Category: Uncategorized

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

[ The original posting date of this was July 30. It was updated with a substantially rewritten version on Oct. 15. ]

I had a request for more information on Beta Culture, to help readers better understand where I was going with the idea. Coincidentally, I’ve been asked to contribute a chapter on the subject to an upcoming book written by Patheos Atheist writers.

I worked for weeks to get that chapter-piece complete, to make it so that it introduced the whole concept, and yet fell within the length parameters given me. I failed at both. There’s SO much more to be said about the idea. As I think I’ve said in the past, I have hundreds of pages of notes full of ideas I want to get out there, and that will require a book-length treatment.

It’s longish — more than 8,000 words — so I’ve split it into four parts.

So:

Beta Culture

The day I left home to go to Reason Rally 2016, a friend — who knew I’d be driving 8 hours to get to Washington DC and another 8 hours to return that same night — asked me “Why are you going to this thing?” I gave him a flip answer as I stepped out the door: “Hey, it’s the Atheist Woodstock!” Thirty seconds later, I poked my head back in and answered seriously: “Because when I went to the one in 2012, it was the first time in my life as an atheist I felt welcome, and free, and HOME.”

If our one desire as atheists is to be a loose body of free individuals, nothing more need be done. We’re there and getting more there all the time. But if we want to have our own place in the world, a permanent place, a home, we need something bigger than atheism. Something sturdier. Longer-lasting. Self-perpetuating. Because atheism alone can’t get us there.

Here’s why I think so, and what I think that ‘something’ is.

Three Boats

Think of the future as an archipelago of possibilities, with all the things-to-come each on its own island. One island might contain a future of clean beautiful cities and unspoiled wildlands, of education and wealth; another might present a future of grit and poverty, overpopulation and starvation; a third might lack humans altogether; a fourth … you get the idea.

Every one of us will eventually arrive on one of those islands, to live in some sort of future. But most of those futures will be, in broad terms, of someone else’s making. In that future, whichever one we reach, we’ll pay whatever they charge us for our student loans. We’ll dress in what they sell in the stores. We’ll listen to the music and see the movies and read the books they provide. We’ll vote for the candidates they offer us. We’ll eat the foods — and the ingredients in those foods — they put on the shelves, in stores they own. We’ll celebrate their holidays. We’ll receive the medical care, or lack of it, offered by their hospitals. We’ll tread lightly under the scrutiny of their cops. We’ll obey their laws, or go to their prisons. Because the only boats going to that distant archipelago are theirs.

Who are the owners of those vessels? Who are they? Government. Corporations. Religion.

Government:  Organized and powerful, government can and does direct money, labor, and planning toward large-scale projects that can span decades or longer. Supposedly created to serve its citizens, it can have goals that have nothing at all to do with long-term benefits to ordinary people. It can create laws, operate police forces, courts and prisons. It can interfere in the lives of its citizens in ways large and small. It can even engage in wars, sending young men and women off to die for no good reason.

Business: Large corporations plan for their own future, a future of survival and profit in an environment of competition and scarce resources. Corporations have goals to benefit themselves first, customers second. Yes, they have to keep customers happy in the short term, but that doesn’t mean they actually have to benefit — or even keep from harming — those customers in the long. If there’s more money in sugary carbonated soda than in fruit juice or tea, guess which product will get the advertising budget? If lottery tickets are a more profitable sell than savings accounts, what’s going up on all the billboards? Which will be available in every convenience store? If a profitable product like tobacco actually harms the customer, but nobody can prove it without a protracted legal fight pursued over decades, will they sell it? You bet they will.

Religion: Not just people in random Brownian motion, but tens or hundreds of millions gathered together with common beliefs and goals — dictated, supposedly, by an actual god — operating out of one or more churches in every city, town, hamlet and neighborhood in the U.S. Religion can set and enforce social mores with real consequences that might range from public censure to shunning — in the past, even to death — and it functions across generations.

