bcpart1

 

Closing In on the Problem

A fable to start with

Once upon a time life evolved on a certain planet, bringing forth many different social organizations—packs, pods, flocks, troops, herds, and so on. One species whose members were unusually intelligent developed a unique social organization called a tribe. Tribalism worked well for them for millions of years, but there came a time when they decided to experiment with a new social organization (called civilization) that was hierarchal rather than tribal. Before long, those at the top of the hierarchy were living in great luxury, enjoying perfect leisure and having the best of everything. A larger class of people below them lived very well and had nothing to complain about. But the masses living at the bottom of the hierarchy didn't like it at all. They worked and lived like pack animals, struggling just to stay alive.

“This isn't working,” the masses said. “The tribal way was better. We should return to that way.” But the ruler of the hierarchy told them, “We've put that primitive life behind us forever. We can't go back to it.”

“If we can't go back,” the masses said, “then let's go forward—on to something different.”

“That can't be done,” the ruler said, “because nothing different is possible. Nothing can be beyond civilization. Civilization is a final, unsurpassable invention.”

“But no invention is ever unsurpassable. The steam engine was surpassed by the gas engine. The radio was surpassed by television. The calculator was surpassed by the computer. Why should civilization be different?”

“I don't know why it's different,” the ruler said, “It just is. ”

But the masses didn't believe this—and neither do I.

A Manual of Change

My first concept of this book was reflected in its original title: The Manual of Change. I thought of this because there's nothing the people of our culture want more than change. They desperately want to change themselves and the world around them. The reason isn't hard to find. They know something's wrong— wrong with themselves and wrong with the world.

In Ishmael and my other books, I gave people a new way of understanding what's gone wrong here. I had the rather naive idea this would be enough. Usually it is enough. If you know what's wrong with something—your car or your computer or your refrigerator or your television set—then the rest is relatively easy. I assumed it would be the same here, but of course it isn't. Over and over again, literally thousands of times, people have said to me or written to me, “I understand what you're saying—you've changed the way I see the world and our place in it—but what are we supposed to DO about it?”

I might have said, “Isn't it obvious?” But obviously it isn't obvious—or anything remotely like obvious.

In this book I hope to make it obvious.

Humanity's future is what's at stake.

Who are the people of “our culture”?

It's easy to pick out the people who belong to “our” culture. If you go somewhere—anywhere in the world—where the food is under lock and key, you'll know you're among people of our culture. They may differ wildly in relatively superficial matters—in the way they dress, in their marriage customs, in the holidays they observe, and so on. But when it comes to the most fundamental thing of all, getting the food they need to stay alive, they're all alike. In these places, the food is all owned by someone, and if you want some, you'll have to buy it. This is expected in these places; the people of our culture know no other way.

Making food a commodity to be owned was one of the great innovations of our culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key—and putting it there is the cornerstone of our economy, for if the food wasn't under lock and key, who would work?

What does “saving the world” mean?

When we talk about saving the world, what world are we talking about? Not the globe itself, obviously. But also not the biological world—the world of life. The world of life, strangely enough, is not in danger (though thousands and perhaps even millions of species are). Even at our worst and most destructive, we would be unable to render this planet lifeless. At present it's estimated that as many as two hundred species a day are becoming extinct, thanks to us. If we continue to kill off our neighbors at this rate, there will inevitably come a day when one of those two hundred species is our own.

Saving the world also can't mean preserving the world as it is right now. That may sound like a nice idea, but it's also out of reach. Even if the entire human race vanished tomorrow, the world wouldn't stay the way it is today. We will never, under any circumstances, be able to stop change on this planet.

But if saving the world doesn't mean saving the world of life or preserving it unchanged, what are we talking about? Saving the world can only mean one thing: saving the world as a human habitat. Accomplishing this will mean (must mean) saving the world as a habitat for as many other species as possible. We can only save the world as a human habitat if we stop our catastrophic onslaught on the community of life, for we depend on that community for our very lives.

Old minds with new programs

In my novel The Story of B, the middle volume of the trilogy that begins with Ishmael and ends with My Ishmael, I wrote, “If the world is saved, it will not be by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.” I'm afraid this is a case where the words are all easy, but the thoughts are slippery. I'll rephrase it. If we go on as we are, we're not going to be around for much longer—a few decades, a century at most. If we're still around a thousand years from now, it will be because we stopped going on as we are.

