How Might Humanity Survive a Radically Changing World?

The Journey Ahead

Every journey starts with the destination. You need to know where you are going before you start working out the trip to get there. Even if the goal is simply to have new experiences you still have something in mind when you set out. This is as true for a journey of the mind as for the body. And it is just as true for the journey of humanity through evolution. Where are we going?

This will be the first in a series of blogs on the consequences of our rapidly changing world with regard to the future of humanity. We are entering a period of dramatic change. Our relation with the environment, the climate, and our access to high-powered fuels is undergoing radical reorganization. Everything about our current civilization is going to radically change as a result. This series is aimed at first establishing a vision of a sustainable future situation for some form of humanity and then providing some travel tips for how to get to that future. It will be an arduous journey for mankind. We will be facing terra incognita. No one has ever been in this environment before. So the uncertainties are legion. All we can do is keep a destination in mind and look for the signs along the way that suggest we are getting to where we want to go.

In this post I want to outline some ideas on where that destination might be. I base these ideas on several factors that are observable about our species today and the emerging clarity we have regarding the environment that is evolving around us.

In fact this is the point. The environment is evolving, to a large extent due to our activities over the last ten to twenty thousand years. A changing environment means that we have to evolve in order to remain fit to exist in whatever that environment turns into. Given the kinds of environments which have existed in the distant past we know that however radical the near future environment will be (e.g. higher sea levels, warmer average temperatures, biodiversity destruction, etc.) life itself will endure in some forms. These will be the seed for distant future speciation and a new efflorescence of the tree of life. That some form of future hominid, derived from genus Homo will exist I take as a given. But it also depends on how the current species of sapiens manages to survive the transition. It is to that issue that I turn.

My starting point is the end point. My inquiry begins with the question about what kind of life should humans expect to have even in a radically changed world. One early vision of the state of humankind subsequent to the depletion of fossil fuels was the Olduvai Theory of Richard C. Duncan, in the early to mid 1990s. Duncan envisioned a reversal of civilization and reversion of humans to the status of primitive humans whose remains are found in Olduvai Gorge in Africa. Aside from being a catchy title, the theory suggests that humanity will regress, possibly even evolutionarily, to a form that can succeed in the more primitive environment with only real-time solar energy to support it.

In other words, our civilization and the species we have become, are mere flashes in geological time. And now, as Richard Heinberg puts it, “The Party Is Over”.

In spite of agreeing with the Malthusian analysis inherent in peak fossil energy, population overshoot, and Homo sapiens' minimal average sapience, and all that those entail for the future of civilization, I am not inclined to think humanity is destined for the Hobbesian view of the human condition as “...nasty, brutish, and short.”

There are two basic reasons for my perverse long-term optimism in spite of my short-term pessimism (of course I would call it realism, but others disagree!) First, we humans have learned one hell of a lot about how things in the world work. Granted we are not good at learning how we ourselves work (mentally). But we have amassed a tremendous amount of knowledge in the sciences and engineering and much of it might be applicable even in a low-power energy future. Our knowledge of systems science and systems ecology alone may make living feasible regardless of what the future world is like (within reason of course, we probably couldn't survive in a runaway warming that would lead to a Venusian climate!). There can be a technological civilization in the future but one that is not driven by frenetic needs to run as fast as we can run. Second, and most basic of all, is evolution. Along with our knowledge of how the world works we also understand the process of change itself. Of course devolution is possible, I don't deny that, but I also don't see it as inevitable. Our understanding of evolution, genetics, and especially the emerging field of Evo-Devo provides us with the potential to become intentional actors in the evolutionary process itself. We are already unintentional actors. We shaped the environment we live in and set in motion the forces that will shape the future environment. We have been embedded in a process of co-evolution, us and our cultures, that has continued to modify our genetics right up to the present. Indeed there is some evidence that our co-evolutionary process is accelerating, not abating. The Homo sapiens sapiens of today is not really the exact same species it was even 10,000 years ago.

Humans can abide as the Earth abides. But it will only be with understanding and intention. The very first question we have to ask has to address what a future human living condition will be like. Will we devolve to Olduvai status, or become something more than we are now?

What Does It Mean To Be Human?

