№ 886: Bumbling On The Hobbes

THE WAY WE ARE NOW (June 24) —

Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short.

That's how life used to be.

You could get “et” by a lion or tiger

if you were not an Austral aborigine.

Then we got civilized and, thereby, fixed everything.

Well, I guess, more or less.

Life on the hole is less short, less lonely.

“Poor, brutish, nasty”? Oh well. If only.

№ 787: Western Sieve 101 (or Fermi's question answered)

REALLY (February 6)

Our ancestors did not know they were primitive.

They thought they were right up-to-date.

They had sticks and stones

and they could crack bones

and suck out the marrow

of whatever they ate.

They extincted mammoths

and other large herbivores

which, we assume, were delicious,

meanwhile escaping the powerful carnivores

who would have found them nutritious. 

They did weaving and pottery,

winning the lottery,

farming and taming animals

and, in large part, 

after many false starts,

some stopped being actual cannibals.

They invented rafts (and later boats)

which allowed them to travel to places remote

spreading chaos and causing contagion.

(Even before becoming Caucasian.)

They built canals, erected storehouses,

coming up with both bows and arrows,

increasing efficiency in hunting and war.

(Which latter they found they were well-suited for.)

When they progressed (blundered?) into “modernity”,

thinking they’d found the key to eternity,

the environment collapsed, setting the brake.

Whole damned thing had been a mistake. 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

№ 623: I Read The News Today, Oh Boy

Is it true climate change will cause the end of civilisation by 2050? (Paywall)

In the worst case, “the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end.”

COMING TO (LEAVING?) YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD SOON (June 23)

Civilization, you say, is collapsing?

By which you must mean this thing

we are perfecting to expedite killing

every last living, ill-conceived being.

So, who — exactly? — thinks this a disaster?
Surely not those who expect a hereafter
on angel wings with God to sing to.
What — on Earth? — would THEY care to cling to?

We, creatures of clay in the image of God,

may have — finally! — this time shot our wad.

Five prior extinctions have kept the world pruned.

Details on sixth at six! Stay tuned.

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№ 382: Last Man Standing

Guardian: Footage of sole survivor of Amazon tribe emerges
Man believed to be in his 50s seen swinging an axe to fell a tree in Brazilian forest

Loggers, farmers and land grabbers murdered and expelled indigenous populations in the area in the 1970s and 1980s, and the man is believed to be the only survivor of a group of six killed during an attack by farmers in 1995. [He] has lived alone in an Amazon forest for at least 22 years. He was first located in 1996 and has been monitored by Funai [the Brazilian government indigenous agency] ever since. A glimpse of his face filmed in 1998 was shown in the Brazilian documentary Corumbiara.

Civilization.

Take it of leave it?

(Freud said it bred discontent.)

And if it kills everybody you know,

you would avoid it — to an extent —

and pray to the gods,

known and unknown,

for civilization to leave you alone,
though it will not,
it's not apropos,
so you may find yourself
with your own Truman Show.

№ 360: Going Viral

Quartz: Viruses love what we’ve done with the planet

Humans like to think of themselves as the dominant force of life on the planet, but stepping into the Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World exhibit in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, makes you reconsider that perspective. . . .The more of the planet humans take over, the more we inadvertently make it a viral paradise, and a dangerous place for us to live.

We believe (by and large),

after the gods, we are in charge. . .

BUT civilization is viruses' plot

and sadly for us, true that is not.

It cannot be accidental that

what we do fulfills their potential.

Working for viruses is no bed of roses —

certainly not what you'd call symbiosis.

BUT if you're thinking nothing could EVER be drearier,

imagine being ruled by bacteria.

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№ 351: Evolution, Creation (Whatever)

Has civilization undone the bit
where evolution favors the fit

and gifted us with a surfeit nitwits?
What ever happened to natural selection?
Shouldn't it head in the other direction?

BUT, if everything's down to creation,
perhaps the creator needs a vacation
or, worse, took up the wrong occupation,
for which, sadly, he's badly equipped
and daily requires reassurance and worship.

Or is LIFE more luck of the draw,

depending entirely on who draws which straw?

IT is what it is. For better. For worse.

Each of us lives in his own universe.

Which explains everything, finely and clearly:

You tell me your TRUTH, I say, “Oh! Really?”

No. 221: Do Over!

...hunter-gatherers considered their environments to be eternally provident, and only ever worked to meet their immediate needs. They never sought to create surpluses nor over-exploited any key resources.

— Guardian: How Neolithic farming sowed the seeds of modern inequality 10,000 years ago

If in “civilization” you “choose” to partake,

you have to acknowledge it's been a mistake.

Our hunter-gatherer forebears

cared for themselves (AND theirs!)

with minimum bother and much less fuss

than day-to-day living requires of us.

They ate what they found as they wandered.

They did not save. They did not squander.

They lived off the land with what came to hand

and as a whole the whole thing was grand.

Then an evil need planted a seed

which led to farming which led to greed

which led weapons which led to war

which led to us AND all we are good for:

exploiting, killing, breeding, diseases,

destroying whatever, whenever it pleases.

If ancestors from 10,000 years past

could visit today, they'd be aghast.

They'd return to their time, uproot their crops

to try ensure development stops.

They'd go on a hunt, they'd eat a weed,

they'd pray that the wheel doesn't succeed.

To suppress their distress, they'd end “progress”

leaving us better off for it. (I guess.)

[updated/corrected: December 7, 2017, 11:56 am EST]

No. CLX: Wither We Ghost

Guardian: Were we happier in the stone age?

Does modern life make us happy? We have gained much but we have lost a great deal too. Are humans better suited to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle?

...From the viewpoint of individual happiness, the "agricultural revolution" was, in the words of the scientist Jared Diamond, "the worst mistake in the history of the human race".

...Evolution has no interest in happiness per se: it is interested only in survival and reproduction...Evolution makes sure that no matter what we achieve, we remain dissatisfied, forever grasping for more.

For two thousand centuries (current best guess)

we hunted and gathered with minimum stress.

We thrived. Some did. (Well, more or less.)

We settled down. We started farming.

Turning wolves into to dogs, I suppose, was thought charming.

Chopping trees, draining bogs we start global warming.

At most, we've been “civilized” (maybe) twelve thousand years.

Our numbers have grown. (Along with our fears.)

Have we advanced? Are we more in arrears?

“Civilization”, I guess, has made a mess.

We created a rat race to pursue happiness

and thus far we've not had that much success.

Some say “compete”, others say “share”.

And then they argue about which is fair.

Forget happiness. Let us despair.

If what we're pursuin'

leads to our ruin,

it 's all our own doin'.

See also: New Yorker: The Case Against Civilization

Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?

...the agricultural revolution was, for most of the people living through it, a disaster. The fossil record shows that life for agriculturalists was harder than it had been for hunter-gatherers. Their bones show evidence of dietary stress: they were shorter, they were sicker, their mortality rates were higher. Living in close proximity to domesticated animals led to diseases that crossed the species barrier, wreaking havoc in the densely settled communities....Jared Diamond called the Neolithic Revolution “the worst mistake in human history.” The startling thing about this claim is that, among historians of the era, it isn’t very controversial.