Rebecca D. Costa - The watchmans rattle: thinking our way out of extinction

Table of Contents

For Bailey, Ben, and Camden

A Note from the Publisher

EVERY ONCE IN A GREAT WHILE, a manuscript crosses a publishers desk that causes a flurry of excitement and expectation throughout the company. We become galvanized by the opportunity to publish a book that will forever change the way, not only how we look at society, but also how we can make it thrive in the future.

When The Watchmans Rattle first arrived in-house, I found it to be extraordinarily provocative and stimulating. I was immediately intrigued by its bold, fresh concepts. In The Watchmans Rattle, thought leader Rebecca Costa shares her compelling vision of the future via absorbing and personal prose; there is no question that this book will foster intense, healthy discourse, in addition to controversy.

In The Watchmans Rattle, Rebecca Costa posits that the escalating complexity of our personal lives, technological capabilities, and government policies has led to serious, globally threatening conditions that have outgrown our brains ability to manage them. Costa demonstrates how we tend to address the symptoms of these complexities rather than work toward long-term solutions for them, thus making ourselves susceptible to dangerous consequences. By continuing with quick fixes, our ability as a society to solve our most challenging problems becomes totally and disastrously weakened and our vision clouded. After identifying and articulating this dynamic, Costa reveals new evidence and research that shows how we can reverse this downward spiralshe hands us the tools to help take our first steps in effecting true, lasting change against the seemingly intractable challenges we face today.

Vanguard Press is proud to publish Rebecca Costa, a significant new contributor with a game-changing message about one of the most important issues of our time. I hope you are as intrigued and enlightened by her words as we have been.

Yours sincerely,
Roger Cooper

Vice President, Publisher
Vanguard Press

Foreword

by Edward O. Wilson

In The Watchmans Rattle, Rebecca Costa presents a view of the parlous human condition with which I completely agree. The clash of religions, and civilizations, she argues, is not the cause of our difficulties but a consequence of them. The same is true of the global water shortage, climate change, the decline of carbon-based energy, our cheerful destruction of the remaining natural environment, and all the other calamities close to or upon us. The primary cause of all threatening trends is the complexity of civilization itself, which cannot be understood and managed by the cognitive tools we have thus far chosen to use.

We have come to this point, Ms. Costa tells us, because humanity lacks an adequate sense of its own history. We have not faced honestly the central questions of philosophy and religion, which are scrawled in simplest terms on the canvas of Paul Gauguins Tahitian master-piece: Where did we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? By history, Ms. Costa correctly means not just of this country or that, but of the rise and fall of past civilizations and, beyond, the six million years of biological evolution of the human line, played out in intricate relationship with the rest of the biosphere.

From the long haul of biological evolution came genetic human nature. This period, during which we acquired our emotions and cognitive capacities, shrinks to an eyeblink the human history begun with the Neolithic revolution ten thousand years ago. The past three millennia have seen the exponentiation of everything gained by cultural evolution: population spread; the efficiency of work, knowledge, technology; and, unfortunately, the depletion of natural resources; the destruction of the remaining natural environment; and an increase in the war powers of more and more groups and nations.

Professional optimists like to say that doomsday predictions are as old as the written word and never come to pass. They believe that the genius and spirit of humanity have always found a way around its problems, and will again, and yet again. In short, not to worry. But to think this way is to ignore the reality of exponential change. If you have a doubling time of any entity or process of, say, twenty years, for a great many such periods the world as a whole will remain unsaturated and manageable. But at some point in any exponential growth, the next doubling time produces an absolute increase that overshoots all the space and resources left. At that point, the options for accommodation also shrink drastically.

There is great truth in the oft-quoted riddle of the lily pads. A pond (a lake, an ocean, all apply) starts with a single lily pad. Each pad doubles per day; the pond will be full in thirty days. When is the pond only half full? On the twenty-ninth day. After the next day, the thirtieth, further growth is so fast it will, if somehow continued, overwhelm the pond and everything in it in a matter of hours.

I am on the side of Rebecca Costa and otherslet us accept the title of realists-in-search-of-a-solution, not doomsayerswho say that because of exponentiation, humanity doesnt have a lot of time to figure things out. We have to solve our problems not by continuing to use emotions and responses that suited our primitive ancestors but now put us all in imminent danger. Instead, we need to use knowledge and reason and take an honest look at ourselves as a species. We need to grasp the increasing complexity of our social and political arrangements, and reach solutions. In The Watchmans Rattle, Ms. Costa urges us to do so by employing the better instruments of our genetic nature.

Introduction

ONE COLD AND RAINY SPRING DAY, I was sitting in E. O. Wilsons office in the back of the Natural History Museum at Harvard when he turned and said, Its dangerous to state the obvious.

It was a chilling warning from the most acclaimed naturalist in the world and the only scientist to be physically attacked on U.S. soil for his views.

Wilson was foreshadowing what lay ahead: the scrutiny, criticism, irrational opposition, and attempts to disparage me for using terms such as evolution and biological obstacles to explain why governments, leaders, and experts have become gridlocked.

But everyone knows we cant fix our problems anymore. The world were handing off to our children is in much worse shape than the one we inherited. Something dangerous is happening, but we havent been able to put our finger on exactly what it is.

So in his charming southern way, Wilson was simply confirming what I suspected all along: Once we discovered the reason for gridlock, it would likely look and feel obvious. The truth always does.

That said, it would have been impossible to write The Watchmans Rattle until 2006. Six pieces had to fall into place and they were 150 years in the making.

The first piece of the puzzle arrived in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species. Darwin uncovered the slow, continuous pace at which all life-forms, including humans, respond to their environment to increase their opportunities for survival. To this day, his discovery remains the most important scientific principle governing life on earth.

Then in 1953 came the discovery by James Watson and Francis Crick of the double helix in DNA. Together they unlocked the mechanics of how Darwins theories worked, and for the first time it became possible to trace the biological genesis of all living organisms. Overnight, evolution graduated from a widely embraced principle to a provable fact.

By the time E. O. Wilsons controversial book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis came along in 1975, I was already a junior at the University of California. According to Wilson, genetic inheritance plays a big role in how we behave as individuals and in groups. Human beings are not born blank slates. We are born with hardwired predispositions and instincts aimed at assuring our species survival. Natural selection has a big hand in explaining modern aggression, altruism, hoarding, competition, even mate selection.