by Jay Einhorn, Ph.D.
(I submitted this essay to the Greenwall Foundation in October of 2000 as an entry in an essay contest. The title and length [3000 words] were specified by the Foundation. It didn’t win, and I never heard from Greenwall, but it does seem to have covered several points which seem even more relevant after September 11th.)
Human societies are motivated by moral and ethical values, some expressed and others implicit. As their successes and failures create new internal and external dynamics, societies change their values and thus their natures.
There is a Darwinian aspect about this. When a society’s moral and ethical frameworks are adaptive to the needs of its people and the exigencies of its environment, that society thrives. When they aren’t, it declines.
What distinguishes humanity’s current situation from all prior ones is that we are now making such an impact on the planetary biosphere that, without sufficient awareness of our behavior and its effects, and consequent determination to organize our energies and activities on a planetary basis, we will commit such extensive damage to the biosphere as to undermine its ability to support us.
Psychobiologist Roger Sperry, the distinguished Nobel laureate, wrote, in Science and Moral Priority:
The practical need for some such unifying global standard becomes more and more evident for things such as world population control, conserving world resources, protecting the oceans and atmosphere, and for various other modern world problems that increasingly require united effort on a global scale (Sperry, 1983, p. 111).
In 2020, if we have avoided the war that continues to threaten us all, humanity will be in transition from local culture to planetary culture. The quality of life enjoyed or suffered by most people will depend on how well or how poorly we ar going about that transition, and how consciously we participate in it.
The Evolution of Planetary Culture
Humanity has existed for most of its life in small groups; tribes, villages, and aggregations of villages. Our ability to organize and cooperate in such groups is the basis of our success on Earth. Our biology has not changed significantly since the emergence of modern humanity about 40,000 years ago. All of the advances in human life which have occurred since are due to cultural evolution. Our ability to live and work together in interdependent social aggregates is both a product of biological evolution and also the means of extending it.
Humanity has learned to live in ever larger, more complex and internally differentiated aggregates. Thus, cities subsumed villages, states subsumed cities, nations subsumed states, and now we find ourselves thrust into the vortex of an emerging planetary culture which no governing authority has yet evolved to organize.
A major defining characteristic of the emerging planetary culture is that it has taken place in the aftermath of two world wars, the seeds of the second having been sown by the first, which itself was preceded by a pattern of ever larger wars featuring the application of technology to ever more devastating methods of killing. Thus, the fledgling global culture has evolved under the impetus of increasingly larger and more terrible wars, and its continued evolution has been motivated by the need to prevent an even larger and more catastrophic war.
War
In The Face of Battle, the British military historian John Keegan traces the development of combat from the heroic man-to-man close-quarters fighting that Homer recounts, through the more distant and impersonal killing of crossbows and drilled musketry which developed in Europe, to the battlefields of modern war in which entire volumes of earth and sky are turned into killing fields (Keegan, 1995). The impersonal devastation of modern war has exceeded our ability to adapt to it, except by restricting war itself.
Yet the restriction of war on a global scale is historically unprecedented; humanity is on very new ground here. The accomplishment of this unprecedented goal will, in turn, require unprecedented levels of international cooperation. In War And Our World, Keegan comments:
...if war is to be driven to and beyond the horizon of the world’s civilization, it will be because the United Nations retains both the will to confront unlawful force with lawful force and because the governments that lend it lawful force continue to pay, train and equip men of honor to carry out their orders (Keegan, 1999, pp. 73-74).
Thus, the development of global methods of cooperation to restrict warfare becomes a moral and ethical imperative for humanity’s biological survival. This imperative cannot be addressed, however, without a reevaluation of the role of men in society.
Men and War
Throughout human history, the ability to fight has been synonymous with manly virtue. Men have been expected to be ready to fight to defend their families and to both defend and expand their territories. Achievement in battle has been men’s path to status and wealth within all societies, and remains so. No matter how otherwise lacking in skill, almost any man can find employment and confirmation of his manliness through military service, and especially combat.
In a future in which war is increasingly restricted, most men will not have recourse to combat to make their living or prove their manhood. The biological survival of humanity thus depends on our redefining the role of men to include mainly non-violent forms of accomplishment, while maintaining the honor and integrity of military service when necessary, as John Keegan emphasizes.
The evolution of the concept of combat from the physical realm to the social is already to be discerned. Candidates for political office who pledge to “fight to keep social security strong,” or “fight to reduce taxes,” exemplify this. But it needs to be extended downward until it becomes a part of every child’s, and especially every boy’s, developmental experience. Questions such as what fight is worth fighting, how do i fight this battle, and how do I know when we’ve won, are questions that boys should be learning to ask and answer in primarily non-violent terms from earliest years.
Population
Exponential increases in human population constitute the next great threat to our biological survival after war. Burgeoning population is itself a cause of war, as societies are motivated to expand their territorial and economic domains to accommodate ever greater numbers. It is also a cause of increasing environmental pollution, another great self-engendered challenge to the survival of humanity.
Biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, in The Population Explosion, compare the situation in 1990 with that in 1968, when they wrote The Population Bomb:
Then the fuse was burning; now the population bomb has detonated. Since 1968, at least 200 million people--mostly children--have perished needlessly of hunger and hunger-related diseases, despite “crash programs to ‘stretch’ the carrying capacity of Earth by increasing food production.” The population problem is no longer primarily a threat for the future as it as when the Bomb was written and there were only 3.5 billion human beings.
The size of the human population is now 5.3 billion, and still climbing. In the six seconds it takes you to read this sentence, eighteen more people will be added. Each hour there are 11,000 more mouths to feed; each year, more than 95 million. Yet the world has hundreds of billions fewer tons of topsoil and hundreds of trillions fewer gallons of groundwater with which to grow crops than it had in 1968 (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1990, page 9).
Draconian policies, such as forced sterilization in India, appear to have had poor results. China has fared better, by combining population limiting policies with economic incentives, and moving toward equal rights for women. The two variables that seem to be most strongly correlated with reduction in family size are improvement in family prosperity and equality of socioeconomic opportunities for women.
Women and Childbearing
Childbearing, for women, has historically had approximately the same role as war has had for men. Within the approved social contexts of marriage, childbearing automatically conferred a measure of personal viability and social success upon women. As women gain more ownership over their own lives and control over the destinies of their children, however, the number of children they have tends to decline. Thus, equality of socioeconomic opportunity for women, by being central to achieving reduction in the increase of population, is directly related to the biological survival of humanity. Body and soul in 2020 will be better off for everyone to the extent that women have achieved genuinely equal rights.
Environmental Pollution
In our endless search for survival and prosperity, humanity has already polluted our planet enough to compromise its ability to support life in some places. Toxic wastes, atmospheric pollution, and ozone depletion already cause illness and death. This has happened quickly; it’s just in the last century or so that the combination of technology and population has altered the biosphere as a side effect of our struggle for individual and social viability. The exact costs of environmental pollution are debatable, and there are no quick and easy ways to resolve a problem which is itself composed of very many causes in terms of industrial processes and consumer demands. The overall trends, however, are clear; impartial observers may argue their rate, but do not dispute the trends themselves. Global warming, desertification, ozone depletion, fresh water depletion and contamination, air pollution, and related trends are established facts.
As Roger Sperry emphasized, we must become aware of the effects of our behavior on the biosphere in order to survive. This will require the development of methods of monitoring and reporting on trends in the biosphere. The Worldwatch Institute, in Washington D.C., is an example of an environmental monitoring and information service contributing toward this end. In Saving The Planet, Worldwatchers Lester Brown, Christopher Flavin and Sandra Postel offer a number of suggestions about economic reporting that would take environmental damage or preservation into account. They point out that the Gross National Product, or G.N.P., is “blind to the destruction of natural wealth,” and even “counts as income many of the expenditures made to combat pollution and its adverse consequences,” such as the costs of cleaning up the Alaska oil spill, and the costs to Americans of medical care incurred annually as a result of air pollution (Brown, Flavin and Postel, 1991, p. 123). The development of indicators of economic performance which reveal and highlight the environmental impacts, for worse or better, of human economic behavior, is a moral and ethical necessity for humanity’s survival.
Changing Consciousness: Intercultural Relationships
Since planetary organization at an unprecedentedly high level will be essential to the future survival of humanity, an unprecedented degree of cooperation and collaboration between members of different and disparate cultures must evolve. Members of one society, however dominant, will not be able to turn their backs on the problems of another once those problems reach global scale. Issues such as desertification, population growth overflowing national borders, the international spread of contagious diseases, the prospect of terrorists using weapons of mass destruction, contamination of international waters, and chemical and radioactive contamination of the atmosphere, all compel disparate societies into substantive collaboration. This will necessitate changing attitudes toward persons from outside one’s own culture.
Every society cultivates the belief in its members that its worldview and behavioral norms are the best. This is implanted in, and absorbed by, children as they develop in their earliest years, and is very hard to change. Thus, cultivating the understanding that different cultures have their own validity in the context of their own historical circumstances, and that all cultures have their successes and failures, their own cycles of development, decline, and regeneration, is a moral and ethical necessity for the biological survival of humanity.
Changing Consciousness: Awareness of Influence in the Formation of Patterns of Belief and Behavior
The susceptibility of humanity to cultural messages about what we should believe and do, operating through social influence and not connected with the perception of truth about situations, has been the bane of humanity throughout our history, giving rise to carnage of all kinds. Depersonalization of intended victims, by reducing them to less than fully human status in the eyes of fighters, is always a prerequisite for ethnic violence.
The barrage of persuasive impacts blunts perception and dulls judgment, making us less, not more, able to tell truth from falsehood. We have not evolved to live adroitly while being the target of constant manipulation. Yet our decisions, whether as consumers or voters, have results that substantially affect the future survival of humanity.
