On 5/11/2011 11:24 AM, Keith Addison wrote:
> With the environmental crisis, we're now in a situation where we can
> decide whether Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done
> about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human
> intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will
> survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent
> existence, and we'll take a lot of the rest of the living world along
> with us.
This point presumes that intelligence lies at the root of our
environmental problems. Unlike other creatures, we don't lack for
understanding of the problems we face, nor do we struggle to define
solutions. Yet, in a supposedly well-educated society, people wear
ignorance like some badge of honor. Just today a "patriotic American"
posted THIS in a different forum:
"The real problem is Taxes, Traitors, and Invaders. The purpose
of taxes is to reduce what is taxed. Gee... they started with products,
then us, now every American. Yet they don't tax illegals. Guess we
know what they DO want. Hmmm?"
Bald-faced and racist vitriol of this kind gets flung like ape scat
against anyone who dares suggest that fundamental change to our economic
system is necessary because our current model threatens the
environment. (I have pale skin, and nobody would say such a thing to me
in person. But my name evokes a visceral and very ugly response among a
certain crowd who have never seen me.) If the racism card doesn't work,
the next layer is hatred of all things "progressive." (That's the
"traitors" part.) Beneath that lies fear of intelligence and education,
a la Glen Beck. If that doesn't work, religion is the last bastion for
the ignorant. Even a devout person like me feels exasperated by what I
hear in church every week.
So, is the problem really intelligence, or is it stupidity?
<big snip>
> It's particularly interesting to take a look at the people who are
> running these campaigns, say, the CEOs of big corporations. They know
> as well as you and I do that it's very real and that the threats are
> very dire, and that they're threatening the lives of their
> grandchildren. In fact, they're threatening what they own, they own
> the world, and they're threatening its survival. Which seems
> irrational, and it is, from a certain perspective. But from another
> perspective it's highly rational. They're acting within the structure
> of the institutions of which they are a part.
This is intelligent? We designed the economic system. We can
design whatever economic system we desire. Protagorus said this a LONG
time ago: "Man is the measure of all things." (Uh oh, my education is
showing . . . Bad me!) I'm confident this is true, and that we COULD
create an economic model that is equitable and gentle on the earth. But
that would mean we'd have to give up our sense of entitlement to wasting
our resources. We're too worried that our brothers and sisters in other
parts of the world will get what we think we deserve, so we compete with
one another for the last scraps on the table. Being a bully is very
effective in the short term . . .
<more snippage>
> Meanwhile, the role of finance in the economy has exploded. The share
> of corporate profit by financial institutions has just zoomed since
> the 1970s. Kind of a corollary of that is the hollowing out of
> industrial production, sending it abroad. This all happened under the
> impact of a kind of fanatic religious ideology called economics-and
> that's not a joke-based on hypotheses that have no theoretical
> grounds and no empirical support but are very attractive because you
> can prove theorems if you adopt them: the efficient market
> hypothesis, rational expectations hypothesis, and so on. The spread
> of these ideologies, which is very attractive to concentrated wealth
> and privilege, hence their success, was epitomized in Alan Greenspan,
> who at least had the decency to say it was all wrong when it
> collapsed. I don't think there has ever been a collapse of an
> intellectual edifice comparable to this, maybe, in history, at least
> I can't remember one. Interestingly, it has no effect. It just
> continues. Which tells you that it's serviceable to power systems.
But doesn't this also call into question the intelligence of the
rest of us who keep going along with this nonsense? Before all of this
started, I was complaining about unintended consequences, arguing with
my stock-broker sister that unlimited growth is IMPOSSIBLE on a finite
planet, but she--and apparently most of everyone else--simply didn't
comprehend the problem. Now, I've always known that my eldest sister
isn't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. I wonder if there's a
certain threshold below which intelligence offers little advantage.
Sometimes, two standard deviations from the norm feels like the distance
across the Grand Canyon.
In fact, the intellectual edifice may have collapsed, but it's got
a fresh coat of whitewash that makes it look pretty enough to pass
muster for most folk. I feel a bit like Ezekiel, who had a similar
problem with the leadership of his people a long time ago. (It's ok to
promote knowledge about something as long as it's from the Bible, isn't it?)
<another snip>
> Let's go to the environmental crisis. There's nobody around to bail
> you out. The externalities in this case are the fate of the species.
> If that's disregarded in the operations of the market system, there's
> nobody around who is going to bail you out from that. So this is a
> lethal externality. And the fact that it's proceeding with no
> significant action being taken to do anything about it does suggest
> that Ernst Mayr actually had a point.
On this I strongly disagree with Mr. Chomsky. If the evolutionary
advantage we enjoy over other creatures is a "lethal mutation," why is
it that I look at this human-derived economic system and think: "This is
madness!" I change my behavior. I speak out against the injustice of a
system that concentrates wealth into few hands and rewards "leveraging"
the productive labor of other people, rather than individual work. But,
the people who support this system are too dull-witted to see the
consequences of their attitudes and actions. They scream about
excessive taxation, immigration, a return to "traditional values," and
worry about the government of the third-largest nation on earth getting
too intrusive into their personal lives. (Yet, they're quite willing to
demand that the same government force compliance with their definition
of moral conduct.) I can debate this issue point by point, shred the
arguments that bolster environmental apathy, and yet, people cling to a
fervent, irrational allegiance to this failed economic model.
Why do they do this? Because people make decisions based on how
they feel, not on what's logical. The problem is not that we have big
brains. The problem is that we fail to use them . . .
robert luis rabello
Adventure for Your Mind
http://www.newadventure.ca
Crisis video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZedNEXhTn4
The Long Journey video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4muxaksgk
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