Will Human Progress Doom Us All?

I am often reminded of the terrible price we and the Earth have paid for what we call in perfunctory fashion “progress” and wonder if we will someday fade into obscurity like our reptilian cousins. I cannot emphasize how important it is to instill in you, dear reader, the “what” and “how” our demise will come about. I have read, as you most likely have, the environmental destruction our species caused, the wars that were wrought, the lives that were lost needlessly as a result, the people that were exploited and destroyed by parasitic, multinational corporate interests. It all seemed remote, distant, even surreal, but it’s not. Some of the places I have been made this reality painfully obvious.

Above is the Morenci Copper Mine in Morenci, Arizona. It is the largest copper mining operation in North America and one of the largest in the world. This picture I took does not even do it justice. There is more, much, much more than what can be seen. This pit alone covers 2.1 square kilometers.

This is the Lavender Pit Mine near Bisby, Arizona. In case you were wondering what that black pool of liquid is, it is toxic waste from the acid-leaching process used to extract copper from the ore. “About 256 million tons of waste were stripped, but a portion of this was acid-leached for additional copper.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavender_Pit

This picture was taken towards the end of March in 2015. The smell which wafted up from the pit was quite pungent. It smelled very close to Sulfur, but there were other more exotic smells mixed in. It was very toxic. I could only imagine what it must be like at the very bottom of this 274 meter deep pit.

Sometimes I do not have to travel very far from home to see our future unraveling. In the trash strewn deserts of the Colorado River Valley, I only need to travel off the unimproved Silver Creek road to see what epitomizes our cancerous culture. To my left and right, there are acres and acres of garbage, twisted metal, broken televisions and computers, sofas, mattresses, kitchen appliances, bullet casings, shotgun shells, and lead from all the bullets taken aim at many of the things I just listed. The lead is quite possibly non-recoverable due to cost.

It’s times like these Michael Crichton’s Lost World comes into view, and I can see Ian Malcolm and Dr. Richard Levine puzzling over the question of why the dinosaurs really went extinct while they were observing the ones on the island of Isla Sorna. The dinosaurs were successful creatures which dominated the Earth for millions of years. They pondered that perhaps something about the dinosaurs themselves caused their extinction, rather than just a meteor impact. After all, we have birds, fish, the coelacanth, large reptiles like the crocodile and alligator. All of which survived the dinosaurs’ extinction event. Malcolm and Levine eventually arrived at an answer which seemed to satisfy their curiosity. The larger dinosaurs died off from failing to change their behavior to adapt to new situations. They were too successful at what they did and stagnated their evolution as a result.

“But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost — they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching.”
― Michael Crichton, The Lost World

When there are over 7 billion human inhabitants, very little adaptive fitness is transferred via DNA. Humans now evolve through behavior and learning. But our insistence on homogeneity in society is stultifying innovation and creativity, and it is slowly killing us from the inside. How is this happening? How is the human race approaching extinction, when it seems we are the most successful species on the planet? Ah! It is because humans are so successful that extinction is almost an inevitability. Humans live in large groups and occupy every habitable zone on this planet. Humans possess a destructive drive to exploit the Earth’s natural resources and reproduce with no sign of changing this behavior. All sense of pragmatism seems to have gone out the window with global politics dominated by gormless consumers. People seem insistent on bringing everyone together as one mind, one body but cannot seem to agree on which end is the head and which is the tail. This is in part due to the industrial revolution, but the growth from that era is quickly overshadowed from the growth caused by the internet. In the womb of the world, this growth can only be described as teratomatous.

“Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.” ― Michael Crichton, The Lost World

It sometimes can occur in a flash of clarity that our only purpose in life is to facilitate the 6th mass extinction and then ourselves become extinct in the process. Humans destroy things so well. “The culprits for the biodiversity loss include climate change, habitat loss, pollution and overfishing.” Of course when you have millions of people living together in a given country, it matters very little what kind of democratic government you have. Political intransigence and cultural norms will curtail any progress in ameliorating the situation.

