Unknown: 0:02

The cosmos is within us. We are made of starstuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. Carl Sagan. Welcome to the lessons from nature podcast, modeling the secrets of the bees, hosted by Mark Rubin.

Mark Rubin: 0:21

If you hear my voice, you're alive. And if you're alive, you've been cooperating with other people in your habitat. This means you must be part of a tribe of people who cooperate that trade and share resources. Today on the lessons from nature podcast, we'll be discussing secret 19 from honey is money. Cooperating costs less than fighting. It's about the idea that since there's enough honey for everyone, it makes sense to invest in weapons of peace, more than weapons of war. I'd like to introduce my co host, Dr. Jamie seris. Jamie is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology Maynooth University. He holds advanced degrees in social cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago with an MA and PhD, he has completed a postdoctoral fellowship and clinically relevant medical anthropology in the Department of Social medicine at Harvard Medical School, Jamie will co host four of the lessons from nature podcast episodes with me, where we will discuss the anthropological secrets of the bees, through the lens of the human business of making money, and the bee business of making honey. Welcome, Jamie. It's great to have you back on the lessons from nature podcast. So today, Jamie, we are going to be talking about a very important chapter in honey as money. Back in 1985, when I was thinking about doing this ego project, I read a book by Buckminster Fuller, called operating manual for Spaceship Earth, and another book of his called critical path. And these books gave me some ideas about optimal resource allocation, and models that relates, you know, global consumption of things with global production of things at a big scale, like how many chickens the human beings eat, per second, or like things like that, like Buckminster Fuller style of the keeping track of things. And this got me thinking about the way we operate the planet. And one of the things that Bucky said in his books was that if the USA invested 90% of the money, that we invest in war, on peace, and we did that for five years, if I remember, it was a long time ago, but I think it was five years if we did this, that the number of people on the planet that we could feed would be 100 billion people at the time that were 5 billion people on the planet. And there were 500,000 of them were starving. And I just thought like that was that really struck me in 1985 of like, something was like, if we could feed 100 billion people, and we have, you know, a half a million people starving, then this is a problem that can be solved, like the gap is big if we if we invested in these, you know, weapons of peace is what I'm calling it, weapons of peace. So what I want to say as relates to this episode is that is that war is more expensive than peace. It makes sense. I think that from if nothing else, an economic perspective, that it would make sense to invest in pursuing peace, because it's a net cost savings. But sadly, it seems like war is more common than peace with our species. over long periods of time, I want to look at the topics we're going to be discussing through the lenses of weapons of peace, which would be things like abundant clean energy, abundant, clean water, abundant clean air, clean land, clean food, universal education, all around the planet, science, health care, disease prevention, food production, battery storage, all the stuff, that if we if we did, we wouldn't need to fight over these resources that keep the populations alive. And so given everything that's happening in the world, let's focus this episode on human behaviors related to increasing cooperation. Through peace in honey is money. There's a line in this chat that says investing in survival costs honey, now today, and as this relates to human civilization, investing in immediate needs can be costly, but it's necessary to survival. And it relates to how humans invest in things like health care, infrastructure and energy production. How do anthropologists see the trade off between immediate resource allocation and long term survival in human societies? And I'll clarify it more is there evidence that human beings make long term decisions about their immediate needs versus future needs, and how can we expand on that for longer periods of time?

Dr. Jamie Saris: 5:12

There's evidence that humans do both. You can see certainly examples that humans seem to always everywhere have a pretty heavy footprint on their ecosystem. That, you know, we mentioned this last time, I believe that the vast majority of the large animals that have survived with humans co evolved with us with hominids in Africa. And if you look at ecosystems where, especially if Sapiens Sapiens came in, and you know, the new world is an obvious one, within, you know, 10,000 years, that entire ecosystem that some millions of years to develop in North America had substantially altered, I mean, most of the large animals that have been hunted out that climate change might have assisted in that process. But it's, it's remarkable how rapidly that change. So you know, the anti bison, the American Horse, the American lion, all of those creatures that if you ever get a chance to go to Los Angeles and revisit the Page Museum, which is the La Brea Tar Pits, you can see examples of them. On the other hand, you also have examples of quite long term planning painlessly, I think it was an Oxford they needed to replace in the chapel, the major oak beam, the building had been built, I think, 400 years ago, and someone had planted an oak, you know, that was at the right maturation and the right height and everything else, so they can get, you know, a support being the correct size for them. So, I mean, we both are everywhere, temporal beings, and how we think through what you might say consequences is really highly dependent on time and place.

