Complex societies and their administration, including institutionalized education, are an early attempt to adjust the human nervous system including emotional instincts, habituation, and communication to population densities and group sizes beyond that experienced at a family-tribe group size.
Valuing expansion produced a strength in numbers that insured our survival–as a species–from competition with other animal species.
Valuing similarity has allowed us to emotionally and consciously recognize the kin relationships through which loyalty, shared purpose, communion, and organized activity developed. (Kin relationships, though, are not a species-specific attribute.)
Without the cultural institutionalization of these values in custom and myth, planning and sustained agricultural development would not likely have been possible or quite so successful. But we have not adequately adjusted our values, customs, organization, and administration to the neurophysiological base being oriented towards need while our industrialized societies manufacture surplus. We have not adapted to our mechanical production of surplus; we, as a species, have been unable to come to grips with our phenomenal success.
Intelligence, technology, and organization have not been lacking (although improvements in these areas will improve the overall situation). But in order to adjust well to this unimaginable situation, we will have to adjust our motivations, values, customs, as well as administration and utilization of surplus.
It has been said that our instincts have not kept pace with cultural developments, and that may be true enough from one perspective. But it could also be said that our cultural development to date has not plumbed the full depth and extent of our vast human potential. We experience the truth of this individually and collectively. Our phenomenal evolutionary success is the tip of a massive iceberg, the size and ballast of which lies below the waterline. History is the visible part. History teaches important lessons in administration, but the mountainous, largely hidden, strength is VAST. We must come to terms with that mass.
God and evolution invariably prune overpopulation–usually by nasty means if history is at all accurate. Charles Darwin found it natural and eventual that humans, once they realized their global connection to humanity, would feel connected with the international populace and act accordingly. Our national institutions, though, have not evolved as quickly as our growing consensus on this connectedness (as prophesied by the natural scientist best known for propagating natural selection) has. National institutions in developed democracies, though, tend to walk quietly a step or two behind cultural development. If it is debatable whether our instincts are leading or following, it is certain that national institutions are either following, slowly, or getting in the way. But it will be impossible to administrate global morality without semi-cohesive nation-sized institutions–whether those institutions are paired with the governing of states or otherwise.
Since at least the 1500s or so, in “advanced” nations, commerce has dictated policy. In expansionary economic terms, oversupply increases demand for cheap product. (In evolutionary terms, overproduction allows for competitive “selection”, pruning, cut-backs.) The cost of measuring out humanity in expansionary economic terms is immeasurable in humane terms and impossible in ecological terms. The expansionary economic idiom cheapens humanity at only the material benefit of the buyers and turns people and their endeavors into products; even the neutered “consumer” is divested of real, individual humanity. (In international economics, the American market can be seen as capital, political clout, diplomatic weaponry.) When humanity is parceled and measured out rather than explored, this divestiture is inevitable.
In human costs, the arguments between various cultures, nations, and competing moralities is similar to any other aggressive take-over strategies. The numbers may be manipulated in the end for the sake of the stockholders’ comfort–the winners writing history–but the people involved tend to diminish in overall richness. We must come to terms with mass; we must accurately measure our success in comprehensive terms, not measure ourselves in diminishing returns.
Copyright Todd Mertz