Guest Post: What’s Our Disease?
Humanity is acting like a disease. But humanity isn’t a disease; humanity has a disease.
Hi Collapse2050 readers.
Occasionally, I will share guest articles written by conscientious people active within the community. To expand the perspectives delivered by this site, I look for people who provide something I can't/won't/don't. Agreement is not a pre-requisite. In fact, I encourage others to challenge my world view.
I also want to use my growing platform to share the great work others are doing.
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Today's article was written by G. Scott Erickson, author of "Toward a Philosophy of Life Based on Life". An independently-published endeavor with great reviews:
If you've ever felt life, the way we live it today, was hopeless, please read this book. It is genuine, it is compassionate and it will give you hope.
What Erickson has done is pretty much summarized the countercultural literature that began to criticize Western civilization from the sixties on: the destructive nature of capitalism, the destruction of the natural environment, and the need for us to move toward a sustainable, and life-affirming, way of life, and so on.
I recommend this book for book clubs because it will start a lot of the "right" kind of conversations, the kind that are thoughtful and helpful.
Some people have considered the negative aspects of human history—the wars, the genocides, the ravaged ecosystems—and concluded that the entire human race is a disease. They imagine the human species as intrinsically flawed, as an evolutionary mistake. And they look forward to the day when this flawed species finally eliminates itself. Some people have gone as far as to compare humanity with cancer—a disease that spreads uncontrollably and eventually destroys itself by destroying its host.
Most of us reject such ideas, but how do we respond to the destruction we’ve caused? How do we respond to the abundant evidence that humanity is spreading uncontrollably and is well on the way to destroying itself by destroying its host? How can we reply to those who consider humanity to be a disease?
I propose that humanity isn’t a disease, but that we have something that can be considered to be a disease. That’s more hopeful, since diseases can be cured. If that’s the case, then what’s our disease?
To answer this question, we need to be clear on the difference between illness and disease. As I see it, illness is a response to a disruption to health, and disease is the cause of the disruption. This is in agreement with common dictionary definitions of disease such as “an alteration of a living body that impairs its functioning” and “a disturbance, disruption, or cessation of normal functions of the body or its parts.”
It also agrees with other definitions. The World Health Organization defines disease as anything that works against health, defined as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being.” This is similar to the conclusion of psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, who defined disease as “any defect in the structure of our bodies or our personalities that prevents us from fulfilling our potential as human beings.”
One aspect of disease is that the resulting illness draws a disproportionate amount of energy and resources from the host. Pathologist Rudolf Virchow stated this in what has become a basic maxim of medicine: “Every diseased part of the body holds a parasitic relationship to the rest of the healthy body to which it belongs, and lives at the expense of the organism.”
This is as true for psychological illness as it is for physical illness. Neurosis is caused by a disruption or distortion of the psyche, and the resulting illness draws a disproportionate amount of energy and resources from the host and lives at the expense of the organism. Our mental resources become disproportionally focused on maintaining the life of the distortion, on arranging thoughts and perceptions in order to preserve the distortion.
This also applies to fundamentalism, which we can think of as a form of mental illness. We commonly think of fundamentalism only in respect to religion. But there are fundamentalists in every area of human endeavor, and the same principles apply to them all. We can consider fundamentalism to be an illness, with the disease being whatever ideology we’ve internalized. As with neurosis, fundamentalism arranges thoughts and perceptions to preserve the distortion. When there’s evidence that a fundamentalist ideology isn’t working, it can’t be because the fundamentalism is wrong or limited. So we need to deny the evidence; we need to ideologically “kill” the evidence.
What’s the worst disease? Most people would answer: cancer. Cancer inspires a degree of dread and fear deeper than other diseases. We may consider other diseases to be tragic, but for cancer we reserve the term evil. Definitions of cancer include: “a malignant evil that corrodes slowly and fatally” and “any evil condition or thing that spreads destructively.”
Cells effected by cancer exhibit certain core characteristics. Here are some of those characteristics, taken from cancer texts:
- The energies of these cells are diverted exclusively toward their own proliferation; they no longer focus on helping to build a functional organ or tissue.
- The growth of tumor cells seems to be regulated by some internal program, not by cues from the environment that are communicated by growth factors.
- Loss of contact inhibition seems to represent the essence of the cancer state—failure of the ability to respond to environmental cues by stopping growth.
The underlying characteristic of cancer is unlimited growth. As one cancer text puts it, “Cancer cells divide without restraint, cross boundaries they were meant to respect, and fail to display the characteristics of the cell lineage from which they were derived.”
Cancer cells are deviants. One aspect of what makes cancer such a sinister disease is because the deviance is from within. Cancer doesn’t come from anywhere to invade us. Cancer cells arise from normal cells. Cancer consists of part of us—some of our own cells—becoming a renegade force turning against us. It’s an utterly irrational disease. It comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, killing itself as it kills the host on which it’s dependent. If it wins, it also loses.
Back to my earlier question: Has humanity contracted some sort of disease? From the perspective of life on earth, humanity definitely acts like a disease. If we think of humanity as “cells” in the collective body of earthly life, humanity is definitely “an alteration of a living body that impairs its functioning” and “a disturbance, disruption, or cessation of normal functions of the body or its parts.” To paraphrase Rudolf Virchow, “Humanity holds a parasitic relationship to the rest of the healthy planet to which it belongs, and it lives at the expense of the organism.”
But what’s more disturbing are the parallels between our behavior and the processes of cancer. The excerpts from cancer texts require only slight modification to apply to us:
- The energies of humanity are diverted exclusively toward its own proliferation; it no longer focuses on helping to build a functional environment.
