mass extinctions on Earth have been life's "self pwns", most dramatically being the Great Dying of the Permian-Triassic, where life literal suffocated itself in sulfur clouds rolling out of the Oceans. Or how about that time life oxidized itself to extinction in great waves of oxidation events, whose evidence is found in the layers of iron that was precipitated out of the Oceans. That was a laugh wasn't it?
Don't get me wrong human arrogance, hubris, and folly is ripely deserving criticism, derision, and mockery. However, do not for once over estimate how much control we have over our own behavior, particularly in aggregate, let alone our ability to control a planet. I think the current state of civilization is best characterized as a toddler violently writhing out of control, destroying everything in reach in a temper tantrum. Humanity is NOT in control of it's own facilities. We are in the full grip of Thermodynamic determinism now.
Initially, I was confused by thinking you were referring to the recent "Death is a Nothing-Burger" post and this "inventions" post, which wasn't making sense in terms of difficulty reconciling. But I think you mean my more general effort to de-center humans, fight human supremacy, support determinism and lack of free will, etc. Indeed, this is a subtle and nuanced "both can be true" mindset.
Our (left) brains often demand watertight logical consistency all at once in a single (simplified) context, but the actual world contains multitudes of conflicting contexts as a function of space and time. At the risk of offering too-simple an example, water is a liquid; a solid; a gas. These irreconcilable states are all true, but not all at the same place and time—changing depending on the context.
Similarly, it is possible to combat human supremacy *and* prefer a long-duration outcome for humans that doesn't carry out a mass extinction. I can also know that I am not important to the universe, while continuing to eat and enjoy being alive.
Determinism isn't the same as predictable: the universe is effectively open-ended. If humans are to have a future short of catastrophe, it will only be because (cultural) behaviors change, in response to a complex set of stimuli. Nothing wrong with playing a role in the stimulus package. It's natural to react in ways other than resignation and defeatism: it's how we're here at all.
The Universe is locally open ended while globally closed. That is the fundamental nature of statistics. In aggregate determinism is emergent.
As for preferring a World without extinction, the Universe does not give one lick about your preferences, nor mine.
About "does not give one lick"… I get that—I really do. I actually find comfort in it. At the same time, note, preferences *do* influence actions and consequences. Life is engineered (selected by feedback) to pursue preferences. Our preferences as a species are, therefore, not irrelevant and powerless to alter the universe (those preferences are *part of* the universe). If all life decided that because the universe has no plan and doesn't care, there's no point in having preferences, therefore stopped pursuing food (for instance), life would terminate in short order. So: the universe doesn't care: who cares? It changes nothing—and the universe doesn't care that preferences make a difference, either. They just do.
No that is backwards. We engineered to post-hoc ascribe preferences to our actions. Even at the scale of a few thousands humans they are mostly not in control of themselves.
It's like you're insisting on a particular order for the chicken–egg question: it can be both, together, as a package—looked at from either direction (no "backwards" or "forwards"). That an amoeba prefers to head toward the food instead of away from it is the only way it can work/survive/persist. By "prefers" I mean: reacts to stimuli asymmetrically. One needn't read too much into it (driving it to the point of "wrongness").
My cheeky response: in the latest season of Love, Death, and Robots there is an episode where humans abuse an alien weapon, which causes Earth to implode in a very local black hole. The show illustrates this as a microscopic dust particle on the edge of our galaxy making a shrill fart sound. And that about sums up the entirety on the human race.
That is a bit of semantic cheating you are using around the word "preference". The most charitable thought I have is that you are using the term very loosely. Less charitably that is an abuse of terminology.
The idea of "preference" is a construct we impose on the actions of, in your example, the amoeba. That it appears to moves toward a food source is entirely mathematically predictable from the chemical and thermal gradients, as a form of stochastic descent.
In my first attempt at graduate school I tutored ecology masters students in the mathematics they required to code the numerical methods used to simulate exactly those sorts of processes. That was back in the mid 1990s!
Surely, preference is an illusion? Using the word implies that there was another option we could choose but, without free will, there isn't.
All the usual complexity still applies (as in Decisions, Rivulets, and What is Life posts), but it's cumbersome to load up the language (unequal to the task) with these various disclaimers. I could say that Life prefers to live rather than die, and will execute decisions in service of that goal. Otherwise it wouldn't be Life. We prefer continuation over extinction, but are over our skis and may not possess the wiring to avoid it (a novel situation, not secured by evolution to produce appropriate responses).
