Why Isn't the Brain Green? / HAPPY EARTH DAY!/ The Emerging Integral World

(a short apology to those of you who are not familiar with Integral Theory. I try to use as little jargon as possible, but sometimes it doesn't work. I will be putting up posts soon for cross-reference of technical terms.)

Why isn't the brain green?
An article in the New York Times.

The short answer is that while we all have the capacity for global-level concern, most people have not developed to this capacity. Humans 20,000 years ago had no need to think globally, and so biologically there's nothing that would make a human "green." Even asking the question is a little odd; why in the world would we have developed a concern for the environment millennia before we had invented/discovered the concept? Embedded in the question is the assumption that being green is a good thing for the brain absolutely, as if somehow the brain ought to be green, but this is like saying that a bacterium ought to be concerned about the health of the human host. Humans aren't bacteria on the world, of course; it is a comparison of scale, and the difference between the two, that humans have the ability to understand their reality mentally and alter their behavior based on it, is important. Human evolution is primarily taking place not biologically, but conceptually or memetically, or if you insist, mentally, though the last word is not quite precise enough. The brain isn't green because it's not a biological necessity. "Greenness" is something that becomes necessary only when the human organism is acting on a global level. Fortunately, unlike bacteria, we might be able to stop ourselves from being so biologically/physically successful that we destroy the conditions permitting our own physical existence.

And to the article, which has a number of interesting points:

Firstly, nobody seems to care about the environment this year.

'At the top of the list [naming American citizens most pressing worries] were several concerns — jobs and the economy — related to the current recession. Farther down, well after terrorism, deficit reduction and en­ergy (and even something the pollsters characterized as “moral decline”) was climate change. It was priority No. 20. That was last place.'

Something in this is reminiscent of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. You can't be worried about something largely intangible (at this point, at least) if you don't have a job or a house or food to eat, and so in a recession, there's no climate change. The article glosses over this without mentioning this hierarchic (holarchic) aspect. 'Weber’s research seems to help establish that we have a “finite pool of worry,” which means we’re unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem — a plunging stock market, a personal emergency — comes along. We simply move one fear into the worry bin and one fear out." It's not that our pool is finite, though, it's that more pressing physical fears trump the abstract ones, or, SDi level one problems (not having food, say) trump any problems at the higher levels. If you're so hungry you're digging through rancid garbage heaps you're probably not too concerned about expressing the unique snowflake of yourself through romantic photos of the rain.

Of course, much of the impetus of the article is that Climate Change, far from being something abstract and in the future, is coming to a neighborhood near you. Until it does, for most people, it's just not a real problem; that is, "Climate Change" will never be a problem, higher food prices from desertification of agricultural land will be a problem, and even more directly, having less money from spending more on food will be the problem. The higher up the spiral you are, (the higher your cognitive/memetic level) the more real the problem is to you, which is to say no problem is ever abstract. No matter how you try and make the problem seem a problem, without direct apprehension of a problem, there simply isn't one. The article describes this in the following way:

'There are some unfortunate implications here. In analytical mode, we are not always adept at long-term thinking; experiments have shown a frequent dislike for delayed benefits, so we undervalue promised future outcomes. (Given a choice, we usually take $10 now as opposed to, say, $20 two years from now.) Environmentally speaking, this means we are far less likely to make lifestyle changes in order to ensure a safer future climate. Letting emotions determine how we assess risk presents its own problems. Almost certainly, we underestimate the danger of rising sea levels or epic droughts or other events that we’ve never experienced and seem far away in time and place.'

The problem isn't real for most people. Even if they can cognate it, or, say, have an emotional reaction to the idea of their children growing up Mad Max, unless it holds their attention it'll be gone soon, as they fall back into their operative consciousness.

'And even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a “single-action bias.” Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.'