The field of positive psychology is relatively young, focusing on what it means for humans to thrive, be happy, or feel fulfilled. One popular concept in this arena is self actualization, especially as developed in Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs theory. Maslow posited that humans are motivated by a set of needs that arc from the most basic biological (food, warmth) to social (love, esteem), to a higher self fulfillment or actualization, which includes mental states that permit higher thoughts and concepts, such as love of humanity as opposed to love of self. Several psychologists have considered versions of this sort of needs/drives architecture and a very full literature on subjects like creativity and success (e.g. ‘Flow’ in psychology). The general understanding in Maslow's theory is that as lower level needs are met and remain unthreatened (one has enough food and feels loved) the individual naturally moves into the mental space of actualization where they can be creative and develop positive attitudes toward others and themselves.

What this set of theories tell us about human beings is that they have the mental capacity to be marvelous beings given that their basic needs are being met. My own reading suggests that the happiest people are actually those who are actively participating in meeting their own needs. They are not necessarily individualists, but more generally are being productive members of a group effort that collectively provides for every one's needs in the group (and presumably for the few misfortunates who cannot directly contribute, and for children not yet ready to contribute).

In the modern industrialized/informationalized civilization where one would think all of our basic needs are being taken care of, it is hard to understand why so many people are unhappy and why we have become so unsapient. But the problem is that our materialistic views of what civilization should mean has done a pretty good job of taking care of needs at the lowest levels of the hierarchy (food, shelter, etc.) but has actually been contrary to the middle needs (sexually suggestive advertising and explicit sex scenes in movies are not substitutions for love). Our education and enterprise processes, designed to maximally take care of those material needs, does not address our self esteem needs. We try to compensate by telling our young kids what a great job they did on that drawing, or that they are special, or through grade inflation (don't get me started!) But we run people through the education mill in order that they have the requisite job skills to keep the machinery of commerce going. In my view this is the antithesis of self actualization. The only real higher needs we are supporting is the need for the psychopathic rich to get richer. I take solace in knowing that many of them are still not happy, really.

The bottom line is that humans, in general, really don't need the kind of materialistic world that our high powered energy and lack of wisdom has created to be happy or have the opportunity to self actualize. I think I understand how we got here. Once agriculture was swinging into full gear our societies became focused on managing everything to ensure maximum yield, usually against a very uncertain climate. We worked so hard at producing the basics that we sort of forgot that there is more to life than making a buck. Some so-called primitive tribes, the few left in this world, haven't forgotten, those that have been lucky enough to live in climates that provide the rich biological and hydrological resources they need. But we modern humans have forgotten. In fact, we perversely think that our McMansions and smart phones are the very definition of happiness.

The vast majority of people in the modern world do not seem to be able to grasp the essential difference between being glad to have the latest iPad and being self actualized. The former lets you get the latest updates on gossip, the latter lets you create something of value (even if you do it on an iPad!) I think one of the reasons that we have gotten to this point is that, as I mentioned above, evolution hasn't stopped. As a population we have been co-evolving with our materialistic cultures. We have created those cultures (but recognize that the actual acts of creation are done by very, very few people!) And in turn those cultures have selected for those who only want what those cultures offer - more materialism. And, as I have written before, this latter effect is what has helped select against higher sapience. One does not succeed in this world (either in monetary terms or in procreation) by being wise, only aggressive or lazy. Smarts help some to succeed monetarily, but it really doesn't take smarts to operate a refrigerator (to see a darkly humorous logical extreme watch the movie: “Ideocracy”)

The selection pressure of high powered industrial civilization has, unfortunately, tended to favor lower sapience. I think this also means it has disfavored the drive to self actualization. At the same time, paradoxically, it has provided a platform for the few bright people to discover new knowledge and produce amazing technologies. This was possible because the non-actualized masses provided a demand (as long as energy was available) and an impetus for novelty. It is ironic that, to paraphrase Dickens, ‘the best of times (knowledge) was made possible by the worst of times (unthinking consumption)’. But there you have it. The question is, now that the world is changing and the loss of energy will completely alter the consumption side of the equation, where do we go from here? Can we focus on the fact that some human beings, and especially those that seem to be more sapient than most, do self actualize in spite of the culture we live in? Can we use this knowledge to address the question of what would we like a future to look like given that we will not have the high powered energy sources of today? I think we can.

