Rita on materialism's consequences

Materialism's consequences

(Q) [Paul's question: "Rita said, 'It is the unnoticed modifications of your biological environment that are most likely to end the human experiment, not bombs or weapons'. Our dangerous modifications of biological systems spread wide.  (Such as cross-species gene splicing, destruction of natural habitats, powerful drugs, chemical food additives, nanotechnology - to name just a few.)  Is Rita referring to all of them generically or to particularly dangerous types of modifications?  What are these unnoticed consequences?  Is there a single guiding principle that is being violated, beyond a blind attitude that says, 'if it can be done let's do it'?  If these consequences are unnoticed, that suggests that we are not perceiving properly.  What is the nature of this blindness or misperception?"]

(A)  That is at least four questions.  We'll take them one by one.

First, I was not referring to any of the specific challenges he mentions as one specific example.  In a way, I wasn't even pointing to the subject as a whole.  The danger is not so much in any specific tinkering, but in the unconsciousness that assumes there are no consequences - unintended consequences are still consequences! - to treating the world as only a natural resource.  It would be closer to say I am referring to the root cause of so many dangerous effects, and that cause is the taken-for-granted assumption that the world is partly alive and partly dead.

(Q)  I'm not sure it would make much difference if scientists knew that all the world is alive.  Think how they treat animals.

(A)  Well, as I said, treating the world as a natural resource, as if life were a giant gold-rush.  That is why the world - or rather the human place in the world - is more threatened by an assumption than by a weapons industry or the rivalry of states.

The second part, the nature of unnoticed consequences, could be summed up as the on-going redefinition of life that takes place invention by invention, change by change, loss by loss. What you in the 21st century take for granted as life is a poor shell of what the 18th century, say, would have taken for granted.  So, species go extinct, forests become depleted [by which, I realize after a while, she meant become cut down faster than their replacement rate], fish stocks become depleted, etc. - and for each generation, what they are born with is taken as normal, and they measure losses only from there, rather than from a sort of complete inventory of the world.

(Q)  I have often said, I'm glad I'm old and not young and won't have to live in the world that is being stripped down.  A world without tigers, or lions?  A world where they will begin to become merely mythological beasts?

(A)  The net is being ripped in many places, and each one tearing the net tears only a small piece; may not think of themselves as tearing it; [each] certainly never sees the overall scope of the problem, and never looks a few decades downstream.  But this is not a disquisition on ecology, except in so far as human consciousnessis an integral and irreplaceable part of the ecology.

As to the guiding principle, it is the same as that mentioned earlier in the context of health. Unless human consciousness rapidly transforms into a realization of immortality and the responsibility that accompanies the ability to affect not only 3D ecology but the non-3D world as well, the drag will at some point exceed the ability of the system to overcome it, and this experiment will end and humans will find themselves incarnating elsewhere because Earth will no longer be suitable.  I'm drawing far conclusions.

"If it can be done, do it", is a natural result of the capture of science by technology.  It wouldn't have to be uncontrolled or even harmful - after all, it has had plenty of good effects, too - if there were a system of ethics, or let's say design principles, that would serve as guidelines. That can only come with a wider, higher, more consistently connected consciousness.

Finally, the nature of the blindness could be clear from the foregoing.  No science or politics or ideology or economics can sustain itself indefinitely if it is based on an understanding of reality that is so incomplete as to exclude half of what it is observing, or more than half.  Once realize that 3D and non-3D are integrally connected and many things will become clear, and will arrange themselves in proper perspective.