251 comments on Climate Change, Sabre Tooth Tigers and Devaluing the Future
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k Nation (Jim Kunstler)
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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.