Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism

How wide are our brains?   Generally speaking they are smaller than a breadbox.  But Emily Dickinson tells us they are wide – even wider than the sky -- because they include so much within them:  Memories from the distant past, hopes for the future, the feelings and ideas of other people, the landscapes and soundscapes of the environment, and for some people a sense of the sacred.   In this way, then, our brains are wider than the sky.  

   We were talking the other day about the mind’s capacity to envision the relevant future.  The future is a question mark.   Relative to one’s time frame the past is already decided and the future is not-yet decided.   The future contains many different possibilities which can be actualized, but it is not possible to know precisely which possibilities are actualized until they are actualized.   At least this is how constructive postmodernists in the East and West think about the future.  This makes the future both exciting and dangerous.  “It is the business of the future to be dangerous,” says Whitehead.

There is a difference between (1) a relevant future and (2) an interesting but speculative future.  A speculative future that is a future that it interesting to contemplate, but which does not seem to have relevance to our lives or those about whom we care.   There are no absolutes here.  What may seem speculative to one person may seem very relevant to another.   Consider the question: “What will be the status of the sun in eight billion years?”  One person may find this merely speculative and another quite relevant.  What we find relevant depends on our frames of reference.

   Despite disagreements, many people today rightly say that the future of life on our planet, the future of life on Earth, is a relevant future.  This does not mean that we will live to see that future.  But it does mean that the living beings who will inhabit that future – people, other animals, plants – are among those for whom we care.  They do not yet exist as we exist, but they will exist, and we find something beautiful in the very act of existing.  This is another idea important to constructive postmodernists or process thinkers. 

Here we presume two ideas very important to process thinkers East and West. 

   One is that there is indeed something beautiful in the act of existing.   The idea is that the act of existing has a subjective side as well as an objective side, and that the beauty lies partly in the lived subjectivity of living beings: their unique ways of perceiving and responding to the worlds around them and within them.  We stress unique because each living being, from human being to tortoise, has its own distinctive beauty, and thus its difference from others.  The beauty of our planet lies not only in the presence of subjectivity or feeling everywhere, but in the different kinds of feeling of which they are capable.

   The second idea is that living beings who dwell in the future, and who are not yet actual from our point of view, are nevertheless part of who we are in the present, because their lives will be affected by our actions.   This is an insight that often comes to people with age.  They begin to realize that, though their lives may end, what is important to them is that the act of experiencing – call it the joy of living – may continue even after they die, as something to be enjoyed by others.  Biologically, of course, these “others” may be those in their genetic lines.  But we believe that, within many humans, there is a desire to help all of life, and not just our own genetic kin.   This is part of what Buddhists call the Bodhisattva impulse that is within each of us.  It is an impulse to help all living beings: not just those in the present, but those in the future. 

   But here there is a problem to us today.  The problem is that so many powerful organizations act as if the only relevant future is ninety-days.   This kind of thinking – call it quarterly thinking – is part of the immaturity of business culture.   Many, many people in the past have had wider temporal horizons.  Traditional Indian society thought in terms of kalpas and multiple lifetimes.  The Iroquois said we should make decisions on the basis of how people would be affected seven generations after us.   These futures were relevant to them.  Here’s the problem:  

Our economic welfare has trained us to think differently than most of the older world’s residents or even America’s in the recent past decades. The value of visualizing and conjecturing along expansive timelines provides us with valuable insights the shorter slices of immediate time will not allow. It turns out, despite loud protestations to the contrary, that our country, its political apparati and primary economic and industrial institutions turn on the supremacy of the fiscal quarterly report.  In order for the rest of the world to enjoy our standard of living, it would take six and a quarter Earths' worth of energy resources.  It seems as though we are incapable of thinking in terms of years let alone decades because the healthy short-term performance to keep a job is more immediate and important than all that theoretical future stuff.

   This begins to explain why we humans in large groups seem to repeatedly make very poor long-term decisions in favor satisfying immediate survival needs. This survivalist fixation is short-termism. We are indebted to Jared Diamond and Alan Weisman for shining a light in the darkness allowing us to see the various manifestations of this very phenomenon. For we modern humans this is now mediated by financial survival in terms of quarterly fiduciary performance from which derives Quarterly Consciousness. We are indebted to The Economist, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and Scientific American Magazine of course, but we would say Paul Krugman, David Leonhardt and Jeffrey Sachs most deftly pointed us in the right direction on this conclusion.