Mark Rubin: 6:51

Yeah. And that's, it's an interesting balance. I think there's many more examples of short term thinking and long term thinking,

Dr. Jamie Saris: 6:57

you're probably right. I think what happens is people forget that there was long term thinking, I mean, famously, the Fujiyama reactor in the disaster with the tsunami, as people were running up the mountain, you know, to escape the wave, they passed a standing stone that had been I think, again, it was about 1000 years before, you know, where there was another tsunami. And so the water got up to this high. People knew it was there, it's often that we don't take the warning seriously, that problem of the science of consequences is, I think, probably the most pressing one, you know, on our on our plate right now. And you know, modern society is not doing a good job of it.

Mark Rubin: 7:45

The science of consequences, I think, I think that should be taught in like first grade, I think it is. But it's only like about like lunch money. And like it should be used, we should continue the education of those those ideas, because everything we do has a ripple effect. And well, that actually brings me to a line in the chapter. It says the lifespans of our future bees is shrinking every day, we must collect the honey in the most harmonious way. And something about the queen bees, a queen bee lives 20 generations of a regular worker bee, which is the human equivalent of 1500 years. And the Queen can't leave her house called the hive. And she relies on the worker bees to bring her energy, so she can survive multiple generations. And in that way of thinking, the queen bee is planning for her survival by extending the lifespan of her babies, basically, keeping her DNA alive while she's alive, so they can keep her alive for longer. So here's the question, how the human societies typically address concerns about the shrinking quality of life, or the shrinking lifespan of future generations. And a follow up question about declining birth rates is declining birth rates and population collapse, a concern?

Dr. Jamie Saris: 9:09

For those two are really related. For the most part lifespans are still increasing, we're seeing the increase in places where we don't usually expect to see older people societies in South Africa and Southeast Asia, you know, that were historically poor places in that post World War Two development discourse, you know, have rapidly expanding lifespans and you know, thus populations of older people. But where you see lifespans flattening or shrinking is precisely where you see some of those problematic regions of the world that they're failing societies or Russia right now. Depending upon how you squint has a lifespan in its early 60s, you know, which is equivalent, or getting very close to where Tanzania Because right now, that is where you tend to see localized forms of instability, it's usually associated with very, very bad inequalities. And effectively, a level of hopelessness in society that's generally marked by, you know, what sociologists would call a nomadic behavior, particularly in Russia's case, alcoholism, which is a massive, massive issue. So there's that problem there. And then declining birth rates, historically are a story of success. Yeah. And so, you know, the question about, there's a sort of strange demography is destiny, you know, folks who, you know, imagine populations have the same logic as cancer cells do, which is to constantly keep a pyramidal structure. But of course, as you become more successful, you're simply making this massive pillar that's going to wipe out so you're gonna guaranteed to get to the edge of whatever the resource capacity, you know, is, most people estimate that we will probably peak near 10 billion in the century, and you'll start to see relatively rapid declines going, you know, by the beginning of the next century, we could be where we are now and rapidly shrinking. Now, I don't think those those numbers are going to shrink forever. That question about whether we'll be able to manage it, both the places of relative declining, you know, population health indices, with life expectancy being one of the primary ones, and a shrinking birth rate is really going to be a question of how we deal with inequalities. That's what drives environmental issues. That's what drives social are most of the social pathologies that we talked about. It is one of the worst aspects of human society or when a human society moves in that direction, it tends to throw off all of the worst signals that humans are capable of producing. Let's define

Mark Rubin: 12:04

the weapons of peace now that now that we're talking is a weapon of peace is a weapon that increases equality, for

