Culture is everything people learn, believe and consider real that is apart from their genetically determined physicality. Culture lives in people and is preserved in imperfect artifacts that transmit information when new people engage them. A bit of culture dies with every person, and a slightly different culture is relearned and recreated by following generations.
Culture is a living meta-creature. We may think some things are true and unchanging, but we re-create them every generation, factoring in our own needs and experience. We cannot live, even imagine very accurately, outside of our own time. Consequently, history is tricky and subjective.
Culture has limits. We are incapable of avoiding certain repetitive patterns such as war because true, awful experience dies with the experienced. Culture cannot transmit deep visceral, horrifying experience to enough new people to prevent new wars and other terrible recurring cultural patterns.
I wrote the above on FaceBook in response to a question from one of my beloved daughters, Meg, "What is culture?" It seemed worthy of reproduction, editing and extension here. I am not a cultural anthropologist, have no specialized training. So what I write, distilled from my life experience, is probably not new. Very little is new.
The culture of the past two hundred years has been grossly distorted by abundant fossil energy. We have come to believe culture has somehow advanced or progressed. The Great War killed the idea of human perfectibility for that generation, but like a weed, "progress" springs up again in the popular imagination. We just take for granted the electronic marvels that have so changed how we communicate and learn in a mere decade. We do not understand the energy it takes to develop and manufacture what will soon be yesterday's quaint marvels. We do not grasp the intricacy and fragility of the interlocking technology network. We have put culture on steroids. One fairly grim consequence, the AK-47 is ubiquitous. But losing hope would be the wrong interpretation of my little tale.
The great distortion in human circumstances since the industrial revolution was and is completely dependent on abundant supplies of energy, mostly finite fossil energy, and the new materials and methods that energy has made possible. We cure disease with that energy, redirected with all our mutual cleverness. We feed a vastly inflated world population with crops bred to respond to massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticide from petrochemicals. These crops respond to mechanical cultivation, fossil fueled, of course. Like every civilization before us, clear challenges line the horizon, but we really believe we can solve any problem. Solve it before the consequences of that problem take large numbers of us out in a massive orgy of misery.
I sail a small, fiberglass, aluminum, Dacron and polyester sailboat on the very sea men have sailed for eons. I have come to appreciate that ancient people knew more about harnessing the wind and traversing the sea than I shall ever know. The only difference is I have access to more useful materials. That, I submit is not really progress, simply better tools. I do not risk my life making a living from the sea. I don't really know how. They could do it 1000 years ago and did. For all my technology, I am ignorant as a baby compared to my seagoing fore-bearers. I cannot fit the concept of progress into this picture.
Those of us in relatively new societies, like the USA, have short cultural memories. This leads us to simplify issues. Peoples with longer traditions, Serbs, Albanians, Jews, Palestinians to pick a few you may recognize, live in a present which includes an ever living past. The emotional fire of ancient wars, massacres and genocides can be as real as going to market yesterday. These ancient cultural realities combined with exploding populations without economic future cannot be defused. They will play out over hundreds if not thousands of years. One might think I would be a pessimist. Once I was.
So it may seem strange that I am optimistic about the future of Homo Sapiens, our species. I'm optimistic about my life and my grandchildren because there is no percentage in pessimism. Yes, there's lots of bad stuff, but almost all of it is out of my control. So I chose to focus on what I can influence, which is this glorious day. One day in my lifetime, one day in the Earth's 4.7 billion year lifetime. Mere existence is such a thrill.
I must digress on ancient peoples to establish perspective. Our biological relatives, other hominids, migrated out of Mother Africa many times over at least 2.5 million years, spreading in various directions. They left clues which allow us to deduce their existence. The currently dominant view among scientists who devote their lives to studying such things, is that all people alive are almost entirely descended from a small group of people anatomically identical to us. This small group of direct ancestors, Homo Sapiens, as few as 50 thousand people, migrated out of Africa perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. More intelligent and adaptable than older lineages of hominids, they replaced other hominids, with some interbreeding of course, and spread to every environment on the planet.
Some 10,000 years ago we humans developed agriculture. Settlements followed, civilizations developed, government, organized religion and all the rest. The earth is about 4.7 billion years old. Life arose on earth about a billion years later. Some view the universe as a complex self-organizing system. Complex, self-organizing and unpredictable from the big bang onwards. Life seems inevitable in such a system. We are an instance of life. Self-organizing life.
