Part 1 Introduction

Jay Hanson is a man with an idea. That idea has to do with the fundamental nature of energy and the perception of the reality of energy to every manifestation of life and every activity on earth, including the human activity of gaining knowledge and the maintenance of culture and society.

About two years ago, Jay Hanson got out of the website maintenance business and handed the site over to Tom Robertson, the Moderator of the Energy Resources Group on yahoo.com. On January 16, 2003, Jay posted a message entitled "Farewell Dieoff.com" to the dieoff website, in which he summarized his work over the previous ten years.

The document contains much of interest to anyone who is concerned about the human future today. Jay wrote that he developed an interest in sustainability "when it became clear to me that our present economic system was totally unsustainable and self-destructive. It seemed little more than a well-organized method for converting natural resources into garbage." He believed that a better grasp of economic reality would be welcomed, and attempted to run for public office with the intention to publicize and clarify the flaws in the system. But disillusionment awaited him. He learned that not only are such ideas about sustainability not welcomed by the political-economic establishment, but actually the notion that the United States is a democracy is a myth – "it is actually a stealth plutocracy."

Following this disillusionment Jay undertook further studies. He researched the field of the social sciences, including sociology, cybernetics, system theory, biology, ecology, physics, and evolutionary theory, only to conclude, after several years, that "little – if any – of the so-called ‘social sciences’ (including economics) taught in our universities had anything relevant to say about the real world. Eventually I discarded social science altogether because it had absolutely nothing worthwhile to say about sustainability." The insights gained from these research activities boiled down to two fundamental laws: energy and biological evolution. He concluded that our current economic system is fundamentally incompatible with the basic energy laws of the universe, and that it could never be sustainable.

At this point Jay embarked on a study of human nature, hoping to find a key to what might actually be a sustainable form of human society. "Human nature is much more difficult to understand than energy laws for two main reasons," he wrote. "it’s not taught, and we are genetically biased against self-knowledge." He summarized the fruits of his research to two principles: the computer analogy and a social principle.

The analogy of the computer with the human brain has often been made. The idea is that the brain-matter (neurons, dendrites, etc.) form the hardware, and that thoughts are the software. The ability to think new thoughts is a facility mostly absent from people over the age of 25, for the ability to think new thoughts depends upon years of work – "to grow the brain hardware required to think the thought."

I believe that  Jay’s insight is profound, but the computer analogy, and his own rationalist bias, prevent him from grasping it fully. It is not only that to activate the cognitive functions of a human mind requires a long education – "hard-wiring." . This is not to say anything new. Nor is it even that a lifetime spent in gaining an education is a guarantee that we will be able to produce genuine thoughts.

The computer-brain analogy is false because no distinction is made between the process of thinking and the process of intellection. The computer analogy holds only for the process of intellection. It’s like saying if you want to construct a house you start by digging the basement. Sure. And then you keep adding to it, level by level. And sooner or later you find you have constructed a house for yourself. And everything’s just dandy, that’s the way you go about intellectual construction.

But there is just one problem. Your act of construction was a response to a need for a dwelling place, about which you had a prior concept of a "house." The process of intellection cannot explain the genesis of the unifying idea nor can it address the question of to what extent conceptual activity is the response to a need. Yet scientific thinking presupposes this conceptual activity all the time, although it does not explain it. It depends upon the reconciling activity of thinking to unite a mass of disjoint facts (e.g. the idea of evolution).In that sense, to think is to throw some of the hard wiring out. It is not to add and complexify but to simplify by means of moving to a different level.

Thus the peculiar characteristic of the mind is not addressed in the computer analogy. The "newness" of a thought is owing not solely to the quantity of complexity and "wiring" but upon the qualitative difference between this thought and its predecessors. In other words, there is a time-dimension, a past, and a memory, connected with the ability to form a new thought. The ability to think a new thought thus raises the fundamental question of whether, and how, human life is an enterprise of gaining self-knowledge in time.

But in this respect Jay argues himself into a tight corner. He says that human nature is difficult to understand because it is not taught and we are genetically biased against self-knowledge.  Yet where does he draw the line between the knowledge gained through the scientific study of natural phenomena and self-knowledge?  Isn't the study of biology a way of gaining self-knowledge?  I thought the Darwinians believed we gained a great deal of self-knowledge through the study of geology, and surely we would not want to deny the astronomers their two-cents worth about the general position of man vis-a-vis the universe?  So is Jay saying  we are genetically biased against some kinds of self-knowledge but not others, or that the science which has taught us so much about the world and the way we study it has no bearing on self-knowledge? And this is not even to bring up subjects like history, for example, which a few people here and there still  pursue in the deluded belief that it has something to teach about how human beings strut and fret their hour upon the stage.

