Collapse of the Industrial World — Science versus ideology pitfalls
Of the dangers in wading off outside one’s domain of competencies…
Hi Erik,
I reply to your last set of comments.
Hé ben dis donc! Ouh Là Làaaaa… They kind of sound a bit funny to me. I don’t know if you realise that on this side of the Atlantic you come across a bit like a mini “Polit Bureau” of defunct USSR fame, that is, seeking to impose an ideology, “civilisation is unsustainable”, on the basis of grossly misunderstood science, which I am confident is not what you intend.
So, I reply to clarify a few points, at least for the benefit of readers.
You refer to a number of scientists and/or NGO activists in support of your beliefs:
Garrett is an atmosphere scientist. Hagens’ PhD is in Natural Resources with an MBA with honours in finance. Murphy is an astrophysicist. Rees’ PhD is in population ecology. He is known for developing the notion of ecological footprint, and for having branched out into “ecological economics”, an oxymoron if there is one, the two, ecology and any manner of economics being incompatible. Seibert has a MS in Systems Science/Environmental Management, and appears to be mainly self-made with “explorations in yoga, shamanism, animism, astrology, and teacher plants”… Daniel Schmachtenberger has a “Degree of Science in Mathematics from Maharishi University of Management [of Maharishi Yogi transcendental meditation fame] and earned the title A.B.D. in Counseling Psychology at Body Mind College”…
Matters of civilisation and sustainability of mode of social organisation pertain to the social and human sciences as well as overlapping with the natural sciences. None of the above has any background in the social sciences. Although all are well intentioned, they all have waded unwittingly into areas where they express extremely naive views and find themselves largely out of their depth. They ignore major developments by the likes of Edgar Morin, Bruno Latour, my regretted friend Jean Baudrillard, my other friend Serge Latouche, Jean Jacques Walter, René Girard, Julian Jaynes, Marcel Kuijsten, James Cohn, Brian McVeigh, Francisco Varela, and many others. Except for Rees who is marginally older than me, they were all students when we produced fundamental developments concerning humankind development dynamics, that have a strong bearing on sustainability matters, most particularly during the 1970s, developments that invalidate large chunks of what they are pronouncing on now. The tragic of the story is that these have not yet sunk in, across disciplinary divides, ideological prejudices, and in some instances language barriers…
Concerning diagnosing the woes of the industrial world, the people that you reference make generally robust observations where and when they stay on solid physical, descriptive matters (although Hagens’ notion of humankind as a “super organism” does not pass muster). When they venture into social and psychological grounds is where they go astray. For example, re Seibert’s Real Green New Deal (REALgnd), some of its premises and goals are about correct, re the fated prospects of the current industrial world. However, their take on how to handle the challenges remain naive at best.
Murphy’s book Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet: Assessing and Adapting to Planetary Limits, is great on the physical side of things. Yet he misses fundamental aspects of humankind’s dynamics.
So, no, don’t tell this old timer that I am “not familiar” with their work ;-))
As I stressed at the beginning of what I hoped could be a dialogue, talking of “civilisation” and “sustainability” in unspecified pseudo-generic fashion is utterly meaningless. What you do not seem to understand is that the people you refer to essentially delineate specific matters that render the industrial world not viable in the longer run. That’s great, very important. However, none of what is robust in their findings specifies that no society can be viable for long periods of time in ways that are not ecologically destructive. It does not eliminate the possibility of a viable space. In turn some of us, since the 1960s have been researching in transdisciplinary ways, encompassing the natural and social sciences and engineering, the feasibility of evolving thermodynamically and ecologically sound social spaces. We have found that this is actually feasible, yet outside the confines of the current industrial world.
You see, often in science some guys come “left field” who notice something others have missed and that opens a new avenue that changes the game. So here, my colleagues and I have figured out a few things that are rather simple in their principles that have this potential. If you had actually read my White Paper in extenso, you could have possibly seen that I explain in lay terms how one can integrate an indirectly heated, recuperated Brayton-Ericsson thermodynamic cycle, using positive displacement machines, with heat pump and heat transformer functionality. This means that one can use modest low entropy energy inputs, especially from the solar influx, to leverage large amounts of relativley higher entropy energy sourced from local environments to match in real time energy requirements directly at the point of use. In simpler language, this means one can achieve some three times more with twice less primary energy sources and materials.