The "we" in this article used over and over again is intended as "us humans," but I'd propose that it actually shifts back and forth, mostly covering 5th-level rational operating humans, people at around the same basic level as the NYTimes itself, no coincidence. Articles like this could be taken as evidence of the push of a large number of the "East-Coast rational-liberal" demographic, again, NYTimes readers, into the 6th level memes, or at the least as a record of the struggle moving between 5 and 6. The single-action bias noted above is seen when somebody is trying to make a change in their life, and brings us back to the question of the article, "Why isn't the Brain Green?" "We" want it to be, so "we" do a few things to pull us in the direction, though obviously the "we" hasn't fully arrived there yet. One practices and practices and practices behavior one knows is beneficial, and, with persistence, can eventually make that behavior part of their daily consciousness. One tries and tries and tries again over a number of years to eat more healthily, and eventually five years down the road, even if one hasn't reached their original ideal, not only eats more healthily, but does it naturally, without thinking or struggling, enjoying it. This is the process the above is chronicling: people's actions as they try to do something they think is better than what they are but don't yet own it. There are plenty of people who live every decision in their lives with a full environmental consciousness. They just aren't the mainstream.

Interestingly, the title of the article itself relies on an "Overdrive 5" mentality that we are the brain, that all behavior originates in the brain. Of course, had the title been, "why isn't the mind green?" the answer would have been, "because some people's mind's aren't." In either case, "greenness" is something learned/ grown into, it is not a given, except as a potential.

So what do we do as integrals if we don't want the world to warm into hell?

Most often, people think of the problems as technical. But, as climate change is being caused by people's behavior, so must human behavior be the basis for combating it. As logical as that seems, 'the notion that vital environmental solutions will be attained through social-science research — instead of improved climate models or innovative technologies — is an aggressively insurgent view.'

So, what changes are we talking about? Obviously, the more people at a level 6 or higher in the world, the more likely that, naturally, things will be handled in a more environmentally-sustainable way. Equally as obvious: we're not going to get there any day soon. Interestingly, the article takes a rather integral framework for dealing with this problem.

'If you don’t think or feel there’s a risk, why change your behavior? In response, researchers like Leiserowitz have investigated messages that could captivate all different kinds of audiences. Reaching a predominantly evangelical or conservative audience, Leiserowitz told me, could perhaps be achieved by honing a message of “moral Christian values,” an appeal possibly based on the divine instruction in Genesis 2:15 to tend and till the garden.'

To deal with the problem integrally, we need to give incentives to every level of development to create a sustainable (not merely environmentally so) sound community. For 5s, the emphasis can be on the business opportunities of conscious capitalism. As mentioned above, religious 4s could be persuaded that it is God's desire that they take care of the Earth.

This goes back to the beginning and the list of people's priorities of concern: there is no singular problem, there are many manifestations of one problem, and they need to be dealt with as one problem with many heads. Integrally tackling Climate Change means improving our economies and the stability of our societies, it means dealing with energy, and terrorism by helping to cultivate healthy societies in other parts of the world, it even means re-instilling and fostering a sense of moral community, though it would likely look a little different than the ideal of those who answered the above survey with "moral decline," even if grounded by the same basic sentiment.

The author of the article is a little skeptical about this at first, saying that some of these practices being researched (what the main content of the article is) seem to manipulate the natural decision making process, but comes to the conclusion that there is really no natural decision making process; one cannot make a decision in an absolute vacuum. I'd add that the "nudges" the author talks about are done by every society that has ever existed; it's called "acculturation." The difference here is that we are becoming conscious of this, and of how to manipulate this, which most of the best leaders were likely quasi-aware of in any case. One of the biggest factors, the article mentions, is whether decisions are made individually, or in a group.

'The subjects in half of the 50 test groups would first make their decisions individually and then as a group; the other half would make group decisions first and individual ones second. Weber and Handgraaf were fairly confident, based on previous work, that the two approaches would produce different results. In Amsterdam, Handgraaf told me, he had already seen that when subjects made decisions as a group first, their conversations were marked far more often by subtle markers of inclusion like “us” and “we.” Weber, for her part, had seen other evidence that groups can be more patient than individuals when considering delayed benefits. “One reason this is interesting is that it’s general practice in any meeting to prepare individually,” Handgraaf said. Or, to put the matter another way: What if the information for decisions, especially environmental ones, is first considered in a group setting before members take it up individually, rather than the other way around? In Weber’s view, this step could conceivably change the decisions made by a corporate board, for example, or a group of homeowners called together for a meeting by a public utility. Weber’s experiments have also looked at how the ordering of choices can create stark differences: considering distant benefits before immediate costs can lead to a different decision than if you consider — as is common — the costs first. Here, then, is a kind of blueprint for achieving collective decisions that are in the world’s best interests'.

