- Salman Rushdie; At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers

From Section 1: The Voice of God

I may have my scholarly lapses, but I certainly could not garble a living writer's work and pass on without presenting a proper quotation. With that obligation out of the way there is another I can discharge, which relates to a comment I made in the Introduction about some of my reasons for undertaking this exploration being easier to explain when we are closer to the end. We can begin with one of the experiences that first stirred me to conceive a project like this, which came in the form of an encounter with a rather pathetic book on the subject of saving the world. I will not name the book because I am reluctant to attack a sincere effort in a worthy cause, nor do I think it fair to single out one among many products of what I have somewhat perversely come to call the Joan of Arc school of scholarship and polemics, whose proponents' attempts to make things hot for the opposition usually end up warming them ways other than intended. The kind of people who are fond of making statements like: the ecological devastation wrought by industrialization and the global economy have driven X number of species extinct and condemned Y percent of humankind to poverty, and then for justification they add little reference tags to studies that those in the know will immediately recognize as exercizes in which the authors have extracted most of the relevant figures from their own fundamental orifices. People who do this sort of thing may think they are erecting a pale around all that is right and good, and perhaps they are - but to my eye they are merely tossing a few more faggots onto the pyre while fuelling the already widely-encouraged perception that anyone who objects to carrying on with business as usual is a figure-fudging extremist, romantic tree-hugger, bomb-throwing anarchist or delusional paranoid. Excess in a noble cause may be virtuous, but those who enter the public arena should heed the words of one of my favourite fictional TV characters: if you come in come heavy, or not at all.

These observations also relate to the literary style I have chosen to use, most notably the practice of placing facts and examples alongside the statements they are intended to support instead of stashing them in appendices and footnotes or packaging them into tables and diagrams. As I see it, the main advantage of doing things this way is that the reader is allowed - and indeed forced - to continually judge the validity and relevance of what is being said each step of the way. It also cuts down on distractions, although the resulting narrative may not be as streamlined as many would like. Those who prefer formal structures and generous genuflections towards the current consensus within each discipline encountered along the way may also be disappointed, but as I said at the start my aim has been to serve less as an expert than as a guide - something along the line of Mark Twain's steamer boat captain in Life on the Mississippi, whose remarks could be taken both as entertainment and as an account of a long and hazardous journey that never stays the same.

Our journey here has taken us through the history of a living world where genomes, lineages, cells, communities, organisms, families, populations, social groups, societies, attitudes, urges, experiences, traditions, histories, perspectives, philosophies, priorities, ambitions, hopes, dreams, dreads and visions have been struggling towards the future sixty second out of every minute, sixty minutes an hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week with no vacations for countless generations. Along the way we have encountered spectacular destruction and prodigious creativity, witnessed lengthy periods of calm and outbursts of frenzied activity, heard cautionary tales of the worst that can happen and encouraging reports of the best that can be accomplished and we have considered how we may have gotten where we are and where we may be headed if we keep on the way we are going. Those who were expecting the sure path to a better future to be revealed at some point along the way will be disappointed, not that such a thing was ever promised. And those who have already committed themselves to future fixes like universal disarmament, the worldwide redistribution of wealth and the reshaping of global human consciousness may not have found much succour either. I realize that we live in a world where everyone from individuals to supranational organizations has already picked sides, formed factions and joined the struggle for hearts and minds, territory and wealth and control of the future, and certainly my depiction of the winners in those struggles as the denizens of a massive malignancy that bestrides the human and natural worlds can be taken as a sign of my own concerns about where we are headed. But as I trust you will also appreciate by now, after one has spent some time exploring the roots of the present it becomes difficult to generate much enthusiasm for future plans that seem to have nothing behind them but the good intentions of folks who believe themselves to be in direct communication with a higher power.

This is not to say that I have anything against tuning into the universal wavelength. Perhaps not the channel that drove poor old Saint Joan to drag on her armour and win glory for France and a rather different kind of glory for herself, but something more along the line of what the noted mythologist Joseph Campbell described in a story I hear him tell long ago. The tale concerned a young lad living in southern India, who was advised by his elders to further his education by seeking instruction from a well-regarded local holy man. The sage duly accepted the new student, and after a few hours of introductory material he concluded the first day's teaching by telling the youngster that God is in the sky, in the rocks, in the trees and in each and every one of us. "Even me?" asked the lad. "Even you." said the sage. "Now run along home, that's enough for today."

