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| Samurai helmet by Myochin Nobuie |
"The evil and thus keenest danger is thinking itself. It must think against itself, which it can only seldom do." - Martin Heidegger
The lateralization of how attention is deployed (opponent processing) appears to have begun deep in our evolutionary past. McGilchrist wrote: “the earliest known instance of a nervous system, that of Nematostella vectensis, a sea anemone over 700 million years old, already exhibits lateral asymmetry... of the nervous system [which] has been universally conserved as a means of addressing the problem of how to ‘get’ without being ‘got’". Fast forward over geologic time to the emergence of the genus Homo, and we see that this trend, from such humble beginnings, appears to have inexorably escalated carrying us to our current predicament. Both Gazzaniga and McGilchrist believe that the emergence of language has made the left hemisphere’s world increasingly virtual, causing disruption across the planet. Gaia has developed a global civilization that is captured by 'hypostatized intelligence', nihilism, and appears to be facing collapse. To be sure, there is an alternative path we might take, toward awakening to wisdom, recognizing our biologically instantiated, embodied paradox, and overcoming collapse.
There is a telic or quasi-deterministic aspect to this in line with Maynard Smith and Szathmáry's 'evolutionary transitions theory', however unlike that theory, the hemisphere hypothesis points to our eventual arrival at a decisive moment for our ecosphere, for Gaia, when we might intentionally choose to exercise wisdom. A developmental trajectory, and role for exercising our agency in affecting its course, can also be seen within McGilchrist's books, whose subtitles first describe "the Making of the Western World" followed by "the Unmaking of the World". The possibility for "re-connecting with the world" is suggested at places in the text, though not in the subtitles. Concerning that possibility, McGilchrist is a "hopeful pessimist". What may be interesting is the potential to explore what sort of implications the hemisphere hypothesis may have when we think on grand scales of time and space. Can it shed any light on the Fermi paradox?
In his article "Under the Sign of Erasure", S.C. Hickman writes "humans may be following the path of previous alien civilizations in our galaxy, due to Fermi’s Paradox we should’ve made contact with other advanced intelligent species in the cosmos long ago, but the fact that this has yet to happen brings us to one possibility ...advanced intelligence produces short-term thinking, which in turn accelerates the very self-lacerating forces and wounds which eventually kill them. This could entail any number of things from resource depletion, wars, over-population, climate change impact, disease, famine, etc. ...In many ways one feels as if this undetermined anxiety below the surface of life on this planet were accelerating toward not only a climate tipping point, but a mental tipping point..." (Carl Sagan also speculated on societal suicide.)
Although Hickman didn't have McGilchrist in mind when he wrote that, we can recognize the hallmark consequences of an unmitigated LH intelligence. What he described isn't "technological determinism" per se (a charge that historical materialism has faced, perhaps with good reason). The critical variable here is not matter, but intelligence. Yet his account is deterministic in the sense that no alternative future course is suggested that an agent may recognize or select. Later Hickman would write "Both Heraclitus and Blake surmised that without conflict or oppositional thought there is no forward movement in life or experience. We need challenges to overcome our essential stasis, our narcissistic enclosure as humans and societies." The hemisphere hypothesis points out that evolution has indeed supplied us with such "oppositional thought" precisely for the reason of opposing that intelligence with wisdom.
The responsibility to choose is imposed upon us. Attention, both what we attend to and how we attend to it, is a profoundly moral act, but it may also carry profoundly existential consequences as well. Can the Fermi paradox be explained by the hemisphere hypothesis? McGilchrist wrote "Nature, that we are reviling and doing our best to devastate – is the great whole to which we belong. All the elements of the left hemisphere insurrection can, individually and together, be seen as an attack on Nature – and, with it, on the body; and hence on life itself." He doesn't venture to speculate if this sort of predicament has played out at other times and places throughout the cosmos. But if the lateralization of attention emerges early in evolutionary history and is assiduously conserved thereafter, it isn't unreasonable to imagine that this could be the 'Great Filter', or perhaps one of several barriers, through which we must pass.
In his short story "Swarm", Bruce Sterling wrote "Intelligence is a great bother. It makes all kinds of trouble for us… You are a young race and lay great stock by your own cleverness. As usual, you fail to see that intelligence is not a winning strategy. Already your race is flying to pieces under the impact of your own expertise… Intelligence is very much a two-edged sword. It is useful only up to a point. It interferes with the business of living. Life, and intelligence, do not mix very well. They are not at all closely related, as you childishly assume." Like Hickman, Sterling clearly made intelligence his object of criticism. Unlike Hickman, he's suggesting that mitigating it's excesses is a possibility, however the form this mitigation takes within his story is primarily via suppression rather than opposition. It's a tight story at only 18 pages long, and was recently adapted as an episode of the Netflix series "Love, Death & Robots". Through his characters he's chastising us for our "ratiocentric bias".