None of these “boats” travel alone. They rope together to smooth the journey. The boat of business sails in close touch with the boat of government. Considering there are something like 15,000 lobbyists in Washington DC, allegedly spending $3 billion a year to influence legislators, and most large corporations pay little or nothing in taxes, the corporate boat is not only well-fueled and -powered, it is avidly assisted by the vessel of government. Government, in turn, leans heavily on business for navigational cues.

The boat of religion gets all sorts of perks from the government, and does everything it can to reflect influence back into government. It succeeds: Government officials pay constant homage to religion, treading carefully on any issue that even remotely relates to it. Case in point: The Catholic molesting travesty was out in the open for years before law enforcement slouched into action.

So where’s the boat that has room for atheists, or atheist goals? Say we want to reach the island where schools — all schools — teach evolution. Not as some also-ran topic covered in a day, not as a suggestion given no more weight than creationism, but as the rock-solid heart of every discussion of Earth biology. Who’s going to make that happen? Who’s going to get us there?

Government? Uh, no. They’re going to waffle and sniff the air, veer off and carefully not get involved. Corporations? Nope. They’re gonna sit this one out too, kids. Churches? Ha! Not on your life. They’re the ones who got us to this island, the one where teachers are afraid to teach.

How are we going to get those actual science classes for every kid in America — the ones that explicitly say creation didn’t happen but evolution did? Answer: We’re not. It’s not going to happen. There is no boat going there. Generations of schoolkids will come and go with inferior science education.

There’s this island we want to get to, but there’s some whole other island — another future entirely — we’ll arrive at. We’ll get the future that government, business and religion will take us to. You and I might want a cure for Alzheimer’s in five years, but if government won’t help fund the research, if universities, hospitals and pharma companies won’t do the research, and if religion blocks the research, or owns the hospitals that might otherwise apply or test the treatment, there will be no cure for Alzheimer’s in five years. Not here, anyway.

But isn’t it enough just to be atheists? If we free ourselves and others from the grip of religion, won’t good things automatically follow? No. Atheism alone isn’t going to get us to any particular future because, beyond the bit about individual freedom (no small thing!), it has no built-in direction. Atheism by itself isn’t even a thing. It’s a non-thing, an opposed-to-this-other-thing thing. It can work immense changes on individuals, but as a larger social force, a force aimed at some particular future, it is dramatically rudderless.

If atheism isn’t going to get us there, and the three boats aren’t going to get us there, what can we do?
How about we build our own boat? To have any hope of creating a future of our choice — possibly any hope of having a future at all — we pretty much have to.

So let’s talk about this imagined boat of ours. Let’s talk about culture.

Culture

In simplest terms, culture is all the things you learn from your parents, peers and elders, and then pass on to your own children and grandchildren. Culture is just about everything you do. Your culture is the unwritten handbook on how to live life on scales both large and small.

It’s what you eat, the utensils you use to eat it. What to wear, what language you speak and the regional accent with which you speak it. Where to live, how to relate to your fellow men and women and children, what to learn and what to do with it once you’ve learned it.

It’s the haircut you sport, the songs you sing, the dances you do, the way you court and wed and cohabit, the way you welcome children into the world and bid farewell to departing elders. It’s the games you play, the slate of acceptable careers laid out before you, the jokes you tell. It includes your ceremonies and holidays, the things you read and don’t read. It presents you with life goals — a lion skin, a sheepskin, an eagle feather, a position of respect and honor within your tribe. Ways to deal with strangers and outsiders. Entertainments, contests, rules for interpersonal conflict. Women’s ways, men’s ways. It offers something for every social and psychological need humans have. For some of us, it’s the protective underwear we don at night, and even the short list of positions acceptable for (married-only, heterosexual-only) intercourse!

The substance of culture is taught to each new generation, but culture itself is probably automatic. Drop a group of ignorant kids on an island, isolate them for a hundred years or so, and their descendants would emerge possessing a complete culture, containing every possible thing they needed to live day-to-day — every ceremony, recipe, song, and article of clothing.

