Dark Age America: The Cauldron of Nations | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

Sept. 3, 2014 (Archdruid Report) -- It's one thing to suggest, as I did in last week’s post here, that North America a few centuries from now might have something like 5 percent of its current population.

It’s quite another thing to talk about exactly whose descendants will comprise that 5 percent. That’s what I intend to do this week, and yes, I know that raising that issue is normally a very good way to spark a shouting match in which who-did-what-to-whom rhetoric plays its usual role in drowning out everything else.

Now of course there’s a point to talking about, and learning from, the abuses inflicted by groups of people on other groups of people over the last five centuries or so of North American history. Such discussions, though, have very little to offer the topic of the current series of posts here on The Archdruid Report. History may be a source of moral lessons but it’s not a moral phenomenon; a glance back over our past shows clearly enough that who won, who lost, who ended up ruling a society, and who ended up enslaved or exterminated by that same society, was not determined by moral virtue or by the justice of one or another cause, but by the crassly pragmatic factors of military, political, and economic power. No doubt most of us would rather live in a world that didn’t work that way, but here we are, and morality remains a matter of individual choices -- yours and mine -- in the face of a cosmos that seems sublimely unconcerned with our moral beliefs.

Thus we can take it for granted that just as the borders that currently divide North America were put there by force or the threat of force, the dissolution of those borders and their replacement with new lines of division will happen the same way. For that matter, it’s a safe bet that the social divisions -- ethnic and otherwise -- of the successor cultures that emerge in the aftermath of our downfall will be established and enforced by means no more just or fair than the ones that currently distribute wealth and privilege to the different social and ethnic strata in today’s North American nations. Again, it would be pleasant to live in a world where that isn’t true, but we don’t.

more

http://worldnewstrust.com/dark-age-america-the-cauldron-of-nations-john-michael-greer

[PatrickforO]

1. Your post is very though provoking and so deserves a thoughtful reply

In a larger sense, our species may be a sort of virus, a cancer that has metastasized over the earth. We are the only species of whom it can be said that if we went extinct, all other life on the planet would actually be better off. I have often thought the highest form of human civilization to be stone-aged hunter-gatherers who live in small tribes separated by vast geographic distances. Such tribes don't harm others too much, because they can't, and don't harm the earth on which they live for the same reason.

I cannot fault your analysis, but I do have a question. Do you think it possible that humans will ever evolve beyond this propensity to create evil systems? Let me explain. Most of the people I know, taken as individuals, are pretty decent and generous as far as they can be. There are people who are evil, or malignant toward others, but they are relatively rare.

However, what we've done is multiply until the earth can barely sustain our population, and certain people or groups of them have created systems that benefit them, but have evil result to all others. I am speaking now, in current time, of the corporation as a person, and the military-industrial complex, and in a larger sense, of capitalism as a political-economic system.

I'm interested in your perspective on whether we as a species have ever, or will ever, show signs of ending such inequitable systems.

We try, of course, but then tend to become corrupted. Still, as a longstanding dreamer and idealist, I cannot help but see us as we could be. If we all decided to make this world a benign place where we respect each other and take care of each other, and create systems that would allow everyone alive to simply have enough, earth would be a nice place to live. For everyone.

I'm not talking some pie in the sky utopia, either, although I've been so accused. But what would this world be like if education were free, healthcare were free, and everyone had pensions and was able to earn enough to have enough? Oh, maybe in your eyes this is a provincial argument, but what if? The Danes have done it. The Dutch, Swedes and Norwegians have done it. Why not the rest of us?

[PATRICK]

2. When do we get to work together to survive?

All the old hunter gatherer nomad forces are very much in effect combined with the agrarian settling down until it doesn't work stage. The mercantile capitalist cross fetilization or something or other and scientific knowledge has helped sustain bad habits- without reflection, self-knowledge, discipline or significant moral advancement or concentration on higher intelligence itself. The world could use an intelligent protector/maker species. The blowback however by that species preferring to live like simpler animals instead, turned in upon itself, lording it with their powers, can become the major threat to life on earth instead.

Unless the human race works to BE a human race, the perversion of its progessive, unique evolutionary might IS a biological depravity, a disease, a shameful march to self-induced suicide by stupidity, whining and hating and grasping what it can in warped imitation of a natural world it has eaten and discarded. An intelligent race that does not act its part dies in shame and brutality.

I see hope as twofold. Getting people to face the future and work extremely hard to be better in all the good ways. Deciding on how changes must be guided constantly away from atavistic pressures until pathologies are bred and engineered out the oxymoron currently self-titled homo sapiens.

Ten thousand years of history in all sorts of human civilizations show the never ending cycles of over breeding, over consuming made much worse by ruling structures until it all breaks down
with all the possibilities of advancing human progress not taken advantage of in the good times and thus cracking into horror and dissolution in a food crisis.

The more educated and learned the civilization, the greater the shame, the bigger the lost opportunity. It might be discouraging to realize we can never win over the old animal ways but without trying we will not even see or formulate the next visible steps to evolving ourselves, a very scary unknown that can only work with wisdom and responsibility.

It might be a big duh for the human race to finally, like some drunk hitting bottom, find that its primary purpose is to protect nature. To advance whatever unique intelligence it has. It's out there but in action you might not know it enough to be embarrassed by the failure.

When do we get together? When we do. Or we die after the question mark.