If we are not mere Animals why are we behaving like One?
Sex & Violence & Food . That’s what animals care about most. If you look on the TV or internet or read a newspaper or peruse the shelves of a book store I bet that most of what you will see/hear is about these same 3 topics, eg.: 30 percent of all data transferred across the Internet is porn. War in the Ukraine had made 5 million refugees. Famine is coming to Ethopia. With this mind let’s consider the weekly CACOR zoom presentation yesterday by Dr. Anders Wijkman entitled “If the Circular Economy is so obvious – why is it so slow in the making?” After his talk I thought: “Our insatiable hunger for more, more, more appears to me just like the behaviour of any organism – whether it be the Covid virus multiplying in our lungs or algae destroying a lake because of fertilizer run off.” Well that rather sobering, but obvious, thought has put me into a bit of a “funk”. Today I am asking that together we consider the question: “Does the data support the hypothesis that human behaviour is fundamentally different than the plants and animals we consider so inferior to ourselves?” The basic idea is this: the basic drive of all life is simply to reproduce itself: Success = more copies of my DNA. If we were different than animals we could say “no” to this basic drive and use higher order brain functions like self-control and delayed gratification and future planning and altruism to over ride this basic biological urge. To answer this question “Are we different than Animals?” let’s look at some graphs from Ander’s presentation.
What do all these graphs tell us? We are a species that is consuming more, more, more: more of our DNA walking around means more of the worlds resources must be directed our way! Sure, we have used technology to be more “efficient”, sure we have reused/recycled, sure we could stop flying. The fact is we have tried to do all these things but the data tells us our efforts have come to naught. That is a harsh fact to accept. So does it seems like we following the primal urge to copy our DNA & take the resources we need to do so, even at the cost of making other species extinct? Even at the cost of risking the future of our progeny? The answer is a resounding yes! But the solutions do not lie only in better technology, it lies by looking deep into our souls and realizing that we are not living up to our potential as “human beings”. In fact, the data suggests that we are very much “human animals”, not really “human beings” whose executive functioning is in charge.
And this is precisely where the tension lies: Panthera tigris and Homo sapiens are actually very much alike, and we are drawn to many of the same things, if for slightly different reasons. Both of us demand large territories; both of us have prodigious appetites for meat; both of us require control over our living space and are prepared to defend it, and both of us have an enormous sense of entitlement to the resources around us.
John Vaillant, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
Need more convincing? The well known graph below left shows what species do when go into overshoot mode. How does that this applies to us? The graph on the right is one support for supposing that we are in overshoot mode already. Any species that causes the mass extinction of other species is clearly consuming resources and taking up the living areas of these species. Clearly, if we continue on our current trajectory we will suffer the consequences, like any other plant or animal. Now, this is all well known. My point is that our technological approach to solving the problem is actually part of the problem. We must stop acting like animals. We must actually exert self control by saying “no” to more, more more. No more of our DNA and no more using of resources that are needed by other species. No to worshiping the God of GDP growth forever. Yes to self discipline and thinking of others before yourself.
Of course, there is lots of good news along with the bad. Although the graph below left shows we are reproducing out of control, we can see from the right graph that it looks like our population explosion is ending. However, as you saw above, our consumption explosion is in full gear. The data does not suggest that we can stop the party before permanent damage is done to the Earth’s ecosystem. A quick side step: a bit on the war in Ukraine, which is impossible to ignore. It can be seen as a part of this larger system collapse: Russia feels threatened when no real threat exists. This stress and over reaction is typical when a life form, whether amoeba or individual human or society like Russia is suffering from chronic stress, stress partially caused by an overall “Zeitgeist” that is filled with a foreboding that things are “just not right” – without knowing the cause. Well, I am proposing that the cause is that many of us now have this very unconscious feeling that the train of human civilization, unless it changes direction drastically, is headed off a cliff.
So, what does the data tell us? To be brutally honest it seems to say that in spite of our best efforts and in spite of our enormous potential to use our executive function to over-ride our basic biological urges for sex and violence we are behaving like any other animal or plant. So what does this mean for our future? Well, that is pretty obvious: we will consume resources until they are gone, fight each other over the scraps and our population will collapse through starvation and disease. Not a pretty picture. But, and this is a but, to hell with the data. You are I are not controlled by it and we are not controlled by past events. In spite of the facts I am a big fan of the old WWII adage: “Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead!” You see there is this inner core of me that, in spite of the facts, believes that we can become human; we can use the higher order executive functions in our cerebral cortex that animals and plants do not have – we can over ride our primal urge to only focus on making more copies of my DNA and grabbing more resources to do so.
To help me remain hopeful and optimistic I have just purchased a recently written SCI-FI book entitled: The Ministry for the Future by K.S. Robinson. Here is a short description. “Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the world’s future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story. From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined. Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry For The Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us – and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.”
So, what can you do? Stop being an animal. Focus on more than sex and violence and food in your life. This includes stopping to watch the absurdly sex filled and violence filled entertainments provided for us and eating less/no meat. Meditate. Laugh. Share meals with friends. Vacation locally. Pray. See problems as opportunities for growth. Accept risk as part of life. Worry less. Smile more. Focus on what you can do something about and mostly ignore the rest. Be content with much, much less stuff and more experiences with other people and with nature. This includes letting go of your desire for more, more, more – a programming that is tough to over–ride but one that all of us, with the discipline that makes us free, can over–ride. Read some books to inspire you, ie. The Post-Pandemic World, Sustainable Living on a Wounded Planet by John Erik Meyer. Then, and only then, can we become truly human and not merely remain as we seem to be today , a human animal masquerading as a human being. Good luck!
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