How will that have come about? How are we going to stop going on this way?

Here's how old minds think of stopping us. They think of stopping us the way they stopped poverty, the way they stopped drug abuse, the way they stopped crime. With programs. Programs are sticks planted in the mud of a river to impede its flow. The sticks do impede the flow. A little. But they never stop the flow, and they never turn the river aside.

This is why I can confidently predict that if the world is saved, it will not be because some old minds came up with some new programs. Programs never stop the things they're launched to stop. No program has ever stopped poverty, drug abuse, or crime, and no program ever will stop them.

And no program will ever stop us from devastating the world.

New minds with no programs

If the world is saved, it will not be by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.

Why not new minds with new programs? Because where you find people working on programs, you don't find new minds, you find old ones. Programs and old minds go together like buggy whips and buggies.

The river I mentioned earlier is the river of vision. Our culture's river of vision is carrying us toward catastrophe. Sticks planted in the mud may impede the flow of the river, but we don't need to impede its flow, we need to divert it into an entirely new channel. If our culture's river of vision ever begins to carry us away from catastrophe and into a sustainable future, then programs will be superfluous. When the river's flowing where you want it to flow, you don't plant sticks to impede it.

No programs at all?

Programs make it possible to look busy and purposeful while failing. If programs actually did the things people expect them to do, then human society would be heaven: our governments would work, our schools would work, our law enforcement systems would work, our justice systems would work, our penal systems would work, and so on.

When programs fail (as they invariably do), this is blamed on things like poor design, lack of funds and staff, bad management, and inadequate training. When programs fail, look for them to be replaced by new ones with improved design, increased funding and staff, superior management, and better training. When these new programs fail (as they invariably do), this is blamed on poor design, lack of funds and staff, bad management, and inadequate training.

This is why we spend more and more on our failures every year. Most people accept this willingly enough, because they know they're getting more every year: bigger budgets, more laws, more police, more prisons—more of everything that didn't work last year or the year before that or the year before that.

If not programs, then what?

A man was found sitting in the middle of the desert in a contraption made of rocks, bits of lumber, and old, blown tires, which he was busily “steering” as if it were actually a vehicle in motion.

Asked what he was doing, the man said, “Driving home.”

“You're never going to get there in this,” he was told.

He said, “If not in this, then in what?”

We're like this man, busily trying to steer into the future in a Rube Goldberg assemblage of programs that has never taken us any farther than this man's pile of junk took him. Even after we've acknowledged that programs don't work and never have worked, however, it still somehow seems natural to ask, “If not programs, then what?”

I'd like to recast the question this way: “If programs don't work, then what does work?” In fact, I have an even better way of asking the question: “What works so well that programs are superfluous? What works so well that it never occurs to anyone to create programs to make it work?”

The answer to all these questions is: vision.

The invisibility of success

When things work, the forces that make them work are invisible. The universe at large is a notorious example of this. It took a towering genius to recognize the laws of motion and universal gravitation that now seem almost boringly obvious to us. Newton's genius was precisely the genius of seeing that which is so evident as to be unseeable. Every advance in science makes manifest a working that is cloaked by its very success.

The dancer's admonition is Never let them see you sweat. When it comes to the laws of the universe, this admonition becomes Never let them see you at all: make them deduce your existence. And indeed the laws of the universe are never directly observable, so we have no other way of discovering them except by deduction.

What works in the living community is similarly cloaked by its success. The basic laws of ecology have the beauty and simplicity of a fairy tale, but their existence only began to be suspected a century ago.

The invisibility of tribal success

People are fascinated to learn why a pride of lions works, why a troop of baboons works, or why a flock of geese works, but they often resist learning why a tribe of humans works. Tribal humans were successful on this planet for three million years before our agricultural revolution, and they're no less successful today wherever they manage to survive untouched, but many people of our culture don't want to hear about it. In fact, they'll vigorously deny it. If you explain to them why a herd of elephants works or why a hive of bees works, they have no problem. But if you try to explain why a tribe of humans works, they accuse you of “idealizing” them. From the point of view of ethology or evolutionary biology, however, the success of humans in tribes is no more an idealization than the success of bison in herds or whales in pods.

Our cultural excuse for failure is that humans are just “naturally” flawed—greedy, selfish, short-sighted, violent, and so on, which means anything you do with them will fail. In order to validate that excuse, people want tribalism to be a failure. For this reason, to people who want to uphold our cultural mythology, any suggestion that tribalism was successful is perceived as a threat.

