Behavioral Problems

Are we then The Unprepared Society (1968) in relation to the consequences of improvident responses to unsettling socio-environmental trends-as described by Donald Michael 30 years ago? Outcry against the projections of the 1972 Meadows report, The Limits to Growth, and of President Carter's 1980 Global 2000 Report indicated that an outspoken sector of Americans rejected precautionary forecasts and agreed, at least tacitly, with the late Julian Simon that society has been inundated by "a surplus of false bad news."¹³ It seems probable that a plurality of people want to believe that "the best is yet to be."

So far as one may generalize, modern society collectively has not comprehended that its course of development has brought it to a basic change-of-state. Success in improving the human condition within the environment has obscured the risks incurred in its achievement. For example, advances in medicine, engineering, sanitation, and agriculture have facilitated an explosive growth of human populations, stressing all elements of the biosphere. Risks that might have been avoided have often been ignored until unwanted consequences become evident (radioactive wastes and biocides). Modern political economies have been administered with minimal understanding of, or regard for, the greater environmental context within which they are encompassed. Damage to the natural environment has been regarded as the price of progress. But this price, (often unnecessary) has bought no protection for mankind's future.

The modern view of progress has been distorted psychologically in a way that has obscured its cumulative adverse impacts on humanity. Human behavior, while driven by forces both internal (cerebral) and external (environmental), is moved by perception. How people interpret what they perceive is largely determined by their own experience within their culture, and is a legacy of generations past, transmitting interpretations of reality which may persist as after-images even though the reality has in fact changed. The man-nature dichotomy, the conquest of nature ideology, material expansion, and perpetual growth have long been dominant themes of modernity. They continue to be mantra of social behavior, albeit increasingly at odds with science-based holistic systemic perceptions of reality.

Only within recent decades has the paradigm of a world environment as an interactive multiplex feedback system with diverse and contingent limits begun to be comprehended among informed people. General Systems Theory advanced this concept and by the 1970s, systems interpretations of the world environment began to attract notice.¹⁴ In 1972 the Club of Rome initiated a series of reports on the "problematique"-"the predicament of mankind"-which assumed a multi-systemic world environment.¹⁵ Moreover the "system" is synergistic in that changes affecting one aspect of the system may cause changes in other parts of the system.¹⁶ It is truly impossible to do just one thing. Yet few people appear to understand that the ultimate environment is an interactive system and more, because it exists within a dynamic cosmos without which our living world is inconceivable. The systems synergistics concept implies an ultimate unity of knowledge, elaborated recently in writings by E.O. Wilson (e.g., Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, 1998). Yet our published knowledge of the world remains largely specialized and segregated. This may be unavoidable if research is to advance detailed knowledge. But there is also need to appreciate the connective, integrative, interactive aspects of holistic knowledge which we seem poorly equipped to comprehend, but ignore at our peril.

Why have responses to repeated and authenticated warnings of the consequences of exponential growth of the human economy been largely ignored, denied, or rejected? The reasons appear rooted in two interconnecting realms of comprehension. One may be an underdeveloped mental capacity to envision our situation on the time-space trajectory of the real world. There are today, however, vigorous organized efforts to forecast and evaluate possible futures, but they have been confined largely to so-called epistemic (like-minded) communities with little visible impact on public opinion or policy.¹⁷ To the extent that this is a deficiency, it limits our ability to perceive the interconnectedness and to evaluate consequences of trends. The connected other realm is cultural-a composite of social convention, tradition, faith, institutional inertia-and perceived self-interest. These possible root causes may be examined separately-but in the human persona they integrate to form a coherent outlook on life. The vision may be erroneous yet satisfying to a human urge for coherence and consistence with a personal view of self interest.¹⁸

The most basic and important questions regarding human behavior have yet to be answered empirically by the sciences of the brain and nervous system, complemented by sociobiology. Our assumptions today are largely based upon inference. Yet inference, drawing on human history and observed behavior, may lead to pertinent questions and hopefully to reliable hypotheses toward averting hazards to the future. Returning to our question: Have the evolved capabilities of the human mind and culture failed thus far to sufficiently equip humanity to comprehend and evaluate the consequences-good or bad-of its accelerating far-reaching impact upon its environment and thereby upon itself? Jay W. Forrester, systems scientist at MIT, thought so, and in a 1971 article published in Technology Review he wrote:

It is my basic theme that the human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave. Our social systems belong to the class called multi-loop nonlinear feedback systems. In the long history of evolution it has not been necessary for man to understand these systems until very recent historical times. Evolutionary processes have not given us the mental skill needed to properly interpret the dynamic behavior of the systems of which we have now become a part.¹⁹

Forrester's hypothesis suggests three comments. First, his observation regarding the behavior of social systems applies equally to our comprehension of "natural systems." Indeed, human social systems collectively may be regarded as a very special natural system characterizing the human species. There are other social systems in nature, notably among primates and certain insects, with a survival success record far longer than that of humanity.

