I used to brush them away. Gossamer threads which, once entangled in the fine hairs on my face or hands, tickled and became annoying, so I would brush them away. Uninvited distractions to the pleasantness of my walk through the trees. I don’t now. Passing through the low-hanging spindly fingers of tree limbs that line the muddy “off the beaten track” trails of my forest walks, I feel them attach themselves to me and I just let them lie.
In my mind’s eye, and with each new step, I see myself being gently wrapped in the weave spun by so many night-owl, needle-limbed spiders until finally, all of me has been tightly draped. All that is left is a silvery cocoon suspended in the forest, glinting like a drop of water dangling precariously from one of autumn’s last leaves as the day’s final shards of sunlight pierce the canopy.
Invisible, bound by silk and bereft of all movement, I surrender to the rich cuddliness of nature’s bedding and sleep a deep sleep; not death, but neither fully alive. Light and shade come and go like ticks of a clock from another place. When I am sleeping there is no time, there is only before and that fades the longer I sleep. Everything I am, everything I have ever been, is here and now. I’m asleep and waiting to be born anew.
But what if there is no rebirth? What if there is no pupa of perfection, no new and improved self capable of scratching its way through its bindings, no Butterfly, not a cocoon but rather some ornate shroud, what then? Will it eventually fall to the mossy floor of the forest where the night needles will busily tether me to the earth allowing the demolition order granted at the moment of my conception, to be finally concluded?
Can I choose a cocoon over a shroud? If I could, I would choose Butterfly just for those few moments of perfection and harmony and light, held aloft in a woody sunbeam. I would. And if I can’t choose, what then? Am I just a dusty shadow of a Butterfly, a dull moth idiotically drawn to and bashing my head against all that is bright or shiny, imagining a silvery moon where there is only a dirty light bulb or a mindless flickering TV show? My existence is a thumb smudge away leaving nothing but a dry smear to signify my passing. I’d rather be nothing. I’d rather just be very still and very quiet and very unnoticeable until nature finds another use for me.
I can’t be a Butterfly. I don’t think I can choose anything other than what I have already chosen. Neither a cocoon nor a shroud, I have knit myself a straight jacket, the spiders will do the rest. But maybe an ember will. Escaping from an “almost-out” flame, engorged on the oxygen of new thinking, maybe one of these embers will become a fire that will warm and grow and illuminate everything. Wouldn’t that be something?
So, a flying saucer full of aliens comes down to earth in 1790, about 30 years after the start of the industrial revolution, to study our planet. They are pretty impressed.
“Wow Xanex, this place is off the chart!”
“I know Keanu, look at all this shit! Now this is what you call a rich biosphere right?”
“Totally X, there’s like millions of species of animals and forna, we could be here for yonks classifying it all. Where shall we start?”
“I’ve got an idea Keanu, why don’t we take a top-down approach and identify the species at the very top of the food chain and work our way down?”
And so they do. Keanu tells Xanex to do a quick search to try to find evidence of any intelligent civilisation on the planet. After about 10 alien minutes, Xanex is standing at his console scratching his head.
“Wassup X?”
Says, Keanu
“Erm, honestly? I’m a bit confused. I did my search and I found what looks like one single species, but I’m thinking they are actually two. I mean they are biologically exactly the same except for a few environmental adaptations like skin colour, facial features and what not, but in every other way they are completely different”
“I don’t get you X, how can they be two species if they are biologically exactly the same? That don’t make no sense at all bra'”
“Yeah I dig it Keanu, I wasn’t chosen for this mission because I’m a pretty face you know. I am actually the astro-biologist on this fecking mission”
“So what you flappin’ about then X?”
“Ok look, Let’s give the whole bunch a name so we know what we are talking about. I dunno, how about humanity?
So I’ve made a picture of the first kind of human. On the face of it, this geezer seems to be more technologically advanced than the other type (clothes, wigs, sail around in ships and making stuff in factories), but they seem to be spreading all over the planet from this bit of the planet here, taking over all the land but then fucking up everything they come across. Forests, killing all the wild animals for fur, killing all the whales for oil for their lamps and whatnot.
I mean, you can’t really blame ’em
They spend a lot of time killing each other, but they especially like killing this other type of human. It’s almost like a sport! They seem to want to own and kill everything they see. Except for dogs! They love their dogs. Just for the sake of argument, lets call these ones “Greedy Humanity” or “Avarus Humanitas” because us aliens love our Latin don’t we?
Then there’s this other lot. It’s almost like they don’t give a crap about technology. They have basic hunting tools like spears and blow pipes and bows and arrows, and a really weird wobbly stick that they throw at big hopping mice, but it’s quite clever really because it comes back if they miss so they don’t have to run and go pick it up before they can throw it again, and some basic tools for a bit of farming and such, but no machines you can really point at.
They don’t seem to want to own anything at all! In fact, they seem to be very determined to not use anything they don’t actually need. They only hunt what they actually eat and farm in a way that preserves the land. Classic hunter gatherer types. Pretty nomadic bunch following the seasons and allowing the land they just left to recover from their presence. Great wheel of life stuff really. They live in relative harmony with each other (odd scuffle but nothing to write home about), and they seem to show a lot of respect for the natural environment and well, everything really. So whilst they are technologically miles behind these tossers, it strikes me they have a much more sustainable and intelligent way of life; almost wise. In fact so wise that they seem to intuitively understand at a spiritual level that energy and matter are the same thing and that makes everything as valuable as everything else. They make no distinction between a pebble or a person. We could call them “Wise Humanity” to distinguish them from these greedy bastards. “Wise Man” for short or “Homo Sapien”.
