Industrial Civilisation, Part 2: Did We Even Have A Choice?
In Part 1 of this two-part series, we pondered the question of whether industrial civilisation and all our science and technology was worth it when balanced against the suffering and exploitation of so much of humanity over the years. Whether you decided it was or was not worth it, I hope you left feeling some compassion for all those people who suffered (and are still suffering) to achieve it. It made me feel guilty about my part in supporting the systems that cause such suffering. I was raised in the system and I did not have much of a choice of whether to participate in it. Nonetheless, I certainly have done nothing to fight the system or try to alleviate the suffering.
In this Part 2, I ask the question of whether humanity chose this path or if it was inevitable. Could we have chosen differently? Could we have stayed in hunter-gatherer tribes? Was it is possible for us big-brained humans to NOT have the Enlightenment? Next time around the civilisation wheel, can we prevent ending up right back here?
As I was gathering my thoughts on this question, Medium author Patrick Metzger published a book review, “An Inconvenient Apocalypse” Is Not The Feel-Good Book of the Year. The book is An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity by Wes Jackson and Bob Jensen. It has made crystallising my ideas for this column so much easier! The book looks at, among other things, the long history of us, homo sapiens. Other great sources for this long history are the extremely popular Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari and of course Wikipedia.
Looking way, way back, the first homo (tee-he), homo erectus (tee-he), emerges about 2.5 million years ago. Homo erectus walked upright on two legs, hunted in groups, foraged, and used stone tools and fire. This was the state of things for a long, long while—more than 2 million years!
About 300,000 years ago, homo sapiens showed up, anatomically indistinguishable from you and me. But it wasn’t until about 60,000 years ago that something happened, something that archeologists, anthropologists, and evolutionalry biologists refer to as The Great Leap Forward. At this time, modern human behavior starts to be seen, including abstract thinking, figurative art, bladed and composite tools, burial practices, and more. People started talking to each other, too, though language may have begun to evolve as much as 100,000 years before that. The Great Leap Forward also marks the beginning of homo sapiens moving out of Africa and along southern Eurasia to China and Australia; and up through the Middle East to Europe. As I recall, Yuval Harari does not identify causes for The Great Leap Forward, but Jackson and Jensen think it was due to climate change. The last great ice age was ending, and the ice up north was sucking up all the moisture so that Africa experienced terrible drought. Homo sapiens nearly went extinct, diminishing to a population of perhaps only about 2,000! This is what drove them to migrate north, and then spread out east and west, searching for food supplies for their survival. Subsequently, battling harsh ice age conditions drove them to use their big brains for problem solving, creating The Great Leap Forward. (Some scientists believe in a gradual evolution of thought and behavior rather than a Great Leap, but let’s sick with the Great Leap hypothesis.)
Was it The Great Leap Forward that led inevitably to the mess of modernism we are in today? It would still be another 50,000 years, until about 10,000 years ago, before agriculture appears, so maybe it was not inevitable. On the other hand, perhaps it was inevitable that agriculture would appear once the ice retreated enough to make it feasible. Were we already just too smart to avoid discovering agricultural practices? (But not smart enough to forsee their eventual negative consequences.) And agriculture led to private property ownership which led to… well, here I’ll just repeat the quote from Jean-Jaques Rousseau that I included in Part 1:
The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine’, and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. — Rousseau 1754
Agriculture and food storage technologies led to larger communities which led to heirarchies as the greedy took more than their share of stuff, and kingdoms to protect their stuff from being stolen by others. In addition, living in denser communities and in close proximity with domesticated animals gave rise many of the diseases of civilisation that still plague us today.
How can it be that we, humanity, lived for tens of thousands of years—millions of years, if you include homo erectus—in egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes, and yet so quickly changed to aristocratic, elitist, hierarchical societies? Jackson and Jensen argue that this is simply human nature, how the human animal is genetically predisposed to behave. We have this dual nature, and which behaviors we express depend on environmental factors. We hunted and gathered as long as we could, but negative environmental factors drove The Great Leap Forward, and then positive environmental factors unleashed our tendencies to build larger communities and hierachies. So there you have it.
