Greening the Jordan Desert: Australian permaculturalist Geoff Lawton accepted the challenge to try to create viable permaculture in a corner of Jordan horrifically desertified and awash with salt from the Dead Sea. This video describes the astonishing results. Again, this was a community-driven achievement — Geoff just supplied the know-how. One of the gardens is illustrated above. Put this accomplishment with what Majora’s community has done in the South Bronx, and you have to believe that with the right people invited and engaged, the right tools and knowledge, and trust in the community, bottom-up initiatives can accomplish anything. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link. [Addendum July 21: Slawek Rogulski actually pointed this link out to me back on July 2, and I lost track of it]

Three Ways to Persuade: Jeremy Heigh describes three ways to persuade people to do something: Pitching (carefully crafting the ‘elevator pitch’ that will, if they’re ready, blow them away when they hear it); Flipping (finding the ‘tipping point’ where the person who you are trying to persuade is most open and vulnerable to your argument, and focusing on that; and Pinging (bouncing ideas and information and opportunities for communication off the person you want to persuade, and then listening and paying close attention to the responses until you know so much about that person and their wants and needs that you don’t need to persuade them, you just respond to what they’ve already told you they’ll ‘buy’.

An Improvement on TinyURL: The short URLs that TinyURL and similar redirection services give you to replace those huge, impossible-to-remember-and-type URLs are really useful, but they’re so cryptic that you need to be very careful not to misspell them. Now, 310URL lets you pick your own short suffix to its 301url.com/ prefix.

A Satiric Take on Higher Education: Also from the TED series, Sir Ken Robinson explains, in hilarious fashion, what’s wrong with the Western education system and how it could be made better.

Thought for the week, on a somewhat more sombre note, from WaPo journalist Robert Samuelson, entitled “Global Warming’s Real Inconvenient Truth” (thanks to Dale Asberry for the link):

Not that this is any excuse for not ratifying Kyoto and trying, as some countries are doing, to achieve or exceed emission-reduction targets. But the point is valid. Politicians and idealistic citizens who don’t understand the impossibility of massive consensus intervention in complex systems need to wake up to the fact that it is not in our nature, and not in the capability of our political, social and economic systems, to change quickly and radically enough to address or even reduce global warming. There is no precedent for such utter change occurring anywhere near this quickly in human history. It ain’t gonna happen.

Of course I also think it’s naive to believe, as Samuelson does (and as Bush does) in the god of technology as deus ex machina for the ‘problem’ of global warming. No technology has ever ‘solved’ a problem without raising or contributing to another intractable problem, usually more difficult than the one that was solved. To believe that some brilliant invention or combination of inventions will so reduce emissions (even in the face of political and economic indifference, intransigence, incompetence, and corruption that always mitigates against rapid introduction of all new technologies) that it will halt and reverse the accelerating effects of everything 6.5 billion of us are doing to add to greenhouse gases, is the technophile’s equivalent of The Rapture. And its believers must share with believers in The Rapture a fanatical refusal to acknowledge the lessons of history. Not to mention the laws of thermodynamics.

The answer, like the answer to the reclaiming of the devastated land of the South Bronx and Jordan, is not political or technological, though both may play a small part (or may make the situation worse). The only approach that might work, the only approach that ever has, is bottom-up, one person and one community at a time, with a hundred million networked small self-selected groups of engaged people, self-equipped with the tools and knowledge and the know-how to make effective use of them, trustingin themselves and in each other, and in the outcome — a better, healthier, saner and less destructive way to live.

Andrew liked the phrase, and we dug deeper into this possibility. I wrote:

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time – and whenever we do it, we are not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

I went on to say:

—–

I met yesterday with Jeremy Heigh of Siftstar fame, and we talked a bit about complexity. We agreed that:

• While children seem to embrace complexity, adults seem to loathe it. We wondered: At what point in our lives does this change, and why?
• As Picasso said, all children are born artists, and those who survive as artists in their adult lives somehow manage not to ‘grow out of’ that ability like the rest of us do.

