Evolve: The Journey to PACEM 2050

By William Spencer

Should a species smart enough to foresee its own demise be able to consciously evolve in order to overcome threats to its existence? Evolve reveals the nexus of evolutionary biology, sustainability and peace on the journey to PACEM 2050.

There is a Burning Platform threating our species. Although our species is extremely good at cooperation, social polarization is preventing our citizenry from being in adequate alignment to adopt the necessary public policy to mitigate future ecological disaster. There are only three scenarios going forward: extinction; eusocial evolution, or a long-term cultural intervention to overcome our current lack of conceptual understanding, lack of social empathy, and lack of decision making to implement the solutions needed to mitigate catastrophe.

No single government action, no corporate solutions or temporary changes in citizen behavior will resolve the challenges we face. The problems are interconnected and the path to find solutions represents the solution itself. A principle of evolution, and of social change, is that only the system can change the system.

PACEM 2050 is the uncharacteristic social change strategy that changes the structure of how we share the realities of sustainability, social polarization, and approaching ecological tipping points.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Jul 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798765242131

William Spencer

WILLIAM SPENCER is a freelance Copywriter and Novelist based in the North of England. He has been a full member of the Institute of Copywriting since 2006 and was employed by an Oxford based publishing house for a period of five years during the early nineties. His debut novel THE WAY OF VENGEANCE was inspired by his late mother-in-law, who was a childhood survivor of the Holodomor Terror Famine in the Ukraine.

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Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Dedication quote from Kenneth E Boulding, Stable Peace,

Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978.

Author photo by Barbi Reed

ISBN: 979-8-7652-4212-4 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-4214-8 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-4213-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023908770

Balboa Press rev. date: 07/28/2023

PRAISE FOR EVOLVE

There is no more urgent and important issue in the world than the intertwined challenge of peace and sustainability. Humanity is approaching a precipice, but we can still turn aside and climb the mountain instead. In this wonderfully visionary and well thought out call to action, the wisdom of Will Spencer shows us a clear path forward in PACEM 2050. May we tap into our full potential to EVOLVE!

William Ury, PhD

Harvard Negotiation Project

Co-author Getting to Yes, and author The Third Side

"At a moment in history when climate panic and despair shriek off the editorial pages, it’s a relief to find a calm, scientifically informed narrative that is both hopeful and practical. Will Spencer has earned the right to be taken seriously when he says large scale change is possible. He has a four-decade track record of making hard things happen, including the creation of the US Institute of Peace.

Evolve is a bold prescription for another large-scale intervention that shows us a way back from the abyss. Its method is collaboration. Its expression is empathy. Its substance crosses three science-based disciplines. Evolve is a sophisticated blueprint drawn for us by a resilient social change agent. It’s an urgent call for social engagement, appealing to our better angels as responsible citizens of a democracy and as Homo sapiens opting for survival of the species."

Thomas J Rice, PhD

Former Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University

Co-founder of the Interaction Institute for Social Change

You might not realize that you’re on a Burning Platform, but you are. Bad news? Indeed! But there is also good news: although we can’t get off the Platform, Will Spencer shows that we can put out the fire. Moreover, there is much in our evolved biology that can enable us to do it. As Smokey Bear famously points out Only You… And this book makes clear, you won’t be alone in this essential struggle.

David P Barash, PhD

Professor of Psychology and Zoology emeritus

University of Washington

Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science

"Ignorance more frequently begets

confidence than does knowledge: it is those

who know little, not those who know much,

who so positively assert that this or that

problem will never be solved by science."

Charles Darwin

The Descent of Man

1871

Evolve

The Journey to PACEM 2050

William Spencer

Dedicated to

Kenneth and Elise Boulding

"The problem of peace policy is seen not

as how to achieve immediate and certain

success, but as how to introduce a bias

into the system that moves it toward

stable peace at a more rapid rate."