“Some are smart but they are not wise”
Shoshone Proverb
So, whilst the greedy ones seem to have all the power, land and technology, I reckon these wise ones, intellectually, philosophically, spiritually, ethically, and environmentally are actually the top of the food chain, but from the looks of it, they are pretty much on their way out what with all the butchering and slaughtering these greedy ones are doing.”
If Keanu had eyebrows, they would have been furrowed in thought. After about a minute he speaks up
“So, we’d better kill all the greedy ones then init?”
“Eh? What all of ’em?”
Says Xanex.
“Yeah, we better kill ’em all. The greedy ones I mean. It’s logical and us aliens are known for our logic and that. Look, if we let ’em live then these wise ones are goners right? Also, if these greedy fuckers keep going the way they are, then I can see a time when they will fill the atmosphere with Carbon Dioxide from all these fossil fuel burning factories they are setting up, and we all know what happens when you pump the atmosphere up with CO2 right? Just a big mess and all of ’em, including the wise ones will become extinct along with lots of other species. So if you think about it we are duty bound to kill ’em really. Actually, it’s like we are doing them a favour really, because I’m sure that if they were thinking straight, they wouldn’t want to set off a global extinction event.”
Now X is thinking.
“Couldn’t we just show ’em how to do fusion and then they won’t use these fossil fuels?”
“You crack me up X, you really do.”
laughs Keanu
“You really think these nutters would use fusion properly? These dickheads would blow the planet up. No, we’re definitely gonna have to kill ’em. That is exactly, what we need to do”
He reaches over to a big red button on the console, winks at X and pushes the button.
“Kaboom motherfuckers!”
Ok, so I’ve sort of nicked the idea from the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, but I have modified it in two important ways: A) I didn’t want to kill off ALL of humanity and B) I didn’t pussy out at the last minute because John Cleese reckons we are all capable of changing our ways if only we were allowed to get to the point where everything was teetering on the brink of an abyss.
If the aliens had visited back in the 1790s, and had pushed the big red button (and they would’ve), wiping out Avarus Humanitas, the world would be a very different and better place today, because the ethical, philosophical and religious worldview of the remaining indigenous peoples is so fundamentally centred on the idea that
“Man belongs to earth, earth does not belong to man.”
Native American Proverb
Geographically, the remaining peoples of the earth would include Native Americans, South American indigenous tribes, Pacific Polynesian peoples, New Zealand’s Mauri peoples and Australian Aboriginal peoples.
All these peoples shared a common understanding and acceptance of our place in the world and the need to live in a way that maintains Nature’s fine balance.
All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
Chief Seattle (Seathl)
Now, I know what you’re thinking…
“Isn’t it a bit insensitive to be talking about pushing a big red button that kills pretty much everyone, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means we are teetering on the brink of WW3 Creasy?”
I can see why you might think that mon brave, but A) I would retort that I have actually been thinking about writing this blog for about 6 months (way before comrade Putin and NATO bolloxed everything up) and 3) what better time is there to demonstrate that not only have we not changed since the industrial revolution, but that we never will and that pushing that big red button (not the one that sets off all the nukes, the other one the Aliens had), is really the only logical and ethical thing left for us to do.
We have lost our humanity, or rather, our technological evolution has stolen it from us. We have lost our spiritual connection to the Earth. Walking the dog in local woods with the sound of the M25 ringing in your ears doesn’t count. It really doesn’t.
“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
Crowfoot (1836-1890) warrior and peace-promoting head chief
Implicit in these words, is the notion of being still in the world and simply observing, and in that observing we learn truth and nothing could, or should, be more important. Instead of this simple but powerful truth, we, Avaratus Humanitas, have chosen to define and teach and reinforce a set of “moral” and “ethical” values based solely on the assumption that people are more valuable than everything else.
This is the fundamental difference between the world’s wise people and the rest of us. If a single human life is more valuable, more sacred, than everything else, then everything we do to preserve, enhance or worship that life becomes ethical. If human life is so sacred why wouldn’t we build temples of concrete and steel to worship it? Why wouldn’t we sacrifice everything that was there before to build those temples? Why wouldn’t we rape the earth over and over to grow the things we need to feed or decorate that abundant and most precious life? Everything else is secondary, everything else doesn’t matter. Only we matter, and we have enshrined that core value deeply into our collective psyches and our religious beliefs.
“Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God and it remains for ever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end.”
Catholic Catechism
Whether it is Christianity or Islam or Judaism, the basic premise that we are more special than everything except God is baked in. This is the most basic and flawed form of logic. All cats have three legs. Tom is a cat. Ergo, Tom has three legs. Logically flawless and absolutely wrong. Humans have value, trees are not human, therefore trees are not valuable. The initial premise for the function is wildly incorrect, so no matter how logical or flawless the rest, the final conclusion will always be wrong.
You have to start from a different place. A more correct premise. A place where a pebble has the same exact value as a new born human baby.
“From a grain of sand to a great mountain, all is sacred”
Peter Blue Cloud (1935-) Mohawk writer
You have to start from a place of simple need versus want. If our only purpose was to survive, using only that which the world could sustainably and naturally provide, we would understand that our current rate of consumption of natural resources was not a problem to be solved later, but one which should occupy our every action and decision.
We would be watchful and careful in the way we shared this space and it would be entirely natural to preserve it so that our progeny could survive and know that everything had equal value too. Imagine the wisdom required to consider the impact of our every decision on the next 7 generations? We don’t even have the wisdom to think about the next one.