The Fermi paradox is considered by Jim Rutt to be "the second most important question in science". (The first being "Why is there anything?") Whether or not our civilization is actually unique depends upon whether the Great Filter is behind us, perhaps relating to the emergence of eukaryotic life, or in front of us. If behind us then we can breathe a sigh of relief. But if we are not unique and many civilizations have reached the same point we are at today, then we have greater reason to remain vigilant to possible threats. And in such a case, the hemisphere hypothesis may provide a possible explanation for the Great Silence and shed light on our current predicament. In some sense, Hickman may be right. There's a fair rejoinder though: If we can imagine this risk, then surely other civilizations could've as well. So what is it about a LH insurrection that is difficult to overcome?
The qualities that contribute to an insurrection don't clearly correlate with identity politics. They cut across our popular ways of dividing society into groups. This means we may all easily misapprehend our own vulnerability. More obviously, the sensitivity to supernormal stimuli that had been adaptive in our distant past due to scarcity has now become maladaptive. This has been called the "paradox of plenty", and it appears to reinforce LH capture. Other dynamics accelerating these processes leading to evolutionary traps have been outlined by Zak Stein and Daniel Schmachtenberger. In short, it all combines to suggest that a global LH insurrection is exceedingly difficult to address. But the outcome is not predetermined. We have the agency to select a future path that leads away from it. If we ‘think against thinking’, as Heidegger suggests we must, can the LH become the ‘antihero’ we need? In any event, to avoid becoming a victim of the Fermi paradox, rather than an exception to it, we must mobilize. In life we pass through many stages. Some of these are clearly much more difficult than others.
Additional remarks
One of the virtues of the Fermi paradox is that, because it is self referential (and to the same extent anthropocentric), it can help to illuminate our biases and prompt us to try to think outside of them. And it uncovers many hidden assumptions concerning topics like: Is there directionality in evolution? Is there a tendency toward greater persistence or increased responsiveness? What is complexity (compared with complication), and is it preferable to the opposite of simplification? These important questions can also be evaluated in light of the hemisphere hypothesis and the existential implications of LH insurrection for a global civilization. The history of Western civilization has apparently oscillated between periods of decline and renaissance, which McGilchrist correlates with LH insurrection and RH reassertion. Are these cycles inevitable, or are they context dependent? If the latter, then can they be anticipated? While it seems apparent that greater complexity is one of the conditions for enabling a LH insurrection (and delusions of omnipotence), it is certainly not the only condition. And we shouldn't neglect that greater complexity, when in service to a holistic view, is also apparently a prerequisite for enabling greater responsiveness, for example with reference to the values of the "good, true, and beautiful", as well as any correspondence these might have with the "social determinants of health".
Large regional civilizations, such as those of the Greeks and Romans, have collapsed within recorded history, but global collapse is heretofore unprecedented. As if prophetically confirming this while highlighting our current crisis, the "Iroquois legend" cited by McGilchrist ominously portends that recovery from collapse will only come "twice on behalf of mankind, but if a third time it comes to pass that you forget, then you will see what will come to pass... Now I leave the matter to you." Of course, we cannot conclusively 'argue from ignorance' concerning the apparent lack of evidence for civilizations elsewhere in the universe. A bewildering diversity of explanations have been put forward to try to explain this situation, most of which invoke the known physics of the universe and/or characteristics of life as we know it. These are not necessarily advanced to assert a 'fact of the matter' concerning the paradox (those which do can be safely dismissed), but rather this speculation is engaged in to refine our intuitions on existential questions. Far from being without value, I think the informed approach taken by astrobiologists like David Grinspoon can help extend our understanding concerning the characteristics of a sustainable, flourishing culture.
The apparent fact that we don’t live in a crowded cosmos could prompt us to wonder if, in some sense, the Great Silence is a necessary precondition for our survival, just as the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period set the stage for the ecological release and diversification of mammals, including the eventual rise of genus Homo. Suzana Herculano-Houzel recently said "Thank you, asteroid. Because there was no opportunities for anything else while those guys [theropod dinosaurs] were around." So should we, perhaps counterintuitively, actually thank the Fermi paradox, and hence the "LH Great Barrier"? Relatedly, if that barrier can be breached, does this lend credence to the "dark forest hypothesis"? Could the interstellar equivalent of therapod superpredators be lurking out there? As we know, vigilantly avoiding predation is also identified with the role of a healthy right hemisphere. So this wouldn't substantially change our need to address a LH insurrection. But the assumptions within the dark forest hypothesis may not apply to any life capable of breaching the Great Barrier, particularly if that is a LH Barrier. ...And what about the counterfactual? What if we actually did live in crowded cosmos? What if the Fermi paradox didn’t exist? Ultimately we may never know. Just as there's no clear answer to the paradox, there’s no a priori reason why a few cosmic neighbors shouldn’t be out there, somewhere, whatever the odds.
