A book entitled, Resettling America, includes a chapter
“Planning and the Paradox of Conscious Purpose,” is written by Gary J. Coates. I read this back in 1981 when the book first
was published. I have been rereading it
ever since and like most wisdom, it is timeless.
It starts by talking about the origins of human
cultures. “....Human culture has been
developing in a direction opposite that of organic evolution. Rather than moving towards greater complexity,
diversity, symbiosis and stability, human-dominated ecosystems have moved
progressively toward simplicity, homogeneity, competitive exploitation, and
fragility.”
No other species has had the
capability to alter the environment to fit its own needs. But we lack the wisdom to know the
consequences. Duane Elgin says “we
mistake power for wisdom.” The author
again:
“A civilization comes into existence through the
development of new ideas, myths, and technologies and through the harnessing of
energy for the exploitation of nature and the domination of other human
groups. When the limit of that
particular form of exploitation is reached, the civilization declines, often
having consumed the material resources upon which it has come to depend, as
well as its capacity for adaptive change in the face of new social, political
and ecological realities. It is
estimated that as many as 30 civilizations have followed this cycle of growth
and decline through the loss of evolutionary potential, leaving behind a legacy
of deforested hillsides, human-created deserts, and plains and river valleys
denuded of topsoil where there was once fertile and abundant life.” Industrial
civilization has speeded up this process.
It “has managed to accelerate this anti-ecological and anti-evolutionary
trend and has brought the entire planet within the orbit of its destructive
influence...this thin film of industrial culture that now envelops the earth,
destroying indigenous cultures and disrupting the world’s major ecosystems is
entirely dependent on nonrenewable resources that are certain to be effectively
exhausted with the lifetime of someone born today.”
At this point, the author ask two questions:
“Is homo sapiens an evolutionary dead end?” and
“How the human species, which is itself a product of
organic evolution, could have developed into such a threat to the very forces
which have created it?”
These questions lead to the “paradox of conscious
purpose”. The paradox
is this one:
“in order to survive we must act purposely. Yet, to act purposely leads us to disrupt the
systems upon which we depend for survival.
Moreover, since purpose is intrinsic to the nature of consciousness, it
is not possible to renounce its use.” To understand the paradox, let’s describe
“purposive consciousness.” The author
quotes Gregory Bateson here. Purposive
consciousness is a “short-cut device to enable you to get quickly what you
want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live, but to follow the
shortest logical or causal path to get what you next want....” Wisdom, in this context, would be knowledge
of the whole system, an understanding of the balances of mind and nature.
The human species starts to shape reality according
to its own purposes, which are out of sync with the whole. This lack of “systemic wisdom” creates a
“cul-de-sac”. The more we act, the more
problems we create. As modern technology
has given us more power to shape our narrow purposes, the more harm we create.
A story by Gregory Bateson is told in full, his
version of the Biblical myth of the fall of the human. In brief, Adam and Eve are living in the
garden. There is a fruit up in a tree,
too high to reach. They begin to
think. To think purposively. Adam went and got a empty box and stood on
it. Still wasn’t high enough. He got another box and finally could reach
the apple. They were ecstatic. “This was the way to do things.” Make a plan and get a result. Specialize.
Humans begin to shape the environment for their purposes. Instead of the purposes of the larger
whole. As the author puts it: “Adam and Eve, no longer satisfied to accept
the fruits of the garden as a gift of God, make the decision to take what they
desire.” They no longer accept
everything as a gift, thereby “rejecting the sacredness which they cannot
understand.” This is the beginning of
the desacralization of nature. This
leads to an anti-ecological direction for humans as well as a narrow realm of
activity.
As the author puts it:
“Activity is seen as a means to an end, rather than
an end in itself. Any merely
appreciative, contemplative and non-utilitarian encounter with the world comes
to be seen as a waste of time, as useless.
But what they have failed to grasp is that, if the world of leisure,
play, and celebration has no value (i.e., serves no purpose), then life is
reduced to a world of total work and constant struggle. The only reward is success in achieving
goals....” This might be the definition
of economics, which shows what a finite game it really is. It takes scarcity as a given, which is a
screwy way to look at the world.
As the chapter unfolds, one can see that “human
conscious purpose is not necessarily an evolutionary mistake, only a
destructive potential which must be corrected and regulated by circuits of
control which serve to direct human purposefulness towards goals and actions
which coincide with the needs of the larger natural systems which sustain human
life. The adaptive crisis of industrial
civilization is the result of the loss of these regulatory processes.”
The author asks, “What are these control mechanisms
and how can they be recreated and sustained?”
These values are sanctity and community. Sanctity means that the earth is a sacred
place. The author contrasts two
different attitudes towards hunting; that of a member of a modern “primitive”
culture and the white buffalo hunters of the last century. The former makes sure they need to hunt,
acting with a sense of humility. The modern
“primitive” is “acting out of a pervasive awareness that nature is a community
to which he belongs and upon which he depends.
It is not a commodity to be used, not a resource to be exploited with
maximum efficiency. While violence may
be sometimes required in order to exist, it should be undertaken only if
absolutely necessary and, even then, only with a deep sense of regret.” The
latter, the white buffalo hunters, in turn, “slaughtered millions of those
great beasts and left them to rot in the sun after removing only their tongues
for a quick profit.” One is based on the
sense of the sacred, the other the sense of expedient.
Community is the other quality. The author writes:
“largely because of cheap fossil fuels and
large-scale centralized technology, we no longer live within community. We live as individuals within a mass, superficially connected to one
another....” Some have argued that
society has been a product of the corporate world and their advertising. Lewis Hyde writes that “advertising is the
culture of a commodity civilization” and gives examples in his marvelous book ,
The Gift.
These two ideas (sanctity and community) are
combined in ecocommunities, associations of living entities living within the
cycles of nature. The author again: The idea of ecocommunities is a symbol of
wholeness, an ideal type, that in principle, is capable of restoring to
consciousness and culture a sense of the circular structure of the world. This idea can be applied at every scale.
Our modern world is suffering from hyper-coherence,
an “unhealthy inter-dependence.” If
there is disruption in one part of the system, it will spread to other
parts. Decisions are made for whole
regions and the inhabitants by distant authorities based on needs that could be
across continents. Is it any wonder
that it is so fragile? The modern theology
of economics informs us that this is natural and healthy. What could be more insane! This one world idea is the opposite of a
planetary culture. In describing the
solution, the author states: “a human
ecology based on the concepts of sanctity and community would be characterized
by wholeness (internal coherence) at every level of organization...associations
of plants, animals, microbes and people living together within the seasonal
cycles of sun, wind and water that provide the energy flows and nutrient
recycling necessary to maintain life.”
At the end he asks:
“How can we get from here to there?”
Another paradox. At no time do we require rapid change, but on the other
hand, we can’t depend on the top-down global elite that pulls strings to the
detriment of the whole. Every movement creates its opposite. Everywhere we look we see humans attempting
to create “processes of evolutionary experimentation guided by a ecological and
evolutionary ethic and informed by an abiding faith in the goodness of life and
the sacredness of creation.” We can
nurture these roots.
One in a series of meta-historical articles.... Understanding history
Charlie Leiden
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