If we had this mindset, the decisions we would take would be very different. If nature produced a female that could not bear children, or a male that could not produce sperm with high motility, the decision wouldn’t be to conquer that natural selection with technology over and over again until the infertile couple actually produce another unnecessary child. Instead, adoption would be as normal and natural a way of “having” children, as actually giving birth to your own or having someone else do it for you as a surrogate. Sacred cow, right? Every man and woman have the right to have their own child whatever it takes, right? Why, because we are more valuable than the beasts of the field who naturally have the same condition, and anyway we have the tech to do it so what’s the problem?
The problem is that nature never gets a say. It tries to rebalance our numbers to levels it can sustain all the time, and we just keep giving it the finger. Disease? No problem. Famine? No problem. Floods? No problem. Infertility? No problem. Soil not producing enough human/livestock feed? Industrial Agro, no problem. Global warming? Bigger A/C units and houseboats, no problem. We think of everything as a problem to solve except us!
“We cultivated our land, but in a way different from the white man. We endeavoured to live with the land; they seemed to live off it. I was taught to preserve, never to destroy.”
– Australian Aboriginal – Tom Dystra
If our only purpose was to survive using only what the world could sustainably and naturally provide, we would not allow our population to to burgeon. It simply wouldn’t make any sense for our survival, or the survival of the other species that share this world. Look at the fuss we made about a few people who died during the COVID pandemic. Yeah, I said it! As I write, 5.98 million people have died of COVID. That’s 0.07% of the world population (7.8Bn and rising), and the vast majority of those people were over the age of 75! Shit, it’s not even one city’s worth of people. A normal and sane thought process would say “ahh, poor Doris/Jim, but s/he did have a good innings”. Instead, we were beating our breasts and going on and on about how unsafe care homes were, when we should have been taking them on daily outings to Val Doonican concerts in the COVID wards!
Too soon? Put it in the comments section.
If we were sane, every school in the world should have at least half their teaching staff come from the indigenous peoples of the world. That would be the only qualification they needed. The other half should only be allowed to teach knitting (with sustainably sourced wool). I accept that there aren’t enough Native Americans, Mauri or Aboriginals etc. to go round because we killed most of them, but if for the sake of argument we could, they would teach our children that living wisely is consistent with the certain knowledge that no one thing in the universe has greater value than any other thing because everything in the universe is exactly the same as everything else. Everything is ultimately energy and it simply moves from store to store (matter). They would teach them that as sentient and spiritual beings, we carry more responsibility for recognising and respecting that value in everything, not less.
If we were sane, only indigenous people could stand for public office. If you live somewhere where you have already wiped out the indigenous people, then you would have to vote for one that lives somewhere else. As our leaders, they would ensure that every decision taken took into account the impact on our world.
Apart from the practical problem of most indigenous people being dead depriving us of the teachers and leaders we really need, we also have the lightbulb problem.
We can no sooner go back and start from a new set of values, than we can uninvent the light bulb. It’s like someone pointing at a yellow cup and saying “that cup is red”. Nothing will convince you that the cup is red when you can see it is yellow. Our value system and beliefs are so deeply entrenched that they cannot be unbelieved. They can only die out. We have set our avaricious foot on a trail that has a clear and unambiguous destination and all the tree hugging in the world will not stop us from getting there. We are collectively consumed with consumption, engorged by our bottomless appetites (ever been to an “All you can eat” buffet in the US?), and yet more individually isolated and lonely than ever before, as Globalisation lays waste small communities in favour of anonymous city life. At the same time, we’re all so badly trying to be woke about some things that we have forgotten that we are deeply and artificially asleep to the single central truth; everything has equal value to everything else. If we woke to that simple truth, then no other wokeness would be needed. Bias and prejudice and intolerance cannot stand up in water that deep.
“It’s impossible to awaken a man who is pretending to be asleep.”
Navajo Proverb
I wrote a blog a while ago called Shouldn’t we Weaponise Babies? because I believed that the root cause to all of our problems today is the sheer number of humans that are consuming resources on our world. The basic concept behind that blog was to rapidly and radically reduce the world’s population to preserve the ecosystem required for high biodiversity on earth. I’d like to update that belief a little because it occurs to me that massive population reduction alone, albeit still very much needed, will not do the trick.
I seem to recall that I proposed a reduction from 7.8Bn people to say 500m people because at that level, provided that we never allow the global birth rate to grow above the replacement rate (2.1 kids per female), our level of consumption would be so low that the damage we have done could be healed naturally. I’d like to revise the reduction in population to 370m people, which just happens to be the total global population of all remaining indigenous peoples.
“That is a very spooky coincidence Creasy!”
Isn’t it?
Oh no….
I think I proposed that today’s children should be persuaded to not have children or to only allow 1 in 2 girls to have babies or something. So, I’ve changed my mind on that too. I don’t think that our selection of who can reproduce and who cannot should be random any more. We should limit reproduction to indigenous peoples only. What good is it to reduce the population if the people left teach those children the same values we carry around today. No, no, no, no, no! That won’t do at all. We have to scrape those values from the human consciousness like a burned lasagne from a baking dish that wasn’t stacked properly and therefore never made it into the dishwasher.
By only having indigenous people procreate, we can ensure that their children go to schools that only have indigenous children and indigenous teachers. To make sure that they don’t become infected by our values, we can create reservations in the cities for everyone else, where they can live out their lives. In 100 years they, and their values, will have all died out and the cities can be left to entropy to sort out. During that 100 years we should provide these people with every luxury their hearts may, and will, desire so they don’t feel like, well, like the indigenous people did when they were sent to a shithole reservation. Most importantly it might stop them from trying to escape or go to the countryside.
