A Modest Project to Save the World: The Gift of Peaceful Genes

By Warren Johnson

Most Americans cannot imagine getting by with less, or that it could be an easier and more relaxed way of life while using less of our diminishing supply of resources. Our descendants will thank us if we do that. But it won’t be easy, given the many changes in our ways of life that it will involve, and will benefit the environment too without the harm it would have done to our descendants without it, and also the more relaxed ways of life that we can live in the times ahead, rather than causing the collapse that we are moving toward now. The world is much too beautiful to risk that, as we are doing now.
This is the subject that is being written about ever more frequently now, especially as the climate changes have become ever more damaging, with higher summer temperatures and winds, colder winter temperatures, and more extremes of all of them, and will become steadily more difficult to overcome, as has already become the case.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Mar 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781665739719

Warren Johnson

Warren Johnson, PhD, is professor emeritus and former chairman of the Geography Department at San Diego State University. A geographer, educator, and author, he has a profound appreciation for the land, which led him to publish his 1978 bestselling book Muddling Toward Frugality. This book secured Johnson’s place as among the first to advocate sustainability in the midst of a frenzied materialistic world. His life-long fascination with sustainability began with his PhD where he examined the influence of medieval thinking on the development of the British National Parks system. An honored professor emeritus of cultural geography, natural resources and energy, he now applies his enthusiasm for the medieval Age of Faith to examine the roots of sustainability.

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Copyright © 2023 Warren Johnson.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-3970-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-3971-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023904049

Archway Publishing rev. date: 3/14/2023

CONTENTS

Preface The Parable of the Boats

Chapter 1 The Original Gift

Chapter 2 The Two Falls from the Garden

Chapter 3 The Appearance of Limits

Chapter 4 Nature, Faith, and Evolution

Chapter 5 Reason, Evolution, and Faith

Chapter 6 Evolutionists vs Darwin

Chapter 7 The Comedy of Survival

Chapter 8 Marriage, Family, and Community

Chapter 9 The Dangers: Income Differences and Climate Change

Chapter 10 The Sustainable Revolution

Chapter 11 Suburban Sustainability

Chapter 12 The Kid’s Question

Acknowledgements

About the Author

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PREFACE

The Parable of the Boats

M any years ago I came across this parable that stayed with me even though its author’s name did not. It spoke of the quest for the good and the noble as people rowing boats upstream against the current of human selfishness. Progress was slow and required continuous effort, and periodically individuals would falter and be swept downstream toward degradation and violence, but overall, the boats moved slowly upstream. Then in recent times a group of rowers turned their boats around, and rowing easily downstream, convinced others that their rapid progress was proof of the rightness of their ways. Now most boats have been turned around, and so strong is the current of human self-interests that we have moved far downstream, so far that we are beginning to feel the anxiety of being far from anything that can be thought of as the good life. We also hear what ominously sounds like a cataract ahead, and instinctively fear it.

Most Americans are now concerned about where this nation is heading, but even the thought of doing something about it is so intimidating when in a real sense the economy is functioning as our religion now, if that word is understood in its original Latin, of religare, meaning to bind together. This is something that all societies must have if they are to hold together and function; otherwise, there would be chaos. Our society is now being bound together primarily by the economy, and thus can be referred to as the Market Faith. It is holding us together very effectively with the natural inclinations to pursue our own interests, but that also means that competitiveness is replacing the cooperation that took the original human advance forward, and with growth the source of everything that is good in this society, of freedoms, incomes, and profits. But that is also making politics more hostile as people struggle for their own interests, while marriage, family, and community become more difficult when there is less that is holding them together and can be trusted. The dominance of growth also bars consideration of how the economy could be allowed to slow down gracefully toward the sustainable ways of life that will have long term value for our descendants, but for us too as the Market Faith shapes ever more of our lives in stressful and unsatisfying ways, and now even destructive ways. With climate changes.

This is not to deny that our society has created unprecedented levels of wealth and betterment in response to the promise of Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as stated in the Declaration of Independence, but with ever less said about responsibilities to others, nature, and the common good. It is more than a coincidence that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was also published in 1776, since these are the two great documents of the Enlightenment, the philosophical movement that reflects the ideals of freedom, reason, and science that would take this society forward so rapidly. The people themselves would decide what was right for them, rather than kings, nobles, churches and landed gentry. We were helped in this with the abundance of land and resources we had, but everywhere it would be the power in the fossil fuels that would take the Industrial Revolution forward in historically unprecedented ways. The religions of the earlier eras were powerless to resist these forces, especially after the religious wars in Europe had discredited religion as an ordering force, and left it as a personal matter that was barred from politics. The differences disturbed even those who were among the first to experience the new ways of life in the Industrial Revolution. In 1802 Wordsworth lamented that Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; little we see in nature that is ours. We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon. Even Marx said much the same thing from a slightly different perspective in 1848, when he wrote that the quest for profit has put an end to all feudal, idyllic relations. It has left remaining only the egotistical calculations. In 1880, Dostoevsky wrote that if the belief in immortality is destroyed, nothing then would be immoral, everything then would be permissible, and every living force maintaining life would dry up.

But the Enlightenment ways could not be stopped as wealth spread worldwide with colonial activities and then the global economy, and with ever less concerns about where such an economy was taking us. The ways that had worked well for so long were increasingly seen as leading in undesirable directions, especially as ever more people were pressing for their own interests, let alone what we were doing to this beautiful earth as consumption and population continued to increase. With that came the sense that the demands of the Market Faith had to be accepted wherever they were taking us, even if it meant a faster paced and more impersonal and competitive way of life that inevitably weakened families, communities, and the faiths that formerly held societies together.

