 This is ThinkTech. I'm Jay Fidel. Welcome to Community Matters. Actually, it should be way beyond that. It's not only Community Matters. It's Political Science Matters. It's Ecology Matters. It's Coronavirus Matters. It all matters. And we've got to get our hands around it. And Lewis Herman is going to help us do that. He's a Political Science Professor and much more at UH East Manoa, West Manoa, West O'ahu. West O'ahu is just, yeah, it's not Manoa. I want to be clear. Okay. Sometimes we have to get out of Manoa and go West Young Man. So Lewis, what is ecology anyway? Well, ecology is the study of the relationship between living systems to one another, living creatures to one another. It's basically how the species on Earth live together, evolve together, and sustain one another. But you don't consider a virus a living creature then? For sure. Absolutely. And viruses evolved along with cells. They ancient. I mean, there are several theories about the evolution of viruses, but they've been around for at least one and a half billion years. That's billion, not million. And emerged soon after cells or even some theories that they merged with cells. They're sort of partial cells. Okay. Well, so I guess that's very important. I mean, I would like to sort of shape this conversation could take six hours, but I would like it to develop the relationship between the coronavirus, the virus and the ecology, or at least to know where it fits in the ecology, in the evolution of the ecology, in the evolution of humankind. So this is really a mouthful. Why don't we give you a few minutes to go through your slides? Because I know you need to do that. It's okay to do that. You get some time from that, Louis. So why don't we start with slide one and see if you can go through them quickly. Okay, sure. Yeah, I mean, a picture can just communicate a lot of big ideas very quickly. And that's very obviously graphics speaks 1000 words. Cool. So that that first picture, I don't know if we can have it bigger here. You know, basically, talking about the proximate cause of these pandemics is our style of industrial agriculture, in particular, CAFOS, concentrated animal feeding operations, which crowd immense numbers of animals together under very stressed, unhygienic conditions, pump them full of antibiotics, and manage to keep them alive long enough to produce a lot of meat. This is done in close association with dense human populations. Generally, both populations are stressed. And it's a perfect breeding ground. It's like the Silicon Valley for incubating pandemics, incubating infectious diseases. And the evidence is that about 60 to 76% of recent there's recent rise in infectious diseases is due to this kind of farming is due to our modern system of industrial industrialized monoculture. So so modern farming, and by the way, it was a great piece on PBS frontline about modern farming, about the guy who made scientific farming and brought it to the whole world in order to start to save off starvation. And then he found that that that that the modern farming and all these crops and foods were creating, you know, overpopulation. And then we wound up with the same kind of starvation that he was trying to prevent in the first place. It's very interesting. Yeah, the food system is broken. Yeah, right. So when you move from hunter gatherer, and you get into scientific agriculture, and you get into cities and crowds and, you know, compressed humanity, you get a you get a really bad thing. It's much worse than life in the good old days as hunter gatherers. But it follows, you know, because the search by mankind all these years, 100,000 years has been trying to live live in a, you know, a quality of life world, have all the science and technology and food all around us. As soon as we do that, we get in trouble. So it's a, you know, it's a self defeating process. How could we not have gotten into agriculture? How could we not have gotten into technology and compressed cities? We had to do that, didn't we? It's our destiny, isn't it? Uh, it's our, I think it's our destiny to, to grow in consciousness and awareness of what we are and what our place on the planet is, but their pathologies of civilization. I mean, it's, it's a fascinating subject. Why we moved into civilization settled cities around 10,000 years ago within theolithic revolution. And the evidence suggests that this was not a happy choice because we wanted to improve our lives. We are forced by desperate necessity in part, climate change, the drying of North Africa, the extinction of the big animals, the big charismatic megafauna and human beings were effectively starved into agriculture. And with the rise of civilization, you begin to get these infectious diseases and all, all sorts of other pathologies, which intensify about 5,000 years ago with the classic civilizations where you have these mass human populations under generally very unsanitary conditions, often living pretty close to their own sewage. And the beginning of domestication, well, domestication begins with the neolithic domestication of animals. And so you've got crowds of human populations, not very healthy living next to in close regular intimate contact with animal populations, initially cattle and horses and then pigs and dogs and ducks and birds and so on. Perfect breeding ground for viruses and other infectious organisms crossing