A recent meta study adds to alarm about the state of life on earth.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320718313636
Obvious problems with the study as its biased towards papers showing decline, and most data is far from significant. But I don't think there are many who doubt the decline of wildlife across the planet. You only need to take a walk these days to observe the reduced insect numbers.
Like so many complex systems e.g. weather and stock market finding definitive proof of trends is almost impossible. Trends belong to the class of thinking called linear systems. Dynamic systems are scale independent and what you see depends upon the time frame. What today looks like a decline could be part of a larger increase could be part of a larger decrease and so on. People are still able to argue about climate change based on such uncertainties and the same will be true for the die hard believers that mankind is having no impact on the planet.
But in my view life is a limited thing, and the planet only so large and while climate change and population change and extinctions are part of the dynamics of the planet there is a New Problem in town caused by mankind.
But The Problem seems to me to be far deeper than simply waking up to a few things. It is a fundamental problem at the heart of the Western Project. That is why this blog steers such a wide course. This is not a problem that can be solved within the framework we have of Western Civilisation. It requires a paradigm shift that will change everything.
Who cares that insects are going extinct?
Its a question that is almost impossible to evaluate using Plato or Newton or Einstein or Kant. There is nothing in the whole of Western Civilisation that answer the question. Who cares if everything goes extinct?
Humans are sacred, although that has been a long journey and some are more sacred than others. 2 million Armenians can be slaughtered and its not that important. 6 million Jews and its the end of the world. But broadly we accept that humans going extinct would be bad. But the natural world going extinct does not have an answer.
So the problem is best approached by removing some artificial boundaries. Humans don't exist. Consciousness is not Human. Matter is not different from Mind. The world is not made from Atoms. Animals are no different from Humans. Insects belong to the exact same world as Humans: there is no part of the world that is exclusively human and no part that is exclusively insect.
OK that is a lot to process and justify.
Perhaps best to start with an interlude here:
Starting at 6:16. “The hunter pays tribute to his quarry’s courage and strength. With ceremonial gestures that ensure that its spirit returns to the desert sands from which it came. While it was alive, he lived and breathed with it and felt its every movement in his own body, and at the moment of its death, he shared its pain. He rubs its saliva into his own legs to relieve the agony of his own burning muscles, and he gives thanks for the life he has taken so that he may sustain the lives of his family waiting for him back in their settlement.”
In this small passage exists everything that is missing from the whole Western Project and in fact everything that was over shadowed when the Farming Revolution occurred at the start of the Neolithic. The last 6000 years have been just been a diversion from the main evolution of mankind.
The San people of the Kalahari do not hunt with great technology but simply by pursuit until their faster prey is so exhausted that they can over power it. What is to be noticed is what Attenborough calls "With ceremonial gestures." What are these? What part to they play in getting food into the mouths of hungry hunters who have been working all day? Where in Plato, Newton, Einstein or Kant is there a foundation theory for "ceremonial gestures."
The answer lies in the list of statements I made. In reality there is no difference between the hunter and the hunted. Attenborough says "While it was alive, he lived and breathed with it and felt its every movement in his own body, and at the moment of its death, he shared its pain." The hunter has a relationship with the hunted that is completely mutual. You track an animal for a whole day, you understand its every thought and movement: you know that animal as well as yourself. And you see intimately when you take that animal's life that it must lose so you can gain. There is a balance. What you take, is balanced by a loss in the world. Here in fact is Newton's Second Law. So the bushmen take very cautiously, knowing there is an equal and opposite cost. And they pay respect to that cost. They do not wish to anger the world from which the Kudu came from. When the world is angry and the Kudu go then the people suffer. Perhaps also there is a deeper level also of simple respect and empathy for the world around them. An appreciation of the world they live in, along side their fellow people and animals. One great interconnected cosmos.
Now some of these ideas have been given full voice in the last century or so. Writers like David Thoreau have been driven to explore the anti-industrial world. The Romantic artists have gone outside the city walls to marvel at the sublime wilderness and be terrified at nature's fury. There is a soul still present in humans that identifies with the San people. But that soul is trapped inside house arrest and deprived of action by several thousand years of civilisation. Economics, technology, science and academia does not have a theory that can form a foundation of human soul. And comfort does make cowards of us all!
So returning to my list of artificial boundaries. How has our soul been trapped in house arrest?
Firstly most notably there is the boundary created by specialisation and industry. There is probably only a fraction of children today who have ever been to a working farm. I was lucky enough to live on a farm for a few weeks during my childhood when my parents stayed at B&B's. I have milked cows and have a vague idea of some of the processes that underlie my nutrition state. I became vegetarian to overcome the industrial barrier. Unlike the San people I will never be able to have a relationship with my food, so I must take more crude life style choices and just avoid the slaughter house all together. But then you learn about milk and realise you must be vegan to escape the slaughter house. The barrier between us and the natural world is almost total. We are left with just the crude choice of an "organic vegan" life style that seeks to at least restore some respect for what we eat. How pitiful compared with the rich diet and relationships the San people have with the world.
