“Sustainability” is a form of Karma Yoga
March 14th, 2008 by geprI’ve been thinking quite a bit about “sustainability” lately. As a follower of the computationalist school of complex adaptive systems, I tend to believe “sustainability”, as a concept, is either ill-formed or merely an ideal limit that can only be approached, not obtained. But, in either case, it is a worthy goal. Also, as a follower of critical rationalism, my contribution (assuming I contribute at all), will probably consist mostly of a clarification of the concept so as to make it well-formed or more approachable. After all, what is modeling and simulation, except a tool for thinking … for refining thoughts and concepts? Of course, it’s a matter of faith whether more refined concepts can lead to more precise and accurate action. A faith which I obviously hold.
In any case, I’m also a fan of philosophy because, as Jesus’ parable of the sower says: “he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty”. I.e. if you work to ensure that your gestalt is robust, when you receive information and integrate it (as opposed to grafting it on with spit and bailing wire) into your gestalt, the return you will realize off that new information will be manifold.
So, in that spirit, while poking around in Eastern philosophy, the concept of karma (accumulated effects of action) yoga (discipline) leads me to correlate this “new” concept of “sustainability” with karma yoga. The official karma doctrine seems to say that karma takes effect after one dies and guides the circumstances into which (supposedly) that same person is reborn. So, karma yoga would be the process of learning to discipline your actions so that you accumulate less karma. If you have no karma when you die, then you are liberated (and presumably not reborn).
If we really stretch our metaphor muscles, we can think of reincarnation as neo-Darwinian evolutionary descent and karma as the stigmergic process of modifying our environment (including our selves), by our actions, to such an extent that subsequent generations (in our particular lineage) are constrained and facilitated by the modifications made to the environment. For example, prior generations have, through their karma-laden actions, built the city of New York. Current generations are born and live much of their entire lives where their movement is constrained to the streets (i.e. they can’t walk through buildings), their dwellings are constrained to the structures, their “hunting” is constrained to the established market places, etc. An accepted term for this historical accumulation and collaborative construction over time is “stigmergy”. Stigmergy is karma.
Viewed this way, the “new” efforts described as “sustainable” consist of disciplining our actions so that future generations are not as constrained by our actions as they otherwise would be. Ideally, we would liberate subsequent generations to experience their environment in as many ways as possible without coercing them to homogenously trudge down a stiffly constrained rat hole.
Now, the above text might lead one to think this is incompatible with the more exploitative technologies like the manufacture of silicon wafers, where companies externalize their pollution in the form of toxic chemicals and heat. But, it doesn’t. The invention of the silicon-based quantum well, the transistor, the integrated circuit, and the modern computer, all fall into karma yoga, disciplined action intended to liberate subsequent generations. It’s not a contradiction. It’s a paradox, which is resolved by hopping up to a higher level of discourse. The invention of this heavily polluting technology has opened more doors through the facilitation of information flow than it has closed through the deleterious effects of its pollution.
I.e. the liberation of subsequent generations from the karma of our actions does not necessarily imply some idyllic surface world populated with hunter-gatherer Eloi powered by a dirty smelly underworld populated by Morlocks. A future environment built through “sustainable” processes may look entirely different from any world we’ve seen or imagined so far … perhaps a world where the toxic waste generated from silicon wafer manufacturing is nutrient for several life forms … which means it would only be “waste” to the wafer producers but would be raw materials for others.
So, if we think deeply about “sustainability”, we may be able to co-construct (with our sibling life forms in our current ecology) an entirely new landscape that is less fragile than the one we’re currently constructing. But to do that, we will need to develop some methods for measuring and estimating the long-term effects of our current actions.
My punchline’s always the same, I’m afraid. 
How do we measure and estimate the long-term effects of our current actions? Why, through modeling and simulation, of course!
- gepr
Tags: evolution, modeling and simulation, philosophy, stigmergy, sustainability
March 14th, 2008 at 12:12:12
Hi Glen,
Good be in contact.
I’m not sure why you think this needs to be torn down. Using modeling and
simulation to help us determine the effect on the planet seems like a good
(and not controversial) idea.
– Russ Abbott
March 14th, 2008 at 13:13:02
Well, criticism is always good. And there’s lots to criticize in my post. For example, it’s tenuous that “sustainability” is primarily about opening up the options for subsequent generations. I suppose one might also claim “sustainability” consists of preventing subsequent generations from creating “unsustainable” processes.
It’s also reasonable to posit that karma yoga is solely a method intended for single organisms, rather than species or lineages. Can a society be self-conscious and discipline its collective actions? Or is it the case that the effects of collective action are so nonlinearly related to the actions of the individuals within the collection so as to make collective action discipline suspect (or even self-contradictory)? I.e. perhaps the system is so complex as to prevent estimation of the collective outcome? Or, perhaps it’s simply a categorical error or fallacy of composition to apply organismal operators like karma yoga to collectives?
