After the Collapse of Modernity

Alice: How long is forever?

White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.

- Lewis Carroll

Modernity: A historical category marked by the questioning or rejection of tradition; the prioritization of individualism, freedom and formal equality; faith in inevitable social, scientific and technological progress, rationalization and professionalization; a movement from feudalism (or agrarianism) toward capitalism and the market economy, industrialization, urbanization and secularization; the development of the nation-state, representative democracy, public education, etc. - From Wikipedia based on Michel Foucault 1977

This is a detailed continuation of my recent lyrical essay, “The Fatal Myth of Human Progress.” It covers the connections between U.S. politics and environmental protection in the late 20^th Century. It also discusses what actions and supporting stories Humankind must come up with as we near ecological and economic collapse.

Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

By Nathaniel Rich
Photographs and Videos by George Steinmet
The New York Times

August 1, 2018

The above exposé is a good late 20^th Century history of how the U.S. missed perhaps its best chance at ending its environmentally destructive ways, and leading the rest of the world to do the same before it became too late.

The Ronald Reagan and John Sununu types in power at the time, the 1980s, were not going to do that. Passing legislation containing environmental pollution restrictions on U.S. industry would go against their small government, free enterprise credo. To them, the scientifically established risks of continuing to produce ever more CO₂ to the detriment and perhaps end of Earth’s life-sustainability were worth taking. Here is what they did:

“After the election of 1980, President Ronald Reagan took office and considered plans to close the Energy Department, increase coal production on federal land, and deregulate surface coal mining. Once in office, he appointed James Watt, the president of a legal firm that fought to open public lands to mining and drilling, to run the Interior Department. ‘We’re deliriously happy,’ the president of the National Coal Association was reported to have said. Reagan preserved the E.P.A. but named as its administrator Anne Gorsuch, an anti-regulation zealot who proceeded to cut the agency’s staff and budget by about a quarter. In the midst of this carnage, the Council on Environmental Quality submitted a report to the White House warning that fossil fuels could ‘permanently and disastrously’ alter Earth’s atmosphere, leading to ‘a warming of the Earth, possibly with very serious effects.’ Reagan did not act on the council’s advice. Instead, his administration considered eliminating the council.”

…

“When the beaten delegates finally emerged from the [Noordwijk Ministerial Conference of 1989] conference room, [the Sierra Club’s Daniel] Becker and [environmentalist Rafe] Pomerance learned what happened. [Yale nuclear physicist and Science Advisor to President George H. W. Bush, D. Allen] Bromley, at the urging of John Sununu and with the acquiescence of Britain, Japan, and the Soviet Union, had forced the conference to abandon the commitment to freeze emissions. The final statement noted only that ‘many’ nations supported stabilizing emissions — but did not indicate which nations or at what emissions level. And with that, a decade of excruciating, painful, exhilarating progress turned to air.”

Sununu, White House Chief of Staff under U.S. President George H. W. Bush, had thereby prevented the signing of a 67-nation commitment to freeze carbon dioxide emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005. In doing so, he singled himself out as a force for starting coordinated efforts to bewilder the public on the topic of global warming and changing it from an urgent, non-partisan, and unimpeachable issue to a political one.

Here is what Rich’s article says happened after that:

“More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference, Nov. 7, 1989, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it. In 1990, humankind emitted more than 20 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. By 2017, the figure had risen to 32.5 billion metric tons, a record. Despite every action taken since the [1979] Charney Report* — the billions of dollars invested in research, the nonbinding treaties, the investments in renewable energy — the only number that counts, the total quantity of global greenhouse gas emitted per year, has continued its inexorable rise.

“Like the scientific story, the political story hasn’t changed greatly, except in its particulars. Even some of the nations that pushed hardest for climate policy have failed to honor their own commitments. When it comes to our own nation, which has failed to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the efforts of the fossil-fuel industries to suppress science, confuse public knowledge, and bribe politicians.”

Also interesting in the article is the claim that Exxon and others in the private sector were at one time receptive to the inevitability of some form of less carbon policy and laws. They stood ready to retool and redirect their industries away from oil, natural gas and coal if they were going to be forced to, if for no other reason than to keep their operations profitable. It seemed they simply could not deny the science, much of which they had produced, unlike the politicians of the time.

However, I may be reading more into the private sector’s response to the science than is there. I doubt they were going to retool and redirect for any reason other than profitability, like a sudden attack of moral conscience. Maybe corporations did and still do have a conscience. Why, the Supreme Court not long ago ruled they are no different from individual citizens when it comes to giving money to politicians….