But the entire history of intelligent life here is a mere blink in the history of the Earth. We have greatly changed the face of the earth. We are the first great, continent resurfacing intelligent species on earth. Anyone coming after us will unearth our works, sift through our landfills and wonder. Homo Sapiens took a developing planet and altered it unmistakably. Rarely altered it for the better if you look at it from the viewpoint of the planet or the biosphere. Subdued it we have. Humans are extremely adaptive and ubiquitous. We can eke out an existence almost anywhere in the terrestrial biosphere.
It has been mathematically proven that history is not deterministic. The future is unknowable, unpredictable. Every non-trivial prediction about the future is wrong. Nevertheless, if enough predictions are recorded, some come close enough to future events that we laud their authors as prophets. But prophets are right only once, thus proving by another, weaker method that the future is unpredictable.
The fun of thinking about things on a large scale is to create a plausible story about the future, sort of like science fiction. This is my story. It is most certainly false except in the most general possible way. But fictions can give us hope, can let us willfully deny the arbitrariness of the future. Fictions can give us faith. As a species, it seems to me we need faith to move forward against what seems to be an impossibly hostile future.
We are cresting a bubble fueled by fossil energy. This energy has permitted our species to increase in numbers vastly higher than the Earth could otherwise support. The ultimate drug, energy. We have reached the point where we are probably changing the climate of the planet. Planetary climate has a wide range and, if history is a guide, can exist in many varied stable states besides the one we currently enjoy.
One scientific suggestion is that Homo Sapiens is the naturally selected product of a long period of climate instability in Africa. Wet, dry, hot, cold - quick flips that rendered many less adaptable creatures extinct. We were pressed very hard and many died. Our forbearer hominids had the genetic prerequisites and variations, so to speak. The best adapted to surviving fast, huge environmental changes survived, became Homo Sapiens, us. Perhaps larger brains and language were the result of this terrible pressure to survive constant change.
What is different now is that we fully inhabit the planet, not just part of a continent. We are more adaptable and resourceful not because we are much smarter, if at all, but because we have infinitely better tools. Any horror we can imagine, including full thermo-nuclear war, vast climate disruption, asteroid hit, famine, plague, volcanic eruption, will probably be insufficient to wipe out every last settlement. Only the minimum human breeding population - perhaps 2000 people, need survive. The planet will survive as it always has, probably in some form that will support human life somewhere.
That part, the survival of just enough, is sort of based on probability, based on the effect of tools and culture and sort of based on hope. Unknowable, remember. Given time, which the Earth has plenty of, those future humans will know what we know from having decoded our garbage. Hopefully they will have developed some characteristic that allows them to avoid our fate. If not, the earth has time for more cycles of boom and bust in the inevitable self-organizing path to sustainable intelligent life.
This process is probably taking place on other planets revolving around other stars as well. Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe close enough to contact? Maybe not. Perhaps in our neighborhood, we are THE instance of intelligent life in the process of evolving the universe. We are just not ready to fly yet. Another 10,000 years, the same interval since we invented agriculture, things could be unimaginably different. And a million years? Who's counting years on a planet that has existed for 4.7 billion of them and will exist for at least several billion more? Perhaps the next step in the self organization of the universe is to become intelligent itself in some way we cannot understand, but in a way in which we played a part. We primitives, we cavemen with our addiction to fossil fuel and wreaking havoc on our partners in the biosphere. The first to leave big footprints on the planet. Probably not the last.
So that is my happy ending, smile or frown. At best a wild-ass guess in vaguely the right direction. In my story, everything really does work out in the end. We're just fixated on the wrong time-frame. Our imagination lacks enough zeros. As a population, our job is to work, eat, grow, nudge the culture and reproduce. Lives upon lives upon lives. Tiny bits of existence to experience and wonder about. Our lives have meaning, just not very much in the scheme of my imagination today.
We cannot stop reproducing, cannot stop or even influence the process very much. The problem space was bounded long before we got here. Wait, maybe descendants of the whales populate our bit of the Universe. Nah, that's a movie plot.
Culture is a living meta-creature. We may think some things are true and unchanging, but we re-create them every generation, factoring in our own needs and experience. We cannot live, even imagine very accurately, outside of our own time. Consequently, history is tricky and subjective.
