Warm Words
May.20, 2008, filed under Miscellany
The last paragraph from the article of the same name in the April edition of The Environmentalist, written by Simon Hodgson of Acona:
So which am I in, the optimist tribe or the pessimist? Neither: I’m a fatalist. Problems come (and [global warming] is a big one) and people and societies respond, reorganise and re-invent themselves. Not without pain, and accompanied by major change, I admit. But we live today in a world unrecognisable to people even one hundred years ago. And no global government masterminded the transition — it just happened as billions of ordinary people took trillions of decisions in a system of unimaginable complexity. And here’s the paradox: most environmental campaigns push for orthodoxy. “Believe this!” they say, “Think and act like me. Know what I know and you’ll do what I do.” Wrong. Tackling climate change is going to need all the magnificent diversity of human nature. Even Jeremy Clarkson has a part to play. Long live the tribes.
It’s the first time in a long while I’ve read something that has given me a whiff of potential hope. Not for the reasons you might think. I am of the opinion that ‘free will’ is a moot point. I have been guilty of the anthropic principle: treating humans as somehow something different. Stupid. Damned stupid.
The human species is yet another of the complex biological mechanisms that exist on this world. Individually humans are greedy, selfish, self-centred, idiotic, superficial and insanely religious. As individuals they are cultural. As a species they are still biological.
So there’s still hope. Because survival is an organic imperative. On a species scale I suspect humans can be modelled using the same simple but emergently complex maths that can mimic the massing of starlings or the shoaling of silver jacks.
Maybe the solution will come from the interplay of tribes. Humans are tribal: humans are strongest on the level of community. At the level of the monkeysphere. Maybe if we quit trying to do things either individually or globally and instead play to our strengths, we’ll get somewhere.
Long live the tribes indeed.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
