In which someone else throws my OMGbleakdarkfuture trigger
I am, by nature, a cynical man. A pessimist, even - especially when it comes to matters environmental. Some might even say overly negative. I’ve certainly shown evidence of depressive traits.
But even I feel like Happy Bozo The Happy Petrochemicals Clown by comparison to Peter Watts:
“There was never a time when things could be turned around with such petty gestures. You want to effect real change? You’ve got to address the root of the problem: human psychology. We evolved in the moment, we evolved to recognize imminent and proximate threats: pestilence, predators, an alpha male coming at us with murder in his eyes. The site of a rotting corpse or a deformed child makes us squirm; the toothy smile of a great white freezes our blood. But we never evolved to internalize graphs and columns of statistics. They may be real; they just don’t feel that way.”
That’s the most cheery paragraph. And just to preempt any possible confusion, I’m linking to that post because I think he’s utterly right.
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March 31st, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Indeed. One of the problems is that our technology has hugely changed in fractions of a lifetime, but evolutionary timescales are much, much longer (I almost typed ’shorter’ then; this is how my brain has been today…)