Culture has limits. We are incapable of avoiding certain repetitive patterns such as war because true, awful experience dies with the experienced. Culture cannot transmit deep visceral, horrifying experience to enough new people to prevent new wars and other terrible recurring cultural patterns.
I wrote the above on FaceBook in response to a question from one of my beloved daughters, Meg, "What is culture?" It seemed worthy of reproduction, editing and extension here. I am not a cultural anthropologist, have no specialized training. So what I write, distilled from my life experience, is probably not new. Very little is new.
The culture of the past two hundred years has been grossly distorted by abundant fossil energy. We have come to believe culture has somehow advanced or progressed. The Great War killed the idea of human perfectibility for that generation, but like a weed, "progress" springs up again in the popular imagination. We just take for granted the electronic marvels that have so changed how we communicate and learn in a mere decade. We do not understand the energy it takes to develop and manufacture what will soon be yesterday's quaint marvels. We do not grasp the intricacy and fragility of the interlocking technology network. We have put culture on steroids. One fairly grim consequence, the AK-47 is ubiquitous. But losing hope would be the wrong interpretation of my little tale.
The great distortion in human circumstances since the industrial revolution was and is completely dependent on abundant supplies of energy, mostly finite fossil energy, and the new materials and methods that energy has made possible. We cure disease with that energy, redirected with all our mutual cleverness. We feed a vastly inflated world population with crops bred to respond to massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticide from petrochemicals. These crops respond to mechanical cultivation, fossil fueled, of course. Like every civilization before us, clear challenges line the horizon, but we really believe we can solve any problem. Solve it before the consequences of that problem take large numbers of us out in a massive orgy of misery.
I sail a small, fiberglass, aluminum, Dacron and polyester sailboat on the very sea men have sailed for eons. I have come to appreciate that ancient people knew more about harnessing the wind and traversing the sea than I shall ever know. The only difference is I have access to more useful materials. That, I submit is not really progress, simply better tools. I do not risk my life making a living from the sea. I don't really know how. They could do it 1000 years ago and did. For all my technology, I am ignorant as a baby compared to my seagoing fore-bearers. I cannot fit the concept of progress into this picture.
Those of us in relatively new societies, like the USA, have short cultural memories. This leads us to simplify issues. Peoples with longer traditions, Serbs, Albanians, Jews, Palestinians to pick a few you may recognize, live in a present which includes an ever living past. The emotional fire of ancient wars, massacres and genocides can be as real as going to market yesterday. These ancient cultural realities combined with exploding populations without economic future cannot be defused. They will play out over hundreds if not thousands of years. One might think I would be a pessimist. Once I was.
So it may seem strange that I am optimistic about the future of Homo Sapiens, our species. I'm optimistic about my life and my grandchildren because there is no percentage in pessimism. Yes, there's lots of bad stuff, but almost all of it is out of my control. So I chose to focus on what I can influence, which is this glorious day. One day in my lifetime, one day in the Earth's 4.7 billion year lifetime. Mere existence is such a thrill.
I must digress on ancient peoples to establish perspective. Our biological relatives, other hominids, migrated out of Mother Africa many times over at least 2.5 million years, spreading in various directions. They left clues which allow us to deduce their existence. The currently dominant view among scientists who devote their lives to studying such things, is that all people alive are almost entirely descended from a small group of people anatomically identical to us. This small group of direct ancestors, Homo Sapiens, as few as 50 thousand people, migrated out of Africa perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. More intelligent and adaptable than older lineages of hominids, they replaced other hominids, with some interbreeding of course, and spread to every environment on the planet.
Some 10,000 years ago we humans developed agriculture. Settlements followed, civilizations developed, government, organized religion and all the rest. The earth is about 4.7 billion years old. Life arose on earth about a billion years later. Some view the universe as a complex self-organizing system. Complex, self-organizing and unpredictable from the big bang onwards. Life seems inevitable in such a system. We are an instance of life. Self-organizing life.
But the entire history of intelligent life here is a mere blink in the history of the Earth. We have greatly changed the face of the earth. We are the first great, continent resurfacing intelligent species on earth. Anyone coming after us will unearth our works, sift through our landfills and wonder. Homo Sapiens took a developing planet and altered it unmistakably. Rarely altered it for the better if you look at it from the viewpoint of the planet or the biosphere. Subdued it we have. Humans are extremely adaptive and ubiquitous. We can eke out an existence almost anywhere in the terrestrial biosphere.