The Nature of Political and Economic Behavior

Regrettably, we humans are so much like sheep; we seem to need strong leadership. As Bertrand Russell put it: “Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!”

Even when we humans do think, many of the damaged or weak-minded among us think badly; and/or follow the bad thinking of immoral leaders in office, in churches and mosques, and in the media. Some who are severely damaged and/or weak take up an AR-15 to ‘argue’ their point of view and help win victory for their race, ethnic group, or religion in a misapplied Thomas Hobbesian, social Darwinian notion of a war of all against all.

We have become ‘free’ and self-infatuated to the point of being a lethal danger to ourselves. The Internet has been a blessing and a curse, an enhancement of our living and dying. 

We are strange creatures living in strange, ever more dangerous times.

Where are the West’s Ghandi’s, Confucius’s, Mandela’s? We had Socrates, Darwin, Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, FDR with their warts and all. Still, all along and up until now, the rich and powerful control the rings in our noses and content of most of our minds.

Watch The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu TV. It is a three-season story of ecological and economic collapse in the U.S. followed by theocratic tyranny. It reminds me of what most sensible, thinking people said before the Nazis came to power in Germany and Trump was elected U.S. president: “It could never happen.” However, it did then, and it could again in an even worse manner as portrayed in this TV series.

Genes and Neurons

Many like to claim humans are inherently, by their nature, tribal and laden with genetic tendencies we are unable to overcome or ameliorate. Some cite the hive and colony behavior of bees, ants and termites. Let us recall that ant behavior was the expertise of Harvard and later Duke University biologist E. O. Wilson, the father of sociobiology (here and here) in the 1970s.

The last common ancestor between ants and humans lived 610 million years ago. It would be difficult to find a less appropriate species than ants on which to base, by analogy or any other comparison, a genetic deterministic understanding of Humankind. Nevertheless, since the 1990s many in the science community and large numbers of science writers and members of the U.S. public have accepted a biologically deterministic view of human nature.

I do not think analogous ant-like genetic mechanisms had anything to do with the GOP deep-sixing the anti-carbon science of that time and this, or the motivations of the voters who kept and still keep the immoral bastards in office. GOP politicians are driven by their lust for power and wealth. Their constituents enslaved by the delusions of power and wealth achievement Republicans feed them and they, the weak-minded as well as the smarter, willingly opportunistic constituents, accept.

In both instances, leaders and followers, the beliefs and values held and associated behaviors acted out are taught and learned. They are not, during political campaigns or on election days, percolating up from the chemistry of our genes (E. O. Wilson and others) or from prehistoric pseudo-moral codes some claim (Jonathan Haidt) are also somehow in our genes, and still jerking us around since the Pleistocene.

If sociobiology and neuroscience ever overtake the power of learning as the predominant driver of what we think and do, in the minds of our leaders and the masses, it will grow and hasten our inhumanity toward each other and further embolden and empower the tyrants and zealots among us. We will become ‘free’ from our conscience and absolved in our law courts of personal responsibility for our individual and societal transgressions. Worse still, we will be ‘freed’ from the responsibility of crafting our moral systems and behavior by reason, teaching and learning and based on experience. Gradations of crime culpability will be adjudicated based on levels of biochemical penetrance arising from our alleles. We will be able to claim our genes make us human and drive our actions. Our beliefs, values, and behaviors will become ancillary side effects, symptoms, and post hoc rationales for what our genes direct us to do. Justice shall be served upon our bodies, not our behaviors. Freedom, free will? Pfft. 

Of course, there is a genetic component within us. However, the only thing we control is the non-genetic part of our nature - nurturing, teaching, learning. After all, when you burrow down to the chemistry of the genes and neurons you do not find behavioral scripts, you find potentials. In addition, those potentials are developed and expressed, for better and worse, by the embodied minds of persons in society. Stories and myths set the direction and lead this development and expression of our humanness. That is what I will always fight for and place all my bets on for our future survival and flourishing – learning over biology.

Science and Myth

For “science” see here. In particular, I am referring to the “scientific method.” See here for “myth.”

Science has delivered Humankind its greatest factual and technological achievements so far imaginable. At the same time, our political and economic leaders, capitalizing on these achievements over the past two-and-a-half centuries, have led us to the precipice of an ecological abyss. An imminent cataclysm we have helped them create along the way through our acquiescence, labor and consumption. See here.

