The New Renaissance

If one book might have changed my life, and many books have done that somehow, but if I had to choose one, this would be Ishmael (and the sequels Story of B and Beyond Civilization). It's interesting that I've read it 5 years ago and from time to time I think again about its ideas and how it has shaped me and my choices...

For that reason I feel I need to share it with the rest of the world. How? Hummm... I searched and I found a speech by Daniel Quinn (the author of Ishmael) where he summarizes his ideas. You can read the 6 pages in a PDF version clicking at http://kaos.nomadlife.org/TheNewRenaissance.pdf, going to the website http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Writings/The_New_Renaissance.shtml or, as I know you are busy and unable to read 6 pages of text, go through my "summary" of the text, below. It will take you less than 10 minutes, but it will knock you down in a way that you might not be able to sleep. If it happens, come and chat with me... would love to hear your reactions...

By the way, feel free to copy and pass it forward... could someone help me and translate it to Portuguese?

Here it goes...

Daniel Quinn - The New Renaissance...
Excerpts... for extremely busy people... ;-)
(bold parts were done by myself)

... I am hopeful, because I feel sure that something extraordinary is going to happen in your lifetime (...) I'm talking about something much more extraordinary than has happened in MY lifetime, which has included the birth of television, the splitting of the atom, space travel, and instant, global communication via the Internet. I mean something REALLY extraordinary.

During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet--or they're not. Either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then humanity will be able to see something it can't see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don't figure this out, then I'm afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we're driving into extinction here every day--as many as 200--every day....

... the human population is going to increase to ten billion by the end of the century. It isn't just the doom-sayers who say this. This is a very conservative estimate, recently endorsed by the UN. Unfortunately, most of the people who make this estimate seem to have the idea that this is workable and okay.

Here's why it isn't.

... maintaining a population of six billion humans costs the world 200 species a day. If this were something that was going to stop next week or next month, that would be okay. But the unfortunate fact is that it's not. It's something that's going to go on happening every day, day after day after day--and that's what makes it unsustainable, by definition. That kind of cataclysmic destruction cannot be sustained.

... The extraordinary thing that is going to happen in the next two or three decades is (...) a great second renaissance...

Nothing less than that is going to save us.

The first Renaissance (...) was understood to be a rebirth of classical awareness and sensibility (...), which was the necessary preface to an entirely new historical era.

The Renaissance (and indeed the modern world) came into being because during the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries an interrelated complex of medieval ideas came under challenge. (...) during the Renaissance, reason and authority were (...) replaced by . . . observation and experimentation. Without this change, science as we know it would not have come into being and the industrial revolution would not have occurred.

During the Middle Ages, (...) our relationship with God was a collective thing that only the Roman Catholic Church was empowered to negotiate. During the Renaissance, this dispensation was challenged by a completely new one, in which our relationship with God was seen as an individual thing that each of us could negotiate independently with God. In this new dispensation was born the magnification and sanctification of the individual that we take for granted in modern times.

(...)

If there are still people here in 200 years, they won't be living the way we do. I can make that prediction with confidence, because if people go on living the way we do, there won't be any people here in 200 years.

I can make another prediction with confidence. If there are still people here in 200 years, they won't be thinking the way we do. I can make that prediction with equal confidence, because if people go on thinking the way we do, then they'll go on living the way we do--and there won't be any people here in 200 years.

Although several key ideas of the Middle Ages disappeared during the Renaissance, not every key idea of the Middle Ages disappeared. One of the key ideas that remained in place--and that remains in place today--is the idea that humans are fundamentally and irrevocably flawed. (...) We're destroying the world--eating it alive--but it's not our fault. It's the fault of human nature. We're just badly made, so what can you expect?

Another key idea that survived the Middle Ages is the idea that the way we live is the way humans are meant to live. (...) Even if we destroy the world and ourselves with it, the way we live is still the way we were meant to live from the beginning of time.

