Mass extinctions
Man, couple of great recent posts by Ran Prieur, about mass entinctions causing great leaps in biological complexity, and us being due for our 62 million year mass extinction event, and more bad news about global warming.
It occured to me a few months ago when I saw the 62-million year cycle article that maybe civilization is just doing the earth's bidding, and helping it's periodic detox, so to speak. And maybe the detoxing is good, because it causes increases in overall complexity in the long haul. There's just something so great to me about the idea that we're not nearly so important as we think we are. Puts things back in perspective and dislodges some of that humanism/anthropocentrism we're so used to.
I love it.
It occured to me a few months ago when I saw the 62-million year cycle article that maybe civilization is just doing the earth's bidding, and helping it's periodic detox, so to speak. And maybe the detoxing is good, because it causes increases in overall complexity in the long haul. There's just something so great to me about the idea that we're not nearly so important as we think we are. Puts things back in perspective and dislodges some of that humanism/anthropocentrism we're so used to.
I love it.
posted by Archangel at 3:40 PM
4 Comments:
Yeah, I kind of like the idea of that... a planetary fever to rid itself of a virus. Sweet.
Haha --
That civilization is actually "beneficial" is a thought-line I'm definitely exploring, because I'm really really sick of people saying civilization is "destroying the planet." Fuck that! Civilization IS the planet, just as much as anything else is.
And besides, destroying the planet is a lot harder than we think. Good luck!
- Devin
Hey Devin,
It's true it's a part of the planet, like everything else here. But I still hold some sympathy for the idea of a lost state of grace, and that this is simply a mis-step of some sort. This prevents me from saying outright: "Civilization is the planet," because I think the planet is good and civilization not so much.
That's pretty simplistic, though. There's something to it all that we have here, and I don't know if any of us will ever have a grasp of what that is. It's probably not all bad, though I've entertained the notion that it is. It's also, for fairly obvious reasons, not all good. I dunno- crazy stuff, huh?
Hmm. I don't really subscribe to the moral values of "good" or "bad". Calling a particular thing good is pretty much meaningless. The word "good" is entirely empty. It does not describe any particular process, or happening. At the root "good" and "bad" are dualistic moral classifications that don't have any bearing on reality.
Now, we have personal feelings, and experiences, and we sometimes say something feels "good" or feels "bad". But this is really unhelpful, and amounts to more of a judgment of a particular feeling than any sort of description or expression.
These personal feelings and experiences are all we have, and they're how we make sense of the world. Needless to say it's often very difficult to communicate these feelings and experiences, particularly in a culture of judgment and fear where our feelings and experiences are viewed as illegitimate or invalid. I resent this invalidation intensely, but my feelings of resentment are invalidated as well. After so many years of being invalidated and judged and confined to what we moralistically should feel, it's often extremely difficult to get in touch with the root emotions anymore. All we have are the residuals of those emotions, which come out in our moralizing and our judgments of the "external" world. Rather than talking about our personal relationships, which we actually have power in, we abstract our emotions to an extreme, to the grandiose level of "civilization" itself, and find validation and safety in ruthlessly critiquing what is ultimately a construct in our minds.
This is coming from some pretty intense emotions -- desperation, frustration, anger, hurt, and fear. We all understand these emotions on an extremely abstracted and intellectual level, which is what we have in common. I would say that most people in the crashblogospherewebnet (heh) are struggling with or have struggled with grandiosity/inferiority complexes, martyr complexes, and narcissism, to name a few. There is a particular process at the root of these that I think brings us all together -- we've basically, and rather unintentionally I might add, created a support group for people recovering from "civilization", i.e. the enculturation process we've all been through. "Civilization" is just a sound with five syllables and is inherently meaningless. Our emotions and our feelings don't, and cannot, come from meaningless abstract concepts. They come from our own particular stories.
So, applying that, I've come to understand why my own story resonates so much with the myth of a fall from grace, and the myth of being separate from the planet, and the myth of the destruction of civilization. My fall from grace was my childhood loss of innocence and playfulness. My separation from the planet was my alienation and loneliness and ultimate narcissism. And what I called the destruction of civilization was merely my abstracted pain and anger with my parents and school -- the main agents of enculturation in my life so far.
At any rate, we're definitely onto something, but it ain't coming from the abstract. It's coming from our most deeply personal relationships -- by far the most powerful of which is our relationship with our parents.
- Devin
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