What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire Page #9

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Whatever. It's been one

technological fix after another.

And then as soon as you try to answer

something with some kind of a technological fix

that doesn't really go to the root of the problem

then there's going to be new problems.

And then it just rolls along.

And so now, I mean, you look at the state

of the world now and half the people in the

world are living in urban areas.

so how do you answer that?

And the population explosion

has gone to such an extreme.

How do you answer that, but

with another technological fix?

Half the people in the world live in cities.

And cities, by definition, exceed the

carrying capacity of their local environments.

I don't think most people know this.

But you'll agree that to make up your

mind fairle you have to know all the facts.

See, I don't think you know all the facts.

If we knew all the facts we'd have discarded

the myth of the technofix a long time ago.

To my eye our crisis, at its deepest

levels, is a crisis not of technology

but of meaning and purpose.

We keep acting like all we need do is

throw more technology at it while we

fall to understand, or even see,

the clearly cultural issues that doom to

fantastic failure these ever more desperate

attempts to keep the present system going.

We've been pretending for so long

we've forgotten what we once knew.:

you can't survive in the long run

if you don't follow the laws of life.

As we settled into agriculture and civilization,

agriculture and civilization settled into us.

We fenced ourselves off from the world. . .

And everything inside the fence

became what we needed to survive.

And everything outside the fence

became threatening, wild, you know,

uncontrollable, keep it out!

And our technologies cut us

off from our own experience. . .

We can build a culture that sits

between us and the world.

And it mediates our behavior toward the world.

And it mediates what we do

and what we perceive.

If you have a spear, it becomes a lot easier. You

don't have to kill somebody right in front of you.

You can kill somebody thirty feet away.

And that distance makes it easier to kill.

And if you've been sent into war with a B2

bomber strapped to your back and an array

of high-tech sensors at your fingertips,

you can kill Iraqis with no more thought

or feeling than you might have wasting

the Covenant on your X-Box at home.

this disconnection from the world,

from other people and other creatures,

altered our relationships,

and left us confused and wounded.

At what point do we stop and listen? And if we

stop and listen, what will we be able to hear?

Disconnection has stopped our ears.

The planet's voice barely registers.

Our minds are clogged with stories.

Central to my understanding of the world is

this.:
all cultures are based on stories.

The culture of civilization and empire comes

with its own unique set of beliefs and impulses.

Listen to some of the stories that have

brought us to our present predicament.

"There's never quite enough"

"We're innately flawed"

"it's heresy today to say, 'let's stop growing"'

"Hard work is morally virtuous"

"More is better"

"The physical world as i see it is everything"

"We can solve any problem"

"I mean... they actually say that the

way to be happy is to own more stuff"

"We are to subdue the earth

and have dominion over it"

"We own. . . we own the planet. We own

everything here. We own these resources"

"Humans have rights. Nothing else has rights"

"There are many times in which people just

don't want to be told that such-and-such

a place is off-limits to them"

Living with stories like this, is it any

wonder we're devouring the planet?

In some ways we're kind of -

we're in a culture of two-year-olds.

Where we just won't look at the limits.

Dominion over the Earth, in Genesis, didn't

mean to leave this pillaged and smoking.

Daniel Quinn has named some

of the basic stories of Empire.

The ambient voice of our

culture tells us that

this is the best that

humans could ever hope for.

What we've got right now,

where we're going.

It's just unsurpassable.

Ergo, any alternative

has got to be worse.

There were other

civilizations besides ours;

they did not think that they

had the one right way to live,

and that everyone in the world

should be made to live that way.

We're taught to think

that we are Humanity.

if there are other people out

there that are different from us,

well they're degenerates,

or they're just not as

far advanced as we are.

We came along,

and began doing things,

and building civilization,

and this is the way humans

were meant to live from the beginning.

Which is one reason why we can't give it up.

Here, perhaps, is the most

dangerous story of them all. . .

We are superior to all other creatures

and our lives are independent of theirs.

Narrator.:
Through his intellect man

has developed a superiority over

every other form of animal life.

with the stories of Empire in place, civilization

was ready to spread around the planet.

Ran Prieur explains the core idea of

"The Parable of the Tribes",

which reveals how the culture

of Empire prevailed in a process of

cultural evolution that selects for power.

imagine there's a bunch of tribes

that are living together peacefully.

And one of the tribes, for some reason,

instead of living in balance and in peace,

they decide that they're going to make

a bunch of weapons and conquer

the next tribe and turn them into slaves.

The next tribe has three choices.

if they run away the paradigm of the

violent tribe expands into their territory.

if they submit into slavery the paradigm

of the violent tribe expands into their territory.

if they build weapons to fight back the paradigm

of the violent tribe expands into their territory.

And that just goes on until the whole

world is made up of people who make

weapons and fight and enslave other people.

After ten thousand years of this,

we've forgotten who we are. . .

How could three million years of

human life be meaningless?

The way people were living at

that time, during that vast period,:

they were living in a way in which

humans could live for millions of years.

Tens of millions of years. And that's something!

Man, now we're saying "how

many decades can we have?"

And if we go on living this way, it's not many.

It strikes me as critical that we

remember who we really are.

We have these huge brains and a great

capacity for innovation and adaptation.

But we can get trapped inside of stories and

fantasies that block us from our own greatness.

Well, human beings can act either

as members of climax ecosystems,

where we integrate ourselves into

everything else that's going on,

or we can act as invasive

species, like the cane toad.

The classic example of human beings acting as

an invasive species, of course, is Europeans

over the last five hundred years or so.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Not all human cultures have followed this path.

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