It seems to me, therefore, that the idea of great art becoming truth, becoming ‘real’, and the idea of children starting out as artists and appreciators of complexity, and then becoming inexorably neither, are connected. Also related is the acceptance, as we ‘mature’, of religions, either humanist or spiritual super-humanist, anti-natural moral codes that reject Gaia and the reality of the interconnectedness of all life on Earth. Perhaps these religions act as artificial, man-made ‘hearts’ to keep us going, to replace the natural ones that had to be removed because, in civilization culture, they wouldn’t stop bleeding.

What deranged madness grips (most of) us, what horrific violence so afflicts us, at some point in our young lives, that we lose our artistic capacity, our capacity for appreciating and embracing complexity, most of our capacity to imagine, and our ability to see and live a third way that is neither rational (scientific, logical, intellectual) nor moral (religious, emotional, spiritual), but rather natural (intuitive, sensual, perceptual)? Why don’t we even notice the resultant dissociation from reality? And how can we bear ‘realizing’ how much we have lost of what makes us ‘us’ (and ‘us-all’), to the point we have to fight every moment of our lives in the hopes of recapturing just ‘one line‘ of it?

Perhaps when Eliot said “human kind cannot bear very much reality”, he was telling us that, because we cannot conceive reality (it can only be perceived), we cannot, as we ‘mature’, understand it, and we therefore resent it, find it unbearable, intolerable, humiliating, terrifying.

A complex, conceptually unfathomable Gaia does not and cannot ‘fit’ within the rational and moral models that man has constructed in his brain to make sense of his world. In fact, no complex (unordered), adaptive, ‘unknowable’ system that manages itself and is indifferent to human intervention and even human existence, fits within our rational and moral models. For that reason, complexity (and Gaia specifically) is not only resented, but intolerable, in the same way that the mere concept of Earth not being the centre of the universe was intolerable at the dawn of the Renaissance. We have ‘reinvented’ prehistory as one of outrageous disorder full of cannibals, fights to the death for no purpose, constant deprivation and suffering, beasts ‘red in tooth and claw’. But as Jonas Salk said “If all the insects on earth disappeared, within fifty years all life on Earth would disappear. If all humans disappeared, within fifty years life on Earth would flourish as never before.” No matter how we try to destroy, rationalize or moralize it out of existence, Gaia, the real, natural universe all around us (and still, dormant, within us) continues to defy us, defy our understanding and attempts to control it.

You may have read my self-confessional article saying that I believe that I am damaged*, a shadow of my former self. Somehow (perhaps there is a bit of artist in me) I sensed this draining of capacity happening to me as it was occurring, and ever since I have been grieving its loss. Perhaps unlike most people I am just unable to get over this grief and get on with my new shallow life living inside my head. Perhaps I am romanticizing this loss — a butterfly lamenting the loss of those hundreds of caterpillar feet, when I should be rejoicing (re-Joyce-ing?) in the giving up of the ability to dance in favour of the ability to fly. But somehow I feel I have lost these capacities in return for nothing except an increased ability to cope with civilization, its demands and its restrictions. This draining of capacity, this detachment from Gaia, this dissociation from the instincts, from the senses, from the perceptions, from the reality of Now Time, this terrible loss, is what we call socialization.

I’m not angry about having been subjected to this process. We do what we must, and this is the price of maintaining, for a little while longer, our fragile, man-made, anti-nature civilization. Heretics must be converted or suppressed, because the very tenets of the society that 6.5 billion people now depend on are at stake. If we were to accept that self-contained human societies living as much as possible outside of nature, managed by human hierarchies as well as possible, borrowing massively from billions of years of stored resources, were non-viable, when there is now no other possible way to keep those 6.5 billion people alive for even a short period of time, we would have complete social collapse, anarchy, the chaos that our rational and moral belief systems so abhor. This is unthinkable.

Let the artists and the children perceive such realities and horrors, for awhile, if they must. We’ll get to them soon enough.