In general, explanations for the Fermi paradox that refer to our known limitations have more evidential support and are often more parsimonious. Therefore obstacles surrounding communication appear more plausible than positing the existence of aliens with the motive and resources to impose and maintain a “prime directive” that prevents our awareness of their existence. Given this, what other known limitations, aside from communication, might explain the Fermi paradox? Here the speculation of Carl Sagan and others may be relevant: Does (ostensibly intelligent) life exhibit suicidal tendencies that present a real existential threat? If so, why? Does this constitute a significant known limitation (or obstacle) for our long-term survival? Our answers to these questions may be relevant to the paradox, that is, if we have reason to suppose we may not be unique in this regard.
It's possible to formulate a hypothesis that can never be disproved, for the simple reason that the evidence to decide it is not available. For these hypotheses we can ask: What sort of evidence would be needed? For example, if I were to try to prove that the Fermi paradox can be explained by the hemisphere hypothesis, I might need data on numerous alien civilizations, their environmental conditions, the physiology, phenomenology, and relationships of the inhabitants, and whether they are extant or extinct. None of this evidence is available, and it likely never will be. The Gaia hypothesis faces similar difficulties. What is the chance that life can persist for billions of years without globally balancing feedback processes? We only have a sample size of one. Given the lack of direct comparisons, simulations have been created. These suggest that homeostatic processes at a global scale are in fact necessary, in combination with a lot of luck. Simulations are models, and therefore never fully correspond with reality. The only reason one might think they could shed any light on the Fermi paradox is because we've used them with varying levels of success in many other fields. It wouldn't establish certainty, but it could narrow the range of the possible. So while speculation is rampant within literature and philosophy, even with a sample size of one it is possible to make educated inferences regarding cosmic questions. And that in turn can aid us in identifying where we are most exposed to risk.
Yesterday I hiked a few miles out from a valley bottom to pick the wild Alaskan blueberries that grew higher up the slope, fresh washed by the morning rain. I can't think of any food that packs more flavor. To me, and for many people, ounce for ounce they are more precious than gold. And the beauty of the place! That alone was reward enough. But before I began harvesting I ascended to a high plateau. In every direction I saw the rolling hills, valleys, and winding streams of a terrain that seemed to extend almost forever. I felt a brisk wind, the wet rain, the warmth of the sun, and the sting of hail (for a few exciting minutes). The Earth is alive.
Humans are extremely adaptable, due both to flexible needs, but also to an overabundance of ingenuity for meeting them. The cultural technologies we developed, beginning possibly two million years ago, helped place us on an evolutionary path that enabled us to eat anything we wanted, anything at all (as one paper suggests, with a predilection for big game). Being a nomadic big game hunter was perhaps the pinnacle of health and exhilaration, never matched since. So I find it deeply ironic that we exterminated almost all the big game species in the geologic blink of an eye after encountering them, that is, once we began to move across the globe. It’s a big question for me: If we live in paradise, then why eliminate the noblest animals that we share it with? No doubt these creatures were vulnerable to other environmental factors as well, but we played a decisive role. Was it our brains, culture, and a conducive physiology that did it? Were we, and they, ultimately a victim of our own success?
It’s important to know the answer, because the same 'curse of intelligence' we were given at the dawn of hominin evolution is still with us today, and as dangerous as ever. Rewind the tape, and to be sure things would be simpler for us, but what would prevent us from straying off the path of sustainability in the next geologic eye blink? Do we need to put a bigger fence around “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”? Daniel Quinn said “To think that our toys make us wealthy is very bizarre”. He is absolutely right. If our toys have actually made us poorer than ever, then does that imply that taking our toys away will make us rich again? It might help, though that doesn't get to the root. The most precious thing we’ve ever had is wisdom, which is recognizing when the products of intelligence are no longer serving us well. It’s the awareness, sometimes all too fleeting, that just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should do it (the is-ought problem). It may be that navigating this ethical tension within us has defined our path more than anything else.
