In today’s LATimes, Hal Clifford writes very amusingly about a not-so-funny possibility: That our way of life as we know it will soon collapse, leaving us as vulnerable as a hairless chihuahua in the woods.
I live a comfortable, conventional life that is at odds with what I know intellectually. A life that I am all but certain could easily be changed by forces beyond my control.
And this is where I begin to feel like a Mexican hairless Chihuahua. These dogs wouldn’t last a week in the woods, so they live their lives in tiny sweaters, tucked in the crook of somebody’s arm, or scampering around a city apartment and yapping at the Chinese food delivery guy. Their environment is, shall we say, artificial.
And isn’t mine too?
How long, I wonder, would I last in the woods?
As evidence for our difficulty facing big enviro problems, Clifford mentions an article from the magazine he edits, Orion, by Bill McKibben. Back in the summer of 05, McKibben pointed out that our inability to deal with big slow problems like global warming has a evolutionary component:
There was great Darwinian pressure to pay attention to the tiger roaring in front of you. You solved one day’s problems, and moved on to the next day. It’s no wonder that we find it hard to concentrate on something like global warming that plays out over decades, not news cycles.
True, undeniably true, and it’s depressing when you contrast the weight of the scientific evidence against the lack of interest from the public, as documented by framing specialist Matthew Nisbet. The environment in general and global warming in particular show poorly in the polls he cites.
Yet the word "Darwinian" implies that this focus on "the tiger in front of us"–the Other, one might say–is part of our genetic heritage and inalterable. But an extraordinarily readable article on primate behavior by a Stanford scientist, Robert Sapolsky, makes exactly the opposite point:
...one often encounters a pessimism built around the notion that humans, as primates, are hard-wired for xenophobia. Some brain-imaging studies have appeared to support this view in a particularly discouraging way. There is a structure deep inside the brain called the amygdala, which plays a key role in fear and aggression, and experiments have shown that when subjects are presented with a face of someone from a different race, the amygdala gets metabolically active — aroused, alert, ready for action. This happens even when the face is presented "subliminally," which is to say, so rapidly that the subject does not consciously see it.
More recent studies, however, should mitigate this pessimism. Test a person who has a lot of experience with people of different races, and the amygdala does not activate. Or, as in a wonderful experiment by Susan Fiske, of Princeton University, subtly bias the subject beforehand to think of people as individuals rather than as members of a group, and the amygdala does not budge. Humans may be hard-wired to get edgy around the Other, but our views on who falls into that category are decidedly malleable.
Of course, an ability to avoid seeing the Other as the enemy is not the same as the ability to face an abstract problem. But please, no more talk about how we’re "hard-wired" for mindless agression in the face of the Other. Read the piece, and you’ll see that extensive primate behavior studies as well as brain studies have shown that’s just not true.
Kit Stolz 