*(and perhaps everyone is, though I wouldn’t presume to say so — well, yes I would, but I suppose I shouldn’t)

Several readers like what I’ve been saying about significant change having to come from the bottom-up, but are skeptical that intentional communities, natural enterprises, and peer-to-peer information, education and action groups can scale sufficiently to have an impact on all the damage that big, top-down-organized governments and corporations are doing, and to solve the world’s most intractable problems. I want to explore that concern in this article.

Top-down organizations are (generally) hierarchically organized. That means the power to make decisions on actions rests with one, or a very few people in the organization. It also means that those people have the authority to force those lower down in the hierarchy to carry out those decisions. The reality is that while those people will pay lip service to the instructions they receive, they will often not do what they’re told, either because (a) they don’t understand what they’re being told to do, or (b) they don’t agree with what they’ve been told (it doesn’t make sense, or it’s too much work) and they’re sufficiently buffered by the bureaucracy of the organization that they can get away with not doing it.

The consequence is that these (usually) large, hierarchical organizations are utterly dysfunctional. The people at the top have the illusion (because no one dares tell them differently) that their instructions are understood and being effectively followed. The people at the bottom are (usually) just struggling to do their (usually) unique jobs the best way they can, despite ill-conceived, ill-informed, poorly-communicated and often foolish instructions from above. The customers/citizens that the organization is intended to serve are completely divorced from the top-down communication and decision-making process. If they don’t like the decisions they can buy from/vote for the other ‘choice’ in the political or economic oligopoly. That is the customer’s/citizen’s only input into the system.

The reality is that the expensive and elaborate mission statements, strategic plans, statements of core values and principles, vision documents, and other ‘change’ programs usually have no effect on the organization at all. The achievements of the organization are simply the aggregate of the collective efforts of the employees, and success depends on an infinite number of factors, few of which the employees (let alone the people at the top) have any control over. What gets rewarded gets done, however, and what is rewarded in hierarchical organizations is finding ways to sell more products at higher prices to more customers while simultaneously hollowing out the organization to reduce costs (and hence, ironically, reduce capacity). This is euphemistically called ‘productivity’, and as I’ve reported before there are six main ways to do it:

• Charge customers more for the same stuff
• Get government subsidies
• Charge customers the same price for inferior stuff
• Reduce wages
• Reduce material costs
• Reduce regulatory costs

Almost all activity of hierarchical organizations is currently devoted to these six tasks. Oligopolies enable this by eliminating competition. Massive deceptive advertising and PR campaigns are used to con the customer. Intensive lobbying buys politicians, who in turn provide subsidies, deregulation, corporate indemnification from litigation, and protectionist intellectual property laws. Outsourcing, offshoring, union-busting and benefit-stripping reduce labour costs. Egregious and environmentally ruinous ‘free’ trade agreements and one-sided contracts with struggling nations extract cheap materials. Collectively this is called ‘globalization’, and it is promoted as something that is good for all of us.

The hierarchical organization is only doing what is rewarded. There is ferocious internal competition to take credit for the organization’s collective success and shift the blame for its collective failure. This adds to the dysfunction, preventing people from sharing ideas and information, and rewarding deceptive credit-taking, scapegoating and exploitation of other people and the environment (reducing costs by ‘externalizing’ them, i.e. making them someone else’s cost and problem, usually future generations’). This destructive dysfunction is papered over with absurd talk about the importance of teamwork and collaboration. Employees learn (by reward or punishment lessons) that the real objective is to use the team to produce what you can take disproportionate credit for.

This behaviour is not unique to the private sector. Governments and government organizations are pursuing the same six ‘productivity’ goals bulleted above, via user fees, obfuscation of benefits, ‘centralization’ schemes, takeover of other government entities, reducing services, deceptive advertising and PR, and privatization. Politicians play up the myth that public organizations are less ‘efficient’ than private organizations of the same size (Ralston Saul and others have thoroughly debunked this myth, but it is immensely popular among a wide swath of simple-minded conservatives and libertarians who are easy to convince that, except for waging war, government-run organizations are inherently evil and incompetent). This, despite overwhelming evidence that the defence and ‘security’ functions of government are much less competently and ‘efficiently’ run than ‘privatizable’ functions like public health care and public education.

