From: Jacques Du Pasquier (jacques@dtext.com)
Date: Mon Apr 08 2002 - 14:44:03 MDT
CurtAdams@aol.com wrote (3.4.2002/19:12) :
>
> In a message dated 4/3/02 14:09:37, jacques@dtext.com writes:
>
> >but many others [desires], sometimes quite important and
> >deep, are left starving, and on the whole it all seems quite
> >incoherent.
>
> Which others? I'm at a loss to think of any significant way in
> which I'm worse off than I'd be in an agricultural or hunter-gatherer
> society. I'd like to see my family more often than I do; but I
> certainly *could*, and I choose to live where I do for compensating
> benefits. I can think of much I'd miss in a less-developed society
> even if I'd always lived there.
No doubt about that (last sentence). That's why we adopted the
technology we adopted after all. We WERE living there, and we selected
technology that brought us HERE, where we have more of what we wanted
THERE (food aplenty including chocolate, running water, malls,
entertainment, more knowledge than we can assimilate, contraception,
pornography, and endless massive audio-visual stimulation that gives
our brain the impression that we're doing so many things while lying
on a couch).
Let me say that I am *not* a primitivist (though I understand why some
people are and I respect that). I don't regret the hunter-gatherer
lifestyle. In the ancestral tribe, I am the guy who looks at the
trees, the animals, the children, the girls, my fellow hunters and my
own hands with amazement and tenderness, wondering what it all means,
and how we came to be what we are, why we always want to have sex, why
we die and what life is worth given that we'll die, and how we could
be more than what we are.
My point is to acknowledge "disadaptation", because it appears to me
as an obvious trend, which I feel in my bones, too, and to reflect
about how we can leave our archaic and disadapted old skin and adapt
to the potential we are starting to imagine.
All that being said, now I answer directly your question.
There are several rather obvious ways to answer it. One is to focus on
certain unattractive lifestyles common in our cities. I won't
elaborate on that: the huge French gray towers, the poverty, the
insecurity, the unemployment, the socio-ethnical problems (France has
the Arab-origin community, demographically explosive, mostly on
welfare, and that is kept apart by the rest of the community), the
huge proportion of dumb jobs, the boredom, the social stress...
Switch to something completely different: Microsoft Windows. Many
(otherwise priviledged) people struggle with it. I am appalled at how
much time of their life is wasted at trying to master something to
which they are so unadapted (and which is intrinsically dysfunctional,
too). Friends stay on the phone for hours discussing the problems
they've had. They amass a knowledge that will be worth nothing one
year later.
Turn to television. It's dangerously adapted to our cognitive
apparatus. Such a stream of moving images is just too seducive to
resist. A huge proportion of people just sits behinds it several hours
a day, bombarded by advertisment, and watching silly programs (often
with some illusory promise of sex) to keep them behind their set when
the next ads will come. Pretty humiliating again.
Go to the supermarket. Can you trust your desires? Can you follow them
joyfuly and taste the pleasure of their satisfaction? Nope. If you do,
you will eat only junk food (which by essence is designed to please
you), as many people in fact do, and your health will suffer. You have
to learn that "all that is good is not healthy" (why is it good then
for christ sake? because of disadaptation), and re-educate yourself
and get to learn that lettuce IS good, contrary to what you first
thought. You have to actually read books about the ancestral
environment to understand what your desires actually mean in terms of
diet. (See the URL given here by someone about "paleodiet".)
Never mind, what you really like in this world is learning, reading,
writing, thinking, etc., so this world is really made for you. But can
you keep learning all the time, and stay behind your screen connected
to the Internet in all of your leisure time? Neither. You have to
exercise. You have to run in loops to stay fit. Or even to sweat on a
fake bicycle in your apartment. How idiotic is that? Very! But you
have to, because your body is made to walk and run a lot, and if you
don't you run out of order. You may be in love with your brain, but it
was only designed to coordinate your body to walk, hunt, protect
yourself, and it is your body that sustains your brain. Focus on your
brain too much, and over time your body will get sick, then your brain
will get sick in turn.
Or think of the quantity of anxiety generated by Septembre 11, for
example. People who already have enough to cope with day to day, now
worry about guys thousands of km away who want to kill them, and about
whom they can do nothing. Great. The hunter-gatherer way of life was
precarious? Of course it was. But at least you knew what to focus on.
And every single thing in your body was designed to help you to cope
with it, including your arms, legs, sight, desires, instincts...
I think anyone could go on for hours about such things. They are all
examples of disadaptation. Every paragraph above describes one obvious
advantage...
