I struggle to strike a balance between certainty and circumspection. Our culture has a tendency to favor certainty, while one of my favorite and frequent fall-backs—seldom wrong—is: “we don’t know.” Certainty is often the hobgoblin of decontextualized, rigid, (only) logical thinking: an artificial by-product of incomplete mental models. That said, I feel that I can do more than throw up my hands on every issue. I can be fairly certain that I will never perform a standing jump to the moon or breathe underwater (without apparatus) like I often do in dreams.
Thus, I write this post in full appreciation of the red flag around certainty. Yet, in full consideration, I can indeed identify some elements of reality about which I can be fairly certain—to a reasonable degree. At the very least, these things would appear to be consistent with a robust account of how the world appears to work.
I’ll skip an exhaustive list of certainties, and stick with points that have some bearing on the meta-crisis of modernity. But for illustration that certainty is not misplaced, I think most would agree that we can function under certainty that in the next billion years, say, gravity won’t turn off; the sun will continue to shine; Earth will keep rotating to produce the familiar day/night pattern; if I pound my fist on the table my hand won’t sail through it, etc. We are justified in “taking these to the bank.” The items below are not all as completely iron-clad, but are helpful in forming a basis. I have asked myself for each one: “could I be convinced otherwise?” Generally the answer is “yes, I suppose,” to varying degrees, but some would be a tough pull, requiring solid evidence. Most of the content is a repackaging of points I have expressed before, but I hope in a useful, consolidated form.
So let’s get to it: here are things I am reasonably (functionally) certain about:
Universal Certainty
We live in a physical universe manifesting as an external reality—independent of animal thought or emotions (sentience). Real atoms, stars, and galaxies were here first.
The small cast of characters (particles) and rich set of interactions (forces) elucidated by physics appears to be all that is required to permit a staggering array of emergent complexity, including self-replicating life as one of the more amazing outcomes. Okay, this one is more a matter of belief than certainty, motivated by parsimony (one can’t disprove any number of arbitrarily indulgent assertions to the contrary). But I am comfortable accepting this brain-busting and awe-inspiring version of reality, free of tempting mental short-cuts. It’s a sort-of “tough love” stance that does not privilege humans, which feels like the enormous universe an astrophysicist witnesses. In any case, I thought I should put it out as one of my baseline assumptions.
A run-of-the-mill star (our sun) hosting a planetary family set up life on at least one planet in our galaxy, where conditions were forgiving enough to foster an explosion of biodiversity.
Human Certainties
Humans are almost entirely heritage: evolution sorted out the thorniest problems of how to live over billions of years, from which our organism borrowed liberally—although availing itself of only a small sampling of the full suite of available tricks pioneered by life.
A naked human (or group of humans, really), given no technological toys, can survive for a natural (seven-decade-ish) lifetime on some parts of Earth’s surface, but nowhere else in the solar system and perhaps even the galaxy. We humans belong firmly to Earth, as one small part of en evolved community of life.
Humans have been on Earth in some form for something like 2.5–3 million years.
Homo Sapiens has been on the planet for about 10% of that time, and anatomically modern humans for the last 5% of the human era (about 150,000 years).
The use of fire was part of the human story well before Homo Sapiens’ arrival, perhaps for the last 1.5–2 million years.
For those millions of years, humans did not cause a sixth mass extinction, but lived close to their original ecological context as advanced, observant, contemplative animals in what we call hunter-gatherer mode (or variants thereof as allowed by regional biophysical constraints).
Megafauna extinctions accompanied the migration of Homo Sapiens out of Africa, where the rapidity of migration (compared to evolutionary timescales) was too fast for megafauna to adapt—as opposed to the numerous surviving megafauna in Africa, which—very importantly—co-evolved with humans over millions of years. But the rate of wild biomass loss was orders-of-magnitude slower than what we witness today, and seems to have run its course before recently being re-invigorated with a vengeance to sixth-mass-extinction proportions. Incidentally, among the megafauna that Homo Sapiens likely bears some responsibility for eliminating are other human species like Neanderthals, Denisovans, and possibly Homo floresiensis.
About 10,000 years ago—only about 3.5% of Homo Sapiens’ tenure on Earth (and 0.35% of human tenure)—the climate entered an unusually stable period, which likely played a role in multiple instances of agriculture springing up. Prior to this, horticulture had been practiced around the world, but the agricultural revolution marked a new level of intensity in control over land, plants, animals, and other humans.
Given its short run on the planet—short even for our genus or species—we cannot call agriculture a “normal” and sufficiently-tested mode of life on this planet. We cannot, therefore, justify any confidence in its longevity. A mountain of evidence suggests that it has had unsustainability written all over it from the start (we’ll touch on this again in a bit).
Me and My Brain
I am certain that I will die, and I believe I will be well-and-truly dead for eternity. I don’t personally buy into notions that any sensation of “being me” continues after my neurons stop firing—much like what happens under general anesthesia (I’ve experienced this form of temporary brain death twice as a young adult: instantaneous hours-long jumps over nothing). I actually find comfort in this finality: nothing is permanent. Sure, my life can leave material imprints for a time, including imprints in the form of neural arrangements in others’ brains, and that’s more than enough.
I am certain that as long as I live, I will do so as an animal on Earth, wholly dependent on oxygen, water, carbon, nitrogen, and a handful of other nutrients in common circulation within ecological communities. Doing my part in that circulation effort, I will continue to breathe, drink, eat, pee, and poop, as all animals do. When I die, my atoms will be available for other life to recycle (no point sealing my body up in impenetrable denial).
The human brain—while sporting capabilities that are in some respects a cut above those of other animals—is simply a complex, evolved meat-organ that has obvious built-in limitations in every respect. Consequently, the universe can’t fit inside it, nor can the full context of an ecological community-of-life and all its longstanding interdependent relationships. Our mental models are therefore necessarily context-poor to an unappreciated extreme: short-cuts that are incapable of containing the whole story, calling for humility.
Modernity’s Certain Demise
Modernity is an unusual (new) mode on the planet, not yet having been subjected to evolution’s slow judgment.
Modernity uses non-ecological materials—dredged from the depths—that are not part of the circulation schemes employed by the community of life.
Modernity is not rooted in ecological relationship, but is more an expression of ecologically-disconnected human mental constructs. It does not “tuck into” myriad reciprocal ecological arrangements vetted by evolution and the patience of deep time to work in relation to the larger community of life. While nothing is unnatural (everything in the universe is part of the universe), not all things are integrated into longstanding relationships. Cancer or all-out nuclear war, for instance, are “natural” possibilities, but not compatible, integral parts of life.
Modernity would cease to exist without humans (or functional equivalent).
Humans cannot persist without a healthy ecological foundation, as no complex organism stands alone on the planet. Even if our brains are not up to the task of appreciating all the connections that relate to quality of air, water, nutrients, soils, etc., these things are still vitally important. In other words, we would be tragically foolish to imagine living without insects, plankton, microbes, fish, birds, etc., and the uncountable and unknowable interrelationships between them all.
Therefore, modernity cannot persist without ecological health.
But therein lies the rub, because modernity is completely reliant on ecologically erosive practices and on non-renewable materials whose extraction is not only in limited supply but damaging to the very ecological health it ultimately relies upon for its existence. The community of life cannot help to recycle modernity’s weird materials. As such, modernity is not integrated into reciprocal relationships with the community of life, and essentially can’t be compatible (they have different material “languages”). In other words, modernity actively and necessarily undermines its own essential foundation, setting up its own failure.
Even agriculture as practiced 5–10,000 years ago causes essentially permanent damage to land and soils over thousand-year timescales (down to decades using modern methods), so that we have no viable plan for how we would magically keep agriculture going over timescales relevant to our species. Meanwhile, ten-thousand years has brought us to the brink in a relative—and accelerating—flash. “Somebody will figure something out” is not anything close to a plan—nor is any speculative, undemonstrated scheme out of someone’s head that necessarily lacks sufficient ecological context.
So, yes, I can be reasonably certain that modernity is self-terminating as a short-lived, unusual, demonstrably destructive mode of living that is reliant on one-time resources and not at all integrated into the only real form of life-support on the planet: ecological reciprocity. Thus my attraction to the cancer analog.
A No-Brainer
Representing an execution of ideas out of human brains, themselves readily capable of—indeed essentially required to operate on—notions divorced from unfathomably complex ecological relationships, it is to be expected that modernity does not translate to longstanding ecological viability. Why would unconstrained, decontextualized ideas happen to get lucky and work compatibly with evolution’s long experiment? Such spurious schemes are practically certain to fail.
Evidence, Please?
Next week, I will approach this topic from a complementary angle: one centered on evidence.
