Readers often ask me what the point is of writing about the accelerating collapse of our global civilization if I believe it’s inevitable and unstoppable. As a non-believer in free will, my answer is that this seems to be what I’ve been conditioned and am compelled to do these days. My role, it seems, is to chronicle the fall, not to try hopelessly to prevent it.
But although I’m skeptical about most of our attempts to ascribe causality to highly complex phenomena (post hoc ergo propter hoc cognitive bias and all that), my brain’s incessant ‘sense-making’ predilection seems to make me want to understand why (or at least how) we got to this state.
I’ve written about my own theories a lot, most recently in this article which included the chart above, “blaming” our current destructiveness on a combination of unfortunate past climate change and the “brain damage” that arose many millennia ago from unique evolutionary changes to the human brain. This evolutionary misstep, which anthropologists call brain entanglement, is explained in this article.
This is only a wild guess, of course, though it seems to have a lot of supporting scientific evidence. And in the long run, we can never know and it doesn’t matter anyway. We’re fucked. No point in pointing fingers once the iceberg has been struck and the ship is going down.
Still, there is some strange comfort in at least having a plausible understanding of what seemingly led to this catastrophic end to our global civilization and quite possibly our species.
So I was quite intrigued when my friend Paul Heft drew my attention to an ongoing debate on this subject between agronomist Chris Smaje and physicist Tom Murphy.
Chris’ argument, which he explains here, is that our brains were likely part of the problem that led to our current predicament. It was our (entangled) brains’ capacity to abstract, imagine, and reorganize the world that disconnected us from ecological feedback, what Edward O Wilson called our global biophilic self-regulatory connection with all life on Earth (part of what’s called the Gaia Hypothesis). Through what Chris calls “symbolic consciousness”, we began to live in an imaginary, abstracted world of our own invention, instead of in the real, physical world.
Chris asserts that this hallucinatory way of being in the world predates the discoveries that led to (monoculture, high-maintenance) agriculture, and hence we shouldn’t blame agriculture in particular for where we’ve ended up. “[Language], farming and so on were not the cause of our malaise but the result of it”. Unfortunately, after making this point, Chris reveals that he believes absolutely in free will and is not at all a determinist, so he then prescribes what we “can do” to steer the planet in a more positive direction, presumably by rising above or even employing the cognitive impairment of our “symbolic consciousness”. The cause of our disease somehow becomes the vehicle for our healing. Read the article if you want to know more; I can’t properly summarize it, because at this point it ceased to make sense to me.
Tom’s argument, which he explains here, is that our current predicament had nothing to do with our brains, and is entirely the result of unfortunate circumstances. The cause was a “sequence of structural transitions — agriculture, language, emergence of nation-states, fossil fuels — that have cumulatively locked us into ecological overshoot”. None of these were necessary or predictable, they’re just what happened. And Tom’s a believer, like me, that we have no free will, so basically he is saying we had, and have, no agency in how any of this transpired, or how it will play out.
My quibble with Tom is why this sequence has never happened — indeed no part of it has ever been in evidence — in any other creature on the planet. Our natural evolution, he seems to be saying, ran into the wall of “material and energetic constraints”, and the result was disaster.
So I guess I’m stuck with the theory that I’ve diagrammed above. Still not convinced we could have gotten here without entangled, damaged brains. Still not convinced that this evolutionary misstep was necessarily anything more than a spandrel — an accident of nature’s incessant explorations of potentially better-adapted mutations. A natural experiment that went tragically wrong, and is now in the process of being brutally corrected through collapse and possibly extinction.
And I’m still not convinced there is anything we could have done through the exercise of some magical imagined “free will”, or anything that we can “willfully” do now. It’s completely unpredictable what happens next, and after that. But it’s completely determined.
Ship’s going down.