This has been validated by a number of engineers and more importantly by a series of patent examiners. Here, the point of patenting is not to “make a mint” and instead it is to be able to manage how this technological development gets used for the benefit of all of humankind and much life on Earth.
The core point is that our development emulates what life on Earth has been doing for several billion years. It operates in non-dualistic fashion, just like Earth-Life. A core problem with the industrial world is that it uses brute force, extremely wastefully, to achieve anything. Instead our way is gentle, making minimal use of resources put in play, in sound ecological fashion. It is part of ways of thinking and doing things that emerged some 2500 years ago and have kept going strong, albeit as undercurrents, ever since. These ways are now core to cutting edge science in a number of disciplines. This is why what we are developing has the potential to be a game changer.
In fact, what we are doing with our technological development is what humankind has been doing for some three million years, in round numbers. Humankind is a technological, social species. It evolves with technological and cultural developments most often coming left field that change the game.
A good example is in the interplay between the Neanderthal and Sapiens variant of Homo. Clive Finlayson’s extensive work comparing Neanderthals and Sapiens is particularly relevant.[1] His concluding chapter is titled “The survival of the weakest”, that is, “us”, as a kind of hybrid of the two. Concerning Neanderthals, he concludes: “I therefore maintain that Neanderthals were not cognitively inferior to Moderns nor do I find support for a sudden mutation that generated the complete package that made up the Modern Human overnight. Neanderthals were simply different. A morphology and way of life that had become increasingly complex and had been successful across the mid-latitude belt of western and central Eurasia for close to half-a-million years disappeared because it was not designed to cope with the speed and direction of change that hit Eurasia at the end of the Pleistocene.” p. 207.
Concerning Sapiens, he ends his analysis of evidence at the time of his writing saying: “I hope to have shown in this book that we are the product of chance and a great deal of luck. We are here because, in scrambling for survival in the margins of the world of other humans, we became increasingly inventive and kept finding ways of hanging on and then taking over when others that had been better adapted than ourselves vanished as circumstances changed. That we are here today is the end result of a series of chance events that kept us in the running. It could easily have gone the other way…” P. 208.
There is abundant evidence that humankind is now at a comparable juncture. Homo is not “homo-geneous”, if I can put it that way. Over the last 3 million years or so, it has evolved largely culturally as well as genetically by branching out in numerous ways. I often use the image of braided rivers where streams diverge, then remerge and so on. Where the average span of mammal species is in the order of 1 million years, “we” have been going on for some 3 millions years, largely thanks for this non-homogeneity. From an Earth-Life perspective this is what matters — A genus that has the potential for developing conscious intelligence fully integrated in Earth-Life (as I discuss in COP26 is bound to fail and so are all other Climate Emergency actions… Or… Life on the cliff’s edge and Part II)
Similarly with the Neanderthal-Sapiens interplay, steering away from the brute force of an industrial world that is in the process of collapsing, our approach is that of the “weakest”… a gentle technological blending into Earth-Life, taken as a self-organising, self-regulating, self-perpetuating complex thermodynamic system, operating far from equilibrium, that leverages several times over the energy influx that it receives from the sun.
This is left field; as far as we can tell no one had thought about it before. We think that it has the potential to be as important as learning to master fire some time between 1 million and 400,000 years ago, that is, when Homo culturally/technologically modified itself genetically as a “braided” set of species (cooked food resulted in a shrinking of the digestive tract and a substantial increase in energy available to brain activity — Homo is now dependent on cooked food) and simultaneously began to modify Earth-Life…
There is scope. This is why we talk in terms of a Fourth Transition, coming after hunting and gathering, after biomass based societies and after the industrial world. Our Initiative is bold, outrageous, and exciting. It addresses a desperate situation. It is entirely based on well proven science and engineering, and masses of evidence data. We think it deserves giving it a go (instead of being “donged on the head” and being accused of “hype” ;-)))
So, Erik, by all means, if your belief that “civilisation is unsustainable” is so important to you, fine, hold on to it. Meanwhile let us free to think otherwise and develop new avenues that actually may turn out correct.
Cheers
Louis
[1] See Clive Finlayson, 2004, Neanderthals and Modern Humans — An Ecological and Evolutionary Perspective, Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511542374; and his subsequent contributions.
