Last week’s post covered a great deal of ground—not
surprising, really, for an essay that started from a quotation from a
Weird Tales story about Conan the Barbarian—and it may be useful
to recap the core argument here. Civilizations—meaning here human societies
that concentrate power, wealth, and population in urban centers—have a
distinctive historical trajectory of rise and fall that isn’t shared by
societies that lack urban centers. There are plenty of good reasons why this
should be so, from the ecological costs of urbanization to the buildup of
maintenance costs that drives catabolic collapse, but there’s also a cognitive
dimension.
Look over the histories of fallen civilizations, and far
more often than not, societies don’t have to be dragged down the slope of
decline and fall. Rather, they go that way at a run, convinced that the road to
ruin must inevitably lead them to heaven on earth. Arnold Toynbee, whose
voluminous study of the rise and fall of civilizations has been one of the main
sources for this blog since its inception, wrote at length about the way that
the elite classes of falling civilizations lose the capacity to come up with
new responses for new situations, or even to learn from their mistakes; thus
they keep on trying to use the same failed policies over and over again until
the whole system crashes to ruin. That’s an important factor, no question, but
it’s not just the elites who seem to lose track of the real world as
civilizations go sliding down toward history’s compost heap, it’s the masses as
well.
Those of my readers who want to see a fine example of this
sort of blindness to the obvious need only check the latest headlines. Within
the next decade or so, for example, the entire southern half of Florida will
become
unfit for human habitation due to rising sea levels, driven by our
dumping of greenhouse gases into an already overloaded atmosphere. Low-lying
neighborhoods in Miami already flood with sea water whenever a high tide and a
strong onshore wind hit at the same time; one more foot of sea level rise and
salt water will pour over barriers into the remaining freshwater sources,
turning southern Florida into a vast brackish swamp and forcing the evacuation
of most of the millions who live there.
That’s only the most dramatic of a constellation of climatic
catastrophes that are already tightening their grip on much of the United
States. Out west, the rain forests of western Washington are burning in the
wake of years of increasingly severe drought, California’s vast agricultural
acreage is reverting to desert, and the entire city of Las Vegas will probably
be out of water—as in, you turn on the tap and nothing but dust comes out—in
less than a decade. As waterfalls cascade down the seaward faces of Antarctic
and Greenland glaciers, leaking methane blows craters in the Siberian
permafrost, and sea level rises at rates considerably faster than the worst
case scenarios scientists were considering a few years ago, these threats are
hardly abstract issues; is anyone in America taking them seriously enough to,
say, take any concrete steps to stop using the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer,
starting with their own personal behavior? Surely you jest.
No, the Republicans are still out there insisting at the top
of their lungs that any scientific discovery that threatens their rich friends’
profits must be fraudulent, the Democrats are still out there proclaiming just
as loudly that there must be some way to deal with anthropogenic climate change
that won’t cost them their frequent-flyer miles, and nearly everyone outside
the political sphere is making whatever noises they think will allow them to
keep on pursuing exactly those lifestyle choices that are bringing on planetary
catastrophe. Every possible excuse to insist that what’s already happening
won’t happen gets instantly pounced on as one more justification for
inertia—the claim currently being splashed around the media that the Sun
might go through a cycle of slight cooling in the decades
ahead is the latest example. (For the record, even if we get a grand solar
minimum, its
effects will be canceled out in short order by the impact of ongoing
atmospheric pollution.)
Business as usual is very nearly the only option anybody is
willing to discuss, even though the long-predicted climate catastrophes are
already happening and the days of business as usual in any form are obviously
numbered. The one alternative that gets air time, of course, is the popular
fantasy of instant planetary dieoff, which gets plenty of attention because
it’s just as effective an excuse for inaction as faith in business as usual.
What next to nobody wants to talk about is the future that’s actually arriving
exactly as predicted: a future in which low-lying coastal regions around the
country and the world have to be abandoned to the rising seas, while the
Southwest and large portions of the mountain west become more inhospitable than
the eastern Sahara or Arabia’s Empty Quarter.
If the ice melt keeps accelerating at its present pace, we
could be only a few decades form the point at which it’s Manhattan Island’s
turn to be abandoned, because everything below ground level is permanently flooded with seawater and every winter storm
sends waves rolling right across the island and flings driftwood logs against
second story windows. A few decades more, and waves will roll over the
low-lying neighborhoods of Houston, Boston, Seattle, and Washington DC, while
the ruined buildings that used to be New Orleans rise out of the still waters
of a brackish estuary and the ruined buildings that used to be Las Vegas are
half buried by the drifting sand. Take a moment to consider the economic
consequences of that much infrastructure loss, that much destruction of built
capital, that many people who somehow have to be evacuated and resettled, and
think about what kind of body blow that will deliver to an industrial society
that is already in bad shape for other reasons.