All other land should be returned to nature immediately and shared by the indigenous peoples of the world. We can’t give it back to them because their own system of values meant they never owned it in the first place.
Rewrite the 10 commandments as well, the one’s we have are pretty useless and nobody follows them, and they just keep going on and on about not committing adultery or not coveting they neighbours wife or not coveting they neighbours house which is fundamentally the same thing. If you ask me, the bloke who wrote the commandments is basically telling a crowd of sex starved other blokes, who have been wandering about for 40 years in a desert that takes a couple of weeks to walk across, not to shag his missus.
Our new commandments might look something like…
In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next 7 generations (Iroquois Proverb)
Regard Heaven as your father, Earth as your Mother and all things as your Brothers and Sisters (Native American Proverb)
Remain among the clumps of grass and do not elevate yourself (Hawaiian Proverb)
Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children (Native American Proverb)
Take only what you need and leave the land as you found it (Arapaho Proverb)
Pray to understand what man has forgotten (Lumbee Proverb)
The love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome (Santee (Dakota, Sioux) Proverb)
Only have 2 children. If one dies adopt another, or buy a dog….same thing. (Creasy)
Sit still on this high rock, look closely and you can see the pub from here (Aboriginal Proverb)
Don’t go near anything alive in Australia because it will bloody kill ya’ mate (Aboriginal Proverb)
These few simple measures, self evident and obvious, set the stage for a global renewal, not just of the land, but a healing of the collective mind. We have been poisoned but the poison is sweet and while the sweetness hides it’s fatal toxin, fatal it will be.
All but a few have forgotten the central truth of being, but it is still lying there in the pockets of those few, polished by soft hands and passed secretly from old pockets to new pockets, as they patiently wait for us to finish our feeding and move on like a great heard of bison, knowing that the wide trail of broken grass we leave behind will grow again as soon as we have gone.
If we want the best of humanity to go on, then the rest of us must “go quietly into the night”, so that the others can recommence their guardianship of this very special island in the cosmos.
“But how do 370m peacefully minded people force 7.4Bn people who don’t mind massacring all the peacefully minded people because it happens to be Tuesday and that’s when we do all our killin’ and butcherin’, to stay in the reservation Creasy?”
Ah! a crease in the Creasy solution. A crinkle in the Christmas wrapping paper of our Global gift. To a lesser man your observation might pose an insurmountable obstacle; a mountain range blocking our route to Nirvana (not the band). A chasm so deep and so wide that you could only fill it with the putrid dead corpses of Avarus Humanitas! And that, my little piranha, is why I have hatched PLAN B!
Through countless births in the cycle of existence I have run, not finding although seeking the builder of this house; and again and again, I faced the suffering of new birth. Oh housebuilder! Now you are seen.
You shall not build a house again for me. All your beams are broken, the ridgepole is shattered. The mind has become freed from conditioning: the end of craving has been reached.
Siddhārtha Gautama
Do you remember when you first took on the responsibility of owning a house? Do you remember how it felt when you signed those mortgage papers and someone handed you the keys and it was all yours? Not yet a home; somehow an empty walled echoey shell of a place, lacking furniture and warmth and connection, but great acoustics if you like to sing. So full of not-yet realised potential, so naked of everything else.
I remember feeling both exhilarated that I had reached such a “grown-up” milestone in my life, and at the same time horrified by the commitment and “end-of-youth” implications of settling down in this place. It wasn’t even a house. It was a third-floor, 3 three-bedroom flat in Hampstead, London. No garden, a kitchen you could just about swing a cat in (and I would have if one of those cold-hearted buggers had ever made it into the kitchen), and a living room with pitched ceilings and a wooden beam that managed to give the place a little touch of character.
“You oughta be an estate agent Creasy wiv all dem fancy descriptions of rooves and beams and whatnot!”
From that moment on, for most of us, the trajectory of our lives can be pretty accurately mapped.
“Bloody Hell Creasy, that’s a bit bleak and cynical isn’t it?”
Is it?
Is it though?
I don’t think so. Not really. Maybe a bit. I may be working out some personal issues here, but the reality is that every adult in the western world spends their days churning away at the same old shit like a lab rat on an exercise wheel, and why?
Another day another dollar….
“You want the truth?”
“I think I’m entitled to the truth!”
“You can’t handle the truth! Son we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be paid for by people with jobs. Whose gonna do it, you? You, eight-year-old life-sucking kid? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for me having to work all the time and you curse the crappy presents you get at Christmas. You have the luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that my job while tragic, probably pays the mortgage; and my existence while grotesque, and incomprehensible, to you, pays the mortgage. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wheel, you need me on that wheel! We use words like hard work, long hours, absent parent. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent paying the mortgage, you use them as a punchline. I have neither the time, nor the inclination to explain myself, to a child who rises and sleeps, under the blanket of the very house that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I’d rather you just said ‘thank you’, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you get a job and help pay the mortgage. Either way, I don’t give a damn, what you think you are entitled to!”
A Few Good Men
“And that’s the truth, man! That’s the truth. Can you handle it? It’s just a question between friends, you know? Oh, and when they call you ‘shrimp,’ I’m the one who defends you!”
Jerry Maguire
Oh yeah baby!
Where was I? Oh yeah, houses. The greatest symbol of “success and security” there is barring a Sunseeker 131 or a G550 (look ’em up). Also, the best investment you’ll ever make over a 25 year period. The downside? You’ll be almost dead before you can realise and enjoy the fruits of your investment, but at least you can leave it to your kids so they can unwittingly take over your wheel by getting on the housing ladder.
“But it’s always been like that hasn’t it Creasy? Ever since Humans have been around?”
