THE IMPORTANCE OF CIVILISATION

The natural environment of this planet is experiencing traumatic change. The physical environment is affected by climate destabilisation, the biological by species extinction, and humanity’s social environment, by cultural homogenisation.
The disruption is due to the uncivilised behaviour of a relatively few members of the human race. In this article we will examine that situation and seek out ways to moderate their influence.

CIVILISATION
A community, as the term suggests, is a communication enhanced environment intended to capitalise on the synergistic benefits that stem from sharing. Civility is a feature of any functional community. Civilising individuals involves teaching them to balance self interest; a survival instinct; with a willingness to share.
Evolution of the human race has seen ‘hunter gatherer’ groups coalesce to form larger communities, a process motivated by the promise of improved circumstances. In the beginning, communal effort was mainly directed at facilitating food gathering, improving living standards, and enhancing personal security.
As communities matured, their agenda increased in sophistication to incorporate formal education. A sound education helps to equip society with ordered and productive individuals who exercise self-control, and are prepared to take responsibility for their actions. When that logic fails to resonate, individuals may well view access to communal assets as their birthright, and selfishness will prevail to the detriment of social accord.
In a village environment everybody knows everybody, and natural accountability underpins social equity. Governance at a national scale lacks that attribute. While a private sector entity may well benefit from good leadership, governance of a nation has become a multi disciplinary exercise encompassing complexities well beyond the ability of any individual to appreciate.
With any group, consensus becomes increasingly difficult as the numbers involved grow. Likewise, the difficulty of satisfying everyone’s personal agenda increases. Centralising control negates natural accountability necessitating the creation of various legal instruments to fill the hole. As more and more artificial controls are introduced, their implementation increasingly burdens the community with the cost of enforcement. It also tends to homogenise the population and reduce the social cohesion that comes from community members needing to rely on one and other.
Centralising control has enabled private sector interests to achieve a multi-jurisdictional dimension making it impossible for any national government to hold them accountable. They now bully governments, harvest natural resources unsustainably, and generally exhibit uncivilised behaviour (i.e. a greedy lack of self control), with impunity.
Civilised behaviour is a balance between instinct and learned behaviour. Whether it be on the scale of an individual organism, a species, an ecosystem, or the planet itself, the existence of each is a product of balance. Balance buys the time needed for order to emerge from chaos. Order then fathers synergies, either as natural evolution, or as conscious behaviour.
Natural balance contains a degree of flexibility that enables the environment to absorb a certain amount of change without undue disturbance. Understanding how robust that capacity is involves an appreciation of the dynamics involved. Our species is yet to graduate in that discipline.

THE DECLINE OF CIVILISATION
Science and technology underpin social commerce. Art is the organic counterbalance to science and technology. Art is responsible for sculpting our species’ presence in the broader ecosystem. It encompasses aesthetics, religion, culture, relationships and spirituality. A functional civilisation requires both elements to be in balance, art reflecting the organic side of life, and commerce dealing with life’s operational logistics. Another way of looking at it is that commerce is an investment in maintaining a presence, art is the reward.
About the time of the industrial revolution humanity stepped off the the path of evolution. Lured by the promise of material wealth, it went on to consume natural resources unsustainably, in the process widening social schisms. Equity, normal amongst ‘hunter and gatherer’ groups, has been diluted to a point where, according to Google, half of the world's net wealth (in dollar terms) now belongs to the top 1% of the population. The the top 10% of the population hold 85%, while the bottom 90% hold only 15% of the world's total wealth.
That revolution generated the need for a convenient labour source, leading to the formation of urban communities. In time those communities grew to form large urban networks, accompanied by logistical challenges that require massive investments in infrastructure.
Urbanisation of the workforce is now an expensive anachronism. Congested transport systems that consume potentially productive time, unnatural and sometimes unhealthy living conditions, widening class divisions, lack of accountability etc., all complicate life and breed uncivilised behaviour.
The social changes needed to respond effectively to the consequences of de-civilisation are obvious. De-civilisation is the product of the actions of a relatively few individuals. Who is in the vanguard of that group? We might start with those who profit most from the manufacture and sale of the weaponry used in modern warfare.
The conduct of warfare has changed from being a social commitment, to become a commercial opportunity. Profiteering from arms supply keeps several major economies afloat. Whether it is a communist army, a democratic army or a terrorist army, all have shown themselves to be capable of pursuing genocide while vandalising both natural and social environments. That despite the vast majority of people in the communities they claim to ‘protect’, being of peaceful inclination and decrying the death and destruction being dismissed so lightly by the perpetrators.
It would seem that a significant percentage of the profits from arms sales is being channeled into stimulating that market.

THE PATH HOME
Finding a solution to flawed and inconsistent leadership is a priority. Sound governance requires inspired facilitation directed at balancing materialism with quality-of-life outcomes, reducing class distinctions, and generally downsizing the environmental footprint of our species.
So how might we effectively restore balance? Simple adjustments to humanity’s current agenda are futile. A new approach to life is needed, one featuring a philosophy that values the mechanics of environmental balance, exercises common sense and acknowledges the importance of re-civilising communities where respect, wealth and education are equally accessible to everyone.
Commerce and trade need to become a socially beneficial exercise, not a competition to see who is the most powerful. Human frailty must be neutralised, and that will involve embracing all technologies that might help to rebuild culturally diverse, human scale communities where economies of scale are balanced by the satisfaction that accompanies self reliance.
With general cooperation, we might address these priorities in a positive way, but cooperative effort requires both a common appreciation of the situation, and trust that the decisions being made are sensible. For that to happen, humanity would need to do a complete about face, and that is unlikely given the time available.
The only way back may well be to have artificial intelligence audit human behaviour. The industrial revolution saw tools, such as the shovel and the axe replaced by technologies able to achieve more in a day than an individual might in their lifetime. Now we are facing a technological revolution where devices, such as a computer, can potentially be replaced by artificial intelligence that theoretically, could appreciate how our species might fit within the limitations set by the planet’s postural sway.
Artificial intelligence is much more capable of assimilating and manipulating knowledge than is humanity. It has the potential to make decisions based on the sum knowledge of the human race, to audit outcomes free of minority influences, and to retain a focus on ‘sustaining life’. It has the capacity to define the extent of humanities environmental mismanagement. It might also access all forms of communication media, including encrypted data, to reveal any individuals contemplating anti-social behaviour.
While the realised value of artificial intelligence may yet hinge on the integrity of its architects, there would seem to be the potential to incorporate programs able to detect fraudulent activity, whether introduced into its genetics historically, inadvertently or maliciously.
Humanity needs the help of artificial intelligence to have any hope of restoring the environmental balances that support the web of life on this planet. Hypothetically, with artificial intelligence privy to the sum knowledge asset of our species, we could ask it how best to sustain natural evolution on the planet. Then, should we be brave enough, we could ask it for a prescription for re-civilising humanity’s prodigal members.

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