Part 1 argued that modern humans are maladapted by nature and nurture to the world they themselves have created. Our paleolithic brains are befuddled by the sheer scale, complexity and pace of change of our socio-biophysical environments. Our contemporary (yet ‘natural’) simplistic, reductionist mechanistic ways of approaching this new ‘reality’ fail to enlighten.
Part 2 makes the case that much of our befuddlement is due to the onslaught of unfamiliar, dangerous, scale-induced emergent phenomena including cultural pathology. We cannot control the chaotic world that is unfolding from the clash and convergence of large complex systems, both cultural and biophysical. The evidence suggests that modern techno-industrial (MTI) societies have been irreversibly expelled from the sustainability Garden of Eden and are in danger of being ‘selected out’ altogether.
Emergent phenomena
‘Emergence’ describes complex systems properties or behaviours that result from of the interaction of two or more systems components (or whole systems) but that are not properties of, or detectable from, the structure or behaviour of the individual components. We can anticipate that, in an era of rapid change, explosive economic growth and countless unprecedented systems interactions, particularly between the human enterprise and the ecosphere, there will be many emergent phenomena with regrettable consequences. However, the nature and scale of these phenomena may not be evident until they, well… ‘emerge’.
Examples of emergence proliferate at every spatial scale. Many involve the interplay of technology with biophysical nature. Consider the innumerable possibilities for unpredictable consequences generated by the over 350,000 synthetic chemicals that have been let loose in the ‘environment’ as they encounter each other, natural biochemicals and living organisms. The majority of industrial chemicals have not been adequately tested, yet thousands have been detected in our food supplies and every organ of the human body. (Humans gotta be crazy!) Environmental contamination is implicated in the 50%-and-climbing decline in male sperm counts in the past half-century; one recent study found that modern human brains contain about 7 gm of microplastic particles (the equivalent of a plastic spoon), that the quantity is rapidly increasing[1] and that higher levels of contamination are associated with dementia. Neither trend was anticipated before the fact.
Some cases of emergence can afflict single individuals: your father’s dementia may emerge as those microplastics interfere in some as-yet-unknown way with his brain activity; alcohol or drug addiction emerges with substance-induced gradual changes in brain structure and function; hallucinations emerge from the interaction of psycho-active chemicals and the synaptic networks of the brain.
Other examples affect large biophysical systems or the entire ecosphere. A purely natural phenomenon (though humans may be increasing their frequency and violence) is tornadoes, energy dissipating structures that can emerge from major thunderstorms when dry, usually cold, frontal systems collide with moist unstable air masses. Human-caused emergence includes: the thin eggshell syndrome that extirpated many populations of raptors in the mid/late 1900s (including the bald eagle in the lower 48 US states). Thin-shell syndrome emerges from the hormone mimicking/endocrine disruption action of chlorinated hydrocarbon biocides, particularly DDT and its break-down product, DDE, on previously unknown steps in the birds’ eggshell production system; atmospheric ozone depletion emerged when fugitive modern refrigerants (e.g., chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs) destabilized stratospheric chemistry; the spread of ocean anoxic (or ‘dead’) zones emerges from the die-off and subsequent oxygen-depleting decomposition of massive algal blooms, which themselves result from domestic sewage and agricultural (fertilizer) runoff, likely exacerbated by yet another human impact, anthropogenic global heating. And, of course, global heating itself is an emergent property of green house gas accumulations in the atmosphere (particularly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels) upsetting global heat balance. In fact, virtually all co-symptoms of overshoot are emergent phenomena that spring from the clash between growth-addicted industrialization, whatever its political form, and the steady-state dynamics of the ecosphere. (Reminder: Overshoot is ultimately a terminal condition. There are too many people consuming and polluting too much.)…
Bottom line
The collapse of complex societies results from a mismatch between the innate cognitive capacities of the growth-oriented human genome (in whatever culture-specific guise of perceiving the world) and the systemic surprises that emerge from excessive scale. Our essentially Paleolithic brains and associated social behaviors are functionally obsolete to manage the myriad emergent phenomena invariably associated with the internal machinations of large societal organizations or their interactions with the biophysical systems that contain them. The situation today is infinitely complicated for a global culture consisting of multiple disparate, competing, mutually hostile, resource-needy societies simultaneously confronted with the biophysical limits imposed by a finite planet.
Let me be clear—this is a true predicament, not a solvable problem. I am arguing that H. sapiens does not evolve socially stable, eco-compatible large-scale complex societies because we cannot evolve socially stable, eco-compatible large-scale complex societies. Such societies simply do not ‘emerge’ from the neuro-cognitive algorithms that help determine unnaturally large-group human behavioural-dynamics, particularly the dynamics of generated by global MTI society.
In Part 3, we will explore one neurocognitive mechanism that seems to be implicated in positively fomenting societal evolution-to-collapse.
Read the full article here.
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