(If you have issues or interests, Search will list relevant papers.)
My name is Vernon Molloy.
I became identifiable August 22, 1942. (This is usually referred to as being born.)
My fortune is that this was judiciously encouraged. That is to say, my family and community had enough resources that I was allowed to live, but not so much that I was prevented from doing so.
Armed with images of foetuses, pro-lifers insist that identifiability occurs nine months earlier than birthdays suggest.
Why stop there? Why is every human being not foreshadowed when parents meet … or are imagined and conceived a generation earlier … and so on ad infinitum?
The point is, ‘conception days’, ‘birthdays’, ‘death days’ … attempt to parcel up proceedings that have neither beginnings nor endings.
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After a few decades of exuberant belief in immortality, I started ‘doing stuff’ to retain my ‘entity status’: bicycle, run, eat well, drink far more than I should, bicycle, do push ups ….
So far, so good … although the equilibrium between catabolism and anabolism - between building up and tearing down - feels increasingly precarious.
For recreation, I operate a tree farm near Belleville, Ontario. This has something to do with having been raised on the same farm when the main crop involved seven children; and with having read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden when I was 15.
(For an audio of Walden chapter 1: http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/gutenberg/2/6/2/8/26289/ogg/26289-01.ogg
If this whets your interest, the complete audio book can be found at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26289/26289-index.html )
However it happened, a good deal of my life has been given over to philosophical issues.
This is how I came to question the moral and rational agent claims underpinning the political, economic and intellectual proceedings governing the modern world.
In the arguments below, these claims are characterized as incoherent. I suggest how they encourage arrogance and lead to false notions of well-being.
These confusions help explain why human beings will soon be responsible for the biggest destruction of life since a comet eliminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Even if this is not true, environmental and resource-depletion crises are certainly combining with increasing poverty to create misery and turmoil.
- These difficulties are usually traced to some combination of population growth, industrialization or moral decay.
- The economies we have contrived require perpetual growth to avoid collapse.
- Endless growth is impossible in a finite world.
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The only ‘ good news’ in all of this is bad news for most of us. Modern economies are organized so that the wealth resulting from improved technologies and efficiencies flows to fewer and fewer human beings, to military and corporate adventures … and to entertainments designed to distract the rest of us from our prospect.
The logic is simple: every new technology, every improvement in institutional and manufacturing efficiency … means that products and services can be produced with fewer workers.
The results already include automated factories, outsourcing manufacturing, call-centres … and the collapse of the middle class in Western nations.
In other words, a race is occurring between environmental degradation and globalized poverty. The score to date? Circa 2000, five per cent of human beings possessed more than ninety five per cent of the world’s wealth.
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To understand how this crisis occurred, and glimpse what might be be done about it, we need to understand persons in a new way.
I propose that persons do not exist because Divine Creation, evolution or – a recent proposal – harnessing fire to cook food, yielded creatures with big brains.
As Julian Jaynes argued in The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral mind, self-awareness only occurred when genetic endowments combined with cultural resources – an event he thinks occurred between the times the Greek poet Homer penned The Iliad and The Odyssey.
The point is, although beings just like you and I have existed for at least 250,000 years, persons have only recently become reliable possibilities.
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I grew up on a small farm near Ivanhoe, Ontario. My advantages included three brothers and three sisters, an Irish-Catholic father who sometimes remembered his religious duties on Sundays, and a more reliably devout French-Canadian mother.
These stalwart individuals not only gave birth to seven Ivanhoe Molloys, they managed the consequences with patience and humour. Children today have few of the advantages we enjoyed. They face challenges we never dreamed of. Not the least of their difficulties is that they appear oblivious to how rapidly the world is changing.
You and I may belong to the last generation to have a sense of what normal looks like. When rates of change pass ‘rapidity thresholds’, individuals are unable to grasp what is going on beyond increasingly narrow circumstances. This is a new hazard. Human beings evolved in in a world wherein the big picture was changing so slowly that it could be safely ignored. Clearly this is no longer true. The irony is that we appear unable to pay attention to even matters that would have terrified our parents and grandparents.
To make matters worse,
- Exceptional individuals do not experience these failures as quickly as most.
- The institutions, corporations and nations these individuals tend to ‘head up’ enjoy increasingly compliant workers, consumers and soldiers.
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In 2001, the National Geographic calculated that the world’s population would be sustainable if each person represented an ecological footprint of about 5 acres (2.02 hectares). This just happened to be the amount of arable land in the world. The average industrialized person commands 20, while North Americans utilize the sustaining capacity of 30 acres.
The citizens of ‘developing nation’ average 5 acres, but are far from content.
How could these problems be fixed? Backlander projects are based on an understanding of reality introduced by Heraclitus (circa 500 B.C.) and developed in Alfred North Whitehead’s 1927 Gifford Lectures.
Briefly, the world is an event, not a container stuffed with things undergoing change.