No, it hasn’t always been like that and in some places, it still isn’t. I was having a busy day watching YouTube the other day and came across a video on a channel called Fearless & Far called “Asking Hunter-Gatherers Life’s Toughest Questions”.
I fuckin’ hate Baboons…
In this video, the commentator introduces a Tribe of hunter-gatherers called the Hadzabe in Tanzania. There are only 1500 Hadzabe people left and their numbers are declining. Their way of life may only survive a few more generations. When asked what the most important thing in life was, this wizened badass of a Hadzabe called Sokolo, thought for about three seconds and said, “Meat, Honey, Corn Porridge” and then he added “hunting Baboons, Antelopes and Zebra”. Personally, I thought this was a bit redundant given the whole Meat is the most important thing, but I’m probably nitpicking. At this point, one bright young chap interjected that Water was pretty important too. “Quite right” replied the badass (or words to that effect). I might have added shelter to that list but I think Sokolo was a bit of a foodie who really didn’t get on with Baboons.
Now whilst I can neither Hunt nor Gather or spear a Baboon to literally save my life, there was something compelling about Sokolo’s simple assessment of what is truly important in life. I also found myself reflecting on the fact that over the years I had often found myself trying to figure out what mattered, but unlike Sokolo, whose worldview is ultimately positive despite the carnage he wreaks in the Baboon community, I have always considered what matters in the context of worst-case scenarios. A series of “What-ifs” if you will, that ultimately end up with me being homeless and destitute. What would I do? How would I survive? Where would I live?
I’m quite fond of the idea of living under a bridge. It strikes me as the sort of place that homeless people might live under. Natural shelter from the elements but not so great in an earthquake. Not much going on. Easy to build a cozy cardboard shelter against one of the concrete stanchions and very convenient if for any reason I wanted to get to the other side of whatever it was the bridge was bridging. I think I would try to find a bridge in a sunny place.
“Don’t Trolls live under bridges Creasy?”
Only the one’s where Billy Goats called Gruff cross.
As to what I would do?
“You really thinking about quittin’?”
“The Life?
“Yeah”
“Mos’ definitely”
“Ah fuck. Wachu gonna do then”
“Well, That’s what I’ve been sitting here contemplating. First, I’m gonna deliver this case to Marsellus. Then, basically, I’m gonna walk the earth.”
“Whachu you mean, walk the earth?”
“You know, like Caine in “KUNG FU.” Just walk from town to town, meet people, get in adventures.”
Pulp Fiction
Here, fishy fishy…
There’s nothing written that says I have to stay under the same bridge. When I live under a city bridge, I’d wander about looking for coins on the floor, or lie on the ground looking for coins under vending machines. Apparently, this strategy fed my son throughout his University days. If anyone came in he would exclaim “I just dropped a quid under here” to hide his shame. If I moved to a bridge that was more suburban or rural, I might try my hand at a bit of hunting and fishing in the fields and rivers (I have watched as much Bear Grylls as the next man).
When you take all this into account, I calculate that I could probably survive on £1 a day. £1 will buy you a loaf of bread and water is free (there are loads of places you can get fresh water for free if you think about it). This is reassuring. Not because I am worried that I might suddenly be skint and homeless, but because if I wanted to be skint and homeless, I know I don’t need all of the things that I have been conditioned to “need” to survive. More interesting, was my emotional response to the idea of living that way. It made me feel happy with a big dash of precognitive relief. Why relief though? Where does that come from? It’s in the letting go. Just the process of thinking about this simpler “being” creates a sense of being in that state already. Stress falls away like chainmail after the siege. The need to compete and win and show that I have won, a need no more.
“That’s just nutso Creasy! Who would want to be skint and homeless and living under a bridge?”
It depends on how you define “skint” and how you define “homeless”.
I fuckin’ hate Sokolo…
I suspect the Hadzabe, by our standards are proper skint, but money has no purpose or meaning in their society. Now dead Baboons? Well, it goes without saying that a man with 10 dead Baboons is way wealthier than a man with say, 9 dead Baboons? All joking aside (although Sokolo doesn’t strike me as a man who jokes about Baboons), their currency would be skillsets, which when used in co-operation enable a very simple, uncomplicated, unfettered and sustainable way of life within a small and very related community. If you can hunt, great! If you can collect berries, fantastic! If you can tell stories, well who doesn’t love a good story? An individual’s worth would be less than the collective’s but a function of how many berries you could gather, how many songs you could sing and how many Baboons you could hit with a brick.
As for being homeless, how many times have you heard the phrase “Home is where the heart is”. How do you find a home in such an anonymous and heartless society? Our homeless people are not homeless because they don’t have a house, but because they can’t find their individual worth in the kind of society we have built and because kin are far away.
“Creasy, surely you can see the good in our society too though? what about the homeless shelters or the soup kitchens or the many charities that help people in need?”
When did you last go and work in a soup kitchen? When did you last offer one of your spare rooms to a homeless person or refugee? When did I? Do you know anyone who has? Sure, we’ve all dropped a dime in a charity bucket or make a donation every month to our “favourite” charity, but when did you actually directly do something for someone who is not actually related to you?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticising. Really I’m not. After all, rB > C, right?
“Wassat? Say what now? Hmm?”
C’mon, you know rB > C, right? Hamilton’s equation for the evolutionary development of an altruism gene, right?
Well, there you are then. No need to explain. It’s all there in rB > C.
“No, I like totally get it Creasy, but maybe you need to clarify a bit for the others?”
Ok fine. Here is a useful wee article by Jonah Lehrer that will get everyone up to speed.
