Points of departure have their own gravity.
They buzz with an energy that defies the stress of timetables and strollers and delays. It’s the anticipation; of leaving the routine for something new, of reuniting with something missed. Before air travel became so bureaucratized, even an airport could provoke the same frisson as a cruise terminal or a train station. I’m still drawn to the body language and expressions of people carried through the currents of a concourse, projecting every possible emotion.
This post is the point of departure for a project I didn’t realize I’d been working toward for many years. Seeing it launch makes me similarly excited. I’ve casually studied my species as objectively as possible. I’ve watched consistent and contradictory behaviors and asked what motivated them. I’ve had a long-standing respect for science and read and thought about the philosophy behind it. As climate change data has grown progressively clearer, I’ve been disappointed in our inability to recognize this as an inflection point in the trajectory of civilization. The choices we make right now will be historic in one way or another.
The Lizard Brain Project aspires to serve as a stake in the ground, a reference marker for a new conversation. If humanity fails to meet the climate challenge, this marker will be little more than a gravestone. In the event of that failure, the landscape of a sublime, unique civilization will be strewn with such markers, and this one won’t merit a second look.
In this first post, I want to establish the stakes. The fact of human life is a miracle, not in a religious sense, but because the odds have always been so stacked against it. Life itself is a miracle, and we may never know whether Earth’s particular cocktail of atmosphere, magnetic field, proteins and luck are an aberration or a consistent feature of our universe.
In light of even the possibility that we’re unique, it would be a tragedy to allow this civilization to devolve into a polycrisis of primitive violence, which is the road facing us if things don’t change soon. In other posts and interviews I will support that idea more completely. The Liberal economies and political systems forming the stage on which even developing countries now operate are only held together by trust; in the value of our currencies, in the commitment of our governments to look after us in exchange for giving up certain freedoms under a social contract. In the face of shortages of basic resources like water and cropland, in the face of drought and the breakdown of power grids, that trust will continue to dissolve. Fearful humans are violent humans, and violent humans can do a lot of harm very quickly.
We’ve lost large-scale scientific knowledge before. Ironically, after the fall of Rome a lot of human learnings were only preserved by the efforts of the newly-formed empires of Islam, whose most fundamental followers would now remove all traces of Western history and influence. I don’t believe that even the most catastrophic scenarios of climate collapse and social disintegration would result in human extinction. We’re too hardy for that, and spread too widely. But it’s entirely possible that we’d lose an overwhelming amount of knowledge. It takes a sophisticated economy to support the data centers and online libraries where our cumulative knowledge largely exists.
A core hypothesis of this project — in fact the Lizard Brain metaphor itself — is that our inability to meet this challenge so far, and in many cases our willingness to disbelieve its existence, stems from ancient survival instincts deep within us which are now leading us astray. Humans are inherently scientific. We always have been. In the last half-millennia we’ve refined that science into a very precise tool. We have all the data we need and the ability to understand the significance of that data. We have no excuse for inaction. But even now, in this eleventh hour, we’re failing to do what’s necessary. The work now is to allow our higher minds to prevail over the fearful, competitive instincts holding us back. It won’t be easy, and we don’t have much time.
On The Lizard Brain Project YouTube channel, I interview evolutionary scientists, cognitive psychologists, policymakers and anyone with a useful perspective about what stands in our way and how we move forward. Understanding ourselves for the animals we are is essential to our success. We are one global species, and the solutions to our problem must also be global.
So I invite you to read the posts. Watch the interviews. If you have something to add, please comment or submit your own posts and ideas. This is a global conversation. We need all the voices we can get if we want to provide a vision of hope. And I do have hope. In spite of all the reasons to be pessimistic, I believe in us. We’re worth preserving. Thank you for being here and helping us do that.
— Dave Coulter
11/15/2023
The Lizard Brain Project is always looking for contributors. Submit essays to submissions@lizardbrainproject.com. Or feel free to leave a comment below.
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