At its best, culture provides you a Home, a place of acceptance, support, and stability. It gives you an identity, an automatic sense of self. At its worst, it acts as something of a cage, trapping its people within it, oppressing them, offering the threat of punishment or ouster to those who don’t stay in line. But to most of us throughout history, the price has apparently been worth it.

Here in the U.S., it seems to me culture comes in three general “grades” — which I label Full Culture, Fractional Culture, and U.S. Overculture.

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Continue to Part 2

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

Full Culture

Already described above, full cultures cover every aspect of life, providing both game and gameboard for living. They present an elaborate social framework with all the details worked out.

In New York state where I live, full cultures include the Amish and Hasidic Judaism. However confining or silly they might look to those of us outside them, from the inside they provide a place of warmth, safety and familiarity, which most would only reluctantly leave.

But other than these, which make a deliberate attempt at island-like isolation and purity, few of us have anything even close to a complete culture. Here in the United States, they’re actually hard to come by. Instead we have the other two types.

Fractional Culture

Harley Davidson culture, gamer culture, NASCAR culture, Star Trek and Star Wars fan culture, Renaissance Festival culture, countless others. They contain certain rules and traditions, but those rules address only that one small part of life. Everything else has to be borrowed.

Fractional cultures, it seems to me, arise because they satisfy the yearning for a tribal home-place, a sense of inclusion with ‘My People.’ You and yours have a team, a band, a sport. But they fall apart on the rest of life. Science fiction fandom might provide you with the details of how to conduct yourself during late-night filking, but it’s mostly silent on funeral traditions, or what to wear to work. As an avid Yankees fan, you might attend all the games, go to after-parties with fellow Yankees fanatics, wear Yankees caps, and for all I know drink Yankees beer and dance the Yankees dance. You might even be enough of a Yankees fan to have a Yankees-themed wedding — all the while feeling included and safe in the cherished Yankees traditions—but you’re not going to ask for the Yankees meal on an airplane. You’re not going to confine yourself to exclusive Yankees positions for sex (I’m guessing catcher’s mitts and face guards are involved), or send your kids to Yankees school every day.

U.S. Overculture

All of us outside full cultures live in a huge, blended mess of subcultures I call U.S. Overculture. Overculture provides guidance for every aspect of life, but it does so in fractured, massively oversupplied form, presenting us with many different models for weddings, scores of courtship rituals, diverse ways of bidding goodbye to the departed, a dozen traditions for observing holidays — including distinctly different holidays — and countless potential suggestions for every other aspect of life.

You can have a cowboy wedding, a Catholic funeral, a Hello Kitty birthday party, Goth hairstyles and makeup, biker clothing, Montessori schooling for your kids, Wiccan holidays, any of thousands of other traditions, ceremonies and activities … without actually belonging to any specific home culture. All of us in fractional cultures, or no culture at all, call on this Overculture every day of our lives in order to fill sociocultural needs.

Overculture provides ton lots of traditions and foods and clothing, songs and dances and everything else, but the one thing Overculture fails to provide is any sense of belonging. It gives you no Home, instead leaving you adrift in a choppy cultural sea. Most of us manage only some vague identification as “American.”

The Worm in Overculture

We might think living in U.S. Overculture is perfectly fine, and miss a home culture not at all. We might even interpret the lack of a home culture as the ultimate freedom. After all, we don’t have to wear a beard and work a farm our entire lives. But that freedom comes with a degree of exposure and vulnerability. Because a great deal of U.S. Overculture arrives as purely predatory marketing. Rather than socially-useful traditions, corporate-supplied culture is an extended sales pitch aimed at nothing but profit.

On the streets of any large city, some large percentage of the faces you see will have a cigarette stuck in them. This pricey, health-destroying practice wasn’t something that got passed down by generations of wise elders, it was relentlessly advertised into existence by tobacco companies. We might imagine “A Diamond is Forever” to be cherished, ageless tradition, but it arose out of an ad campaign begun in 1947, before which sensible brides-to-be much preferred husbands to spend limited household money on washing machines or cars. Yet today, the central element of a “proper” proposal is a diamond engagement ring, the pricier the better.