By way of summarising the article, it wasn’t really Hamilton it was this bloke called Charles Darwin. Darwin had a problem. He had described Natural Selection, or Evolution, as a cruel mistress who ruthlessly removed the weakest links in an evolutionary chain. His whole theory depended on the notion that one specimen of a species will selfishly seek to propagate its genetic code to the detriment of all others. How could altruism, therefore, exist; a selfless act of generosity from one specimen to another? The fact of the matter was that altruism was observable everywhere in the natural world across a broad swathe of species. Didn’t that stick a dagger into the heart of Darwin’s theory?
To a lesser man, maybe. Darwin simply tagged this as a paradox and moved on. Evolutionary scientists spent the next century or so trying to figure out this paradox until a pissed up chap called J. B. S. Haldane (a biologist), who when asked in a pub how far he would go to save the life of another, replied
“I would jump into a river to save two brothers, but not one, or to save eight cousins but not seven”
William D Hamilton
Later, and because Haldane never tried to develop the proof of his drunken theory, another chap called William Hamilton, a young graduate student of UCL, spent years doing the mathematics and in 1964 came up with rB > C . Lehrer explains:
“In other words, genes for altruism could evolve if the benefit (B) of an action exceeded the cost (C) to the individual once relatedness (r) was taken into account. The equation confirmed the truth of Haldane’s joke: once kinship was part of the calculation, altruism could be easily explained in genetic terms.
This basically says that if you are related to me by blood, the action I will take to save your life will be directly proportional to the amount of my genetic material you have. The closer the genetic tie, the more action you can expect. Indeed, by not acting to protect you, I would be working against my most primal need to propagate my genetic code to the next generation.
Raise your hands for the Museum trip
This proof has been widely accepted in the Evolutionary Science community (now that’s a club I want to join!), as the origin of altruism, not only in humans but in other species too. It’s not kindliness or generosity, it’s simply survival of the fittest in its purest form.
No wonder then that in small tribal communities typified by the Hadzabe, we see high levels of altruism within the tribe where many families are related by blood. Collective hunting and farming and gathering make complete sense in this context. Equally, no wonder that we did nothing to arrest the genocide in Rwanda. Biologically, we didn’t and don’t give a shit, especially as there were no economic benefits for us intervening. Put another way, my Dad didn’t fight in WWII to save the Jews from the holocaust, but to prevent Gerry from marching up Whitehall and threatening the life of uncle Bernie.
I’m a symbol of success now?
The more distant the genetic relationship, the less we care. It’s our nature. It doesn’t make us bad people. It’s biology. In our globalised society where families disperse to achieve economic improvement, we have built societal structures that provide no reason to be altruistic to one another, and every reason to not give a shit about, or even talk to, our next floor neighbour in London. Altruism in this context is basically Virtue Signalling. It’s the act or pretence of showing generosity, typically through the banking system, in order to promote our social standing. A social standing that is further enhanced by increasingly extravagant shows of wealth; houses, dogs, cars, boats and planes. A social standing intended to attract a mate rather than protect the tribe. A Peacock society.
Industrialisation destroyed our rural way of life and led to urbanisation. Urbanisation dismantled the village where altruism thrived in the extended family and replaced it with the nuclear family unit and very low levels of altruism. Personal wealth and competition have replaced community sustainability and cooperation. Philanthropy pretends to be altruism, but is the domain of the super-rich and therefore a platform upon which to display wealth no matter how good the underlying intention. Globalisation, is this societal shift to the 10th power.
Conclusion?
It cannot sustain. It cannot survive. Not because I say so, but because evolutionary science is not simply saying that it’s a surprise that the altruism gene exists, but that without the action the altruism gene enables toward closely related specimens, the mechanics of evolution will not work at all, and we all become the weakest link in the chain.
Oh, and if you are wondering why you can’t stop yourself from buying that pre-wrapped-in-plastic bunch of bananas to help save the world, it’s because biologically you, like me, don’t give a shit about either the bananas or the environment and it seems biology often wins out over intellectual reason. I too buy the wrapped bananas because the supermarket app I use as I shop can’t handle unwrapped produce. I could handle it when I go to checkout, but then I would be wasting three minutes of my time that I don’t use for anything else whatsoever, weighing and bagging my unwrapped produce. So whilst intellectually I understand that the plastic will either end up in a landfill for the next 1000 years or the ocean, where it will strangle a baby seal, biologically I don’t give a shit. If I thought for one second that the plastic bag would suffocate someone in my family (including Bob), I would stop. No matter how much I try to rationally link the macro effect on the environment back to my local micro context, my biology and my societal conditioning won’t let me and so every now and again, when I’m not using the app, I buy the loose bananas and the rest of the time I don’t.
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness”
Martin Luther King Jr
Martin is of course spot on. Every man, woman and child must choose, and every day we do. Every day we choose the darkness of destructive selfishness. It’s not that we are all bad people, it’s that we are too many people. We’d like to think that we are more than the sum of our biology but the evidence says differently. When you create distance between members of a broad but genetically close family unit, altruism (acting for the benefit of others) is diluted and the inverse (acting for the benefit of oneself ) gains sway.
When there were only a couple of million of us wandering around hunting and gathering, our lack of give-a-shittedness didn’t matter because a) our way of life worked in harmony with our environment b) we were naturally culled by nature via climate, disease or predation and so c) there were too few of us to make a material difference on a global scale.