Dr. Jamie Saris: 12:12

equality, and increases access. Or you might put it another way decreases exclusion. Whether that exclusion is based on class, whether that's based on gender, whether it's based on lifestyle, that sense of inclusion, has to reach the interstices between the classic sociological categories and other people. Very, I mean, there is I mean, I'm not crazy about a lot of the Patek discourse around it, about the so called crisis of masculinity, but any society produces vast swathes of alienated young man, at its own peril, parts of that alienation is a sense of, can't you see something ahead of you, you know, something good ahead of you, which is not built into the economy, you can maximize the economy and make it very alienating for 98% of the people. It's in the society. But we're not like the hive of the bees, we're in this sort of weird, uncanny gap between being social obligates social creatures who imagined that they're only functionally social. And that comes to this, you know, the final and the probably the darkest little chests that we can open on this question is words social. Yeah. Whereas the most highly social activity that humans wore is indeed so social, that pacifist philosophers like William James spent a lot of time thinking about how you could take the good parts of war, without the destruction, the good parts of war about the selflessness, the sense of common purpose, you know, so William James had a very famous phrase, the moral equivalent of war. This would be like, moral Crusades to make sure that infant mortality doesn't happen. It could be misguided, I think, you know, certainly the temperance movement, you know, I guess I was was a kind of moral crusade, but that James was, you know, constantly searching for some sort of way of Iranians centripetal American kind of forces. And he saw war as being extremely useful for that, but of course, he was appalled by its consequences. So he was, you know, very much against the Spanish American War, and, you know, he, you know, but like, Could you take the good parts of that? And if you look at American society, you know, we talked about this, the armed forces were the Harbinger, but fundamental changes in American society from racial equality and gender equality, because like the army doesn't care right. The Army well So the RV is on subconsciously, a hive mind, you know, it's a created hive mind. So like, all of this stuff in the society, you know, gets burned away, and that's very attractive at different times to social reformers. And so we struggle with that, you know, in American society in particular, but it recognizes something kind of fundamental that not all social aspects of human beings are sweetness of light, we're always you can make a case, no social, in certain kind of darker situations that I would say in, in worship, and in war, two parts of the human kind of thing that really quite freaked me out, you know, but I, you know, recognize them as being central parts of how humanity actually develop.

Mark Rubin: 15:47

You know, that's really the tribal components of, of religion, and war, and belief, and fighting, do things that are important. So I'll define a weapon of peace now that I'm keep modifying as we go, as I learned from you is a tool that can be invested in, that increases the quality and access to resources, and second, creates an optimistic view of the future, a shared future together, and also organizes people around the pursuit of an objective or goal like a war. Yeah, but a war that could be a war for something that does something good.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 16:32

Yeah, a common good, a common, one of the great difficulties of kind of success is that it's good in the sense that it puts everybody on another level, but you're seeing, you know, you can forget that this was a created situation, the fact that you're you can imagine your child dying in infancy, is not natural. That is a that is a non natural human intervention in nature, okay, up to an including making a virus, but hopefully other viruses extinct in the wild, like smallpox, that that's, you know, two generations and all interpreted don't really doubt wrong 70 years, that you have millions of Americans who are far more terrified of vaccines than they are of infectious diseases.

Mark Rubin: 17:23

Yeah, I have observed that people are more afraid of invisible danger than visible harm. And a good example, there's many good examples of that. But, for example, I know someone who doesn't like microwave ovens, because they're afraid of microwaves, however, so they don't have one. However, they listened to bluetooth earbuds in their ear, which is microwaves and have Wi Fi throughout the house and also enjoy the occasional cigarette and drink of alcohol from time to time, which, which are proven to be harmful. And I think that goes back to the tribal discussion we had before about things people are afraid of commonly, and being in groups of other people that share the same fears as a herd behavior. Because when you're surrounded by people that are afraid of the same things, it's safer, it's safer, because they'll sense them for with maybe at the perimeter like before you and maybe let you know that the danger is coming. But whether the danger of rational or logical or reasonable or based on reality is not relevant to these behaviors. And I think that gets us into trouble

Dr. Jamie Saris: 18:36

stopping. I mean, again, that was the dream of the Enlightenment, and which was, you know, part of the American Dream that you would establish as part of a rational democratic culture that was in its function, if not necessarily its commitment secular, that you can establish shared truths. So if you look over the various clean air acts, the final one, which was passed in the Nixon administration, there was like 16 years or 15 years of Acts, all bipartisan. And while there were debates and people voted against it, they were on at least quasi rational grounds. Well, this is going to cost money. And it might make American cars uncompetitive visa, even though the Japanese were rapidly adopting this technology, like catalytic converters, and you know, but it was never, that there's no such thing as air pollution. There's a shared ontology that people could debate about. I think that that part has largely been lost. In the US right now. I think it's very, very hard to come up with a shared objective reality that we might quibble about the edges and say, Yeah, we need to do something about this right here.