Hierarchies scale well in one respect: They concentrate power and wealth in a few hands, where it can be used to acquire even more of it, using the techniques described above. This is known as ‘leverage’ (financial and political) and, like the overweight kid on the teeter-totter, they have a lot of it. This leverage compensates for the inherent lack of effective communication, lack of information-sharing, inertia, vulnerability (in the face of sudden catastrophe), destructive politics, and unresponsiveness and indifference to the needs and well-being of people, that renders hierarchies so dysfunctional. In the wake of hierarchies’ leverage, innovators, entrepreneurs, and imaginative alternative ways of doing things are crushed. Choose Tweedledum or Tweedledee, or drop out of the system. As citizen, as customer, as employee, that is the only choice you have.

Enough about hierarchies. Let’s look now at networked systems, what Jon Husband calls ‘wirearchies’. The power in networked systems is decentralized, or as Searls & Weinberger put it ‘at the ends’. The obvious advantages of this are responsiveness (power distributed more broadly to people in touch with citizens, customers and employees are more aware of and more capable of responding to these constituencies’ needs) and resilience (when part of a networked system ‘goes down’, it is relatively simple to ‘work around’ it).

The purpose of networked systems is, like the systems in nature, not ‘efficiency’ or ‘productivity’ but effectiveness. Look at the seeds of a tree, or the redundancy in any ecosystem, and you see how well it gets the job done, no matter what eventuality may occur, but in an extremely ‘inefficient’ manner.

So imagine we were to evolve a new social, political and economic system, bottom-up, networked and non-hierarchical. Could it contend with the existing hierarchical system? And could it solve some of the intractable ‘wicked’ problems that the hierarchical system contends with now, and would have us believe it is coping with as well as is possible? In other words, can a Networked Society scale to do what it must to out-perform and replace our Hierarchical Society in dealing with the world’s intractable problems?

I think there is broad dissatisfaction with the existing hierarchical system, but great skepticism about whether there is any alternative. Communal and socialistic societies don’t have a very good track record, even though there may be some argument that the hierarchical societies deliberately crushed them because they represented a threat. The reality is that people, as citizens, customers and employees, do not buy into theories or ideals. They want to see evidence that some alternative system actually works. They believe their peers, not pundits (whether those pundits be at the top of a hierarchy or out on the Edge).

We do what we must. People will be inspired to stop voting for, buying from, and working for Tweedledum or Tweedledee only when they perceive they have no other choice, when the pain begins to considerably exceed the comfort that comes from the status quo. What’s more, they need to have some other choice presented to them, not just the idea of creating one. As I’ve said before, we need to start with local experiments of intentional communities (alternatives to the hierarchical political system), natural enterprises (alternatives to the hierarchical economic system) and peer-to-peer information, education and action groups (alternatives to the hierarchical social system). Just as the first life on our planet needed to brew in the primordial soup for a long time (probably with lots of false starts), we need to monitor and learn from these experiments, and let them evolve naturally. We cannot be concerned with whether we have the luxury of time for this to happen — one cannot invent a new Networked Society overnight, and evolution takes time.

The Internet (so long as it remains free from hierarchical tolls) will allow these experiments to be watched more effectively and by more people, and will allow us to share ideas, experiences and learnings more effectively with other people on the Edge. This could accelerate the evolutionary process of the Networked Society somewhat. The way I see it evolving is more and more people slowly weaning themselves off the Hierarchical Society as real alternatives become available to them regarding:

1. where to live (in a true community, not a subdivision),
2. who to live with (most likely a clan of several dozen people, not a nuclear family),
3. how to make a living (in responsible partnership with people you love, in service rather than in servitude),
4. who to buy from (natural, sustainable, caring enterprises, not Tweedledum or Tweedledee),
5. how to live more responsibly (knowledge and choices that give you a genuine ability to walk lighter on the Earth, not just buy a slightly less irresponsible product),
6. how to live more self-sufficiently (knowledge and choices that free you from dependence on the Hierarchical Society), and
7. who to support politically (with your votes and your tax dollars)

These are the most important decisions most of us make in our lives, so the emergence of alternatives is likely to attract a lot of public interest. The powers in the Hierarchical Society are aware of this, and are trying to offer us some easy (for them and for us) alternatives (like houses with solar panels and organic products) to keep us from abandoning them. They don’t understand that this is far deeper than a fleeting yen for counter-culture or a new form of consumerism.

