1. Why do people who possess more than enough things to live healthy and fulfilling lives act like they need more, like they can never get enough? What is enough? When does craving (greed) end, and how can it end?
2. Why such hatred, violence, and war? Why can’t we get along?
3. How are we to communicate meaningfully across difference? How do we maintain individuality, autonomy, and agency, as well as connectedness, empathy, understanding, and a sense of mutual desire for togetherness?
My premises:
1. These questions are old, old questions, but their formulations and their “answers” have changed over time. This means that they lie on some kind of continuum between problems that will always be with us (problems that have their roots in the intrinsic order of the cosmos, in “the way things are”) and problems that are time-space-bound and are mutable (problems that have their roots in human culture, cognition, and social life). It’s very difficult to tease these aspects out from their tangle with each other.
2. It’s the “intrinsic-ness” of these problems to human existence in particular and to life and living in general that have allowed (enticed?) modern biologies to speak to them. That is, biologies, which seek to discover patterns in nature and to characterize living creatures, has had and continues to have something to say about “what is ‘enough’ for living beings and when and why do they go beyond ‘enough’”, “why we fight”, and “how are living beings both connected and separate”. (These same questions are posed and given multiple answers by religions, philosophies, anthropologies, sociologies, psychologies, and economics’, which is important to remember and will be revisited.)
3. I want to look to the natural world to find inklings of answers to these questions, but I don’t know why, and I’m not sure how.
4. I’m going fairly blindly on intuition, desire, inkling, hope, and faith that the living world is not as need- and greed-filled, unnecessarily violent, and hopelessly armored in impenetrable boundaries (through which communication is impossible) as it are often characterized. I have a guess – a well-informed and educated guess based on observation and experience, but a guess none the less – that much of what dominant, mainstream and modern biologies have had to say about this topic are influenced by patriarchal, eurocentric, and positivist biases. I don’t know what I’ll find.
mydigest said,
December 26, 2006 at 7:44 pm
The driving force for more, when the individual apparently has sufficient, is the same force that in other areas brings expansion of knowledge, and application of knowledge into technologies. It is what has brought us residents of industrial civilisation out of short, nasty, brutish lives. It has the disadvantages you note so eloquently. I suggest that it ought to be tolerated in others, and positively directed in oneself.
It does keep the economy going, of course. And those who say that there are limits to growth are actually manifesting the limits to their imagination. Part of the drive, or force, is the dis-satisfaction with the latest product, however good, and the desire for fine-tuning it. The result of this tinkering is the doing of far more with much less, a feature you would expect greens to praise; instead they tout the wonders of taking the bus and acoustic guitar.
Cy Quick at mydigest.wordpress.com