Food (f)or Thought
Access to high energy content foods (like high fat animals) that are easily digestible (using food processing technologies like fire) released constraints on the growth of body organs with high energy requirements. That’s the story of how the hominin brain grew. There was a ratcheting effect. Better food, bigger brains, better food. Food and the brain have been intertwined in this way for most of our history. So dietary changes had major consequences for evolution, but also for ecological sustainability, as we see all too clearly today.
In a way, this was a Faustian bargain, a double-edged blade that cut both ways. The growing brains of early hunter-gatherers may not have known the longterm implications of harvesting pressure on animals they didn’t coevolve with. Regardless, our brains facilitated the extinction of megafauna, and still faster that of isolated island ecologies. Larger brains led to both good and bad things. We now live on a planet largely depopulated of megafauna, and impoverished in other ways as well. And from enabling us to take down the largest animals, bigger brains have ironically now led to highly processed and nutritionally poor 'pseudofoods'.
Today many people do recognize limitations, and understand many of the implications of unsustainable resource use. But do we recognize why it was that, in many cases, we didn’t pay attention to the early signs of collapse when the last group of mammoth or moa were seen? Or more recently, when the sources of freshwater we rely on began to dry up or become contaminated? In either case, can we say there was never any indication? Or did we simply not care either way? Action, a change in lifestyles is needed, but perhaps more fundamentally we need a change that allows us to pay attention. Only one hominid species remains extant today. (Nine walked the Earth 300,000 years ago.) And our survival is far from assured. Given our historical track record, is exercising restraint even natural? Individually yes, but collectively? The great evil of greed and profligacy is that, on a geological timescale, 'what took years to build can be destroyed in seconds'. I think we’ve never faced a problem more wicked, nor in some ways more fascinating, than trying to engage the inner dialectic between our divided nature in a more productive manner, rather than continuing to allow the subterfuge of our 'vices' to undermine our 'virtuous' intentions.
[A
note on context: The other day a friend said I should look to the
anatomy of the human digestive system to understand diet and how to
address chronic disease. They suggested that a carnivore diet can be an
important part of that. Of course, context is very important, as the
diversity of cultural forms can attest. Perhaps the only thing worse
than a mono-crop is a mono-culture. I responded “Yes, but… we might also
look to the anatomy of the neurological system to understand thought.”
Just as understanding how our digestive system functions can tell us
about the food we evolved to eat, understanding more about how our
neuroanatomy functions can tell us about the kind of thoughts we evolved
to think. So in the above I adopted several of their somewhat
controversial assumptions, mostly for the sake of exploring these
alternative paradigms for understanding the origin, development, and
future of the human condition, which was really the broader subject we
were looking at, and what sort of implications might follow should we
elevate either paradigm. This is not intended to be an endorsement of
any specific dietary regimen, a topic about which I have many
reservations, none of which are stated here.]
Coda
Dividing humanity into Western and non-Western cultures is diagnostically illuminating. But the underlying neurological foundation is shared cross-culturally, such that if you take any group and place them into similar situations, what predisposes one group toward a tendency to deplete their resources and another to exercise the wisdom for restraint and long term flourishing is going to be primarily the result of the aforementioned extrasomatic features. And after the spread of global trade routes, cultural differences became the single feature that best accounts for variation. Elinor Ostrum showed this, and McGilchrist's conversation with Ameer Shaheed was on exactly this point as well.
What this suggests is that solely looking to the past as a source for hope to escape our predicament may be delusional, as the very traits that make us human are also the traits that make us a danger to ourselves and others. This is the realization of the coincidence of opposites. Indeed, this insight is present all over the world. Given the evidence of the Quarternary extinction event, which began very very long ago and has only picked up speed since then, we cannot be optimistic without the instantiation of a new way of being. Although more of a conventional history writer, and not characterized as a "big history" writer along with the others previously mentioned, I think McGilchrist can be viewed in this way.
Perhaps these are the 'pangs of birth' we are experiencing. Maybe we are looking at the wrong things. Instead of a linear trajectory from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to industrialism (and current talk of Industry 4.0), we can look at the development of attention. A child begins life in awe of the world, takes joy in the thrill of their bodies in adolescence, and in older age comes to appreciate the wisdom of a wider perspective. Exceptions exist of course, but there is a pattern. Would an early global culture recapitulate this? If so, then one would expect to see writers like McGilchrist gain greater prominence over time, and others inspired by such ideas to extend them further. ...But birth, especially the birth of something new, can be a very dangerous time.