For our purposes, rather than an automatically-occurring birthright, consciousness ebbs and flows within events sometimes known as persons.
Linking the possibility of rich inner lives with with a wholesome mixture of cultural resources, communities and self-sufficiency underscores the importance of getting these relationships right.
just a thought ,but if we slowly remove the subliminal messages we are drowning in every where we look “YOU NEED THIS PRODUCT, This life Style , This unrelenting torrent of instant fix drugs etc. Lets do what the Germans did in the 50′s. T.V.Commercials were limited to one time slot of 10 minutes per hour on one channel only. Lets ban money for 3 days per month , During these 3 days tax free barter in manditory , gradually increase the number of days per month.
just an observation . By the way article is well done.
How are you Vern. I like your writing. Maybe we can get together one day for coffee. Spend lot of time going to the YMCA in Trenton for swimming and Sauna. We even could meet there as you like the Sauna and I can go swimming. Please let me know or give me a call. Home 613-962-5030 Cell 613-848-5930
Hi Vernon,
Your name was passed on to mme by B Dollan. For your records I to am a landloard with tenant issues and would like to have acces and nominate individuals. My email address kotela@sympatico.ca. Thanks in advance.
Alex
How refreshing to read what I suppose might be called `real’ thinking, as opposed to the magical thinking that possesses most of us – and not the other way around.
Being born the same year as you, I would agree that the `War Babies’ might be the last to know what a `normal’ human being might be like. I would define `normal’ in this sense as being a member of the human species who understands that our `mission’ is to protect and maintain our species, as it is with all species. I often used this cohort in my work when I wanted to model requirements for future generations, particularly the aging Boomers.
I think, though, that coming from what sounds to me like a traditional farming family has been a blessing. Being out in the real world of living and growing (or not) gives one perspective. Living in neat rows of houses in a concrete world with gardens that are manufactured or in pods that give one no opportunity to experience Earth provides, instead, a sense of the world and living that is severely circumscribed and prone to developing a view that we are somehow `in control’.
Humans have always lived on the edge of the abyss, it seems to me. We certainly are the edge of one now.
Thank you for this website. We need thinkers.
If you really start to think about, it must be the vegetarians and vegans that are running this world into the ground. And if it is not them, they must be running a close second. Think of all the prairies that have disappeared, turned into waste lands, the rainforests turned into soybean and corn fields. Wherever you see the ‘amber waves of grain’, you must think of the destruction, the havoc this has wreaked. And Monsanto and Cargill are only too eager to perpetuate this nightmare. Even our own institutions are aiding and abetting by promoting the “healthy” diets heavily favouring carbohydrate based products and thus creating generation upon generation of diabetics, heart and cancer patients., and a whole array of other diseases and health problems.
But then….do we not have to sustain ourselves with this carb based toxic brew in order to have enough to survive on for all of us? Could we , could our world, survive on an animal based (not industrially farmed) diet? I don’t think so and there you have it. We can shoot the crap all we want, we’re on a float shooting for the rapids. You can steer a bit one way, or you can try to delay by dragging your feet through the water, you can throw momma overboard and drag her beyond the float to slow it down. In the end you” hit the rapids and whatever you did, it was all for naught. So why not just keep on shooting the crap and keep on partying until it is all over. By the way you’ll have lot more fun with steaks than tofu.
The Vegetarians and Vegans are a relief to the overburdened food system that struggles to support the meat consumption of the ‘developed’ world. The rainforests being demolished to grow soy and corn are being sacrificed to provide feed for the factories of production-line animals being raised in an artificial and suffering based way to provide cheap meat to indulge this fraction of the world’s population. Those that live in the developing world where meat consumption is much less have a significantly smaller footprint.
Tofu is only a small aspect of a meatless diet. You have to be more adept at cooking, however, to enjoy a healthy vegetarian/vegan diet. The solution to our large footprint could be to open these killing fields (abatoirs) to the public. That yummy steak might become repulsive if this happened.
For those who cannot give up meat, perhaps they could pay more (the artificially low price of meat is due to the unacceptable way animals are raised) to buy meat from animals that have been raised in a more natural way. That is: free-ranging, humane, free of steroids to make them grow abnormally fast, free of antibiotics to keep them from getting sick in the disgusting conditions of confined animal feed operations.
Consequently, people would consume less meat thereby reducing their footprint. They would live healthier and longer as well as greatly reduce their impact on our healthcare system. Less suffering everywhere. Win-win.
Maybe we need to look at ourselves as a resource. Or as a virus.
We WILL eventually exhaust the resources available and then cease to exist.
This is inevitable. So lets just carry on and the sooner WE are gone the better off other species will be.
Lose-win
Unfortunately, this is more likely to end our rampage on the planet. Common sense is too inconvenient. Still, we owe it to the next generations to pull our heads out of the sand and stop being oblivious to what matters.