Too Stupid to Live?

Are "humans too stupid to prevent climate change," as the Guardian says James Lovelock said? Ignore for a moment that he didn't actually say this--he knows the climate has already changed, and will keep changing for a long time to come, and what he actually did say was "I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change," which is a little different.

The real question here isn't about human intelligence, or inventiveness, adaptability, ingenuity, etc. For me, the question concerning the Climate Crisis has for a long time been: has human civilization developed far enough to meet this challenge? It's more a question of whether we as a society--as various polities, organized in the fashions we are (however you describe how America is governed for example)--are ready, are up to the tasks.

For the past decade or so I've thought of this as an open question--the most important open question regarding the future. An affirmative answer would mean what seems the most desirable future: a continuous civilization that changes for the better, with the least destruction and trauma, preserving the hard-won best of its past.

These days it seems very unlikely that this will happen. It does seem that human civilization is flunking this test--that its most destructive and self-destructive aspects will overcome its best potential. Because this is the crisis of crises--and it can't be confronted by indirection or accidentally doing the right things for the wrong reasons. It's too big for that. The reality of it has to be understood and accepted, and efforts to address it comprehensively must be clear and sincere. Whatever saved civilization from its previous major test--thermonuclear war--won't alone work this time.

Reading the Lovelock interview, I found much to ponder and much to disagree with. So my reasons are perhaps different from his, but I have to agree with him on this point--that human civilization has not developed "to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change."

Apparently, as a society we aren't able to deal with the nature of the problem: of anticipating and preventing catastrophe this far in advance, or of understanding why this catastrophe is likely to happen, and why we must act now.

But it's more than not understanding lag times, feedback and tipping points. It's not just a matter of being clever, of coming up with ingenious technologies (which some folks are doing.) Partly it is the same problem that H.G. Wells identified more than a century ago--the inability to think comprehensively and act seriously as an entire civilization, as a human species.

Some of the reasons for that were identified by C.G. Jung, for example, and they reside more in the parts of the psyche outside what we regard as "thinking" (observing, conceptualizing, etc.) It's become clearer to me from the crude violence and willed ignorance of our politics, that our civilization is tipping towards psychosis--an apocalyptic madness.

Maybe it's an epidemic of denial, stoked by fear of what so many need to deny. Maybe it is the flowering of something deep in the culture, as Jungian Edward Edinger believed, that's more consciously promoted by certain fundamentalist Christians. Certainly it is the American refusal to take the psyche seriously, to use the conceptual tools that Jung identified to temper the unconscious with consciousness of its power and habits.

The fact that we have no one like Wells or Jung today--no one who speaks on this level, of civilization as a whole-- is further evidence that we're on a downward spiral, with no help in sight.

We don't seem to even have a prominent figure with the moral authority and moral courage of Martin Luther King--who stirred up such intense opposition with his Civil Rights stands, and later, even more with his opposition to the Vietnam War. Nobody seems to gets that response anymore, either for or against.

We're fortunate to have the best mind and heart in several generations in the White House now, but as President Obama pointed out in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he is a head of state, and that has limitations as well as powers built into it. And even at that, look at the virulent hatred that confronts him, as well as the slipshod thought and cynical lying that dominates our establishment politics and public discourse. That his at times frustrating middle-of-the-road approach, his gentle nudging forward--is vilified as extreme socialism, is evidence of how far we haven't come, how we seem actually to be regressing.

This species, capable of such intelligence and imagination, may well turn out to collectively be too stupid to stop destroying itself. That seems to be the trajectory, though it may take many years for it to play out (and then again, it may not.) But that seems to be the logic of it now.

As for dealing with the near future--which can become the present at any minute--some thoughts on that another time.