Do either of these customs truly benefit the people who follow them? Not in any way. People trade money for illusion.

Full cultures serve as guardians for the people within them, but those of us living in U.S. Overculture have little or nothing to perform that function. An active ad campaign can be projected at us or our children, and there is no social mechanism, no equally active protective force, to oppose it. Left to evaluate the thing as lone individuals, many of us simply adopt whatever it is because it is new, different, and briefly entertaining. For every new thing presented, lottery tickets or vape sticks, Beanie Babies or Pokemon Go, car surfing or brain piercing (any day now), large numbers of us are right there, sucking it up.

Even if you as an individual detect the falsity, the uselessness, the actual physical harm of something, any public show of resistance will meet with instant unthinking opposition from those already under the spell. “Hey, vape pens are awesome, man! They’re way healthier than cigarettes!” “But Beanie Babies are a great investment!”

—No, new things are not automatically bad. But they’re not automatically good, either. Having a home culture with a collective of smart, trusted advisors helps you breast the daily flood of marketing, huckstering, and outright lies.

Religion and Culture

Speaking of the Amish and Hasidic Jews, note that both cultures are rooted in religion. In fact, every tribe, city-state and nation I ever heard of throughout human history had religion at or near its heart. Every culture had holy men, monuments, temples, gods, complex myths of afterlives and paradises and places of eternal punishment, plus numerous everyday rules and injunctions about how to relate to the supernatural—some of which you broke on pain of death.

Except for the part about death, that very much includes the society we live in here and now. As every atheist knows, you can’t sneeze without a chorus of god-bless-yous — often from complete strangers. The U.S. is well-salted with 10 Commandments monuments, many of them still on public land, police vehicles in some jurisdictions defiantly carry goddy bumper stickers, military leaders pressure subordinates to attend religious services, goddy signs and billboards are everywhere, biology teachers are nervous about using the word “evolution” in science classes, and there is a never-let-up insistence across the nation to say prayers at public meetings. Every disaster has people giving thanks to God for their survival, no matter how many others died in the event. With “In God We Trust” on every bill and coin, we ourselves hand out religious tracts with every cash transaction.

A few years back I drew an imaginary 2-mile-diameter line around my house in a town of 60,000 people, and discovered close to 80 churches and church-owned properties inside it. More than schools, more than libraries, more than gas stations and convenience stores!

Where has that left atheists? Out in the cold. There has never been a time or place we  could truly feel welcome. If you’re an atheist, probably most of the people you know — including your own family — tolerate rather than welcome you. In some countries, being an atheist can be a death sentence. Even here in the United States, there are places where you’d be wise to hide it. There is no place we fit. Non-god-believers are not safe, or free, or home in most of the “civilized” world today.

We even take part in borrowed holidays. Those of us who enjoy Christmas do so only by resolutely telling ourselves it’s a mostly secular occasion. You know, with the gift-giving and Santa and all. And yet, as we are frequently reminded by goddy neighbors, it remains CHRISTmas.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We could have our own holidays. We could have our own everything.

Culture, Rebooted

Religion itself is cultural. Draw a Venn diagram of Religion and Culture, and the circle of Religion would be wholly contained within the circle of Culture. It might occupy only one small area of the Culture circle, as it does in U.S. Overculture, or it might almost completely dominate it, as it does in conservative Christian or Islamic sects.

Culture is not religion; culture is the container religion comes in. There might be a lot of things people think are religious, but which are only cultural, things that can be teased out and considered separate from religion. A perfect example, understandable by just about any atheist, is morality, which might be presented as specifically religious, but really isn’t. You no more have to be religious to care about others, to attempt to be a good person, to not lie and steal and kill, than you have to be able to ride a bike in order to get to work.

