Centering in the present

When we look to the future to give meaning to our lives, we lose the meaning we can make for ourselves here and now.
– John Gray

Since my next post on unplanning is ripening but slowly, I thought I’d post slightly edited excerpts from a paper I found enlightening in my quest to understand unplanning’s underpinnings. Vladimir Dimitrov is an Australian mathematician with keen interest in complexity, chaos theory and fuzzy logic. In Complexity, Chaos and Creativity: Journey beyond Systems Thinking he explores how complexity improves upon systems thinking, and in the process illuminates some of the ways that planning undercuts us.

Wholes inside wholes

System thinkers see the world made up of parts (systems, subsystems, components, elements, particles) that can be separated and analyzed independently from one another. The underlying assumption is that the whole is more than the parts, where ‘more’ usually relates to ‘more complicated’ or ‘more difficult to study and understand’; consequently, the parts are simpler and therefore easier to study and understand. For artificial (human-made) systems, such an assumption can be accepted. In nature and society, this assumption fails.

The microcosm is not simpler than the macrocosm; the same inseparably connected dynamics, energies and forces that make the spiral of our galaxy fold and stretch pulsate in a similar way through any living cell. The life of a single individual is not simpler than the life of society considered as a whole. In the fractal structure of nature the whole consists of wholes, only the scale changes.

To be fair, I think that system thinkers made a real effort to stress the emergent quality of the whole when all those components came together, which made it ‘more than the sum of its parts.’ That was an important insight of systems thinking. This insight was then built upon by complexity researchers.

It occurs to me that when we attempt to come up with patterns that help us walk in the “right” direction (as planning attempts to do), we are stymied by the effort to set clear goals and then break them down to parts, into steps that we can take. The alternative that I am trying to articulate does not start with a linear process (over there a goal, over here we taking the steps and the jumps arrived at by deduction). It starts with an awareness of wholeness that shifts into another wholeness, and another, as we walk. Tomorrow’s wholeness, emergent as it is, is not altogether predictable from today’s wholeness, and we have to give it a chance to evolve according to its own logic, not ours. The movement of wholeness to wholeness is like the slight turn of a kaleidoscope: a new whole, just as lovely and coherent, emerges from the previous pattern. Each new turn takes us further from the original whole but the final pattern still carries within it an echo of the first configuration.

Be here now

Complexity and chaos focus their attention on the present, because even tiny perturbations in the process of self-organization occurring at present can have enormous impacts on further development. It is an impossible task to make the ‘butterfly effect’ follow a goal-oriented strategy or target-setting anchored in the future.

While centered in the present, complexity thinking has the capacity not only to see the emergent phenomena at the moment they happen, but also to capture the signals related to their potential occurrence before they happen. This is of crucial importance, particularly if the emerging phenomena could affect negatively the unfolding of life. In contrast, being constantly centered on the various goals and targets attached to the future, systems thinking can see that emergence only after it has occurred, that is, when it is too late to undertake any action to prevent its occurrence. This explains today’s impotence of of systems thinking to cope with ecological complexity. Being mostly preoccupied with all kinds of ‘ecologically sustainable’ goals and dreams for ‘clean technologies’, with many local projects for ‘tomorrow’s environmentally friendly developments’ and noisy preparations of world-wide forums about how to make the planet a ‘better place to live for future generations,’ ecological systems thinking is unable to stop the ever accelerating tempo of environmental destruction that happens today.

Life happens in the now. Letting planning processes take that now away from us seems, in retrospect, just another deceptive trick of a way of life gone awry.

Don’t plan; plant!

Another important advantage of complexity thinking is its awareness of the self-organizing capacity of the present. This awareness helps complexity thinkers see new emergent phenomena and to facilitate initiation of new processes that are coherent with self-organization and therefore realizable.

Complexity thinking does not try to fight with chaotic attractors that emerge out of the turbulent flow of human life and does not aim to ‘reform’ or ‘improve’ them. Attempts to improve chaotic attractors are similar to attempts to ‘improve’ the whirlpools of a mountain river — an entirely senseless task! Chaotic attractors reveal the self-organizing nature of complex dynamics, and to fight self-organization means to lose: nature is always stronger than the individuals who fight it. But what complexity thinking is able to do (and successfully does!) is to seed the emergence of new attractors.

As all the attractors pulsating in the ‘phase space’ of life have a common supply of energy, when the energy flow directed to nourishing newly planted attractors grows in volume and intensity, the energy supply to the other attractors automatically decreases and, if not supported any further, those attractors simply ‘shrink’ and dissolve.

This takes me back to my post on the counterproductive nature of political resistance. I am convinced that our strategy needs to be based on recognition of the energies that flow through “all that is” (as aikido teaches) and on the use of those energies in seeding new possibilities. Fighting the old gives new energy to it. Planting the new now — in the present — that’s where our attention is sorely needed.

Orwell redux

Prediction, target setting and goal achievements are essential attributes of systems thinking; they work effectively in a linearly ordered environment where the changes in system’s inputs are proportional to the changes in system’s outputs and the cause-effect relationships are transparent enough to be discerned. Because of this, whenever systems thinkers (systems analysts, designers, developers) explore real-life situations, they automatically turn to models that allow prediction, target setting and goal achievement. And since any non-trivial life situations represent a realization of some chaotic processes, difficult to predict or orient toward pre-defined goals and targets, systems thinkers focus intensely on trying to ‘improve’ chaos, to substitute for it some form of order, or more precisely, to impose a pre-designed model of order.

In society, such ‘improvements’ on chaotic behavior gravitate to the establishment of hierarchical models of order. When put into operation, such models serve to assert power and control. Thus, in an almost invisible way, the application of systems thinking to social reality contributes to strengthening the power-oriented aspirations and ambitions in society. The sphere of economics and politics is saturated with such kind of aspirations and ambitions, leading to what some have described as the “global free-market capitalist religion.”

The phenomenal brainwash in society serves to suppress any spontaneous and therefore difficult to control expression of self-organizing ability of complex social dynamics. If released, this ability could be a threat to the functioning of the System. Marionette-like governments, corrupted police, various military, technocratic and educational institutions, bureaucrats and commissioners with controlling, legal and financial functions, a great number of experts, consultants, preachers, and entertainers all help the System to function properly. If they do this, the System grants them Its support.

