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| Atlee: A Deeper Inconvenient Truth... |
254 Views |
| posted on Sunday, July 09, 2006 |
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A DEEPER INCONVENIENT TRUTH -- AND THE OPPORTUNITY IT BRINGS
By Tom Atlee
The Co-Intelligence Institute
July 8, 2006
http://www.co-intelligence.org
http://www.democracyinnovations.org
http://www.taoofdemocracy.com
http://www.evolvingcollectiveintelligence.org
Dear friends,
We have evolved to create problems that are much bigger than we can readily solve. Our next evolutionary leap will change that.
The only way we will remain in the great drama of life is to make that leap.
The humorous article below by Havard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert clearly describes our limited individual ability to observe and respond to the world around us. It offers a glimpse of ideas I learned 15 years ago in Paul Ehrlich and Robert Ornstein's remarkable book, NEW WORLD, NEW MIND: MOVING TOWARD CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION. (You can now download it for free at <http://www.ishkbooks.com/NWNM/TOC.html>. Highly recommended.)
In short, this is our predicament: We can co-create global warming much easier than we can co-create a stable climate. Not only that, we can co-create population explosions, chemical pollution, weapons of mass destruction, species extinction, and poverty just by living our ordinary lives -- whereas solving these problems is a major challenge. Our social systems are so designed that when we each act intelligently on our own self-interest, we collectively move towards global destruction.
Once I realized that, I knew that solving each of these problems would not solve our propensity to create more problems. The Bigger Problem is deeper: To overcome our biological limitations as individuals, we have co-evolved collective systems and capacities -- cutural, social, economic, political, scientific, media, educational, public relations, etc. But the flaw in all that is that we have designed them primarily for comfort, profit, power, control, and entertainment rather than for collective intelligence, sanity, and wisdom.
That is what needs to change. And that is what is missing from powerful wake-up calls like the article below and like Al Gore's remarkable film AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. They tell us that the change needed to deal with global warming is the political will generated by millions of individuals, a great "rising to the occasion".
But the change that is actually needed is in the collective systems that prevented us, as a society, from seeing clearly and responding to global warming in the first place. They are the same systems that prevent us from seeing clearly and responding to every other great problem, threat, and opportunity we face.
And there's more: It isn't just a matter of solving these problems or increasing our capacities. The changes that are demanded will transform us as a civilization, as a species. If we pass the test we have created for ourselves in the 21st Century, we will _BE_ different, individually and collectively. We will have made the evolutionary leap required of us.
That evolutionary leap will be different in kind from every other evolutionary leap in the 13.7 billion year history of our universe: It will involve the ability of life to evolve CONSCIOUSLY
-- to intentionally and wisely redesign itself to serve not only its own survival but the well-being of the whole of life.
And that will be something new under the sun, something of ineffable beauty and grace, a collective dream worthy of our best efforts today, when we have the resources we need to take that remarkable step together, to make that unprecedented difference in ourselves and our world...
Coheartedly,
Tom
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IF ONLY GAY SEX CAUSED GLOBAL WARMING
By Daniel Gilbert
Los Angeles Times
July 2, 2006
Original Link
Why we're more scared of gay marriage and terrorism than a much deadlier threat.
..........
No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.
The odds of this happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb. And yet our government will spend billions of dollars this year to prevent global terrorism and … well, essentially nothing to prevent global warming.
Why are we less worried about the more likely disaster? Because the human brain evolved to respond to threats that have four features -- features that terrorism has and that global warming lacks.
First, global warming lacks a mustache. No, really. We are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized for thinking about others. Understanding what others are up to -- what they know and want, what they are doing and planning -- has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an obsession with all things human. We think about people and their intentions; talk about them; look for and remember them.
That's why we worry more about anthrax (with an annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an annual death toll of a quarter-million to a half-million people). Influenza is a natural accident, anthrax is an intentional action, and the smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn't. If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.
Global warming isn't trying to kill us, and that's a shame. If climate change had been visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation's top priority.
The second reason why global warming doesn't put our brains on orange alert is that it doesn't violate our moral sensibilities. It doesn't cause our blood to boil (at least not figuratively) because it doesn't force us to entertain thoughts that we find indecent, impious or repulsive. When people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally do something about it, such as whacking each other over the head, or voting. Moral emotions are the brain's call to action.
Although all human societies have moral rules about food and sex, none has a moral rule about atmospheric chemistry. And so we are outraged about every breach of protocol except Kyoto. Yes, global warming is bad, but it doesn't make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don't feel compelled to rail against it as we do against other momentous threats to our species, such as flag burning. The fact is that if climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.
The third reason why global warming doesn't trigger our concern is that we see it as a threat to our futures -- not our afternoons. Like all animals, people are quick to respond to clear and present danger, which is why it takes us just a few milliseconds to duck when a wayward baseball comes speeding toward our eyes.
The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That's what brains did for several hundred million years -- and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.
Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain's most stunning innovations, and we wouldn't have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.
We haven't quite gotten the knack of treating the future like the present it will soon become because we've only been practicing for a few million years. If global warming took out an eye every now and then, OSHA would regulate it into nonexistence.
There is a fourth reason why we just can't seem to get worked up about global warming. The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to changes in light, sound, temperature, pressure, size, weight and just about everything else. But if the rate of change is slow enough, the change will go undetected. If the low hum of a refrigerator were to increase in pitch over the course of several weeks, the appliance could be singing soprano by the end of the month and no one would be the wiser.
Because we barely notice changes that happen gradually, we accept gradual changes that we would reject if they happened abruptly. The density of Los Angeles traffic has increased dramatically in the last few decades, and citizens have tolerated it with only the obligatory grumbling. Had that change happened on a single day last summer, Angelenos would have shut down the city, called in the National Guard and lynched every politician they could get their hands on.
Environmentalists despair that global warming is happening so fast. In fact, it isn't happening fast enough. If President Bush could jump in a time machine and experience a single day in 2056, he'd return to the present shocked and awed, prepared to do anything it took to solve the problem..
The human brain is a remarkable device that was designed to rise to special occasions. We are the progeny of people who hunted and gathered, whose lives were brief and whose greatest threat was a man with a stick. When terrorists attack, we respond with crushing force and firm resolve, just as our ancestors would have. Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain's alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed.
It remains to be seen whether we can learn to rise to new occasions.
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Daniel Gilbert is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of "Stumbling on Happiness," published in May by Knopf.
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NHNE Climate Change Resource Page
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