The Two Cultures Revised
From C.P. Snow to M.K. Hubbert and beyond
From C.P. Snow to M.K. Hubbert and beyond
Modern expansionist culture (r-culture) comes in two flavors. In C.P. Snow’s words, the scientific worldview/mindset (nature centric) is one, and the humanities worldview/mindset (human centric) the other. Both worldviews, however, are part of a modern growth-is-good techno-industrial worldview/mindset having its origins in the Great Human Expansion 75k years ago (distal beginning followed by the out of Africa greater expansion 55K years ago) of an expansionistic invasive form of human whose global expansion is climaxing this century.
Most science done today is as bought and paid for. Around 8 million people have earned a PhD (3.3 million in STEM), and most expect to be paid, i.e. they earn a PhD to benefit financially as part of a monetary culture. Some get a PhD incidental to wanting to know and understand the nature of things (e.g. Wittgenstein, Feynman), but do they number more or less than 1%?
In M.K. Hubbert’s revision of Snow’s tale, the two cultures are the matter-energy systems worldview/mindset inquiry-based culture that is wholly nature centric (monistic, viewing human society as a subsystem), and the other is the socioeconomic-political-monetary culture/worldview/mindset that is conclusion/belief-based and wholly human centric, dualistic, with nature as externality even if celebrated and visited. Compare biophysical economics and neoclassical economics. One is a pretend science.
Hubbert notes that the two cultures are incompatible, while C.P. Snow wanted to find some common ground. Most scientists serve the worldview of those whose bread they eat, and doing so is easy as most are paid to do only silo science (are paid to be experts with tunnel vision). Thinking in systems is an extracurricular/extramonetary activity that is overlooked provided it doesn’t interfere with your service in helping to grow the monetary economy (stupid).
It is hard to think in systems when your salary depends on your not doing so — on not thinking globally and beyond (i.e. actual foresight intelligence is an existential threat to the world socioeconomic-political system).
But Hubbert’s two cultures is a fragment of the larger story of the two cultures. The r-culture of we expansionist modern humans is the default culture we swim in, the sea of error, ignorance, and illusion that is our worldview/mindset. Hubbert’s monetary culture, the culture of the 99.99% of today’s MTIed (modern techno-industrialized) humans evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin, the last 50k years of human expansionism with its narrative of human exceptionalism.
That we are not mere animals is the big lie that only true believers can believe in, a condition that has been selected for for over 50k years. We moderns are the outcome. We moderns, with absolute certainty, know that The Gods of the Copybook Headings (so-called ‘reality’, e.g. the laws of thermodynamics/energetics, the claim that water will wet us…) WILL NOT “with terror and slaughter return!“ This is true even though all prior overcomplex societies failed to persist, because our overcomplex society is exceptional. Just look at our cars and smartphones…and we’ll soon colonize Mars….
So back to revising our grasp of reality, of the nature of things. We are all products of and serve the now global r-culture, the culture of r-strategists, which can be defined as — look around and back over the last seven thousand years of remorseless empire building. Then look further back to know then thyself as an expansionist form of human.
We are a domesticant form of hominin, not unlike dogs are a domesticant form of wolf. Normal wolves are K-strategists and as a social species have a K-culture. They live in packs and only the alpha female breeds, has enough pups to replace normal wolf mortality by accident, disease and old age.
Dogs serve their humans and breed opportunistically to allow humans to select the pick of the litter to serve them. Their ancestors were normal wolves 30k years ago. There are about 900 million dogs in the world, of which 471 million are pet dogs (the rest are feral/stray dogs).
Within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, stray dogs rapidly depopulated, and within a year the non-viable breeds had gone extinct, and none ‘bred true’ to breed standards. The form of dogs that persisted soon reverted to a mid-sized hound dog. But to renormalize as K-strategists, the dogs in the Exclusion Zone will continue to over breed in wasteful conflict until packs renormalize back to what works long term, i.e. one alpha bitch breeds and the other members of the pack work as matrifocal supporters of Mother and her/their spawn who all occupy a range that supports a population that is not too large or too small for renormalized dogs (a number well within their Dunbar’s number that sets a maximum viable size, which in wolves is about 30 (average size of a wolf pack is 6–7 animals, but can range from 2–12. Superpacks can sometimes contain 20–30 wolves, and may have two or three litters of pups from more than one female, but such superpacks tend to not work well long term and split up, i.e. are rare exceptions that only work for a time when there is abundant large prey).
Normal K-strategist humans have a Dunbar’s number of about 150 (for a time when superbands form) compared to 30 for wolves and 12 for Norway rats, but that is a maximum number that, like wolf superpacks, works only for a time, and is well above optimal. Normal nomadic humans live in bands (a pack of humans are said to live in bands or camps) of 20–50 trusted (with one’s life) others (range 5–85, average size 28). Beyond 50, splitting into two groups becomes increasing likely if there is uninhabited habitat to occupy, or the increasing stress (via GAS, general adaptation syndrome) lowers fertility in K-strategists as overshooting the upper limit of a habitat’s carrying capacity NEVER has a good long term outcome.
Those who are products of our r-culture can see no value in living within limits. We don’t believe in living within limits. Every meme of our culture screams “NO!” don’t even think about limits, just keep on keeping on growing, spreading rapidly, expanding. When the resources of the valley you currently occupy become scare, just move on to the next. If it is occupied by megafauna, including other hominins, so much the better. They are fine resources for the taking.
This narrative has worked for over 50k years at the leading edge of expansion, i.e. a short time, about two hours, in Gaian time. What has worked for two hours may not continue to work as the days, weeks, and months go by, even if we moderns firmly believe it will.
The r-culture is strongly selected for only on the leading edge. After a valley is taken and exploited, and the most enthusiastic expansionists who are not getting too old move on, some remain to make do if they can, i.e. partially renormalize as the decades, centuries, and millennia go by. The initial expansion of hunter-gatherers (of Man the Hunter expansion) into Europe (“displacing” all K-strategist/K-culture hominins while interbreeding with some to acquire adaptive genes) were forced to renormalize for over 30 thousand years before being “displaced” by agrarians from the western Fertile Crescent area before both were made to go away (by breeding the females after the males “went away”).
The Indo-Europeans were forced to partially renormalize for only a few thousand years before their modern (last thousand years) re-expansion worldwide. The data is that what leading-edge r-culture “on steroids” selects for is weakly selected against after conquest until an opportunity to re-expand arises, e.g. the Austronesian expansionists who took Tikopia.
Note that the foundational two cultures: r-culture exponential growthists and K-culture people of place living within limits, are foundamental to thinking about modern human culture. The two cultures are incompatible (sorry C.P.) and one is not remotely sustainable, though it can build monuments and preside over a mass extinction event likely to include humans and all forms of human civilization, including any potentially viable ones.
If saving the biosphere from modern humans and maybe even a viable form of renormalized human is to consider (for posterity’s and Gaia’s sake), then thinking better about the human condition may be the only morality.