That is the essence of utopian thinking, it seems to me, this idea that you can fix (or govern) the world by imposing a human design onto it. No wonder utopian visions mostly turn out to be dreary reruns of Plato’s Republic spiked though and through with pie-in-the-sky fallacies!

And a parting thought from Christopher Alexander:

Thus the world has entered a new phase. What is made, what is built now, what develops in the world, is governed by images and rules. It is no longer automatically governed by the existing wholeness. It is now governed by what we decide.

 

Tyranny of the (inner) planner

If you say “I will do this”, you sabotage yourself. What really works is to say, “Will I do this?”
– Ran Prieur on the Willpower Paradox

I grew up in the heartland of planning. The hype surrounding those ceaselessly promoted Five Year Plans hung heavy in the very air I breathed. So when I fledged and left the nest, I planned. It was enjoyable then, the dreaming and scheming, but somehow it never got me to those lovely goals. That puzzled and disturbed me. Mostly, I blamed myself. Eventually, though, I matured into a heroic planning push. For two and a half years, I used a closely followed planning process to get me — late bloomer that I was — through college. It worked extremely well. Hey, I thought, it was just a matter of time, I finally learned how to do this! Now it can see me through the rest of my life!

And I tried, oh did I ever. And the harder I tried, the more my inner self balked. Eventually, I got to a place where the very thought of planning made me… unwell. My head simply refused to look yet again at the larger picture, refused to painstakingly envision my goals and destinations, refused to be herded by the drill sergeant-like presence of lists and tasks. I started having nightmares of interminable train trips where invariably I lose my baggage, meander off after it, and never discover wherever it is I am going. You figure my subconscious was sending me a hint?!

I used to muse about my ‘inner slave driver,’ desperately wishing I could liberate myself and not having a clue how. Well, in the absence of alternatives, I “liberated” myself by falling off the wagon almost entirely. My inner self went on strike, and my day-to-day life suffered. I forgot commitments, lost my day-runners, and accumulated ‘to do’ lists in dusty, carefully ignored piles. For a decade, I oscillated between refusal to do any planning and systematic doing, and desperate periods when the taskmaster gained an upper hand. I would run around trying to regain ground previously lost, getting a lot of stuff done but never catching up, then fall off the wagon once again, miserable, loathing all that stress and unpleasantness and feeling of futility.

Then, I went through a long period of chronic and acute illnesses, and mostly just stopped trying to cope at all, only doing what truly needed doing for survival’s sake, and letting the rest fall by the wayside. But lo and behold, I did not die, and a couple of years ago I gave some thought to the daunting prospect for having a life again. And I reasoned that either I must find an alternative, or it’s time to throw in the towel and go back to the taskmaster.

Perhaps my illness really gave me a gift. It gave me permission to be entirely self-determined and autonomous. It gave me a chance to let go, and see if something new would emerge in place of the old dysfunction. The cancer illness gave me the opportunity to heal my planning sickness? What a strange unfolding. Realizing this a year ago, I belatedly voiced appreciation to my own deep self that “we” (the multivoiced self that I am) finally did demote the slave driver. We’d become refuseniks of the planning mode, of all that drives modern people to run the treadmill. We suffered for it, as all refuseniks must. We paid the price. We understand that to mercilessly drive one’s own self is neither self-respecting nor a good example to others. So what now?

I pleaded with the universe to show me another way. Ask, and it shall be given. Over the last few months, I have finally come across and partially internalized another way of doing things. I call it unplanning. I am writing this in the conviction that I am not the only one who has dealt with the problem of counterproductive goal-setting. And I see evidence that politics, businesses and many other areas of life have been damaged — not helped — by the rise of the rational, technocratic planning. Wouldn’t heartlessness toward the self directly translate into heartlessness in the public square?

Did you know that those astonishing medieval cathedrals were built in the utter absence of a planning process? The builders, craftspeople and pious volunteers had no blueprints, no final design. They started with a prayerful dream and good skills, and let the edifice emerge. They tried bold things. Sometimes, they had to backtrack, or stop the project, only returning to it when understanding grew. The beauty and daring they infused into those soaring structures endures to this day.

It turns out that the builders of the Empire State Building in New York did not exactly follow a plan either. They did not even have a design when they started! Yet they finished the building in 19 months and under budget, not unusual in those days. This intuitive building process that relied on trusted experiential knowledge was trampled in the rush toward modernity. Instrumental rationality preened itself as the replacement for all that was old fashioned, all that quaint reliance on off-the-cuff, fuzzy local rules, and traditional hands-on skills.

Planning has failed me personally. But my thesis is larger: planning — that imperious child of overweening rationality and pencil-pusherdom — has failed us all. I suspect that the many problems of human-crafted, urbanized environments — depressing architecture, alienating neighborhood layouts, user-hostile design, or especially the failure to provide for a livable future — have been made worse by a reliance on the planning process. As architect Christopher Alexander, who has been trying to conceptualize a different way in his many books, writes:

Eliminating the plan is not a call for chaos. Rather it is an attempt to overcome the difficulties inherent in this way of ordering the environment: the impossibility of making accurate predictions about the future needs and resources; the ignorance of the more minute relationships between places [and people] which are not prescribed in the plan; the insensitivity of the plan to the ongoing needs of users, and the alienating quality of the plan as an administrative device.

I have come to see planning as a way to colonize and dominate the future. It’s yesterday dictating to today. It’s an example of instrumental reason, like Orwell’s pigs, grabbing the master’s spot. I invite you to come with me on an exploration of alternatives.

In a mechanistic view of the world, we see all things, even if only for convenience, as machines. A machine is intended to accomplish something. It is, in its essence, goal-oriented. Like machines, then, within the mechanistic view processes are always seen as aimed at certain ends. We think of things by the end-state we want, and then ask ourselves how to get there.

This mistake was widespread in the 20th century. For example, in the extreme 20th century view of some mechanistic sociology, even kindness might have been seen as a way of achieving certain results: part of a bargain, or a social contract, which had the purpose of getting something.

