pre ko mo rec

Usually we draw a pretty sharp dividing line between us and animals. Between man, the thinking ape (even that ape part still hurts in many parts of the world, for example much of the US), and all the other animals. The ‘non-thinking’ apes and birds and cockroaches and so forth. We point to our language, to our faculties for reason, our art and aesthetics, our complex cultures, our tool use, our social nature. I mentioned reason. We are particularly proud of that, which is why we also call ourselves sapiens - the thinking, the sapient. We are man the thinking. Women might feel offended, but back in the 18th century when Linnaeus chose to classify us as homo, it was pretty much a given that women didn’t think much.

Nowadays we know better. Those wise enlightenment men were wrong. Pretty much nobody* thinks very much, and humans as a totality think just about as much as a virus. A virus?

Yes, quite like a virus. The human species developed quite a few interesting innovations, put them together and took them to new hights. Other animals also reason, also use tools, also have cultures. But none quite as much as us. What this has amounted to is a substantial breakthrough for humanity. We have gotten rid of all our predators. To a much greater extent than any other large mammal we have become environment indendent. We have adapted to pretty much the whole world, and found ourselves masters and top predators of our ecosystems.

And how did we react to our almost demigodly stature among all the plants and animals of nature? We have spread forth, multiplied, fecundified, froliced, fucked, shucked and hucked our way till we ooze across the world, so numberless many that it would have been unthinkable a mere millennium ago

In short, we have reacted just like a virus that suddenly finds a chink in a body’s immune system and begins to multiply. For all our vaunted intelligence, as a group we have acted just like a mindless packet of RNA stealing material and energy from other systems and organisms to copy itself. Only we’re packtes of DNA, not RNA. When a virus multiplies too far and too much the death of its host usually follows, and consequently the death of the virus stuck in the host. A virus has to spread to other bodies to keep going. If a virus is too lethal and kills its hosts too quickly, it tends to get stuck and not spread very far. Not infect many new warm bodies. And die out. By analogy, we are a happy go lucky tribe, horde, mass of monkeys who just keep eating and breeding.

And what happens when we fill up our body? Our little planet Earth? Well, unfortunately there are no nice, warm, new Earths to spread to in our vicinity. The colonization of space, one of my favourite sci fi topics, is apparently still a long, long way away. It looks like what happens when we run out of room and resources is a not very nice situation where, ahem, the virus starts to die off along with the body.

Now, a virus can keep spreading in a host even while that host is dying or already dead. If we just take a look at the death toll in extinctions we’ve already caused, it becomes obvious that our planet’s ecosystem is already teetering. The good news is that life on Earth will almost certainly survive. The bad news is that we might well not.

We’re not quite like a virus in that we have tools. Weapons. Nice, big, nuclear ones among other things … and sometimes I feel like we’re living in the balmiest time of them all, that nice, warm time before the big storm. Of course, there are other solutions. We could, for example, start organizing ourselves rationally, limiting birth rates, limiting consumption, introducing excessive taxes on luxury goods and so forth … but to be honest, I’m skeptical we’re going to get our act together in time. I think we’ll survive, but we’re going to need a big, nice, painful jolt to get our act together.

I just hope I end up on the winning side …

*of those few who think, I’m willing to wager that more women actually think and reason than men, but even those few enlightened ’sapients’ aren’t all reason and no rhyme.

As a student of anthropology I’m in a strange position. I’m not altogether thrilled by different cultures, by unusual customs, by the exotic. Often I find it silly and foolish. That’s not to say I’m (that) ethnocentric. I find numerous customs of my own culture silly and foolish (to say the least). I share the views and goals of the Enlightenment, to an extent, in that I believe that reason and debate can lead to … a better life and world, progress, to use a dirty word … whereas clinging to tradition and appealing to authority are forces of obscurantism and obfuscation, resulting in conflict and worse lives for the majority of people.

This is unusual, because the stereotypical anthropologist would be thrilled by diversity and loudly expound cultural relativism and how every unique culture should be preserved. I disagree. Cultural relativism shouldn’t be an excuse to suspend moral judgement … I often and happily judge things, often my views may be skewed, but I reserve the right to judge. Where I agree with cultural relativism is that a position of cultural power and superiority, lets call it hegemony, doesn’t somehow confer the right to intervene in other cultures (well, except in exceptional cases like genocide and naked agression). I wouldn’t call for the wholesale eradication of minority cultures. I wouldn’t fight for global monocultures or oligocultures on the basis of some kind of arguments of economic efficiency. Likewise, the development of sophisticated computer systems is making arguments for monetary union less pressing, more a question of political and bureaucratic control, than a question of efficiency.

In a funny way, agricultural analogies sneak back into culture. Just as planting only one kind of crop in a large field makes it more susceptible to pests, so making cultures incredibly homogenous may make them more susceptible to different pests - bad ideas, bad memes, external conflict, stagnation - and weaker in the long run. In this sense European goals, attempts to weld together a single European culture through monetary union, bureaucratic hypercontrol, economic, banking, transport and logistics unions, and so forth, is quite wrong headed. I get the feeling that the EU has a confused view, where it considers culture as something seen in museums and interesting folk dances, a kind of Germanic volkskunde approach, where culture and economy are two different and isolated systems.

This is silly and foolish. It makes little sense to talk of economic basis and cultural superstructures. Economics and politics are defining elements of culture, and if we exclude them from the area of reasoned, rational political debate, we are essentially excluding a vast element of our lives from any kind of … well … popular control. We have an EU that is working hard to create a monoculture in the most important area, people’s well being and people’s political cultures. I wonder if creating a hyperbureaucratic culture of control, timidity and corporativity is conductive to human flourishing, to evolution and change. I think it is not. My contacts with bureaucracies are fortunately limited, but even my limited contact has made me consider them mechanistic and profoundly inhuman. Something I would gladly give over to machine overlords - I’d prefer a robotic bureaucrat to a human acting like a robotic bureaucrat any day.

And where does that leave our monoculture? Well, look at potatoes and Ireland, I say. Making everything too similar to everything else is just as bad as preserving differences for their own sake*.

Sometimes a potato is just a potato. Sometimes it isn’t.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tractors_in_Potato_Field.jpg

*something many traditionalists and ethnologists apparently wish to do. Down with my language, I say, let them speak Inglish!