I was scrounging around in some early draft files of my book manuscript today and found a series of notes from late 2022 titled “The Maxims of Advanced Retroadaptics.”
The current book manuscript is still thematically aligned with these notes, but the actual text and development is now totally different. I thought you might enjoy reading these notes as a kind of warmup to the book, so I’ll drop them one at a time for the next few letters.
The Long Dance Maxim
The Self-Rescue/Autonomy Maxim.
The Polymath Maxim:
The Unlearn aka Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There! Maxim
The To Hell With Purity Maxim
The Go With Friends Maxim
The Connect with Nature Maxim
The Existential Exuberance Maxim
Prologue: As a species we are in overshoot of carrying capacity but sometime soonish we won't be.
I'm going for the barest, simplest, most clear common vision of the future here. Not everyone is going to agree on what kind of government or economy or culture they want, and that's a good thing, but often we get tripped up when we try to come together but instead wind up arguing about capitalism vs socialism, neo-primitivism vs human trascendentalism (uploading minds etc), hitech vs ecotech vs notech.
It's obvious at this point that human society is well in overshoot of the carrying capacity of the earth. There's no trickery that will save us from this fact: all species that are in overshoot undergo some kind of correction to bring their arrangement back into balance. This isn't some kind of hippy dippy Fern Gully idea: when you break it down, it's just thermodynamics. The same laws that apply to steam turbines and coal fired power plants also apply to bugs and birds and crops and gut bacteria and forests and photosynthesis.
Not ideal
How we act, what we do now, will effect how this correction plays out. We know how carrying capacity overshoot goes for other species like deer and bunny rabbits; not great! What we don't know for sure is how much we humans, as being that are theoretically capable of self-reflection and making group-level future-oriented decisions, can impact what the process of overshoot correction will look like. But pretending that we can continue shooting above the carrying capacity of the earth is thermodynamically similar to saying that a rocket engine can continue to thrust upwards even after it's sputtered out of jet fuel, or that a forest can support a large population of deer even when there's no more food left.
Possible?
Advanced Retroadaptics, the flotilla, post-consumer praxis, what I’m doing with my life generally speaking, is about coming up with ideas for responses (not solutions!) at a very pragmatic level of what to do here, now, this Tuesday, in light of the complexity of the world we find ourselves in.
These maxims are a first-pass attempt at condensing the complexity of the predicament into coherent and concise actionable guidelines for thinking about our lives in the 21st century.
The Long Dance Maxim
We're on a long journey, on a network of paths, we don't know where we're going, and we'll never arrive. So: slow down. Breathe. Enjoy the journey. Don't tucker yourself out in the first five minutes. Don’t panic.
You and I are never going to live long enough to experience the place we're trying to go. Our children will never arrive, and our grandchildren with never arrive. Maybe our great grandchildren will but honestly probably not them either.
If our ultimate destination is 'a sustainable culture, rooted to place, not in overshoot of the carrying capacity of the earth', then that's going to be something like I don't know 200 years in the making, best case scenario. We are never going to see that. Probably no one who will know us, really young people when we're really old and about to die, will see it either.
It's not a sprint, it's a marathon, except no that's wrong it's an ultramarathon, and when we die we'll just hand the baton off to someone younger who will carry it for a time, and then hand the baton off when they die, et cetera.
And there is clearly no prescriptive path, no official route. We're all making it up as we go. Some of us, without knowing it, are currently headed down dead end paths that won't work out. But that's all right! That's useful information for the rest of us. It's a reason to take good notes.
And no one knows what the destination actually is, what it'll look like, what parameters we'll have to deal with. How stable will the climate be in 200 years? That'll make a difference as to what it makes sense to build. What will the coastlines look like? What will the carrying capacity of the world stabilize at after industrial consumer society is done drawing it down? What areas of the world will be no-go zones due to tactical nuclear exchanges and damaged power plants? What old ecosystems will have totally collapsed, and what new exotic ecosystems will be flourishing in 'exotic abundance'? How much, and what forms, of energy will we be able to access? What synthetic biological weapons will be circulating long after deployment, and what impact will that have on travel and society? What will the level of technological proficiency be at, aka, how much technical stuff will we have forgotten, or invented, or leapfrogged?
No one, no one knows the answers to these questions. Holding dear some very specific vision of the future is insane. It's asking to become insane. (Ask me how I know.)
In a way, I like to think that this is Gaia's way of teaching humanity to think less linearly. The massive uncertainty of what the future holds pretty much demolishes the utility of most forms of simplistic A to B thinking in a really obvious way. Right it's really obvious that linear thinking isn't going to serve us well anymore.
We have no choice but to muddle our way through, to master the art of ad hoc development, to flow and become adaptable and nimble. It's the century of adapt and overcome, I think. And that's all right, that's what our species is good at, but we've been in a very linearized culture for a long time so we'll need to break out of those ways of thinking as quickly as possible.
In fact, forget the metaphor of sprinting and marathoning, and journeys. It's not quite right, is it? Because that's a linear metaphor! It implies a goal, a trophy at the end, winners and losers, podiums, sponsors, a row of portapotties in a parking lot -- nooo, forget that, I take it back.
We're *not* in a race, and we're not going anywhere. We are already where we are going. No. We're in a dance. We are a dancing people, but we forgot how to dance - well, no, we forgot how to dance *well*, so at the moment we suck at dancing, because we've become accustomed to 'dancing' in a world with a stable climate and air conditioning and easy access to dense energy supplies and all the rest. Right now our job is to get better at dancing. To invent, to re-invent, to synthesize and evolve new dances, new steps, new music, and to find joy and meaning in the dance.
Yeah. I'm renaming this principle. It's not the long journey principle, it's the long dance principle. I like that.
Reading
For the prologue: Limits to Growth, Meadows et al.
For the Long Dance Maxim: Muddling Towards Frugality by Warren Johnson. There were some absolutely killer books that came out in the 70s that are even more relevant today than when they came out. This is one of them.