It should not be controversial to state that an amoeba prefers to move towards food. Over-analysis of any phenomenon risks missing the wood for the trees.
If a dog yelps after being struck or wags his tail on seeing his owner return home, are his actions merely due to "chemical and thermal gradients… stochastic descent"? Or does the hound actually feel?
Just as to a man with a hammer every problem starts to look like a nail, maybe to those trained to think in terms of mathematical statistics everything ends up being seen only in terms of numbers.
In order for language to work there is some 'common knowledge' – such as that organisms feel and make choices (influenced by nature and nurture) accordingly.
"I could say that Life prefers to live rather than die, and will execute decisions in service of that goal. Otherwise it wouldn't be Life."
Right, so it's not actually a "preference" rather an aspect of life. A fact of life.
Speaking from lived experience, life emphatically does not need to "prefer" to live to keep living. Sometimes life feels like it was brought into existence without it's permission. And sometimes life screams "You had no right at all to put me in the middle of all this!"
Is it possible to use science to figure out how to better integrate into the community of life, rather using it to wreck the planet?
Excellent question. It's sort-of what I'm attempting: using the scientific basis I've learned to flip primacy away from human aggrandizement, in favor of the Community of Life. Seems possible in principle, but whether our culture can accept such a path is a more dubious proposition.
Tom, I'd share Richard Jones' dilemma, that unless we identify our truly progressive inventions vis a vis human/taker supremacy, how would we proceed in a better direction? Good/bad might just be two sides of the same coin: self-reflection. I would say, that itself could be a good 'invention'; to build on it, and on its offshoots:
1. Music, dance, sport, poetry, humor, art;
2. Philosophy, especially the examination of the ways and limits of our knowing;
3. Ecological/metabolic energetics (of Odum, Pinkerton, Hall, etc.);
4. Arithmetical analysis (without it we wouldn't know that we are in a pickle);
More bad inventions, or those that can go sour too easily:
1. Compounded interest, fractional reserves;
2. Lifelong and/or inheritable debt (roots of modern slavery?);
3. Institutional violence (roots of domestic violence?).
Most of our dichotomies describe inseparable aspects of a single phenomenon: one defining/creating the other. See the tenth episode of Metastatic Modernity (Ditch the Bad?) for how tangled the inseparable mess of Likes and Dislikes are. It's almost pointless to list Goods if they necessitate the Bads.
As implied, Good cannot exist without Bad. One defines the other and vice versa. The 'struggle', at least in the human domain, between the two is an eternal one, and oftentimes either of the two morphs into the other. The trick is to identify them correctly and keep them in balance.
The worst 'invention' is undoubtedly the human ability to think in abstract terms, but it also happens to be the best thing about humans, having allowed people to lead lives in the abstract, rather than remain within the realm of the concrete.
As to to the 'metastatic' nature of the technological incarnation of the human enterprise, any species would behave the same way humans do. Upon discovering an abundant source of resources, they would devour them voraciously, multiply beyond the carrying capacity, exhaust the resources due to their limited quantity or inability to renew, and go extinct. The difference is that humans are smart enough to screw things up on a planetary scale, or so it appears.
Anyway, speaking about dichotomies, one problem is that (unbridled) consumerism has no opposition. There is no asceticism, abstinentism, austeritism, modestism. Consumption is the universal raison d'etre. I do understand, however, as per your position, that even if there were something like that, it wouldn't change much overall.
Everything humans do, discover, or invent is akin to what all other species do, which amounts to creating as favorable living conditions as possible. Thanks to their more developed intellect, humans are able to transform stuff and procure themselves way more goodies than any other critter.
The problem is what humans have NOT discovered (invented) or realized or refused to acknowledge. Namely, the meaning and (long-term) consequences of their conduct. Humans are on a collision course with themselves DESPITE having the intellectual ability to understand that.
What humans need to invent is a mental vehicle that will oppose their (biologically inherent) desire to create as luxurious living conditions and destroying their natural habitat and other creatures in the process. I think that the Maya civilization had something like that, where people perceived themselves as being a link in a long chain, i.e. they saw the continuity of their existence beyond their lifespan. We only see as far as the next useless piece of crap we get from Amazon.
Can something be invented to change human myopia that, combined with the somewhat developed intellectual ability, is ultimately self-destructive?