Discerning the same pattern in two distinct (yet related)
domains likely points to a more fundamental dynamic having its roots in human
nature itself—that is, in our species as formed through 1.8 million years of natural
selection. Critically, the overwhelming majority of the incremental adaptations
to better fit with the environment occurred while homo sapiens individuals lived in small hunter-gatherer “bands.”
Our nature, as in our genes and bodies, is a result of a myriad of such “fine-tunings”
that occurred in and for a way of life, or “world,” that differs appreciably
from that of modern man. We may therefore be hampered internally from being
able to cope even with our own messes, and even survive them. In fact, because
it will take natural selection a long time to “catch up” with our large and
complex living (and working) arrangements, we may actually be unwittingly
inclined to make matters worse even to the point that we as a species lose out—meaning
go extinct. In this essay, I raise two problems—global warming and economic
inequality—as demonstrative of this self-destructive element in our very
nature.
In its Climate Change 2014 report, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) asserts that the world, “in many cases, is
ill-prepared for risks from a changing climate.”[1]
This point bears on adaptation to the
changes taken as a given, which as a strategy can be distinguished from prevention, which seeks to obviate or
avoid the changes themselves. According
to the U.N.’s expert panel behind the report, without “additional measures to
contain emissions,” global temperatures would rise about 3 or 4 degrees Celsius
(5 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 on top of the 0.8 degree Celsius (1.4 F)increase
already “on the books” from when record keeping began in the nineteenth
century.[2]
Cuts in emissions of 40 to 70 percent by
2050 would be necessary to keep the rise to 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 F), which
would be necessary to avert the worst.[3]
Lest government officials around the world conclude that
continuing to “kick the political football down field” given the number of
years between 2014 and 2050, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri adds an important
economic and political factor: “The longer we delay the higher will be the
cost.”[4]
Even so, by the sheer gravity of the status quo (and the vested interests
behind it), we might expect the de facto choice
of going with the higher costs anyway, with current carbon emissions held more
or less constant. So it might come as a surprise to learn that the global
carbon emissions set a record high in
2012. They rose by 2.2 percent (1 gigaton) a
year during the first decade of the twenty-first century—a rate of
increasing exceeding those in the previous decades.[5]
Meanwhile, the global population continued to increase unabated, ironically
making it decreasingly likely that the innately schizogenic[6]
species would survive in the “brave new world” of a warmer, more volatile clime.
Globally, we are going in the wrong direction, which is particularly astonishing given the science that was coming in. Even before the evidence of the human (homeogenic) contribution, why exascerbate the problem by adding record amounts of CO2 emissions? The human brain seems to have a (genetic?) blind spot that operates at the expense of its very genes.
That is to say, not only was the world as a whole not making
a dent in the existing emissions level; governments taken as a whole were allowing the problem to worsen. “There is a clear message from science,” Ottmar Edenhofer
of the IPCC said. “To avoid dangerous interference with the climate system, we
need to move away from business as usual.”[7]
Astonishingly, even with reasonable
forewarning of danger to the species and the “relatively modest” cost of “keeping
global warming in check” if and only if “the
world acts quickly to reverse the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the
atmosphere,” humanity seems stuck to its “business as usual” mantra as if the
species were oblivious to tomorrow, or at least conveniently content living for
today with a minimum of obstacles getting the way of our selfish pleasure.[8]
It is as though humanity had been bitten by some insect
infected with a virus that renders its victims totally oblivious to their own
self-defeating actions and even prompts the creatures to, as it were, smoke
even more. I suspect that no virus is necessary—that this pattern exists
societally in at least one other major domain, suggesting that something in
human nature itself not only dismisses warnings, but also cheers us on to make
matters even worse.
The other domain I have in mind is that of income and wealth
inequality. As reported in USA Today,
American CEOs saw their total compensation—including salary, bonuses, perks,
and realized stock and options gains—increase 13 percent to a median level of
$10.5 million in 2013, even as the 105 million full-time workers saw their
wages go up just 1.4 percent to a median level of $40,872.[9]
In other words, for all the warnings of destabilizing levels of economic
inequality among Americans, the gap was actually widening.
Both with regard to global climate and American democracy
(as distinct as a type from plutocracy, the rule of wealth), two degrees of
separation are in play. Not only have efforts not been forthcoming to reduce
the imbalances of carbon and income, respectively—this is bad enough—but we are
also making the problems worse.
To be sure, arguments can indeed be, and have been, tendered
on behalf of economic liberty and even employment security against hampering
business production and capping incomes via progressive taxation. Such
objections typically focus on the business and individual levels and more or
less assume that the system, whether an ecosystem, society, or government are
simply aggregates that do best when the individual units, or parts, perform
optimally. Systemic constraints on the latter for the good of the system are
thus counter-productive, even unfair, in this line of reasoning.
Antithetically, the “systemists” point to the systemic risk
of a unit piercing through the constraints of an ecosystem or the umbrella-like
stability of a political economy—Gregory Bateson describes this danger as a
schizogenic variable breaching an otherwise homeostatic equilibrium.[10]
Even as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook claims his total compensation in 2013 of
$3.3 billion is not too much, and Larry Ellison of Oracle does likely regarding
his own $229.8 million and Howard Schultz again for his $163 million at
Starbucks, the economic and political power latent in such extraordinary gains
in wealth (not to mention the prior years’ incomes accumulated by these three
men alone) act as “black holes” both with respect to representative democracy
and (relatedly) the interests of the business sector relative to broader
interests in long-term human survival on a hotter Earth.
In short, the system being out of balance both globally and
in the American context goes beyond the tension between individual rights and
the security of the overarching systems; the status quo itself has too much
power over our species. Indeed, given that almost all of our species’ existence
has involved the pressing survival need to guard against the threat of
immediate dangers, such as that of a tiger or lion lurking in a nearby bush,
our very nature is oriented to today over tomorrow. The oceans of time
necessary for natural selection to adapt our very nature to our complex
economic, governmental, and social arrangements means that our species and its
even its best form of government yet may succumb to our own misguided devises
that are oriented to extending “the party” today (for in the long run we are
dead, right?).
1.
2. Ibid.
3. Gary Strauss, Matt Krantz, and Barbara Hansen, “The $100 Million Club: CEOs Get
Richer; Workers Get Left Behind,” USA
Today, April 4-6, 2014.
4. See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology
of Mind.
6. Ritter, "U.N. Climate."
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. That is, acting as a variable maximizing its value at the expense of the
system, such as an ecosystem.
