251 comments on Climate Change, Sabre Tooth Tigers and Devaluing the Future
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Dealing with Peak Oil and Global Warming in a way that overcomes the various forms of myopia, irrationality, and selfishness that are the outcomes of the psychological phenomena Nate Hagens speaks about is ultimately a moral and spiritual problem. Overcoming the "discount problem" requires the willingness to rationally appreciate the true nature of what we face, and to freely embrace the acutely self-sacrificial choices required in overcoming the "discount problem" within oneself so as to deal with what we face effectively. As individuals and as a race, we are free to embrace or to reject the moral and spiritual transformation that all this entails.
Richard Heinberg recognizes this in his book "Powerdown." There he writes, among other things, in response to critics of his who chide him for overlooking the need for moral and spiritual regeneration. His response to them is that what he outlines as the path of "Powerdown" IS ITSELF the very moral and spiritual regeneration that would be necessary for humankind to deal with the problems facing it without descending into anarchy and war leading ultimately to oblivion.
That is exactly the achilles' heel of Heinberg's very thoughtful overall outlook, in my opinion. Just where exactly does he expect this widespread moral and spiritual transformation to originate from? To suppose that one could reasonably expect something like that to happen is tantamount to implicitly introducing a "Deus ex Machina" into the world, insofar as this world is regarded from a scientific standpoint.
Western man has been awaiting the dawn of this moral and spiritual transformation ever since the rise of Progress Ideology in its various forms during the Enlightenment - but it clearly hasn't happened yet. What reason is there to believe that it will happen in the next generation or so, when humanity so sorely and desperately needs it (as many who post on TOD would reluctantly agree, I think)?
It is at this juncture of the discussion that religion DOES become very germane to the Peak Oil/Global Warming debate. As a very general matter, religion has pertinent things to say about the moral and spiritual dimension of the problems we face as a race that are utterly crucial, and that the scientific/technical standpoint on things is incapable of addressing. The very short answer is that Divine Grace is necessary to effect the required moral and spiritual transformation.
I have to say that many things about the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy have never made any sense to me before reading this essay. Celibacy, relinquishing worldly goods, extreme age of the College of Cardinals - they all make perfect sense if the goal is continuation of one of the longest-lived human institutions. Yes, religion probably does have something we need here. It deals with the human "magic" that John Michael Greer was recently talking about, it has the tremendous timeframe needed to appreciate these problems, it is one of the few organizations/concepts that has found ways to harness short-term human desires to long-term goals. Unfortunately, religions are still calling for population growth, are only now speaking up about climate change, and haven't discussed fossil fuel use. What if peak oil happens too fast for long-horizon religions to respond?
I am just amazed that I haven't seen a book about this topic before. What an eye-opener. Thanks, Nate!
Great point - organized religion is an institution that dampens peoples steep discount rates. I hadnt thought of it that way before, but it makes sense.
Think about it - with no religion, people would REALLY focus on the present - but the concept of an 'afterlife' is a huge lump sum at the end of ones life thats net present value overcomes small daily costs and allows people to behave differently than animals with incredibly steep discount rates. (my dog is eating a hambone right now and couldnt care less who the pope is)
So thats the cultural template, even though in many cases it has gone awry - but if the template works, we could apply it for a different reason (climate change and peak oil)
Just thinking out loud -thanks for your comment!
Wow. Three responses even more stimulating than the original essay. Which started damn good. Wow.
I don't think that's really necessarily true. I am not at all religious, yet I have an extremely low personal discount rate. I actually find living for the moment quite difficult and depressing.
I do accept though, that religion performs a necessary function, many people really need it, and of course I agree that it would be of great benefit if it could be harnessed to move civilization to a new paradigm where we could powerdown in such a manner that it/we could have a future.
From an American spiritual leader:
Oren Lyons, seventy-six, is a wisdom carrier, one of the bearers of a variety of human tradition that can’t easily be reduced to a couple of sentences….
After the Peace Maker gathered five warring nations—the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Cayugas, the Senecas, and the Onondagas—and after great efforts and great cohesive work, the power of the unity of the good minds brought together this confederacy based on peace. And after he had taken the leaders and sat them under this great tree on the shoreline of Onondaga Lake and instructed them on the process of governance, on the principles of governance, on the importance of identity and the importance of rule and law, he said, “Now that we’ve planted this great tree, in your hands now I place all life. Protection of all life is in your hands now,” and when he said all life, he meant literally, all life.
