A book that should be considered a suitable text for a broad framework of global ecology and human technology and economic history and analysis is "Too smart for our Own Good", author Craig Clifford. The book is unlikely to represent the Federal Government's view on a history curriculum for Australian schools.

This week the Coal-Ignition Federal Government proposed that high school curriculum for the subject of history, needs reviewing because it has become too "leftist", and really ought to have more emphasis on history of Western Civilization. Quotes echoed by the media included the inescapable fact of the "Judeo-Christian" and "Democratic" values of the majority of the colonists of Australia. Of course, school history curriculum on our origins should go deeply into the makeup of present value systems and worldview, in the broad context of the development of human culture. The history of western civilization, if anything, is the end result of the development of technology.

The "TSFOOG" book predicts that education minister Christopher Pyne, if he took the trouble to read it, would regard it as worse than a leftist views orgy. If he really understood its contents, Mr Pyne would ban it from all school libraries. Or not, as that would attract attention. Its better for capitalist manipulators to tippy-toe around it. Mr Clifford writes in the latter part of the book, about "worldviews", that they develop from fundamental beliefs that are very difficult to break out of.

...

"Thus, for example, for the vast majority of people educated along Western lines, be they ever so intelligent in a conventional sense, to take the theory developed in this book seriously, despite its scientific nature, would require their making such a great break with the socioeconomic aspect of their worldview that it would be virtually impossible for them to do.

From a biological point of view a further difficulty is that the Western worldview is supported by human territoriality and the reaction and pioneering principles."

...

Mr Clifford reviews our human story so far, from prehistory of our species when we left the trees, to the present, referencing a solid literature trail of views from anthropology, archaeology and economics, all of which support an ecological worldview, which is in contrast to the Western worldview. He finds a coherent explanatory pattern to our tragic species story, of threatened extinction by repeated technological success in the face of ecosystem constraints, which he calls the "Vicious Circle Principle". (VCP) This is explicated and supported in detail for each stage of our technological history.

As the repertoire of technology grew, from the acquisition of using and controlling fire, to more advanced stone tools, lance, spear, bow and arrow, our hunter and gatherer forebears increased the food resources they could exploit, the numbers of species that could be hunted. New technology relaxes the external constraints on population growth, and weakens internal cultural "checks" on population growth. The previously constrained population grows more, and exploits the newly available resources, even if it means more work per person. Ecological principles ensure that newly available resources become depleted. If they are non-renewable, substitutes and harder to obtain sources must be found. If the resources are renewable, they will still have a natural rate of restoration, which can be exceeded. Ecosystems change with the impacts. Eventually population grows enough to come against the constraints of what the existing technology can extract from the environment, and if this continued, some form of "ecological equilibrium" might develop with regards to the population size of human technology that the ecosystems will sustain.

Because necessity becomes the mother of invention, people living "on the margins", may be fortunate to find another means of subsistence, such as to develop technology of horticulture, and settled agriculture. New lifestyles and resource sources relax population constraints, and so the VCP accelerates. Every technological advance can add to our capacity for growth. A turning of the wheel is the expansion of human population, to occupy the new ecological and energy niche made available by technology, until degradation of resources, or growth in population, cause new constraints to be felt, such that the ingenuity of human inventors is again asked to find ways to take the next set of available resources from nature.

Technology also has "domesticated" our kind, as much as we domesticate the species selected from nature to serve our purposes. We take technology development and economic growth very much for granted. It is the fabric that supports and grows our civilization, and nature is something to be dominated and conquered. And that is also its fundamental weakness. The total amount of available resources is finite. Renewable resources have limits too.

Mr Clifford writes :

...

" there are three major factors that account for the failure on the part of the vast majority of educated people to admit what is happening, and none of them is that they are unaware of it."

• How we see the world is largely determined by short term contingencies, in particular capitalists' desire to make as large a profit as possible.
• The detailed facts about our history and current situation are themselves unsavoury. (Growing massive physical and ecological deterioration of our biosphere).
• The effort that would be required to change them is gargantuan.

The result is our negative view of our future is psychologically and practically repressed.

Mr Clifford himself takes a pessimistic view.

...

"According to the VCP the individual territorial instincts of the powerful override whatever other instincts they may have as support the well-being of the species, and it is they who determine the course taken. And, it seems to me, there’s not much we can do about it. The revealing of the nature of the situation, such as is attempted in this book, is not going to make any noticeable difference."

...

Now there is a rhetorical challenge to be proven at least partially wrong. Its also in keeping with a spirit of scientific realism in the book.

So are we going to let the individual territorial instincts like those of the powerful Mr Christopher Pyne determine our fate?

At least we can know what we are up against. Is that better than being deluded?

What we lack is working technology to change our instinctive nature, and regulate our population growth, which is against natural evolutionary principles.

Survival, sexual, and social instincts, that drive our technological irrationality, all allow us to hide from ourselves our need to regulate our own biological nature.

And Mr Pyne is going to try to ensure few people will learn of this, as our capitalist rulers have their own template of nationalist historical and territorial solidarity in mind. Now that really is being too smart for our own good.

Mr Clifford has collected and echoed the many warnings over the last 40 years or so, that we are on our way to extinction as a species.

...

“A measure of political reality is that government has yet to acknowledge the impending crisis". This is a situation that has not changed in the ensuing 35 years. And they draw the conclusion that we are on our way to extinction as a species.

These are the wise people of what may be the last age of humanity, none of their ever so important warnings being refuted (or acted upon).

As Dennis Meadows has recently said, “The message that current growth trends cannot be sustained is now reconfirmed every year by thousands of headlines, hundreds of conferences, and dozens of new scientific studies.”

...

Furthermore, all computer simulations of humankind’s development into the future since that time, including the original ones of Limits to Growth, show not only that the present system will decline, but that it will crash, and that the longer it continues the greater the crash will be. In terms of Schumacher’s metaphor: we’re stampeding over a cliff. So the fact that our situation is terribly threatening has been known to decision makers for more than 30 years, and this quite independently of an awareness of the operation of the vicious circle principle. What an understanding of the VCP adds is a realization both of how we have come to this pass, as well as why we in fact have made no serious attempt to remedy the situation despite our being aware of it.

...

No wonder Mr Pyne wants to put blinkers on the school history curriculum.