I looked back on the diaries I wrote the last few years on my birthday. I find this year's a bit different. Once again I am glad to have made it this far and as long as I can keep learning, writing and growing I will keep that attitude.
I had a great birthday present in 2010 when the President signed the ACA. I have always been disappointed that we did not get single payer, but I have also always been glad we could get help to some people even if they are stuck with the insurance and drug industries and other profit makers.
What is most on my mind this year is the political climate and the climate. Read on below if you are interested.
When Jim Coffman and I wrote our book, Global Insanity: How Homo sapiens Lost Touch with Reality while Transforming the World, we were pessimistic about the future. After a lifetime of research and scientific excursions down many paths, I had reached a conclusion that I did not like. Jim shared it. Here is a summary of the book so you know what I am talking about:
The Global Economy that sustains the civilized world is destroying the biosphere. As a result, civilization, like the Titanic, is on a collision course with disaster. But changing course via the body politic appears to be well nigh impossible, given that much of the populace lives in denial. Why is that? And how did we get into such a fix? In this essay, biologists James Coffman and Donald Mikulecky argue that the reductionist model of the world developed by Western civilization misrepresents life, undermining our ability to regulate and adapt to the accelerating anthropogenic transformation of the world entrained by that very model. An alternative worldview is presented that better accounts for both the relational nature of living systems and the developmental phenomenology that constrains their evolution. Development of any complex system reinforces specific dependencies while eliminating alternatives, reducing the diversity that affords adaptive degrees of freedom: the more developed a system is, the less potential it has to change its way of being. Hence, in the evolution of life most species become extinct. This perspective reveals the limits that complexity places on knowledge and technology, bringing to light our hubristically dysfunctional relationship with the natural world and increasingly tenuous connection to reality. The inescapable conclusion is that, barring a cultural metamorphosis that breaks free of deeply entrenched mental frames that made us what we are, continued development of the Global Economy will lead inexorably to the collapse of civilization.
Am I trying to sell books? That's a joke if anyone understands the scientific /academic publishing game. I do wish our message will get read. It has been getting out but not in any significant numbers. If you have read the summary you will know why I want the message to be read.
My path to writing this book started when I was a sophomore in college studying Civil Engineering. I took a psychology course and it changed my life. I realized that I was fascinated by the workings of the human mind and wanted to know more.
The rest of my college education put me in a fairly unique track for trying to gain that understanding. I had all the engineering math and science that a biologist would not have. I got my BS in biology but was different from any of the other biology majors.
Graduate work in physiology was accompanied by more math and physical chemistry at the graduate level and my post doc was in in biophysics with emphasis on nonequilibrium thermodynamics. That grew into network thermodynamics and computer modelling of large complicated physiological systems.
All that coupled with my specializing in the nervous system both the CNS and the neurons that made it up, I naively thought I was on my way to understanding the mind from the ground up. Unfortunately, that is impossible. I was lucky enough to be introduced to the new complexity theory early on since one of its originators, Bob Rosen, was just a few years ahead of me in graduate work at the University of Chicago.
Later, when Bob died from complications of diabetes in 1998, I was ready to carry on with the tools he developed.
I have been a radical political activist since the 1960s and, being a holist, never separated my political thinking from my career activities.I tell that story because I think our book is not just another book. It comes from a thinking that is very uncommon today.
So my reflections as I reach 79 are built on that thinking. I am not happy with what I have learned, but I am stuck with it. We are in big trouble. The system that has evolved regarding the collective human species does not look like it can break free of a suicidal social dysfunction that drives it.
Meanwhile as it progresses we write our diaries and work in elections. As I have written many times, that is part of the problem, not the solution.
The reality that is confronting us by the day is that we have seriously fouled our nest and the results are beginning to look devastating. I never thought we would see these consequences while I was alive.
I have been fighting bladder cancer and have a progressively worsening peripheral neuropathy so I don't know how much longer I will exist. I have been a teacher all my career and want so badly to teach now. I can't do that for many reasons. The main one is that there is no place for my message to be taught.
It would make me very happy to know that I have been heard and that some of this thinking will continue. Many other authors have come to the conclusions we have but without the perspective that is uniquely ours. I may be vain and arrogant for saying that but I believe it is true.
Jim and I wrote a follow up paper to try to explain why this message is so hard for people to accept. It will be out shortly. I'll keep working until I am unable to continue. I thank those who take the time to read these things. I hope you can get somewhere with the ideas.