None of this had to happen. Half a century ago, policy
makers and the public alike had already been presented with a tolerably clear
outline of what was going to happen if we proceeded along the trajectory we
were on, and those same warnings have been repeated with increasing force year
by year, as the evidence to support them has mounted up implacably—and yet
nearly all of us nodded and smiled and kept going. Nor has this changed in the
least as the long-predicted catastrophes have begun to show up right on
schedule. Quite the contrary: faced with a rising spiral of massive crises,
people across the industrial world are, with majestic consistency, doing
exactly those things that are guaranteed to make those crises worse.
So the question that needs to be asked, and if possible
answered, is why civilizations—human societies that concentrate population,
power, and wealth in urban centers—so reliably lose the capacity to learn from
their mistakes and recognize that a failed policy has in fact failed. It’s also worth asking why they so reliably
do this within a finite and predictable timespan: civilizations last on average
around a millennium before they crash into a dark age, while uncivilized
societies routinely go on for many times that period. Doubtless any number of
factors drive civilizations to their messy ends, but I’d like to suggest a
factor that, to my knowledge, hasn’t been discussed in this context before.
Let’s start with what may well seem like an irrelevancy.
There’s been a great deal of discussion down through the years in environmental
circles about the way that the survival and health of the human body depends on
inputs from nonhuman nature. There’s been a much more modest amount of talk
about the human psychological and emotional needs that can only be met through
interaction with natural systems. One question I’ve never seen discussed,
though, is whether the human intellect has needs that are only fulfilled by a
natural environment.
As I consider that question, one obvious answer comes to
mind: negative feedback.
The human intellect is the part of each of us that thinks,
that tries to make sense of the universe of our experience. It does this by
creating models. By “models” I don’t just mean those tightly formalized and
quantified models we call scientific theories; a poem is also a model of part
of the universe of human experience, so is a myth, so is a painting, and so is
a vague hunch about how something will work out. When a twelve-year-old girl
pulls the petals off a daisy while saying “he loves me, he loves me not,” she’s
using a randomization technique to decide between two models of one small but,
to her, very important portion of the universe, the emotional state of whatever
boy she has in mind.
With any kind of model, it’s critical to remember Alfred
Korzybski’s famous rule: “the map is not the territory.” A model, to put the
same point another way, is a representation; it represents the way some part of
the universe looks when viewed from the perspective of one or more members of
our species of social primates, using the idiosyncratic and profoundly limited
set of sensory equipments, neural processes, and cognitive frameworks we got
handed by our evolutionary heritage. Painful though this may be to our
collective egotism, it’s not unfair to say that human mental models are what
you get when you take the universe and dumb it down to the point that our minds
can more or less grasp it.
What keeps our models from becoming completely dysfunctional
is the negative feedback we get from the universe. For the benefit of readers
who didn’t get introduced to systems theory, I should probably take a moment to
explain negative feedback. The classic example is the common household
thermostat, which senses the temperature of the air inside the house and activates
a switch accordingly. If the air temperature is below a certain threshold, the
thermostat turns the heat on and warms things up; if the air temperature rises
above a different, slightly higher threshold, the thermostat turns the heat off
and lets the house cool down.
In a sense, a thermostat embodies a very simple model of one
very specific part of the universe, the temperature inside the house. Like all
models, this one includes a set of implicit definitions and a set of value
judgments. The definitions are the two thresholds, the one that turns the
furnace on and the one that turns it off, and the value judgments label
temperatures below the first threshold “too cold” and those above the second
“too hot.” Like every human model, the thermostat model is unabashedly
anthropocentric—“too cold” by the thermostat’s standard would be uncomfortably
warm for a polar bear, for example—and selects out certain factors of interest
to human beings from a galaxy of other things we don’t happen to want to take
into consideration.
The models used by the human intellect to make sense of the
universe are usually less simple than the one that guides a thermostat—there
are unfortunately exceptions—but they work according to the same principle.
They contain definitions, which may be implicit or explicit: the girl plucking
petals from the daisy may have not have an explicit definition of love in mind
when she says “he loves me,” but there’s some set of beliefs and expectations
about what those words imply underlying the model. They also contain value
judgments: if she’s attracted to the boy in question, “he loves me” has a
positive value and “he loves me not” has a negative one.
Notice, though, that there’s a further dimension to the
model, which is its interaction with the observed behavior of the thing it’s
supposed to model. Plucking petals from a daisy, all things considered, is not
a very good predictor of the emotional states of twelve-year-old boys;
predictions made on the basis of that method are very often disproved by other
sources of evidence, which is why few girls much older than twelve rely on it
as an information source. Modern western science has formalized and quantified
that sort of reality testing, but it’s something that most people do at least
occasionally. It’s when they stop doing so that we get the inability to
recognize failure that helps to drive, among many other things, the fall of
civilizations.
Individual facets of experienced reality thus provide
negative feedback to individual models. The whole structure of experienced
reality, though, is capable of providing negative feedback on another
level—when it challenges the accuracy of the entire mental process of modeling.
