Preface

Big Problems

Almost everyone knows that humankind faces huge problems now, and will do so even more in coming years. Melting ice, dramatic storms, immigration, terrorist attacks….   But I don’t need to rehearse them here: they’re a feature on daily newscasts and explored more deeply in readily available books and reports.

And everyone knows that we ourselves are creating those problems. They don’t exist without us. It’s no one else, and nothing else. We are making the problems that we have to solve—posing the challenges to ourselves that we alone must meet.

No one solves problems by burying their head in the sand. People solve problems (individual or collective), first, by taking responsibility for them. Then, in the case of large complex societal problems, they may have to ditch cynicism or indulgence or despair and take up the notion to begin with that they are solvable. Those first two steps are often related.

Then—again in the case of complex social problems—people in democracies can (in principle) openly explore their root causes and publicly discuss and debate what they find and think and want to do about them.  And, finally, people in the advanced democracies have many opportunities and resources to work within the possibilities given by democratic institutions to roll back the problems and roll out solutions.

(The environmental and social challenges for poor people in impoverished countries are of a different order: They can’t be ignored; they are an integral part of the picture; but they do need to be considered in their own right. Here I’m thinking primarily in terms of relatively privileged citizens of the developed countries.)

It’s a tall order, though. Just because something is possible in principle doesn’t mean it will happen.  But the longest journey begins with the first steps. And the first steps in this journey—one many people have already begun—is to engage in that which most makes us human: namely talk—or, as the case may be, writing, or making movies, shooting videos, posting blogs—in sum, learning and communicating.  Action of course is important too; but it’s always better to think first.

Reading, Writing, & ‘Rithmatic: One of the Biggest Big Problems

And just here, at the beginning, we slam into one our biggest problems.  If thinking and talking, research and writing, are really our first steps then we’re already in trouble.  People have done that.  Leaping into the fray at this point is a like joining a marathon race already in progress in which no one knows where the finish line is. Just facing the sheer volume of information and communication makes you want to throw up your hands—or maybe sometimes just throw up.  There’s already an overwhelming amount of material and no end of controversy about the problems and prospects of burgeoning high-tech humanity on a limited planet.

Even worse, we already know so much more than we put into practice.  What we’re learning about the world and about ourselves far outpaces the ability of our culture with its entrenched institutions and habits of thought to change in response to that learning.  This creates a widening gap between what we know and what we do.  I’ll say more about that in a moment.

Nevertheless, we have to keep doing it—keep on learning, talking, figuring, and writing; it’s the only way.  And we don’t have to feel totally lost or directionless.  Given the confusing babble already out there, works that offer overviews and perspectives, that bring different aspects of our current situation together into more coherent pictures of where we are and how we got here, are an essential part of the mix.

That’s the intent and thinking behind this blog. I like to figure things out for myself; and by sharing what I know and think, I can hope to make my own small contribution. Furthermore, my own field of anthropology has some uniquely important and widely undervalued (too often even within the profession itself) resources and perspectives to offer.

As a whole, the big story is one of disjunction: Different aspects of our lives are moving increasingly out of phase with each other. That’s a particular instance of a very general pattern—a characteristic aspect or property of complex systems, in fact. Evolution in the universe in general happens at different speeds on different levels; and in itself that’s not necessarily a problem. For us in particular now, however, what we are learning about ourselves and the Earth, and the cosmos we’re in, advances far more rapidly than our cultures adapt or change to reflect this knowledge.

Consequently, we have this widening gap that I mentioned between what we know and how we live; while at the same time troubles with how we live—with the modern individualistic, consumption-based, growth-oriented way of life—rapidly ramp up to truly worrying levels. So much so that increasing numbers of sober, reflective people in different walks of life fear that we may be approaching a tipping point or crisis of civilization itself. For us, in our current situation, then, the growing disjunction between what we know and how we live is a problem, a big one.