And it’s an instruction that we carry today. We feel responsible for animals, we feel responsible for trees, and responsible for fish, responsible for water. We feel responsible for land and all of the insects and everything that’s there. And when he spoke of the four white roots reaching in the four directions, I think he was talking to all people. Not just Haudenosaunee. This is an instruction for all people.
But after all of that, a woman said to him, “Well then,” she said, “how long will this last?” And he answered, “That’s up to you.” So it’s completely up to us if we want this Creation to continue, and if we want to be involved in it, a part of this whole recycling, this whole regeneration of life, and we want to be celebrating it, and we want to be enjoying it, and we want to be preserving it, carrying it on, protecting it for future generations.
http://www.orionmagazine.org/pages/om/07-1om/Lopez-Lyons.html
IIRC, celibacy was not a requirement of the priesthood until the twelfth century. I understand that it was introduced because preventing priests from leaving issue would ensure any property they owned would pass to the church rather than to heirs. (As many churchmen and bishops were also wealthy landowners, the measure made sense in terms of church power).
You can interpret this development as one particular Pope deciding to aggrandize the Church (and hence himself)... that is, it is consistent with the 'selfishness' hypothesis that ties in with discounting. In other words, don't expect to see an institution like the Church doing much good in ameliorating the negative impacts of discounting. Churchmen have the same neuronal circuitry as the rest of us, and those that survive Church bureaucracy and hierarchy are exactly the sort of short-term careerists and conservatives that also screw up the world in every other field of human endeavour. Sh*t floats to the top, as they say.
I agree with your assessment for the need for moral/spiritual regulation of behavior to stay within carrying capacity.
Some indigenous peoples use taboos to control overharvesting by making some areas off limits (sacred areas).
The ancient Egyptians had the longest running continous urbanized culture in the history of the planet, from about 3000 BC to about 1500 AD when the last remanents (above the Nile cataracts) were crushed by Islam. This was achieved despite being limited to a very narrow strip of land in the midst of a huge desert. How did they achieve this?
1) A Greek historian called the ancient Egyptians "entirely too religious". Egyptians believed they would be judged after death as to worthiness for afterlife; this controlled behavior in the present. Also, the priest class was responsible for storing grain in times of plenty against times of famine. No one questioned their authority.
2) Greek historians also regarded ancient Eqyptian men as fools for treating women as equals. Fools like foxes! Women were allowed to own businesses, initiate divorce, and most importantly (drum roll, please)...practice birth control.
To paraphrase a little saying that went around a few years ago, "all I need to live indefinitely in a finite world I learned 5000 years ago".
Could you give me a link to a web source about the remnants of the Egyptian civilization above the Nile cataracts? I love history and would like to read more about that. I've googled and haven't found anything specific. Thanks
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761559385/Civilization.html#p7
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-47441/history-of-education
I also recommend reading about the Indian early (urban) civilizations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilization
http://www.harappa.com/har/har0.html
While I don't dispute your premise about religion which makes intuitive sense, it seems to me that a formal religion or sense of spirituality isn't the essential ingredient. What is essential is a value system that places the individual within the larger context of humanity and all life. Religions can do that, but they can also carry a lot of baggage that redirects the focus back to, if not the individual, then at least to that individual's tribal group. One of the things that most religions are very good at is promoting the us/them divide, whether it's between sects within the same religion, between religions and their undrpinning cultures, of between believers and non-believers.
It seems to me that the more inclusive a value system is, the more it places the individual within the entirety of humanity and life in general, the more likely it is to promote the kind of flattening of the discount curve that is essential. For this purpose, my choice is for garden-variety humanism.
Unfortunately, the inclusivity of the value system of an individual seems to be as innate as many other aspects of personality. From the cultural level, it can only work with what is available, the world isn't populated with latent buddists.
It only appears to be innate because we're taught it very early. The world is populated with potential Buddhists (or at least potential Unitarians), we just can't rescue them early enough. that makes the deprogramming a bit harder later on.