In many ways we are victims of our success, but I'd be remiss if I didn't also note that in other ways we are beneficiaries. Of course the balance today does seem much more tilted to the former than the latter. But this might be misleading. After all, there's no reason why evolution should proceed in a straightforward and linear manner toward the greater realization of telos (assuming there is a telic aspect to the cosmos). It may be that our course is more like a spiral, or a meandering river, or maybe it's like those intricate labyrinths that adorned medieval church floors. Looking down from above, with the broadest possible perspective, one can clearly see the shortest path. But in life there are moments when our actual path takes us further away instead. It's like the familiar story of the farmer and his horse, though on a much grander scale. Some 'big history' writers have described a relatively simple linear trajectory (Harari, and possibly Diamond and Pinker, seem to favor this), whereas others may see a more complex labyrinthine or braided stream (Graeber and Wengrow in particular) that winds its way over rough terrain.
Terrence Cole once said "Forget about the saying 'those who don't know the past are condemned to repeat it'. That's crazy. The problem is, people who know the past are the ones who love repeating it! They're stuck in it. They can't get away from it. And they can't see what's ahead." Nobody can. But interestingly, this sort of blind repetition and 'stuckness' has been described as a characteristic of psychopathology by McGilchrist, and a characteristic of contemporary culture by Graeber and Wengrow. It's worth keeping in mind in that context.
Many horse trainers believe that blinders (aka blinkers) keep horses focused on what is in front, by preventing them from seeing to the rear and, in some cases, to the side. This may be very useful for the horse trainer. Are people today wearing metaphorical 'attentional' blinders, both those of our own making, and those others have made for us? What are we failing to attend to?
Life is a more or less permanent condition of vulnerability, transience, and everyday frustrations - in all their immediacy and incomprehensibility. Instead of brushing aside such things, as well as the pernicious effects of poverty and waste, illness and depression, and infirmity, we should bring these still more into daily public view. Not with the intention to valorize suffering, but because we are called to attend and respond to it with care, kindness, understanding, and at times humor. As Anna Lembke said, "Life is a slog [messy, imprecise, and limited], and I think if we could admit that and take comfort in knowing we’re not alone in the day-to-day struggle, paradoxically, we would be happier."
McGilchrist quoted Thoreau, who said "The question is not what you look at, but what you see." At this point the 'horse blinders metaphor' begins to break down. Unlike horse blinders, our attentional blinders don't prevent us from looking at these things in daily life, so much as we too often don't see past the web of rationalizations that conveniently allows us to dismiss what we don't want to see, and the delusional thinking that pleasantly distracts us. But if these aspects of our world are physically displaced, or otherwise hidden from view so we can't even look at them, then any possibility of seeing them, however remote that may already be, can be completely eliminated.
The personal and social costs for all this are very high, especially when opportunities for actual, meaningful engagement are missed. How we see the world, how we attend to it, determines whether we can recognize if something is there or not, and whether it is meaningful to us. Since we can’t evaluate what we can’t see, one important quality for a thriving, flourishing society is taking off our 'blinders', those delusions and other distorting factors that have constricted our apprehension of the world. So the questions I have are: If we can recognize where we have been blind, can we prevent the distancing effects of blindness from returning? Can we bring the world back into view, and then keep it from slipping away? ...The manipulation of information, producing both fear and violence, is a common tactic among authoritarians. So anything that permits us to see the world as it really is, and not get caught in the web of rationalizations (that conveniently allows us to dismiss what we don't want to see), or the delusional thinking (that pleasantly distracts us), would tend to frustrate their attempts to seize and hold on to power by dividing us against one another. |
| (Image: Sarah Howell) |
An important contribution from McGilchrist to the nascent field of collapsology was placing this ancient insight into coinciding opponent processes on a neuroanatomical foundation. Dougald Hine, one of many modern proponents of this burgeoning area of thought, appears to recognize and appreciate this. As Hine notes, "McGilchrist’s work on the distinction between the left and right hemispheres is relevant to all of this. It gives us something stranger than a simple binary, because the simple binary is itself the way that the left hemisphere is seeing the world." It is incapable of seeing paradox. But to understand collapse, as with all other aspects of the world, we must be able to see the paradoxically coextensive processes of creation and destruction. Be able to see how, as the concept of tzimtzum in Lurianic Kabbalah recognizes, creation is impossible without limitation, without vulnerability to infirmity, sickness, and death.