But! There’s nothing that says the Venn circle of culture must contain a circle of religion. It’s just that we’ve never tried it. Maybe never even been in a position to try it. Until now.

Imagine a specifically, emphatically non-religious culture, created — for the first time ever in the world — by newly freed and connected atheists. Imagine a culture founded in reason and science rather than superstition and mysticism. A culture that reveres education, excellence and careful thought, that has as its champions teachers and intellectuals rather than ridiculously costumed priests and jingoistic uniformed “heroes.” Something that helps guard us from the lies and silliness projected at us daily via TV, radio, Internet, magazines, newspapers and billboards.

Give it a working title: Take all the religious cultures collectively, past and present on Planet Earth, all the tribes, city-states, kingdoms and nations, and call that Alpha Culture — Alpha because it came first. Call this new non-religious culture Beta Culture. “Beta” not because it comes second, but because it comes next.

(Yes, I’m aware there’s already a ‘beta culture.’ Doesn’t mean the term can’t be repurposed. If it’s a problem, think of the two as Culture 1.0 and Culture 2.0.)

So what is this Beta Culture? It is, or could be, a crowd-sourced, deliberately-constructed  culture with the specific aim of providing a permanent socio-cultural home for reason-minded people — atheists, agnostics, freethinkers and secular humanists.

In the islands-of-the-future metaphor, it would be a new boat aimed at that far archipelago, a cultural tool to carry us to a future in which we have a place. It might not get us there directly, but it could influence the courses of the other three boats, a lot more than a demographic of rootless individual atheists who currently have no choice but to catch a ride with others.

Beta Culture would be a first in at least two ways: First in that it contained no religion or mysticism. Second, it would be the first culture deliberately constructed by the (hopefully) rational people who were to live within it. Built up one piece at a time from within, it would presumably possess an important third difference: It would be one of the few cultures that deliberately sought to empower and strengthen its members, rather than to control and limit them.

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Continue to Part 3

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

Culture’s Gifts

The Home-feeling — which I call “Place” — is only one of the assets of a home culture. Cultures also offer Values, Ways and Goals.

Values serve as the guides and arbiters of good behavior: Honor your mother and father. Be generous to the less fortunate. Never lie to a child for any reason (which apparently is not a widespread cultural value!).

Ways are all the outward physical displays of culture: Wear a cowboy hat and a big silver belt buckle. Quit school at 14 and work the family farm. Never eat pork.

Goals are the menu of personal aims, careers and benchmarks of success: Raise a big family. Go to college. Kill a lion all by yourself.

What would Beta Culture include?

Values

Every culture has a set of core values — its basic concepts of who and what “we” are.  What we hold dear, what we’re proud of in contrast to all other, lesser cultures. In building Beta Culture, the easy part would be finding things to include. The hard part would be making it work, deciding on the various traditions and values and making them stick.

Of course its most basic value is atheism. Rationality. A reason-based lifestyle and view of the world. In attempting to create a fully non-religious, non-superstitious, non-mystic-woo-woo culture, this is something on which it could not afford to compromise. Loosen that rule and you end with just another religio-mystical culture, and damn, it’s been done.

In Beta Culture, there would simply be no place for the faithful, the superstitious or the woo-woo mystical. Prospective members would be either firmly convinced the universe works by physics and chemistry—that there are no such thing as gods or ghosts, spirits or mystical forces — or not. Only one of those positions gets you through the door.

There are values that flow out of reason. I picture Beta as powerfully oriented toward education — not just school and college, but some degree of permanent, ongoing studiousness throughout life. This educational emphasis would be one part of a broad push toward empowerment and support for its individual members.

I see Beta as equalitarian, as post-racial and, necessarily, as futurist. It would also be basically activist — including a muscular humanism aimed at making the world a better place.

I imagine it as very much an international thing — not just in the culture itself, but in those who chose to be members. Every Beta — while legally remaining a citizen of his/her home country — would first consider himself a ‘citizen of Earth’ rather than of historic tribes and nations.