While we, all members of Humankind, now stand looking down wide-eyed and fearful into the toxic wasteland of our future, the best the world’s mightiest and wealthiest can do, regrettably, is order the band to once more strike up “We Can Work It Out (Through Science, Technology And Politics As Usual),” and play on.

Credit: Getty Images

Reinventing Religion

However, some among us, the huddled masses on the cliff, are not willing to swoon and dance to the same old song any longer. Some want to rebel against those that have led us to this dead-end. Others think that rebellion alone will not be enough and say we need to reinvent religion to save ourselves. Consider the following:

“Tomorrow’s Gods: What is the Future of Religion?”

By Sumit Paul Choudhury

BBC Future

August 2, 2019

“‘Consider the ‘Witnesses of Climatology’, a fledgling ‘religion’ invented to foster greater commitment to action on climate change. After a decade spent working on engineering solutions to climate change, its founder Olya Irzak [system architect at Off-Grid Electric and the founder of Frost Methane] came to the conclusion that the real problem lay not so much in finding technical solutions, but in winning social support for them. ‘What’s a multi-generational social construct that organises people around shared morals?’ she asks. ‘The stickiest is religion.’

“So three years ago, Irzak and some friends set about building one. They didn’t see any need to bring God into it....” ... “‘We hope people get real value from this and are encouraged to work on climate change,’ she says, rather than despairing about the state of the world.”

What!?

Beginning with the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, the money and power controllers in the West commandeered science and is technological fruits. In applying this knowledge and technologies to the greatest needs of the greatest numbers of Humankind, our leaders have failed to deliver. Worst of all, they have spread their formula for progress and civilization globally and bum-rushed the lot of us to the verge of extinction.

Let us turn to religion, some say. Seems to me it was religion, through its notions of human superiority, exceptionalism, progress, and perfection under the guidance of gods that, when condoned and coopted by those holding power, helped lead us into the mess we’re in.

Is not the definition of insanity at its most fundamental, doing the same thing repeatedly yet expecting different results? No, a reinvention of religion is not what we need. Unless it is something for all of Humankind akin to the last rites Catholic priests administer to dying individuals, saints or sinners.

The time for reform has passed. Fast-track revolutionary civil disobedience inspired by the fear of impending catastrophes is our only real hope to avoid extinction. Nevertheless, even that might fail. “We’re fucked. Fight anyway!” say many of those in the Extinction Rebellion.

There is no way or time for the wealthy and powerful to slam the gears of consumer-crony-capitalism into reverse; retrofit and redirect technology and manufacturing; redistribute wealth more equitably throughout the world; and still have their air conditioning, iPhones, football, quiche, makeup, skinny jeans, and shiny cars. Religion and “We Can Work It Out” will not allow the world to have its consumer crony capitalist cake and eat it all too.

The Hope of Reversibility

In response to my recent essay, “The Fatal Myth of Human Progress,” my brother-in-law in Uganda, Peter Kiondo, asked: “Is there any hope of reversibility when this creature (humans) is only interested in short-term (single lifespan) solutions while its population increases uncontrolled?”

That is the most important question of our present and future. Should we have hope regardless of how dire the future appears? Abraham Lincoln, Viktor Frankl, Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others were convinced we must.

What exactly is it we fear and hope we avoid? In his 2019 Lapham’s Quarterly essay, “Hell Breaks Loose: Searching for Hope in a Blazing World,” Henry Freedland, writer and former senior LQ editor put it this way:

“Late in life Charles Darwin reflected on the state of the world, ‘whether there is more of misery or of happiness; whether the world as a whole is a good one or a bad one.’ He felt that the continual propagation of species indicated that ‘sentient beings have been formed so as to enjoy, as a general rule, happiness.’ But his belief in the power of evolution—‘that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature’—did not come without a sense of remorse about the possible destruction of earth. ‘It is an intolerable thought,’ he wrote, that ‘sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.’

“Darwin’s fear was of an external destructive force, a possibility posed by physicists in his day around which there is now scientific consensus: ‘that the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life.’ But his fear of possible exogenous annihilation refracts in my mind to a fear for the beings alive now. He hoped we wouldn’t die in a freeze from above; I’m praying we can save ourselves from the fiery pit below, the one that we humans are installing on our crusty surface. I’m praying we can fight for the possibility of making it to the death of the sun.”

Reversibility

Much of the science I have read says that even if we went to zero carbon today, there has already been enough carbon released to raise the earth’s temperature by a catastrophic 2 degrees Celsius by 2050.