Making tribal success visible is the work of my other books and will not be repeated here.

Conspicuous success, invisible source

Our culture has been conspicuously successful, in the sense that it has overrun the world. For most of our history, this success was perceived as merely an inevitability, the working out of human destiny. People no more wondered about it than they wondered about gravity. When Europeans “discovered” the New World, they considered it a sacred duty to take it over. The people who were already living there were just in the way, like trees or rocks or wild animals. They had no real business being there, as we did. For us to take over this hemisphere was just part of the larger plan (presumably God's plan) for us to take over the entire world.

That we were able to overrun this hemisphere (and indeed the entire world) came as no surprise to us. This is simply what was meant to be, so naturally it came to be. No one is amazed when clouds produce rain.

Before Newton, people didn't wonder why unsupported objects are compelled to fall to the ground. They just figured, what else could they do? They have to fall to the ground, and that's that. Our historians have always been in the same condition when it comes to our tremendous cultural success. They don't wonder why we were compelled to take over the world. They just figure, what else could we have done? We had to take over the world, and that's that.

Vision is like gravity

Vision is to culture what gravity is to matter. When you see a ball roll off a table and fall to the floor, you should think, “Gravity is at work here.” When you see a culture make its appearance and spread outward in all directions until it takes over the entire world, you should think, “Vision is at work here.”

When you see a small group of people begin behaving in a special way that subsequently spreads across an entire continent, you should think, “Vision is at work here.” If I tell you that the small group I have in mind were followers of a first-century preacher named Paul and that the continent was Europe, you'll know the vision was Christianity.

Dozens or perhaps even hundreds of books have investigated the reasons for Christianity's success, but not one of them was written before the nineteenth century. Before the nineteenth century it seemed to everyone that Christianity no more needed reasons to succeed than gravity does. It was bound to succeed. Its success was sponsored by destiny.

For exactly the same reason, no one has ever written a book investigating the reasons for the success of the Industrial Revolution. It's perfectly obvious to us that the Industrial Revolution was bound to succeed. It could no more have failed than a ball rolling off a table could fall toward the ceiling.

That's the power of vision.

The spread of vision

Every vision is self-spreading, but not every vision spreads itself in the same way. In a sense, the spreading mechanism is the vision.

Our culture's spreading mechanism was population expansion: Grow, then get more land, increase food production, and grow some more. Christianity's spreading mechanism was conversion: Accept Jesus, then get others to accept him. The Industrial Revolution's spreading mechanism was improvement: Improve on something, then put it out there for others to improve on.

Clearly all spreading mechanisms have one thing in common: they confer benefits on those who do the spreading. Those who get more land, increase food production, and grow are rewarded with riches and power. Those who accept Jesus and get others to accept him are rewarded with heaven. Those who improve on something and put it out there for others to improve on are rewarded with respect, fame, and wealth. The benefit conferred shouldn't, however, be confused with the mechanism itself. Our culture wasn't spread by people becoming rich and powerful, Christianity wasn't spread by people going to heaven, and the Industrial Revolution wasn't spread by people winning respect, fame, and wealth.

Vision: success without programs

When a chemist puts water in a test tube and adds salt, an angel comes along and dissolves the salt into charged particles called ions. Because we perceive the universe to be self-governing according to internally consistent and comprehensible principles, the angel in this story seems completely superfluous to us. We therefore cut it away with Occam's razor.

Although historians now look for the reasons behind Christianity's success, they aren't looking for programs. Christianity thrived in the Roman world because the people of that time were ready for it, and historians would no more expect to find programs at work there “promoting” Christianity than chemists would expect to find angels at work in their test tubes. (It might be argued that Constantine's Edict of Milan, allowing Christians freedom of worship, was a program of support, but in fact it merely permitted what two and a half centuries of persecution had been unable to stop, much as the twenty-first amendment to the U.S. Constitution merely permitted what fourteen years of Prohibition had been unable to stop.)

In the same way, the spread of our culture has never had to be kept going by any program. It has never flagged for a single instant, and the same can be said of the Industrial Revolution.

When the vision turns ugly

When the river of vision begins to carry people in a direction they don't like, they start planting sticks to impede its flow. These are the sticks I call programs.