Kenneth Boulding

CONTENTS

Preface – Peace As A Progenitor Of Sustainability

Introduction – Sustainability Dominoes

Chapter 1 – Fruit Flies And Smokey Bear

Chapter 2 – A Moment of Dreadful Suspense

Chapter 3 – Darwin’s Dominoes

Chapter 4 – Philosophy of Evolution

Chapter 5 – Urgency of the Burning Platform

Chapter 6 – Peace Gene

Chapter 7 – Protecting the Earth Hive

Chapter 8 – Sacred Cows and Empathy Blockers

Chapter 9 – Conscious Evolution

Chapter 10 – Meaning, Identity, and Structure

Chapter 11 – Selling Peace

Chapter 12 – To Make Peace Possible – Imagining Roadmaps

Chapter 13 – To Make Peace Probable – Adapting Structures

Chapter 14 – To Make Peace Popular – Marketing Empathy

Chapter 15 – To Make Peace Profitable – Revisioning Economies

Chapter 16 – To Make Peace a Principle – Creating Bias

Chapter 17 – PACEM 2050

Diagrams and Insights for Conscious Social Evolution

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Glossary of Precepts and Principles in Evolutionary Biology

Further Reading and Study / Questions for Discussion

References

About the Author

PREFACE

PEACE AS A PROGENITOR OF SUSTAINABILITY

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The activist is not the man who

says the river is dirty. The activist

is the man who cleans up the river.

Ross Perot

Should a species smart enough to foresee its own demise be able to consciously evolve in order to overcome threats to its existence? Our instinct to evolve is not just part of our DNA but assumes a cloak of personal responsibility for the collective outcome. Those who fail to see a way to sustainability, also lack a sense of peace as the core design of our evolutionary process. Cooperation within our species is what has driven our capacity to flourish. It is at the heart of our evolutionary progression and success.

Taken together, these are indeed big concepts and notions, but humanity now faces our biggest dilemma. Human development and learning require both theory and policy to sustain it, much as a river requires water to flow or raised banks to define it. A defining moment for our species is upon us: how will American culture adapt to accelerate the diffusion of concepts and frameworks in order to advance peace and sustainability? This extraordinary need collides with the ordinary compliance of most Americans to protect our lifestyles and cultural norms.

This book addresses two of the most important challenges of our time: social polarization and sustainability. It describes the next phase of human evolution where strategic cultural change is necessary to become more sustainable, and implicitly develop renewed empathy for our natural world, and the needs and interests of diverse communities. This realization calls on our species to become more cooperative than we have ever been. One path forward in this journey is a long-term social change process called PACEM 2050, designed to facilitate our species to adapt to the ecological and social threats we face. The moment in which we find ourselves is the nexus of evolutionary biology, sustainability and peace.

Scientists tend not to be dramatic. But these days scientists are increasingly using words and phrases in their studies and reports like: unprecedented, frightening, dramatic, immense danger, emergency measures, unsustainable, urgency of the crisis, or without a coordinated rescue. There is no question that threats to our familiar lifestyles, even the survival of our species, are on our minds. Cognitively, we know we are headed toward an ecological cliff; prescriptively we either argue or just feel stuck. This is a story of a communal path offering co-learning, hope and a defined direction. It is the way we evolve. It is a social change process familiar to our species, but foreign in current times.

America is threatened by new levels of social polarization and global ecological degradation. These current trends cannot be ignored, regardless of one’s personal political persuasions or geographic home. For nearly 250 years, our country has had its share of social conflict, but none greater than today because such disunity menaces our capacity to mitigate the environmental catastrophes we face. Clearly people want change, whether it be a return to perceptions of the way America used to be, or to heal the nation and get on with better managing the sustainably necessary in response to climate change. In the past America has been threatened by civil and foreign wars, but in this moment, the threat is not merely unrest but the imminence of ecological collapse.

Although people express their desire for America to change, seldom do they express how to affect such change. With an abundance of self-help books and seminars on how to improve our personal lives, there are few prescriptions on self-help for America as we bog down in despair about the threats of climate change and a socially polarized citizenry not yet aligned in dealing with it. The seriousness of our lobster-in-the-pot moment is staggering, yet for many among us, the internal turmoil and confluence of coming ecological disasters brings only inertia and complaints. Some argue that our problems are tied to social status, class and power, and this may well be. However, whatever our personal or group sense of identity or meaning in our lives, the reality that our human species is threatened transcends all else. Our basic evolutionary biology dictates that we must evolve. How we consider that process and adapt nearly everything we have known is at hand in this moment.