But anyone following Émile Torres has surely noticed that the search for eternal life hasn't ended. If anything the pace has only quickened, coinciding with accelerating climate disruption and a more keenly felt awareness of Gaia's mortality. It also parallels the Ecomodernist search for technological solutions to address planetary overshoot (having missed the opportunity to prevent megafauna overkill). The standard response from those skeptical of these efforts is by now very familiar: What exactly needs to be solved? When does the solution only serve to reinforce the very problems we want to solve? Do we need a cure for death, or less ambitiously, are we only looking for a means to maintain our quality of life until such a time when the end finally arrives? And in regard to society itself, what larger scale societal structures should we be hospicing, and how exactly does that work?
The field of collapsology has unearthed some difficult questions. But there's more than one way to answer them. We can "shut up and calculate", as David Mermin famously said, parodying the instrumentalist viewpoint. Indeed, there are in many cases pragmatic solutions to these very real existential threats. Or we could "sit with the question" a bit, otherwise rephrased by Donna Haraway as "stay with the trouble". This clarion call has since been taken up by later Posthumanists, like Bayo Akomolafe, and many others besides. The question, the trouble, the contradiction, the predicament resists a simple solution, but it is conceptual simplicity that typically describes the solutions we imagine. Unfortunately, in this area, even the search for workable complex solutions evade our grasp.
When faced with a predicament as old as that which collapse rests upon, at the outset we are already precluded from uncovering a reasonable answer. Any journey beginning with the intention to find a way, a 'solution' to keep the world from slipping away is met without success. The answer, so far as there is any, might simply be to no longer be blind, to no longer look away wherever and whenever we see the world falling apart, especially when we feel helpless to stop it. It is through seeing these things that we bring the world back into view, and our response correspondingly changes. This is the world into which we were born, the world in which we fell in love.
The paradox is that the solution to collapse, the solution to keeping the world from slipping away from us, doesn't consist in holding on tighter and trying to solve all of it's problems, or finding the elusive elixir for flourishing. It is simply in being present to the problems, the predicament, and the cognitive dissonance. If we can do that, then all manner of things become possible. Accepting collapse as part of our conditioned existence isn't a do-nothing apathy. One need only refer to Camus' famous line "the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart" or Macaulay's inspired verse "How can man die better than facing fearful odds?" to see that recognizing our limitations can bring out the best in us.
Nagarjuna wrote, "When buddhas don’t appear and their followers are gone, the wisdom of awakening bursts forth by itself." One must be able to see through the words if there's to be any chance of interpreting the meaning of paradoxes like this. In the context of these meditations, I'd suggest that flourishing, insofar as it is possible, must be reconceived as a condition premised upon the awareness of non-flourishing (collapse), insofar as this is an ineradicable aspect of our world. To do this we would need to de-center LH 'solutionism' (the buddhas and their followers) in order to re-center RH attention to the transient world (the wisdom of awakening). Once we place the world at the center, the appropriate responses (what are conceived within the LH as solutions) become more natural and fluid (wu wei).
What is meant by the concept of collapse? During a conversation with Hine, Dougie Strang addressed this in a roundabout manner. He first noted Stein's Law: "Everything that can't go on forever will end." To this he added Davies' Corollary: "Things that come to an end often take much longer than you think to end." And lastly he observed "A decade ago we were thinking the end of modernity was around the corner, but actually it's still with us, and we're still grappling with it. Most of us will continue to grapple with this problem, I think, because although it's coming to an end, it's just the beginning of the end rather than the end of the end." There are many different ideas about what collapse is, and how change might be good and/or bad. It often depends on the yardstick we use to measure it. So a change in how we think, from a focus on "events" that happen at distinct moments to an understanding of the "conditions" that underlie events and allow us to see how they flow into each other, could create a change in mindset for how the entire subject is approached. How we will reckon with the single, unavoidable fact that the adjacent possible is only a heartbeat away from us is critical.
I tend to view collapse in a similar sort of way, as a scale invariant, requisite background 'condition' for life that has always been with us. Sometimes it demands more of our attention than others, but most of the time we may be barely aware of it. In this way of thinking, there is no pre-collapse nor post-collapse. But of course, there is a second, and perhaps more popular, way of viewing collapse: as specific 'events', instances over which one might attempt to exert some control by manipulating the features of our world (our economy, society, politics, individual behaviors, etc). These events have 'windows of opportunity'. And once the window is closed or the 'tipping point' has been reached, collapse is assured, and efforts to mitigate or adapt may or may not prove effective.
Though people can and do debate the specifics, and for good reason, I don't think anyone can deny the reality of collapse. But I also think there might be problems with focusing on it solely as an 'event' rather than as a 'condition'. Defining collapse as an event with certain diagnostic features may encourage a too narrow perspective. And this could prevent us from being present to the ways in which it actually manifests in our lives right now. Another problem is that evaluating collapse in a way that highlights our ability or inability to control, manipulate, mitigate, adapt, or otherwise solve it can similarly distract us from the reality in front of us.