The Acceleration of Evolution in the Universe

The advent of life greatly speeded up the evolution of complexity on Earth—and in the cosmos. Similarly, anthropologists have long noted that human cultural life evolves more rapidly and flexibly than biological life. Human biology has not changed significantly since the advent of language and culture—possibly 50,000 or 60,000 years ago, or earlier depending on what criteria you use or evidence you’re looking at.  In any event, it’s clear that since the advent of human culture the most significant human evolution has occurred on the cultural plane, and at a much more rapid pace than biological evolution does. Biological evolution hasn’t stopped, but cultural evolution overtakes and overshadows it.

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A later note (2018-03-17): I just came across a couple of articles in which the cosmologist and physicist Stephen Hawking makes a similar point about how evolution occurs at different speeds on different levels.

Stephen Hawking died on March 14, 2018, the same day that I put up this blog post on my web site. The news of the famous physicist’s passing flashed around the globe, followed by tributes to his life and work. I came across this review article in the on-line news service Quartz, that in turn links to the original short article by Hawking himself. Hawking says that “our view of human evolution as simply biological is too narrow [because now humans] “evolve much more quickly, beyond the physical limitations of their biology, because of written language.” Hawking, of course, wanting to tell the story with numbers as well as words, has some interesting figures to compare the growth of informational content in “the external record in books,” compared to the “internally transmitted genetic material.”

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Similarly, just as culture evolves more swiftly than biology, so today’s science evolves more swiftly than culture. With the advent of modern science human knowledge and understanding of itself and of the cosmos grows in depth and complexity much more rapidly than our cultures do—and more rapidly than our cultures can keep up with.   Entrenched institutions, habits of thought, and daily practices can’t keep pace with what we’re learning. Consequently, we have that widening gap between what we know and how we live. Let’s take a closer look, beginning with the origins of those modern institutions and patterns of thought that are being overtaken by the growth of knowledge that they themselves generate.

The Widening Gap Between What We Know and How We Live

If you read the following heading sentences one after the other, in order, you’ll have an overview—the skeleton of the story. Then you can come back and read the text under the headings to put some flesh on the bones.

1.  Early modern science gave rise to a new world-view that became the social, political, and economic bedrock of the emerging modern world.

Knowledge about the universe, about our world, about ourselves, has grown dramatically over the past few hundred years. Some of the biggest ground-breaking discoveries—the heliocentric solar system, Newton’s laws of motion, Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics—were made in previous centuries. Those theoretical breakthroughs laid the starting blocks for later scientific advances. But perhaps even more, along the way they also shaped the emerging modern world at large—its institutions, its ways of thinking, its general world-view.

For instance, the idea that things can best be understood by breaking them down into their individual components and then uncovering the universal laws that govern the behavior of those parts became central to our thinking, virtually taken-for-granted, following Copernicus’s and Galileo’s cosmological discoveries and Newton’s mechanics. Similarly, theories of evolutionary growth and development later crystallized around Darwin’s idea of “survival of the fittest” as the engine of evolution—and of the burgeoning capitalist economy.

Those ideas—the world including human society as a machine governed by universal cause-and-effect laws, and human progress as an outcome of that machine driven by competitive individualism—broke free from the Medieval world-view and its institutions. They were powerfully liberating and compelling in their time. Thus, the methods, thinking, and general world-view of early physical and biological science, all too understandably, found their ways into the social philosophies that shaped the modern age.

Ancestral social thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, Baron Montesquieu, René Descartes, Adam Smith, and Herbert Spencer translated Newtonian and Darwinian ideas into the social, political, and economic principles that we still live by. The individualism that underlies political democracy and capitalist economics as we know them, for instance, has roots in the works of those Enlightenment figures whose thought teemed with the creative insights of early modern science.

Take, for instance, the notions of separating and balancing the powers of government as one might design a machine, and of aggregating individual preferences to run a nation and competitively drive its economy. You can easily see in such examples how the powerful Newtonian and Darwinian ideas that dominated the early modern eras got woven into the governing institutions that were being formed then, and that continue to shape how we live today.

As we’ll see, the initial scientific justifications for our economic and governmental institutions dissolved in the light of further scientific advances; but that in itself doesn’t mean they aren’t good and worth preserving in their own rights.  Modern institutions helped greatly to increase some individual freedoms and the material well-being that we enjoy today, and we do need to appreciate and preserve their positive aspects.  But these later scientific advances, which we’ll briefly turn to next, do tell us that we won’t be breaking any natural laws if we work to change destructive and exploitive social dynamics where and when we find them.

