Given our biological limits
for adaptation, the intellect's ability to deceive itself, and society's
ability to advance class exploitation, how do we avoid the sins described here?
Traditionally, the answer has been education or adherence to a code. Education,
what is taught, usually controls codes. Nothing challenges us more than
maintaining intellectual honesty, without which truth becomes the servant of
agendas. Agendas have virtually buried any interest in intellectual honesty.
Proofs, consistent logic, and selfless appraisal do not appeal to agendas. The
denial of global warming provides a good example. The fact that certain gases
trap heat and that we produce million of tons of those gases cannot be denied.
Two and two is still four. Measurements confirm the fact. Given what is at
stake, any doubt should be resolved by avoiding the risk. The same goes for
atomic energy. Endless arguments over what cannot be denied lead to adaptation
by default to agendas. Long-term strategies remain impossible.
Intellectual dishonesty
inhibits debate by misrepresenting what people say. Politicians avoid debating
the merits and specifics of programs for fear of ridicule and confusion. All
kinds of litmus tests replace debate on the merits. Are you American enough, or
conservative enough, or red-headed enough to be president?
Natural selection provides
the starting point in the search for truth. It teaches the facts we need to
construct a sustainable moral code. The genome and the structures that support
it reflect the results of natural selection. Introducing elements into the
environment that the genome cannot tolerate (poison) is a sin under the ethic
of survival of the species. We all do it, particularly in conjunction with
technology. Reducing this sin must become a major purpose of science and all
people.
The other cardinal sin
disclosed by natural selection concerns inefficiency. Driving oversized,
overpowered cars may increase one's status in the money game but the waste of
energy and materials does not enhance survival of future generations. Improved
gas mileage for personal cars will never match the efficiency that the
universal use of public transportation provides. The number of examples provided
by consumerism is endless.
How we measure efficiency
presents the difficult question. Again, money does not provide the best test.
It merely avoids value judgments. For example, if it costs less to use more
energy than to use a new material in a manufacturing process but the material
is renewable, which choice do you make? Today it would be to save the money,
not the energy. What if the material used to generate the energy is far more
important to survival then the material saved by using the energy? Do we still save the money as the first
choice? Is the energy undervalued? Should an added tax correct that situation?
No one asks these questions
or makes a decision based on survival of the species. Few regulations address
the long term; few receive scientific input based on all the impacts involved.
Politics decides. How to maintain the species must become the political
question.
One of the things Marx got
right is the preeminent influence that means of production of goods and
services has in human affairs. The means has changed so significantly that much
work has become marginalized. The old jobs are disappearing or paying a lot
less. Hence the huge rise in unemployment that stimulus by government no longer
cures. Keeping people employed now requires the sacrifice of resources to
maintain growth--capitalism's only answer to economic disaster.
Capitalism has failed to
provide a future. Turning resources into cash and making it big mortgage future
generations with debts to the environment that cannot be repaid. Anticipated
technological miracles provide the apologies for taking the risk. Technology,
in fact, played a major role in creating the danger. It provided the means for
upsetting the equilibrium that millions of years of natural selection
established.
Systems that require
never-ending growth to survive must, in the long term, fail. Survival requires
an anticipatory design strategy (see Buckminster Fuller) that employs
technology for increased efficiency, not financial profit. The fact that we can
build it and profit from it does not justify its use. Only advancing survival
of the species can justify a technology.
1. Natural Selection's
Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil , by Carter Stroud, for the
basis of these assertions and related matters.
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