If we stay at the same level of carbon emission we’re at now the increase would be five or more degrees of increase, by century’s end, leading to an utterly lethal cataclysm. That answers the reversibility part.

Hope

Will the wealthy and powerful throw their golden goose, their cash cow we call crony consumer capitalism into reverse; that is, retool and reinvent their manufacturing, and more equitably share their wealth before the world experiences environmental and economic collapse?

I don’t think the wealthy and powerful of the world have the will to abandon the myth, the story that drives them and the masses, and justifies our staying on the fatal course we are on. To abandon the myth would be a sacrilege to most of them.

They and the masses are drunk on and addicted to the myth of progress they believe leads to flourishing and paradise here on Earth, and forever in Abrahamic heavens. 

To abandon the golden idol of capitalist modernity would be to admit failure, to gore a now sacred belief. That is, the belief in our exceptionalism above all other life forms and our sense of entitlement to dominate Earth and freely reproduce to please God; and to brutally compete with rather than equitably share with our fellows based on a mistaken, misplaced notion of Darwin’s biological theory - Social Darwinism.

There is one good use religion can now be put to. As we stand on Apocalypse Cliff, we can choose to consider ourselves a form of sacrifice. We can choose to throw ourselves downward, figuratively not literally, as offerings not to Mammon but to the only real God we’ve ever had but the Abrahamic religions have led us to forsake - Gaia, Mother Earth. She who gave each of us life and who is now forced to take us back home, into her womb to be reborn as what we cannot know. Or, we can fight and create a new story.

A New Story

With each passing year, I am becoming less enamored with the reason and science aspects of the Age of Enlightenment. Both of these major ways of human knowing will nevertheless always be extremely important to me personally. I will continue to value them both as Humankind’s greatest means of discovery and problem solving despite their limitations. And as a Stoic, reasoning, as a means of mediating the influence of my emotions on my behavior, is especially indispensable for me.

So, you ask, what are the shortcomings of science? Science has yet to go beyond the greatness it has achieved in terms of knowledge discovery and material problem solving. It has not gone further and begun providing a means for establishing a new global moral system and the stories needed to support such a credo. I agree with Sam Harris and Michael Shermer (also Shermer), reasoning and science could and should help us do that.

Regrettably, there has been and remains so much pushback from mainstream Western philosophy, the Abrahamic religions, uber-nationalists past and present, and within science itself that a global science-based morality is unlikely to become more than a dreamed of ideal. An ideal eloquently and legalistically worded in the conventions, protocols and resolutions of the United Nations, yet significantly ignored or undermined by the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nations.  

Consequently, I have become more enthralled by the Enlightenment’s story making and story telling than its reasoning and scientific methods. In particular, I find the Enlightenment story of “progress,” a belief in the improvement of individual and group wellbeing, far more motivating than the reasoning and science the Enlightenment promised would carry us toward that betterment. But it’s not the content of the progress and potential perfection of Humankind myth I’m taken by. It is story- or myth-making and telling itself I now see as the greatest power humans possess. In addition to myth-making and telling, reasoning and science remain as crucial methods for creating, testing and legitimizing the stories we live by. But, in the short term, reasoning and scientific facts seldom trump the myths and stories in the minds of the masses. And in democracies the masses matter. After all, the short term, an individual life, is all those among the masses have. Day to day, feeling good has the edge over knowing well.

Understanding and leading human beings using the standards and methods of reasoning and science are necessary but not sufficient. At one time not long ago I thought it was both. But among the many things that the control of the American people currently wielded by the Republicans, a minority party, and the fact that a critical number of the electorate put Trump into office is 2016, one thing really grabs me. That is, the failure of a majority of scientific polls and the reasoning of the majority of great minds in the U.S. to foresee either unlikely political transformation happening, or the existential threat they now pose. Voter emotion, political story telling and gerrymandering defied our best science and reasoning and both happened. The GOP and Trump now rule and our existential threat worsens by the day. A critical number of the U.S. electorate didn’t rely on the arguments of reason or the evidence of the natural, political and economic sciences in deciding on how to cast their ballots. They relied on their emotions and the GOP and Trump stories and myths that soothed those emotions.

Emotion and story telling were ignored by the standard model science and reasoning experts, and decisively by the Democrat Party in its treatment of a large portion of the electorate in 2016. They were certain their vaunted “reasonable person” of law and “rational man” of economic science would vote for Clinton. They misunderstood the U.S. electorate.

