/* The conservative critique, and a partial rebuttal */
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''This is chapter 3 of [[SolSeed: The Book of Life#The "SolSeed Gospel" according to Ben|Ben's portion of SolSeed: The Book of Life]].''
=== Redefining our priorities ===
: "Clearly, the highest loyalty we should have is not to our own country or our own religion or our hometown or even to ourselves. It should be to, number two, the family of man, and number one, the planet at large. This is our home, and this is all we've got."
::: ~ Scott Carpenter, Mecury 7 astronaut, quoted at http://spacequotations.com/earth.html
Imagine a world where society measures its success not by abstract economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product, but by measures of people's happiness and fulfillment, ecosystem health, and so forth. A world where you ask not what you can do for your country, but what both you ''and'' your country can do in the service of people and ecosystems everywhere. A world where technology is neither idolized nor demonized, where every technology is studied carefully to weigh its costs and benefits to all living things.
If your first reaction is to point out the enormous gulf separating this vision from present-day reality, I don't blame you. Ideals like this one have to be considered as either very long-term goals, or general "north star" guides for work toward building a world that more closely approximates the ideal but never reaches it.
It's also useful to ask, if most aspects of a vision like this would be appealing to most people, why does our present-day world look so different? Can we explain the persistence of grave injustice, widespread destitution, and bloody wars, given the extreme unpopularity of these things? What has been blocking us from building a better world?
Here's my best shot at an answer: our society's priorities are completely backwards.
==== Our current priorities ====
First, as pointed out in chapter 1, our society is obsessed with '''material wealth'''. You can see it not only in people's individual desires for financial success, but in the measurement of nations' well-being through numbers like the Gross Domestic Product and the volume of trade with other countries. This obsession has embedded itself at the root of how our civilization functions, to the point where constant growth in financial wealth is required for the economic system to function well.
Second, we're particularly focused on one form of material wealth: '''advanced technology'''. In the 1950s, many wealthy and upper-middle-class Americans insisted on buying the latest and greatest car every year, replacing still-fully-functional vehicles merely because they were "out of date." Today, thankfully, we mostly focus that obsession on much smaller gadgets like computers and smartphones, but the reduction in waste is perhaps outstripped by the growing difficulty of coping with accelerating technological change. "Disruptive innovation" is the buzzword of our time, implying that you can never have too high a rate of technological progress.
Third, although we set up '''institutions''' like governments and corporations to provide benefits to people, we often end up subordinating ourselves and our needs to the needs of the institutions we live in or work for. You can see this attitude in many legal documents: apartment leases, employment contracts, end-user license agreements, and citizenship forms all involve voluntarily setting limits on your life for the sake of an institution's well-being. Nationalism and employee loyalty, when deeply felt, can drive a syndrome where an organization starts to behave as if the continuation of its own existence is all that matters. Some of the worst symptoms of this disease in the private sector include huge corporate layoffs and disobeying or lobbying against laws designed to help people and ecosystems, just because they would damage the organization's profitability or force a major change in its operations. The consequences of excessive nationalism can be even worse: unnecessary and destructive wars, massive-scale surveillence, indefinite imprisonment and torture of people who supposedly pose a threat to "national security."
And finally, most people these days firmly believe that humanity exists outside and above the natural world, a species so exceptional that we have the right and indeed the responsibility to reshape the planet to better serve '''human interests'''. Combine this attitude with a staggering overconfidence that assumes we actually know enough about the world to make global-scale changes without triggering massively harmful side effects, and the confluence of environmental crises we currently face becomes easy to understand. (Actually, we don't know nearly enough about the way the planet works to predict in advance which of our activities will prove to have global impact, much less what that impact will be.)
In short, our civilization's list of top priorities currently looks something like this:
# Material wealth / economic growth
# Technological innovation
# Maintenance of institutions
# Human welfare
# Conservation of natural resources
So what would it look like if we turned that list upside down?
==== My suggested redefinition ====
In the new list of priorities, #5 would simply be '''wealth'''. No longer constrained to material products or services easily measurable using money, this concept would embrace social, aesthetic, ecological, and even spiritual wealth, all of which are clearly desirable. And although increasing one form of wealth at the expense of another might sometimes be deemed good or even necessary, such decisions would always be made with a full understanding of what is being sacrificed.