Real kindness is something quite different, something valuable in itself. It is a true process, not guided by the grasp for a goal, but by the minute-to-minute necessity of caring, dynamically, for the feelings and well-being of another. This is not trivial, but deep; sincerely related to human feeling; and not predictable in its end-result, because the end result is not a goal.

 

Complexity thinking

Everything is deeply intertwingled.
– Ted Nelson

Remember when we discovered systems thinking? All those amazing feedback loops and flows; finally, a way to grok that the system really is more than the sum of its parts. Well, complexity thinking takes the fun a few steps out into the wild blue yonder. It builds on those systems insights. But instead of painting images of thermostats and other mechanical gizmos, it dwells on slime molds, weather patterns, ants, immune systems and whirlpools. The feel of it – oh joy – is organic, organismic. It leads us away from machine-based thought patterns that have dominated civilized intellectual landscape for centuries. No more clockwork universes for you and me, thank you very much!

Complexity thinking emerged from non-linear mathematics. In practice, it means stepping out of the framework of linear continuity and smoothness, and entering the world of discontinuities and sudden transformations. A particularly endearing concept is the phase shift. Picture a brook babbling along while the temperature drops. Nothing to see here, just water, right? Then all of a sudden, what was swirling fluid turns into hard, crunchy ‘glass.’ A phase shift just occurred – an unexpected reconfiguration, sometimes a fundamental leap or an evolutionary breakthrough. Phase shifts are not intuitively apparent. Would a tribesman raised deep in the Amazon ever anticipate ice? And this is one of the reasons doom no longer makes sense to me. The daunting, dreadful, suicidal sameness we see all around us holds the potential for an astonishing transformation, a radical reordering of what was there before.

Often, it is a tiny nudge that leads the system to such a shift. This phenomenon is called the ‘butterfly effect.’ As the saying goes, a butterfly flapping its wings in China may precipitate a windstorm in Kansas. Discovered by a mathematician who was studying weather patterns, butterfly effect simulations were instrumental in convincing the scientific community that accurate long term weather forecasts were not possible. Translation: what each one of us does to coax out a better world can have a huge and surprising impact down the line; moreover, it’s not something opponents of such changes can foresee or prepare for.

Complexity thinking explores new metaphors and intimations that are remarkably friendly to the new political and social consciousness just now being born. Take self-organization, for example. Self-organization — the ability to emerge structures without anyone actually in charge — is the default behavior of complex adaptive systems. In other words, life knows how to organize from within and will do so if left to its own devices. Hey, the anarchists have been right all along! And even better: complex systems show that entirely local behaviors generate global patterns and structures (global in this case meaning systemic, overall). As researchers say about social animals, “they think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behavior.” If slime molds can do it, surely humans might?

When individuals in a group are able to respond collectively to changes in circumstances, the group becomes a complex adaptive system. Life, as a complex adaptive system, happens ‘at the edge of chaos.’ This is the fertile space lying between rigid order and randomness. Organisms move back and forth within that space, avoiding the trap of going too far in either direction. There appears to be a force that attracts the living forms to that in-between space where they can flourish. Such a force, such a “lure” – a point or region to which a system is drawn – is appropriately enough called an attractor.

Systems thinking has one major weakness: a fixation on goals. After all, machines are always designed with a definitive purpose in mind. Life, not so much. So complexity thinkers talk of strange attractors instead. These are potential end-states that themselves emerge from the present, and cannot be either predicted or pre-set, much less arrived at by stepwise design. I will return to this welcome insight in a series on unplanning.

There are other intriguing areas to explore that impinge on complexity thinking. Here’s a sampler: fuzzy logic, game theory, self-similarity (fractals), chaos theory, tipping points, coherence, stigmergy, criticality, small worlds, circular causation. In addition, complexity theory has been making inroads into the bleak landscapes of “management” and corporate restructuring, scaring the crap out of ladder-climbing sycophants hungry for their slice of the power pie. The cat is out of the bag: complex systems, sorry, cannot be controlled. Be still, my beating heart — is the myth of heroic managerial prowess nearing the dustbin of history? As the tide of complexity thinking rolls in, the beach is washed clean of the sandcastles of the control freaks. Complexity science is painting the mustache on the boss. Who woulda thunk?

But enough candy for today. Have some broccoli fractals. Tasty!

 

Lordy, the meek did inherit!

[Fourth part of a series: 1, 2, 3]

This was the tremendous strength of the tribal way, that its success did not depend on people being better. It worked for people the way they are – unimproved, unenlightened, troublesome, disruptive, selfish, mean, cruel, greedy and violent.
– Daniel Quinn

Is domination in our genes? It seems very likely. After all, the bands of our closest primate relatives are “run” by alpha leaders: among chimpanzees, the strongest males dominate the troop; among gorillas, a big male presides over a harem, and among the bonobos, both alpha females and related males wield power in the band. It is therefore highly probable that domineering alpha individuals led the bands of the early hominids. Domination conferred advantages: those who could snatch the most resources and mate with the most females “won” by surviving and passing on their genes. But at a certain point along our evolution our ancestors became radically egalitarian, sharing power and economic resources among all members. They lived as near-equals, had direct access to food and basic necessities, enjoyed modest affluence along with freedom and leisure, and refused to tolerate grabs for power, wealth, and prestige. This successful and durable adaptation is documented not only by archeological evidence but also by ample ancient and recent ethnographic accounts of “primitive” societies. [A sampler of links: on human reciprocity and its evolution, on the Batek people, and on tribal egalitarian ways.]

How did this transformation come about? Here is the argument. Our distant ancestors, just like chimps have been observed to do, chafed under the rule of the alphas. Nobody likes to be bullied on a regular basis. Nobody likes to have their food stolen by the bigger fellows just because they can. While rank and file chimps put the kibosh on their alphas only occasionally, stone age hominids figured out how to do it so regularly and thoroughly that a new social system was born. This is such an important and surprising development that we may speak of an egalitarian revolution.