There are, of course, many experiments in all these areas going on now. Should we be concerned that none of them have ‘caught on’ yet? I would be more concerned if some of these experiments had caught on. There is not yet a broad sense of urgency — we do what we must, and there is not yet that kind of imperative for the majority of people that they must do something other than what they’re already doing.

What will precipitate this sense of urgency? Not likely a political or economic or environmental event — terrorist fear-mongering aside, these events just don’t get at us where we live. Unless you live(d) in New Orleans, it’s doubtful that global warming has yet changed your life-style or even made you wake up every day thinking you must, soon. Remember, this movement is bottom-up. What will precipitate this sense of urgency will be small successes communicated peer-to-peer. Peer-to-peer alternative music sharing shook an industry to its roots (and that industry reacted in the prototypical, hostile, hierarchical organization way). Imagine if we start sharing alternative ways to live, that require purchase of much less, and then nothing at all, from multinational corporations. That allow us to live comfortably, joyfully, with 90% less income and 90% less consumption of standardized, packaged, imported commercial products — and 90% less consumption of energy. That make starting your own business easier and more pleasurable than working for The Man. That eliminate your dependence on outside suppliers of good and services, and your dependence on ‘experts’. That are more fun.

As I’ve mentioned before, these alternatives and changes could essentially starve the Hierarchical Society to death. That society depends utterly on our ‘consumerism’, on our tax dollars, on our Learned Helplessness, and on our psychological addiction and financial indebtedness to it. Show people that there is an alternative to that addiction and helplessness, one that is healthier and happier, and you need not do any selling. It will happen, growing slowly (too agonizingly slowly to suit most of us!), until people opt out of the Hierarchical Society and opt into the Networked Society, not out of political or ideological conviction, but simply because it’s easy and because that’s what their friends are all doing.

So imagine that happens, and the starved Hierarchical Society crumbles. No more globalization and big multinational corporations. No more standardized, centralized systems for anything: health, education, utilities. All replaced with local, community-based, self-managed alternatives. How will this transitioning new world of self-sufficient communities deal with global warming, with terrorist threats, with foreign despots, with world poverty and hunger, with pandemic diseases, with natural disasters, with the End of Oil, with social security, with immigration, with national transportation? The (federal) government won’t be able to help — it won’t have enough revenue to do these things. Of course, we could argue that they’ve been useless at addressing these problems anyway, making the situation worse, if anything, with every intervention. But surely someone has to at least put on a brave face and try, lest these problems get away from us entirely and our countries be overrun with unwanted foreigners and fundamentalist crazies? Who’s going to negotiate for, and between, and coordinate and represent these little communities in situations of larger-scale conflict and catastrophe?

We will still have a world in which most of humanity lives a marginal, dependent life in lands desolated by short-term, ill-considered economic and political activity. It is only we privileged few, a subset of the inhabitants of affluent nations, with substantial access to knowledge, resources, and collective organizational processes, who can hope to build and show off the experiments and models of a Networked Society. So how can we hope to not only scale these models to accommodate most humans in our own countries, but show them and introduce them to people who have none of the ingredients on which these models are built? How will a fledgling Networked Society ‘play’ in Darfur, in Tajikistan, in the South Bronx?

Well, perhaps better than we might think. The people in ignored and devastated areas of the world (and within our own countries) have learned that community is everything, that if they don’t look after themselves no one will. All we need to do is help them remove the obstacles (poverty, pollution, corruption, warlords etc.) to making intentional communities, natural enterprises, and peer-to-peer information, education and action groups work for them, in their own way. How do we do that, in a bottom-up, peer-to-peer, non-hierarchical way?