So we need both an awareness of the fundamental conditions of life, and an appropriate response to those conditions. Viewing collapse as a constitutive feature of our present reality allows awareness, and awareness allows an appropriate response, just as an appropriate answer can only follow from understanding a question. As McGilchrist recently said, "the first thing to do is to understand what is wrong." This is why attention is a moral act. "Without addressing it we won't be fulfilling our humanity." As noted, I think Hine and many others are encouraging just this sort of approach to collapse. While excessive greed and social fragmentation, and the institutionalization thereof, may have brought us to specific collapse events, we also wouldn't necessarily want to eliminate our capacity for these either. Change, when it comes, and if it comes at all, can be imposed on us externally when we can no longer ignore a collapse event. Or it can emerge from an internal realization, from an awareness that, in some very real sense, maybe collapse has always been a part of who we are.
Further remarks:
Here, 'seeing clearly' or 'being present' means being open to, and not looking away, when confronted by a reality that rarely conforms to our preconceptions and often conflicts with our preferences. In this way our responses are better able to flow from our actual experience. It's the familiar wuwei approach described in Taoism, but now informed by opponent processing and the hemisphere hypothesis, which highlights in a very similar way the importance of 'presencing' before 'responding'. It's only when we have sufficiently 'presenced' to reality that our responses can have a chance to be appropriately aligned with that reality. But the terms are unimportant. For example, Friston's 'active inference' framework involves some very similar ideas, however does not rely on a dual description of perception (the 'internal states' of this framework), though it easily could.
Collapse is similarly understood in the Taoist fashion of complementary opposites that mutually entail one another. An awareness of collapse is the basis upon which the potential for flourishing is built, just as flourishing is the basis upon which collapse has any meaning of its own. Life and death. It's certainly true that an authoritarian may choose to focus on one or the other. The most effective forms of deception will always contain a kernel of truth, but never the whole truth. So an inordinate emphasis on collapse can create a lot of fear and division, thus enabling an aspiring dictator to seize and hold on to power. Addressing this, and healing the divisions thus created, are major concerns today. A very pertinent question, in light of this, was recently put to McGilchrist: “How do we respond to people on the ‘cluster B spectrum’, those belonging to the so-called ‘dark triad’, and the ‘covert malignant narcissists’ whose nature is to be an imposter of sorts, because many of them function under the guise of promoting understanding, complexity, and interconnectedness?”
He replied: “Narcissistic and psychopathic, as well as probably borderline personalities (cluster B spectrum), can be enormously manipulative and deceptive. These people play an undue role in forming our society. They are effectively predators and they tend to prey on individuals from other categories (cluster C spectrum). There are far too many such people in positions of power today. Perhaps there always have been. And that's one of the problems about having systems of power. We can't trust them to mold our futures. They will always present something which is a disaster as something for our benefit.”
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| Source: https://youtu.be/3d5ny5-yM9c |
"I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End." - Revelation 22:13
Some interpretations suggest that Adam and Eve are symbolic of each of us, and the allegory of the fall is thus the story of how each of us (we have an "inner Adam and Eve") moves through life in the course of development, as we initially acquire knowledge through division, and eventually wisdom through unification (critically, the "union of division and union"). And so, if God, that infamous un-word, was a fairly benevolent and loving figure before the fall, afterwards he became a "murderous control freak", this can be seen as consequent to, and ocurring parallel with, the LH fragmentation of the world into opposing elements, each isolated and entirely irreconcilable. As Heraclitus said "all things take place by strife".
The coincidence of opposites is clearly a big theme here, as can be seen in the numerous 'merisms' throughout the creation myth. Wikipedia tells us that a merism is a rhetorical device or figure of speech in which a combination of two contrasting parts of the whole refer to the whole. For example, when God creates "the heavens and the earth", the two parts (heavens and earth) do not refer only to the heavens and the earth. Rather, they refer to the heavens, the earth and everything between them, the entire universe. Likewise the phrase "good and evil" could similarly imply "everything". McGilchrist cites Alan Watts' book The Two Hands of God: the Myths of Polarity to suggest the original Hebrew meant "the useful and the useless", indicating how the LH value of utility is leading us "onwards toward the abyss" today.
If the "original sin" was the fracturing of an original unity, then it would follow that it still holds meaning for us today in no small part because the fractured and divisive way of attending and 'being in the world' continues to be recapitulated in the physical fractures we see across the living web of creation. Wendell Berry's lines "There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places" are a powerful reminder of this.
