The Real 3-Body Problem Is the Human Race, Nature, and the Culture Between

The human race is not really a success. Our species became extinct millions of years ago - in nature. It survives today as a living form only because it was extruded from nature into culture. This is a very different context. It means that the ancestor of Homo sapiens who was divergent from the basic stock, and all that creature's descendants down to the point where they became clearly shielded from nature by culture, became extinct in nature because they were failures in nature. The human race survived only because it was able to leave the natural environment and enter a cultural environment that the race made for itself. The main function of the cultural environment was to provide a setting in which the genus Homo could survive as a living form outside nature. In this process culture acted as a buffer between the genus Homo, as an animal, and nature, shielding Homo from nature. In this sense, both the human race and culture are non-natural.

Students of human origins persist in formulating the problem in two parts (humans and nature) instead of in three parts (humans, culture, and nature). The usual two-part formulation has concealed the fact that the human race's closest animal relatives share in this problem to some extent. Culture plays a part in their survival as well, but nowhere near to the same degree as it does in ours. As a result the debate about human origins goes around and around the search for an ecological niche in which the human race can survive in nature. This misses the target because the human race did not find a niche in nature but instead made a cultural insertion into nature; the human race then survived by living in that culture, not in nature.

From the beginning, culture has been a disruptor of ecological systems, but this is not apparent right away because the human race's cultural innovation was too weak to leave any evidence for this. Until the human race acquired fire about half a million years ago. Then this cultural innovation began to have a widening effect on the vegetation of natural ecosystems. By allowing humans to live in caves, the use of fire modified the ecology drastically, excluding carnivores and restricting residence by bats, so that the rising floor levels in the caves took on quite different forms from what they would otherwise have.

Since the function of culture is to provide an environment in which the human race can survive when it can no longer survive in nature, the main feature of culture is that it is different from nature, and different in such a way that it pushes nature aside and destroys it, at least locally and temporarily. Culture acts as a buffer between us as living entities and nature as a manifold of ecosystems. Thus, from the beginning, culture was destructive of natural ecology. Since the 20th century, we are now facing the consequence of this process by which we, in modifying nature by culture, destroys the ecological balances which are essential to the continued existence of nature as a system of ecological niches. We are now beginning to destroy nature as a whole. Any discussion of this process must cease to look for any ecological niche in which we can find a place in nature; it must acknowledge, instead, that we, despite our continuing efforts constantly fail to find such a niche. We fail because our use of culture destroys the niche in which our culture is, making it necessary for us to change our culture. This change modified nature in a larger capacity, leading to a continuing need to change culture once again. Constant improvements.

History poses an interesting problem. It is quite necessary to have a basic understanding of how the world got to be the way it is. To be historically illiterate is to be condemned to think forever as a child. Unfortunately, most historical accounts are written to flatter the victors in some struggle. And that's when conditions are good. MOST history was lost forever the minute after it happened. So most of what passes for history is horribly biased and woefully incomplete.

Most of what I consider historical facts are related to sequence. Favorite example: The last use of cast-iron cannons happened in the US Civil War which ended in 1865. By 1870, the cannon had been replaced with rifled artillery which the Prussians used to destroy the French Army at the Battle of Sedan. The lesson here is not that the Prussians won or that the Second French Empire was ended, the lesson is that advances in steelmaking would forever shatter primary concepts of warfare — even though the new lessons were still not learned by 1914. (The preservation of archaic traits seems SOP for the human race — especially its leisure classes.) Anyway, if you only keep your timelines in order, the rest of history is mostly details.

Institutionalization by vested interests can kill you. It can even bring down civilizations. This is especially true in the domain of wealth-creation. By "wealth" I don't mean paper profits or even gold, but good and useful things the making of which depend on facts. The preacher who promises eternal life or the economist who asserts that continuous geometric growth in a finite biosphere is possible will always seem able to come up with an answer (excuse?) whenever their assertions are challenged with contrary evidence. A structural engineer who specifies a 10" beam when a 20" one was necessary has no hiding place when the building falls down.

Even better, getting the "little" facts straight is certainly not the be-all and end-all of the "producerist" consciousness. There have been some great big-picture thinkers in their ranks. But perhaps the most interesting was Charles Sanders Peirce who is considered the father of Pragmatism. Yes, I know, pragmatism is used by sloppy academics and journalists to describe some narrowly focused ethical illiterate who thinks it pragmatic to ruin the lives of thousands so that Wal-Mart's profits will be a little higher next quarter. Fortunately, Peirce's Pragmatism is WAY more complex and nuanced.

The key to understanding his incredible contributions to human thought is to understand something very simple — perhaps the most interesting goal in personal development is a desire and willingness to update your worldview when new evidence appears. Continuous improvement is a powerful idea — for example, it was the core operating assumption of Toyota (a victim of lies and slander) and Boeing (a victim of MIC and High Finance). The idea is that if something isn't working, try something else. Unfortunately, this idea puts the Pragmatists in direct opposition to any and all people who believe reality should be forced unto preconceived explanations—the religious nuts of all manifestations.

Our ancestors survived, and then thrived, by CHANGING THEIR BEHAVIOR. The ones who clung to the past - didn't.