Humans are unique among animals in cooperating in large groups of unrelated individuals, with a high degree of resource sharing. These features challenge traditional evolutionary theories built on kin selection or reciprocity. A recent theoretical model … takes a fresh look at the ‘egalitarian revolution’ that separates humans from our closest relatives, the great apes. The model suggests that information from within-group conflicts leads to the emergence of cooperative alliances and social networks.
– Understanding the “Egalitarian Revolution” in human social evolution

The conjecture has it that it happened when our ancestors became communicative enough to form discreet coalitions, well enough armed to easily threaten or kill an upstart, and motivated to fairly share the meat needed for their growing brains. Nobody knows how long ago this may have been. Computer models have shown that the change may have occurred quite fast, within a few generations. We do know that big game spears date back at least to 400,000 years ago, that the later erectus had a large brain, and that hunting is probably far older than had been thought. Some anthropologists put the egalitarian revolution at perhaps 100,000 years ago, but allow that it may well have happened much earlier. Others go back as far as 2 million years to the beginning of the Paleolithic. I am taking here the liberty of assuming, not unreasonably, that we sapiens entered our speciation in the egalitarian mold.

Before 12,000 years ago, humans basically were egalitarian. They lived in what might be called societies of equals, with minimal political centralization and no social classes. Everyone participated in group decisions, and outside the family there were no dominators. Rather often the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers pertains more to males than females, but the women enjoy far more political potency than did the women of Athens, and these mobile foragers kept no slaves. Their highly equalized version of political life goes far back into prehistory…
– Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest

For thousands of generations since the egalitarian revolution, we lived in small bands where the many set limits over the few for the benefit of all. The betas put an effective check on the alphas by wit, wisdom and alliance. Aggrandizing individuals who got out of hand were brought down a peg or eliminated. And so the evolutionary advantage went to the cooperators. In the former alpha-led system the advantage was to the strong, and the weak suffered. In the new system the advantage was to the weak(er), and most did well as a result. This state of affairs required continued vigilance, and an ongoing culture of egalitarian traditions of checks and balances. Our ancestors formed a new status quo that suited evolving human awareness, well-being and conscience better than domination. They came upon a strategy of effectively resisting power abuse by advantaging cooperative, sharing, pro-social behaviors.

This remarkable pattern of “vigilant sharing” saw humans through severe ice ages, intense global warmings and volcanic winters. It saw them through all the hardships our species has suffered in the 200,000 years of its existence, and that’s no small thing. A social system where vigilance against Hyde-ish behaviors is coupled with sharing most of the Earth’s bounty confers an evolutionary advantage. During difficult times, tribes that look after each other survive. Those that allow self-aggrandizing alphas’ rise into dominance and resource hoarding will be at a survival disadvantage. After all, those human bands where some gorged on meat while others starved would have, other things being equal, done poorly in ice age competition with other groups whose members were all relatively well fed, or in coping with the hardships of a frozen, arid world.

There were always failures. Despotic or greedy individuals managed to snatch power for a while and disturbed the equilibrium. But this only reinforced overall the traditions and customs mediating these weaknesses. Our ancestors did not try to convert the human nature to something else. They shrewdly acted on what the human nature really was, and cultural evolution did the rest. Displaying the same sharp wit as certain astute American Founders of 200+ years ago, they understood that human society must acknowledge and be shaped around human weaknesses, vices and foibles. They built in checks and balances that curbed the — certain to occur — misuse of power and incipient greed. Their leadership patterns can be described as ad hoc egalitarian meritocracy: people rose into leadership on the basis of helpful qualities, were carefully watched, and unseated if power went to their heads.

Human beings, after all, are not created equal in ability. It is the responsibility of the community to make sure that ambitious or aggressive individuals don’t overstep the boundaries leading to power abuse, while at the same time giving these naturally advantaged people enough leeway that they may benefit the community through their talents and leadership. It’s a balancing act that requires constant care… like driving a car. All goes well most of the time, because continual vigilance is practiced, and small adjustments are easily and continuously made. If the driver stops paying attention, however, trying to right the situation will probably be hard and painful once the tree approacheth ready to smack the vehicle. And so also, once a dominant individual or a clique muscles their way into power, the cost of dealing with them can be quite high. Egalitarians understand well that power goes to people’s heads with tedious regularity, that it devolves on the rest of the community to be alert to it, and that it is the responsibility of the weak to curb the strong.

Let’s go back to the time when the ice began to let up, some 17,000 years ago. There had been occasional societies in the European Paleolithic where a measure of economic and political inequality took hold for a time. Nevertheless, the predominant pattern is remarkable. Here we are, egalitarian to the bone. We are sharers, our possessions are few, we are on the lookout for upstarts and hoarders, standing up for the weaker members of the band. We murder each other with unsettling frequency, mostly men killing other men while competing for women. We skirmish against other bands and tribes, but casualties are limited. Occasionally, a despotic individual arises, wreaks damage, and is eliminated. We live within modest abundance, and famines, as well as great many later diseases, are largely unknown. We are still both nice and nasty inside, but over the last several hundred thousand years have become remarkably nicer in our behavior within the tribe. The underdogs unite to keep the bullies in check for the benefit of all.

Vigilant sharing of power and resources has been the preferred mode of our species’ existence for most of its time on Earth. Did these cultures halt human evil? No; they circumscribed Hyde. And if they could do it, why not us? Finding a way to reconnect with our egalitarian past in the near future seems more and more like the sweetest dream worth pursuing.

 

Potions

Longbottom, at the end of this lesson we will feed a few drops of this potion to your toad and see what happens. Perhaps that will encourage you to do it properly.
– Severus Snape

But wait a minute, you might be saying. [For the first two parts of the series, see here and here.] If our nature is dark and light, then we may as well throw in the towel. If this malfunctioning human system called civilization is simply an outgrowth of who we are, then any other system we create will also be fatally flawed, right? A valid concern; does either theory or history bear it out?

Our shadow side, our dappled human psyche explains much. It particularly explains the everyday evils stemming from our mistaken or malign intentions and misguided actions. But does it explain enough? Human nature did not abruptly change 6,000 years ago. Yet as history shows, there was a distinct cultural and behavioral break with what went before. Human existence — first in Mesopotamia, then elsewhere — suffered a profound, alarming, and sudden setback, as city-states and then empires rose, wars were institutionalized, human cruelty reached horrifying heights, economies turned to steady plunder, and stratification, slavery and perpetual indebtedness pushed large numbers of human beings into inhuman misery. This civilization, with its dark heart of conquest and domination, was born.

