Climate Change, Society and Culture.

Respect for the Environment as a necessary part of Culture. A reflection:

Text by Dr Jacques Rangasamy, MBE.
Photographs by David Cross.

The current British Museum exhibition “The World of Stonehenge” contains art and artefacts whose exquisite creative sensitivity and technical skills cannot fail to command respect and admiration. The exhibits, chosen and curated expertly, precede recorded history. Their makers have bequeathed to posterity no narratives of their lives and customs, no indications of cultural practices and beliefs, but only their art and artefacts to speak for them. The displays would remain largely inaccessible to our predominantly literary cognition, if our intelligence of feelings and empathic imagination do not assist in our effort to comprehend them. The exhibits invoke a mentality and a cultural attitude of reverence for the environment and for nature, as well as for the fellow human beings who shared their communal existence. The material culture they produced seems to suggest that their sense of being, their sense of humanity and their sense of belonging to nature were braided together into a distinctive and shared cultural identity. This aspect of the exhibition offers the people and their culture as an exemplary model for us and our time. A couple of days later, I followed my visit to the exhibition by a walk on the moors of Devon with my son. We spent time examining a prehistoric stone circle and the accompanying alignments of stones in Yelverton-Merrivale. The stone circle and alignment of stones were positioned in perfect accord with the four points of the compass. The circular disposition of stones and the horizon formed con-centric circles. Standing in the middle of the stone circle feels like being at the centre of the world, the axis mundi.

It heightens one’s sense of presence in the world, of inclusion in the scheme of creation; it inspires a feeling of privilege to be alive that awes and humbles at the same time. One could perhaps even call it an experience of the sacred. Indeed, the art and utilitarian objects, the tools and monuments, the skills and technologies they developed seemed to have been inspired by, and dedicated to, that sense of the sacred. The alienation that has come to settle between Nature and us would have appalled them. Compared to our own, their technology was rudimentary, but suited to the economy of their existence. Financial economy has for ideal the creation of abundance, existential economy favours sufficiency instead. Their hunting technology, which served to feed families and communities, was based on stone and wood. The later introduction of metal boosted their hunting competencies, but coincided with the first evidence that self-sufficiency had turned into self-centredness, and that the competitive defence of the latter generated violence directed towards other human beings. Perhaps it foreshadowed the dedication of metal technology, in our own modern time, to industrialisation and armament, two substantial contributors to our alienation from nature.
The paradigm exemplified by the ancestors who roamed the British Isles provided a sobering background when contemplating the value of our sophisticated technologies. Our technology, particularly the more recent new technology, has enlarged considerably the scope of our creativity and communication, contributed to our healing and health maintenance, productivity and accountability, facilitated our teaching and learning, reinforced our defence and security; it has expanded the scope and efficiency of social processes and helped in the caring for human existence. It mediates between our increasingly sophisticated needs and their fulfilment; and it has rooted itself in our collective existence. Its immersive quality is capable of altering, for better or for worse, the model of being by which we have chosen to live. Technological innovations have illuminated the human condition.

But like all light, it also casts shadows. In the way chiaroscuro, the play of light and shade in drawing, defines a figure, new technology has its light and shadow sides that together give the just measure of its role in our existence. The light side of new technology is self-evident, as indicated above. Its darker reality, however, can be summarised in one image, that of the super-efficient servant who uses his sneaking indispensability to impose upon his master’s will, attenuating thus the latter’s critical sense and sensibility and influencing, self-servingly, the conduct of his life. Artificial intelligence has woven itself into the fabric of our cultural and economic being.
However, the existential convenience it brings holds us hostage, for the demands of our way of life taxes the health of our ecology and exhausts the natural resources of our environment. The average human is clothed in an ill-fitting economic model of being, but which qualifies him for admission into our cash-engineered contemporary societies.

Humans are caught in a dilemma between healing the environment and abiding by an economic system that discords with the eco-system. And the political will to resolve our predicament became undone by leaders, governmental and economic systems who prioritise short-term profits over long-term ecological security. As suggested above, the archaeology of prehistoric and ancient cultures suggest that their technological competency give their people the necessary adaptive skills to live harmoniously with their environments. The interactive association between human existence, technology and environmental factors is fragile and needs thoughtful handling. The archaeology of our own civilisation could well reveal to future generations a paradoxical mixture of cleverness and contemptuous imprudence for our environment; an unresolved paradox that spelt extinction for many previous civilisations. Now, perhaps more than ever, the voiceless survivalist instinct that pulsates at the core of our humanity needs heeding.
Our chemistry lessons taught that Dimitry Mendeleev, in his Periodic Table of the Elements, positioned Carbon adjacent to Silicon.
Our biology lessons, on the other hand, gave Carbon a substantial presence in the biochemistry of the human species. Carbon helped create the human organic framework for the hosting of Life; and of its animating principle, Consciousness.
But today, we are witnessing a development unparalleled in the history of our species: the transfer, on an industrial scale, of Consciousness from the chemistry of Carbon to that of Silicon. On a wider environmental context our carbonisation of the atmosphere imperils the sustainability of planetary life.

We remain bewilderingly unresponsive to the fierce urgency of climate change, despite the wealth of scientific evidence that the ecological degradation caused by our pursuit of abundance, comfort and security imperils the sustainability of Life. Nor have we realised that our indifference to the vulnerability of poorer planetary inhabitants to climate change is ultimately self-defeating, for it turns us into the cartoon character sawing the branch on which he is perched. But most alarmingly, we can-not grasp that the offloading of functional aspects of human consciousness onto the altogether foreign body that is Artificial Intelligence may be preparing our species for redundancy. Our dependency on artificial intelligence to run our smartphones, computers, our major socio-economic, military, healthcare, transportation, communication and educational processes has reached the point of no return. If artificial intelligence in its many forms and guises were to seize up, the world would stop functioning, our communication and work systems would crumble and large parts of societies would collapse. The thickening fog of artificiality we have released upon the world is enshrouding our human nature and its inextricable correlations with Nature. After its initial promises of empowerment, artificial intelligence, like the indispensable servant mentioned earlier, is disempowering us. We are trading the freedom and integrity of our species for the benefits of easy living that artificial intelligence provides. Giant corporations are harvesting our individual authorities to feed their own gargantuan authority; the latter entitles them to author our lives, reduce world civilisations into mega-business empires and turning us hu-mans into profit-making accessories.

Thanks for reading.