Is there any point in civilization’s trajectory that we could have chosen a different path, and not wound up where we are today? It is hard to see it. It wasn’t a direct line to industrial civilization. Many times we stopped (or got stopped) before we got here. Empires arose but stabilised and peaked at low technology levels. Religions arose and tried their best to prevent scientific advancement. But eventually our big, curious brains won out, and we arrived at The Enlightenment and the beginning of the scientific method.
Could we have foreseen the limits of our natural resources and the dangers of burning carbon fuels? On the one hand, no, why would we? World population in 1492, when the white man began pillaging America, was only about 400 million. Who would have imagined that the trickle of settlers in the New World could exhaust the resources of this mighty continent, with rich forests spreading from coast to coast? Who would have imagined that we could affect the health of the bounteous and seemingly infinite oceans?
On the other hand, yes, there would soon come those who could imagine it. Most famously, in 1792 (world population about 1 billion), Reverend Robert Maltheus warned that human population would inevitably overrun the earth’s resources. He was met with much derision, and still is, even today, when his predictions are coming true.
About 100 years later: “In 1896 [world population 1.6 billion], a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.”
—https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
Another almost 100 years later: “In 1969 [world population 3.6 billion], President Richard Nixon’s adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a memo describing a startling future. The increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by burning oil, gas and coal, Mr. Moynihan wrote, would dangerously heat the planet, melt the glaciers and cause the seas to rise. “Goodbye New York,” Mr. Moynihan wrote. “Goodbye Washington, for that matter.”
—https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/07/climate/senate-climate-law.html
In 1972 the Club of Rome comissioned the Limits to Growth report that quite accurately predicted our current dilemma. Wikipedia states, “Although its methods and premises were heavily challenged on its publication, subsequent work to validate its forecasts continue to confirm that insufficient changes have been made since 1972 to significantly alter their nature.”
“Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977 [world population 4.2 billion], 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation…”
—https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
“There is no longer any significant difference of opinion within the scientific community about the fact that the greenhouse effect is real and already occurring,” said newly elected Sen. Al Gore, who, as a congressman, had already held several House hearings on the matter. Gore cited the Villach Conference, a scientific meeting held in Austria the previous year (1985 [world population 4.8 billion]), which concluded that “as a result of the increasing greenhouse gases it is now believed that in the first half of the next century (21st century) a rise of global mean temperature could occur which is greater than in any man’s history.”
—https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/06/11/30-years-ago-scientists-warned-congress-on-global-warming-what-they-said-sounds-eerily-familiar/
1988 [world population 5 billion]: Dr. James Hansen testifies about climate change before a U.S. congressional hearing.
—https://unfoundation.org/blog/post/the-historic-1988-senate-climate-hearing-30-years-later/
I’ll stop there. The point is, we, humanity, have been warned of the consequences of our choices and we did nothing.
Jackson and Jensen describe humans as “carbon-seeking” organisms, programmed to seek out energy-dense carbon sources to fuel our lives and endeavours (which most other organsims do as well). Up until now, we have simply not been willing to imagine putting limits on our carbon-seeking behavior. Perhaps now, or in the immediately upcoming decades, we will finally heed the warnings and learn to live within limits and in lower energy and resources lifestyles, because we finally feel the threat of losing it all.
I can believe this explanation of the trajectory of human life on this planet, more or less. I believe human nature led us inevitably to where we are, more or less. Therefore I don’t think we, as a species, need to feel guilty about the choices we made, though we must bear responsibility for them. But now, now that we see, now that we know, now what will our choices be? If civilisation does crumble and disappear, and we begin to build it up again (after global warming cools and the climate re-stabilizes, maybe a couple of centuries hence), will we be wise enough to make better choices this time around? And how can we pass on the lessons we’ve learned to our ancestors centuries hence? Is it time to start building the Foundation ?
—Lannie Rose, October 2022
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
p.s. Kudos to the commenters on Industrial Civilisation Part 1: Was It Worth It? who, like me, thought that column begged exploring the issue discussed in this one. I’m not saying “I am right and you are wrong” about our conclusions. These are just my thoughts, and they may well be wrong. Different points of view are great! I may even change my own mind after reading Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything recommended by commenter De Clarke.
