Limits

The other day the L. A. Times carried an article on the increasingly evident limits to Olympic athletic performance, unassisted by drugs or technology. To quote;

"A French researcher who analyzed a century's worth of world records concluded in a recent paper that the peak of athletic achievement was reached in 1988. Eleven world records were broken that year in track and field. Seven of them still stand."

That paper and others published in the last two years suggest that the Olympic motto -- Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) -- is becoming an anachronism."

This trend toward the natural limits of the human body in a human endeavor, sports, that is both an avid concern of a large mass of our population and is governed by the notion that one can always do better, has the potential to bring the reality of limits home to the American public, which prides itself on "doing better"

This need to both recognize limits yet find ways to motivate people is a fundamental issue facing the sustainable society which is an imperative of our future.

What do ordinary people do, especially in a competitive society ideologically built on the premise that tomorrow will be better than today? I think we have something of an answer when we reflect that Ronald Reagan was elected during a period of stagflation. Granted that inflation was high, but economic growth was miniscule in terms of what people were used to. This was Reagan's major pitch, i.e. that we had to free capitalists to create the needed growth and the consequent jobs. There was no depression, no bread lines, merely stagflation, which was enough to generate a return to 19th century capitalism and its attendant barbarities. The American people let Reagan massively deregulate business and finance. One of the earliest manifestations of what was to come was the Savings and Loan crisis of 1986 in which, through massive amounts of brokered certificates of deposit were purchased by the wealthy thereby driving up prices, all the while being protected by the taxpayer in the form of FDIC insurance on those certificates. Charles Keating and the other financial crooks could not lose on their gambles. This turnover of the economy to financial institutions, the major home of the wealthy, combined with massive tax reductions for the wealthy, spelled the doom of the American economy and the increasing impoverishment of its people. Reagan added the final touch to this plundering of the public purse by the wealthy by making miscreants of its victims, e.g. his arch racist reference to "welfare queens." All this flowed from a non-growth economy as it occurred in a capitalist context. We need to think hard and honestly about human nature and how we expect to reach such an non-growth, sustainable, economy with a population unsophisticated, uninformed, consumption-driven and possessed of an ethos built on the infinite frontier of a new continent.

In my most optimistic moments I think that humans will ultimately have to learn to be satisfied with pleasures of the mind; that understanding will have to replace "doing." Science, for example, began simply as a search for understanding. It was not until the 16th century when Francis Bacon declared "Knowledge is power." that science seen as a power to modify the natural world. However, if history is a guide, the reduction in effort devoted to exploiting the earth's resources will result in greater effort to satisfy our emotions. Increasingly humans give evidence that they do not know what to do with freedom from the demands of daily survival. We even have gone to the insanity of producing fake "reality" shows and "extreme" sports.

Much of the thinking on the psychology of limits appears to be locked up in professional journals. The most exhaustive treatment I was able to find is an essay by John Walsh. In his paper Toward a Psychology of Sustainability, argues that the solution is to be found in a profound change in our cultural psychology. Our problem lies in what we value, often to the point of addiction, as in the psychology of consumerism. In terms of human potential we have a very narrow set of cultural values focused mainly on acquisition. Our culture is not up to the job of global sustainability.

He says that the cultural psychology common to millions found mainly in Asia is up to the job of creating a sustainable world. A salient element in this culture is training oneself to transcend the immediate and thereby achieve a universal view of humanity, the natural world and the integration of both. The argument is far more detailed and the evidence far more abundant than this simple statement can convey. There are fragments of this article scattered around the Internet. For those of you who subscribe to Questia, the Internet library, the complete essay may be found there. To give an idea of the article's depth the following quote by Albert Einstein constitutes its final words: "A human being is part of the whole, called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all creatures and the whole of nature with its beauty.4

While I find problems with Walsh's approach, e.g. the practice of suttee, once common to this culture, of sacrificing a man's wife at his funeral or the rigid caste system that flourished in this culture, this aspect of it, and the fact that it is actually practiced by millions of ordinary humans, indicate it may hold promise as a psychology of sustainability and thereby survival.

To sum up, the major burden of this column is that the answer to the unprecedented problems humanity now faces is not to be found solely, or even mainly, in technology or even population reduction. We humans, in all our complexity, guided by the chaos of our desires and antipathies and the cultures into which we have embedded them, are the root cause of what we face. We must change not just our behaviors, but our various limiting cultural world views and the change, Wash would argue, must be internalized as an operating ethos. No matter what we do unless we change our perceptions of ourselves and the world we inhabit, no amount of effort in any other direction will suffice. That some of what is needed is found in the lifestyle of millions should offer us some guidance. To close with another quote from Walsh's paper "As one wag put it, we've finally discovered the missing link between the apes and civilized humans: it's us!"

Bob Newhard