Thought of the month ...

November 2010: We are the first global mammal species. A few days ago, early in the morning I was walking from my hotel past the "Birdsnest" in Beijing towards the National Conference Center. Looking at the people out there, I suddenly was struck by the thought that we are the first species of our size that is truly global. We have left the cradle of mankind in Africa and migrated to all parts of the land surfaces, we are present on and in the oceans, throughout the atmosphere and even out in space. What does it mean for us to have transitioned from small groups rooming the Earth surface, groups with individual habits, cultures, and economies, groups kept in narrow boundaries by the forces of nature or conflicts with other groups, to a species characterized by large numbers, a globally connected culture and economy, and with each entity depending on many others and the global development?

I believe this transition necessitates a paradigm shift in our survival strategy. In the past, competition appeared to be a successful strategy for those who prevailed (although not for those who lost). So much so that many believe that competition is the only survival strategy. The costs in terms of lives, lost livelihood, and economic damage of that strategy has always been very high, and it surprises me that alternatives have not been developed successfully (although some leaders managed to follow transiently the principle that the best wars are those that never start).

In his book "Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life", Dacher Keltner¹⁾ discusses the origin of our ability to experience compassion not only for the members of the own family or societal group, but also for complete strangers of different social standing, nationality and race. Considering that competition is considered the prime, if not only, survival strategy, this ability may come as a surprise. However, the author provides compelling reason for the hypothesis that compassion in fact can be a survival strategy under certain circumstances, in which competition might lead to no winner at all.

The transition into a global, connected, and interdependent organism may have created a situation in which competition for survival can only lead to a global loser: mankind. I dare to predict that the mounting problems will lead to a rapidly diminishing importance of nations with an equally rapid increase in our understanding of the existential challenge faced by mankind. In 2015, we will realize that instead of reaching the Millennium Development Goals, we are further away from them than we were in 2005. We will see more people go hungry than today, more people without access to sufficient drinking water, more poverty. Instead of mitigating climate change, we will see an increase in climate-changing human impacts on the environment. Instead of increasing prosperity on a global scale, we will increasingly see the deficiencies of an economy designed for nations competing with each other and not for a global community of entities depending on each other. The pressure of these circumstances either will enable the leaders of the world to make the shift in survival strategy from competition to compassion, or will lead to global unrest and destruction as predicted by, for example, James Lovelock in his book "The Vanishing Face of Gaja." The emerging existential crisis is a challenge and opportunity. Realizing that the old strategy of "changing the address when things get bad" (i.e., migrating to new lands, with all the negative impacts of migration) does no longer work for a global and interconnected species, we hopefully will understand that "changing the lifestyle to avoid that things get bad" is the only viable strategy on a finite and globally populated planet. We may emerge as a truly global community fit to survive on the planet, or we may disappear after a very brief period of the Anthropogene.

If you have a story, thought, or picture worth to be considered as story, thought or picture of the month, please feel free to inform me about it by sending an e-mail to hpplag@unr.edu.