His teacher's revelation was still buzzing in the youth's head as he walked home along a raised path flanked by dry irrigation ditches, and he scarcely noticed when an elephant come up behind him carrying a load of paddy straw. The mahout on the beast's back called out to tell the boy to make way, and the lad was just about to step out of the way - standard practice when an elephant wishes to pass - but then he had a profound insight of his own. "I am God, and the elephant is God," he said to himself, "So why should God get out of the way of God?" He had stopped in the middle of the path to ponder that point further when the mahout shouted again, and then without further warning the elephant nudged the dumbfounded student off the path with her trunk and trundled past in a cloud of dust. The boy was still sitting in a daze in the dry ditch when his teacher came along a few minutes later, and on seeing the old man the lad jumped up, gave himself a brisk dusting off and glared up as imperiously as one can under such circumstances. "This is the fault of your teaching." he huffed. "I do not understand. If the elephant is God, and I am God, then why did I end up in this ditch?" he asked with a whine. "Ah," replied the holy man, holding up an admonishing finger. "But did you not hear the voice of God telling you to move off the path?"

That story relates to another experience that nudged me towards this project, which occurred while I was watching TV one day when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was trolling for stories in Newfoundland following the closure of the Grand Banks cod fishery. The event had already made for some good theatre, like the infamous Bay Bulls encounter mentioned earlier, but what I found most interesting were the stories from the outport communities, many of which were already well on the way to becoming ghost towns. One news crew ventured out and managed to locate a fortysomething fisherman sitting in the back of his boat, surrounded by racks of suddenly useless nets and tackle. He was obviously still in shock from recent events, and when he was asked to relate his perspective on what had happened he paused thoughtfully for a moment and then replied with typical islander candour. He began by noting that for most of the time he had been fishing up until the mid-1980's, a hundredweight (i.e. fifty kilograms) of cod would have accounted for around twenty fish, thirty at the most. He went on to say that by around 1989 it was taking an average of fifty fish to make up a hundredweight, and then after a thoughtful pause to glance around at the no doubt heavily-mortgaged boat he added that in the waning days of the fishery it was taking seventy or eighty cod to make up the same weight - when you could find them, that is (he neglected to mention that catching fish that small required using illegal nets).

After a bit more prodding the fisherman admitted that everyone knew it was the mature cod - which is to say the twenty per hundredweight class - that comprised the breeding stock, and hence it had been obvious to most of the people directly involved in the fishery that for at least three years before the collapse the catch had consisted largely of juveniles; indeed by the end they accounted for virtually the entire surviving cod population. And yet, despite the fact that the fishermen enjoyed being fishermen, their suppliers were keen to keep selling them equipment, the fish-buyers were glad to take the catch, the banks would have preferred to issue loans rather than foreclose on worthless boats and equipment, the people of the maritime outports treasured their traditional way of life and their political representatives enjoyed their positions of power and influence, somehow they all spontaneously conspired to run the Grand Banks cod fishery into extinction. Maybe everyone did have a little blood on their hands, including the seals and foreigners, and maybe what happened in Newfoundland was a local outbreak of a national or global malady, but one thing that occurred to me while I was watching that fishermen was that an awful lot of people must have turned a deaf ear to the voice of God when it was telling them they were on the wrong path.

It has of course become increasingly risky in this day and age to talk about things like divine voices, given the extent to which such inspirations have become linked to barbarities committed everywhere from the fetid backwaters of humankind to the most exalted towers of privilege - which have recently been shown to be rather closer to each other than either those looking up or down could have imagined. But the voice I am talking about does not come from above with thundering instructions to take up arms in defence of the absolute and eternal truth. It speaks softly to us from fishing nets and poisoned rivers and smouldering stumps and massive piles of corpses hastily interred. It whispers in the background when words full of faux sincerity tell us that there are more forests now than when men first landed on the moon, and points out that you would have to be standing on the moon to confuse a pesticide-soaked, chemically fertilized monocultural tree plantation with the forest it has supplanted. It is the voice that hums behind the static on the car radio as we zoom along in triumphant consumption, constantly reminding us like Caesar's chariot attendant that despite all the glitz, frenzy, turmoil and waste we will soon be as dead as big-bellied toddlers expiring under the hot African sun. The voice that if we would all just stop and listen would...... well, there's the problem. Our receivers have been built and tuned by millions of years of evolution, millennia of tradition, centuries of history and decades of experience, and we have all been following different roads in different vehicles at different speeds for different lengths of time, so how can we expect to hear the same voice amid the strident, inane cacophony we have created, or hope that everyone will end up heading in the same direction, or even assume that we all should?