The Destination

If we start from the premise that what it means to be human is that each individual has the capacity and the opportunity to achieve higher states of awareness and understanding of the world, to become self actualized, then our destination has to be some kind of living condition in which that is made possible. I started writing about a ‘feasible’ living situation starting in Feb. of 2010. The series can be found here:

1. What is a feasible living situation for future humans?,
2. A feasible living situation continued.,
3. What should we fight to save?,
4. More on aesthetics and humanity,
5. and Toward a better understanding of a feasible living situation

In this series I explored what kind of social structure and physical infrastructure would be necessary to provide a group of highly sapient individuals with a reasonable means of living sustainably and that would allow all members of that society to achieve some level of self actualization. I provided some basic ideas about what kind of land might be required under reasonable assumptions about the climate situation several hundred years from now. I have not seen any evidence that would alter my conclusions from that analysis, which are unhappy for the current population. The projected carrying capacity of the planet under extremely modest assumptions about consumption patterns of a sapient society is radically smaller than seven to ten billion people as currently projected by the UN through 2100. Given the reduced biodiversity of the near-term future (say the next 100,000 years or more) that carrying capacity will be greatly reduced even from what we currently project based on, say, ecological footprint analysis. It could be in the low tens of millions world wide.

Thus we are looking at a picture in which a few climatically stable pockets support a few villages containing a psychologically optimal number of individuals each. These might be in communication, even have trade with each other, but nothing like the inter-community commerce we see today. Life will revolve around the education and food growing systems, with construction and its support services on an as needed basis. People will basically do those things that satisfy the spirit. They will, of course, primarily be concerned with raising food. If done right they will have ample time for enjoyable times with family and friends. They will pursue their education, both in how to improve their living skills and how to better understand the world around them and their past. These need not and should not be peasants living just at subsistence. If that were the only option then would it really be worth there being a human species?

Humans are capable of growing mentally long after they finish growing physically. A society, careful to control its population size, can still grow in knowledge even though it is not growing economically (in the way we think of it now). The destination is self actualization for all. If we cannot find a pathway from where we are now to that destination then I'm not sure it is worth even stepping outside to start the journey. On the other hand, I strongly feel there is enough sapience in some members of the current species to find the path.

I have always had an adventurous spirit. And I think that it is likely that humanity will come out of the transition as a better species, that is wiser in the ways to live in balance with the Ecos. With that belief I'm game to explore some possible paths. I hope I don't have to go alone, because then, again, it isn't worth the effort. The future success of humanity will be based, as it always was in the past, on a collective effort of a group. We shall see what develops.

The First Step - Sacrifice in the Now

It is hard to contemplate doing something so radically different tomorrow, given that today things in the world seem almost normal. It is very difficult for anyone, even a very sapient person, to consider going and learning to live off the land with only real-time solar energy inputs while it is still possible to get in your car and run to the grocery store for a loaf of bread and gallon of milk. The question is, do we start now to learn to live more balanced lives, or do we wait until the fan is on high and the fecal pellets are flying to make the move?

The problem with the latter is that we are in a relatively slow transition at present. The fan isn't blowing at maximum and the fecal matter is in such small quantities as to be nearly indiscernible. The danger with waiting is that we have been in an exponential growth mode for so long. The problem with exponential growth is that you can feel like everything is just fine until the crash comes. It is like walking toward a cliff in a pea soup dense fog. You're OK until you step off the edge. And then it is too late. It does no good to wish you had turned right or left instead of going straight while you are hurling toward the bottom.

We are in completely unknown territory now. We know with fairly high certainty that our energy flow is going to be diminished. And unless someone very quickly pulls a massive energy replacement rabbit out of the thermodynamic hat, nothing else we have on the shelf right now can scale up quickly and broadly enough to keep there from being a catastrophic loss when, for example, the oil stops flowing because the producers can no longer make profits, and then the coal stops flowing because it takes a lot of diesel fuel to get coal. Natural gas is still a big question as to the volume we might have to work with, but even with NG there are infrastructure conversion issues that will keep it from being an immediate substitute. The whole problem revolves around the fact that we just do not know how much net energy we have to work with from fossil fuels, but especially oil. If we are, as I have suggested based on my computer modelling, past the peak of net energy production, then we are already screwed.

And here is the main point. We don't know where we are relative to net energy. We can only make educated guesses, but they are still just guesses. If we are past the point of no return, how would be know it? As one of my favorite Brandi Carlile songs says “...there are no warnings, only signs.”

Since I advocate that only the highly sapient need apply, perhaps this provides a means for testing sapience potential without some of the genetic testing I've written about. Only the really sapient will see the practicality of sacrificing a few more years of the comfortable consumer lifestyle to start preparing now. I admit it is a sacrifice. It means finding a location with all the right attributes (you can't just start a permaculture farm nearby where you happen to live if the climate is unstable). It means cashing out your assets to trade for land and off-the-grid capabilities. And, by the way, this does not mean buying solar panels that you will be stuck with in twenty years, not able to get replacements or repairs! It means giving up what you are used to having now without really knowing for certain that this is the best thing to do.

