Yet every child
Is cast from paradise —
Into growth and new community,
Into vast, ongoing
Change.

Octavia Butler

Let’s do a quick reminder of where our civilization is heading.

Globally, the natural support systems of the planet are faltering (in case you don’t quite believe this, and need a confirmation from online, the source of all wisdom, a quick Google AI return reads, “Earth’s natural support systems are in rapid decline because human activities have severely altered about 75% of land and 66% of marine environments.” — since this was a Google search, presumably that includes both the Gulf of, and Lake America).

In the US, we’re hurtling towards economic collapse, civil war spawned through the manufactured culture war, and a mental health crisis, all because the plutocracy has created a hermetically sealed vault to protect and extend its own dominance, leaving the rest of us fighting each other over table scraps.

And delusions of every kind rule the day: a fossil fuel renaissance under Trump, built on Venezuelan and eventually Greenlandian booty (never mind that this will accelerate the incineration of the planet); AI and crypto utopias (while grift and fraud, perpetrated even by the Trump clan itself, actually define the space — oh, and data centers are eco-tragedies foisted on anyone who isn’t NIMBY-rich enough); the liberal green revolution (which refuses to see the fundamental unworkability of our current pattern of consumption, no matter what the energy source).

In short, global consumer industrial civilization, in its capitalistic and quasi-capitalistic formats, has brought us to the brink of full-scale planetary collapse, but the only way we can think of to transcend it is by having MORE of it: more economic growth, more jobs, more production, more consumption, more manufacturing, more investment, more opportunity. More of everything — that’s the logic of the cancer cell. Endless growth inside a finite system that is already being killed by all the previous growth. This is obviously a plot line that leads to death.

The previous three posts on this blog asked, “What kind of country do we want to be?” This question is really part of a much bigger one: “Does humanity have a workable future at all?”

Now, this might sound stupid, because humans would seem to be at the height of our power and dominance as a species. Despite our political, economic, and social problems, it cannot be denied that, collectively, we’re doing amazing things: curing diseases, flying around in space, walking around with super-computers in our pockets, plumbing the depths of the human genome, creating artificial intelligence that rivals our own, and churning out different kinds of hot sauce for every occasion.

But aside from our amazing technological power, the bonds of human cooperation and solidarity, never particularly solid since the dawn of civilization, are fraying badly. When humans left behind the hunter-gatherer, tribal lifestyle a few thousand years ago, the main issue that emerged with the rise of settled, sedentary societies was how to coordinate and cooperate with many, many anonymous strangers. Our social primate brains are just not evolved for that kind of mass thinking. Our tribal social capacity tops out at around 150 people that can be known intimately. Anything larger than that, and we just can’t keep things straight: names, reputations, shared history, trustworthiness, and other interpersonal score-keeping variables.

Our main solution to this problem of civilizational scale was, and still is in many places, religion. The interpersonal mechanisms in our brains were essentially hijacked and leveraged by the priestly and ruling classes (often exactly the same, but sometimes not quite), and then projected out onto the cosmos, creating a supernatural sphere of surveillance, with Big Gods emerging to enforce moral, ethical, and even legal obligations between strangers (see the amazing book by Ara Norenzayan on this subject, Big Gods). The resulting discipline and fear of divine judgment created by religions allowed for the rapid expansion of technological and economic power, which requires a huge supporting infrastructure of trust and cooperation.

As civilizations continued to grow in scope, breadth, and sheer demographic volume, religious control was augmented, and in some places replaced, by secular systems of surveillance and behavioral enforcement. National identities, ethnic identities, and other political and social systems of loyalty and self-definition emerged to continue the grand project of creating cooperation and coordination between many millions and even billions of anonymous strangers.

The problem is that the emergent powers of civilization, powers unleashed by religious and quasi-religions social cements, are now running amok, released from the archaic, conservative restraints that those same cultural traditions used to provide. This has happened because all the traditional boundaries, rules, and moral strictures created by religions, nations, and other cultural identities are, at bottom, fictions, mythological constructs without much correspondence to the concrete reality of everyday life, which has become increasingly determined by our fast-hurtling technological advances. Certainly, religious systems are still incredibly influential, as evidenced by their continuing importance around the world, even in the US. But in terms of sheer ability to shape the material contours of our lives, our jobs, and our communities, science and technology have pushed religion and other ideational identity systems into smaller and tighter spheres of influence, which actually makes them desperate and more ideologically combative, as they struggle to preserve their dwindling practical importance. (A good example of this is the anti-vax and general anti-science movements inside MAGA. There’s no good reason to reject settled science, unless you’re trying to carve out space for religious and other increasingly-obsolete ways of understanding the world. The virulence of the anti-vaxxers comes from the shrinking, constricted space to which their older ways of knowing have been relegated.)

Let’s try another way of looking at the problem. What the development of civilizations has done is crush the natural human preference for actual tribal groups (again, our social primate brains want and need a large sphere of intimates to function well, groups that top out at 150 or so), and replaced it with artificial macro-tribes on the one end (religions, nations, ethnic identities) and the domestic micro-unit on the other end (individual, couple, nuclear family, even the extended family — and let’s remember that even the broader family units of Asian and Latino cultures are still not functional equivalents of larger, truly tribal formations). Neither of these new civilizational arrangements, the macro and the micro, really work for their human subjects. They are no substitute for the tribal, which is mandatory for human flourishing.

This civilizational system, which allows for amazing levels of social discipline and cooperation, has made us into the juggernaut species that we are today. But unfortunately, that very power has had devastating effects on both the environment, which is buckling under our impact, and on people themselves, who are increasingly victims of that planetary decimation. And of course, international and intranational inequality are further indications that our sheer power as a species does not come with any kind of assurance that things will cleave to our aging, outmatched religious, political, and social ideologies.

Human power creates big groups and the big gods necessary to hold those groups together. But we can never escape the longing for the truly tribal, which is baked into our genes and our brains. We’ve been fleeing the tribal for around 7000 years now, but it isn’t working. Power freed from the tribal becomes power liberated from the natural world, a faux freedom that is now killing us.