On November 15th, I drafted something about the population of the planet reaching eight billion people, which it supposedly did on that day.
Think of all the poop, I wrote.
How might we poop out the love? I wondered.
But I couldn't quite hit “post” on this because this milestone of the population got tangled for me into other questions:
What are we paying attention to?
What should we be influenced by?
These are very 21st-century subjects: attention and influence.
(Pooping out the love, by contrast, is as old as, well poop itself.)
Sam Harris says somewhere that we have “flown the perch” of evolution, that evolution did not really prepare us to run the global society we must now run. Certainly, our numbers put pressure on that idea. All of us need food, all need water, and all would be safer in a stable climate.
Yet as Harris would concede, we have lived through enough history to know a few things.
Like, we need to pay attention to, say, threats to our habitat rather than the Davos pretend show currently in session, that a meeting of global billionaires may have value but not if they all take private planes to get there.
It is a poopy problem, but we are attracted to the shine of the rich rather than their actual influence. We pay attention to the wrong thing.
At the end of this article in the NY Times, Anand Giridharadas says billionaires are “not our saviors, they are our mistakes.” And in this interview, Scott Galloway points out how Elon Musk's “total lack of grace” is part and parcel of a god complex. We made Steve Jobs a kind of Jesus, Galloway says, and “now Elon Musk has taken on that mantle.”
The bad news is how powerful the billionaire shine is. The good news is that, more than ever, we might crank the wheel of school and work and life towards the generative rather than wasteful simply by shifting our attention.
Shouldn’t every headline in every newspaper, in this sense, report how we are doing protecting the rainforest? Or some such?
Once upon a time, you had to go to church and the king was in charge. Such forces could only be shifted by reformation or revolution.
In the modern industrial economy that replaced popes and royals, every dollar spent counted as a kind of vote. Too often we voted for (or were fooled into voting for) cars over bikes, roads over mass transit, and suburbs over neighborhoods, but more of us had a say in the world we made.
Now, in the panopticon in which eight billion of us live power is, as much as anything, what finds eyeballs. Money still makes the world go round, of course, and you could argue that the Davos crowd would be smarter to meet in private, but the networks of attention which pixelate through our world obviously matter as much to the tyrants and oligarchs who want to dominate them or, in lieu of that, shut them down as they do to you and me.
Bullies and narcissists demand attention and for the first time in history, we could ignore those who think they matter just because they are bullies and narcissists. Their thrones and castles shrink, in a sense, because they too are now just images on the screen.
Ignoring Mr. Putin would not end the war in Ukraine and ignoring Mr. Musk would not make Twitter less awful but at least we would have flown the perch of evolution toward a better global society.
As long as I am on this subject I’ll make three suggestions that sound quixotic but which I would love to see as part of a poop-out-the-love agenda:
A website curated by smart twelve-year-olds from around the world that announces the thing they believe we should all tune into so that their children will be able to thrive.
A Global Middle-Class Party: Single-issue voting based on whether the candidate lives in and serves the middle class. Pro-gun? Anti-gun? Abortion? Any other social issue? Forget that. Do you want more progressive tax policies and better services for the average person in your country? Yes? You have my vote and my attention.
And, as I have argued before, Harvard changing its admission policies so that even geniuses can learn to tend our common garden and our education system can go from “only achieve myself” to “responsible global citizenry.”
Dreamy, as I say, but given how many of us there are now, maybe worth dreaming up together via where we put our attention.