Nor can you do anything like this alone. It will take a community. So not only do you have to make the decision to self-sacrifice now, but you have to convince others that they should do the same. Again this is a test of sapience. If any of your friends balk it probably means they wouldn't be great contributors to the situation anyway.

I see this process as one of self-organization rather than engineering a social group. The sufficiently sapient will recognize the signs and begin to take action, not waiting for warnings (at least from the official powers that be). They will find ways to find one another, especially in these days of social networking media. No one could orchestrate a successful transition. No one could dictate it or ‘run’ the community. It will have to come from a democratic and egalitarian process. It will necessarily be at the only scale in which such a process could ever succeed, a face-to-face community.

Other sacrifices are in the wings. Even if sapient communities become established they will need to be prepared for what will transpire in the rest of civilization. I will save this for another time, however. In the near future I will return to the physical aspects of a feasible living situation and try to explain better why so much land per individual is needed to establish a truly sustainable life. And then we can talk about how to establish it (like financing) and protect it once things start to come unglued. In the mean time it would be nice to know if any of this is helping anyone. I have received a few nice e-mails from folk saying that they get what I am talking about and would like more ideas put out there. This blog is a response to those. But I don't know if my thoughts are really helping.

Comments

[George Mobus]

This is a comment from Stewart Shuker who is from Brisbane, AU.
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Great discussion.

I am new here and I can instantly see many of the same lines of thought and influence as have shaped my own growth.

I did my PDC with Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawnton in 2009. As a result I joined www.foodconnect.com.au where I work whilst building strength to do what Bill Mollison calls, 'crossing the line'.

It is wonderful to see the influence of Illich, Martenson, Hugh-Smith, Heinberg, and so many others that I have come to embrace in my own life.

Above all it is refreshing to see a conversation about our situation and future in terms of what I see as the base challenge, that being humanities coming to terms with it's own nature, or more precisely humanities reconciliation of the human condition. It is refreshing to see the problem [the human condition] being discussed more directly and not being enmeshed with the symptoms [greed, inequity, religion].

May I be as bold in my first post to suggest that just as Newton's picture of a non-realtivistic word 'worked' within limits acceptable at the time, so has Darwin's... however I suggest we are now past the acceptable limits of Darwin's theories. We need a fuller picture of what it means to be human, a fuller picture of how we got here, a higher resolution picture of the meaning of life.

Has anyone here read any Jeremy Griffith? I suggest that his profound work may well round out the picture you are painting and take this discussion from the ballistic to the relativistic; give this discussion more traction as we plan a transition from a position of being more in tune or aligned with our nature.

Here is one small example [I hope I do him justice in framing his work this way] of the higher resolution image which Griffith projects of the human condition.
Q. Is it human nature to be nurturing, supportive and loving?
Q. If you answered yes, why do we see humans being divisive, brutal and duplicitous?
Q. Is it also in our nature to be hurtful, hateful and vengeful?

These questions are important, and not answering them, especially as a teenager [and I see humanity acting as a teenager] is taking quite a risk and has taken quite a toll on all of us.

Many answers to these questions mix the problems with the symptoms. Griffith suggests that it is not in our nature to be divisive and hateful and brutal, that these behaviours are symptoms of the real problem, that being our collective and individual inability to integrate our nature and the understanding of our own mortality into our daily view of ourselves and how we fit into our relationships, communities and the natural environment.

This topic is obviously too big for a single post, and if I have tickled your interest I suggest you quickly visit the following site.

http://www.worldtransformation.com/

Please look past the basic nature of the site and the name itself. Once you have read and watched a little of Griffiths material you may come to understand his choice of words.

If Plato and Aristotle were alive and read Griffith, they would die happy men.

Great site George; great discussion, great insight and great tone; mature and grounded. Thanks for posting it on the net free of charge.

Stewart.

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I will be working on responses to comments later today.

George

[George Mobus]

Matt,

Couldn't agree more. A number of permaculture-based groups have contacted me with questions about where they should go and I defer to the climate models. But since we really have no idea as to where the "most ideal" place will be, better to let evolution be the guide and there be many in various locations. Then someone is more likely to make it!