To be honest, the modern situation is enough to make your brain hurt, and it is understandable that many people are content to embrace the busyness and distractions that wait to swallow us all. It is also understandable that many of those who still can muster some concern for the greater reality, however they perceive it, have sought comfort in everything from ancient mysticism to modern mantras, like the ever popular think globally, act locally - which could just as easily be the slogan for the planet-chewing juggernaut that so many have demonized. What is a bit more difficult to understand is how fisheries around the world can run into the same problems over and over again after it has been proven that they could easily be made sustainable with a few commonsense remedies. Or why after decades of nay-saying and indifference the nations of the world finally responded to studies showing links between human activities and local, regional and planetary climate changes by holding a series of enormous confabs to draft ineffectual remedies that were summarily ignored after everyone went back home. Or what about the biomedical researchers who have been working patiently for generations in the face of resistance and propaganda to establish the epidemiological, physiological and molecular links between tobacco smoke and a suite of debilitating, lethal and expensive diseases ranging from cancers to circulatory and respiratory failure - what has come of all that work? The people who made billions from tobacco sales have endured a few sham-floggings, those who continue to use their products have been put at risk of receiving civic citations if they are caught wafting toxic clouds towards others and biomedical researchers have been threatened with loss of funding and prosecution for federal felonies if they become involved with certain kinds of research, including some aimed at treating the diseases that smoking encourages.

The preceding sentences may seem to add up to a cynical non-sequitur, but they were meant to convey despair. The kind of despair that comes naturally to someone in my position, which might immodestly be described as that of an intelligent, reasonably well-informed citizen of what is reputed to be one of the best places to live on Earth. The kind of despair that comes from watching obvious and urgent problems being ignored and simple solutions dismissed out of hand, while vast amounts of energy, resources and good will are expended in some of the most bombastic exercizes in self-important time-wasting ever conceived. The kind of despair that comes from knowing that many people recognize that humankind has come to occupy a unique position in the living world, yet few seem able or willing to even begin to appreciate the implications for us and for a planet that has already been grotesquely impoverished by policies that can often be traced back to old, sick and profoundly ignorant men with high levels of serum cholesterol and/or carbon monoxide and/or tranquillizers and/or the mind-fuzzing remnants of a four-whiskey lunch, who are routinely called upon to decide the fates of distant communities when they would rather be settling in for a good nap. The kind of despair that ultimately drove me to sacrifice more than most reasonable people would have in an attempt to make some kind of dent in its enormous, lurking bulk.

And how was I going to do that? By now the basic rationale should be plain, along with the overall plan. First, establish a conceptual approach towards the living world that gives us a chance of appreciating our place within it. Next, explore a biological phenomenon that seems to have something to teach us about how our own evolution has diverged from that of other living things. Then use that knowledge to examine our own malignant tendencies in greater detail via a series of historical examples. And finally, go back into the past in search of knowledge that might help us to better understand those tendencies. Of course what we actually concluded with was a rather idiosyncratic account of human evolution and the rise of the civilized world that staggered to a close with a disturbing - and no doubt to many unsatisfactory - fantasy. To those who feel short-changed I apologize, but to me that ending seemed a perfect fit with the story of the world we have made for ourselves, which has drifted so far from the sense of the one that created us that we may as well be hovering in thin air and chattering away like insane budgies.

A more conventional approach would have been to follow the heroic exploits of the explorers who came after Archimedes and his classical colleagues, but I was out attack despair not reinforce it, and as Archimedes and many of his successors great and modest have sooner or later come to realize, we have for some time been living in a world where new knowledge and those who garner it only matter when they support and advance the status quo - everything else is ignored, lost or suppressed while Cloudcuckooland rises ever higher. As for that vision of the city in the clouds, not only does it serve as a useful metaphor for where the evolution of modern humankind has been heading for centuries, it also captures the essence of the one sure prediction that our exploration of cancer allows us to make, which is that sooner or later modern civilization will come back to earth - the only question being when, how and how hard the landing will be. If we make a determined effort to reconnect ourselves to the natural way of things we just might preserve something like the world we are familiar with, but if we keep on straining upwards a more likely result will be a crash landing, possibly one so severe that it will clear the stage for the emergence of a new world like those that have appeared after previous debacles. A world that will go on without many of its former residents, but with any luck it may generate a profuse variety of new ones.

