'Myopic Man' exposes a fatal flaw in the working logic of the modern environmental/conservation movement. It asks what is it about human nature that leads people to ignore or deny their environmental footprint. Others have addressed the denial of human nature in general, but none reveal the link to historical and current events, or what we can expect in the future. This book focuses on how self-deception is the unconscious predisposition that insulates excessive consumption, competition, and aggression in all people. During our 7 million year history these behaviors were never a problem until the last two centuries. The book is not another pessimistic accounting of how human nature has impacted the global ecosystem. In 12 chapters, it explores the biological basis of why history repeats itself. From 9/11 to Iraq, from worldwide immigration crises to global warming, the fact that population growth, consumption, waste and pollution indexes have all gone in the wrong direction is explained by the human predisposition to avoid, deny, and ignore the evidence of ones individual contributions to these global problems. Three chapters explore how organized religions create natural infrastructures that support self-deception in consumers under the guise of prosperity. Another two chapters explore how media and advertising are used to institutionalize our denial about consumption, waste and pollution through politics and commerce. One chapter zeros in on the denial rampant within the environmental movement itself. It reveals how 50 years of reliance on the Lockean blank slate constructivist model of human nature, now discredited and replaced by a modern Darwinian approach, explains the overall long term failure of the conservation movement. It makes the point that from the E.O.Wilsons, Al Gores and other high profile environmental leaders on down to many activists in the field, their fundamental misunderstanding and denial about the Nature and evolution of the human mind is what keeps the movement from connecting with the average consumer. This misguided assumption about how easy it is to change the core of human behavior prevents environmentalists from developing programs that lead to real changes in those pesky global indexes. We can plan on 50 more years of failure and environmental decay unless we begin to deal with our institutionalized denial about human nature. Another chapter explores the ethics of technology and our religious-like faith in its ability to solve human caused global and local problems; the chapter asks whether more technology is necessarily a good thing when the history of our use and abuse of technology is what has led to everything from 9/11, Iraq and the problems that come with globalization. In the end, it might just turn out that Man the innovator, may be too much of a good thing.
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Editorial Reviews
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The great Russian author Anton Chekhov once noted that 'Man will become better only when you make him see what he is like'. In 'Myopic Man' Marc Pratarelli compiles a brilliant portrait of what man is like and with it a near-sufficient Darwinian explanation of our escalating ecological crisis. Seeing the truth about ourselves confers the possibility of 'becoming better'. It is very simple, really. Humans evolved to capitalize on short-term self-interest. Continued unconscious obeisance to this propensity by 6.8 billion people on a finite planet is both destroying the ecosphere and over-riding any serious attempts to subdue our destructive traits. (Short-term survival instincts are not easily swayed by long-term rational analyses.) Regrettably, society remains fixated on symptoms and oblivious to cause. We are therefore stalled in myopic denial of the biological roots of our ecological conundrum. Certainly the blank-slateists among us will reject Pratarelli s thesis along with any notion that we use it to become better (and thus, ironically, provide additional evidence of its validity). --William Rees, coauthor of 'Our Ecological Footprint'.
I believe you will find Professor Pratarelli's analysis of the human condition, a condition characterized by persistent narrowmindedness and denial of our collective impact on the environment, to be refreshing... --Brunetto Chiarelli, Director, International Institute for the Study of Man, and author of 'Global Bioethics'.
I believe you will find Professor Pratarelli's analysis of the human condition, a condition characterized by persistent narrowmindedness and denial of our collective impact on the environment, to be refreshing... --Brunetto Chiarelli, Director, International Institute for the Study of Man, and author of 'Global Bioethics'.
About the Author
Marc Pratarelli is the author of two earlier books entitled 'Niche Bandits: How BIG Brains Consumed an Ecosystem'; (2003), and 'Paradigm Shift: Evolutionary Psychology Speaks to Environmentalists' (2007) and more than 150 academic publications. His recent studies in evolutionary psychology have led to a growing international reputation as lecturer, educator, scientist and consultant. Trained in cognitive neuroscience, he is presently a Professor of Psychology at Colorado State University at Pueblo where he teaches human evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology and research methods & statistics. He is a member of the International Institute for the Study of Man, in Florence Italy, and an associate of the Università di Firenze Department of Anthropology.
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