As I suggested the other day, if we can find ways to ‘solve’ poverty, pollution, corruption and crime in our own disenfranchised neighbourhoods, where these problems have defied all top-down approaches to alleviate, we should be able to apply the same ‘solutions’ to solve problems on a global scale: global poverty, global warming, despotism, terrorism etc. After all, neighbourhoods are complex systems.

In a previous article I suggested a four-step methodology for doing this, built on Open Space and a group of other methods that seem best-suited to addressing complex system problems. The four steps were:

1. Invite: Invite all the people with an interest in solving the problem, without limit or restriction, to come together.
2. Provide Tools: Give them methodologies, tools, frameworks, ideas, possible strategies and information that equip them better to address the problem.
3. Provide Training in How to Use the Tools: Teach them (or rather, help them relearn — we once knew how to do this instinctively!) the practices and capacities (some of these capacities are listed on the right side of the illustration above) they need to apply in order to use the methodologies, tools, strategies and information effectively.
4. Trust in the Outcome: Trust in the group’s personal will and collective ability to solve the problem better than experts and outsiders who lack the context of what can and cannot work, and trust in the group’s acceptance of the responsibility to do what, as a result of what they have learned and discovered together, they must.

Pretty idealistic, huh?

A few years ago the people of our neighbourhood got together and rebuilt a barn (actually a large garage for one of the neighbours, but it was originally a barn), which was close to falling down, and pretty sad to look at. No one in the neighbourhood is an expert in construction, but between us we knew a fair bit about different aspects of the job, and we had access to the Internet, and to others in our collective networks. We did an exemplary job, using precisely the four-step methodology noted above. We taught each other, we learned what we needed to learn, the invitation was so compelling and delightful we had a huge turnout (the only thing we ran out of was food, and that was quickly solved by self-organization), and the outcome was extraordinary. We did that!
This methodology is all about facilitating self-organization around a problem that the group is passionate about, and, collectively, pretty well informed about. I’ll tell you on Saturday about how astonishingly well this type of self-organized, self-managed process is working in the South Bronx. I’ll also tell you about an amazing community-based success story in a desertified, salt-drenched corner of Jordan. If this kind of process can work in those places, why not in Darfur and Tajikistan? And if it can transform a neighbourhood of hundreds or even tens of thousands of people, why, by repeating the process over and over, virally, using the enthusiasts and champions from each community where it works to ‘seed’ the process in ten or a hundred others, couldn’t it transform a whole nation, a whole world, one community at a time?

I am, as you probably know, a great believer in The Wisdom of Crowds. It makes enormous intuitive sense to me. This methodology is merely a facilitated application of that wisdom.

You’re concerned about the places it doesn’t work — the places where the concentration of power and the abuse of that power is so extreme that bottom-up processes can’t overcome them. And so, they breed despots or terrorists or economy-wreckers and then we have a global threat to all of our communities and neither the time nor the ability to mobilize community-by-community to address that threat. Or you’re concerned about the surprises, like pandemic disease or tsunamis that wreak havoc before there is any chance to get together to work out an approach to them. Or you’re concerned about the cumulative effect of millions of communities, each by themselves not contributing much to global warming or The End of Oil but collectively threatening the survival of the planet and our civilization. Don’t we need some top-down powerful ‘force’ that can focus on just those problems? After all, even a radical communitarianist like Peter Singer says, advocating a ‘lite’ world government in his book One World:

I’d love to know what you think about this. Personally, I don’t think it’s possible. It requires an altruism and a resistance to the temptation of power that is simply not in our nature.

How does nature deal with such catastrophes that overwhelm its inherently self-organizing balancing mechanisms? It lets them happen, and shrugs them off. Or it adapts to them. These catastrophes, in the face of an enormously resilient ecosystem, are (except for the odd extinction event every 50 million years or so) ultimately limited in their impact, and unsustainable long-term. They burn themselves out. Indeed, that is precisely what nature is doing now, in the advanced stages of the Sixth Extinction in the planet’s known history, the first caused by the actions of a single species, us.