It has been mathematically proven that history is not deterministic. The future is unknowable, unpredictable. Every non-trivial prediction about the future is wrong. Nevertheless, if enough predictions are recorded, some come close enough to future events that we laud their authors as prophets. But prophets are right only once, thus proving by another, weaker method that the future is unpredictable.
The fun of thinking about things on a large scale is to create a plausible story about the future, sort of like science fiction. This is my story. It is most certainly false except in the most general possible way. But fictions can give us hope, can let us willfully deny the arbitrariness of the future. Fictions can give us faith. As a species, it seems to me we need faith to move forward against what seems to be an impossibly hostile future.
We are cresting a bubble fueled by fossil energy. This energy has permitted our species to increase in numbers vastly higher than the Earth could otherwise support. The ultimate drug, energy. We have reached the point where we are probably changing the climate of the planet. Planetary climate has a wide range and, if history is a guide, can exist in many varied stable states besides the one we currently enjoy.
One scientific suggestion is that Homo Sapiens is the naturally selected product of a long period of climate instability in Africa. Wet, dry, hot, cold - quick flips that rendered many less adaptable creatures extinct. We were pressed very hard and many died. Our forbearer hominids had the genetic prerequisites and variations, so to speak. The best adapted to surviving fast, huge environmental changes survived, became Homo Sapiens, us. Perhaps larger brains and language were the result of this terrible pressure to survive constant change.
What is different now is that we fully inhabit the planet, not just part of a continent. We are more adaptable and resourceful not because we are much smarter, if at all, but because we have infinitely better tools. Any horror we can imagine, including full thermo-nuclear war, vast climate disruption, asteroid hit, famine, plague, volcanic eruption, will probably be insufficient to wipe out every last settlement. Only the minimum human breeding population - perhaps 2000 people, need survive. The planet will survive as it always has, probably in some form that will support human life somewhere.
That part, the survival of just enough, is sort of based on probability, based on the effect of tools and culture and sort of based on hope. Unknowable, remember. Given time, which the Earth has plenty of, those future humans will know what we know from having decoded our garbage. Hopefully they will have developed some characteristic that allows them to avoid our fate. If not, the earth has time for more cycles of boom and bust in the inevitable self-organizing path to sustainable intelligent life.
This process is probably taking place on other planets revolving around other stars as well. Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe close enough to contact? Maybe not. Perhaps in our neighborhood, we are THE instance of intelligent life in the process of evolving the universe. We are just not ready to fly yet. Another 10,000 years, the same interval since we invented agriculture, things could be unimaginably different. And a million years? Who's counting years on a planet that has existed for 4.7 billion of them and will exist for at least several billion more? Perhaps the next step in the self organization of the universe is to become intelligent itself in some way we cannot understand, but in a way in which we played a part. We primitives, we cavemen with our addiction to fossil fuel and wreaking havoc on our partners in the biosphere. The first to leave big footprints on the planet. Probably not the last.
So that is my happy ending, smile or frown. At best a wild-ass guess in vaguely the right direction. In my story, everything really does work out in the end. We're just fixated on the wrong time-frame. Our imagination lacks enough zeros. As a population, our job is to work, eat, grow, nudge the culture and reproduce. Lives upon lives upon lives. Tiny bits of existence to experience and wonder about. Our lives have meaning, just not very much in the scheme of my imagination today.
We cannot stop reproducing, cannot stop or even influence the process very much. The problem space was bounded long before we got here. Wait, maybe descendants of the whales populate our bit of the Universe. Nah, that's a movie plot.
From what you've written, I'd say that you put oil at the center of our culture. I think I'd put "me" at the center of our culture. Oil is just one of the things that feeds me. (Entertainment is another thing that feeds me.)
ReplyDeleteLacking independent evidence, many assume we are the most important thing in our lives. Enlarged to a population, this sort of thinking led people to believe the sun revolved around the earth. The artifacts that surround you are very different from those prevalent 200 years ago. These things are composed of raw materials from the earth, including fossil energy, transformed by other people into computers and, yes, entertainment. Just because our present circumstances seem "normal" does not mean they are either naturally occurring or sustainable.
ReplyDelete