Second, although biological evolution may not have initially given us the capabilities needed for valid perception and appropriate response to the multiple systems which affect our future, it does not follow that the human mind lacks an innate capacity to learn to respond rationally to the interactive dynamics of the environment. Yet it appears that human inventive ingenuity has been outrunning the underdeveloped anticipatory disposition of the human mind. History demonstrates that human societies have a capacity to learn, but it is not merely the process of learning that is necessary. Wrong lessons may be learned. The survival value of our learning is to apprehend the realities of this world and to act in consistence with its parameters. Its larger purpose would be discovery of the road to survival. It seems doubtful if many people today if they thought about it at all-would regard this as a practical or useful activity. Personal mortality is conceded-the possible collapse of human society is a subject for writers of science fiction-hardly a present issue. But humanity cannot survive apart from the biosphere within which Homo sapiens evolved; the artificial environment of the spaceship is a false facsimile of the planetary environment. If the World Scientists Warning is valid and the timing of environmental change is uncertain (the future may arrive sooner than expected), the risks that human society is incurring ought not be dismissed as unfounded alarms.

Third, Forrester appears to have believed that innate human mentality can be extended and enhanced by learning the processes of systems dynamics simulated by the computer, thereby enhancing the perceptive and reasoning processes of the mind. Humans may learn from computers how to identify and diminish risks, and to direct behaviors toward desired outcomes that are consistent with the way the world works. This is an optimistic expectation.

Computers may simulate intelligence, but they have not attained an autonomous creative intelligence (admittedly an ambiguous concept). We may never develop a computer with rational capabilities independent of engineer or programmer. A problem must at least be partially formulated in the human mind before its substance, significance, and possible solutions can be delineated by the computer's heuristic capabilities. Thus the utility of the computer as a simulator and problem-solver is ultimately dependent upon innate properties of human mentality. And computerized responses to inputs of information cannot be more reliable than the adequacy and validity of that information. The findings of artificial intelligence may not be sufficiently persuasive to overcome incompatible paradigms or mind-sets long-embedded in human culture, and reinforced by perceptions of personal self-interest.

Policy choice for the future is complicated by cognitive dissonance over questions involving relationships between population, resources, and environment. There has arisen a choice dichotomy between the perceived advantages of a continuous growth economy and, alternatively, sustainability of the environment. There appears to be a popular belief in the reality of environmental problems, but also in the necessity for economic growth and a consequent commitment to inevitable increases in human population and material consumption, infrastructure development, job-creation, and global commerce. There is emotional resistance to the concept of limits even though reasonable people might concede that growth cannot continue forever.²⁰

Problems commonly described as "environmental" are therefore often "human behavioral." For example, our assumptions and assessments regarding environmental disasters commonly misconstrue their causes, externalizing them in nature rather than internalizing them in misguided intentions and unrealistic expectations. Humans reveal a seemingly infinite capacity for evading recognition of their own errors-seeing themselves as victims of nature instead of collaborators in their own misfortunes through lack of foresight regarding the predictable behavior of nature. The question remains whether the intransigence of perception is so persistent, reason so firmly bounded, and perceived self-interest so compelling, as to preclude informed and realistic choice toward preservation of the quality of life and the environment.

Many common environmental disasters are "normal accidents." They are largely predetermined by inadvertence, misconception, inattention to the demands of high risk technologies, and to perverse defiance of nature, such as building habitations on coastal barrier islands, in river flood plains, on semi-active volcanos, or on geologically unstable terrain.²¹ Thus the causes of "human disasters" are too often behavioral. Self-destructive behavior is also exemplified in tolerated indifference to environmental degradation caused by exploitive farming, grazing, mining, deforestation, and development, and by the release of synthetic chemicals into the environment which may threaten reproductive fertility, intelligence, health, and, at worst, possibly survival.²² Creative destruction by natural forces becomes human disaster when humans have made themselves vulnerable to predictable natural events. Foresight and prudence will not avert all environmental misfortunes, but implemented in policy they might avert or diminish those predictable catastrophes metaphorically described as Nature's Revenge.