My point is this. I am gradually yet cautiously taking up a mode of thinking among those in the absurdist or existentialist camp. Human behavior defies understanding by science and reasoning alone. The Life-threatening mess we have gotten ourselves and the planet into, despite our best efforts at natural, political and economic science and reasoning, is nothing other than absurdity brought about by our believing in and living by a bad story – the story of human exceptionalism and inevitable progress through the political use of science and economics.

The greatest motivator is our emotions and the stories and myths that address them. See here, here, and here. The creating and telling of stories that address emotions, all of them, especially fear, is that which is in the greatest need of Humankind’s attention, understanding and guidance. I am in search of a better story for myself personally and, as an anthropologist, for Humankind. I’m far more hopeful of coming up with one for myself than one for all of us.

What to Do

What is there to do beyond practicing political and economic science, and encouraging the electorate to use reasoning versus emotion in assessing candidates during political campaigns and selecting among them on Election Day? Of course, we have to do these things. Throwing in the towel on the modern standard model of politics and economics would be far worse and likely lead us faster into autocratic, theocratic slavery and civilizational collapse. 

But until a critical mass of humans accepts that we made a grave mistake in the Early-Mid Bronze Age by turning our back on each other and willingly trudging off under the yoke of autocratic Mesopotamian kings; then meekly, with our gaze upward, yearning and praying for the heavens of the Abrahamic religions; and most recently with our shoulders back and heads aiming even higher toward the social and material modernity comfort myths crafted by the Enlightenment rationalists, scientists, and industrial inventors, we shall remain doomed to ecological and economic catastrophes and an eventual apocalypse.

Politicians and economists are not Humankind’s leaders. They are highly trained, mental tool-bearing functionaries; the former armed with language and legal knowledge, the later with numbers and mathematics. Both have rational models and accompanying myths to appeal to our reasoning and emotions. But above all, our emotions and myths are our leaders.

Kierkegaard, Camus and the other existentialists are correct. Modernity is an incomprehensible absurdity, but each of us must do our best to make it better one human encounter at a time.

Going Forward

What should guide and inform our way forward and what exactly should we do? I think a new, better story is needed. One that is an honest admission of what we are as sentient beings and what we can realistically expect to become. Essentially, we are flawed, fearful primates capable of greatness, but only when we are led to produce the greatest good for the greatest number.

The promises of heaven, modernity, and nationalism, especially libertarian politics and laissez faire economics, have failed at addressing our most basic human need and trait – a mutual respect for each other inherent and expressed in communalism.

I know of no certain way to get there. Reform seems unlikely. The powers that be must first see the incarnation of their myth go up in flames, from within and/or without, before changing course. A total breakdown, complete with every horror imaginable - here and there, unevenly, sporadically, fast and slow - followed by a total reset from the very bottom up may be the only possibility.

That is, the only possibility of a return to the social norms of our hunter-gather past. Not a return to the organic kumbaya communes of the 1960s. I’m thinking of a new, improved approach to local communal living; one that avoids the flaws that doomed the various communal movements of the 20^th Century. Those efforts failed primarily because their inhabitants willfully joined and brought along their mythic before the Fall Garden of Eden, noble savage notions of total, unaccountable individual freedom of thought and action.

I am envisioning a new commune-ism that ecological and economic collapse will have forced on all Humankind. Where we turn to our neighbors for support and put our notions of individual freedom, greed, lust, and entitlement second to the survival and flourishing of our local group that protects and sustains our individual lives, and to the flourishing of peaceful relations between neighboring groups.

It will take a lot of the suffering and horror of the apocalypse to humble us enough for this. It will also require us to self-repress our infatuation with material things, our appearance, and our desire to outshine and cuckold each other. In short, it will require a willful forsaking of most of the major hallmarks of being modern, and what it means to be human will have to be redefined.

Right now, before the apocalypse, what this new way of human life would be like is almost impossible to imagine, much less speculate as to whether it would work or not.

At best, it will succeed for a significant number of local groups and new, larger social groupings where new and better institutions will emerge and be sustained. At worst, the groups that cannot shake the mental chains of modernism will annihilate or enslave all other groups. And autocrats, divine and otherwise, will come to rule once again like they did in Mesopotamia. And Humankind will once more take the fatal path to a new modernity.

During the Great Recovery from modernism, each individual in each group will have to choose to support the autocrats among them or each other, again.

