November 19, 2010

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

We've heard it all before: Our civilization is on that slippery slope that slid the Romans, the Mayans, the Khmer and other great empires into collapse. Costa says we know how to avoid it, but we're hampered by societal handcuffs she calls “supermemes.”

Why doesn't water-starved Southern California build desalinization plants? Why can't we beam down the energy we need from orbiting solar panels? Why can't we mitigate the disparities between rich and poor which foment wars and terrorism?

Costa, a professional trend-spotter, says the complexity of our civilization - like that of the Romans et al - has grown beyond the ability of our brains to understand and deal with it. Our mental capacities have evolved very slowly, whereas the systems we have put in place grow more complicated in quantum leaps.

“Until now we have never understood the real consequences of the uneven rate of change” between biological evolution and the evolution of complex societies and technologies, Costa argues.

“When we can't develop new cognitive behaviors fast enough… irrational behaviors materialize.”

The glimmer of hope Costa sees is a talent she calls “insight.” It's that out-of-the-blue solution that seems to come from nowhere, without premeditation or laborious decision-making. An example would be the smoke-jumper in Montana, surrounded by wildfires and certainly doomed, who suddenly saw that if he started a little fire of his own, burned out a place the inferno couldn't burn and would pass over, he might hunker down in it and survive. He did, while his buddies who simply ran were all killed.

Two telltale signs forecast impending disaster for a civilization. The first is gridlock, when a society becomes unable to comprehend or resolve large, complex problems. Instead it continues the same solutions that worked when the society was smaller, applying Band-Aids to a grievous wound.

The second telltale occurs when the problem continues to get worse and the society begins to substitute beliefs for facts. Why? Because “knowledge is much harder to acquire than belief.”

Consider the Maya. For centuries they built intricate water storage and distribution systems, maintaining an expanding empire. But there came a time when “the population was exploding, the need for water was rapidly escalating, and the annual rainfall was declining.” Instead of any practical steps to mitigate the problem - relocating some of the populace, for instance - the leaders turned to ritualistic murder in hopes of appeasing the gods.

Didn't work. “The point at which a society can no longer think its way out of problems is called the cognitive threshold… once a society reaches this cognitive threshold, it begins passing unresolved issues from one generation to the next  until, finally, these problems push the civilization over the edge. That is the real reason for collapse.”

This time we have more understanding and better technology. We could solve them, Costa argues, except for our supermemes. “Meme,” a term invented by a sociological theorist in 1976, is “a unit of cultural transmission or imitation.” Memes, like genes, compete for survival as they are transmitted from one individual to the next. They can wax, wane or die out completely. Or they can morph into supermemes.

“A supermeme is any belief, thought or behavior that becomes so pervasive, so stubbornly embedded, that it contaminates or suppresses all other beliefs and behaviors.” For the Maya, fetishism became the supermeme; in medieval Europe, Christian dogma assumed that role.

Costa's first supermeme is irrational opposition to new ideas. “We are hardwired to perceive real change as threatening…In nature, animals that gravitate toward what is already known and understood frequently improve their survival opportunities by reducing the risk…”

Second is the personalization of blame. Costa's example is the plot to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day in 2009. First described by the president as a “systemic failure,” the incident quickly became a campaign to demand the resignation of individuals. Fixing the system, Costa argues, would be more logical, but the supermeme interferes.

Third, counterfeit correlation. With so much information and misinformation coming at us, it becomes impossible to discover real cause and effect. We've come to believe that correlation implies causation - making it hard to correct a problem when we can't pinpoint the cause.
Silo thinking is the fourth supermeme. Countless stories exist about government agencies, researchers, academic departments and the like, walled off in their own “silos,” that fail to share information - with results that are sometimes tragic, sometimes ludicrous.

Fourth is extreme economics. “We begin applying the strategies we use to succeed in business to the other areas of life.” The result, she points out, is often the sabotaging of ideas that would improve human life in destitute parts of the world - because they aren't profitable.

Unlike most doom seers, Costa offers specific ways to overcome our supermemes and think our way out of collapse. Lest we find her insights too outlandish, she appends some 60 pages of notes and citations. Hers is a meaty book, but Costa serves it up in easily digested bits.

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