Humanity does not mean being human, it means being humane, or compassionate and sympathetic, in our consideration of others. It is a characteristic of our best self as Homo sapiens that has allowed us to evolve over 200,000 years to become the species we recognize today. Our evolutionary biology is the preface of our unique species. The unequaled function of empathy in our species is the scientific feature that enables cooperation. Our human ability to cooperate is the mechanism of how we will mutually define and take the kinds of actions necessary to overcome the ecological disasters we have set in motion.

Some ask where did our ability to work together go? Others earnestly seek ways to move the needle of social cooperation as well as engage effective strategies to achieve sustainability. But now it is becoming increasingly evident that our challenge is more than that. Scientists predict that by the year 2050 there will be a devastating confluence of natural and social disasters brought on by ecological tipping points. This intensifying Burning Platform, if you will, increases the necessity to both better understand the threat and our ability to work together to mitigate its effect on our way of life.

Nearly everyone senses that dramatic social change will be not unlike herding a million snarling cats. It is difficult to conceive of how such cooperation might be possible. But our biology has hardwired the cooperation within us, driven by our survival instinct of empathy for others. Humans have advanced and evolved due to our capacity to cooperate. The five mechanisms that have brought about the evolution of cooperation in our species are: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection. ¹ These precepts and principles arising in our evolutionary biology, represent the playing field for cooperation, greater social peace and sustainability. These and other terms describe the adaptive traction of social collaboration as defined in the glossary at the end of the book.

Utilizing these fundamental biological directives to achieve improved social harmony and sustainability requires understanding the seven barriers that impede their natural function. These barriers are Empathy-blockers that work against such goals. All have contributed to interrupting our evolutionary journey to being in better balance with nature and the formulation of relevant public policy leading to sustainability. Chapter Eight describes the dynamics played by each of the seven barriers. Where socially constructed barriers have arisen in our evolutionary past, they have been overcome, or that branch of our developmental ancestors has perished.

The origins and development of human cooperation can be seen in both our physical and social evolution. As an example, physically we evolved an opposable thumb that is longer, compared to finger length, than any other primate thumb. Parts of our body evolved to cooperate with other parts through natural selection. This enabled humans to easily touch other fingers, allowing us to firmly grasp and manipulate objects of different shapes. Our physical evolution allows us to walk, reach, and grab.

Moreover, our social development has fashioned a species that is among the most cooperative of all species. The special status we have achieved as a prosocial species is only surpassed by 19 of the current 2 million species. Our large brain size uniquely enables our ability to imagine, think, learn, communicate and control our environment, exceeding all other known organisms. But all these distinguishing traits have evolved from our ability to cooperate. Our species’ strength to cooperate is being tested as we struggle to overcome social polarization in the face of further ecological threats.

Precisely how Americans evolve now is directly dependent upon our capacity to sell peace as a progenitor of sustainability. Our advanced ability to cooperate – to create peace - must be thought of as possible; it must be made more probable; peace must become popular, and it must become profitable. Together these advancements combine to make peace a principle. This integration brings into focus the nexus of evolutionary biology, sustainability and peace. The capacity – intellectual imagination and vision to conceive of this – is what makes humans so rare among other species.

Like a preface, the science of evolutionary biology precedes our understanding of what it means to be human. Our human preface describes a manuscript written over time, including our physical and emotional state. That is why a concept conceived in the mind can be felt in the heart, and we ponder, what is it that we feel in our hearts that inspires our minds? It is in better understanding the interplay between ecology, evolution, genes and cultural development that we manifest the tools to survive beyond 2050. This synthesis sets forth the opportunity to fundamentally view these sciences in practical ways that may very well preserve our species. Included in this construct is the potential of social mechanisms that have already proven effective in business and strategic collaborative initiatives.

It is worth noting that our bodies were only designed by nature to last 38 to 40 years. Over the past 200 years, the breakthroughs in science that developed penicillin and created access to clean drinking water, for example, have nearly doubled human life expectancy to 78.8 years. Moreover, good choices in diet, healthy lifestyles and other forms of improved medical care have improved both the quantity and quality of life. The implications of this are that humans are now challenged to make more conscious choices about cooperating in equally breakthrough ways to extend the life of our species.