- welfare and modern life represent a comfort and security
unimaginable in the ancestral environment
- so are personal computers, that allow to make many things
unthinkable before
- television is an incredible source of value, as an infinite yet
almost free source of education, entertainment and quasi-experience
- the supermarket is a huge convenience, you can find everything at
the same place, and get all what you need for one full week in one
hour, at a very low price (fruits from the other part of the world
for a few euros, or very complex industrial preparations)
- for those who like learning and "knowing stuff", it's obviously now
the best time ever
- knowing about what happens everywhere in the world in real time is
also arguably great
...but they nonetheless all bring a change of environment that makes
us more and more disadapted on the whole. This is a world where we can
do more and more; but we are less and less adapted to it.
This is not to say that SOME of us don't manage to live fulfilling
lifes. You're attractive, so you have lots of sex, and can arrange it
better than ever with your cellular phone. You're not poor, so you can
travel conveniently by airplane. You go scuba diving one day,
windsurfing the other day, then skiing for a change. You can't believe
how much fun you have. Your work is extremely exciting and
interesting, it pays a lot, and you live in a great, protected suburb.
You have re-educated yourself about diet, you don't eat junk food (in
fact they don't even please you anymore), you bought Harvey's 75 $
book on nutrients among many others, and you spend hours to measure
what you eat (or better yet you have someone else do it for you). You
just love lettuce and ginseng (they taste so excellent !), and eat
lots of fish. You love running in loops, too. You have no time left to
watch television, having more interesting things to do. You have a
computer, know how to use it (in fact part of your work is related to
computing, which is why it pays so good, as no one else is able to
cope with it), possibly you even run Linux and your last system crash
or accidental data loss was several years ago. You are connected to
the Internet, know how to use it, too, in fact you identified folks
with whom you share many interests, and you're having long discussions
with them, in which you have fun in your free time, learning and
trying to win arguments.
Whatever the value we personaly ascribe to such a lifestyle, I don't
see it as a desirable general target. My argument is not that it is
not "generally sustainable". It is that much of it really consists in
cultural tricks meant to readapt oneself, and somehow I feel that this
should not take so much room in one's life. It seems like one is one's
own child, and has to care about oneself as such.
While environment changes and you stay essentially the same, you can
rely less and less on internal guidance (desire, instinct), and you
must rely more and more on external guidance, other cultural
constructs. It all becomes complicated and artifical. Your body (which
is yourself in an important sense) becomes less and less of an
adequate tool for the simple job of your life, and more and more of a
bizarre baggage that you have to take care of while pursuing fancy
goals. You may of course focus on activities that exploit your
primitive faculties, sport and money accumulation being two primary
examples; disadaptation produces the market for such activities and
they naturally flourish as a remedy to frustration. But such
activities are disconnected from what really matters in your life (if
anything !). Which makes deep satisfaction elusive.
This is a problem that "primitivists" tend to stress (the way I
imagine them at least), and that "extropians" tend to repress. I don't
like the idea that what you share in a group is a blind spot.
(Note I have left completely aside obviously and massively negative
aspects like pollution, possible self-destruction, government control,
etc.)
Now here's an even more radical idea about disadaptation. Though it
manifests itself quite obviously in such trivial situations as those
given above, where a technology or social innovation has moved our
natural environment away from the ancestral one, the great Disadapter
is something else, which is itself the cause of cultural progress:
it's our imagination.
Our cognition has grown to a point where we can imagine too much
compared to what we are and can be. Our life form seems just bizarre,
one of too many possibilities. A fixed life form and a finite life
span is too tight a dress. Even more than having disadapted to our
environment, our body has disadapted to our mind. (This is how I feel,
at least.)
Seen that way, you could say that all the cultural endeavour is a
product of this imagination that is ahead of the body it inhabits, and
that this necessarily produces more obvious satisfaction (we get what
we wanted) and more disadaptation, until we change ourselves.
And then? One probable outcome (in a relatively peaceful and leisurely
environment) is that we redesign ourselves around our present desires
-- the mere implements of evolution to make us realize gene
replication -- in such a way that we can healthily focus on them only,
without having to take care of chores. And from this modest starting
point, we go on to explore further (think of Plato's idea that sexual
desire leads us to beauty).
And then? Mm, maybe we expand our imagination until we hit another
limit to change and start disadapting again by dreaming of being
something else, which we then proceed to bring to existence, etc.? Or,
we just stabilize, like oysters. Homo sapiens is intrinsically
unstable, because individuals are instrumental to their genes, which
combined to a superior cognition creates a tension that the individual
has to solve. But once it's solved, maybe we get happy for good and
stay there?
Yet another approach would be to say that the moment we start changing
ourselves is another "prediction wall" (but not linked per se to the
increase of intelligence). It may not be logically unpredictable, but
it definitely becomes much more difficult to predict than when we're
able to count on human nature.
Jacques
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