Mark Rubin: 19:59

There's a lot I'm in honey as money cooperating costs less than buddy. Because if the flowers move too far away to keep our visa alive, we'll have to pack the best we can and swarm to another hive. And this is about migration, and mass migration, the bees swarm, when they need more room, or some other often leave in maths, and humans do the same. And I have noticed on the planet Earth, that there are there are cities that are underwater. I have seen pictures of them and maybe seen a couple. So they it exists. So. So let's see, I'm gonna try to do this from like the naysayers perspective. Yeah, throughout history in the world, there have been cities that used to be above the water and that are now below the water. That's indisputable, the further this is this is true. Now, humans like to build cities on the edges of the water, because it's pretty. And also, there's good access to shipping and transportation. Make sense for a while. However, in the US, there's many parts of the country that are one or two feet above sea level. So I'm just going to pick the US as an example. Now, someone living in Holland, I think, would agree that designing around the height, expected height of water and having contingencies for reducing the water wouldn't necessarily through various servers, and and planning for this variability would be a good idea. But to people that live in like Miami, maybe maybe the idea that, like the one foot above sea level will be there forever, could be a thought in their mind, as the planet warms up, and the intensity of storms increase. And I read that for every one degree centigrade, that the Earth warms up, there's 10% more water in the air. That would mean to me, just based on the reality of other cities being underwater, the number one number two that we build close to the oceans. And number three, there's going to be more destructive storms and a higher water there first, they will have to evacuate cities at some point. And there'll be mass migrations of human beings because it will be too expensive to rebuild every 15 or so in your understanding of the world, when there is a mass migration of any species, and also including humans. Do you believe that will be a peaceful and cooperative process? Or do you believe that this would maybe because you know, war?

Dr. Jamie Saris: 22:37

Well, I think we've already seen mass migration. I mean, that is the quote unquote, migration crisis and that migration is happening, and different countries are dealing with it, you know, in different ways, most of them problematic. I tend to think it's the exception that one day, you have a normal city and the other day, it's underwater. You know, the next day, it's underwater. So you're there, you're going to see a kind of movement out of places like Florida, in the peculiarly American way, it's the market that's driving that because certain places are simply going to be uninsurable. That's really all that is already happening right now. I mean, it's, if the Dutch had left it up to insurance companies to like reclaim land, and they take the dikes and everything else, I'd be there'd be about 40% of Holland, and it would be infinitely poor. But the Dutch do large capital projects extremely well, because, you know, historically, the price of failure was the sea rushing in, you know, so you got a certain height of logic there, I think the United States is going to have to think through some of those processes have mature understanding that this is going to happen, you know, 10 years is going to come from now. And I think that that's part of the culture in some places that become harder to talk to people, things are not going to be the same forever.

Mark Rubin: 23:58

Well, I think that really is one of the elements of the weapon of peace, is understanding our temporary nature, in space and time. People will live after us. There's a line on my website, it's not our planet. It's just our term. You know, I think it's important as a weapon of peace to really start with the basis that life is transient, and other people will come late or other living things will come later. And that brings us to the last question of today, which is a perfect way to end this one. There's a line in the book. It says the purpose of this council is to share our honey debt. And what happened is the queen bees from the local habitat came together to the Council of the queens and they realized they racked up so much honey that that they're making bad decisions and that's going to lead to a fight so they want to share the debt and then together cooperate. And so the question is about shared governance and collaborative responsibility in managing resources. says in debts. Kennett can exist in human societies, and when I say dead I mean, like our carbon debt is an example of. And so here's the question how do you view the role of shared governments and collective responsibility across different human cultures? And what could be done to improve that?