I picture Beta as a champion of evolution, not just the subject, but the broader implications — the interrelatedness of all life on earth. I also see it as a strong proponent of real sex education — including contraception, safety and permission from an early age.

I would expect it to be oriented toward health, fitness and longevity for all its members. Considering the opposition it will face, every member will be something of a warrior. Being healthy and strong helps not just us as individuals, but everyone around us.

Ways

In the U.S., we have two national holidays — Veterans Day and Memorial Day — honoring soldiers, nothing at all to recognize the other heroes of civilization. Allow me to float the idea of an international SALT Day, a day to honor Scientists, Artists, Librarians and Teachers.

How about Conscience Day to recognize the warriors of conscience and justice — the whistleblowers, war protestors, and fighters for social justice who have carried us forward into betterment, but who’ve been treated like traitors and criminals for their labors? —Hell, we could honor people who choose not to have children.

Superhero Day would remind us annually (quarterly?) to devote time to volunteering, cleaning up neighborhoods, assisting the elderly or handicapped. Memory Day would be an annual event to come together for remembering friends and relatives, sharing with each other the stories and pictures of the otherwise unheralded people who have shaped our lives and communities. I can even see some merit in a just-for-the-hell-of-it Aunts, Uncles and Cousins Day.

In place of Christmas, why not Krismas? Jokingly devoted to the fictional Kris Kringle, it could be a weeklong celebration at the end of each year, with gift-giving, visiting, gathering, singing, dancing, performing, formally honoring the accomplishments of friends and family over the year, with lots of eating and drinking included.

Speaking of joking, maybe humor should be a part of any deliberately-designed rational culture. The Flying Spaghetti Monster could be a permanent ‘patron saint,’ a gently sarcastic counterpoint to god-belief. To poke fun at the pompousity of priestly costumes and other church frippery, there might be a tradition of Big Funny Hats worn on at least one annual occasion. Rather than Easter we could observe Wester, a western-themed dig at the religious holiday, held on the same weekend.

More seriously, we would have our own ways to observe births and deaths, graduations and other milestones of life. We could have all sorts of daily and annual and special-occasion Ways  that were not just secular, but that celebrated reason.

Place

A sense of Place, the homey feeling culture provides, would happen simply by Beta Culture existing. But I’d like us to also have our own meeting place. Inevitably, the idiots will call it the “atheist church.” I call it the Nexus.

If my own small town can have nearly 80 churches, many of them occupying pricey downtown properties, there’s no reason why there can’t be one permanent meeting place for Beta Culturists. Every city and town of any size should have a tax-free Nexus. It might contain a freethinker library and reading room, a coffee house or networking center (free coffee for math and science majors!), plus rooms for meetings, discussions and classes. I picture a media center and digital lab, maybe a room for a visiting speaker to stay the night, or even safely secular child care for working Beta parents.

Goals

Addressing the theme of empowerment, I’d want the Nexus to offer regular classes in leadership, public speaking and assertiveness — not only to advance the atheist cause but to enhance and strengthen individual members in their own personal lives.

Considering what I said earlier about asking for a Yankees meal on an airplane — when it comes to Beta Culture, I do want a Beta meal on an airplane. For myself I want a sandwich made in the past two hours, with whole-grain bread and a couple of slices of fresh-roasted free-range chicken breast. I want it to have a fresh salad alongside, with unwilted lettuce, crunchy croutons, tasty avocados and fresh, flavorful tomatoes — all of it made with no artificial ingredients.

That meal is an assertion that Beta Culture must have at least the same sort of determined impact on the world as Jews and Muslims — with every public act a statement of “We exist, we demand others honor and respect our customs and traditions.”

There would be both initial and ongoing World-Café-type sessions to iron out details and values of the culture and the goals of the people within it, including gender ethics, dietary observances, the focus of activism in broader society. Beta Culture might include integral side projects such as media watchdogging or issue activism — possibly a flatly stated opposition to genital mutilation for both girls and boys.