Postscript - Absurdity

My anthropology and personality have finally led me to Absurdism. All ‘modern’ roads lead to Kierkegaard. I am beginning to understand dimly. May Spinoza’s heaven help me if I continue and ultimately fail to understand and accept your views, dear Søren.

“What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a rational being, must act in a case where my reason, my powers of reflection, tell me: you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and reflection say: you cannot act and yet here is where I have to act... The Absurd, or to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act upon faith ... I must act, but reflection has closed the road so I take one of the possibilities and say: This is what I do, I cannot do otherwise because I am brought to a standstill by my powers of reflection.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, 1849

…

“Kierkegaard describes how such a man would endure such defiance and identifies the three major traits of the Absurd Man, later discussed by Albert Camus: a rejection of escaping existence (suicide), a rejection of help from a higher power, and acceptance of his absurd (and despairing) condition.” – From “Absurdism” Wikipedia 

When I began this blog nine years ago I named it Being Human: Our Past, Present and Future in Nature. I did so with the idea in mind that there was something to be gained for myself and others from understanding how we became human, what being human means at present, what kind of humans we are likely to become, and more importantly what might and should we aspire to become, in the future.

I was optimistic in my early blog posts. During the ensuing years I have made considerable effort to fill in the holes in the knowledge of Humankind I had acquired through anthropological training and from working in various fields; and through reading and discussing being human with others that mostly included retired freethinking professionals in the U.S. and Africa.

I confess to a quest for the various gists of our human nature. Having little hope for the speculation of evolutionary and moral psychology to reconstruct them out of thin air or sociobiology and neuroscience to drill down to them in our neurons and cells, I rely on the theories and evidentiary methods of anthropology, ethnographic and nonhuman primate analogy, and the philosophical analyses of science and history. 

Franz Boas, the father of cultural anthropology, won me over on the paramount importance of deep fieldwork fact-finding. But the grand theory focus of his armchair predecessors still has a bit of a hold on me. 

So far, most of my gists of human nature and the arc of prehistory and history remain few and fuzzy; and I regard that as a good thing being a strong tabula rasa leaning person.

But it’s hard to shake the dream in the back of my mind of a true, reliable, probabilistic-predictive science of Humankind, an Anthropology. That is, despite the fact that my own discipline gave up the pursuit for good in the 1960s when they opted for cultural relativism, detailed particularistic studies, and problem solving over grand theories and essences.

I suspect there are many other anthropologists who think like this in academia, yet they dare not speak up from deep in the groove of their tenure tracks. Some of the older anthropology professors, a few of the best, do turn to generalizing and do it well. Marvin Harris (a cultural materialist, techno-economic determinist whose views you might like), Clifford Geertz, David Bidney (here, here), and Bernard Campbell come to mind. 

I guess I simply enjoy taking the long view and hope it will point to a destination Humankind is heading toward more readily than trying to see the future one case study, one Haidtian mythical moral code, or a neuron and gene at a time.

The main realization I have had through all this is that Humankind has taken a cultural evolutionary path from which it has often strayed, and has thereby missed opportunities for correction, survival, and sustainability. Having done so, Humankind now faces the high likelihood of causing its own extinction, and experiencing the serious degradation or end of Earth’s life sustainability.

All bets are off, the future is too close to call. Regardless, retain hope and take all actions necessary for Earth, Life and human survival.

Further Reading

“The Strange Persistence of Guilt,” Wilfred M. McClay, The Hedgehog Review, Spring 2017.

They Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism by Pascal Bruckner, Princeton University Press, 2006 (English translation, 2010).

The View From Nowhere by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press, 1986

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, Vintage Books, 1955.

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in the More-Than-Human World by David Abram, Vintage Books, 1996.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells, Tim Duggan Books, 2019.

Logos: The Mystery of How We Make Sense of the World by Raymond Tallis, Agenda Publishing, 2018.

The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power by Steve Fraser, Little, Brown & Company, 2015.

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future by Friedrich Nietzsche, Vintage Press (1989), 1886.

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, Grove Press, 1963.

Kierkegaardian Reflections on the Problem of Pluralism by Aaron Fehir, Lexington Books, 2015.

Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Translated by David F. Swenson & Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press (1941), 1846.

The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion by Søren Kierkegaard, Harper Perennial (1962), 1846.

Food, Energy, Water and the Climate: A Perfect Storm of Global Events?, by John Beddington, CMG FRS, Chief Scientific Adviser to HM Government, UK, 2009.

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* - “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment,” Report of an Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, July 23-27, 1979, to the Climate Research Board, Assembly of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, National Research Council.