We are, I suspect, too arrogant to just allow these things to happen, to wait for them to pass and ‘solve’ themselves. We couldn’t sit back and just allow Iraq to invade Kuwait, even though the reasons for that invasion were vastly more complex than the simple act of megalomania our politicians and press would have us believe was behind it. We can’t sit back and allow the Bush ideology to catapult the world into the Second Great Depression, even though the fuse is already lit and, if we turf him out of power and catch it, it will blow up in our face anyway. We can’t allow the wretched prisoners at Guantanamo to kill themselves, even if that means force feeding them until we concoct some excuse to execute them. We can’t shrug off 9/11 even though the trillions of dollars we’ve spent on ‘security’ and retribution in response to it have done nothing but make us less secure and have increased the popularity of the (surviving) perpetrators. We can’t accept that the solutions to global warming and the End of Oil that aren’t conceived and implemented in each local community according to its unique situation and needs, will never be acceptable enough to be implemented in any widespread way at all.

We do what we must, but to the humanist in all of us, that is never enough. Foolish or futile as it may be, we have to do more. Try something. Do something. Anything. Make someone responsible. Appoint a committee. Draw up a plan. Get revenge, even though it changes nothing. Hang someone. Stop it from happening again.

I’m not entirely satisfied with this ‘if you can’t do anything objectively useful, shrug off your grief and your outrage and get on with your life‘ answer. Not so much because it doesn’t make some intuitive sense to me that sometimes bad things happen, and last a while, and that attempting to either prevent or avenge them simply compounds (complexifies?) the problem. My dissatisfaction with this answer is more because I can’t sell this answer to people who might find the rest of the Networked Society elegant and compelling, but will find this sticking point intolerable. I’d welcome your thoughts.

1. Humans can change quickly because we are no longer constrained by our bodies and by natural evolution. What makes us ‘us’ now is our cultural evolution, not our biological one. Freed from ‘natural’ restrictions, we can change in a heartbeat. We can accomplish anything. Mind over matter. Imagination trumps mere reality. We can reach the stars, we can live forever. We can create technologies, extensions of our brains, that transcend all ‘real’-world limits. We just need to want to do it, and it will be done.
2. People don’t change. We’re still living with (and in) hardware, our bodies, that control most of what we are and what we do and which evolve infinitesimally slowly. Only 18 of the 16 million bits of information our bodies process each second are conscious. It doesn’t matter that our brains have allowed us to establish more complex cultures than those of other species. We continue to be preoccupied with the needs of the moment. We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, then we do what’s fun. There is no time left for anything else. We can’t even grasp real complexity, let alone control it.

I’m not sure there’s any reconciling these two views, though there seem to be lots of people determined to try. For years I was a fence-sitter on this issue, unwilling or unable to make up my mind. Recently I’ve come down squarely in the second, less popular camp. That’s not to say I couldn’t be convinced to change my mind. But it jibes better both with my understanding of history and with my instincts.

I remember sitting in a dentist’s waiting room many years ago and watching three generations of a Chinese-Canadian family. The grandparents spoke no English, dressed traditionally, and seemed bewildered and distraught about the world. The grandchildren spoke only English, dressed in definitive Canadian branded clothing, and seemed able to take anything in stride. The parents, caught in the middle, had to translate for their own families. They struck me as simply coping, dealing with the needs of the moment. To the grandparents, their grandchildren were utterly alien, incomprehensible.

I’ve seen this again and again over the years, and I now closely observe my own grand-daughters for evidence of how able new generations are to make leapfrog changes that any one individual, no matter how long her lifetime, could not. I recall in my youth arguing with my father (himself a progressive, all his life) about his generation’s inability to change. I told him I didn’t trust anyone over thirty, and that it was time for ‘the establishment’ to get out of the way of the momentous change we were destined to bring about in a new, loving, peaceful Earth.