from the animal population mutating and affecting the human population. Well, you know, there's two ways to go. One way is we solve the virus problem. We bring all our best minds, our best biotechnology down on it. And we figure out how to stop the virus, this virus and other viruses that are, you know, pathogenic or that's one possibility. And then we can live the life that we have been evolving to over the past 100,000 years. Or we can go back to hunter-gatherer. Which would you prefer? Because this is only, or we can stay, you know, static right here, right now, which I don't think works at all. It's obvious that it doesn't work. So we can go this direction or that direction. Which direction are you advocating? Yeah, yeah. Now, we need a creative movement for it. It's not just a choice between this or that hunting-gathering or this pathological form of civilization. You know, we've got to remember that with civilization, you get hierarchy, domination, slavery and warfare. And that has been a marker of civilization. It's virtually endemic to civilization. But at the same time, you get all the wonderful benefits that you've catalogued, including science and technology, writing, specialized knowledge. And we have the capacity to put it all together and get a better picture on one of the possibilities for human existence, where we actually use our technology and our genius to serve needs other than just more food or more wealth, which is currently the plan that we are. So we're actually following a plan, which made a bit of sense in the 17th century when this plan was formulated by the great philosophers of modernity and created industrial civilization. But they weren't playing with a full deck. They had zero knowledge of anthropology. The new world had just been discovered. The understanding of ecology was abysmal. They were emerging from centuries of holocausts with the collapse of medieval Europe. And so, you know, it's time to revise our reality map in the light of this incredible vision that we've been gifted through in part science and the achievements of industrial capitalism. But the old model is dysfunctional. We're going over the edge. There's no getting rid of viruses. We have to reinvent the way we make decisions about how we feed ourselves, how we reproduce. Human population is exploded. We know how to control human population. It's very simple. Educate women. Give them the possibility of earning their own living so they're not enslaved to men as baby machines. So the way forward, I mean, there are a million different points of choice where we can start creating the better world that our hearts know is possible. Well, where does the mammalian thing fit? You and I talked about this. You know, I always feel that you can explain a lot of human conduct by just remembering that we're all mammals. We're all mammals just like the other mammals. And we are mammalian animals. And we are hunger. We want sex. We want sleep. We want comfort. These things drive us. And how can you take that out of the equation? But all of that aside and go into a visionary mode? No, no, no. But the visionary mode, that's a great question, Jay. I love that. Yeah. The visionary mode is part of a deal. So it's not just feeding ourselves. It's not just reproducing. We are mammals. We primates. We share about 96 to 98 percent of our genes with primates, with higher chimps and so on. But there was a revolution. There was a leap forward in the evolution of life about 100,000 years ago, when the human emerged, the modern form of the human between 200 and 100,000 years ago. And what marked the human, what marked the distinction between the human and the primate, was our capacity for self-reflection. In other words, it was a form of consciousness that could reflect on itself and could reflect on its own history. And this opens up a whole Pandora's box of creative possibilities for the human. And we still haven't quite grasped that as a species. We're still in our adolescence. We don't really know who we are and what we're doing here. And part of that, the defining... Do we know more than they did 100,000 years ago? You know, I have this vision. Did you ever have this vision, Lewis, where you could go back and talk to yourself, talk to an earlier version of you, talk to you at, say, 10 years of age and see what you were made of at 10. And you'd find out you didn't know anything. You'd find out you were really half-baked on so many things. And it all came later. It all came in the last 99,000 years. I would be really fascinated with the literary effort and trying to figure out, we should talk about your book, trying to figure out what my meeting would be. I want to have a meeting, okay? Even a talk show with somebody who lived in that period. I don't want to find out what he would have to say to me. Would it be self-introspective? Would it be visionary? What would he be thinking about? He has no base of operation, no fundamental... Would he be just a moron? Or would he be somebody that would be interesting? And I want to get him on the talk show. I hope you can help me do that. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's actually been part of my life's work, is getting in touch with that part of myself. Because don't forget that when we're all born, we are little primates coming into the strange world. We're not that different from the children of the great ancestors of the Sun Bushmen of South Africa 50,000 years ago, 75,000 years ago, essentially the same animal. So we all start off at the same point. We all start off as a little hunter-gatherer, primed for hunting, gathering and intimate bands in a pristine wilderness. And I was blessed enough to grow up in South Africa, 60s and 70s, well 60s basically, where a lot of the country was still pristine. You could still experience, you could still get a sense of what life must have been like when you had elephants and monkeys as neighbors, when snakes crawled around in the bush, when the ocean was full of animals. So when you think of hunter-gatherer, you're thinking of that, of that that you saw in South Africa when you were a child. Exactly. That's a really robust vision of it. Exactly. And South Africa is a particularly powerful place to do this because so much of that original ecosystem is intact. It has one of the richest concentrations of bush, mountain and ocean ecosystem in a small space anywhere in the world. It's one of its biodiversity hotspot on the planet. And plus, you've got the remains of human habitation going back 100,000 years in these magnificent rock shelters on the beaches of South Africa. There's something like 3,000 that have been discovered and probably about 30,000 that exist. So it's quite easy to trip back in that and lead that sort of life for a couple of hours a day. Yeah, it's beautiful, beautiful. And you can see how it's unspoiled and humankind did not spoil it. If they moved on from place to place as hunter-gatherer, it would leave it pristine. And then you have the South African cities, which are pretty tumultuous and have a lot of people. And many, many cities in Africa, I'm thinking of Lagos in Africa. It's really over populated. And they have epidemics there. And so the question, I can take a perfectly good hunter-gatherer environment, hunter-gatherer ecology, such as the kind that you can remember back with a joy of a refreshing view of the world and ruin it. You can ruin it. You can ruin any place, any part of land if you make it a condensed city. Right. So we've got a couple of keys here. We've got to obviously get a handle on global population. And the way to do that again is through mobilizing this mutation that took place in the primate that produced the human brain, capable of knowledge and self-reflection. Because self-reflection gives you choice. And it means that you committed to gathering knowledge. The more conscious you are of reality of where you come from, who you are, the more options you've got about choosing where to go. And what is a life-loving, life-affirming way to go forward. So we've got to mobilize that and deal with human population. We've also got to decentralize. Because what's driving the central movement from land to cities is a form of economics that's driven essentially by a formula that says it's okay to pursue wealth above all else. That the primary moral responsibility of CEOs is to make as much money as possible. This comes, this is the neoliberal formula of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, you know, primary responsibility of businesses to make money. You can't run a civilization or a society on that basis and not expect to find massive political corruption that's endemic to the society, coupled with epidemic levels of ignorance. Is it sustainable? You know, in the world we know, can it go on for say two or three hundred years that way? No way. Now we've hit the wall already. You know, we've got all sorts of markers of this with the ecological meltdown. You know, the world economic forum is estimated by 2050. There'll be more plastic than fish in the oceans. If we kill the oceans, we destroy the climate in a way that's absolutely irreversible. We are on the cusp now of being able to save the biosphere. But we've got to estimate 10 years at the max to turn the whole thing around. We need a new formula. Instead of a profit-driven free market, we need a wisdom-driven free market. And by wisdom, I mean knowledge of the best way to live. In other words, it's got to be morally driven. It's got to be concerned with an understanding not just about own personal lives or our own personal desire to get more for ourselves, which is the current formula generating the epidemic levels of political corruption and ignorance in our society today. But we've got to be driven by concern for finding the optimum balance between self-interest and the good of the whole. Because we know that our well-being, this pandemic has made it abundantly clear, is connected to the well-being not only of human beings, but all living systems, the ecology as well. So you've got to turn the formula on its head. Instead of having profit number one, we've got to have wisdom as number one. So what we're talking about really is a cultural revolution, a revolution in values. This is not going to be a top-down sort of institutional demolition job. This has got to be bottom-up and it's happening. It's enormously inspiring to see this springing up in all sorts of environments. Well, let me throw one answer about that. Like this great documentary about agriculture. I forget his name, he was from the Midwest and he invented new ways, the Green Revolution they called it, to growing crops all over the world. It was adopted all over the world and it feeds, you know, enormous numbers of people even now. But you know, it creates too many people, if you can say that. And ultimately, there isn't enough space, there isn't enough planet for them, whatever kind of technology you use on growing crops. And so, you know, what I put to you is that there's a tipping point here. You can do this, you can do exactly what you're saying, but if you have more than X number of people on Y planet, this planet, they cannot survive. It is not sustainable and many of them will have to die. Arguably, it's the same process we're talking about, except it won't be 8 billion. There will be a fraction of 8 billion because the planet can sustain them in the manner that you're describing. Am I right? Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, in the manner that I described, you know, with sustainable organic agriculture, which is decentralized and localized, people would be living much healthier lives. You'd have the possibility for a more educated, less oppressed population. You detach it from the current model, which is patriarchal, where in the third world, most women are not economically independent of their husbands. And so, under conditions of poverty, populations out of control, wherever women are educated, you have stabilization of population. So that's one way to go. The other way is to consider what this current form of agriculture is doing to the planet. It is absolutely unsustainable. It's destroying top soil every year. I think the amount is about 5 billion tons of top soil are washed into the Gulf of Mexico and America. That's just America alone. It's depleting groundwater. About two thirds of all water on planet Earth, fresh water is used for agriculture. Half the rivers in China no longer reach the sea. The United Nations has estimated that by 2030, the demand for fresh water will overshoot supply about 40%. We've already got water wars in Syria and North Africa. So we've hit the wall, basically. The longer we leave it, we leave it another year, the more painful the process of transformation is going to be. And we could just tip over the edge. We don't know. There's no certainty in this. We used to see climate change articles and ecology articles, environment issues and protests and what have you, every day in the newspaper. And then came coronavirus, which is at the top of the media heap. And we're going to hear about that 24 by 7 every day until somehow it is dealt with. And so that has to be, or at least I can't imagine it in another way, that has to be number one priority because it's killing people as we speak. So the question is ultimately the relationship between that virus and the perfect ability of humankind. What do we do now to get there? Clearly, we've got to deal with the virus with all the tools of medicine and common sense and hygiene that we can. We're doing that. It's not just a matter of isolation. Isolation is part of the deal, but many people who get infected don't show symptoms. So how compromised your immune system is is a critical factor. What boosts the immune system? How do we create a healthy population? That's part of the equation as well. And then the long-term question is, how do we stop generating infectious diseases and pandemics at such an exponential rate? And the answer there is very, very simple. Our system of agriculture is primarily, is the primary driver for destroying wilderness habitat that an urban sprawl and creating these Silicon Valley incubators for infectious diseases. So we've got to deal with that at that source. And there are the really, really good reasons why we should be doing this anyway. It preserves groundwater. It stops soil erosion. It doesn't poison our food. It produces more nutritious food. It puts more people on the land doing satisfying, spiritually satisfying, meaningful, healthy work. You know, all the indications are people would rush to go back to farming, small-scale farming. If it was done in a way that was life enhancing, not the slave farms of industrial monoculture. What about meat? What about cows? What about chickens? What about that? That is that is the heart of the catastrophe are the caffers, the concentrated animal feeding operations. Because in order to keep those animals alive, you need first of all, subsidized corn. They fed corn, which is not a healthy food for a cow, if in the case of beef, they designed to eat grass, not corn. So corn gets them very fat very quickly. But it also ulcerates the liver. They get sick. They suffer bloating. They've got to be given continual low doses of antibiotics. They crowded into conditions where they're standing in their own manure. They stressed unhealthy animals. It's a breeding ground for infectious diseases. And we hospitalize that about 130,000 people a year with things like salmonella, antibiotic resistant E. coli that are generated by these feedlots. So there are actually initiatives now in Iowa, for example, I think Cory Booker has just proposed some legislation to outlaw caffers. But of course, the lobby behind this kind of industrial agriculture is running the government. These are immense operations. You've got immense concentrations of power and wealth behind these operations. Don't forget we have pigs, not only beef, we have pigs and poultry and it's huge. And that's an inherent political science point of view that's inherent in controlling the decision process of the