#ausvote2019

It confirms, yet again, that humanity is bringing the world ever closer to a very bleak future: a planet once perfectly balanced for life to thrive in maximum abundance being, instead, overcome by the ravaging, compounding impacts of habitat destruction, species extinctions, climate disruption, ocean change, and toxic pollution of soils, rivers and seas. On this track, there can hardly be any doubt that humanity, along with the myriad of other sentient and non-sentient species, is shaping up for dramatic declines in wellbeing over the longer-term. 

There is plenty of research from evolutionary psychology into the bases for our patently destructive behaviours. In essence, it says that Homo sapiens has an intrinsic belief that a period of want is waiting just around the corner, so we have to stock up now; we have to focus on the short-term. 

Is it possible for 21st Century societies to get past that?

Mythologies (aka 'religions', depending on their power bases) offer some insights. Whether it's indigenous cosmologies or the Yahweh myths, these belief-based control systems seem to have a mixture of negative and positive impacts on their believers and practitioners. But, in terms of positive effects, indigenous mythologies evolved in societies that were/are intimately dependent upon Nature for subsistence. Therefore, those mythologies helped to shape and enable secure human–nonhuman relationships.

I don't mean to romanticise indigenous peoples and their mythologies: there are many practices that, based purely on superstition or other false beliefs, are harmful to affected individuals, and which apparently provide no additional benefit to the community in terms of meeting environmental sustainability or other human needs. (Mutilation of male and female genitalia are obvious examples.)

Equally, I’m not criticising indigenous peoples and their mythologies; quite the opposite. There were, and are, ingenious practices that ensure the sustainability of environmental needs: water security, food security, etc. 

Some practices seem brutal, such as the practice (very rare, it should be emphasised) of infanticide in certain indigenous communities in outback regions of Australia. Reasonable people could argue that the practice was entirely logical; happening when there wasn't enough water/food for the community, and a baby is only a burden for a community struggling to survive on supplies that were extremely restricted by the realities of environmental conditions, such as an extended drought in an already-harsh desert. Brutal? Of course. Necessary? Well, what was the alternative that would have kept your nation alive for tens-of-thousands of years?

In any event, if we park such severe examples, we can still see many mythology-based practices that have the effect of preserving subsistence necessities, i.e. of ensuring ecological sustainability. Another example from Australia: the practice of totem animals, where a person is responsible for the protection of a particular species. The species is still hunted or harvested for food, but someone's religious function is to ensure that the hunting and harvesting is, in effect, sustainable. And that's all framed around a spiritual connection to that species, and to the land it comes from and lives in. Here, religion is used in a way that protects a community's food resources (and in other cases, water and other subsistence resources).

I'm not saying we should adopt such practices and start inventing mythologies. I'm really just reflecting on my own arrogance about, and criticisms of theism. 

While all the evidence tells us that there are no bases for superstitions or deities, and that religions are wrong in how they attempt to describe how the world and humans came about, other data tell us that mythologies were effective in how they understood and managed human nature; in how they controlled behaviour for the sake of future generations: for over 60,000 years, in the case of indigenous nations in Australia.

In stark contrast, contemporary individualism continues to liberate us from social controls, including those that had developed to overcome our evolved tendencies for self-harm by over-exploitation of our environment. That individualism now has, I believe, an unstoppable momentum, and that's why the future for humanity can only be devastation.