Alvin Toffler's capacity to understand how culture was changing was impressive, till now. In this video, he speaks broadly of advanced cyber infrastructure and conflicts over a biological revolution and genetic engineering.
When Toffler mentions that "Any theory of social change that doesn't have a theory of conflict attached to it isn't worth the space on a computer that it may occupy", he pays attention only to economic and social upheaval, including changes in social roles.
Toffler's still entranced by the conquest of space as the blossom of human promise. "The fourth wave will be when we, having grappled with our own genetics and understood ourselves biologically far better than we do now, when we finally do go significantly and seriously into space." Toffler shows no awareness that primitive brain function, exploited by memeplexes, is the black hood blinding us to the prison of DNA programming.
Orson Scott Card's science fiction trilogy Homecoming:Harmony (1992-1994) evinces more insight than Toffler into the way human genetic programming holds us back and leads us to destroy our planet.
Janet L Factor describes our dilemma best in Of Two Minds, Part 2, The Secular Humanist Bulletin, Vol 26, No. 1, Spring 2010, p 12-13.
"... the faith meme could be summed up as the rule 'Steer only by your emotions.' ... In the end 'Trust your heart, ignore your head' reduces to 'Listen to your DNA'!
"This neatly explains why as religions become more extreme, more rejecting of the world and its knowledge, they all seem to follow the same downward path: women are subjugated, sexually exploited, denied birth control, then married at younger and younger ages; a single male rises to absolute power; he surrounds himself with a cadre of male allies whom he rewards with sexual access to women; ultimately their children are brainwashed and brutalized. It is the primate troop re-created! All in the guise of spirituality.
"... To hand oneself over entirely to feeling, intoxicating though it may be, is not to transcend but to devolve." [bold mine]
Alvin Toffler's failure of imagination is not simply an ignorance of memetics, but failure to look inward critically. His critical eye dissects economics, culture, and war from an emotionally safe distance. He fails to dissect himself the way talented authors of fiction and feminist skeptics routinely do.
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Friday, December 11, 2009
Fourth Wave Civilization: Global Heat Engine
Definition: When the energy and matter streams of an entire planet are subsumed into a planetary civilization which, as a heat engine, destabilizes the planet’s ecosystem, and climate, making the planet uninhabitable. It’s like a primitive engine with no governor, which runs faster and faster until it explodes.
Alvin Toffler introduced us to the Information Age, Third Wave Civilization. We’ve since outgrown that before it consolidated. “History is a succession of rolling waves of change.” he said. Civilizations can coexist and interpenetrate.
Timothy Garrett of the University of Utah writes, “So, perhaps surprisingly, changes in population and standard of living might best be considered as only a response to energy efficiency. As part of a heat engine, creating people and their lifestyles requires energy consumption. Doing so efficiently merely serves to bootstrap civilization into a more consumptive (and productive) state by increasing the dimensions of the boundary separating civilization and its environment.” The Jevrons Paradox applies to civilization as a whole, gains in energy efficiency accelerate global energy consumption instead of slowing it.
Chris Hedges says, “The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits.”
From the perspective of Adrian Bejan's Constructal Theory, in our globalized economy, all of the energy resources and material resources of the planet flow into one stream, corporate profit as measured by the stock market.
The obvious objection, that noneconomic institutions such as religions, journals, news media, and nonprofits compete with global profit flow, providing feedback, turns out to be superficial and misleading. In past civilizations when institutions serving noneconomic functions had independent structures, this was true. Today lines between entertainment, news, politics, business advertising, and religion are superficial. Religions and nonprofit entities thrive or disappear on quarterly returns, media cycles, and politics as much as banks.
While we’ve invented smart appliances, we haven’t invented smart institutions. Corporate entities know only how to survive short term. They’re memeplexes, despite the intelligence of human role players, institutionally no smarter than viruses. Our corporate entities can’t imagine self interest in stopping global climate destabilization. Corporations are structures designed to maximize efficiency of flows - of money, goods, information, and people. Their environment is a free commons to externalize costs and risks. If one nonprofit begins to assume costs which its competitors offload, it chokes off flows of money, goods, information, or people which kept it viable. No matter how noble the cause, if a nonprofit doesn’t raise funds, pay its bills, advertise, and attract new members, it quickly loses market share. As long as religions have an institutional incentive to overpopulate the planet, they will.
In sum, more efficient wind turbines won’t save humanity. We need to reinvent civilization at the roots, adding feedback loops to internalize Planetary costs to institutions which generate them.
Alvin Toffler introduced us to the Information Age, Third Wave Civilization. We’ve since outgrown that before it consolidated. “History is a succession of rolling waves of change.” he said. Civilizations can coexist and interpenetrate.
Timothy Garrett of the University of Utah writes, “So, perhaps surprisingly, changes in population and standard of living might best be considered as only a response to energy efficiency. As part of a heat engine, creating people and their lifestyles requires energy consumption. Doing so efficiently merely serves to bootstrap civilization into a more consumptive (and productive) state by increasing the dimensions of the boundary separating civilization and its environment.” The Jevrons Paradox applies to civilization as a whole, gains in energy efficiency accelerate global energy consumption instead of slowing it.
Chris Hedges says, “The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits.”
From the perspective of Adrian Bejan's Constructal Theory, in our globalized economy, all of the energy resources and material resources of the planet flow into one stream, corporate profit as measured by the stock market.
The obvious objection, that noneconomic institutions such as religions, journals, news media, and nonprofits compete with global profit flow, providing feedback, turns out to be superficial and misleading. In past civilizations when institutions serving noneconomic functions had independent structures, this was true. Today lines between entertainment, news, politics, business advertising, and religion are superficial. Religions and nonprofit entities thrive or disappear on quarterly returns, media cycles, and politics as much as banks.
While we’ve invented smart appliances, we haven’t invented smart institutions. Corporate entities know only how to survive short term. They’re memeplexes, despite the intelligence of human role players, institutionally no smarter than viruses. Our corporate entities can’t imagine self interest in stopping global climate destabilization. Corporations are structures designed to maximize efficiency of flows - of money, goods, information, and people. Their environment is a free commons to externalize costs and risks. If one nonprofit begins to assume costs which its competitors offload, it chokes off flows of money, goods, information, or people which kept it viable. No matter how noble the cause, if a nonprofit doesn’t raise funds, pay its bills, advertise, and attract new members, it quickly loses market share. As long as religions have an institutional incentive to overpopulate the planet, they will.
In sum, more efficient wind turbines won’t save humanity. We need to reinvent civilization at the roots, adding feedback loops to internalize Planetary costs to institutions which generate them.
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