government. So you really have to, you say revolution, you really have to change that. Those lobby groups, those capital concentrations cannot be permitted to make policy for the government. Absolutely. I mean, it's undermining what it has. We've seen in the political dramas of the last few years, our democracy is withering. I mean, checks and balances are increasingly meaningless. The whole formula of government is losing its credibility. So, you know, real democracy is what at stake. And real democracy doesn't exist as Benjamin Franklin noted. You can't have democracy with too much ignorance, with a population that is not educated. So education to me is the driving force in this revolution. That's a revolution of consciousness. It's not a matter of tearing down institutions. It's a matter of waking up individuals. You know, and your work and your show, to me, is part of this whole process of transformation. This sort of getting the word out, giving a voice to people who just ordinary folks, you know, college teachers, people working in the community, whatever. Well, we like, we certainly like to have people like you on. But I don't want to block you from talking about your slides. We have a few minutes left and you have roughly 30 seconds on each slide. Sorry about that. See what you can do with it. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Jay. Go ahead. Let's talk about the slides. There we go. Okay. So, you know, this is, these are actually bullet points. This was Peter Russell's metaphor for understanding, you know, our place on planet Earth. The Earth is about 4.6 billion years. So he wanted to give a graphic sense. He wanted to try and help people understand what 4.6 billion years is like. So he plotted the history of the Earth and the emergence of humanity against the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. And this was, of course, before 9-11 and they're blown up. And in a way, it was kind of darkly prophetic of a crisis in civilization. So if we start at 4.6 billion years, we don't get plants, we don't get the first cells until the 25th floor, the 108 floors of the World Trade Center. It's about a quarter mile high. We don't get plant life until the 50th floor, you know, which is about halfway up. No plants on Earth until halfway through the life of the Earth. Dinosaurs only appear at the top of that yellow column, the top, not the whole yellow column, which is the 104th floor. And mammals don't even appear on Earth until the top story of the 108 floors of the World Trade Center. Homo sapiens appear a quarter of an inch from the ceiling. And the whole of civilization is equivalent to a layer of paint on the ceiling of the top floor of the World Trade Center. So of course, you know, this is an exponential growth curve in terms of informational complexity. And then we get this explosion of informational complexity with a human and the emergence of culture and science and learning and writing and what we're doing now. I mean, the miracles of electronic communication. So this is actually a singularity. The singularity is not technological. The singularity is in consciousness, the capacity to store and comprehend and make decisions on the basis of information. So this of course leads us to what would the application of this knowledge and this creativity help us envision for a post-pandemic world, which is really, I guess, you know, the topic for another couple of talks. Yeah, I'm afraid it is. But maybe there was something in me that, that, you know, let us leave the web there for most of the show. I hope the notion I was, I want to trick you into coming back and going through other slides. Yeah, maybe one more slide. There's one slide of how long we've been hunter-gatherers or two more slides, I think. Yes, okay, go. Do we have time for that? Yeah, sure. Okay, so, you know, these are block columns of the time human beings have been on earth in blocks of 20,000 years, a left-hand column. Hunter-gatherers emerged about 120,000 years ago, probably earlier. Most of the evidence is from 120,000 years. Agriculture only emerged 10,000 years ago and didn't really kick off until 5,000 years. That's that middle little blue column. And then, of course, industrial would actually be invisible on this scale because it's only been around for 500 years and only kicked into high gear in the 19th century. Yeah, so the question is, what happened? And what happened is, I mean, these historical questions, absolutely fundamental. I think we need another slide. This is what should be essential learning in any high school curriculum. It could even be brought into elementary school education. Could you just show one more slide, the slide of industrial civilization? Okay, so this is what happened in the 16th century. These are the foundations of industrial civilization, leading to these exponential growth curves in population, mobility, information, energy. The bottom axis are centuries. The arrow marks 1600, where all this took off. And this is basically where you had three revolutions converging, ending feudalism. Science, capitalism and the Protestant Reformation. And this was formulated into an operating system, if you like, for human beings on planet Earth, which we call liberalism, classic liberalism. If you study the actual writings of those philosophers, Thomas Tarbs, Maccabrelly, John Locke, Adam Smith, founding