Our species is at least 200,000 years old. A mere 6,000 years ago, unprecedented, massively destructive social systems began to rise. How could this possibly be explained by recourse to human nature? Consider an alternative hypothesis. Let us begin by noting that there are two depths of social evil. There is the moderately greater poverty of some within a community. And then there is obscene destitution in the shadow of a palace. There are raiding parties of a couple dozen warriors clashing. And then there is war. There is the painful and often lethal gauntlet that war captives had to run among some Indian tribes. And then there is the destruction of a city where all men are tortured and slaughtered, all women and children sold into slavery and the fields are salted so nothing can ever grow there again (e.g. the Roman sack of Carthage). There is the petty despot of a chief. And then there is the king or modern dictator. There is the raid against a nearby settlement to steal their goods. And then there is the breach of a dam unleashed against another town to destroy all that live there, as the “civilized” people of Sumer liked to do to their neighbors. It is one thing to capture the children of one’s enemies. Quite another to see to it that “their children were beheaded, flayed alive or roasted over a slow fire,” courtesy of the Assyrians. It is one thing to have imperfect human societies where some levels of antisocial harm are expected. And yet quite another to build social systems that glory in violence, cruelty and plunder.

Suppose we agree that we are neither “basically good,” nor depraved and rotten to the core. Our mixed character challenges our evolving conscience, but each left to our own devices, the harm we do is mostly commonplace. Often, we blunder badly. Sometimes, our motives are frankly malevolent in small insidious ways. But the extreme evils listed above cannot be inflicted at personal or small group level. They require a socio-economic system that amplifies Hyde.

Societies that ignore Hyde and leave him at large suffer profound detrimental consequences. After all, the Hyde/Jekyll problem is not symmetrical: the damage done by antisocials wounds us all and is often impossible to right. The people killed in wars cannot be brought back, a ruined landbase may not be able to heal within a timeframe meaningful to mortals. And our Jekylls are always busy cleaning up after the Hydes. All in all, it adds up to Hyde coming out ahead. It can get worse, of course; a culture can amplify Hyde and disadvantage Jekyll to such an extent it ends up with a social system run by psychopaths off a cliff. But there is a third option: putting limits on Hyde, Jekyll can spend his energies in pro-social undertakings.

The unfortunate Dr. Jekyll is trapped in a paradigm that gives Hyde an advantage, mirroring the way this whole civilization is structured. But it’s not hard to imagine a possible happier ending to the Jekyll/Hyde tale. How about this? The good doctor does not work in secret, looking for fame as a lone genius, but is part of a team of colleagues. These people come to spot him as he drinks the potion, aware that the results might be — shall we say — iffy. When Hyde makes his appearance, they are ready. Safely constraining the dangerous shapeshifter, they contact other allies to issue a warning and urge the development of an effective antidote. When Jekyll reappears, they persuade him to remain under watch just in case a flashback occurs, and keep monitoring the drug’s residual effects over time. And the brew? Lock it up in a safe and leave room for a sequel?

In the original novella by Robert Louis Stevenson, Jekyll gets badly addicted to the heady rush of “being Hyde.” Let a chill pass down the spine as we contemplate our own horror of being strung out on seductive daily doses of vile molochov cocktails… In life, there are no guarantees; Hyde lives in us. He too deserves his due. Would Jekyll’s friends be up to considering Hyde’s needs along with Jekyll’s? Facing him with awareness, wisdom and kindness may tip the balance for society at large.

This alternative telling, it seems to me, illustrates the behavior of a levelheaded society as well. A sane culture bent on long-term survival embodies the understanding that we are all better off if we look out for one another, and that the fruits of human intelligence are just another part of the commons, developed and shared collaboratively. It remembers with particular urgency to acknowledge and set limits on Hyde in tandem with Jekyll’s growing powers. A commonsensical precaution, not requiring extra high levels of intelligence or advanced training, wouldn’t you say? And this is exactly what our Paleolithic forebears proceeded to do.

 

Terrible glory II

The problem with people is that they’re only human.
– Bill Watterson

We emerged from the mists of our deep history into awareness as rather appalling, scary creatures, and also as rather wonderful, amazing creatures… something completely new in the world: animals who told stories, who learned to laugh, befriended other species, created new things with their deft hands and spun delightful images with their clever brains. Initially, our powers were small. We lived, more or less, in harmony with the world, like other creatures. We were no more — but no less! — awful and destructive than the hyena or the shark. Like a hyena or a shark, we heedlessly grabbed what the planet offered. But since our powers were small, any damage we did was small. The limits Mother Nature places upon all organisms limited us as well.

Still, we evolved. Any shark or hyena grown an opposable thumb and a manipulative brain would be a very alarming creature indeed, especially as it began to evade, at least for a time, the bounds nature places on all organisms. I don’t blame humans for becoming more destructive as our capabilities grew. Would any other animal behave differently? As our behavioral repertoire expanded — better language, cooperation, skills of survival, hunting, reasoning abilities, symbols, dexterity — our ability to change the world, to help or harm it, increased apace. We became very good at survival, and very good at destroying what stood in our way. Any large predator – had it evolved such abilities – would become a very dangerous creature indeed, to self and others. Jekyll grew in powers. How wonderful. But so did Hyde. How very, very inauspicious.

As our capabilities expanded, humans began to cause significant damage to certain parts of the planet. We damaged a large part of the continent of Australia and its climate through fires. Imagine: small roaming bands of humans equipped only with simple stone age tools managed to bring ruin to an entire continent! We probably had a hand in wiping out our cousins, the Neanderthals, and perhaps other descendants of erectus as well. Our greedy hunting methods included mass stampedes of hundreds of animals over cliffs and into cul-de-sacs when only a few of their bodies could be used. With a variety of improved hunting strategies, we began to have significant impact on certain animal populations, and likely contributed to the extinctions of the Upper Paleolithic. We certainly caused great devastations much later as the outlying Pacific islands were settled, or used as larders by passing sailors.