But in his paper "A Rational Mystical Ascent: The Coincidence of Opposites in Kabbalistic and Hasidic Thought", Sanford Drob wrote "a world that is alienated from and then reunited with God is superior to one that had never been alienated or divided at all". From this perspective, fracture and alienation is therefore a developmentally intermediary step toward a subsequent reunification, one that is somehow more profound than the original unity, and thus it is part of a larger process. We've seen the same sort of three step process before, in the 'McGilchrist manoeuvre' and again in Qingyuan Weixin's "mountains and waters" verses. The lesson is that it is not the mountains and waters that change, nor reality itself, rather it is we who change, just as the world is revealed to each of us differently according to the form of attention with which we use to behold it.
From a literary perspective, Genesis seems to foreshadow the fall when God says "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over... the earth and subdue it." If Adam and Eve were made with the express intent to control the earth, it seems only natural that they'd eventually be seduced and captured by the world of the LH, with its overriding values of power and control. The serpent said that if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil their "eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods". And so perhaps they might've thought: 'Is this not our very raison d'etre? Would it really be so wrong to test this rule, and see if by doing so that we might be much more than we are now?' So it had nothing to do with meeting any of their present material needs. One can have eternal bliss, but that will not satisfy the LH if it thinks it could still have more. Could they have refused? ...Perhaps more to the point, if this seduction was in some sense preordained, is reconciliation as well?
McGilchrist addresses theodicy head on. He pointedly asks: “If God is omnipotent, why evil?” His reconception is not so much of the question of theodicy (it is the same simple question), as it is of who or what we mean by “God”. The subsection titled “The hemispheres and omnipotence and omniscience” is relevant. To establish divine culpability for this “dirty trick” we would need to appeal to something more like a LH understanding of those qualities. Secondly, panentheism (and process theology) call into question the manner in which they could be said to apply. And thirdly, the notion of a coincidentia oppositorum suggests that good and evil are, in some sense, mutually implied, and thus no creative act can exclude the one from the other. As Gerard Dorn, an alchemist frequently cited by Carl Jung, said "There is nothing in nature that does not contain as much evil as good." Note in connection with this the Kabbalist’s description of “an innate tendency to good (yetzer hatov) and an innate tendency to evil (yetzer hara)”. But more interesting still, perhaps, is this: “This is redemption: it is from the divine sparks within the shards of the vessels that this greater unity, this fulfillment of creation, this redemption, is achieved.” ...That is something to think deeply on. After all, we might view our contemporary culture as a world of broken shards, that somehow, nonetheless, contains divine sparks of potential.
The left hemisphere form of attention, blind to the world of the RH, tends toward manipulation, instrumentalism, and deception (involving both self and others) when not reigned in by the RH. This lies behind the evil we see in the example McGilchrist provides of the Holocaust, and while incomparable in scope, the similarly evil acts of Lucy Letby. The big sticking point concerning all this, for many people at least, is that McGilchrist is a self described "great defender of the LH". But, if we associate the LH form of attention with 'evilness', then how can he maintain this defense? The paradox is resolved when we see that there's two ways of looking at good and evil: the LH take on evil, which is that as an abstraction it is absolutely indefensible. And the RH take on evil is that we cannot be so hubristic as to abstractly define and exclude 'evil' outright, lest we in our ignorance become that which we seek to avoid becoming. (However concerning actual acts of evil, when placed in context, we can perhaps be more clear.)
"You know, a gardener cannot make a plant, and he can't make the plant grow. But the gardener can get out of the way all the stuff that would choke that plant, and make the conditions good for that plant to flourish. ...So one of the things that ought to happen is deregulation, but not total deregulation because that's the other extreme that you get from the left hemisphere: “Oh, so you don't want any rules at all? And nobody is accountable for it?” No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, there is a degree of necessary monitoring, and there's a degree of accountability, but there must be freedom too. Otherwise you kill the human spirit."
In the 1820s, the Inuit of northwestern Greenland were hit by an epidemic that killed all the oldest and most knowledgeable members of the community. The effects were catastrophic: even though the surviving Polar Inuit had spent their entire lives observing the full Inuit technology suite, they were no longer able to make fishing spears (no fishing for the plentiful arctic char), bows and arrows (no hunting caribou), or kayaks. The loss of kayaks was the most damaging: their only way of reaching other communities had been by sea, and without kayaks they were cut off from any other models for all the other technology they’d lost. When in 1862 some Inuit from Baffin Island happened to stop along their coastline, the Polar Inuit immediately copied their ways of doing things. The case of Tasmania is even more dramatic.
