Read this book, seriously. Dazzle Gradually, by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

I grew up with the personal computer; it developed with me, flourishing from its elementary state in the late 1980s to the expansive encompassing, life-altering machines of today.  As we grew up together, I was increasingly put off by the incapability of the cultural and social knowledge and thought being instilled in me to grasp, understand, and live in this world. My upbringing as a Mormon demonstrated particularly strong residual mindsets from the past—a past in which we lived in completely different environments than the ones we reside in today.  Well over a hundred years ago, Nietzsche pronounced “God is dead,” declaring that human beings had outgrown the need to look to a God and an afterlife to cope with their existence. Likewise, I find myself increasingly saying and thinking “This way of thinking is dead, it must be replaced.” We are in the paradigm shift of all paradigm shifts. Our technological world has already evolved past the ideas and conceptions that we use to live in it. Either we shift with it and catch up or we lose ourselves.

This is perhaps what makes Dazzle Gradually such a tremendous selection of essays; it challenges many of the basic assumptions that we live by in our everyday lives, both ones that have developed recently and more fundamental ones we know go as far as the written record. Of all the chapters that have instilled this impression thus far, the “Welcome to the Machine” chapter encompasses most acutely the essence of our need to change. In there are two incredibly important challenges to our assumptions: that there is no such thing as artificial and that human life must change to an ecology stable one if it is to make the transition from a pioneer species to a climax community. It seems that such changes in our basic way of thinking are essential to our continued existence.

While there are a lot more pervasive, subtle and deep flaws in our thinking, the conception of the “artificial” has been one of frustration for me for some time now.  This assumption reflects the deeper rooted assumption that we are somehow separate from nature and, as such, opposed to it. It also reflects the classic Judeo-Christian conception that man is to rule the earth and all other things are his subjects. In reality, there is no such thing as ‘artificial.’ We are merely part of the earth, and our technology is not separate or unique (except in its complexity) from the natural course of things. For this reason alone, I wanted to cheer as I read this chapter. It is a relief to see a scientist point out the way that technology was fundamentally a part of nature and that the process of technological development is not something new.

It seems that this chapter captures the essential paradox of our current “green movement.” The cry of the environmentalists contain this contradictory notion that we out to return to a time before, to more primitive forms of farming, to more “natural” methods of production, and that technology and “tampering with nature” is the source of our problems. In truth, however, the movement we ought to having is one more adequately captured by Margulis and Sagan: a movement from a pioneer race to a climax community that forms its own ecological cycles and balance within the world that it has altered and essentially created. The two ideas, the traditional (and radical) environmental movement and the one presented in DG, are so fundamentally and significantly different yet their expression is so difficult to disentangle. Our tendency as humans to dichotomize into black and whites would inevitably lump the two of them together. I have seen this acutely as I’ve studied emerging technologies, especially genetically modified foods. The opposition to these “frakenfoods” has been so incredibly frustrating because it embraces all the ways of thinking of the old paradigm, valorizing nature and the past, assuming humans are separate, and that there is something “artificial” about our existence.

The truth is very much closer to what is expressed in this chapter. We are already tied up in our technology, which is a natural progression of tools as used by a pioneer species. We are changing the landscape of the world but this is natural. However, we are also reaching the point where we have to make the transition from a pioneer species to a climax community. Therefore, ecological thinking is essential, but also essential is for us to evolve our thinking simultaneously, adopting new ideas and conceptions of the world that will allow us to live in such a community. These changes go far beyond those expressed in this chapter. It is my hope to try to identify them and weed them out as much as possible in my lifetime that way we can continue to evolve as a race.