Priority #4 would be a specific form of wealth, '''creativity''', that humans value more because it represents our most unique contribution to the world. A world without creativity and its fruits would perhaps enable a limited form of human happiness, but would be fundamentally unfulfilling (as well as supporting only a tiny fraction of our present population size, which is supported by millennia of creative developments in agricultural technology). However, in this new model, creative freedom would be constrained by the need to avoid reckless endangerment of civilization's systems, the people in them, or the biosphere around them.
To increase its sense of flexibility, priority #3 would be renamed from institutions to '''governance''', a functional definition of which would include things like coordinating large projects, balancing the interests of multiple large groups, and applying some system of justice to deal with harmful behavior. The patterns, practices, and organizational structures that enable these activities would be understood as merely means to an end, and if a clearly superior alternative to one such system were proposed, there should be no major barrier to replacing it.
Priority #2 would still be called '''human welfare''', and thanks to its placement above most of the other priorities, humans would no longer be reducible to "human resources," "consumers," or even "citizens of a country." There would no longer be grounds for blocking measures to improve human welfare on the grounds that it would "harm the economy" or "slow down progress." Such arguments would have to be transmuted into balances between the intended positive effects of a program and the possible negative impacts ''on human welfare'' resulting from the program's social, political, and economic side effects.
And priority #1, as Scott Carpenter says, would be the health and thriving of the whole planet, or more specifically its biosphere--or to put it as succinctly as possible, '''life'''. The effects of this shift are hard to imagine; perhaps the easiest example to start with is human population. According to priority #2, a larger number of happy, fulfilled people is always a good thing--but even if we ignore overpopulation's long-term, indirect threats to human welfare, priority #1 says we must limit our population and resource use to Earth's ecological carrying capacity for our species (with the currently-hypothetical exception of people who live on other worlds). Otherwise, humanity will have a net negative impact on the welfare of the biosphere, which will no longer be morally defensible as soon as we can find a way to live that has a net positive impact instead.
=== Changing the story ===
Even assuming you agree with the desirability of my revised list of societal priorities (and if not, I highly recommend you make your own), you're probably wondering how it could possibly be adopted on a large scale. Priority #1 may appear especially daunting. How, you might ask, could we ever convince our fellow humans to place our own fundamental needs below those of other animals, plants, and so forth?
The key word in that question, as it turns out, is "other." As I'll discuss further in the next chapter, humans need to accept the scientific truth that we are animals too. We are not separate from life on Earth, we are part of it. To place the needs of all life foremost does not subordinate us to something other than ourselves, only something greater.
This may sound obvious to modern ears, but the problem is that for thousands of years, Western culture has based itself on a sacred story in which humans are separate from the natural world, superior to it, and therefore free to do with it as we please. This story has reached the limits of its usefulness and is slowly beginning to lose its hold on us, but we still have a long way to go.
==== The illusion of separation ====
In the Book of Genesis, God explicitly grants humans "dominion" over the rest of life on Earth, and commands us to "fill the Earth and subdue it." While this may not represent the earliest beginnings of the trend, it's at least a clear early indicator of how people in Christendom/Europe have traditionally thought about their relationship to nature.
This attitude is bad enough by itself, as discussed in more depth in my next chapter. But Europeans also applied the concept of separation and the conviction of their own superiority to their relationships with humans from other parts of the world, other parts of Europe, and sometimes even other parts of town, as well as the relationships between men and women. The results included many wars, enslavement of both Africans and married European women (who were considered their husbands' property), and the near-total destruction of indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere.
To be fair, Europeans certainly didn't invent the concept of "otherizing," viewing certain people as "not people like us" to make it easier to attack or subjugate them. Warfare between tribes of Native Americans, for instance, almost certainly involved some form of this dangerous pattern of thought, even long before they made contact with European settlers. Many non-European cultures also have deeply ingrained traditions of power imbalance between the sexes, usually placing men above women. But the sheer scale of the catastrophes resulting from the European variation on these themes, as well as the recent global spread of Western culture and its underpinning stories through modern media, place the responsibility squarely in Western hands for trying to replace the story of separation with a New Story that focuses on unity.
