Life Out Of Balance

[GliderGuider]

With thanks to joshcryer who prompted these thoughts.

Human activity is deeply wounding our planet in many ways. The insults we are heaping on Mother Earth include the deaths of ocean species, the pollution of land, air and water, as well as the destruction of uncountable natural habitats. Our changing climate is shifting the ranges of many species and altering rainfall patterns around the world. As we go about our business, the creatures who preceded us into this garden of plenty, and who have shared it with us throughout our history, are – like the victims of the Snark in the famous Lewis Carroll poem – “softly and silently vanishing away".

Once we recognize and accept that uncomfortable fact, we have to ask what we might do about it. The conventional answers to that question (and even some less conventional answers) reveal something profound about the way we understand the world and our place in it. Our first, reflexive reaction is to try and make our activities less damaging. The usual suggestion is that we need to develop better, greener technology.

Unfortunately, those who seek solutions to our current predicament in technology have misunderstood the nature of problem. Of course technology is an inseparable dimension of the human experience, but to treat it as the primary determinant of humanity is to fundamentally misapprehend what it takes to be fully human.

The problem of modern industrial society is one of imbalance: koyaanisqatsi. We do not suffer from a shortage of good technology, we have plenty of that. What we lack are the balancing forces of the human spirit: wisdom, compassion, recognition of oneness and interdependence. This situation cannot be rectified by developing ever more technology. Doing that will inevitably force us further and further out of balance.

Thinking of "human rewilding" or other dreams of returning to a more primitive past as a solution reveals a similarly mistaken understanding of the problem. While there might be a greater possibility of encountering humane spiritual values in a less technologically complex society, attempting to create that situation by truncating our technology will not work. Doing so would inevitably make humanity less rather than more. It would reduce the possibilities available to our creative natures, and would prevent our situation from resolving properly.

If the problem is one of imbalance, it seems sensible to me that we try to redress the balance by building up the side that is too light rather than lightening the side that is too heavy. While we may not lack for the technology to produce wind turbines, solar cells and more efficient cars, we do lack the “technologies” of wisdom, compassion, universal justice and respect for all life. This is the side of the equation we need to solve if we are to re-balance the role of humanity in the world.

Fortunately these technologies exist, though they are not widely known or valued in our industrial world. They have strong roots in Buddhist culture, in the burgeoning ecological movement, in the growing ranks of deep spiritual thinkers and among those who help create communities based on those values. It is up to each of us to seek out and join this movement as it spreads through our world, adding our individual sparks of awareness and compassion to the tide as it moves past.

Of course, anyone who sees humanity and our contextual reality in materialistic terms will not see the problem as I do, and will have a different sense of what the solution ought to be. That's a good thing: the broader our probability envelope remains, the more chances we will have for a harmonious actuality when the wave breaks and one of those possible futures becomes our living present.

With great love,
Bodhi

[ProleNoMore]

1. Koyaanisqatsi - From You Tube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sps6C9u7ras

[BrklynLiberal]

2. EXACTLY my first thought. I was just going to Google to find out how to spell it.

If I remember correctly, that is where I saw the "Cargo" people. Planes landed on this island during WWII with all kinds of goodies. Now that the war is over and no more planes come in, the population sits around and waits for the planes to return...like a religion.
Waiting for the return of the Messiah.

[XemaSab]

6. Terrific film.

Yeah, I watched it again.

[Delphinus]

8. Wow!

I didn't know how I was going to find it - thanks! :hug:

[AtheistCrusader]

3. This is why I hunt, fish, and grow my own organic garden.

Sure, I can afford all the meat and vegetables I can possibly consume, right out of a drive through window, and kill myself... OR

I can engage in the rather humbling effort of putting that food on the table myself. It's hard work, and environmental depredations just make it all the harder.

[Karenina]

4. Have we finally sliced an artery in Timor?

:shrug:

[HCE SuiGeneris]

5. Compassion, and an ability to WANT to make the world a more harmonious

place, is all that we need. It will rekindle this planet.

What you have so eloquently written is profound in its truth and simplicity.

Nice to know you, kindred spirit. :pals:

[Delphinus]

7. I agree that

wisdom, compassion, universal justice, and respect for all life is what we need to focus upon. I've heard others say, before, that technology will not save us. You've laid it out quite nicely as to why.

Fascinating information about the film - it makes me want to watch it.