Picture leaving a few pairs of predators – say, cats — on pristine Easter Island. They would have multiplied, wiped out the naïve fauna in relatively short order and collapsed, leaving an impoverished island behind. Just the way the Polynesians did it. We think that humans should know better. But the cats’ predicament is our predicament too. Even today, with all the bells and whistles of modern life, we are not good at dealing with the future staring us in the face. We find ourselves just as unable to modify our destructive behaviors as did the hapless Easter Islanders.

Face to face with a more realistic assessment of human nature, is pessimism or cynicism called for? I don’t see it that way. I do think evolution has saddled us with a problem that calls for a great deal of caution. Our shadow side cannot magically disappear by going into therapy, getting religion, via bootstrap evolution, through self-discipline, or doing the 12 steps. It will not disappear by sloughing off civilization. This is who we are: dangerous, amazing, limited human animals. We must face what is in terrible glory inside us. To let our heart be broken by who we are. To know, to surrender to the truth, and to find peace. Then we can quit tearing Mother Nature to pieces in revenge for having made us so imperfect, so “fallen.” Then, we can finally stop destroying each other and the planet we love.

 

Co-intelligence evolving

Next year, much of the writing hereabouts will dally under the astrological sign of Complexity. And since complexity is inextricably linked to evolution (or is it the other way around?), poking Darwinism with a stick will be at times regretfully necessitated. So… why not start now?

This raspberry-flavored whimsy comes adapted from The Sex Life of Flowers (ch. 5, The ‘unacceptable’ face of evolution) by way of Charles Bowden’s novel Blood Orchid.

They will do anything to reproduce. And they will use the needs of others, the deep appetites they see in all our faces, they will exploit these things to further their own ends. They will take over our ways of loving, they will seize upon our sense of property. They will ruthlessly read our diaries, our secret thoughts, and then make us slaves to our own obsessions.

Perhaps no clearer example exists than the tactics of the hammer orchid (Drakaea fitzgeraldii) and its scheme to seduce one particular type of wasp (of the family Thynnidae). Thynnids fall into the trap once they gaze upon the labellum of a hammer orchid.

Female Thynnids prosper by parasitizing the larvae of Scarabacid beetles, and the particular beetles favored as prey live by being root parasites. To find them, the females have to dig and since they spent their time digging, they lost the ability to fly. Indeed, they have lost their wings, a sacrifice which makes it easier for the females to tunnel under the earth. The hammer orchid lives high above them in the trees but somehow has become conscious of their strange ways.

Since the female Thynnids cannot fly, they cannot search the forest above them for food. This problem they solve by sucking fluids from the beetles that are their victims. That leaves the great subject of mating. Most wasps of this type have a culture in which the males are the active parties in mating. Usually, a female just plants herself in an easily reached location, releases a pheromone, and lets time solve her problem. Possibly, it is an intoxicating situation.

Usually, the mating process proceeds rather simply. The female sits, releases the pheromone into the air, and business proceeds. For copulation to occur the male wasp must be triggered by scent, by sight, and by touch. So the pretty and winged male flies a patrol, he stumbles upon the inviting scent drifting through the air and follows it. The female, to make it all so easy, has climbed up a ways off the ground on, say, a grass stem. Now the male approaches, the female begins to move her jaws in expectation. The male descends, grabs her with his legs. And off they go, like a military aircraft with a deadly missile slung underneath.

She does not fear that she will fall. She fastens her jaws on the male’s neck, and there she rides secure. They mate while in flight, a seemingly needless risk that long puzzled scientists. Why is this ride necessary? True, there are a lot of bees and butterflies and whatnot that fornicate in the air. But this species of wasp could have accomplished the venture without leaving the good and solid earth. So why are they behaving this way? And what – the impossible question we are trained never to ask – do the hammer orchids make of it all? For we know, and we insist, the orchids cannot think. Or see. Or in any way we will ever admit, know. And they are up there in the trees, clinging while the male flies and fucks with the female down below.

The male and female wasp do not hurry, no, not at all. They remain locked together in fornication for hours. And they do other things. The female for the first time in her life is off the ground, in flight. The tunnel-digging predator now kisses the sky. She does not waste this rare opportunity. The male hauls her from flower to flower and here they both feed, continuing to fuck all the while. For the first and last time during her time on this earth, the female tastes nectar.

While the male and female wasp are slurping up nectar and fornicating, the male, we think, is also scoping out the forest floor. Sex, we believe, does not distract him from this great task. He is looking for a good place to drop the female later, after the bash, a piece of ground rich in beetles where his kind can thrive, where his descendants will prosper. Just how he does this we do not understand. But we feel confident that however strange it may seem, he is actually the explorer of his world, the Columbus finding the new country and the new future. And the hammer orchid that cannot watch, watches; that cannot see, sees; that cannot know, …

We are in Australia, the wasps are mating just below and orchids, particularly hammer orchids (Drakaea) and elbow orchids (Spiculaea), seem to notice. The hammer orchids, for example, have a strange labellum – that tonguelike projection in the middle of the flower. It looks… just like a small, fat, wingless female version of the Thynnid wasp. The imitation is damn near perfect – shiny head, round, faintly hairy body, ass tilted up a bit into the air. The scent also – that delicious pheromone the female releases – is copied and wafts off into the air from the hammer orchid. It is floating across the forest, it is sexually inviting, perhaps maddening, and the orchid, which cannot possibly know, now it hears the rush of wings approaching it, though of course it cannot possibly hear either.

The fake female wasp rides on the end of a little hinged arm that sticks up from the flower of the hammer orchid. She bobs up and down in the wind, she looks so alive and of course, there is that scent. The male descends — ah, the moment is at hand that evolution has been waiting for, the moment that so stimulated that crabby old churchman Charlie Darwin as he battled his illnesses and fears in his dark English study — grabs the female impersonator, wrenches to take off into his mating flight. And then the hammer comes down, a thing delicately called the column, and on its end are stigma and polinia. The male wasp is already trying to probe that uplifted ass with his genitals when — wham! the hammer hits, and suddenly the male senses this is not a real female and he departs. It has taken less than a second. And glued to his back are the reproductive cells of the orchid. There are four species of hammer orchids. Each attracts a specific species of Thynnid wasp. And they do this by mimicking a female that spends all of her life tunneling in the forest floor far below. Except, of course, for her few hours of flying, fucking, nectar slurping, and fun.