Parts of this story are already commonly understood, at least on an intellectual level: we all know that people living in other countries, people with different skin colors or reproductive organs, and people with different religious beliefs from ours are still people, fellow members of a single species. But two questions remain: How can we make a more visceral connection with the idea that people who look or act differently are our kin? And can we accomplish that without also taking the next step, to embrace our kinship with all living beings on this planet?
Then there's a third, even more difficult question: Before we can tackle racism, sexism, and other divisions among large groups of people, do we first have to find an alternative to the individualism that separates each one of us from even the other people in our "in-groups?" Might we, in fact, have to learn how to surrender our egos entirely, so as to attain a direct personal experience of mystical union with all people and all things?
==== The delusion of union ====
Mystics of many traditions, particularly Eastern ones, assert that through practicing meditation, you can reach a state in which your sense of individuality drops away and you join with a universal consciousness. They claim that this state of mystical union is reality, while our day-to-day experience of being confined to a single "skin bag," as my friend Brandon calls it, is only an illusion.
Personally, I find this hard to swallow. Even the mystics admit that these glimpses of union are always brief. The rest of the time, you can see only through your own eyes; you have no direct access to the minds and experiences of anyone but yourself. You can use empathy to "share" the emotions of others, but you can only feel what you ''perceive'' them to be feeling, through the indirect evidence of your own senses. A skilled actor can make you empathize with an emotion he or she is only pretending to feel.
So even if there is some particular mental state that anyone can achieve with enough meditative practice, in which you feel at one with the Universe, I lean toward the interpretation that it's just a mental state, like the ones associated with various psychedelic drugs. Without scientific support, the truth of what this state tells you remains unknowable. It could easily just be a hallucination.
Mystics might argue that I'd believe otherwise if I experienced one of these moments of "enlightenment" for myself. Others might claim that it's worth believing in the fundamental oneness of all consciousness, regardless of its literal truth or falsehood, because it would lead to a better society.
==== The conservative critique, and a partial rebuttal ====
Or would it? A common objection to the whole New Story concept, one that looks completely damning to most political conservatives and libertarians, is that it’s fundamentally collectivist, and because collective action requires organization, it appears to lead straight back into the trap of placing the needs of organizations above those of human beings. Surely that goes double for the extreme mystical version of the story, where even the separation of our individual consciousnesses is a lie--where we're all secretly part of a giant hive mind, and "groupthink" is the only kind of thinking we accept as real.
To see why collectivism is not necessarily as dangerous as conservatives claim, we need look no further than the ideals of democracy. Self-rule by large groups of people is certainly a collective activity mediated by an organizational structure, but that structure still exists to serve the people in it rather than the other way around. Voting is a process intended to aggregate the individual preferences of a large number of people and use them to guide decision-making. Elected officials and appointed bureaucrats are not meant to view the government they work for as an end in itself, only as a means to fulfill their desire to serve the needs of the citizens.
Obviously, real democracies tend to fall far short of these ideals, but most of them are based on constitutions that are designed to be improved over time. Just because we have yet to find a mechanism of governance that ensures a bureaucracy won’t end up working mainly to perpetuate its own existence, or one that effectively blocks political leaders from placing their own personal desires above those of their constituents, doesn’t mean we never will.
Of course, this isn’t a complete answer to the objection about the story of being one with all life on Earth. What would a democracy look like if most of the “constituents” are bacteria and insects? As yet, no one seems to have a clear answer to that.
The rebuttal also fails to tackle the mystical hive mind issue at all. "Why focus on ''individual'' preferences and use mere physical means to aggregate them," a mystic might ask, "when you can just meditate deeply, ''feel'' what the Universal Consciousness wants to do, and then do it?" But I can't answer such a question with a straight face. "Try it," I'd have to say, "and see how many millions of people disagree with your interpretation of what we all collectively desire."
==== Middle grounds ====
* Falco: reject both ego and interdependence
* Holons (cite Heather Johnson?)
* David Korten again
=== What it means in practice ===
* Achieving big things by working together still feeds your individual ego
* Broad shared prosperity is good for both individuals and the social/economic whole
* We help the disabled because we value their individual lives, despite their limited contribution to society