I imagine a Book of Good Living collected online with non-religious guidance for daily life, for anyone who chose to read and consider it. It might include tidbits such as “Take pictures of your parents, lots of them, something to keep you company in the long years alone.” Or perhaps “Live your life in such a way that nobody has to pick up after you.” Or maybe even “Never leave your dog in a hot car.” But definitely, “Hey, dummy, if you’re on the freeway and people are passing you on the right, get the hell out of the left lane.”

I’d like there to be deliberate efforts at recruiting and youth outreach, at least as aggressive as that done by churches in every city and town in America. I go further in picturing religion-superstition detox classes for young and old, for those interested in discovering and removing the last remnants of religious unreason out of their heads. I’d like to see such things as Beta Scouts (possibly arising out of Camp Quest) and Reason Riders (a motorcycle group already poised to go national) as public aspects of the culture.

Beyond local efforts, I want us to undertake a worldwide push for increasing the numbers of “out” atheists — 10ex9 by 2029 — one billion atheists by the year 2029.

More than any other goal, I’d like it to be a culture of strength, empowerment and independence rather than one of weakness and fear.

The Way of the World

In the era of mass communication, which has pretty much reached maximum saturation with the Internet, most of what we and our young people internalize comes from someone else — corporations, pundits, professional liars and manipulators. The persuasive pitches are everywhere. And everything in them, every word and musical note and motto, is aimed at gaining profit or power. Helping anyone live a better life is a distant second.

Which means: If you don’t teach your kids your culture — your values or ideas or wisdom — someone else will come in and teach them theirs. If you don’t have your own culture, other people will decide the way you and yours live large parts of their lives, often to the very thoughts that occupy your mind.

With no home culture, you yourself won’t be immune to it. Sooner or later you’ll fall for one of those seductive pitches for inclusion and coolness and victory. If you do this thing, buy this thing, wear this thing, you will win, you will succeed, you will belong.

I might feel fewer reservations about all of this if the world was full of good people, generous and compassionate, interested in your welfare and the welfare of your kids, but the fact is, much of the content of U.S. Overculture is exploitative rather than supportive.

Already in the Pipeline

To repeat, there’s the future we want, and the future we’ll get. As literally nobody but freethinkers give a damn about a specifically rational future, the future we most want Will. Not. Happen. Churches, other cultures, broadcast media, corporations, and even governments will pursue their own self-interests, with no concern for your needs and desires, but worse, no long view of human survival on planet Earth.

For those of us in science fiction or tech fandom who happily imagine the Technological Singularity, that moment when advances take place so rapidly the rising curve of change goes completely vertical and all predictive models break down, let me present this alternate concept: The Dark Singularity.

The curve of negative change accelerates until it goes vertical in the other direction — downward to chaos. Human population continues to rise, human appetite and carelessness finally outstrips the ability of our planet to recover, all the elephants and rhinos, lions and wolves, whales and dolphins and mountain gorillas go extinct, shortages of energy, food and clean water spark riots, war breaks out pretty much everywhere, martial law is declared everywhere, and those few sitting pretty in an ugly, diminished world are either government officials and billionaires in fortified retreats, or survivalist fanatics dug in with guns and Bibles.

You think that can’t happen? Point to one coordinated worldwide social force aimed at preventing it. Hell, the main issue causing a lot of this — still-rising human population, with 62.5 million extra people per year, a city the size of Los Angeles added every 3 weeks — is a subject we can’t even bring up without being shouted down with cries of “Genocide!” and “Baby killer!”

If we were 200 years in the future, looking back for details of the fall of civilization, I’m convinced we’d see people of this time as very much in the midst of it. The drowning of New Orleans, the decay of Detroit, global warming, extinctions and invasive species, broken ecosystems, the rise of global terrorism, the electing of messianic figures to public office rather than competent public servants, damaging technologies used to pursue progressively scarcer petroleum, on and on.

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Continue to Part 4