Dylan wrote that over 40 years ago, and my father’s argument that it had all been said before, generation after generation, yet we kept making the same mistakes over and over, fell on deaf ears. He just didn’t understand, I thought. This is something new. And now, nearly 40 years later, I have become my father. And we are still making the same mistakes, over and over.

My Genius is Imagining What’s Possible. It’s a useful and interesting talent. But I don’t confuse what’s possible with what’s likely. It’s possible that a meteor will hit the Earth tomorrow. It’s possible that some benign alien species will arrive tomorrow and fix all the world’s problems for us. But I’m not counting on it, in deciding what to do next and what to do in the future. It’s possible that humanity and technology will transcend the looming crisis facing us, and it’s interesting to imagine that happening. But it’s science fiction stuff, escapism, denial, a distraction from reality, from the real work facing us here, now.

Back in the 1960s, we did what we had to do. We shook an intolerant, war-mongering, fearful culture to its foundations. We ended the war. We challenged everything. We tried some bold and optimistic experiments.

But in the end, we changed nothing. Our twin religions of humanism and technology, it turned out, were not enough to make us, and our culture, over into something we, and it, were not.

So now I’m a skeptic about our ability to change. I recognize its imperative. I can imagine and appreciate its possibility. And I think about the leapfrogs that were made, from the generation of my grandfather, an enlightened and conservative depression-era survivor (and, like me, a bird-watcher); to the generation of my father, a progressive and an explorer who is still today generous to a fault; to my generation; to that of my lovely children, utterly caught up, like the middle generation of that Chinese-Canadian family in the dentist’s office, with the immediate needs of the moment, raising their own families in a deeply troubled economy; to the generation of my extraordinary grand-daughters, who are learning, exploring, discovering what their world is about, and who are not yet ready for the terrible lessons I have for them about their future.

My grand-daughters’ culture is as different from mine as mine was from my grandfather’s and from that Chinese-Canadian family’s. Yet somehow, in the ways that are important, these cultures are indistinguishable. Almost as much as ‘we’ are mere servants of our bodies, so too are we co-prisoners of our culture. Noam Chomsky has said that all human languages are so astonishingly similar that an alien ethnographer would have absolutely no doubt that we all came from a single ancestor. Anthropologists are flabbergasted that human groups so utterly separated by time and space have evolved such staggeringly similar cultures, quite independently. Our culture, with its local variations that cause us so much conflict, is becoming more homogeneous and undifferentiated, and hence poorer and less adaptable, less capable of complex change, every day. Rather than liberating us from doing what we must, and enabling us to do what we can and what is imaginable, our culture is instead our bodies’ evolutionary servant. Our bodies evolved our brains to invent culture because without it we would have perished. To see human culture and ‘consciousness’ as anything more than an evolutionary survival mechanism is a colossal, collective conceit, an exercise, like belief in The Rapture, in magical thinking. As Eliot said, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality”.

So we go on doing what we must. Rising and groaning and going to work. Sublimating our dreams and intuitions and imaginations. Looking after the needs of the moment. Invading Iraq and tomorrow Iran to feed the inextinguishable hunger for the ‘food’ that nourishes our fragile bodies and keeps us in the evolutionary gene pool. Distracting ourselves to death with useless information and desperate consumption and flimsy entertainments. Exploding in numbers and despoiling and impoverishing the Earth. Generation after generation, being what we are, and doing what we do.

The answer is, ironically, not striving for impossible, collective change, but rather becoming more truly human. Connecting better, more authentically to each other and to nature. Learning everything we can; learning to be useful, to be a part. Becoming more aware, more sensual, more instinctive, more generous, more in touch with ‘our’ bodies and hence ourselves. Taking delight in small pleasures. Living on the Edge. Slowing down and paying attention and living in the moment, undistracted. Refusing to be being everyone else in our culture.

That will not save us, but it will give our lives meaning and purpose. Inthe end, I think, that is all there is, and all that can be asked of us.

Image: From Danish Ministry of the Environment.