Week+3+-+Why+are+21st+century+dangers+so+difficult+for+us+to+perceive?


 * Why is it difficult for humans to perceive or understand the dangers of the 21st century world that we are creating?**

Ornstein and Ehrlich summarise it perfectly towards the end of the second chapter of their book, //New World New Mind// when they state that, in the world that made us, there was no reason for humans to detect dramatic long-term changes (to their environment). But in the world //we// made, there are many reasons we must perceive them. It is difficult for humans to understand and therefore adapt to 21st century changes because our hardwiring - the programming long since established in our brains - is simply not equipped to do so.

Pared back to basics, Erhlich and Ornstein reason that we are essentially the same upright animals who have roamed the earth for over a million years. Advances like fires and farming spurred rapid changes to our living conditions, but the size of our brains had by that stage become static. We began to migrate, populating previously unseen territories, we developed tools and weapons, we conceived art and other pursuits for aesthetic and intellectual pleasure. But at its essence, our world was small - our concept of space, of cause and effect, of opportunity and danger, were limited really to what we could see in front of us. Hundreds of thousands of years later, how much has our awareness of time and space changed?

Look at a society today under pressure say, from war, violence or extreme poverty. In such circumstances, what are the core importances to which we are reduced? Survival and reproduction. When civil unrest breaks out, looting begins. Civilised behaviour goes out the window replaced by teeming, panicked masses who struggle with each other to wrest food and supplies from wherever they can. The instinct to survive, to protect self and family as number one kicks in.

From another perspective, we could be seen to be inflicting harm on ourselves, in the way our cultural values have developed. We are being anaesthetised by modern techniques like marketing, media and medications, to the harsh realities of the world in which we live. Our survival potential is actually diminishing as we lose touch with the sources of food, shelter, safety, on which we depend. As Ornstein and Ehrlich suggest, a New Yorker would have a lot of trouble surviving outside the perimeters of their lifestyle construct.

We too, are distracted by short-term sensory pleasures. Though this suggestion may even offend some modern humans, more ancient and basic cultures might argue that the survival potential of many humans today is weakened by behaviours such as indulgence in excessive food consumption, in drugs and alcohol - which we know suppress our central nervous systems. We sometimes pay too much heed to undisciplined expressions of emotion, protecting each other from harsh realities, ignoring warning signs - be they health scares, alarming statistics on road rage, increasingly severe and frequent extreme weather events or rapid loss of biodiversity.

And even when we see the proverbial train hurtling down the track towards us, we somehow allow ourselves to be dazzled by its lights, to tell ourselves we are invincible, to slow our reflexes, to deny the cold hard laws of physics which dictate that the mass of a multi-carriage train combined with velocity at which it is approaching is far greater than our human body can withstand. If we survive to see the effect, we are shocked.

Why? Because we fail to perceive long-term consequences. Back when our species was establishing its genetic programming, survival of the fittest dictated the importance of confronting our immediate surroundings and responding quickly. As Ornstein and Ehrlich state, “Evolution is frugal”. We had no need to see the long view. We had no need to consider how our actions might impact generations hence or people living on the other wide of the world - because we had no concept of cumulative feedback from our actions or that another side of the world even existed. Even if we had known, our behaviours and numbers back then carried no threat over such distances.

Fast forward several hundred thousand years and the same brains struggle with perceiving an understanding the now significant dangers of our century, because our preset survival mechanisms had no need to do so.