fathers, and it was a genius achievement under the conditions of the Holocaust or the collapse of feudalism. But it doesn't work anymore. It's time's run out. It was flimsy in the 17th century. Now it's a formula for global ecocide. Time to be creative. And maybe you can show up the last one again of the creative slide. Do you have that, Eric? There we go. This is a graphic representation of the sort of creativity that we need. You know, just to liberate, because creativity is the last thing to operate in politics. Politics is primarily, as we understand it, corruption, power, self-interest. And what we need is, you know, a creative expression of what's good for all. Which is freedom. You need freedom for creativity. One of the fundamental features, freedom and imagination. And there's another one, love of life. We've got a fact of that in. Love of all of life. We've got to fall in love with the earth again. That's a bottom line. Unless we do that, we're done for because the earth literally, absolutely scientifically, is our mother. The earth literally is the closest face of the creator. Which means we're moving into a new earth religion. Well, I mean, we like it or not, the pandemic is going to change us all. It's going to take us to a new place. I do want to spend some time with you next show, actually, finding out what that place is like, what it should be, what it might be, and how we get there. Before we go, though, actually, Louis, can you talk about your book for a minute and how I can find out more about your thinking and your writing? Sure. Yeah, the book's a good place to start because it includes one thrill of the book is my story, which is part of the model, the reality map model. How do we know reality? You've got to know your own head. You've got to know how your passions, your urges, your emotions have been shaped by your history. And so that's one thread. And you'll get the thread, really, of my searching for reliable knowledge about how to be a decent human being, a little bit of good life. And I stumbled a lot. I grew up in South Africa under apartheid and studied in Cambridge, England, got a science degree, and then volunteered to go and live on a kibbutz in Israel and volunteered for the military and confronted death and all that sort of stuff. That's part of my worldview. The other part is, as the book expands, the big picture, the big story, not only my waking up, but humanity's waking up. So it's the story of humanity. And the model, really, the best model we have of that wonderful question you asked at the beginning, which was, what would it be like to go back in time 50,000 years ago and talk to a hunter-gatherer? The Sun Bushmen of South Africa give us the best picture of that life until pretty recently, until about the 1970s, there were still groups hunting and gathering in the same environment where their ancestors had for at least the last 30,000 years and probably 100,000 years. And they're absolutely fascinating in terms of giving us ideas for rethinking politics. And so the book goes through that. It examines the Bushmen, their religion, their way of life, their politics, and then concludes with applications to modern industrial society, where we see signs of this future primal politics emerging. So the name of the book is? Future Primal. Future Primal and where is it available? It's available online, Amazon, or you can contact me. I'm happy for people to email me or whatever, contact Jay and he'll give you my contact information. We've also started an institute affiliated to UH West Oahu called the Institute for a New Political Cosmology, which is really what we're talking about, a new reality map, new worldview. Well, I certainly want to come back and discuss more. I have a million questions and you still have a lot of slides and we can banter them back and forth between us in further discussions. But I want to leave you with an image that you have left with me. They have coronavirus in Brazil. And also in Brazil, they have primitive tribes, primal, primitive tribes, who live in the deep Amazon and who live the way they have lived for how many tens of thousands of years. And when confronted with the reality of the coronavirus, they are really ticked off. They are ticked off that those holy guys in the eastern end of Brazil have created this problem or brought this problem to them. And they realized, just as you say, they realized how wonderful it was before that happened. And this is undermining their life in the primal sense. And to see them reacting, to see them angry about it, to see them trying to hold on to their way of life, it's a very interesting contra-distinction. Anyway, great image. Yeah, and recapitulates what happened in the New World, three centuries, four centuries ago, where 95% of Native Americans were wiped out by infectious diseases. Pandemics killed most of the population of North and South America. Yeah, or right here in Hawaii. So many epidemics here in Hawaii knocked off a huge percent of the population. Anyway, Lewis, I really enjoyed these discussions. I wish it was more time. That's the limitation of it. But we'll reschedule and we'll find some more time with you and we'll learn so much more. It'll be kind of like ordering your class or better. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jay. I really enjoyed it. This is great. I look forward to more. Go y'all.