The mere setting of metric goals to combat climate change will not get us to where we need to be. Although most Americans view science as beneficial, their degree of confidence in science varies among different political parties, and public attitudes which result in social polarization. Hence the question: how do we herd polarized cats while confronting the serious challenge of current and pending ecological threats? Social scientists know that a social intervention will need to be made. Some sort of prescription for cultural change must occur to break through the noise of social media and our divisive political discourse. Already there is a Burning Platform of ecological tipping points to define the timetable, but less understood or agreed upon is the way to bring about that change in consciousness.

As portrayed in movies, such as Don’t Look Up and elsewhere, some scientists believe we have already passed a point of no return to fix what we have already broken. Other researchers have reported that we have now evolved to lack the necessary social compassion to communally respond to the problems we have created. Separately social and environmental experts are increasingly making the somber case that humans may be one of the shortest-lived species in the history of the earth.

Taken together, many observers have been watching in real time as humans have possibly been contributing to an extinction event of their own making. It all sounds so serious, but, as in the movie, many are in denial because it is so serious. It is reasonable to ask: if this is true, aren’t we doomed? The answer is no, not necessarily, but we are heading for an abyss.

The pursuit of peace today in America is not only an aspiration of commonsense, but a scientific foundation for our survival. It is no longer merely the threat of war that consumes us, it is the failure of cooperation in our efforts to mitigate environmental collapse. As such this activity must become a global enterprise beyond any the world has undertaken. That said, where do we start?

The action required is a long-term, process solution, that may help us all migrate the ecological threats and transform the nature of our current level of social polarization. It is not a new science, but like those already mentioned, it is a synthesis. It is called PACEM 2050. There is ample science behind it. It is simple, practical, and informed by the precepts and principles of our biology.

The fun part of PACEM 2050 is that social scientists tell us we do not all have to engage in it for it to be successful. True, it will take time, strategic coordination and managed cooperation across unique needs and interest geographies, but it can achieve expected results with only the initial efforts of about 16% of Americans. In this there is hope. In PACEM 2050 there is a definable path out of our growing ecological and social crisis. Failure to undertake such a journey may result in our evolutionary preface preceding the very short story of our species.

PACEM 2050 as a journey draws upon the biological and social sciences that are our evolutionary foundation. It will be a decades-long journey and represents a process of hope where so much else seems unattainable, divisive, polarizing or falls short in the precious time we have left.

It is how we will evolve.

Will Spencer

INTRODUCTION

SUSTAINABILITY DOMINOES

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Choices are like dominoes,

one tumbling against the next

and then the next until events

go out of human control.

Ann Rule

There are countless ways to play dominoes. Each requires a fair amount of luck to win; all can be repetitive contests, and usually nobody really loses as the game is intended to be communally enjoyable. Our species has been hovering around a figurative playing board of sustainability dominoes, trying to assess what kind of game we will play.

Our species is in peril due to social polarization, and environmental tipping points that threaten humanity by the year 2050. Already many researchers have nearly given up on our ability to become more sustainable in time to mitigate the ecological disasters we face. American children born today will find two billion more people in the world by the time they are thirty years old. One climate scientist recently told me that he believed we’re in danger of handing young people a situation that’s out of their control.

The mechanism through which the environment is changing affects human health and has an impact on human progress and wellbeing. Humanity is simply failing to consider sufficient ways, or act with proficient moves to defend our species and the planet that is our home.

In our efforts to date, humankind has seemed to be playing a form of sustainability dominoes that has looked more like the card game, Concentration, where all the dominoes are turned over and players randomly try to pick a matching tile from a scattered pile of unseen pieces. Clearly, that game was not really dominoes in the conventional sense, but it gave us air cover to think we were in some way addressing sustainability. We merely gave lip service to sustainability, and some among us felt good about it.