The most interesting of these "nudges," as mentioned above, is the group dynamic.

'“We enjoy congregating; we need to know we are part of groups,” Weber said. “It gives us inherent pleasure to do this. And when we are reminded of the fact that we’re part of communities, then the community becomes sort of the decision-making unit. That’s how we make huge sacrifices, like in World War II.”'

As a more concrete example of this type of thinking:

'In 2005 and 2006, Orlove observed how the behavior of the region’s poor farmers could be influenced by whether they listened to crucial rainy-season radio broadcasts in groups or as individuals. Farmers in “community groups,” as Orlove described them to me, engaged in discussions that led to a consensus, and farmers made better use of the forecast. “They might alter their planting date,” he said, “or use a more drought-resistant variety of seed.” Those in the community groups also seemed more satisfied with the steps they took to increase their yields.'

Some of the feel of this is coming from the transition between level 5 memes, which are individualistic, and level 6, which are communitarian, but the thrust of this seems to be integral: everybody makes an individual decision, there are no decisions mandated by the collective, but one's individual decisions are made in the context of an open, fluid, and continual conversation with the community. It is possible to encourage individual thinking and innovation without devolving into groupthink, a staple of an unhealthy manifestation of level 6.

Another interesting quote:
'“Remember when New York tried to enforce its jaywalking laws?[...]You can’t enforce stuff that people don’t believe should be done.”'

This sums up much of the article: unless it's organic, change, and policy to help produce it, doesn't work. Taking a much wider view, all of this is natural, just as the nudging is a natural part of the decision making process. Societies get to a certain point, then they clean themselves up. There's nothing you can do to push that process along artificially. This, however is often taken as a level 5 mantra when confronting environmentalism: business will naturally get cleaner, just leave it alone! That is the thrust of the following Op-Ed from John Tierney, also from the Times: "Use Energy, Get Rich, and Save the Planet!" Of course, the backlash is also natural, that is, the environmental movement itself is natural, not simply some freakish reactionary outgrowth to late stage-capitalism, a point the Tierney Op-Ed doesn't make explicitly.

While this is and has been true, we're not dealing with relative levels of environmental cleanliness between countries, we're dealing with one non-interchangeable world. In the past, a country could clean up after industry became cleaner, because the pollution could be diffused throughout the rest of the planet and eventually eliminated through natural cycles, like plants cleaning air. The scope, now, is bigger. Not only are we (as a planet) making pollution on a much larger scale than one hundred years ago, we are doing it as a whole planet, not individual countries, and the worry is that there will be a point beyond which the life on the planet won't be able to clean it up again, and that this point will be here before the 2060 that Tierney says could well be the end of carbon even without policy pushes. Additionally, when rich counties got richer, they often got cleaner not just from cleaning up industry, but from moving it to other areas of the world. But where do high-polluting factories go when China and India get rich? And then after that?

What die-hard level 5s often miss in the environmental debates is that when a canary dies in a mine, nobody is worried ultimately about the canary. The difference between the canary, and, say, the 400 or so dead zones on the ocean floor, is that we have no choice but to go on living in the mine.

So, there will be a day when everybody up and down the spectrum of humanity feels the environment is, in one way or another, the biggest issue we have to deal with. That's what we're trying to avoid.

'“Increasing personal evidence of global warming and its potentially devastating consequences can be counted on to be an extremely effective teacher and motivator,” she wrote, pointing to how emotional and experiential feelings of risk are superb drivers of action. “Unfortunately, such lessons may arrive too late for corrective action.”'