But these two medieval survivors are relatively benign. Stupid but harmless. One other key idea survived, however, that is (...) the most dangerous idea in existence. (...) it's the most dangerous thing in existence--more dangerous than all our nuclear armaments, more dangerous than biological warfare, more dangerous than all the pollutants we pump into the air, the water, and the land.

(...) Here it is: Humans belong to an order of being that is separate from the rest of the living community. There's us and then there's nature. There's humans and then there's the human environment.

... 200 species are becoming extinct every day. That's no problem, because those species are out there somewhere. Those 200 species aren't in here. They aren't us. They don't have anything to do with us, because humans belong to an order of being that is separate from the rest of the living community.

Those 200 species are out there in the environment. Of course it's bad for the environment if they become extinct, but it has nothing to do with us. The environment is out there, suffering, while we're in here, safe and sound. Of course, we should try to take care of the environment, and it's a shame about those 200 extinctions--but it has nothing to do with us.

Ladies and gentlemen, if people go on thinking this way, humanity is going to become extinct. That's how dangerous this idea is. Here's why.

Those 200 species . . . why exactly are they becoming extinct? Are they just running out of air or water or space or what? No, those 200 species are becoming extinct because they have something we need. We need their biomass. We need the living stuff they're made of. We need their biomass in order to maintain our biomass. Here's how it works. Go down to Brazil, find yourself a hunk of rain forest, and cut it down or burn it down. Now bring in a herd of cows to pasture there. Or plant potatoes or pineapples or lima beans. All the biomass that was formerly tied up in the birds, insects, and mammals living in that hunk of rain forest is now going into cows, potatoes, pineapples, or lima beans--which is to say into food for us.

We need to make 200 species extinct every day in order to maintain the biomass of six billion people. It's not an accident. It's not an oversight. It's not a bit of carelessness on our part. In order to maintain our population of six billion, we need the biomass of 200 species a day. We are literally turning 200 species a day into human tissue.

... Making 200 species extinct every day is similarly not a sustainable way to maintain a living community. Even if we're in some sense at the top of that community, one day, sooner or later, it's going to collapse, and when it does, our being at the top won't help us. We'll come down along with all the rest.

It would be different of course, if 200 extinctions a day were just a temporary thing. It's not...

[can we predict the future? can we say how our lives are going to be in 200 years?]

... Social evolution is inherently chaotic--which is another way of saying inherently unpredictable. This is true even in relatively stable times. Consider the fact that every intelligence agency in the world was taken by surprise by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which days before had looked as stable as Great Britain or the United States.

And if social evolution is chaotic in even stable times, then it's going to be even more chaotic in the times ahead, when people are either going to start thinking a new way or become extinct...

... people want to have a description of the sustainable life of the future. They think this would enable them to adopt that sustainable life now, today. But social change doesn't come about that way, any more than technological change does. It would have been useless to show Charles Babbage a printed circuit or to show Thomas Edison a transistor. They could have done nothing with those things in their day--and we could do nothing today with a picture of life a hundred years from now. The future is not something that can be planned hundreds of years in advance--or even ten years in advance. Adolf Hitler's Thousand Year Reich didn't even last a thousand weeks. There has never been a plan for the future--and there never will be...

... (...) something extraordinary is going to happen in the next two or three decades. The people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably--or they're not. And either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary.

... People don't want more of the same. Yet, oddly enough, (...) They want to hear about uprisings or anarchy or tougher laws. But none of those things is going to save us--I wish they could. What we must have (and nothing less) is a whole world full of people with changed minds. Scientists with changed minds, industrialists with changed minds, school teachers with changed minds, politicians with changed minds--though they'll be the last of course. Which is why we can't wait for them or expect them to lead us into a new era. Their minds won't change until the minds of their constituents change. Gorbachev didn't create changed minds; changed minds created Gorbachev.

Changing people's minds is something each one of us can do, wherever we are, whoever we are, whatever kind of work we're doing. Changing minds may not seem like a very dramatic or exciting challenge, but it's the challenge that the human future depends on.

It's the challenge YOUR future depends on.