Dr. Fenner, the man who helped wipe out smallpox, predicted humans will go extinct in the next 100 years. Overpopulation and “unbridled consumption” will be the leading cause. He stated we will most likely end in the same way the inhabitants of Easter disappeared.

Easter Island is famous for its massive stone statues. Polynesian people settled there, in what was then a pristine tropical island, around the middle of the first millennium AD. The population grew slowly at first and then exploded. As the population grew the forests were wiped out and all the tree animals became extinct, both with devastating consequences. After about 1600 the civilization began to collapse, and had virtually disappeared by the mid-19th century. Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond said the parallels between what happened on Easter Island and what is occurring today on the planet as a whole are “chillingly obvious.”

Can our dear guide, Mr. Crichton, offer up anymore insights?

“What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There’s no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs.’ The reason is that beliefs guide behavior which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. Next question.”
― Michael Crichton, The Lost World

I really do recommend you read his books. They are so much better than the movies with tons of delicious nuggets, such as the ones I dropped in here. As for whether or not humans will indeed sound their own death knell, I would try and remain optimistic. Optimistic people stand a better chance at actually changing their own behavior and the behaviors in others than the alternative, but more than optimism, we need better stories.

Stories can be used to teach us about ourselves and where we come from. They are used to add humanity to our individual struggles and give us clues as to what to do with ourselves. They teach us wisdom and, in insightful moments, they teach us about the world we live in.

The film Mythic Journeys is an excellent documentary and primer on the power of storytelling. It builds from Joseph Campbell’s work on “The Power of Myth.” I highly recommend you watch it, if you desire to know exactly how myths and stories can help bring people together and teach us what it means to be human.

The kind of stories being told now consist mostly of dystopian futures, cannibalism, survivalism, horror, excess and blatant narcissism, nationalist and propagandist war-stories, and just plain war. There is very little optimism being shared and too much cynicism being mistaken for “common sense.” None of these things sold through mass media can teach a young person very well about the human condition and are insufficient in teaching anyone about being a decent human being.

Better stories allow us to rebuild our culture from the inside out. If we inculcate our children and children’s children with stories that instill compassion, optimism, reason, skepticism, empathy, creativity, and a sense of identity, then our culture will eventually subsume these values as the influence from these stories work their way inward.

We also need to temper our reliance on mass media, namely the internet. I am sure you are aware as I am how ironic a statement like that is, especially since this was written using an online medium and online search tools for research. The reason being is these things force people to become more uniform and accepting of information which has not been thoroughly vetted. The dangers of peer-pressure cannot be understated, either. It used to be that we kept most of our opinions to ourselves before the internet made it easier for us to share them. This allowed us time to reevaluate previously held beliefs or hold our opinions with some shred of dignity without being on the defensive, constantly.

We were polite, civil, even tolerant and empathetic or at least it felt that way before the internet changed us.

Now, we feel compelled to share everything, sometimes with strangers we hardly know or with a co-worker or our boss. This creates a great deal of stress and pressure to conform. The loudest, rudest, most popular personalities online become the go-to authority on just about everything. Your very identity is presently under constant scrutiny. Politicians lacking any sort of equanimity and a bizarrely querulous, misinformed public use the internet as some online refuge for organizing around dubious conspiracies and enact laws as some preemptive measure against phantom menaces.

To save ourselves may mean giving up our cyber playground for a more mature segmented cyberspace that serves an actual purpose other than facilitating mindless drivel, consumerism, and lurid, gormless enterprises.

Isolationism may not be the kind of solution you want to hear to save our species or the planet, and it does sound rather regressive given the globalization rhetoric buzzing about right now. If done pragmatically and not as some reflexive, nationalist rally, it might do some good. It will allow countries the opportunity to invest in their own people and solve internal problems related to economic stress. You see, we grew too fast without first addressing the issues and inequalities generated by rampant, economic and social growth. Actually, it is social growth we currently lack. We have become the most prosperous of our ancestors in all of human history materially, but when it comes social wealth, we are completely destitute. We need to abandon material economic growth for the time being in exchange for social growth and well-being, if we are to have any chance to save ourselves from extinction.