 So those are just a few questions. As you see, I am beginning to have fun with it. But let's move on. Remember, Jay has just been talking about his own efforts to educate himself in the social sciences and finding the enterprise nearly worthless. He describes how he immersed himself in modern knowledge and found it barren. It was unreal, abstract, and removed from the constraints of energy that underlie every manifestation of life. Such modern knowledge – particularly in economics – was a deception and a lie.

But despite this realization, what did Jay do? He went on to acquire yet more knowledge. Let us take a pause here and allow ourselves to consider different options. It would have been possible for Jay to confront the barrenness of modern knowledge head-on, so to speak, and not try to avoid it. Such a choice was open to him – that is, to confront this emptiness, and live with it, suffer with it, suffer through it. I am not saying that he should have done this, only suggesting that the possibility of confronting this radical emptiness lay open to him, and he did not choose to pursue it. He could have taken a leap into nothingness.

Is this a strange thing to suggest? Maybe. it's kind of Zen-like. But make no bones about it – or rather, let us makes all the bones we can about it! The question hanging in the air of that nothingness that Jay refused to confront is whether the human mind is capable of regeneration and therefore whether human life is capable of achieving an ecologically sound relationship with the natural world. In this respect I go  farther along this road than Jay has. I say it is more than the ability to think a new thought that is the issue. It is nothing less than a  renovation of our mind that is now demanded. If we are serious about reducing our ecological impact upon the environment, we can only honestly begin with our own thinking, perhaps by first clarifying the relation of thinking to rationality.  For anything we think about -- nature, genes, the environment, consciousness, human nature -- is just that. It is a "thinking-about."  It is rationality, and rationality implies a distance between the activity of thinking and the object that is thought about. That is what makes rationality so useful as a tool. Thinking is separated from the object and can look at it "from outside."

But there is another form of thinking which is not so much a "thinking-about" as a "thinking-with." Indeed, our word "consciousness" means a "thinking-with" -- a con "with" + scio, to know -- the root of our word 'science.'  If "thinking-about" presupposes a divergence between my thinking and its object, the "thinking-with" assumes that I have an inner awareness by which I can be aware of myself thinking. We should not confuse the perpetual inner dialogue with which we keep ourselves company with this "thinking-with."  Self-talk has to be quieted in order for that about which we are thinking to become a subject with us -- for us, indeed, to "subject" ourselves to it. Indeed, to "subject" ourselves in this manner represents a small victory in our campaign to win a moment's respite from perpetual entrapment in our own heads.

Unfortunately, Jay’s increasing preoccupation with genetic theory rules out  serious effort to cultivate the "thinking-with." Even the idea of "thinking-with" genes, instead of about them, is a bit ludicrous. It would be like having to sprout eyes in the back of your head,  like trying to find another entry-point for subjectivity other than by means of thinking. And actually, this is an idea that has already occurred to Jay, who has used the argument that the gap between a sensory input and the mind's grasp of this input in consciousness proves that we make all our decisions subconsciously anyway.

But this is to get ahead of my story.  Jay’s researches into the human brain and its wiring apparatus led him to convert to the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, from which he deduced that our human "empirically designed pre-program" led us historically over a billion years to "maximize inclusive fitness." Now for someone unaccustomed to the jargon of evolutionary biology, I am not quite sure what this means, but I assume it means that the big brain of the human species gave it (us) a better survival mode when compared to other species. "One of these pre-programs was specifically designed to inhibit self-knowledge with respect to social issues. By remaining unaware of our true motives, we are much more effective at deceiving others."

Here I may make an observation concerning Jay’s self-education. Apparently he did not include literature, art, religion, philosophy, or poetry in his program – subjects that are interestingly termed "the humanities." But surely he is aware that the appearance of intellectualism with guile has been recorded in Western literature, beginning with the Biblical story of Creation. Later in the Bible, the figure of Jacob may be singled out as a guileful intellectual opportunist, along with his Greek counterpart, the ‘wily Odysseus,’ immortalized in Homer’s Odyssey. So Jay’s contention that we deceive ourselves and others is no new news, unless the genetic twist is offered as the final nail in the coffin. But before we bury ourselves, let us note that the big-brained species was not so inhibited in its self-knowledge that it failed to recognize, and perhaps mourn through its literature, its own loss of innocence. The myth of a Paradise or a Golden Age is universal in every culture.

