Implications of the 12 Powers of 10
What do we learn from zooming in across the 12 great crises making a stop at each order of magnitude?
One point: A reconsideration of agriculture and technology from a means of controlling the environment to a means of protecting spaces for useful biodiversity. The evidence is mounting that we are on the verge of a mass extinction event that eliminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. One heading for that program is agro-ecology. Information technology, biotechnology, weapons, and energy systems have to be employed in a way that is subordinated to an open outlook on biodiversity.
Second point: When it comes to technology, we need to think intergenerationally — not only within the human species but in terms of a biodiverse and openly evolving web of life. After all, every person’s genome is unique, but no one human’s genome can transmit superior traits to offspring — at least not in a way that will last.
That was the great fallacy within so much of human society since the agriculturalization of human society. The interpretation of reproductive biology up until recently was based on structuring society so that the superiority of a single genetic line could be preserved. But this is functionally nonsense, whether you are talking about the familial level and certainly if you are talking on the racial or national level. The human species is so densely networked and similar — so homogeneous — that there is no social good in establishing structures through which status can be inherited across generations.
In short, we need a system that is dynamic in the way that it allows kinship and property to be re-allotted over time. There are no superior classes. And there are no superior races. Indeed, genetically and biologically, there are no such things as races. We are all related. And people of all kinds need to share the earth. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need private property.
Third Point: A reconceptualization of how kinship and property can be configured without top down government intervention. This is a big part of what the great rebellion was all about. In the first agricultural states, there was only public property — but all public property was owned by the divine kings and priests. And indeed our current financial crises are all rooted in the realization of the great rebellion of the failure of societies to manage property from the top down. Ultimately, there is only private property. But all private property is defined by interrelations. How we force technology to become a means by which private property relations dynamically evolve and develop rather than a means to keeping them static and unchangeable will determine how our species succeeds beyond the current state of crisis.
I think the aggregate meaning of these three lessons is that humans have to find a way to relinquish control of nature and to guide the ample energies on this planet to keep the dynamic processes of life unfolding as they have — in different way — for 3 billion years. This seems like it would mean adopting an entirely new kind of political ecology. In fact, however, I think it would just mean faithfully following through on the Great Rebellion that began around 4 millennia ago.
Or please, go check out my other posts.
On the ancient origins of modern economic thought.
On a new way of explaining the Gender Wage Gap.
On why schools should be teacher-owned but are not.
Reflections on what schools are and what they are supposed to be.
On the failures of new media to inform like old newspapers used to do.