The system of the hammer orchid usually fails. How could it be otherwise? If perfect, all the wasps would mate with fake females and soon there might be no real wasps to attract. The fake females, well, they are just not the real thing. No orchid can compete with a real lusty Thynnid female, not at all. Males will hardly visit the flowers when living females are out and about. The scent is just not like a whiff of the real thing. But there is a saving fact, a tiny detail that makes the sex life of the hammer orchid possible. Each spring, the males show up a couple of weeks before the females. And the hammer orchid knows this — no! no! that can’t be right, these damn things can’t really know. During this interlude, the hammer orchid seduces male Thynnids, and they land, and they fuck the false female, and the hammer falls. It has been going on for…

 

Doomer no more

We are fucked! We are so fucked!
– a doomer

It’s not that I am rooting for civ to survive. I believe and hope that this civilization is on its last legs. My unciv credentials remain unimpeachable. It’s the other stuff that bugs the hell out of me.

I am sick and tired of all the mantras of doom offered up in daily genuflections by “our kind” of people. Haven’t they noticed that the Spectacle promotes endlessly depressing messages, and has done so for ages? Custom dispiriting propaganda for different population targets! And we have helped it along through a regular menu of bleak scenarios, reassurances of very grim events looming just ahead, and perpetually hopeless computer simulations. You see, whatever we do — repeat after me — we.are.fucked.

Meh. It’s gotten boring, folks.

Isn’t it just a variation on the same millenarian bullcrap spouted by those crazy-eyed folks who assure us that the world will end next May 21st? Nobody knows the future. Nobody. Therefore we cannot know whether we are fucked or not. Ain’t that nice? Having those dismal tidings perpetually running through our heads gets in the way of sensing possibilities that have so far been missed. And guess what: the puppet-masters of the Spectacle want us to miss them!

So I am drawing a line. I will no longer repeat and pass on those tunes that flow out of the ol’ doomer hurdy-gurdy. I henceforth throw my lot in with those of us who are busy sensing transformative ways of proceeding, seeing new visions, finding and walking new paths. To think that we could know the future with the help of smart machines! What an exquisitely bizarre turn of the familiar hubris screw. Forget about those oh so slickly persuasive scenarios. Let us instead bet heavily that Gaia has something else in mind. Let us assume that the endless complexity that is the universe can morph into something unprecedented, swayed by the flapping of a butterfly’s shimmering wing or by a sudden wee burst of lovingkindness. The future I have in mind and heart begins in some tiny thing I do today that amplifies in completely unpredictable ways and tomorrow brings forth a … surprise.

I have been reading an ambitious, sprawling economic history of this civilization. Graeber’s ‘Debt: the first 5,000 years’ is a creative, eye opening work worth a series of winter evenings. I want to quote from its last chapter; to share some lines that hit me square in the solar plexus.

For most of the last several centuries, most people assumed that … the future was likely to be fundamentally different. Yet somehow, the anticipated revolutions never happened. The basic structure of financial capitalism remained in place. It is only now, at the very moment when it’s becoming increasingly clear that the current arrangements are not viable, that we suddenly have hit the wall in terms of our collective imagination.

There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist – most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet… Yet faced with the prospect of capitalism actually ending, the most common reaction – even from those who call themselves “progressives” – is simply fear. We cling to what exists because we can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

Maintaining [the military] apparatus seems even more important, to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain what happened in the former Soviet Union? One would ordinarily have imagined that the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and the KGB and rebuilding the factories, but what in fact happened was precisely the other way around. This is just an extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, the apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and no doubt it’s yet another element dragging the entire capitalist system down – along with producing the illusion of an endless capitalist future that laid the groundwork for the endless bubbles to begin with. Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedom, for most of us, was reduced to the right to buy a small piece of one’s own permanent subordination.

In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons lest speculation, predictably, goes haywire. Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged. About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

The system wants it so that the only thing we can imagine is a catastrophe. People trapped and thrashing in the sticky web of perpetual doom will rather stay with the devil they know. And that serves the elites just fine. Fearing a popular alternative, they felt constrained in the Depression to make concessions, and to spread wealth around after the war. Once that alternative was discredited, they concluded that anything goes. And so “anything went.” And this same “anything” is still going down. But a new game is afoot. They’ll never realize it until it pokes them in the eye. We know the Spectacle is not real. It only exists because people keep watching it and dancing to its tunes.

Since doomerism has become part of the Spectacle, yet another way to keep people fearful and stuck, it no longer serves our interests. Dwelling on ghastly scenarios once had its charms; now it’s just another distraction. Let us imagine something that the puppet-masters hope we’ll fail to see in our mind’s eye — a world that works, a world where life thrives, a world where being human is an adventure — and give that world our undivided attention.

 

Terrible glory of being human I

If we believe in the fundamental goodness of man, we are doomed.
– Dr. Robert Hare

We may as well start with some very bad news, and get it out of the way. We humans are naturally violent, acquisitive, greedy, negligent, aggressive, destructive, petty, mean, self-centered, and sometimes abysmally foolish. And now for the very good news: it’s also in our nature to be peaceful, giving, generous, caring, gentle, creative, broad-minded, kind, altruistic, and sometimes profoundly wise. We are domineering, yet we long for equality.

Mother Culture of the so-called progressive worldview vigorously disagrees. As a reaction to the often-knee jerk blaming of human nature for the failings of civilization, many of us moderns bought the other side of the coin. Haven’t we been told by the various gurus of enlightened 21st century thinking that human nature is “basically good”? Like some anxiety management self-help circle, we indulge in endless mutual assurances that I am ok and you are ok. But the façade of “goodness” crumbles rather quickly under the critical gaze of those who lose faith in the ready blandishments. “There are more and more factors beginning to push us out of the comfortable pew where we mostly once worshiped our species, our ‘leaders’, our civilization, our perception of unlimited human capacity and entitlement and manifest destiny.” Indeed. And along with the worship of our species goes the often uncritical defense of the species’ nature. These particular worshipers fish around for evidence that our primate cousins are gentle giants, that our paleolithic ancestors lived non-violent lives, that hunting and omnivory was really somehow imposed upon us mild-mannered fruit-eaters, and that human aggression is really learned — not innate — and can be erased with another kind of learning.

