Fracturing Comprehension
History can be viewed as cycling through periods of synthesis, analysis devolution, and new synthesis, the last of which may—until we get a good view of devolution—seem perilous. We have already exhausted modern synthesis and analysis, and are devolving rapidly toward planetary catastrophe, which means that the shards of the past—including those of our errors—are in full view. As our worldview and the forms of human apprehension and comprehension that depend on it break down, we find ourselves in a good position to reconstitute them.
Unlike previous periods of devolution, ours is inclusive of the body of life on Earth. That is, the influence and impact of our species on the whole of life are such that hapless cycling is not an option. We must therefore take responsibility for past human actions and consequences by changing consciously, responsively, resiliently, expeditiously, and dynamically, and by effecting renascence with unprecedented agency, speed, and success.
Mistaking Immortality
Many modern errors can be traced back to the desire to control life and death. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein conveys this with prescience and precision. One way to avoid the macabre specter of bringing corpses back to life is to see that we need not view immortality as belonging to the individual body; rather, we can view it as belonging to the bodies of our species and habitats and—ultimately—to the body of life on earth so perilously threatened by modern ways. We can see that we need not be immortal as identities or individuals or even families; we can be immortal as an essential and integral aspect of the life we share with all other lives past, present, and future. This does not necessitate continuation of the borrowed flesh; it does necessitate noting that immortality emanates from our body continuously as the thoughts, words, and deeds that represent our body’s particular and essential contribution to the body of life.
Ignoring and Destroying Life in the Aggregate
Human-caused habitat injuries have been studied in excruciating detail that is only now beginning to break through human denial, confusion, and helplessness. At the same time, new epidemics of chronic disease in humans have been met with the usual responses that fail to support actionable diagnosis or prognosis—much less cure. It is time to recognize that human-caused habitat injuries are impacting all species, including humans, and that modern methods obscure rather than define, engage, and reverse these problems.
To put this epoch-shattering problem differently, modern and pre-modern ways of living are escalating the perennial human errors of consuming and poisoning the body of life on which all lives depend. Humans are now injuring habitats at a rate that only speeds the ongoing sixth extinction. This then also injures humans—possibly in the millions or more—via chronic ambient poisoning. The same injury is evident in many other species such as birds, bees, salamanders, and seals. Evolve Medicine recognizes that life on earth is in critical condition, and offers new views, constructs, and processes that you can use to rescue the species that remain—including your own.
The topic of the eleventh hour has been covered in detail in other sources, though generally in a fragmented, tangential, or chaotic way. If you are unfamiliar with the problem, you can catch up to and prepare to make the most of this website by following these links to access more background details: deforestation; habitat loss; soil poisoning and erosion; melting of ice sheets; decreasing oxygen in the deep oceans and atmosphere; change in distribution of species; extinction and near extinction; the human history of urbanization and collapse. For non-fiction narratives, see: The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry; Collapse by Jared Diamond; 1493 by Charles C. Mann; The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert; Letters to My Grandchildren by David Suzuki; or The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. For a humorous treatment of the subjects, see Humans: A Brief History of How We F***ed it All Up by Tom Phillips. For heartful and informative treatment of averting extinction, see Saving Tarboo Creek: One Family’s Quest to Heal the Land by Scott Freeman or Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Profiteers Beat the System
Every five years or so, drug companies replace their products with newer versions of the same thing, and thus ensure that the adverse effects will escape detection and retribution. Furthermore, when companies develop new drugs, they target patients who must rely on the drug for life, as shown in the film Extraordinary Measures. They thus invest in the perpetuation of chronic illness, as do most of the individuals and groups who comprise the late modern medical industrial complex—including most of those that brand themselves as natural or alternative. This effect is aggravated by the temporary retirement of products that alarm the public—like intrauterine devices and thalidomide—and their later return to the market.
Economic Rationalization
In a consumerist economy dominated by economic rationalism, people assume that the most expensive care must be the best, and that if a little is good then a lot will be better. In truth, expensive care is expensive and its use may or may not be wise or offer desirable results. Fears, ambiguities, and mysteries will continue to exist in spite of awesome technologies, and to grow as they are used for non-rational psychological purposes. They thus become useless or harmful to your body and to all of the bodies in which your body shelters, nurtures, and abides.
Modern mainstream systems of “developed” care compensate for overuse and misuse of resources in part by excluding patients whose ailments do not fit the system or who are costly for other reasons. This may be invisible to the system, or may appear as the rejection of patients who do not meet the criteria for creation of a virtual patient record. Thus, those whose data fall outside of the allowable range must find care and cure elsewhere, or provide their own.
Reckoning Time Poorly
Mainstream medicine as it is today is embedded in modernism: the costs of care and cure strategies to life on earth are ignored, while economic, legal, and managerial considerations are put first. These skewed priorities lead to a warping of care and cure protocols, which are complex artificial systems—that is, part of the social machinery of late modernity—and dissociates medicine from life on earth.
One source of warping is the highly dysfunctional adaption of late moderns to time and resources. The evolution of infectious organisms and the human response to such organisms take place in biological time. However, socially constructed time, as with financial reckonings, has nothing to do with biological time. Emerging illnesses cannot be addressed in social time or seen from inside our late modern social machinery. With time and careful observation of the living world, you can step outside the late modern worldview and return to reality in the form of evolutionary time, and of your lifetime.
Denial Obstructs Progress
Most of us avoid accepting our inevitable end, which is old age, physical decline, and death. If we accept these realities, we tend to gird our loins and prepare for battle rather than take the chance to step back, look at our lives, and ask if we are living well and creating the chance to die well. If we do, we may be shocked to see that we are risking the time that remains to us, our children, and life on earth for the sake of money or a favorite gadget. We may realize that we have been hypnotized by groupthink and buy-in. We can then step up, take responsibility for our lives, and enjoy a real adventure rather than a virtual one.
Missing Warning Signs
After World War II, the chemical industry and other engines of the economy looked to re-purpose agents of biological warfare for use in the green revolution, which was envisioned by policy-makers as a way of ending hunger. As with many well-intended, pragmatic policies, this has done more harm than good. (For more, see the documentary film King Corn.) A number of industrial chemicals have since been identified as hazardous. DDT was banned after Rachel Carson wrote the book Silent Spring, which alerted the public to the harmful effects of DDT on birds’ eggs. More recently, use of the agricultural chemical daminozide (Alar) on food crops was banned after its identification as a possible carcinogen. However, many more chemicals remain in wide use, with their potential hazards disregarded. In other words, late moderns have created social machines that attempt to control the unknown hazards of environmental poisoning by considering only one molecule or class of molecules at a time. Chemicals are innocent until proven guilty, while life is guilty—and punished. The causes of the problems that policies attempt to address are systemic; the solutions are piecemeal and haphazard at best. Phonegate is an example of a narrow response to purposeful obfuscation of the non-ionizing radiation poisoning spread by electronics as well as wireless transmissions of high-energy radiation.
The endgame of modernity consists of convincing humans who value money over life to accept that they cannot “win” the war on life, and thus life—every life—must be recognized as beyond price.
Failure to Respond to Change
No epoch ends all at once; new views are voiced that provide the vantage point from which to take stock of the past and to look ahead for clues as to how to best structure new views, constructs, and processes that sunset destructive ways of life and lead the way toward a living future. Here, you will note that ways of living have already changed, and that our thinking is ready to catch up with solutions that are in progress.