2.    Even as early scientific ideas and insights were shaping the institutions and ways of life that became today’s modern Western culture, however, science itself moved on.

While those foundational ideas I just mentioned were becoming entrenched in actual social, political, and economic institution, science itself marched on.  In fact, the cumulative pace of knowledge growth from those earlier discoveries I just mentioned to the present has accelerated rapidly, with the pace picking up especially through the twentieth century.

And, importantly, that later growth of knowledge has not been simply an accumulation of details, a filling-in of blanks. The twentieth century in particular saw transformative advances in understanding the world and ourselves that are just as revolutionary as those that launched the modern age to begin with, that defined the ideals and institutions we still live by.

The general theory of relativity early in the century, and later quantum theory, advances in astronomy and cosmology that explore the evolution of the universe from the “Big Bang,” and more recently yet, further advances in biology, the theory of culture and the rise of systems and complexity theories, profoundly reshape our views of reality, and of ourselves. Just as Copernicus, Newton, and Darwin propelled a gestalt shift away from the Medieval universe populated by angels and demons in which “Man” was the center of all things, so these later developments similarly transform the Newtonian/Darwinian worldview that still in-forms the major institutions of the modern world.

3.  Consequently, today’s understandings of both the physical world and human nature are more complex, holistic, and realistic than are those of the Enlightenment era on the basis of which Western society, politics, and economics developed and still largely function.

The principles that we actually live by today—the social and economic institutions that embody them, and the real, material infrastructures that have grown up around and house these institutions—were conceived and built up within the scope of the Newtonian/Darwinian universe. These underpinnings of modern western culture as we live it today remain those of an earlier era in the history of ideas. While its science and technology have moved on, our lived culture (the social, political, and economic institutions with all the practices, habits of thought, and emotions that make them real and give form to our daily lives) remains grounded in and shaped by ideas that later scientific understandings supersede or relativize within larger contexts.

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(In this regard, one of the key insights of our current paradigmatic turn is the realization of just how deeply our cultures shape who we are as individuals. One of the now-classic statements of this realization is an early essay, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, originally published in 1966 and now available on-line here.)

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4.  “New wine in old bottles”: This growth of knowledge within entrenched institutions, therefore, creates the ever-widening gap between what we know and how we live.

The situation I just sketched—the ongoing relatively rapid growth of knowledge about our world and about ourselves, while the weightily entrenched political and economic institutions that govern our lives lag behind and remain relatively the same—produces the widening gap between what we know and how we live. The ways we live no longer reflect the knowledge we have.

Put simply, modern western culture, the way we live, embodies some key advances in knowledge of ourselves and our world that raised humankind (those more fortunate or privileged, anyway) up to new levels of discernment and unprecedented material well-being. But later scientific progress reveals errors and insufficiencies in some of the basic ideas that still underpin modern institutions, that now threaten that same privileged way of life.

5.  The errors being revealed by that gap between today’s knowledge and our ongoing social, political, and economic practices have all-too-real consequences that are coming due.

Living on the basis of principles that are way too simple and out of phase with the complexity of the real world we inhabit, as we now understand it, has consequences; and those consequences are coming due. Daily news programs and papers report increasingly severe problems: the costs of human-caused climate change, species extinction, growing inequality and the angers and resentments that go with it, and out-of-control population growth in the poorest countries, to mention just a few current worries. Many thinkers and writers—philosophers, scientists, journalists—actively delve into these issues, and write about them at sometimes deeper levels in a broad range of technical and popular publications.

6.  With  the problems we’re making for ourselves, and the simultaneous knowledge we’re creating, we challenge ourselves to do better.

One way to look at all this is that we’re creating conditions that force us evolve further—to reach new levels in the integration of thought and action. We’re making a world in which we simply have to become more conscious to survive.  We need, with some urgency, to continue learning ways to use the knowledge we have to make our institutions and practices—the ways we live our daily lives—themselves more conscious, more flexible and resilient, and more in accord with the realities and non-negotiable limitations of the Earth we inhabit.