Simple Solutions That Ain’t
11. There is a simple solution to modernity, but modern humans can’t like it
“What is the general answer? Eject economic expansionism, stop growth, use available energies for cultural conversion to steady state, seek out the condition now that will come anyway, but by our service be our biosphere’s handmaiden anew.” — Howard T. Odum, Energy, Ecology, & Economics, 1973
If metastatic modernity is non-viable, then by definition it will end. The simple solution is to seek out the condition now that will come anyway. The condition of being a modern human (2024) is between 8.2 billion pairs of ears, some still taking it in with their mother’s (or bovine’s) milk, and about 2 billion are being schooled (educated) to become modern humans (with adult education provided by fractured fairytales, i.e. media messages) so they can serve the global economy (and by accident of birth, the local socioeconomic-political/religious control system until they have enough money to maybe emigrate if their accident is not viable enough or pleasing enough to them). If I was born in Darfur and was not doing pretty well… considering, by serving my warlord in sheep’s clothing (Gibril Ibrahim, Justice & Equality Movement), then I would try to emigrate.
“We [moderns] are attracted to simple stories and tidy solutions like ants to sugar.” — T.W. Murphy
The solution almost all modern humans like (will vote for), the solution few of the 8.7 million other eukaryote species will — excepts dogs, house mice, jellyfish, cockroaches, English sparrows…) is to use the existing economy, or a Green Circular Doughnut economy, to grow ourselves out of our problems using alternative (to fossil) energy. And to end poverty and reduce inequality, we need to grow the economy (as UN experts agree).
So, figure a ten-fold increase in mining, manufacture, and pollution to end fossil fueled electrical energy generation by using only non-fossil fuel sources, and a five-fold increase in electric energy production to convert to all electric power (some of which could be converted to liquid fuels for rockets. And then what?
And to transition from depending on 20% of energy from electricity, plan on another five fold increase in energy production over current uses and when the conversion to all-electric everything not powered by electricity generated fuels (e.g. hydrogen, ammonia), that the surplus capacity will be use to grow the economy five times larger so the poor people can benefit from the growth (that results in the Anthropocene mass extinction event exceeding that of the Permian, even if a Green New Deal stops/reverses climate change).
“Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an ax in the hand of a pathological criminal. “ — Albert Einstein
Almost anytime you come across words like “our, we, us, people, humans…” you need to add the idea of “modern.” So, “the much-praised technological progress of modern humans, and modern civilization generally, could be compared to an ax in the hand of a modern pathological criminal” is what our brains need to read to put matters in context.
For (modern human) historians, “modern” may suggest the last thousand years of the rise and spread of the Euro-Sino Empire (as metastatic modernity will be called by historians in the future). Natural historians have a longer temporal context, e.g. over six million years of human (homininan) evolution. So to a natural historian, “modern” means the last 76k-75k years of the spread of modern genes and memes (culture) that our modern human DNA that have displaced/replaced all prior homininans except for San, Hadza, Pygmy, and Sandawe whose DNA is less than 50% modern metastatic expansionist human DNA (only about 10k San and 400 Hadza have a mostly intact pre-expansionist K-selected culture). Modern humans (e.g. Indo-European, Austronesian, Bantu, Amerind, Asian) descend from a small population in Africa that began to rapidly expand their population (20k years in Africa, 55k years out of Africa) to dominate all global biomes.
“Modern human society of the planet is reaching the climax of its succession. Reversals of attitudes, policies, and laws are to be expected in the transition from the era of growth to a time of descent. By developing explanations and plans now [1971] for making descent prosperous, we can be ready when the shocks of change galvanize the attention of society. Some can have faith in the future that comes from understanding energy principles. Others will find faith in religions that adapt the necessary commandments for once again fitting culture to the earth. The people of Easter Island disappeared, leaving only their monuments as an example to the world of what happens when culture cannot downsize [degrow] to fit its environmental production.”
End of Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-first Century: The hierarchy of energy by Howard T. Odum (slightly updated)
‘The people’ who put up 887 high-rise statues also devised the Rongorongo writing system. No one who could read it survived. Ergo the information content of their culture, ‘the people’, disappeared other than as remnant population.
We modern humans of 2024 are different:
