 Wednesday, April 3, 2002
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This article comes from the Alas Babylon Yahoo Group.
The Nature of Life
Kristian Mandrup
Denmark
Hardin's thought experiment (see the Theoretic Nature of the Tragedy of the Commons ) uses an imaginary commons to demonstrates the futility -- the absurdity -- of much traditional ethical thinking. The sad fate of the imaginary commons on which people pasture their herds proves that moral principles can be refuted by facts -- the consequences caused when people live by those principles. It shows that if any ethics makes it advantageous for individuals or groups to increase their demands on the biological commons while it forces everyone to share equally the damage which that behavior causes, then the demise of the whole -- the ecosystem which supports that behavior -- is inevitable. Surely such an ethics is absurd. It refutes itself in the sense that it requires or allows ethical behavior which denies the possibility of further ethical behavior.
It shows that the first necessary condition for acceptable moral behavior is to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Inevitably, meeting this goal requires holistic or coerced restraint in order to assure that people never fail to live within the narrow limits of the land and resource use which the Earth's biosystem can sustain. Thus people's first moral duty is to live as responsible and sustaining members of the world's community of living things.
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Thus it is inevitable that the current human way of life, which is an exact mapping of the experiment with imaginary commons, will eventually destroy the ecosystem this type of life is based on (as we are rapidly on our way to do). To avoid this fate we have to go back to a sustainable way of life.
To achieve this we must reduce population size to a sustainable size
1) A reduction of population to 10% at the most. 2) The remaining population must be coerced to live a sustainable way of life. 3) No man may live beyond sustainable means as this will eventually break down the system (a "social law", but forgot which).
This "way of life" seemed to work out for the natives in many places, but they were overrun by those who did not abide to the "rules". Not abiding to the rule is always a great temptation as it grants short term personal gain. So the whole idea works against the way of nature where the "strongest" survive and conquer the weak. That could be the simple explanation why 98% of all species havent made it so far, but died in the process of evolution, competition and changing environments.
Organisms living a sustainable life is "by nature" outperformed by organims living above their means (like modern humans) that in so doing are short term becoming stronger than the sustainable lifeforms that are thus eradicated. In the end however the unsustainable way of life must end or the organism living an unsustainable life will experience dieoff. Another option is to evolve to become a sustainable living organism but then you become the target for the next unsustainably living organisms.
Thus life might be seen as a problem with no optimal solution !
The strong today are the weak tomorrow. The winners are naturally those who are most adaptive. In a dynamic system you must be dynamic to survive.
Humans have been adaptive so far, but are we not stretching the limits ? Can our "democratic" system based on "ethics" and "religions" dating back centuries if not milleniums change in time to adapt to the rapidly changing environments. I have my doubts ! The current human systems will crumble like dust and a new set of systems start all over...
The great "bubble" of human exponential growth is about to burst !