I can criticize my own stuff all day long. 8^) But, I’m hoping that your criticism will be more incisive.
March 14th, 2008 at 18:18:06
Hi Glen,
That is a very interesting stream of thought. Both “karma yoga” and “sustainability” are close to my heart. Having grown up in India and read more than a fair share of Eastern philosophy (although the two have been quite unrelated in my life), I might have a fair bit to say about this, but I’ll save some of it for when we meet next.
One key point that I do want to help clarify: “Karma” actually means “work” or “action” in Sanskrit, not the “accumulated effects of action”. So, “karma yoga” is literally the yoga of work — essentially a way of life based on action, for “good” purposes, without the usual self-interest. So, for example, Gandhi was widely recognized as a “karma yogi”, as opposed to other yogis who might have focused more on devotion, wisdom, etc. By this definition, someone working selflessly (for the benefit of current and future generations) for the cause of sustainability would certainly qualify as a karma yogi.
Colloquially, the word “karma” seems to imply the effects of one’s actions, but that comes about because any action (even a good one) that is done for selfish reasons or with attachment to its results is considered (in Eastern philosophy) to link the doer to the consequences of the action. In that sense, “karma” is shorthand for consequences of actions done with incorrect motives. But again, not all actions will have consequences for the doer in this framework.
The law of consequences of actions is considered to apply not just to individuals, but to groups and societies. So, colloquially, there is individual karma and group karma. But the logic gets very complicated very fast.
Again, very interesting line of inquiry. We should chat more sometime.
Kumar
March 16th, 2008 at 7:07:52
I’m not much of a deep thinker, so I always thought of karma as being a property of a person that is based on that person’s actions, be they good or bad. This, of course, is totally over simplified, and almost silly. A person’s karma in my naive sense is projected outward from the person like a a field, but it can be shielded (to be harder to detect) or unshielded (easy to detect). It accumulates based on recent actions, and dissipates over time, so it can shift from bad to good over time, but not instantly.
This naive idea is totally based on the colloquial notion mentioned above by Kumar and not based on any attempt on my part to understand its meaning in any true or deep sense.
What confused me in Glen’s post and also Kumar’s post is the sense that we want to eliminate karma and that karma develops when motives are incorrect, and does not result when motives are pure.
Would this make the colloquial notion of “good karma” a non sequitur?
These is much more to this thread that I need to ponder, so I’ll post this one tiny thought/question for now.
March 16th, 2008 at 9:09:19
Kumar wrote:
One key point that I do want to help clarify: “Karma” actually means “work” or “action” in Sanskrit, not the “accumulated effects of action”.
Thanks for the clarification. As I suspected, my simplified metaphor breaks down a bit when considering the full meaning of the concept.
Wayne, the idea I was going for is that all artifacts, good or ill, push future generations in some direction. A positive example might be the development of climate-specific agricultural methods that, say, reduce (non-humans as well) suffering throughout the globe. This might be considered “good karma” because future generations will suffer less (forgetting that such ag methods might damage the environment in unforeseen ways). But, even though it’s “good”, it still canalizes (constrains, guides) the behavior of subsequent generations. Subsequent generations would be much more likely to use these ag methods because, to avoid them and let living things starve would be questionable.
It’s less about motives and more about stigmergy. Any semi- or completely permanent artifact biases the options available to subsequent generations. So, the goal of “liberation” is not to avoid bad karma and focus on good karma (i.e. focus on biasing future generations in a “good” way). The goal is to avoid biasing future generations at all. Provide subsequent generations with as many, freely available, options as possible so that they can make their own decisions, optimized in an agile way for the particular circumstances in which they find themselves.
Of course, such non-biasing actions are logically impossible. Actions have, by definition, effective consequences. So, as you point out, perhaps the important part of the discipline is estimating and, perhaps minimizing, the transient for any such synthetic bias. As a collective (e.g. the government) decides on some policy or action, the immediate consequences of the policy are less important than the expected evolution of the bias. When the transient bias begins to fade or shift, will the subsequent generations be left with more or fewer options.
I think “sustainability”, to be coherent would press for policies where we estimate that, as the bias evolves, it will leave subsequent generations with more, not fewer, options. And that would be regardless of whether the immediate consequences of a policy are currently (subjectively) considered “bad” or “good”.
March 16th, 2008 at 10:10:44
Yes, I would agree that leaving the maximum number of options open for future generations is the key to sustainability. Any immediate goals, such as reducing GHG emissions below certain levels, should always be seen in that long-term context. The immediate consequences may be somewhat bad in this case, because the present generation will have to modify some aspects of its lifestyle for the sake of the future (technology alone is unlikely to solve these big problems, IMHO). The old American Indian tradition of making decisions keeping in mind the welfare of the seventh generation to come (”What about the seventh generation? Where are you taking them? What will they have?”) is an excellent example of sustainability in action — which is really karma yoga in the best sense.
Kumar