This brings us to what I think is a critical evolutionary observation, which is that one of the major differences between us and our predecessors going back to the dawn of civilization is that we have the potential to be aware of where we have been, where we have arrived and where we are likely to end up if we make certain decisions - including the decision to carry on with business as usual. Ah, you may say, we may have the potential for such an awareness, or perspective or knowledge or enlightenment or whatever we want to call it, but how do we realize that potential? I cannot answer that question for anyone except myself, and this book is an account of my search for the kind of awareness that would allow someone like me to look at the horrendous, baffling and wondrous events of the past and present and make some sense of them in a way that may come in useful in the future. I am not saying that this is the only worthwhile way of looking at things, or that the route we have followed is the only one leading towards the point we have reached. Indeed given the number of choice points along the way there must be an infinity of possible journeys through the same intellectual territory, and the same destination may be accessible through completely different realms, such as the spiritual, poetic and artistic. Our route has emphasized biology and history because that is where I started from, and I like to think that my experience has shown me some of the more useful ways ahead and some of the traps to be avoided. Biology and history also have an obvious relevance to the study of living things within a living world, being the two disciplines most directly concerned with the only thing that ultimately matters within that world: survival, be it of creatures, of families, of lineages, of populations, of communities, of biospheres, of information, of knowledge, of cultures, of traditions, of societies, of ideas or of pernicious madnesses. Survival provides the plot for every story within the living world and for the story of the world itself, and if we fail to appreciate that fact we are doomed to see things through a dark, distorted and fragmented glass.

If I was a member in good standing of the Joan of Arc school, the preceding remarks could have served as a lead-in to an exercize in the grand tradition of final chapters, where the author leaps on his high horse, ties up all the loose ends, slays a few dragons with fierce polemics and then carries the reader on to his golden vision for the future. Fortunately for all concerned, I am not up for anything like that. What I would like to do instead is meander through some ideas that have come to mind during our shared journey, some of which are relevant and a few of which may be interesting. I make no promises either way, nor can I promise to avoid exercizing a bit of poetic license en route......

From Section 2: Practical Considerations

War

MR. NIXON, YOU CAN CURE CANCER

This proclamation was issued in 1970 by the U.S. Citizens' Committee for the Conquest of Cancer. At first glance it appears to suggest that like a medieval king the president of the day could have cured corruption with his touch, but what the committee actually wanted was a War on Cancer. They got their wish on Dec. 23, 1971 when the president signed the National Cancer Act, formally launching a search for a cure by the time of the U.S. bicentennial in 1976. As he ceremonially kicked off the crusade Mr. Nixon acknowledged that achieving its goal would require the same kind of effort that split the atom and took man to the moon, but in reality the battle with cancer never came close to commanding the resources committed to the space and nuclear programs, nor the disastrous conflict in Indochina. Both wars turned out much the same: despite committing piles of money, armadas of clever weapons, platoons of brilliant minds and untold amounts of blood and toil, the most powerful nation in the history of the world could neither cure cancer nor prevent a local guerrilla conflict from degenerating into a regional genocide. (To dispel any possible misconceptions, I do not mean to imply that the communist movement in Indochina was any kind of cancer; as for Tricky Dick's gang....)

So what went wrong? One facile judgement that can be made with hindsight is that while folks back in the 70's thought they knew a lot about cancers and communism they did not know nearly as much as they thought they did, or at least not what was necessary to be successful. This leaves the warmongers open to accusations of overconfidence and worse, but before we pass that judgement we should pause to consider what one would need to know to win a war. If you knew everything about weapons and their use, would you automatically become an invincible warrior? If you understood the mysteries of cannons and tanks, missiles and warplanes, and battleships and submarines could you command any army on land, sea or air? If you studied the tactics, strategies and memoirs of history's great commanders could you promise to match their exploits? If you had weapons that could hit your enemies wherever they hide and eyes in the sky to track them wherever they go, could you guarantee to defeat those armed with little more than the willingness to fight to the last drop of blood to defend their territory? The great lessons of war are that resources matter, positions matter, battlefields matter, weapons matter, tactics matter, preparation matters, luck matters, knowledge matters, training matters, morale matters and information matters, but no strategic, tactical and material advantages can save those who cannot accurately assess their enemies....