When people argue on behalf of benevolent human nature, the argument often takes this informal shape: It is quite evident that most of us behave in fairly innocuous ways most of the time. But look at all the horrible things people have done – now a list of genocides, tortures, and other ghastly deeds emerges – that is not us, is it? The Hitlers of this world are caused by… culture, stress, poor upbringing, perhaps even innate pathologies. But that’s not us! See, most humans are basically good. Such an argument is based on a fallacy. It’s not either/or: either we are basically good, or we are genocidal maniacs and perverts. There is a third possibility: that we are both good and bad in fundamental common measure. And this point of view, called by some social scientists “the ambivalence model of human nature” is the keystone of my own understanding. I used to believe otherwise. I once defended vigorously the “basically good” point of view. But events in my own life — in my own behavior! — eventually prompted me to take a harder look.

I now accept a different argument. This one is rooted in the evidence of primitive tribes. Their profound egalitarianism, radical sharing, steady emphasis on social harmony, and the rarity of serious armed conflict rightly astounds the modern mind. But it would be a romantic misdirection to claim that greed, violence or power abuse is absent among them. Studies clearly indicate that hiding one’s kill from others, shirking common work, eagerness to inflict severe damage on neighbors, and upstartism has been documented time and again even among remote or newly contacted tribes. Significant levels of violence — mostly among males competing for females, and in skirmishes between bands — have been recorded in most primitive societies.

What is the evidence from our far-ancient ancestors and other primates? An erectus find displays the remains of a human being who had been scalped and his eyes gouged out. There is evidence of interhuman violence, including human sacrifice, in cave art and Upper Paleolithic remains. And a massacre from about 12,000 years ago shows half of a small settlement dispatched by human weapons. Chimpanzees have been observed to terrorize and kill other chimps. It has finally been understood that intraspecific violence is common among animals, including our closest primate relatives. We are no different.

It is the propensity for killing that allows both chimps and humans to be such good hunters. Bonobos were said by eager romanticizers a while back “to have lost the desire to kill.” But careful study shows bonobo females organizing themselves into precise, coordinated, swift and deadly hunting bands as they go after monkeys. It is hard to believe we would have evolved into fierce predators had there been no biological basis for it.

And then there is cannibalism. Well documented among the erectus, Neanderthals, and sapiens, it presents a picture of our nature many of us would prefer not to know. But the evidence cannot be ignored. Both long-ago ancestors and more recent tribal peoples hunted fellow humans as prey. Eating one’s fellows out of dire hunger, reproductive reasons, and cage confinement is not uncommon in the animal kingdom. But gastronomic cannibalism, the hunting of one’s own kind in plentiful times for food is far more unusual. We stand in the company of bull frogs, scorpions, king cobras, sharks, and our primate cousins, the common chimps. Isn’t that alone something to gag on?

Benevolent, us?! Trees are benevolent beings. We are not. Besides, any animal species has it in their power to wreak a lot of damage on earth by overbreeding, overtrampling, overkilling and overconsuming. This is true from bacteria all the way to mammals. It is true of us.

The dark and light nature of our species was vividly portrayed by that classic of a film, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). Dr. Jekyll, a noble humanitarian, develops an elixir that — he hopes — will improve upon human nature. He tests his potion on himself and morphs into the hairy, coarse, nasty Mr. Hyde who goes off on a rampage. The story ends badly. To be rid of Hyde, the world must be rid of Jekyll. The Jekyll/Hyde metaphor is a powerful reminder of the underlying light-and-shadow that lives in ambivalent, dappled symbiosis in all of us.

Where once humans were blamed for the imperfection of civilization, turning it upside down blames civilization for the imperfection of humans. “It is the psychotic demands of civilization that have created these very troubling forms of social disintegration along with the weakness that haunts individuals in their complicit acquiescence, in their enslavement to these urban walls and the psychopathologies they generate.” Human evils are symptoms of stress-related mental illness caused by our culture. If that is true — and the project of Enlightenment has believed it to be so — then all we need is shucking off the burden, healing, and plenty of freedom. More freedom! How sweet it rang in the French revolution. How sweet the sound in all the propaganda for modernity. But if human nature is dark and light, then more freedom for Jekyll will always and inevitably lead to more freedom for Hyde… and that seems like a singularly bad idea.

 

“Our politics”

Slowly you realize that you have become a spectator, an object. Your politics take place on a stage and your social relations consist of sitting in an audience or marching in a crowd.
– Anti-mass

A persistent fantasy lightens my steps. I am peeking into the living room of a large house shared by several housemates. It’s evening, and all are companionably gathered there. All these folks are very interested in political solutions to our current impasse. One is reading a book analyzing the Washington political scene. One is at the computer, following political discussions in the state’s capital city. One is watching TV (with headphones on) where political pundits weigh in about some issues the legislature is discussing. Another yet is strategizing for an upcoming protest, while her neighbor is preparing a speech for the local Democratic Committee.

All is quiet, and into that silence, magic falls. Perhaps the Spirit of the Times has just flown by the softly lit window and waved its magic wand at the gathered household. The people stretch and wiggle about, as if awakening from a trance. They look around, trying to acclimate themselves to something so familiar and yet somehow completely unexpected. And one by one, they slowly turn around to face one another. It’s as though they are seeing each other for the first time.

A dawning. “It’s up to us, isn’t it?” a woman says wonderingly. “Can we do it?” The man next to her leaps in with gusto: “I am betting there are at this very moment small groups all around the world coming to the same awareness. We don’t know about them yet, and that is good, because they need time to mature, hidden from the Eye. But we are not alone!” “Just think,” says another, “we here are the beginning of a whole different world. The time we have waited for is upon us.” Smiles all around: We are the body politic!

“Our politics” begins as we come together within “our space”, three or five or a dozen, and begin the holy work of helping Gaia live & helping each other out of the slavery of Babylon. Then linking through the grassroots with others.

Our politics begins as we resolutely turn away from the Spectacle and give each other our full and open-hearted attention.