Most programs take this form: Outlaw the thing that's bothering you, catch people who do it, and put them in jail.

The fact that programs of this sort invariably fail doesn't trouble most people.

Every year, without fail, we outlaw more things, catch more people doing them, and put more of them in jail. The outlawed behavior never goes away, because, directly or indirectly, it's supported by the strong, invisible, unrelenting force called vision. This explains why police officers are much more likely to take up crime than criminals are to take up law enforcement. It's called “going with the flow.”

Programs aren't wicked, just inadequate

When someone has received life-threatening injuries in a car accident, the medics in the ambulance do whatever they can to keep him alive till they reach a hospital. This first aid is essential but ultimately inadequate, as everyone knows. If there's no hospital at the end of the road, the patient will die, because the ambulance just doesn't have the resources a hospital does.

The same is true of programs. There are many programs in place today that are staving off our death—programs to protect the environment from becoming even more degraded than it is. Like the first aid in the ambulance, these programs are essential but ultimately inadequate. They're ultimately inadequate because they're essentially reactive. Like the medics in the ambulance, they can't make good things happen, they only make bad things less bad. They don't bring into being something good, they only drag their feet against something bad.

If there's no hospital at the end of the road, the patient in the ambulance will die, because first aid (useful as it is) just doesn't have the capacity to keep him alive indefinitely. If there's no new vision for us at the end of the road, then we too are going to die, because programs (useful as they are) just don't have the capacity to keep us alive indefinitely.

But how could we get along without programs?

Once, in the land of broken legs, the inhabitants heard rumors of another land far away where people moved around freely, because no one's legs were broken. They scoffed at these tales, saying, “How could anyone get around without crutches?”

To say that the Industrial Revolution is a terrific example of what people can do without programs is an understatement. It's a mind-boggling example. From the time Giambattista della Porta dreamed up the first “modern” steam engine nearly four hundred years ago to the present, this vast, world-transforming movement has been carried forward by vision alone: Improve on something, then put it out there for others to improve on. Not a single program was ever needed to forward the Industrial Revolution. Rather it was forwarded by the confident realization in millions of minds that even a small new idea, even a modest innovation or improvement over some previous invention could improve their lives almost beyond imagination. Over a few brief centuries, millions of ordinary citizens, acting almost entirely from motives of self-interest, have transformed the human world by broadcasting ideas and discoveries and furthering these ideas and discoveries by taking them step by step to new ideas and discoveries. To acknowledge all this is not to make the Industrial Revolution a blessed event—but neither does condemning it as a catastrophe make it less than the greatest outpouring of creativity in human history.

But how will we live then?

No paradigm is ever able to imagine the next one. It's almost impossible for one paradigm to imagine that there will even be a next one. The people of the Middle Ages didn't think of themselves as being in the “middle” of anything at all. As far as they were concerned, the way they were living was the way people would be living till the end of time. Even if you'd managed to persuade them that a new era was just around the corner, they would've been unable to tell you a single thing about it—and in particular they wouldn't have been able to tell you what was going to make it new. If they'd been able to describe the Renaissance in the fourteenth century, it would have been the Renaissance.

We're no different. For all our blather of new paradigms and emerging paradigms, it's an unassailable assumption among us that our distant descendants will be just exactly like us. Their gadgets, fashions, music, and so on, will surely be different, but we're confident that their mindset will be identical—because we can imagine no other mindset for people to have. But in fact, if we actually manage to survive here, it will be because we've moved into a new era as different from ours as the Renaissance was from the Middle Ages—and as unimaginable to us as the Renaissance was to the Middle Ages.

How can we achieve a vision we can't imagine?

We can do it the way it's always done: one meme at a time. I'm aware this statement needs explaining. The best would be for you to read Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, but in case this isn't convenient for you right this second, I'll summarize. Briefly, memes are to cultures what genes are to bodies.

Your body is a collection of cells. Every cell in your body contains a complete set of all your genes, which Dawkins likens to a set of building plans for a human body—and your body in particular. At conception, you were a single cell—a single set of the building plans for your body, one half of the set received from your mother and the other half received from your father. This one cell subsequently divided into two cells, each containing the complete set of building plans for your body. These two subsequently divided into four, the four into eight, the eight into sixteen, and so on—each containing the complete set of building plans for your body.