Still lagging as we try to be more in balance with our environment, we have refined our sustainability domino play over the past fifty years to look like the conventional version of dominoes. We make auspicious choices, trading turns with other players to match the strategic placement of tiles, end-to-end, creating a spreading phalanx of aligned pieces extending from one to another. Certain pairings, like a six tile-to-a six tile, or yellow-to-yellow appear to make sense to us. Any experienced domino player, or environmental scientist, knows that these efforts to Protect our Earth Hive come closer to approximating perhaps the simplest domino play, where much care is taken to line the dominoes all up, just to see them come crashing down. It is not a game of strategy but rather a scheme to create a dramatic finish when well-placed dominoes sequentially fall into the next domino causing a rapid chain reaction.

Sooner than we might imagine however, that clattering finale threatens our species. The only finesse in this type of game is the delicate touch required to initially align the dominoes without prematurely knocking them down. Communally, Americans have chosen the easiest play of sustainability dominoes; and we are lining up each successive move, burdened with increasing social polarization in ways that ensure failure. Moreover, the real game has yet to start, and we are already confused about what game we are playing, who is playing, and whether we can change the rules.

Sustainability dominoes should be an engaging game of challenge, mystery, and memory. We need to accept that we will at times feel lost, as we have never undertaken this type of play before. It may look like all the tiles are placed face down, and chosen by chance, but every single tile has a face value; every single move is becoming increasingly strategic. Each delay in play is decisively detrimental, potentially devastating, and characterized by our naïveté and denial.

Recently, hundreds of eminent scientists concluded that humans currently face three failures that threaten our survival beyond the ecological collapse we are already witnessing; these include empathy failures, knowledge failures and implementation failures. The researchers make the case that humanity does not presently possess the conceptual understanding, or sufficient compassion to account for the future health of society. They assert current society does not have adequate governance structures nor the capability to implement solutions even if they were known. They termed the irreversible damage we have done to those disproportionately harmed, an empathy failure, a challenge of imagination.²

More than 350 million people who have had absolutely nothing to do with creating the conditions that caused climate change will soon have no food or water and will be on the move. This is extraordinarily troublesome as humans are among the few species whose evolutionary success is directly beholden to our imagination and capacity to cooperate. We are failing to visualize all the dominoes.

Moreover, these scientists agreed that knowledge failures, or research and information challenges will cause us to fall short in understanding how to address social and environmental threats. Humanity is showing an unwillingness, or inability to deal with uncertainty in established decision-making frameworks. Currently, we do not know how to get our minds around the ecological changes we do not yet fully understand. That’s a problem. Polar ice sheets have collapsed far quicker than scientists ever imagined.

Lastly, they perceptively observed that implementation failures, or governance challenges will increasingly become threats on top of the very real social and environmental perils we face. The scientists observed that leaders in business and government have delayed recognition and response to threats that are known but characterized by uncertainty. The inertia surrounding sustainability is threatening. Current targets to limit greenhouse gases are being missed in some parts of the world by 30-40%. That is like two runners dropping out of a five-person relay race. Finishing what they thought was their leg to run, runners stop to look around the track asking: Where is everybody? Sustainability is not a competition; it is a commitment.

This book is written from an American perspective. This is not to suggest that other nations do not have similar problems, but rather to openly appraise our American predicament regarding thinking about sustainability and peace. As dramatic and fundamental change is called for, it is useful to use America as a model because one of our strengths has been as a strong and flexible nation. We are a nation where evidence of the beginnings of change may influence other nations to change also.

Americans are presently seeing the early warning signs of our failing planet’s resources that have enabled human life. We and others around the world can feel the climate changing, sense the population growing; yet we set mere metric goals, failing to consider the social change strategies necessary to better understand the real problems, and conceptualize practical and immediate solutions. Time is not on our side.

In evolutionary terms, peace is the progenitor to sustainability. Sustainability will not be achieved without new levels of social cooperation. Without a reduction in social polarization, the resulting Fortress Mentality among nations, and widespread civil unrest will inevitably undermine global efforts to mitigate the ecological catastrophes threatening human existence. In the vernacular of domino speak we are running out of dominoes and, sooner rather than later, there will be no game to be played.