This isn’t really a problem as long as human affairs percolate along in a consistent, quantifiable manner. But in cases of crises or calamitous straits it is wholly ineffective. Practically in every case quarterly consciousness won’t even allow for the contemplation of a coming precipitous crisis—let alone dealing effectively with it. ‘Either you will deal with reality, or reality will deal with you.’ Short-termism will get you the latter. Beyond Quarterly Consciousness will get you in the realm of the former.

   So let’s spend a moment of our time on this.  There’s a problem both critical to our future and completely impervious to quarterly consciousness in reaching a successful solution. It is the real limits to the availability of primary energy resources versus economic success wholly dependent upon the perpetually increasing availability of those very same resources. This contradiction is literally sowing the seeds of global disharmony and violence. If we take a long-term view, though, a useful picture takes shape.

   In the last several thousand years the main way human societies developed was through the primary utilization of human and animal labor, and the harnessing of water and wind motive power. This accrued to a tiny privileged few extravagant wealth and power, and to the vast multitudes bare subsistence and enslavement.  Whether that servitude was beneficent or cruel made little difference to the bottomline. The status quo trucked along quite contentedly; though, rather callously unconcerned for social justice.

About 5–6 hundred years ago in Western Europe—yet more than a thousand years ago in Sino-East Asia—a dramatic break with the past was building. Extensive and pervasive motive works to harness hydraulic power was giving rise to The Mechanical Revolution. Without this diffuse expansion of manufacturing prowess the next step would not have proceeded. As the limits of hydraulic availability began to make progressive expansion problematic human beings happened upon a viable alternative to moving water—or in the case of Holland, moving atmosphere, wind.

   Roughly 350 years ago Western European societies began augmenting their hydraulic manufacturing with wood-burning nascent steam mechanical devices. The performance and consistency improvement over hydraulic mechanisms was manifold. This became a critical inflection point in human history. The advent of pervasively diffused mechanical capability combined constructively with greatly increased productivity by the application of fuels.

   Roughly 250 years ago forests were verging on the brink of collapse due to overharvesting for construction and fuel. An alternative to wood was being actively sought. Coal was accidentally happened upon and lo’ and behold it perform 2½ times better than wood by weight and initial ease of acquisition. This gave birth to The Industrial Revolution. Accelerated innovation in steam engine design and performance, and in the cheap production of low-carbon, high-strength steel could now be accomplished as it hadn’t been possible previously.

   Yet coal was reaching its limits in capability. Intermodal transportation technology had reached a wall it couldn’t surmount. Maritime wood construction methods could not allow for increases in displacement shipping or war-making capacity. Only the pervasive shift to high-strength steel methods could. Yet this wouldn’t be fully realized until well into the 20th century. Locomotive steam engine technology had reached its thermal limits with coal fuel and pig iron construction methods. This coupled with the increasing liability of the bulkiness and inconsistency of coal as the primary transportation fuel led to exploration for alternatives.

Roughly 150 years ago petroleum and natural gas became that alternative. It performed 10 times better than coal by weight, ease of acquisition and ease of intermodal transportation storage and utilization. Its consistency and high performance produced the spectacular explosion of innovation and invention of the 20th century.

   Now we’ve reached the very same limits on capability—and real availability—of hydrocarbon liquids and gases that was reached 350, 250 and 150 years ago for the previous pervasive primary energy resource exploitations. Only, instead of doing what we’ve done for more than 350 years in the past, now we’re stuck and we don’t have a viable alternative that is waiting in the wings—that outperforms the current primary energy resource.

   This is where long-termism benefits us. Unfortunately, the so-called renewables, hydroelectricity, and even thermal nuclear power, perform no better than wood 350 years ago. That’s our problem. These alternatives suffer from quarterly consciousness. We need to think beyond quarterly consciousness to successfully solve this problem confronting all of us.

We need to do exactly what we’ve managed to do for going on 350 years. We need to imagine and visualize an alternative to hydrocarbon liquids and gases that far outperforms them. We must think beyond quarterly consciousness to be able to invent a technological approach beyond heat. That means leveraging an electromagnetic approach that gets at generating electricity directly from fertile/fissile decay chain interactions. An athermal approach for a post-modern age. An approach that converts the nearly 560-times greater amount of fertile nuclear isotopes compared to the scant naturally-occurring fissile we’re fast and wastefully using up right now.  An approach that is fully scalable so it is more easily diffused than petroleum. That’s where the future lies. And only thinking beyond quarterly consciousness will get us there.   How to do this?  This is the subject of Part II GO.