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steev points me towards a book called Ishmael. i've only read the page i just pointed you to, and only just now, so i won't say anything more than that's what brought this up. it looks pretty interesting, but isn't on the same tangent that this post is on. if you want a real devolution: i keep finding references to the 70's (as this book), where the idealism is still there from the late 60's, but now with a practical attitude. people really tried to make progress, unlike just idly dreaming about it. much better. more on that someday.

missy pointed me to Life of Pi, which i then surprisingly read. without giving anything away, it's about an Indian zookeeper's son, self-nicknamed Pi, recounting how he survived being stranded in a lifeboat for 200+ days. no, it's nothing to do with math. the part which is relevent here is a nice rant Pi goes on about how zoos are really pretty great places for animals. everything's taken care of - food, shelter, mating, medical, dental. people have romantic notions about the animals' freedom being sacrificed for a life in captivity, but that freedom really equates to a very difficult subsistence living in constant fear of predators and uncertain resource supply. there's nothing at all romantic about that. you're given the choice of freedom every day. you can walk away from everything to live in the woods if you choose. yet no one does. which life would an animal choose if it could?

but regardless of whether we overidealize our hunter-gatherer past, the cat's out of the bag now, and i think it's the cat's nature to do that. since the start of life, life has gotten more complex and interrelated. the first multicellular organisms may be the ones to blame, since they discovered cooperation can be beneficial. global society now is just another step. i think it's going backwards to try to simplify things. buckminster fuller (i'm now a huge fan) was on this track. the more you get people interrelated and cooperating, the less likely they'll be to start fights. that's the hope, anyway.

but the main reason i think we can't go back is the reason for writing this post. as far as i can reason, life really is an arms race. evolution is not tolerant of the lazy or kind, and forces things to keep progressing. if you separate and start a rural commune, eventually someone nearby will see the resources you have (or see you as a resource) and force you to do something with the technology they invented while you were whittling slide whistles.

there seems to be a line just between conflict and cooperation where things work the most efficiently. anything competitive works under this rule. Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe talks about this at length. it implies to me that, as life, we're bound to this as well. certainly history seems to show civilization walking this line constantly. but it's incredibly disheartening to me, since i want to believe in cooperation, and in laziness and kindness. and i've never been good at making myself believe in things with prevailing evidence to the contrary.

the best that i can see is that despite the arms race, life grows in complexity (until a catastrophic event). society likewise. and as complexity grows, so often does cooperation, as individuals realize they're stronger if they bond together. but cooperation leads to laziness, and so we're riding the conflict/cooperation line again as someone else spurs us into getting it into gear.

so is that the best we have? i'm looking to be convinced into a rosier worldview. any help appreciated.

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fear of a self-imposed "catastrophic event" is i'm guessing what Ishmael is dealing with. certainly that was the drive behind bucky fuller. enough civilizations have done themselves in already, and it'd be silly to think we're above that. i'd like to read Jared Diamond's latest, Collapse, which deals with this.