- The growth of humanity seems to be regulated by some internal program, not by cues from the environment that are communicated by growth factors.
- Loss of contact inhibition seems to represent the essence of the human condition—failure of the ability to respond to environmental cues by stopping growth.
As with cancer, the underlying characteristic of our society is unlimited growth, most conspicuously demonstrated by an economic system addicted to growth. We’ve been taking an utterly irrational course, destroying the host on which we’re dependent. If we win, we also lose.
Much of our behavior definitely exhibits the characteristics of disease. But it’s helpful to remember that humanity didn’t always act as if was a disease. I would like to propose that the disease is a certain idea that humanity began to embrace 6,000 years ago. It’s the idea that humanity is separate from and superior to nature and other forms of life. As a tumor begins with a single ancestral cell, our illness began with this single ancestral idea, an idea we used as the basis upon which to form our civilization.
It’s the idea that forms the basis of our paradigm, defined by Fritjof Capra as “a constellation of concepts, values, perceptions, and practices, shared by a community that forms a particular vision of reality that is the basis of the way a community organizes itself.” A paradigm results in a system of values and ethics as a result of a simple formula: What fits the paradigm is good; what doesn’t fit the paradigm is bad.
Paradigms not only shape our attitudes; they also shape our cultural landscapes. When we look at any aspect of human civilization, we see the raw materials of nature shaped in particular ways to suit particular purposes. And this shaping is done by paradigms.
This isn’t mysticism; it’s science. Archeology is based on the premise that the artifacts of past civilizations, the physical forms they left behind, reflect the ideas of those civilizations. Ancient Greek architecture such as the Parthenon reflected the ideas of Western rational thought. Other types of architecture reflect other ideas.
This also applies to our technologies. Every form of technology is an expression of a paradigm. As philosopher Henryk Skolimowski wrote, “Technology, as we know it today, is a historical phenomenon born of a certain idea of nature, of a certain idea of progress, of a certain preconception about the deterministic structure of the world and also related to specific social ideals and specific visions of the ends of human life.”
Which leads us to ask a very important question: What’s our paradigm? Since our paradigm hasn’t been consciously formulated or written down, I’ve had to play the role of archaeologist. I’ve had to deduce our paradigm based on the physical forms of our civilization, by our laws and the rules of our financial and legal systems.
As far as I’ve been able to discern, the foundation of modern civilization consists of several interrelated ideas. The core idea is: Humanity is separate from and superior to nature and other forms of life. Other ideas are corollaries:
- Moral concerns don’t apply to interactions between humanity and nature. Nature is merely raw material without intrinsic value.
- Ethics are based on rights rather than responsibilities.
- The individual is primary. Society is secondary at best, and a distracting illusion at worst.
- Only what can be measured is real. Existence consists only of parts.
- Nothing is sacred—or alternately, only churches and religious texts are sacred.
- Progress is defined in material terms of consumer possessions, technological ability, and economic affluence.
- Economic value is equal to social value. Questions of worth can be answered based on profitability. What encourages profit is good. What opposes profit is bad.
That’s our paradigm. Or more accurately, it’s the paradigm of Western civilization, the dominant civilization on earth. It’s a self-serving paradigm, created by the ego for the benefit of the ego.
When the ego emerged 6,000 years ago, that’s when the trouble started. This emergence marked the beginning of an era of large-scale destruction that continues today. The ego emerged initially in northern Europe, in what is now Scandinavia. The transition initiated a succession of ruthless leaders and an era of violent conquest. Physical conquest coincided with religious conquest. This era marked the historical shift from the worship of the earth to the worship of vengeful male Gods of the sky. A hierarchy developed with God on top, then men, then women—with nature on the bottom.
This trend continued with the rise of nation-states and The Age of Empire. As the East had Egypt under the Pharaohs and the Mongols under Genghis Kahn, the West had the Romans under Caesar and the French under Napoleon. Human history became dominated by nations with arbitrarily designated boundaries attempting to expand those boundaries, to conquer territory for wealth and power. Until they inevitably overextended themselves and became conquered themselves, their boundaries dissolving and their territories becoming enclosed within other boundaries that continued the same process.
In addition to the cost in human lives, the process left a series of ravaged ecosystems in its wake, which began by turning the fabled Fertile Crescent of the Mediterranean into the degraded environment that it is today.
The Age of Empire eventually evolved into The Age of Imperialism, followed by The Age of Colonialism. England formed colonies in North America, which rebelled to form a nation called the United States—a nation that quickly began its own expansion. This expansion was called Manifest Destiny. The violence incurred by this expansion was justified by the belief that it was the destiny of the United States to expand its territory over the whole of North America. It was considered to be America’s historic mission based on America’s self-declared superiority.
Manifest Destiny was thought of as a kind of fate. This is true in a sense, except that it wasn’t a natural fate. It was the fate of the ego living out the consequences of its worldview. Manifest Destiny justified itself with the rationale “you can’t stand in the way of progress.” Of course, progress was defined by our paradigm, by the idea that humanity is separate from and superior to nature and other forms of life. In other words, the ego’s idea of progress. Manifest Destiny wasn’t an isolated period of history within one country. It was the continuation of a global movement that began 6,000 years ago and continues today.
The people who think humanity is a disease are wrong. Humanity has a disease. As a result of having this disease, humanity is experiencing an illness. The good news is that there’s a cure. If the disease is separateness, then the cure is to end the separateness.
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G. Scott Erickson is a writer and philosopher who lives in the Pacific Northwest. This essay was adapted from his book, Toward a Philosophy of Life Based on Life, available via amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Toward-Philosophy-Life-Based/dp/B0CRB6BJCP