Other species don’t give a shit either, but they have not industrialised, urbanised or globalised. Where they are too many it’s because we have bred them to eat, and where they are too few it’s because we have destroyed their habitats. All species, in a natural setting will display altruism to protect their genetic progression. We don’t, because too many of us aren’t in our natural setting. Humans are tribal. The vast majority of our history on this planet (about 5 milliion years or 200,000 years of “modern” man) was spent living and working in small tribes. For the past 200 hundred years we have simply dispensed with that way of life in favour of a way of life that is purportedly better but which is evidently not. We have tried to mimick the concept of tribe in companies, markets, and societal structures and have failed miserably. We have encouraged individual security over tribal or genetic security and in so doing sacrificed all that is at the core of who we are.
And that’s why if we don’t let go of the way we have chosen to live, sell our houses, go live under a bridge and hunt Baboons, we are all going to die!
Ok, so I’m not talking about strapping little rucksacks on their backs stuffed full of C4 and pushing them out onto Oxford Street in their strollers, or even attaching them to nuclear bombs in their liddle romper suits like the cowboy out of Dr Strangelove. No, I’m just talking about not having any. Well, not me exactly, but my kids definitely shouldn’t have any kids.
My proposition is conceptually
simple in that it breaks the paradigm that the world’s human population should
continue to grow, on the grounds that this is no longer ecologically or morally
sustainable. Instead, it proposes that the
human population of earth be radically and rapidly reduced to preserve the
ecosystem required for high biodiversity on earth.
“Impossible!”, you cry.
“Bollocks” I retort!
Whilst this might seem dismissive, I choose my word carefully. I don’t say that this endeavour comes without its own unique set of challenges, but many a challenging enterprise has been undertaken with far worse odds of success than this one. I give you Neil Armstrong walking on the moon for example. Most of the technology necessary to pull off that “Giant leap for mankind” didn’t even exist when the project began, yet in 10 short years, there he was hopping down the ladder and uttering his immortal words.
We can make amazing things happen. All I’m suggesting, is that our kids choose to stop having babies. Not because we try and force them too (‘cos we know how that will go), but because they decide that having babies is immoral and toxic. Oh, and we have to let old and sick people die when they are supposed to. Did I mention that? I meant to mention that.
And I might have
been exaggerating. We can’t stop having babies altogether because we’d all die
out and there would be no more humans………
We just have to have far fewer children
than the current global fertility rate of 2.5 kids per female, and very arguably
far fewer than the current global replacement rate of 2.1 children per female.
At the Replacement Rate, population stabilises, wherever it happens to be, after a couple of generations. If we want to make it fall, we have to have fewer than 2.1 kids per female. Look what happens opposite when you reduce it from 2.1 to just 1.6 kids per female (bottom blue dashed line). But that only gets us back to where we are now by 2100, and look at how well that’s going.
The drop needs to be extreme both
in terms of numbers and timeframes. I’m going to run 0.5 kids per female up the
flagpole and see who salutes it. At this level, the population should drop like
a stone and pretty quick. Hell, the
population would get so low it would be hard for a chap to find a dame to go a
courtin’ with.
“WHY WOULD YOU WANT SUCH A THING? MY LITTLE JOHNNY’S NOT GOING TO ‘AVE NO BRUVVERS OR SISTERS”, you ask.
Really good question everyone. I was hoping you’d ask. Firstly Little Johnny is going to have to learn to sit quietly in the corner and play with his imaginary friend, and secondly, in the immortal words of Agent Smith…
“I’d like to share a
revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to
classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every
mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the
surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you
multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way
you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this
planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human
beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague…..”
Epic quote from
“The Matrix”
Ok, Steady on Smith old boy. No need to get carried away. Can’t just go on and on about how humans are all just a bunch of plagues and bandying the “C” word about, you’ll hurt someone’s feelings!
Still, you really don’t need to
be a rocket scientist, or Agent Smith, to work out that something whacky and
unwelcome and uncomfortable is happening with us. You know that feeling you get
every time you hear what the population is, and you just tuck it away because
nothing can be done about it, it just is?
Quite
early in my life I observed something. When something went wrong, more often
than not, I wasn’t taken completely by surprise. I had an inkling. Sometimes
way before the thing went wrong. The thing went wrong not because I didn’t
know, but because I did, and didn’t do anything to stop it. I warranty each of
you have experienced this in your lives. It’s called intuition. It’s not
necessarily borne out of facts or knowledge. A confluence of events, rumours,
insights, experience and intellect add up to a “feeling in my water” that
something’s not quite right. I decided, after a number of these inklings turned
out to be correct, that I would consciously act on all future inklings to confirm
or invalidate the thing I thought might go wrong before it went wrong. As a
result, I became A
MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE!!
Now is the time for everyone to listen to that little voice at the back of our mind. Face into the discomfort of its message. Not wait for the proof, but act because in acting, nothing gets worse and things can only get better. There is no downside to acting now.
There are a few obstacles though. Like the fact that we don’t really recognise that there is a burning raft. The various religious doctrines that bang on about going forth and procreating and that terminations and birth control are a sin. The government incentives which encourage our youth to have kids because we need more rats to run around on industrial wheels to keep stoking up our economies.
We should not underestimate the sheer number of untrusting stakeholders we would need to convince either (our kids). 26% of the worlds population is below the age of 15. Roughly half of these kids are female. Soooo, 26% of 7.7Bn divided by 2 multiplied by the square of the hipppopotomoose plus 3 minus 10 and you get about 1bn girls. Of these we have to convince 1 in every 2 girls not to have a baby. So that would be x over y times by E=MC2 divided by 52….ch-ching =500m girls in our target population.
