"The Watchman's Rattle"

(Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction)
-by rebecca d. costa
2010
This clarion call from sociobiologist costa investigates why every advanced civilization in recorded history has collapsed, and discovers that whenever humans experience exponential growth, there comes a point called the cognitive threshold, when the complexity of problems becomes too great for our minds to handle. After that, the balance between knowledge and belief tips in favor of belief, and the end is near. By that metric, our tipping point has already passed. Am i happy she goes along with the assumptions underpinning the word "civilization"? No - the implication that ANY human society of the past twenty thousand years ought be called "civilized", is a thought that could stand greater scrutiny. But her point is that the mayans didn't get into humyn sacrifice until problems (in their case, water shortage) had grown beyond their ability to cope. How equipped are we to manage pandemic viruses, depleted resources, climate change, pollution, dying oceans, terrorism, or nuclear proliferation? But unlike the doomsayers, rebecca firmly believes that humans are, for the first time ever, knowledgeable enough to overcome our cognitive threshold.
And she tells us how we're going to do it.
She examines how evolution has left us trying to cope with 21st century problems, with a brain suited for the low-stress life of a pre-agricultural gatherer. Our brains are constructed to deal with problems of immediacy, not things a day or month (or generation) down the road.
So it turns out my procrastination proclivities are not, as it turns out, laziness. I knew it, i just knew it!
She outlines the stages of collapse: gridlock, the substitution of belief for fact, and the embrace of short-term mitigations over long-term solutions. She shows how the biggest obstacle facing humynity is our own attitudes. She discusses memes, ways of thinking or being, and how they can grow into supermemes (like the flat Earth, an eye for an eye, monogamy, or blondes have more fun), which can contaminate or suppress all other beliefs. Memes (like not swimming after you eat, which it turns out is fine) tap into our need for belief. Even if it's only believing that the door will open when you turn the handle, we need the comfort of belief to function. The greater the variety of memes, the more likely a culture will survive sudden or dramatic changes. Another meme? We only use 10% of our brains. Nonsense! Can we still enjoy the wonderful movie based on that lie, "Defending Your Life"? Of course.
Supermemes are culture-killers. The five supermemes pushing us toward extinction? Irrational opposition (the tendency to be AGAINST something rather than for), the personalization of blame (seeking scapegoats instead of addressing systemic causes), counterfeit correlation (complexity causing us to lower our standard of proof), silo thinking (compartmentalization which inhibits cooperation...think of the lack of communication between the CIA, FBI, and Homeland Security), and extreme economics (basing every decision on profit/loss projections).
Costa shows how the technology to fix our problems is already available. There are abundant solutions, like the "cool roof" strategy - if we paint every roof and road on the planet white, it would be the equivalent of taking eleven billion cars off the road for eleven years. The reflection/absorption ratio of the sun's rays would change immediately, resulting in global temperature reduction. You want more long-term? Fine. NASA has known for decades that the only sensible way to get solar energy is to put the collectors in space. The world's energy needs would be met, with plenty to spare. What's keeping us from doing it? Capitalism gridlock. Or you want global warming fixed? Science knows how previous ice ages were triggered - the introduction of huge amounts of volcanic sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. We could "shade the Earth" as little or much as we need. The price? $250 million the first year, $100 million each year after. That's "million", not billion. And water? Iconoclast inventor dean kamen has followed up the Segway with the Slingshot, a low-energy purifying system that could solve the world's water problems within two years. The challenge? Getting it into everyone's hands. The obstacle? Capitalism! Perhaps we should rethink capitalism's most basic tenets. No wait, it's already being done...see muhammed yunus' 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for showing that collateral-free loans to the poor are stunningly successful, as long as you make the loans to groups of 5-8, not individuals. It turns out that our culture of individualism flies in the face of humyn nature.
Costa excoriates the idiocy of the self-help era, which encourages everyone to think that our happiness is in our own hands. There are a million shows and books and gurus making fortunes off this idea, happily ignoring the truth...that current human misery is systemic. Black incarceration is a societal problem, not personal. Epidemic obesity is societal, not personal. Drug addiction is societal, not personal. A weak (but irresistible) example is oprah's weight. As a black womyn who created a billion dollar empire in a white man's world, is there anyone who thinks she lacks willpower? In addition, she has a full-time staff of chefs, trainers, nutritionists, and life coaches. She makes staying thin her very public personal agenda. Yet she keeps getting fat! If oprah can't do it, how can anyone?? The "personal empowerment" meme is also fool's gold in terms of global problems. For example, less than 3% of the garbage generated by America is municipal waste. Ergo, domestic recycling is nothing but a cosmetic gesture. I'll add my own example of our misguided obsession with personal accountability - the michael jackson song "Man in the Mirror". It's wonderful and moving...how many millions (including myself) have sung it in uncounted showers around the globe? Yet the message of the song is pure nonsense, in terms of effecting any real change in this world.
Costa tosses out salient examples of how extreme economics affects us on every level - for example, everyone knows what a prenuptial contract is...but what does it say about our priorities that there is no such thing as a precustody contract? And she may make you re-think the notion of the West having ANY association with fundamentalist nations - leaders like bush and blair and obama may invoke god, but the driving supermeme of the West is finance...and that's a pill which will never be swallowed by a fundamentalist state. But fundamentalist states, with their paltry variety of memes, are not built to survive.
Humyns are also genetically disposed to the notion of putting all our eggs into one ovary...but research shows that a barrage of concurrent solutions (many of which won't work) is the soundest way to address even civilization-imperiling complexity.
Is costa a brilliant writer? Well, no. She's competent, and peppers her prose with enough humynity and personal experience to instill belief (ha!) in her as a person. But her writing is only as interesting as her subject matter. In this case? Fascinating. The fact that she doesn't mention any possible solutions to global pollution is neither here nor there (well okay, it's undeniably both here and there).
She ends the book with an investigation of insight...the ability of the humyn brain to synthesize a solution (often counter-intuitive) that transcends our knowledge. Insight is a relatively new feature of our physiology, but if humanity is to avoid extinction, this is where the evolutionary path leads. Costa offers the newest research on brain fitness, which i'll encapsulate by saying that i intend to make quick travel over uneven, irregular ground a regular part of my life.
I've got a planet to save, after all.
And so does rebecca.
You too?

("The Watchman's Rattle" is now on this writer's list of thirteen books every human should read: http://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2015/04/13-books-aware.html)