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Bruce,

Thanks for links and quotes. Some very interesting if not useful insights there.

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Hi Phil.

...a whole culture of normal people that unquestionably fail any test of sapience, who mostly think of themselves and often of each other as rather "sapient".

That culture is us, of course...

I have to take issue with this (hopefully I've captured sufficient context). No population is going to all have the same level of sapience (and no one has zero sapience anyway). There is a distribution in sapience strength. I can't demonstrate that that distribution is highly skewed (more like a Poisson than a Gaussian) but evolution theory suggests that it should be if it is relatively newly emergent. In any case there will be representatives from various levels of sapience in the population. And if the trait is mediated by a few control network segments of DNA rather than a particular mutant gene, then we should expect a range.

Now, if I am right about the distribution shape then your observation of 98%... may hold some water.

I've been trying to get you and others to discuss these curiously insurmountable "dysfunctional fixations", with no success so far. Why do you think that is?

Which leads to your concern for why we aren't discussing the "dysfunctional fixations". I can only speak for myself, and I do believe I have mentioned this before. I am not writing what I write for a wide audience. So the 98% you posit wouldn't understand such a conversation even if a few of us had it. Those who do understand don't need to have the conversation because we realize that no one is listening!

As per my above, there is sapience in many brains (a low level in most brains). So it isn't the case that it is missing from our culture, it just isn't sufficient in our brains and the culture that obtains therefrom. Sapience isn't wisdom. The latter requires a lot of tacit knowledge gained over a lifetime. Unfortunately there are not enough highly sapient beings in the population to flood the market with wisdom. That is what is missing from culture, but even when those who try to put out some wisdom for the masses to consume they simply do not understand what they are seeing/hearing. Ergo, the discussion is essentially futile if the intent is to save mankind. Mankind doesn't know it needs to be saved, and even if it did it would want its salvation to be what it wants - more consumption of junk.

I think it is better for those who are more sapient to spend their time and efforts preparing for what is inevitable and stop worrying about changing the world. That seems to me a Quixotic adventure - noble but not practical.

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Stewart,

Thanks for the link and commentary. I will get to it as soon as I can.

George

[Phil Henshaw]

George, It's interesting that though I tried to be especially explicit I did not succeed in drawing your attention to the clear implication of my example that "sapience" is not a characteristic of individual humans.

It seems the evidence makes it inescapable that sapience is a combined trait, a property of an individual's role in their culture. Within a culture like ours, having a social structure that commit everyone to helping maintain prosperity by accelerating depletion of our dwindling resources, achieving "sapience" seems to not be a 1:100 chance but more like 1:1,000,000 or lower chance.

The evidence is we are a culture caught in the classic trap of "crafty" problem solvers, that they "can't see the new problems". That seems to be the generally observed behavior of all human complex societies, with growth powered by their being expert problem solvers they "run into problems they can't solve", as Toynbee and others have seen it.

[George Mobus]

Phil,

The basic problem seems to be that you are trying to redefine sapience to fit your perspective and not in accordance with the work I have done. My version of sapience is the brain's capacity to acquire and use tacit knowledge for complex moral judgments. I've been very careful to lay this all out in my working papers: http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Background/seriesIndex.html

I am missing your points because I do not grasp your redefinition of the term compared with what I have been writing about all this time. If I had to guess I think you are confusing the term sapience with its behavioral correlate wisdom. If so, then I can see you are right to claim that wisdom is an attribute of not just an individual but of a culture and its individuals. No dispute there.

But if you want to talk about wisdom (esp. collective wisdom) then please drop the references to sapience. The latter is based on specific brain competencies that can lead to individual wisdom (which then can contribute to social wisdom) but it is not what you have been describing.

Can we get our terminology synchronized?

George

[Bruce]

For those who have not read the work, a good summary of Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" is at the link below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_%28novel%29

Perhaps there is something there to inform us about the evolution of human ape culture and its implication for us today.

George and Phil, please continue with the discussion, as I suspect that there is a mutual understanding to be gained, as well as most of the readers here finding the discourse instructive.

[Phil Henshaw]

George, I think I'm using "sapience" not as you define it, but as you use it. I see those as two different things. I think you use 'sapience' as “that property which allows a mind to recognize and consider what it is observing”, or as you put it "a brain's capacity to acquire and use tacit knowledge for complex moral judgments".