Nature is very good at providing negative feedback of that
kind. Here’s a human conceptual model that draws a strict line between mammals,
on the one hand, and birds and reptiles, on the other. Not much more than a
century ago, it was as precise as any division in science: mammals have fur and
don’t lay eggs, reptiles and birds don’t have fur and do lay eggs. Then some
Australian settler met a platypus, which has fur and lays eggs. Scientists back
in Britain flatly refused to take it seriously until some live platypuses
finally made it there by ship. Plenty of platypus egg was splashed across
plenty of distinguished scientific faces, and definitions had to be changed to
make room for another category of mammals and the evolutionary history
necessary to explain it.
Here’s another human conceptual model, the one that divides
trees into distinct species. Most trees in most temperate woodlands, though,
actually have a mix of genetics from closely related species. There are few red
oaks; what you have instead are mostly-red, partly-red, and slightly-red oaks.
Go from the northern to the southern end of a species’ distribution, or from
wet to dry regions, and the variations within the species are quite often more
extreme than those that separate trees that have been assigned to different
species. Here’s still another human conceptual model, the one that divides
trees from shrubs—plenty of species can grow either way, and the list goes on.
The human mind likes straight lines, definite boundaries,
precise verbal definitions. Nature doesn’t. People who spend most of their time
dealing with undomesticated natural phenomena, accordingly, have to get used to
the fact that nature is under no obligation to make the kind of sense the human
mind prefers. I’d suggest that this is why so many of the cultures our society
calls “primitive”—that is, those that have simple material technologies and
interact directly with nature much of the time—so often rely on nonlogical
methods of thought: those our culture labels “mythological,” “magical,” or—I
love this term—“prescientific.” (That the “prescientific” will almost certainly
turn out to be the postscientific as well is one of the lessons of history that
modern industrial society is trying its level best to ignore.) Nature as we
experience it isn’t simple, neat, linear, and logical, and so it makes sense
that the ways of thinking best suited to dealing with nature directly aren’t
simple, neat, linear, and logical either.
With this in mind,
let’s return to the distinction discussed in last week’s post. I noted there
that a city is a human settlement from which the direct, unmediated presence of
nature has been removed as completely as the available technology permits. What
replaces natural phenomena in an urban setting, though, is as important as what
isn’t allowed there. Nearly everything that surrounds you in a city was put
there deliberately by human beings; it is the product of conscious human
thinking, and it follows the habits of human thought just outlined. Compare a
walk down a city street to a walk through a forest or a shortgrass prairie: in
the city street, much more of what you see is simple, neat, linear, and
logical. A city is an environment reshaped to reflect the habits and
preferences of the human mind.
I suspect there may be a straightforwardly neurological
factor in all this. The human brain, so much larger compared to body weight
than the brains of most of our primate relatives, evolved because having a
larger brain provided some survival advantage to those hominins who had it, in
competition with those who didn’t. It’s probably a safe assumption that
processing information inputs from the natural world played a very large role
in these advantages, and this would imply, in turn, that the human brain is
primarily adapted for perceiving things in natural environments—not, say, for
building cities, creating technologies, and making the other common products of
civilization.
Thus some significant part of the brain has to be redirected
away from the things that it’s adapted to do, in order to make civilizations
possible. I’d like to propose that the simplified, rationalized, radically
information-poor environment of the city plays a crucial role in this.
(Information-poor? Of course; the amount of information that comes cascading
through the five keen senses of an alert hunter-gatherer standing in an African
forest is vastly greater than what a city-dweller gets from the blank walls and
the monotonous sounds and scents of an urban environment.) Children raised in
an environment that lacks the constant cascade of information natural environments
provide, and taught to redirect their mental powers toward such other
activities as reading and mathematics, grow up with cognitive habits and, in
all probability, neurological arrangements focused toward the activities of
civilization and away from the things to which the human brain is adapted by
evolution.
One source of supporting evidence for this admittedly
speculative proposal is the worldwide insistence on the part of city-dwellers
that people who live in isolated rural communities, far outside the cultural
ambit of urban life, are just plain stupid. What that means in practice, of
course, is that people from isolated rural communities aren’t used to using
their brains for the particular purposes that city people value. These
allegedly “stupid” countryfolk are by and large extraordinarily adept at the
skills they need to survive and thrive in their own environments. They may be
able to listen to the wind and know exactly where on the far side of the hill a
deer waits to be shot for dinner, glance at a stream and tell which riffle the
trout have chosen for a hiding place, watch the clouds pile up and read from
them how many days they’ve got to get the hay in before the rains come and rot
it in the fields—all of which tasks require sophisticated information
processing, the kind of processing that human brains evolved doing.
Notice, though, how the urban environment relates to the
human habit of mental modeling. Everything in a city was a mental model before
it became a building, a street, an item of furniture, or what have you. Chairs
look like chairs, houses like houses, and so on; it’s so rare for humanmade
items to break out of the habitual models of our species and the particular
culture that built them that when this happens, it’s a source of endless
comment. Where a natural environment constantly challenges human conceptual
models, an urban environment reinforces them, producing a feedback loop that’s
probably responsible for most of the achievements of civilization.
