change

This is an important and hilarious article, intro by Tom Atlee, article by Daniel Gilbert.  Enjoy.

Dear friends,

We have evolved to create problems that are much
bigger than we can readily solve.  Our next
evolutionary leap will change that.

The only way we will remain in the great drama of life is to make that leap.

The humorous article below by Havard psychology
professor Daniel Gilbert clearly describes our
limited individual ability to observe and respond
to the world around us.  It offers a glimpse of
ideas I learned 15 years ago in Paul Ehrlich and
Robert Ornstein's remarkable book, NEW WORLD, NEW
MIND:  MOVING TOWARD CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION.  (You
can now download it for free at
<http://www.ishkbooks.com/NWNM/TOC.html>. Highly
recommended.)

In short, this is our predicament:  We can
co-create global warming much easier than we can
co-create a stable climate.  Not only that, we
can co-create population explosions, chemical
pollution, weapons of mass destruction, species
extinction, and poverty just by living our
ordinary lives -- whereas solving these problems
is a major challenge.  Our social systems are so
designed that when we each act intelligently on
our own self-interest, we collectively move
towards global destruction.

Once I realized that, I knew that solving each of
these problems would not solve our propensity to
create more problems.  The Bigger Problem is
deeper:  To overcome our biological limitations
as individuals, we have co-evolved collective
systems and capacities -- cutural, social,
economic, political, scientific, media,
educational, public relations, etc.  But the flaw
in all that is that we have designed them
primarily for comfort, profit, power, control,
and entertainment rather than for collective
intelligence, sanity, and wisdom.

That is what needs to change.  And that is what
is missing from powerful wake-up calls like the
article below and like Al Gore's remarkable film
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.  They tell us that the
change needed to deal with global warming is the
political will generated by millions of
individuals, a great "rising to the occasion".

But the change that is actually needed is in the
collective systems that prevented us, as a
society, from seeing clearly and responding to
global warming in the first place.  They are the
same systems that prevent us from seeing clearly
and responding to every other great problem,
threat, and opportunity we face.

And there's more:  It isn't just a matter of
solving these problems or increasing our
capacities.  The changes that are demanded will
transform us as a civilization, as a species.  If
we pass the test we have created for ourselves in
the 21st Century, we will _BE_ different,
individually and collectively.  We will have made
the evolutionary leap required of us.  

That evolutionary leap will be different in kind
from every other evolutionary leap in the 13.7
billion year history of our universe:  It will
involve the ability of life to evolve CONSCIOUSLY
-- to intentionally and wisely redesign itself to
serve not only its own survival but the
well-being of the whole of life.

And that will be something new under the sun,
something of ineffable beauty and grace, a
collective dream worthy of our best efforts
today, when we have the resources we need to take
that remarkable step together, to make that
unprecedented difference in ourselves and our
world...

Coheartedly,
Tom

-------------------------

<http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-gilbert2jul02,0.753937
9.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions>

If only gay sex caused global warming

By Daniel Gilbert  /  LA Times Op-Ed  /  July 2, 2006

Why we're more scared of gay marriage and
terrorism than a much deadlier threat.

Daniel Gilbert is a professor of psychology at
Harvard University and the author of "Stumbling
on Happiness," published in May by Knopf.


NO ONE seems to care about the upcoming attack on
the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it
won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead,
it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the
oceans and turn that particular block of lower
Manhattan into an aquarium.

The odds of this happening in the next few
decades are better than the odds that a
disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and
detonate a shoe bomb. And yet our government will
spend billions of dollars this year to prevent
global terrorism and . well, essentially nothing
to prevent global warming.

Why are we less worried about the more likely
disaster? Because the human brain evolved to
respond to threats that have four features -
features that terrorism has and that global
warming lacks.

First, global warming lacks a mustache. No,
really. We are social mammals whose brains are
highly specialized for thinking about others.
Understanding what others are up to - what they
know and want, what they are doing and planning -
has been so crucial to the survival of our
species that our brains have developed an
obsession with all things human. We think about
people and their intentions; talk about them;
look for and remember them.

That's why we worry more about anthrax (with an
annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza
(with an annual death toll of a quarter-million
to a half-million people). Influenza is a natural
accident, anthrax is an intentional action, and
the smallest action captures our attention in a
way that the largest accident doesn't. If two
airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed
into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be
able to name the date on which it happened.

Global warming isn't trying to kill us, and
that's a shame. If climate change had been
visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil
empire, the war on warming would be this nation's
top priority.

The second reason why global warming doesn't put
our brains on orange alert is that it doesn't
violate our moral sensibilities. It doesn't cause
our blood to boil (at least not figuratively)
because it doesn't force us to entertain thoughts
that we find indecent, impious or repulsive. When
people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally
do something about it, such as whacking each
other over the head, or voting. Moral emotions
are the brain's call to action.

Although all human societies have moral rules
about food and sex, none has a moral rule about
atmospheric chemistry. And so we are outraged
about every breach of protocol except Kyoto. Yes,
global warming is bad, but it doesn't make us
feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we
don't feel compelled to rail against it as we do
against other momentous threats to our species,
such as flag burning. The fact is that if climate
change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice
of eating kittens, millions of protesters would
be massing in the streets.

The third reason why global warming doesn't
trigger our concern is that we see it as a threat
to our futures - not our afternoons. Like all
animals, people are quick to respond to clear and
present danger, which is why it takes us just a
few milliseconds to duck when a wayward baseball
comes speeding toward our eyes.

The brain is a beautifully engineered
get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans
the environment for things out of whose way it
should right now get. That's what brains did for
several hundred million years - and then, just a
few million years ago, the mammalian brain
learned a new trick: to predict the timing and
location of dangers before they actually happened.

Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming
is one of the brain's most stunning innovations,
and we wouldn't have dental floss or 401(k) plans
without it. But this innovation is in the early
stages of development. The application that
allows us to respond to visible baseballs is
ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that
allows us to respond to threats that loom in an
unseen future is still in beta testing.

We haven't quite gotten the knack of treating the
future like the present it will soon become
because we've only been practicing for a few
million years. If global warming took out an eye
every now and then, OSHA would regulate it into
nonexistence.

There is a fourth reason why we just can't seem
to get worked up about global warming. The human
brain is exquisitely sensitive to changes in
light, sound, temperature, pressure, size, weight
and just about everything else. But if the rate
of change is slow enough, the change will go
undetected. If the low hum of a refrigerator were
to increase in pitch over the course of several
weeks, the appliance could be singing soprano by
the end of the month and no one would be the
wiser.

Because we barely notice changes that happen
gradually, we accept gradual changes that we
would reject if they happened abruptly. The
density of Los Angeles traffic has increased
dramatically in the last few decades, and
citizens have tolerated it with only the
obligatory grumbling. Had that change happened on
a single day last summer, Angelenos would have
shut down the city, called in the National Guard
and lynched every politician they could get their
hands on.

Environmentalists despair that global warming is
happening so fast. In fact, it isn't happening
fast enough. If President Bush could jump in a
time machine and experience a single day in 2056,
he'd return to the present shocked and awed,
prepared to do anything it took to solve the
problem..

The human brain is a remarkable device that was
designed to rise to special occasions. We are the
progeny of people who hunted and gathered, whose
lives were brief and whose greatest threat was a
man with a stick. When terrorists attack, we
respond with crushing force and firm resolve,
just as our ancestors would have. Global warming
is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to
trip the brain's alarm, leaving us soundly asleep
in a burning bed.

It remains to be seen whether we can learn to rise to new occasions.


Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times