Contents Updated: Monday, September 13, 1999
"The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological kind, but are psychic events... man is exposed to the elemental forces of his own psyche."
It is possible for societies to live and prosper with advanced technology.
Sagan calls this the Existence Theorem. The evidence presented here does not favor it.
We have surmised that intelligent dinosaurs, the anthroposaurs, destroyed their world 65 million years ago. And the omens are that we too are heading for extinction. At the end of the Cretaceous the vertebrate biomass concentrated into a few highly populous species. Today the same thing is happening.
Now, mankind, the new intelligent lifeform, breeds the few species at the expense of the many. Then, it was the intelligent dinosaur. Genetic variation was narrowed by breeding and environmental destruction until it virtually did not exist. It was literally genocide—without the genes to cope with the slightest stresses, the remaining species died off too.
History is repeating itself. The Existence Theorem is bunk!
Why do things tend to repeat themselves? Karl Popper speaks of the "propensity" that some event will occur. Propensity is probability with intent—it exerts an influence on events as if it were a physical field like an electric or gravitational field. It is reminiscent of Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields. Controversial though they are, these hypotheses imply that when something occurs, it has more chance of happening again. If true, and the anthroposaurs have already destroyed themselves, we might be locked into an outcome that will be nigh on impossible—might be impossible—to alter.
Is it our destiny to verify the Existence Theorem or our fate to falsify it. To verify it we have to break free of a morphogenetic field, to establish a new propensity. We seem to have less chance of doing so than deflecting an incoming planetoid.
Where is the will to change our behavior? Where is the mechanism to do it? Do we suffer from the same affliction as the anthroposaurs and perhaps all intelligent life forms—some self-destructive syndrome that is a sine qua non of intelligence? If the answer is "yes" we are doomed. Even if we can see the fault in ourselves, we are powerless to change it.
I believe we have a legacy from the dinosaurs. It is part of our psyche. We cannot reject it.
It is our dinosaur heritage!
What is this syndrome? Strictly we can never know because the psychology of anthroposaurs is not open to study—we cannot make the necessary comparisons between ourselves and them. What we can do is study human psychology and attempt to piece together the elements of the syndrome in ourselves. To see why warnings of doom have had no effect—why people do not want to know. There have been many prophets of the forthcoming catastrophe but they are not hailed and praised for their forethought—they are ignored or condemned as Jeremiahs.
The human race persists in its willingness to destroy itself and most other higher organisms for selfish economic and ideological reasons, all of them short term. There is something strange about the way we perceive things. Small disasters in terms of numbers of dead that occur suddenly, unexpectedly, visibly, shock us. But huge disasters dispersed in space and time, we hardly notice.
Norman Myers points out that the crash of a jumbo jet attracts media headlines, but no headlines shout out the death of a jumbo jet full of children every 20 minutes, the rate of child mortality in the Third World. Yet the cost of a can of beer every three months to the citizens of the First World would stop this carnage by providing money to implement immunization programs and to prevent diarrhoea in infants.
And besides the millions who die every year of disease, starvation and suicide, in the last 200 years perhaps 100 million people have died in warfare. Yet we are totally indifferent to it. We are indifferent to the deaths of our own species as well as to others. Why?
Why are we so perverse? Why are we apathetic about our destruction of the environment and the threats to life we are creating? Why do we allow rapacious industrialists whether of the blue or the red variety to contaminate the earth? Why do we accept the rule of governments that allow them to do it and, through accumulating dangerous armaments and adopting threatening postures, endanger the world in their own way? Why do we retain such an obtuse optimism that we revile those who do warn us of the dangers. Why is it so much more virile to accept the status quo rather than criticize it? Why do we do what we are told even when we know it is wrong? Why don't we recognize our dinosaur heritage?
The late Niko Tinbergen, the world famous ethologist, thought there were human characteristics that once were valuable to survival but which, through the speed of the evolution of advanced society, have become so ill-fitted to the needs of technological man that they now threaten us.
This idea is compelling because the key characteristic of modern man, as it would have been for anthoposaurus, is the remarkable speed at which technological society emerged, creating conditions quite different from those in which instincts evolved. It happens elsewhere in nature.
Migratory birds like swallows that have a late brood are likely to abandon them to die at the end of the summer if the migratory instinct switches on before the young are mature enough. At one time (perhaps when weather was warmer), they could comfortably raise two broods but now they cannot, and so two instincts conflict. There is a maladaptation. Darwin in "The Descent of Man" thought this was evidence that such animals could feel no remorse, had no conscience, indeed no memory of their action. They seem just to forget the brood when the greater urge presents itself. If so, the swallows did not even recognize what they had done. Are we similar?
So instincts sometimes conflict. When intelligence evolves these conflicts become conscious posing the creature moral dilemmas. It resolves them by inventing rules, laws and morals. With the growth of society the rules themselves condition our behavior. So far so good. But the original code of ethics, made in primitive societies, might not be forever correct. If we have built on behavior maladapted for modern conditions, we shall find that our mores, rules, norms and habits—our very ways of thinking—are leading us to disaster instead of giving us guidelines for a better existence.
Are the now redundant side-effects of our own evolutionary history not only inappropriate but actually lethal?
asks Norman F.Dixon, a professor of psychology at the University of London. He asks us to consider the following equation:
Mankind exists and has invented technology. The combination inevitably leads to mankind's extinction.
Can it be avoided?
Yes, if we get rid of technology. But technology cannot be disinvented, so extinction can only be prevented by changing the nature of man. Mankind will have to change to prove the Existence Theorem or technology will falsify it. Erich Fromm, the social philosopher, concurs. He writes,
the Falangist motto, "Long live death," threatens to become the secret principle of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine constitutes the very meaning of progress, and where the living person becomes an appendix to the machine.
In our mechanized, urban societies we have lost the knowledge of our relationships with the rest of the biosphere. Instead we are obsessed with mechanical devices, our cars, TVs, computers and washing machines, and mechanical analysis of the interrelationships between ourselves, our hierarchies, social symbols and selfishness.
Not only are we unaware of the stench of death around us, in some unconscious way we revel in it.
Selfish interest might be one characteristic that was valuable in some evolutionary contexts but is no longer. Other motives which developed in evolution to balance against excessive self regard perhaps fail to operate adequately in our coddled environment.
The thing to be lamented is, not that men have so great regard to their own good or interest in the present world, or they have not enough; but that they have so little to the good of others,
as Bishop Butler put it—selfishness is not excessive self-love, but indifference to others.
Obsessive selfishness seems to overwhelm all other feelings—all obsessions do. Ultimately the obsession destroys even the obsessive. Initially selfish, the behavior eventually contradicts self regard by being self destructive! It becomes a death wish. Necrophilia!
Long live death!
And our society depends upon highly specialized people—experts—who have to be obsessive in their field to succeed. Our society selects for obsessiveness. Entrepreneurs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Generals, Scientists—successful people must be obsessive! They must be necrophiles!
We begin to see that we have a very odd civilization indeed!
Through maladaptation we have become necrophiles—and the most necrophilous of all are the experts.
Just like the anthroposaurs?