Our biggest challenge though, is our unwillingness to let go of this way of life. That scrabble for “success” whatever that means. We’ve constructed a society where all the needles need to be pointing up or somebody is getting shit-canned. Revenues, profits, quality of life, life expectancy, mo’ money, mo’ cars, mo’ cribs, mo’ likes, mo’ social standing, Global macroeconomic indicators, and on and on and on. But we’ve got to keep feeding that machine or it all stops and its food is us. Reducing the population by the amount I am suggesting, means we have to let it all go. Let it all stop. And as my old gran would say, that’ll scare the b’jaysus out of us.
But do we really have such a big problem that we need such a drastic solution? Well let’s take a look and see.
I think Smith’s analysis is very pertinent to this discourse. And accurate. Earth is in fact a host. A living breathing organism which just like us, is populated by many other organisms. It can also catch a cold just like us. About 200,000 years ago, the Earth caught such a cold when one species emerged that turned out to be really good at solving problems (that’s us). Especially problems related to its own survival.
So, let’s assume for the moment that Agent Smith has nailed it and we can be likened to a virus or a plague on the Earth. There are only two ways to stop a virus from spreading before it kills its host. You can kill it, or you can suppress it. Honestly, I’m open to either solution, but I’ve been told “You can’t just go about eradicating humanity”, so let’s stick a pin in that for a mo’ and take a look at suppression.
Remember HIV and how scary that was? If you got it, you were a goner, and not in a nice way, because it couldn’t be suppressed. Today millions of people who are HIV+ will live out full and active lives until they are grey and old. They can do this because we made two things happen. The invention of highly accurate, very fast, point-of-care screening technology, and the development of highly effective antiretroviral therapy.
We can now detect the virus much faster (from ~3 weeks down to minutes). In fact the test results are delivered while the patient is waiting. If positive, antiretroviral drugs are issued on the spot before the host goes back into the community. The patient, knowing that they are HIV+, alters his/her behaviours and so becomes a natural brake on the spread of the infection to others.
The antiretroviral therapy controls the viral load in the patient. It’s still there, but the therapy prevents the virus from reproducing, and the amount of virus in the blood reduces to undetectable levels in the host. At this point it becomes very difficult, almost impossible, to transmit to others, and poses little or no threat to the host. The host has a normal life with a normal life expectancy.
If we carry this analogy on, there are two ways to suppress human population. Voluntarily or involuntarily. The voluntary way is the rapid and radical reduction of the human population, by girls and women of child bearing age choosing to reduce the birth rate to 0.5 kids per female. One baby for every two females on the planet until we reach our target population of say 500m to 1bn people and then to never exceed the replacement rate.
The involuntary way is not what you might be thinking. I’m not talking about making human laws to limit the number of children born. That didn’t work out so well in China. And in any case making laws is a voluntary act of the virus.
When we discuss our relationship with the Earth these days, we tend to talk about it in terms of humans “destroying the planet”. This is a function of our innate and ever-present sense of self-importance. All things being equal, and subject to the arrival of some cataclysmic event, Earth and life on Earth isn’t going anywhere for at least a couple of billion years when the great march of entropy, towards which everything in the universe tends, catches up, as our star begins its death rattle.
Today, we are making a big fuss about CO2 levels hitting 410 parts per million (ppm) because it is double the pre-industrial average. Few would argue that human activity isn’t responsible, at least in significant part, for that increase. In the distant past however, we had much more CO2 in the atmosphere and had an abundance of diverse life on the planet. When the dinosaurs were stomping around 65-250 million years ago, it was about 2000 ppm. Go back 500-600 million years and it was more like 5000 ppm. Life on earth began 3.5bn years ago! Planet warming hasn’t killed off all life forms in the past and there is no reason to assume that at the sorts of levels we are talking about (1-2 degrees C), it will in the future. We can thank Darwin and his Origin of the Species for that. Life will adapt, but some won’t, and those organisms that don’t will become extinct. This is the involuntary option.
So, the answer to the question “Is there really a problem?” is yes. But it’s not that we are destroying the Earth; the Earth is destroying us.
Best case, human generated
greenhouse gases (including from the animals we eat), cause the Earth to warm and
act as an antiretroviral on humankind, eradicating most, but leaving a few
alive, at levels which no longer pose a threat to the ecosystem. Worst case, Earth
is getting a high fever. It’s acting like any other infected organism and
protecting itself from us. Bad news? We are nowhere near as lethal as HIV once
was. We are a common cold, not even a bad bout of the flu. The worst thing
about us is our presence and the scars we leave on the landscape. The climate
gets warmer and wetter globally, the wind will blow, and the seas will heave,
and the Earth, no matter how hardy we think we are, will blow out our candle
with the same ease as my daughter on her 4th birthday. The Earth,
over time, will feel better. Will be a better place. Its wounds will heal. New
forests will grow. The Coral will return. New, better adapted, species will emerge
and all signs that we were once here will be covered over. And we won’t be here to see any of it because smart
as we are, we were not smart enough to survive.
What’s the worst part about this dystopian future for you? For me, it’s that we won’t be here to see the rebirth of Earth’s natural beauty. What it will look like without the scar of humanity on its face. Seeing a world unbound by cities and strip malls and roads and factories and fences. A virgin Earth. An Earth without our ugliness. I’d like to see that. I’m saddened by the fact that I won’t. I’d like someone to see it though. Just a few. Just enough that the world doesn’t know they are there. Hidden away. Quiet. Returned to the village. A whisper of humanity. A different humanity. That best part of humanity that is able to find wonder in a single drop of rain and in the same breath look up at the stars and imagine what is there. Eight billion people can never be in “equilibrium” or harmony with the Earth, but maybe just a few can?
And if not?
“All those moments will be
lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