I'm saying that property is contingent upon the a brain's cultural context. All "knowledge", in fact, relies on the culture of knowledge it is based on and a variation of. So people who are part of a confined knowledge culture can’t see beyond it, just as the mental paradigm of "Flatland" would keep one from discussing mass and volume.

The working structure of the knowledge culture a mind is part of makes ALL its members non-sapient for the realities that don't fit. So one would need to talk about both individual and cultural sapience.

We can list quite a few of these cultural fixations that disable the sapience of their members. They’re commonly observed as relatively disconnected "silos" of cultural thinking (academic departments, economists and Tea Party agitators) that seem to multiply with societal complexity. There's also the strange disconnect between nature an western culture evident in believing in sustaining prosperity by using things up ever faster...

You find it at the very root of scientific reasoning as well. Deterministic science represents nature as a theory that fits the available information (after Popper and Bohr, etc). Naturalists, however, define nature with their open questions, using words to refer to the identifiable but unexplained features of the uncontrolled physical world.

Deterministic science, of course is doing the opposite, defining nature as the explained features of the seemingly controlled world. So enormous gaps in understanding what to do develop, as we radically change the earth.

One can spend a lifetime to no avail, as I largely have, trying to point out to people that each perspective of these kinds is “a different flatland" for the same real world subject. Our silos of thinking are just different dimensions of knowledge that "sapient ones" (if our culture allowed them) would seek to connect. It's virtually impossible to get people to even acknowledge the materiality of the dilemma. It kind of means that why policy discussions get nowhere is that everyone is talking at once in a starkly different language.

[George Mobus]

Hi Bruce.

I read the piece on Ishmael. Very interesting. Some day when I am not so loaded down (when I retire ;^)

I agree that we should not call the problem with human mentation a "flaw". The problem looks to me to be the same as every other species that found itself in an environment in which it was no longer fit. For man, the irony has been that it is the environment that we have created ourselves.

I'm less enthusiastic about what appears to be a claim that humans are victims of the story, as if takers do what they do (enacting) purely as a result of believing the story. This sounds like all we have to do is change the story (and get everyone to buy it) as in changing the culture. I suspect the argument is based on a notion that leavers demonstrate that we are capable of believing a different story. But I wonder how much this might be based on a possibly naive view of "primitives".

In any case thank you for bringing the link to us.

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Phil,

...I think I'm using "sapience" not as you define it, but as you use it.

Hmm. That implies internal inconsistency which I will need to be alerted to! I would hope that my use of the term is consistent with my definition.

You go on to use a term, "knowledge culture", that I am unfamiliar with.

But in reading this comment it still seems to me you are conflating sapience (as I define and, I hope, use it) and wisdom. Wisdom is the aggregate knowledge operating through the mechanism of sapience. I agree that a culture can have a collected wisdom. We often refer to it as "the conventional wisdom". But this is really just the collection of heuristics that have seemed to be valid in the past and are used in lieu of any personal wisdom on matters at hand.

I don't find an argument for "cultural sapience", except possibly as I describe below. What social mechanism would this entail? Perhaps the legal system (see below). As humans evolved and existed in smaller tribes and bands, the wisdom of the elders was the wisdom of the tribe. There was no separate mechanism outside the brains of the those who possessed greater sapience, and therefore became the tribal elders. Also there is reason to suspect that higher sapience capacity was part of the group selection process that led some tribes to succeed where others didn't, i.e. having at least one or two higher sapient individuals in a tribe (of a certain age) was selected for prior to the advent of organized agriculture.

I do think that science IS a social mechanism that can operate outside the restrictions of individual intelligences to acquire veridical knowledge of how the world works. But this is explicit knowledge and science does not deliver wisdom, only this explicit form of knowledge. To have a cultural sapience would require some means of gaining and storing implicit knowledge plus having a way of using that knowledge through a form of cultural "intuition" or judgment. The closest thing that we have at a cultural level that approximates this is our legal systems (which is why we call judges by that title). So perhaps this might qualify as a kind of cultural sapience mechanism. The various forms of laws (e.g. constitutions, edicts, common, etc.) are explicit, but always subject to considerable interpretation (unless you are a member of the Tea Party, in which case you know exactly what the US Constitution says!) So, perhaps an argument that the interpretation of laws (through argumentation) qualifies as a kind of sapience mechanism. I will have to give this more thought.

I agree on your conclusion re: everyone talking a different language. And as I have never found a Rosetta Stone for humanity in its current condition, I really don't try to get anyone to understand anything. Besides, I might be wrong too!

George

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