[joshcryer]

9. Thanks for the post, it's very interesting. I do have to say one thing, though.

From my point of view technology is not remotely a "human determinant." However, it is a "practical reality." It exists. Almost 10 billion people rely on it. Therefore, those of us who do see technology as a solution to the imbalance (which we cannot ignore), do not see it as a "solution" because it is "necessary." No, we can do nothing and let the planet heal itself by eradicating huge swaths of population, that's a perfectly valid "solution." The thing is, technology, science, knowledge, understanding, those things allow us to, as a community, help one another get through mistakes we have made. Simply knowing of the problem, and accepting it isn't enough, if we want to be inclusive and have a global community of people who are part of the solution without even consciously knowing it, we must act. And the most valid actions we can take, the most useful, are technological.

We do not suffer from a shortage of good technology, we have plenty of that.

98% of our energy pollutes. Literally destroys the environment with undeniable certainty. There most certainly is a shortage of technology that is good for the environment, in actual use. Yeah, the knowledge, the base technology exists already, but as far as utilization in a global society is is comparatively non-existent. Whether or not we need global awareness to produce energy that doesn't pollute is not for me to decide. I only say get on it, awareness be damned. Communities (such as the only recently existing "Free Hardware" movement) simply start building windmills en'mass and give them away. Then you'll have something remarkable.

Act now.

[GliderGuider]

10. Thank you

You hold the classical position really well. As I say, that's a good thing -- we will need shoulders to every quadrant of the wheel.

Here are a couple of comments in response.

"Determinant" means "an influencing or determining factor". Technology, from clovis points to carbon nanotubes, has IMO been a major determining factor of of our humanness. It is quite tempting to think of it as our primary or even sole determinant, given that technology expresses both our reasoning ability and our desire to shape our environment. Knowledge is only half of the human equation, though, and except for hard-shelled Abrahamic religions western culture has given the other half pretty short shrift.

I agree that the base technology for sustainability exists, and that implementation is the barrier. That's really what I meant when I said that we have plenty of good technology. My point is that the failure to implement it is not a technological problem, to be overcome be ever more ingenious design. The failure is in the other side of the equation -- the side that encompasses our wisdom, our will and our sense of responsible connection to other life. Until that side of the equation is solved we will not start building windmills en masse and giving them away, no matter how available the technology might be. That impulse does not spring from a technological imperative, but from the human heart.

[joshcryer]

12. I lay fault sqaurely in the hands of authoritarians and elites.

Intellectual property has become the single greatest inhibitor of innovation in modern times, and indeed, property systems themselves (the capitalistic kind) have resulted in large swaths of resources being concentrated at the whim of a comparative few.

If I wanted to manufacture wind turbines (and it's something I've been thinking about starting as a business), it's very likely that I would have to jump many many hurdles as far as patents are concerned. I couldn't "just do it." I'd be sued to oblivion. My entire livelihood would be at stake.

So if we are going to call for this awareness that you are talking about, OK, but it also has to come along with some level of civil disobedience against laws that quite literally prevent us from being one cohesive community capable of sharing with one another and living perfectly sustainable lives with whatever level of technological luxury we desire.

We have intentional communities, they are useful, and will be a factor in the future, we need more though, many more. Patents, copyright, and resource monopolization cannot be continued to be respected. I do not see an economic solution to our pollution problems.

Jacobson recently came out with a plan to take us to complete sustainability, with zero pollution emissions. Zero! It's a remarkable analysis.

"Evaluating the Feasibility of a Large-Scale Wind, Water, and Sun Energy Infrastructure"

Air, fire, water. There's your spiritual component if you want it. :)

The thing about this plan is that economics simply cannot play a part, we can't play the capitalist game, we have to go beyond it, we have to say "no more of this shit" and do it ourselves. I consider the Free Hardware movement the beginning of this. It's small, practically non-existent, but if it grows like the Free Software movement, we may really have something remarkable.

[NNadir]

11. "While there might be a greater possibility of encountering humane spiritual values...

...in a less technologically complex society...!?!"

This statement flies directly into the face of history and is ridiculous on its face.

It was not more "humane" in the Middle Ages, given the brutish, violent and short lives people lived free of technology.

If you are worried about your teeth rotting out of your head, or your child dying of bubonic plague, you're not inclined to sit around musing about the beauty of the Adromeda galaxy, or even your neighbor's petunias and how beautiful they are.

It is not more humane in Dafur, where no one is sitting around on their computers having a cool (if smug) "intellectual" conversation, than it is in say, Ohio or New York.

The statement simply ignores reality by substituting some rarefied fantasy about some pastoral utopia that cannot, does not, and has never existed.

[XemaSab]

13. You mean solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Nasty:



Brutish:



Short:



We're big Hobbesians in this house.

[GliderGuider]

14. Tough room...

I did say that the idea of going backwards was a non-starter. I even weaseled with the word "might". Any perception of pastoral utopian fantasies in that article is projected in from the outside.

I do however suspect that people in the past were happy, at least from time to time, as incomprehensible as that may seem to those of us with good dentists.