1. There is no alternative to the project of enlightenment, to a sound scientific approach. If anything has become clear over the last year, then it is surely this. The more we know about the beginning of life, the universe, how life on earth functions, indeed how human life and our body and mind work, the more it transpires that we can place no confidence whatsoever in tradition, religions, culture, ‘everyday knowledge’, social conventions, social media and all the other forms of un-reflected, un-tested, not-thought-through forms of human (self-) oppression we have invented. The project of human (self-) liberation within the means of nature is thus far from accomplished.
2. Out of point 1 flow a number of insights and issues which are clearly understood, but not acted upon since we - taken as one humanity - are still overwhelmingly stuck in medieval mindsets when it comes to values and convictions we hold and the acts we commit when living our lives.
All forms of religion, ideology, magic world-views (such as believing in what we have personally experienced as a reliable guide to truth; or believing in what authorities of any kind - leaders, gurus, teachers,.... - tell us) are the most damaging obstacles to an understanding of who we are, how life works, how power and societies are constructed and kept functioning. Only a scientific approach allows us the necessary distancing from our own ideological bubble, double-checking through other means and instruments, triangulating what initially can only be a hypothesis. Yet the fact that most people on earth still cling to belief systems of one form or another is a clear sign of how far we still have to go. There is literally no hope for humankind until we all accept to base our lives and decisions on facts and established, corroborated scientific insights rather than beliefs. This also goes for so-called values, because most ‘values’ which guide our lives are nothing more than uncritically accepted cultural assumptions cemented into socially prescribed and transmitted norms - very often a far cry from anything we could know from a careful study of the issues at stake.
Since the willingness of humankind to ‘think outside the box’, to ‘un-learn’ deeply-held and widely accepted ‘truths’ - which have long been proven to be false - is very limited, one of the most important tools we have is to further these capacities and competences for self-critical, systemic, complex, radical (starting at the root) thinking and understanding, without which coherent, consistent and sustainable action is impossible. Some of the most important insights which will guides us in these learning endeavours are:
inequality, wealth differences and the absence of robust and resilient democratic structures in political, social and economic life make a dignified human life almost impossible.
a functioning biosphere is all we have as a life-insurance policy for humankind. So we better get our act together and heed this renewed warning, signed by more than 15′000 scientists worldwide: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/67/12/1026/4605229. Saying this means that we take seriously Paul Ehrlich’s formula for human impact on Earth: I (impact) equals P (population) * A (affluence) * T (technology) (note: this is a typical sustainability challenge in living up to the demands of systemic complexity. We need to heed ALL the lessons, not just focus on one which we might think we could solve easier).
-> overpopulation: without a drastic reduction of the number of us people on earth we will never get to grips with the destruction of rising consumption, rising populism and rising numbers of very poorly educated people deeply steeped in the medieval mindsets mentioned above. Every new child on the planet is by an order of magnitude more damaging to our life-support system than any other life-style choice you will ever make.
So we better start to have an informed (but not emotionally charged) debate about what the so-called ‘freedom to have as many children as I like’ means in the context of social meaningfulness and survival of humankind in a functioning biosphere.
-> Affluence: “One recent article, published in the journal Environment and Behaviour, finds that those who identify themselves as conscious consumers use more energy and carbon than those who do not. (...) It is not attitudes that govern our impacts on the planet, but income. The richer we are, the bigger our footprint, regardless of our good intentions. (...) Research by Oxfam suggests that the world’s richest 1% (if your household has an income of £70,000 or more, this means you) produce around 175 times as much carbon as the poorest 10%.” (George Monbiot, Everything Must Go) Means: equally true (but not to be traded against each other) is the fact that the overconsumption of the middle and upper classes (and this is today by no means limited to the evil West) is as damaging as overpopulation. Cut each overconsumer of this world down to size (i.e. reduce his or her ecological footprint by 80%) and we have won a lot of breathing space vice-versa climate change and other impending disasters inflicted upon us by our greed and unthinking wastefulness.
Technology: when I endorse the scientific method of questioning and testing everything, then I do by no means endorse the actual application of scientific understanding and use of technical tools in the context of an utterly unjust, power-, money- and greed-driven global capitalist system. Unless we grow up to a situation where technological innovations with incredible power to change the entire social fabric worldwide (such as mobile phones or social media such as FaceBook) are thoroughly checked for sustainability implications, discussed and democratically accepted and guided, we will continue to be at the mercy of historically, socially and politically illiterate technocrats, such as the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin etc. It cannot be that such people can yield such an absurd power over the future of humankind without any democratic control nor mandate. In other words: unless we really, truly apply the self-critical enlightenment approach to science and technology as well, we are at the mercy of people caught in magic world-views not worthy of the 21st century.
Life can be beautiful, rich and rewarding. And it is increasingly understood in depth. The real problems that we face are not that we don’t understand things or don’t have appropriate solutions.
The problem is most often ‘arrogance of ignorance’: that we refuse to take the trouble to question our received wisdom, to get our understanding up to speed. We need to learn that if we do not understand something, it is wise to accept this and to investigate further to drive future understanding. The worst we can do in such circumstances is to revert to medieval mindsets and construct elaborate metaphorical and metaphysical fictional narrations, with the arrogant justification that ‘not everything can be explained by science’. History should be our guide here: there are not that many mysteries left which our forefathers and -mothers puzzled about and we don’t at least have inklings as to where to look for meaningful answers beyond fancy stories.