- other directions discussed include Religion, Politics and Exploration -

Ultima Cancer

Back in the first chapter we touched upon the subject of general living systems theory, which is largely concerned with studying parallels in the structural and functional organizations of living things ranging from cells to societies. One of the main parallels concerns a subsystem called the decider, which is the part of a living system that is responsible for processing information received from sensory inputs, matching input with information already present in the system (e.g. templates and memories) and initiating appropriate responses, which are usually chosen from repertoires of innate behaviours (e.g. reflexes and instincts) and options acquired as a result of experience (e.g. conditioned and learned responses). In cells the major components of the decider are the genome, the gene expression machinery and the signalling networks and receptors that link various parts of the cell with each other and provide contacts with the outside world. In multicellular animals the decider is typically associated with sensory, neuromuscular and hormonal tissues, which in higher animals form networks that converge on co-ordinating organs such as ganglia and brains. In organism societies the central component of the decider is the queen; for example honeybee queens decide when it is time to swarm, albeit with considerable prompting from other bees. In mammalian social groups the deciders are primarily concentrated in the dominant individuals; for example the matriarch of an elephant herd makes most of the decisions concerning the migratory route. Primate social groups are organized along similar lines as are ancestral human groups, although the development of collective intellects among people like us introduced a consensus aspect, with many decisions involving extensive conversations. And the recent emergence of larger human social organizations has allowed their deciders to take on a variety of new forms, ranging from tribal chiefs to pharaonic bureaucracies to the strategic committee of the Athenian polis to the burgeoning oligarchies of modern civilization.

If we assess these various social deciders from a historical perspective we can see that those associated with ancestral social groups, moderately sized aggregations like tribes, confederations and other variations on the polis, and some large societies - most notably highly traditional ones like ancient Egypt - have demonstrated a capacity for serving the survival requirements of their associated organizations fairly well, even as those organizations have expanded to include sizeable human populations, communities, ecosystems and natural communities. History also presents examples of social deciders that have failed to meet their basic functional requirements, to the extent that some have been directly involved in driving human and/or natural communities towards unsustainability, instability and extinction. Some defective social deciders appear to have gone bad in much the same manner as the nuclei of cancer cells; for instance the Nazi and classical Maya elites continued to send out the same orders regardless of the increasingly destructive social and ecological consequences. Other malignant social deciders have emerged within organizations that have yet to prove they are not inherently unstable and/or malignant, and indeed some observers have suggested that the same may apply to the deciders in our own heads. For example Arthur Koestler proposed that evolution has given us brains that are too powerful and sophisticated for us to control, hence we have hobbled our intellects in order to live comfortably as supremely clever but nonrational - or at least selectively rational - animals. Keostler linked this intellectual hobbling and selective rationality to modern penchants for environmental destruction, wars and nuclear arms races, and other observers have noted additional symptoms. For instance Sigmund Freud observed in Civilization and Its Discontents that: It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement - that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life, while according to another noted student of modern human behaviour, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity (from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail).

On the face of it these contentions seem at odds with the notion that our unique intellects are what allowed our nomadic ancestors to conquer the ancient world and gave our civilized ancestors the ability to create a grand and complex new world where human deciders now control large areas of the biosphere. However, as we also noted during our evolutionary survey, the creation of the civilized world laid the foundations for some rapid and radical developments via the creation of new, potent and largely artificial contexts for the evolution of human populations, societies, cultures, ideas, attitudes and intellects. Thus while it may be safe to conclude that the standard human intellectual equipment can still produce deciders capable of handling the kinds of situations that our nomadic ancestors faced or those that emerge in societies that have the luxury of expanding and elaborating in an organic fashion, we cannot necessarily assume that the same equipment can perform as well in all of the new situations that have emerged in the last eyeblink of evolutionary time. Nor can we assume that all of the modifications that have been introduced to civilized human deciders are consistent with the operational priorities of the original equipment: survival, adaptation, stability and sanity.

There is of course no way we can put modern civilization on the psychoanalytical couch, but we can consider how some basic aspects of the human intellect operate in the modern world, what influences have affected them and what the major consequences have been. For instance we have noted that ever since the dawn of civilization human societies have by and large been the products of extremely rapid processes of expansion and self-organization, and in modern times those processes have become so rapid and the pace of change has become so consistently high that many social constituents are continually challenged to determine where they fit in - as indeed are their societies themselves. These developments have produced a host of consequences, not the least being that a lot of people have found themselves in uncomfortable and highly stressful situations. We can gain some insights into the effects of those situations by considering the ways in which people have learned to deal with them, in some cases so effectively they have been able to thrive by seeking out situations most of us would rather avoid.....

Section 3: The Way Things Are is presented in the Summary of Chapter 5.