A culture is also a collection of cells, which are individual humans. You (and each of your parents and all your siblings and friends) contain a complete set of memes, which are the conceptual building plans for our culture. Dawkins coined the word meme (rhymes with theme) to apply to what he perceived to be the cultural equivalent of the gene.

The leaping of genes and memes

Dawkins suggests that memes replicate themselves in the “meme pool” (the thing I call culture) in a way that is analogous to the way genes replicate themselves in the gene pool. That is, they leap from mind to mind the way genes leap from body to body. Genes leap from body to body by way of reproduction. Memes leap from mind to mind by way of communication: in lullabies heard in the cradle, in fairy tales, in parents' table conversation, in jokes, in television cartoons, in the funnies, in sermons, in gossip, in lectures, in textbooks, in movies, in novels, in newspapers, in song lyrics, in advertisements, and so on.

A great deal of ink (real and virtual) has been spilled over Dawkins's memes. Some authorities have dismissed them as nonexistent or as nonsense. Others have gone so far as to wonder if memes exist in brains in as physical a sense as dendrites or glia cells. I leave them to it.

Every culture is a collection of individuals, and each individual has in his or her head a complete set of values, concepts, rules, and preferences that, taken together, constitute the building plans for that particular culture. Whether you call them memes or marglefarbs is irrelevant. There can be no question whatever that they exist.

Small percentages, big differences

Unless you happen to be a geneticist, you'll probably be surprised to learn that we differ from chimpanzees by only a very small percentage of genes. We expect it to be the other way around. We're so manifestly different from chimpanzees that we expect there to be a vast genetic gulf between us. Obviously the genes we don't share must in some way “make all the difference.” But it would be a mistake to think that, without these genes, humans would be chimpanzees—or that, with these genes, chimpanzees would be humans. Humans aren't just chimpanzees with extra genes, nor are chimpanzees just humans with missing genes. Nothing in the world of genetics (or any other world, for that matter) is ever that simple.

Only a very small percentage of memes differentiated the Renaissance from the Middle Ages, but obviously the new ones “made all the difference.” The authority of the Church waned, new humanist ideals emerged, the development of the printing press gave people new ideas about what they could know and think about, and so on. To produce the Renaissance, it wasn't necessary to change out ninety percent of the memes of the Middle Ages—or eighty or sixty or thirty or even twenty. And the new memes didn't have to come into play all at once. Indeed, they couldn't have come into play all at once. The Renaissance was ready for Andrea del Verrocchio long before it was ready for Martin Luther.

Which memes do we need to change?

This question is a lot easier to answer than might be expected. The memes we need to change are the lethal ones.

Richard Dawkins puts it with irreducible simplicity: “A lethal gene is one that kills its possessor.” It may well strike you as unfair and somehow unreasonable for such things as lethal genes even to exist. You may also wonder how lethal genes manage to remain in the gene pool at all. If they kill their possessors, why aren't they eliminated? The answer is that genes don't all come into play at the same time. Most genes, obviously, begin work during the fetal stage, when the body is being built. Some, just as obviously, are dormant until the onset of adolescence. Lethal genes that come into play before adolescence are of course quickly eliminated from the gene pool, because their possessors are unable to pass them on by reproduction. Lethal genes that come into play early in adolescence also tend to be eliminated, but those that come into play in middle or old age remain in the gene pool, because their possessors are almost always able to pass them on through reproduction before succumbing to their lethal effect.

Lethal memes

Alethal meme is one that kills its possessor. For example, the Heaven's Gate cultists possessed a lethal meme that made suicide irresistibly attractive to them—but I'm not much interested in memes that are lethal to individuals. I'm interested in memes that are lethal to cultures (and to our culture in particular).

Lethal genes don't start out as benign and then later become lethal. Rather, they start out as having no effect or another effect, which only later becomes lethal. The same is true of lethal memes. Early Semitic witnesses to our cultural beginnings saw that their neighbors had plucked some memes from the gods' own tree of wisdom. They said, “Our neighbors to the north have got the idea they should rule the world. This meme is benign in the gods but deadly in humans.” Their prediction was accurate, but it didn't come true immediately. The memes that made us the rulers of the world are lethal, but they didn't have a lethal effect ten thousand years ago—or five thousand or two thousand. They were at work, turning us into the rulers of the world, but their deadliness didn't become evident until this century, when they began turning us into the devastators of the world.

Ridding ourselves of those memes is a matter of life and death, but it can be done. I know this because it has been done—by others. Many times.