At the risk of mutating this thread even further, I was recently watching an interview with Nick Bostrom, a philosopher, who was asked why we don’t see any evidence of intelligent life when we look out into the universe. And, basically, he said that if we did, it would be very bad news for us because there are obviously evolutionary “filters” that prevent life from forming advanced civilizations and spilling out across the galaxy. The first filter is the “spark” which gives rise to self-organizing life and evolution in the first place; and the second—and here is where my own reasoning takes over—occurs after sentient life appears and has to solve the problem of creating a planetary civilization that does not destroy itself through war or an inability to deal with threats to the planetary ecology.
Essentially, there is a race between the ever-increasing destructive potential of human technology—which empowers people to the extent to where a relative handful of individuals can bring down or annihilate the whole civilization—and our ability to come to a kind of spiritual consensus which allows us to find meaning and purpose in life without singling out some subset of humanity as “the problem” and marking them for scapegoating “solutions.”
The problem is, that we are all constantly pitching one another various kinds of “sucker bait” which, when we take it, embroils us in conflicts that undermine human solidarity. Take, for example, the flame bait potential of this question to and its transparent effort to pit atheists against believers in yet another sterile, polarizing debate—or the invitations to self-righteousness implicit in discussing the prevalence of obesity in terms of character and individual moral failings.
Ironically, one of the most highly corrosive tropes with respect to human solidarity is the way we use “personal responsibility” as an excuse to withdraw our sympathy from one another and abandon people to their fate. Now, I’m not saying that personal responsibility is a bad idea. Far from it. What I am saying is that all too often “personal responsibility” is used as a club to beat others in a kind of self-congratulatory, holier-than-thou way. By making common human failings all about individual character and personal morality, we not only cast these problems in terms of a struggle of “good” against “evil,” we tend to lay off societal problems on individuals.
This, of course, tends to short circuit any systemic analysis of the problem. It removes the social problems from the political arena and places them outside of the processes by which we exercise collective responsibility as a society. And it leaves individuals pretty much isolated and on their own to contend with things like corporate power, and historical legacies of injustice and bad faith. When the economy is mismanaged and millions of people are thrown out of work, it’s not because there is a sudden epidemic of laziness—and yet people are often quick to find some personal fault as to why other people are unemployed.
Likewise, when millions of people are faced with foreclosure, it’s not because they are imprudent buyers living beyond their means—but yet, this is exactly the sucker bait being offered up by corporate lobbyists as to why the banks deserve to be bailed out and individual borrowers don’t. In the case of obesity, if we can blame this entirely on individuals and their moral failings we don’t have to look at how the whole food system has been mechanized in ways that rely heavily on fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics, and how foods themselves have been re-engineered to make them more addictive and profitable, and how all of this is assisted by government subsidies which are held in place by lobbyists paid for out of the vast profits generated.
Look at how the ideology of “personal responsibility” has been used (above) to pillory marginalize people who sue fast food corporations. They are not seen as public heroes attempting to pry open this hidden system of addictive, unhealthful, ecologically unsustainable food, and thereby gain some measure of public accountability for decisions made by these corporations. No, they are portrayed as lazy and greedy, and therefore undeserving of our sympathy and support. It’s all Big Food sucker bait propaganda.
In this respect, it is in the interest of corporate power to undermine human solidarity, and to place corporate profits over things like affordable health care, healthful food, motor vehicle safety, measures to mitigate climate change, and the general empowerment of ordinary citizens. If we are to survive as a civilization and as a species, we will have to solve this problem. We have to start paying attention to how we undermine human solidarity by taking moral cheap shots at one another.