But this still does not ask why we care about insects and the natural world?
The artificial barriers listed work to isolate humans as special in a non-special world. In its crudest form there is inanimate matter and animate humans. Animals are usually not viewed as conscious and animate, but with pets even the staunchest such dualist will acknowledge that their pet dog has some feelings and value before a stone. It is a hopeless way of thinking, and obviously nonsense. Humans are made of the same stuff as a stone! How can materialism prove any difference?
So it turns out there is no difference. Hard-core Materialists like Daniel Dennett accepting that everything is matter and so the same, try to overcome the question of human consciousness by arguing that it must be an illusion. Well he is part correct, but he makes the mistake of assuming that the world is matter. That is the dogma. The truth is the world is nothing! It is neither inanimate matter, nor animate consciousness. Such deliberations are unhelpful dogmas and at root just ideas. I hope I can ignore this line of enquiry - I've already pursues it at length in this blog.
So we can ignore the idea that the world is made of atoms. There are atoms there, but also a lot of other things. Atoms are made of sub-atomic particles (SAPs). Do we now say that the world is made of SAPs. All these are made from Energy too. If there is a fundamental unit it is energy. But its not nice to think of everything made of energy, the goal was to think of nice building blocks. That's the point we must let go of that desire for building blocks. The world is not built like a house. Its like a super hi-resolution screen. Long, long before you get to plank length pixels you give up zooming in, and long, long before you get to the edge of the known universe you stop zooming out. And then anyway we encounter the problem of Paramenides and Democritus. Is the world like a cake that we divide up into parts like ataoms, or is it like a house that is built from atoms. What is the entity here: the universe or a collection of atoms. We live in the centre. That is the building block. Materialism is wrong.
Having smashed up the lego pile and got away from materialism and reductivism. The next most important question is how do animals and humans occupy the same world? Cutting a long blog post short the point is that they are interconnected. All things are interconnected. This is core Buddhist theory. Well described in this blog. To understand where something came from you must look at the world around it. This is as true for humans as it is insects. Its extraordinary looking at a human to think that they were made by the small fertilised egg of their parents nurtured by the surrounding world. All that "human" came from the inanimate world around them. We won't get hung on silly ideas like animate/inanimate we have already smashed up the lego pile in the previous paragraphs and aren't looking at types of substance any more. The truth is that insects and humans both arise from exactly the same universe. While they are completely different, they belong to the same extraordinary creation. You impact one and you impact the other. That is not a statement of practicality like in the papers concerned at what the impact of losing insects on mankind will be, but an appreciation that they belong and arose from the same mysterious world.
And so I can continue. Eventually when the edifice of Western Civilisation has been dismantled we return to the San people and the simple knowledge that we belong in this world alongside all of creation that we see around us. No greater or simple a realisation than that. What was the point of the last 6000 years? It seems to have been a long circular journey so that in the end we would return home and know that we belonged there. The oldest story of them all captured in Paul Cohelo's The Alchemist and also most skilfully and brilliantly in a recent vlog post by Exurb1a
So in conclusion times are a changing, and mankind is undertaking a huge return journey back to
its origins. In Zen they say that at the outset mountains are mountain, then mountains stop being mountains and at the end mountains become mountains again. Mankind is at the point where life is no longer life anymore. We are surrounded by the products of our miraculous labours and it seems almost anything is possible. But over the last century the cracks have been showing from physics to logic and things are no longer certain. The orbit has swung and mankind sees that mountains have stopped being mountains and knows that something is wrong. We yearn once again for Home, and as we return so will the insects and the World that gave rise to mankind in the first place will welcome us back. Its a (deliberate?) irony that Exurb1a chose the snake. In Jewish mythology it was the snake that tricked us out of the garden of Eden. The quest for knowledge that the snake tricked us with has led us far from where we started. But in our heart we only ever just wanted to return.== Addition
So the question that remains and which must be the focused target of this blog (apart from spirituality) is the new economics. Its a great irony that the word "economics" comes from the Greek for home management. Yet economics has single handed destroyed the world. Perhaps that is harsh. Looked at one way it has brought immense material wealth to the world. The average person in the West is now more materially spoiled than the most powerful Kings of old. But economics is a new science, and like everything new it is unfinished and naive. We have begun the journey of economics but it has taken us far away from home. The new economics will be the return to home, and the truth at the heart of economics itself.
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