If it were possible to require all who try to influence others to be truthful in their statements, this situation wold not arise; but it isn’t. people in all societies have been subject to persuasion, and even before the development of mass media, direct mail and telephone marketing, no attempt to legislate truthfulness has ever succeeded. Many people sincerely believe falsehoods, truth may mean different things to different people, and societies pay for freedom of speech by allowing a large amount o bending of the truth.
Everyone who buys and votes has a role in the biological survival of humanity. Thus, the educational focus has to be on the consumer, the target of all this persuasion. We are in a unique position to do this now because of the unprecedented confluence of four unique events:
First, the excellent psychological work of I. V. Pavlov, having been co-opted by Soviet Communism into a purposeful system of deliberate political indoctrination and brainwashing, is now available for study, as discussed by psychiatrist William Sargant in Battle For The Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing (Sargant, 1997). Second, American soldiers were shown to be susceptible to brainwashing during the Korean War, as discussed by journalist Denise Winn in The Manipulated Mind (Winn, 1983). Third, the work of American psychologists was absorbed in Western consumer marketing, as discussed by the Chicago Tribune’s Pierre Martineau in Motivation in Advertising: Motives That Make People Buy (Martineau, 1971). Fourth, the proliferation of religious cults has led to the study of the psychological mechanisms by means of which they entrap members, which in turn reveals cult-like aspects of modern societies which render us all vulnerable to such pressures, as discussed by psychiatrist Arthur Deikman in The Wrong Way Home (Deikman, 1994). This confluence of information makes it possible, for the first time, for a large proportion of citizens in democracies to learn about the mechanisms of influence which surround them, and the psychological and social processes which render everyone susceptible to such influences. Such knowledge in itself is a kind of psychological inoculation, bringing a measure of detachment to individuals in the consumer-electorate upon whose perception and judgment the biological future of humanity depends. It should be disseminated and taught to everyone.
Changing Consciousness: Seeing The Future In The Present
Our consciousness has evolved to focus our awareness on the immediate present and short-term future. Extending our awareness beyond this into the more distant future, and taking our impressions of future trends into account in our current decision-making, requires a change in consciousness which is necessary for the survival of humanity. Paul Ehrlich and psychologist Robert Ornstein emphasize that our normal consciousness, which evolved to notice sharp changes in usual patterns, is not well equipped to recognize cumulative changes that develop more slowly until they become crises (Ehrlich and Ornstein, 1989).
The Role of Journalism
Good professional journalism has an important role to play here, by providing both our leaders and the populace at large with valid information about how human actions are affecting our planet, and what will ensue if such trends are not restructured. It will be difficult for journalism to make these points again and again to a populace which feels entitled to unlimited cheap nonrenewable fossil fuels, in media which compete for survival in the economic marketplace or depend on the patronage of entrenched political and economic interests. Eventually, however, a critical mass of awareness in the public and its leaders must be reached.
Changing Consciousness: Education
Societies educate their children to fulfill roles that already exist in those societies. The challenge to each society in educating children to mesh with the emerging planetary culture is to educate them to live successfully in a culture which hasn’t yet entirely come into existence but which is evolving very quickly in historical perspective.
Such a goal may seem to have little chance of being accepted by societies which are struggling to eradicate the shortcomings of their existing educational systems. If standards are not upheld strictly enough for credentials to be meaningful, or educational opportunity is not available across the socioeconomic spectrum, or large numbers of graduates remain unemployed, having been educated for economies which no longer exist, then these problems will inevitably tend to preempt the attention and resources of cultures beset with them.
Nevertheless, a way forward exists through the recent and growing knowledge about the function and operation of the brain, with its two cerebral hemispheres organized for different forms of information processing, the relationship between emotion, memory and learning, the existence of different kinds of intelligence and thinking, and the role of consciousness as the ultimate product of biological evolution. When human nature is understood as based in a brain which all humanity shares, then differences between individual persons and cultures become recognized as genetically and experientially unique expressions of a fundamental humanity which all individuals and societies must nurture and develop, and which they neglect and degrade not only at their own peril, but at the peril of all.
References
Deikman, Arthur. The Wrong Way Home. Beacon, Boston. 1994
Ehrlich, Paul, and Ehrlich, Anne. The Population Explosion. Hutchinson, London. 1990
Ehrlich, paul, and Ornstein, Robert E. New World New Mind. Doubleday, New York. 1989.
Keegan, John. The Face of Battle. Viking, New York. 1995
Keegan, John. War and Our World. Pimlico, London. 1999
Marteneau, Pierre. Motivation in Advertising. McGraw-Hill, New York. 1971
Sargant, William. Battle For The Mind. Malor, Cambridge Mass. 1997
Winn, Denise. The Manipulated Mind. Octagon, London. 1983
Brown, Lester R., Flavin, Christopher, Postel, Sandra. Saving the Planet. Norton, New York. 1991
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