We think we are thoughtful and reasonable. Our actions paint another picture. Why do we ignore upcoming disasters, follow psychologically impaired leaders, and destroy the environment that sustains us?
800 million years of evolution shaped our genes, told us what’s important and what’s not, and guided our attention and actions. Now powerful interests in our industrial consumer society manipulate our inherited needs and wants — and we don’t seem to notice. We should.
Our Long History
Our bigger-better-conscious-reasoning brain is new, appearing only in the last 0.003% of our animal history. It’s a thin veneer on 800 million years of survival and emotions. Here’s the timeline.
Origins Years Ago
Universe 14,000,000,000
Earth 4,500,000,000
Life 3,700,000,000
Animals 800,000,000
Mammals 200,000,000
Primates 55,000,000
Humans 2,000,000
Homo sapiens 300,000
Agri-culture 10,000
Writing 5,500
Greek culture 2,600
Age of Reason 400
Industrialization 250
Cellphones 40
Real Threats or Imagination
99.99% of our evolution taught us to recognize immediate threats and ignore distant ones. But this swollen brain added imagination, fantasy’s playground. Now we can wallow in imagined threats, particularly those promoted by tribal leaders.
Our Tribe
Modern humans roamed the African savannas in small opportunistic, cooperative family groups led by experienced elders. We needed our groups and our leaders, and our groups needed us.
We are skilled group members, knowing how to fit in and be valued. We saw benefits flowing to those with higher status, so to some degree, we each became social climbers, collecting material goods and symbols that showed group allegiance, and hopefully raised our status.
Today our group skills build nations and corporations, while our need for symbols underlays our industrial consumer culture. We love consuming and we want it now. Amazon gets it!
Imagination and Culture
Unlike every other animal, we don’t coexist naturally with our environment. Early humans lived sustainably as hunter-gatherers, but somewhere between 10 and 20,000 years ago our larger, imaginative brain created culture, and we were off to the races.
Cultural evolution replaced genetic evolution, but we can’t put our genes aside, they remain our foundations. When leaders signal danger, it’s heartbeat up, stand together, defend our group.
Spear fights became culture wars, commercial sports, political battles, and fashion statements. Modern stone-throwing uses dollars and social media, and politicians screaming for our allegiance and votes. I barely notice when business and political leaders cleverly tap into my emotional, genetic inheritance for their own personal gain.
Our Bigger, Better Brain
This 3-pound mass in our head — that’s 2% of our body weight and uses 20% of our energy — brought us imagination, with its heaping mix of benefits. We live through our technological creation, this industrial consumer society, largely disconnected from our natural world.
But it happened too quickly, sidestepping the regulatory feedback and controls of nature. We are now the only species living outside of the rules of ecology. For Homo sapiens, “wise man”, we were terribly unwise. But it wasn’t conscious or intentional. We don’t live sustainably, and we don’t seem to care. We are self-destructive and self-centered, capable of beautiful creativity and deep spiritual experience. We can love, and commit the evilest acts. We do it all. There is no such thing as inhuman.
If planet Earth and its living creatures could speak, they may wish we used our unique imaginative and creative abilities less destructively, more caringly, with less fighting, and more happiness.
Our Humanness
In earth time, we are fleeting moments, irrelevant flecks of dust. But for each of us, our brief life is everything there is. It carries remembered history, imagined futures, and the richness of the moment — including hope.
I hope we will soon recognize and consciously use our inherited strengths. We are emotional, tuned to threats, tribal, status-conscious, imaginative, optimistic, and united when threatened by a common enemy.
The current foe is climate change. It came as an unanticipated result of industrialization, and is now consciously fueled by political leaders financed by corporations that profit from unsustainable (dumping) manufacturing processes.
It’s a stretch, but I can imagine an industrial, consumer culture where we as consumers demand sustainable processes from all manufacturers and suppliers. We have demonstrated we can legislate something similar with environmental and consumer protections. Time to broaden the controls.
To make that shift, we must be more candid with ourselves about our basic human nature, our needy evolutionary inheritance. It’s not something we can collectively do right now — we cannot even discuss critical race theory, let alone critical human theory. But I’m hopeful.
Your Thoughts?
I’m interested to hear how you see us. Did our enlarged, untrained brain unwittingly bring us this culture against people and nature? Will we succeed as the first species to actively destroy itself, a bright flash in evolutionary history? As creatures of the moment, does our future really matter? Or will we fess up to who we are, forgive, and compassionately help ourselves survive infancy?
Please write. Thank you.
Thank you for reading.
Barry
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