Spoiled Rotten

[photo: English countryside. Click to enlarge.]
I don't know if you'd call it human nature specifically, for it seems to be animal nature. Ants do it--even if it's a countertop you routinely clean, if they sense a fat crumb there, they cluster around it with no regard for the extreme likelihood and imminent danger of being literally wiped away. Animals fill the available niches, and they prosper as long as they've adapted to that specific environment--for as long as that environment lasts.

We live on a remarkable planet that, according to the proven Gaia principle, maintains itself within a range of conditions that nourishes life. On top of that, conditions for the past thousands of years have allowed human civilization to grow and survive, in fits and starts, even with some harsh conditions. Then for the past several centuries, much of the world--especially Europe and North America--has lived in golden times. The weather has been temperate--to the point of being unusually excellent. During the past century or so, the earth's normal seizures of violence--earthquakes mostly, but also volcanoes or even large meteor impacts--have happened very rarely in big urban areas, even where history records they have happened repeatedly and science strongly suggests they will happen again.

We've been spoiled by these times--spoiled rotten. And they aren't going to last. The natural disasters are going to be "bigger" than ever, because we've built so much on earthquake zones, we've put so many people there, and we've added lethal technologies to the mix, and we have no adequate plans for the inevitable disasters. We look at Japan today, and know there are no credible plans for evacuating New York or Los Angeles. There are no credible plans for evacuating even relatively smaller cities. And New Orleans after Katrina suggests we can't even deal with one major disaster in a relatively isolated city that size, without a lot of additional suffering.

We haven't had a major disease epidemic in a long time--perhaps not since the killer flu after World War I, which killed more people than the war did. Here we probably believe our science is protecting us, or will. To some extent, that's probably true. But again we are spoiled rotten--spoiled into believing we don't have to pay attention to public health--or more specifically, to pay for it, even as features of our interconnected daily lives makes possible a much faster spread of disease. We don't even consider how much we will need the civility and trust we are carelessly destroying to deal with any such emergency, moment to moment as well as over a long time and a lot of ground.

Ants are probably a lot smarter than we know, and they probably do some planning, but with our big brains, we're capable of a lot more than we do.

Of course, the greatest disasters of our time have been self-inflicted: wars mostly. The most pervasive catastrophe we've begun, the Climate Crisis, is self-inflicted--and continues to be, even when we know what we're doing, and what we're not doing about it. It's already begun, it's affecting almost everyone even now, it's only going to get worse over time with more extreme and violent winters and summers, and we are still not mobilizing to deal with it.

We've built our civilization over the abyss, and we know that we have. But while things are still relatively golden, we could be doing our best to stop what we can stop, fix what we can't, prevent what we can prevent, and prepare for the worst. It is our test: can human animals in human civilization adapt to its environment by anticipating the future changes in that environment? We're not entirely sure why some past civilizations flunked their tests--were they just not capable of dealing with the disaster they anticipated? Or did they not know enough to be able to anticipate it? We largely don't have those excuses. All we have is something we suspect was a factor in the fall of at least some of those empires: decadence, which is just another word for spoiled rotten. You'd think we know enough about history and ourselves to overcome this.