Original Virtue

In order to carve out an explanation for what is going on people will need to suspend their understanding of the past.  This involves suspending familiar narratives that seem to have worked in the past but no longer do.  I've talked about this in light of the assumptions made in our economic narratives but the sister discipline of ideology has formed narratives around the experience of industrial capitalism that needs to be pulled apart and looked at.  Eventually a new narrative has to be agreed upon and serve as the best description of how most people think about reality.  Like all good narratives, there needs to be an origin story, but this one must be based on some kind of demonstrable body of knowledge, even if is a necessarily incomplete one.

An article published recently by Kurt Cobb on Resilience.org provides an elegant pulling together of a lot of themes I talk about in this blog.  In Greed Explained:  J. Paul Getty, Aristotle, and the Maximum Power Principle, Cobb addresses the subject of Greed by placing it solidly into the natural order of things.  Greed is by definition a bad thing, one of the seven deadly sins that will only get you a one way ticket to Hell.  Of course, this is the Christian version of things, but something like that can be found in every major moral tradition, whether religious or philosophical, which is to say, the contemplative traditions.  But Cobb turns the notion of greed a bit on it's head by positing greed as a manifestation of the Maximum Power Principle which represents the original force for human survival and for all other living beings.

So whence all the religious prohibitions?  To use the seven deadly sins as a guide, of the seven, three of them, lust, gluttony and greed, are sins of excess.  Greed is an excessive desire for material things to the point where the soul is so tainted with sin it can only be sent to the Underworld.  So for them this was no small matter.  Excess, however, is a relative term co-defined alongside scarcity and any moral judgement taken on excess has to be seen in light of the competition for scarce resources as directed by the Maximum Power Principle.  It is, after all, the Prime Directive which cannot be denied.

Yet we humans still have this morality which has formed alongside the MPP.  Cobb says, as do others, morality is adaptive and serves a survival purpose as well, meaning that the outwardly foolish decision to voluntarily do with less actually enhances the prospect for survival.  This would have formed in the dimly lit past of the Stone Age, when the Earth's climate was tumultuous, so much so as to frequently reduce available resources to such a degree that it would cause death.  This can be seen in the climate record which shows that the climatic fluctuations were so severe that settled life in a large civilization wasn't possible.  It took at least 60,000 years, maybe more, for humans to take up agriculture, even though evidence suggests it was attempted well before it finally took hold some 8,000 years ago.  Human society and it's moral codes were formed by this experience of uncertainty and scarcity.  But so were our appetites.

And now our appetites appear to be out of bounds in regards to our available resources.  What has seemed normal and innocent is looking like excess.  The narratives which have evolved from both the perception and the actual fact of plenty are cleaving at the very point of perception and actuality.  How we behave at the dawn of a new era of scarcity is a serious issue.  We have this dual nature, or so it seems, where one aspect tries to temper the other, with mixed results.  Dealing with mixed results is nothing new to humanity, but to garner a sense of the transition from abundance to scarcity on a global scale is certainly new.  Humanity has never had to think on this scale, and only a few really ever try.  Only recently has thinking on a global scale even been necessary, let alone truly extending an innate capacity to empathize to all the other people living in all parts of the world.

The innateness and the institutions exist to make the attempt, and it will be made.  And much of it will be expressed through ideology.   Ideology is an instrument of societal organization.  People will organize themselves around values, beliefs, facts, convictions, and a healthy dose of incomplete or false information.  That is also the realm of the individual.  What I like so much about Cobb's thinking is that he is pointing to a conception of the origin of moral and sinful behavior that can be used as an instrument for self-reflection.  The questions of who we are and what are we doing still matter.  There is some new information here which can hopefully instill a sense of humility about the common enterprise.  And, to end on an uncharacteristically optimistic note, this humility may instill other forms of sense, like an unprecedented and heroic scale of global cooperation while the institutions to enable it still exist.