Thus the idea propounded by the evolutionary biologist concerning the universality of human guile and deception belongs to this genre of self-awareness. It is the price we pay for intellect. Everybody should know this by now – if for no other reason that it explains the charm of young children, who have yet to acquire the poisoned gift of intellectuality and the ability to tell lies with a straight face. But characteristically, this insight into the nature of human intellectuality doesn’t come, in the thoughts of the evolutionary biologists, with any emotional force or vitality of feeling. It’s not rooted in any feeling. Our ancestors mourned and created cultures. We do not mourn; we state facts.

But I editorialize. Let me pull back my harness once again and continue with Jay: "Contrary to the received wisdom, people do not think and then act. They act and then rationalize."

I suppose that if one is willing to overlook the philosophical tradition, in which the relations between action and thought have been debated for centuries, that the statement is true. Most people probably do think that they think before they act. In this regard I am reminded of a point that Ortega y Gasset often made, to the effect that people do not think until something goes wrong in their environment, when something they have depended on no longer proves to be dependable. This table I am writing on, I do not think about it. But if the table suddenly collapsed, I would have to think about it, and figure out what happened to it.

It is a good point, and Jay’s intellectual journey is a good illustration of it. In the absence of any viable theory of a sustainable culture and in the obvious increase of waste, despoliation and entropy, Jay embarked on a search to find how the causes for this situation lay in human nature. All of us are now  having to think about these issues because Nature is showing the unmistakable strain of our presence. We are learning just how much we depend on Nature in all vital ways, and the subject of energy resource depletion is causing all sorts of shudders in the domain of thought. And all kinds of rationalizations as well – from the economists and the cornucopians and the fatuous promoters of The Endless Ingenuity of Human Intelligence. Jay is quite right to be disgusted with this attitude. There is a large movement of cultural revulsion today, and I have often thought that disgust and moral revulsion are an important catalyst to human thinking. It is a variant of the collapsing table, only with a moral flavor.

Be that as it may, Jay goes on to say that "in modern societies, economic growth serves as a proxy for increasing fitness…continued social stability requires us to continuously INCREASE energy use, which we now know is impossible! It should not come as a surprise that we have been pre-programmed to overshoot and crash just like other animals." He concludes his paper by saying that there are no humane solutions to the problem – "because it is impossible to solve the problem of human corruption… Unfortunately, the best the poor can hope for is a painless death."

This concludes my summary of Jay’s farewell paper, in which the hard outlines of the situation are boldly and clearly stated. It may be impossible, short of theological Calvinism, to go beyond his characterization of human depravity  and self-deception. And yet the individual writing this paper retained a belief in the value or truth of what he was saying. 

In the end, we come up against paradoxes. With the blade of moral disgust we cut out our own tongues and return to silence. If we have not yet dwelt in that silence it is because the blade is not yet sharp enough.

Part 2 The Dieoff.com e-list

The original phase of the dieoff.com discussion group was dedicated to exploring questions raised by Jay’s farewell paper. I don’t know how long this group continued in operation, but it lapsed eventually, only to re-form recently on April 1, 2004. The purpose of this reformulated discussion group was to promote a book called The Spirit of the Gene, by an Australian photo-journalist named Reg Morrison. Evidently, Jay Hanson thought very highly of this book and re-started the group in order to enable the author, Reg Morrison, to enter into discussions with his readers.

The word ‘discussions,’ however, is a bit of a misnomer. Jay and his friend Reg seem to have evolved to a place beyond dialogue to an Olympian haunt of hyper-rationalism where human-racebashing has become the common sport. Of course, it is nothing so crude and obvious as that – the pronouncements are couched in the impeccable language of biological science and clothed with the latest research into brain biochemistry and genetics. Nothing so crude as emotion is allowed to intrude on the ceaseless paeans to human passivity vis-à-vis the genes. Anyone who has the temerity to question any facet of the genetic dogma will get pages and pages of material thrown at him – whole passages from books, for example. Nobody on the message list seems to question the right of Jay and Reg to secede from humanity in this fashion and make pronouncements upon human culture with its arrogant self-deceiving delusions.

As far as that goes, I think that to call us humans "animal" is an insult to our four-footed kindred; -- a point I have made elsewhere on this website. As for the other part, Jay and Reg never think to look in the mirror for a view of arrogance and delusion.

We see according to our mode of thinking -- said St. Thomas Aquinas. Or maybe it's something about the sword that cuts both ways or the mote and beam -- old old cliches that arose from cultures long, long ago. But of what use are such homely reminders to the new men of science? The new race of men is A.D. -- not anno domini but After Darwin.

Part 3 The Transcendent Gene