One thing is certain in this: it will never be possible to meet the needs of a society that depends on growth and the quest for more regardless of how wealthy and powerful it has become. It is such a society that has already begun to feel more like the struggle for survival in nature than the peaceful cooperation that cultural evolution relied on to transcend the limits of natural evolution. The proven way is to find satisfactions more as our ancestors did, with the selflessness asked for by most of the great faiths, and come with Jesus’ Great Commandment, to love others as ourselves, the commandment that all the other commandments are based on. That is the way that promises a long future for our species on this beautiful planet, rather than the flash in the historical pan that was made possible with the fossil fuels that power the economy. The movement from that to sustainable ways of life could be smooth or halting, but the long human advance confirms that such a transition is possible, since it is the way that we lived in much of our past.

The case this book makes is yes, especially as it becomes ever more difficult to cope with our lives as the Market Faith shapes us in ever more dangerous and unpleasant way, and leads toward some form of overshoot and collapse. This is the task of Chapters 10 to 12, and will be more appreciated as it becomes clearer how much more satisfying life will be without the excesses of the Market Faith.

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CHAPTER 1

The Original Gift

I n this era when humans are such a dominant force on earth, there is a tendency to idealize nature, which is healthy in many ways. But this should not be taken to the point of forgetting that there is still much truth in the harsh words of Darwin’s natural selection and Tennyson’s nature red in tooth and claw. The human advance came with the long evolutionary process that was required to transcend these aggressive instincts, but the 98.5 percent of our genes that are the same as our closest primate relative, the chimpanzees, should help us to keep in mind how much we have in common with them, and how easily we could revert to their violent ways; as we are being encouraged to do if we listen to the media or are to be successful in our economically based way of life.

Cultural evolution is what made the difference. It is the path that our distant ancestors found that enabled them to move beyond what was possible with natural evolution. Even if there were many reversions to violence in the process, the achievements of our forebears should not be disparaged; they made us human in the positive sense of the word, of working together rather than fighting for dominance. This process went on over millions of years as our pre-human ancestors slowly moved away from the other primates to become Homo sapiens, those who think and are wise. This enabled them to move out of Africa some 50,000 years ago, perhaps more, and across the land bridge of the Middle East, and then east and west, and finally skirted the Pacific on the north to reach the New World. Everywhere they were adaptable enough to make use of the natural foods they found, and rather than living lives that were nasty, brutish, and short, as philosophers not unreasonably assumed, the hunter-gatherers were found to be more peaceful and cooperative than expected. The human advance had moved beyond the survival of the fittest of natural evolution, with the common denominator being the capacity to work together easily and productively, rather competing for dominance.

This was not known until recent centuries with the first contacts with hunter-gatherers that had been driven to the most difficult environments that other peoples had no use for, but depended on cooperation to survive in them. It was cooperation that enabled our earliest ancestors to transcend the struggle for survival of nature, and in a process that seems so improbable as to be almost miraculous, they were able to restrain instincts as powerful as for sex and dominance to create harmony in the family. But other species in nature cooperate and are monogamous, and the original human family would still be vulnerable to the aggressive males seeking ways of spreading their genes as widely as possible that had taken natural evolution forward. It was in preserving harmony in the family that community would become essential, but that could not be done by relying on the most effective fighters in the group, since that would leave the community dominated by its most aggressive males. It was necessary to rely on a collective effort to preserve the peacefulness of the group while keeping marauding males at bay. If the bones of Homo erectos are taken as a rough marker of when pre-humans first began to be more fully human—when they walked upright, used stone tools, had fire, and buried their dead—it would still be 1.8 million years before the time when the hunter-gatherers that we know about lived.

Fortunately, enough of them survived into our era that we could learn much about their ways, even if only in the difficult environments that more numerous agricultural peoples could not make use of, such as deserts, tropical forests, and the Arctic. Still, the evidence collected from them has been immensely valuable in helping us understand how we got to where we are, such as Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimos and several sources about the Kalahari Bushmen in southern Africa, both of which have been confirmed with evidence collected on film, such as Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty and The Hunters about the Bushmen by John Marshal. Both make it clear how well they worked together, how happy they were, and how much they valued the harsh environments they lived in, even though they would seem to be much too harsh for humans to survive in, especially when all they had was what they could carry from place to place in their quest for food.

If our distant ancestors had one major advantage in this process, it was that cooperation enabled them to hunt more effectively, both to take larger animals and to make use of all the meat before it spoiled, and without fighting for what they favored the most aggressive. It may have been in hunting that the value of cooperation was initially demonstrated, but could also have occurred among the women who did the gathering that usually provided more food. In time cooperation spread to many other tasks as the family and band became the core human institutions that encouraged peaceful cooperation. The groups that could work together easily found things going better for them, as reflected in the passing of their genes forward in children who grew up well adjusted, productive, and comfortable when living with others. Those with stronger drives for dominance and aggressiveness were thwarted in this; the killer genes, in effect, were killed off, if not in fighting then in failing to reproduce effectively in the more cooperative circumstances that were shaping the human advance.

These genes took great lengths of time to evolve, a process that can be thought of the way of learning from experience, with the ways that worked carefully preserved. Over great lengths of time and undoubtedly with many setbacks, the balance shifted in favor of peaceful cooperation, and as this occurred, ways of life evolved that gave humans their critical advantage in the evolutionary struggle. If evolution is the survival of the fittest, the fittest turned out to be those who could work together most effectively, not the strongest and most aggressive that wasted energy and lives in conflict. Cultural evolution had moved beyond the limiting factor of natural selection, and this enabled humans to occupy all the world’s environments, while the other primates remained in their original habitats. Cultural evolution was paying off in impressive ways.

If this conclusion about peaceful cooperation is surprising, it is because it is so contrary to the current impression of human nature, as dangerous