Two guides for a healthy biosphere
How we can use more holistic thinking to dethrone the god of economics
If you've read some of my previous posts and newsletters, you've probably noticed that I talk a lot about the problems of our modern consumerist society. But if our current economic system of comparative advantage and free trade pursued to its purest form is leading us down the wrong path, what else can we use as a guide?
In this post, I'll describe two philosophies we can use that go beyond mere economics and politics.
The inclusion of nonhuman organisms
The other day, I was reading a book about technology and its interaction with society. I won't mention which book it was, but what struck me most about it was that it was so human-focused. It seemed to take as axiom that we should focus only on maximizing short-term measurable improvements for humanity, instead of all life on this planet.
But fundamentally, human happiness and contentment is connected with the health of the biosphere, and that includes all plants and animals, including humans.
In the future, we will need to consider the stability and health of the biosphere in all our choices. Ultimately, this will involve making what will appear to be sacrifices. We will have to pollute less and reduce the apparent convenience of plastics. We will have to take projects like E. O. Wilson’s Half Earth idea seriously, and we will have to live much more simply.
This change cannot simply happen at a low-level within existing laws. Laws must be changed, right up to the constitutions of countries, so that animal species are as cared for as humans. This may sound strange to some, but it won’t sound so strange if we continue down this path and destroy the organisms that give us air.
And even beyond the benefits that we accrue immediately, other life has the right to exist and we should protect it in the same way we protect human life.
The emphasis on basic questions
Our modern global society is tuned to produce specialists. We have chemists, engineers, doctors, lumberjacks, programmers, and an endless list of other professions. Our schools teach specialized knowledge to solve specialized problems, and pretty much all schools dive right into abstract ideas about specific things.
Humanity wasn't always like this. In the time of Leonardo da Vinci, we had general thinkers who liked to ask general questions.
However, the world is still in need of people who ask the most basic and general questions without resorting to highly specialized knowledge to provide the answers. We need more general philosophy, and serious thought put into the problems of our time in a general sense.
We should ask questions like: where are we all going? How does our global connected society impact the future?
Moreover, the answers shouldn't come from data analysis, machine learning with demographics, or some other specialized academic field. We should go back to the fundamentals and redefine things and ask questions all over again without needing to cite fifty obscure papers in the top sociology journals.
Schools should encourage students to ask basic questions of life and existence, and ponder them much more, instead of integrating sinusoidal functions or balancing organic reactions.
Conclusion
In short, we need new ways of thinking that transcend the automatic response of minimizing cost, maximizing profit, and optimizing for one or two easily-measured variables like GDP that look good on international reports.
We need to mentally deconstruct society and examine it from its core, and move towards a new philosophy of harmony with the biosphere by taking into account nonhuman life. One of the ways this can be best accomplished is to lessen the farce of specialized education and put more weight on being empathetic and wise thinkers about the most basic concepts and biases that we take for granted.