Accordingly, peace is the portal to sustainability. The nascent personal capacity of individuals to envision and evolve our instinct to cooperate is the missing link of our species. The conscious development of our cultural capability to seek communal measures to mitigate the seismic effects of climate change constitute an uncompleted step of learning and adapting in our evolutionary progression. It is as if our adolescent evolutionary minds have not yet developed beyond our juvenile developmental state to fully recognize and assimilate the mindfulness of a more mature version of our species. We are after all, a very new species to our planet.

These are core principles and the precepts of human development. They are in the evolutionary biology that defines us. In sustainability dominoes, the real game is in the manifest nature of cooperating to live in balance with nature, and with one another. This personal and social conditioning is a constitutive dynamic of evolution. The need to adapt – committing to the necessary enterprise transformation of our public policies, institutions, and organizations – is essential to Protect our Earth Hive.

It doesn’t matter that you wear a new sweater made of reconstituted plastic. Adapting lifestyles to green-wash wardrobes does little to impact the fundamental structures that guarantee a sustainable relationship with our planet. It does matter that we’ve been asking the wrong questions; focusing on the wrong problems and stating them in ways they cannot be solved.

To succeed, we must recognize that human cooperation is not an artifact of our evolution but an accelerant. It is our single hope for survival. When you realize you have a single hope, you try to make the most of it. Peace is a condition that unavoidably precedes sustainability. One is not possible without the other; one is an antecedent to the later. Social change strategies that draw us closer to peace will be responsible for pulling us toward sustainability.

In society, as in business and among individuals, change is possible using strategies and communication processes that engage only a portion of the social system to direct the entire society in a particular direction. Social science research has shown that about 16% of the members in a social system, whom Everett Rogers called the Innovators and Early Adopters, can inspire and attract the remaining 83%. New ideas and innovation can flow through networks of people and structures to result in alternative meaning and identity. Singular events such as this characterize evolutionary development and learning. Change toward a more sustainable America is a path to which we must dedicate ourselves; one foot carefully placed before the other. In this, it is possible to know what we are doing, and what not to do.

If we as a country can learn to sidestep the many distractions of fame, front-page politics, and the noisy vibrations of our media-centric lives, we might earn the chance of returning to just being human. Recognizing once again our frailty as species is a necessary wake-up call. Currently, we are sleeping-in, as it were. As humans, our evolutionary biology offers us the precepts and principles that got us to where we are. It can show us how to get beyond the challenges of sustainability. To be successful in this awesome task, the answers rest in the simplicity of our species’ sense of free will and cooperation. One evolutionary biologist believes it’s time we grew up, not just woke up.

The changes we will need to make as a country involve the same processes that our species has relied on in our evolutionary development. We are, after all, humans. It is instructive that our species has evolved to this point – to this moment, as a result of biological processes, social processes and behavior change. Humans adapt to survive. We have evolved as a species because we have learned. When a species puts its energy into fighting with others in the hive, the organism stops learning.

In sustainability dominoes, the challenge for Americans and all other nations, is to grasp the true essence of the game we are playing; know which dominoes to play when and be constantly reminded that we are playing a communal game where we all win, or all lose. This moment of social learning and human development represents a realization in our species that we may be privileged to seize only once; and that moment is fleeting.

This moment is the nexus of sustainability, evolutionary biology, and peace.

ONE:

FRUIT FLIES AND SMOKEY BEAR

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The greatest threat to our planet

is the belief that someone else will save it.

Robert Swan

In the spring of 1972, I sat upon an uncomfortable stool in a college biology lab trying to keep my fruit flies alive. I could not understand at the time why they were dying, although I easily understood that if they continued to die, I would suffer a bad grade in my genetics class. I remember thinking at the time, so long ago, that I would much rather be anywhere else. It was my senior year in college, and I had other places to be, people to meet, and meaningful things to accomplish.

Many people today would rather be someplace other than where we find ourselves. The MAGA people say they want our country to return to a place where it can never return. Everyone else seems to be saying to the MAGA people, Please go away, as you don’t understand a few basic things about America, and how it will continue to change. Social polarization is at an all-time high, just when we need to be coming together to figure out some important stuff.

Evolutionary biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky once famously said, Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. He