Flawed Brains and Culture Change
February 11, 2005
Hank Stone
hstone@rochester.rr.com
I read a hair-raising article from the Common
Dreams Newsletter (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0206-01.htm Apocalypse
Now: How Mankind is Sleepwalking to the End of the Earth ). Summary: Human activity is disrupting the planetary
future in profound ways, with no get-well plan in sight.
Our lives, and our children, their children, our relatives, our friends, our possessions, our countries—all depend on the continuing health of the planetary ecosystem. How can we be letting that slip away from us?
PERSONAL REALITIES
We humans are built with a flaw. We experience the world around us as if what we see, smell, taste, touch and hear is real. And we have the illusion of being rational. But we are not the objective and rational beings that we think we are. We are capable of believing anything!
The illusion of objectivity is an artifact of evolution. Natural selection has favored the strong over the weak, fighters over philosophers. Our ancestors survived if they had fast reflexes and could follow the lead ape. Now our young men aren’t afraid to die in battle, but don’t dare question what they are fighting for.
From earliest childhood we absorb the culture around us like a sponge, learning language, how to behave, religious and cultural ideas: what “reality” is. We acquire our identities while we are too young to question. Christian parents tend to have Christian children, and Muslim parents Muslim children.
Our religious and cultural beliefs are not trustworthy. To the extent that a culture shares one set of beliefs, everyone in the culture may “know” they are “right”, but be completely wrong.
Consider that everyone once “knew” the Earth was flat and there was only one sun. Scientists, whose methods rely on systematically questioning their hypotheses, now believe there are billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars like our Sun.
People “knew” that we humans were specially created, to be above the animals. Now we are commonly accepted to have significant genes in common with snakes, grasshoppers, oak trees, and eggplants.
Each person lives in their own personal reality, but experiences the world as if that were Reality itself.
FILTERS
As adults we carry with us a brainful of beliefs that define not just who we are, but what we can experience and think.
Our subconscious minds filter out the great excess of sensory information we continuously receive, so we can go about the business of living. If you sit quietly and listen, you will hear sounds that were there all along, but that were screened from your attention. Ideas and thoughts are also filtered out of our consciousness, if they don’t conform to our prejudices, or seem irrelevant to our life stories.
When we are presented with ideas from another culture, we tend to receive them as if they had labels attached, saying where they fit into our realities. Ideas might be labeled “superstitious” or “primitive” or simply “wrong.” We are all prejudiced. This is not because we are bad people, but because of the way human perception works.
Our human consciousness tricks us into thinking what we see around us is real, and what we believe is true. We have the illusion of being objective and rational observers. What we believe acts as a filter, limiting what comes to our consciousness. This protects our peace of mind by preserving the illusion that our worlds are coherent and self-consistent.
CULTURAL STORIES
Our culture has taught most of us that America is the best, capitalism and economic growth are good (and sustainability is nonsense), Americans deserve a house in the suburbs and an SUV, God favors our country, and the war system is necessary for security.
Part of our cultural story is that things will continue as
they have in the past. But when the colonies
broke away from
The continuing evolutionary success of the human race requires new mechanisms for getting along cooperatively and sustainably. These mechanisms will require a new cultural story about who we are. And changing our cultural story requires challenging our false sense of being objective.
POSITIVE FEEDBACK
Our American cultural story is obsolete, since it cannot guide our country to a sustainable future.
They say where there’s life there’s hope. And as long as life goes on normally, most people keep the hope that no major change will be necessary. We are reluctant to “borrow trouble,” and take on the very large questions of future prosperity and survival. People especially don’t want to be seen as gullible, or as cowardly Chicken Littles, afraid the sky is falling. If things really are serious, why is so little about it in the press? Why isn’t the president sounding the alarm? Why doesn’t the government find a fix?
The decisionmakers we look to for leadership are fallible people like us. They have strong reasons to believe in the existing system. After all, it has delivered them money and power! All things being equal, they believe it will continue to do so. God, or the “invisible hand of the market,” or some new technological marvel will keep the economy moving upward. If that were not so, then decisionmakers would have made bad decisions in the past, leading to our present predicament. We cannot be in a predicament, according to this logic, because they are rich and powerful, therefore smart, and therefore have not made mistakes.
The rest of us may not be rich, but by the world’s standards we are far from poor. If we work hard and don’t rock the boat, maybe some day we will become rich. We work, we play, we consume, we watch television. If the program gets too alarmist or distressing, we change the channel.
Yet the old cultural story is beginning to change, because growing numbers of scientists, and those who listen to them, are sensitive to new dangers. Scientists present facts as they see them, but are as reluctant as everyone else to draw negative conclusions. The society seems to be going along fine, everyone seems happy, and no one wants to be the bringer of bad news.
Unexpected facts tend not to pass through peoples’ filters. There is also denial; people tend to dismiss threats of dire consequences. So life continues to be good, and we are rewarded handsomely for believing that life will continue to be good.
NEW CULTURAL STORY
When great distances separated the world’s cultures, every society could believe itself to be uniquely important. Anyone threatening their “interests” was an “enemy,” and one need not take the culture of the enemy seriously. But in this interconnected world, cultural stories about our own special importance, our special country, and our special favor with God, look arrogant to people in other countries. Wars, having enemies, and even considering ourselves superior-- have all become obsolete.
We cannot afford to be enemies with other human societies, because war has the potential to destroy humankind. We cannot wage war against the Earth’s climate and squander its resources, including oil, because we need them to survive. We cannot continue to crowd out and pollute out the Earth’s plants and animals, without compromising the world our children will inherit.
If humankind is to survive the 21st Century, we need new stories that allow us to live together, sharing the Earth. The way forward must be where security, prosperity, and sustainability intersect.
In that place, we will also find cooperation, reason, justice, tolerance, and joy.
To get there, we must have humility—the knowledge that we can be wrong. With humility, we can have dialogue. If we reason together, we can discover our biases. In the safety of small groups of friends, we can explain the way things seem to us, and compare that to the way things seem to others. We can examine our prejudices. In such a safe and unhurried environment, we can change our minds.
The new cultural story will be born quietly, humbly. And when we become a crowd, the television stations and newspapers will find us newsworthy. Then “the people” will see where we all have to go to protect our future. And our institutions will follow.
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