Dr. Jamie Saris: 25:21

At one time, we were quite hopeful that international organizations could do that. And, you know, again, I think it's easy to get depressed about it. But you know, the relative successes that were enjoyed, you know, the 50s, and 60s, for some of these purposes, what the Law of the Sea isn't a terrible example, that there isn't one enforcement arm for the Law of the Sea. But, you know, countries, largely, not all that largely run those laws, because there seemed to be in everybody's interest, even if you are an inland state, you know, you're gonna rely on a port somewhere I can imagine, we might be able to do something like that, you know, on on our carbon debt, or at least our carbon crisis, if we had a couple more rational governments, bigger governments, because I think, you know, many smaller states, whatever they say, are becoming aware that things are changing dramatically. And if there was some kind of equitably shared burden, but that becomes depth in serious questions about who has power and who's willing to share it. The history of humans is that people with power only share power when they're worried about something bad happening, because if you look at the massive changes, let's say, European and American societies post World War One and post World War Two, like Britain, for example, you know, the 1914 election, or sorry, 1912 election, had the most restrictive franchise in Europe, you know, practically nobody could vote in the 1920 election, it had the most liberal franchise in Europe, that did the British ruling class suddenly become enlightened? Did they say, Hey, we've been like complete bastard, sensible, even the Conqueror in 1066, I think it's about time, you know, nearly 850 years later that we're going to know, several 10s of millions of men working class men trained in arms, and we used to command structures read back all at once. Yeah, we were not going to be able to do business as usual, you know that there might still be some poor Mark tugging and everything else. But, you know, you thought you have a stake in this society war instance, that he says is the father of many things. And one of the things is, you know, birth is after war, things don't go back to be different than I've been, right. That kind of moment to happen. Without the crisis of war, this idea about cooperating is, ultimately, these kinds of structures are going to have to be there. You know, I think anybody with two brain cells firing, and so it's in everybody's interest to hasten the moment of those structures. But I firmly believe, and this is, again, the fact that humans live in the symbolic order, not the real world. There are people who are more attached to their profits, and they're attached to life itself. And I think it's it's the race between that. And kind of what everybody knows. And which one of those wins is going to be whether we're going to use pessimistic or optimistic about the next 30 or 40 years.

Mark Rubin: 28:43

That was really well said, it was a great story to explain it. I'm going to end with one observation of that is that if human beings can agree about the rules on the seas, as we're moving objects around, and what like what is okay and what's not. I believe there's an opportunity for us to agree on what happens on our spaceship called Earth as we move through space. Because we're just, we're moving together. We're on one ship. We're moving through space. And if I pollute one part of my spaceship, it goes into the entire spaceship. Okay, and like it's not hard to grasp the the idea that we're all connected together on this rock. Yeah, it would be better to cooperate and invest in weapons of peace. Yep.

Dr. Jamie Saris: 29:31

Awesome. Absolutely. I thought you did a very good extension. On Carl Sagan, this pale blue dot. That's one of the I think every kid should learn that little speech that was in cosmos. You know, everybody you ever loved and everybody hated. Everything you ever heard about is odd that thing so if you have an enemy, you know, to be forgiven, because there's nothing like this anywhere. Even the people who annoy you There's a sort of weird, unique kind of thing. So, I always thought that it was a call to a sort of species consciousness that you know, I would like to inculcate in children much earlier

Mark Rubin: 30:12

ie to and this project is based on three people Carl Sagan Buckminster Fuller and and stalking Wolf who was the guy I learned from Tom Brown Jr. and he was an Apache scout. The project is based on those three philosophies, the space and time stuff, and our placement of the universe is from Carl Sagan, resource allocation and optimization as Buckminster Fuller, and planning for seven generations ahead. 500 years is from stalking Wolf. And basically those are the three influences in the Venn diagram of this project. All living things that cooperate, follow principles of anthropology, if you did any work today to make money, the success of your work required cooperation from at least one other person, and maybe that person paid you it would be wise to scale up cooperating across our entire species, with all living things. After all, cooperating cost less than fighting. So investing and getting along makes a lot of B sense. If you enjoy this discussion about anthropology and the way bees and people are similar, subscribe to the lessons from nature podcast, where we're modeling the secrets of the bees. On the next episode of the anthropology series, Jamie and I will discuss the idea that most things cost more later. So it makes sense in solving problems now. Visit project and it lay down lay for more information about living in harmony with the rest of nature. Thanks a lot for watching this