Getting back to the proposal that, just as we can, like C.S. Lewis does in the final chapter of Mere Christianity, see in the teachings of Jesus a radical new paradigm shift for human evolution, we can also see a way forward for ‘normal’ evolution that addresses some of the challenges of ‘collapse’.

I’ve hesitated to write this because it is a landmine of potentially controversial shibboleths. Taking more time to think about it has not made me any more confident that I can avoid stepping into any of those. So, as ridiculous as it feels to have to make the following disclaimers, I do so now to hopefully avoid the worst bad faith misinterpretations of what I want to say. I am not a eugenicist. I do not support population control. I respect personal decisions at the granular family-planning level of reproductive choice and responsibility. In general, but with certain caveats to minimize risk of potential harms, I support IVF, adoption, surrogacy. There may be more to include in this list and I’ll have to come back to it later, but for now I think that covers the basics.

The theories of ‘collapse’ I find most interesting and compelling are those in which the basic evolutionary impulses of humanity directly contribute to the conditions for humanity’s historical and potentially future ‘collapses’ – be they cultural, civilizational, or existential. I mentioned agriculture and industrialization as two major examples. Both can be seen as technological advancements developed by humans to address key evolutionary issues of survival, competition, fitness and reproductive success. But just as agriculture and evolution contribute to humanity’s evolutionary success, they also contribute to humanity’s collapse. I’m interested in the ways in which the teachings of Jesus might be directed at managing humanity’s evolutionary successes so that they do not also contribute to humanity’s collapse.

I’m going to use Bible stories to illustrate, not because they are the most historically reliable or evolutionarily significant, but because they are what I know best, and more importantly they are what Jesus would have known best, which is crucial for my claim that this is actually what Jesus taught and why.

Agriculture is not the problem. It’s intriguing to speculate that when Yahweh does not “look with favor” on Cain’s offering of “some fruits of the soil” we’re seeing the beginnings of a divine hierarchy placing nomadic herding culture above settled crop cultivation. But that seems like a stretch. Besides, agriculture isn’t the problem: consolidation of control over land and resources made possible by agriculture is the real problem.

We’re not told why Abram’s family leaves the agricultural ‘fertile crescent’ of Ur but his migration coincides with potential competition between conditions for the pursuit of nomadic herding and those for the acquisition, possession, and defense of stable farmland.

Evolutionarily, both nomadic herding and stable farming are imperfectly adapted solutions. Both suffer when there is famine in the land. But agriculture has an advantage. Joseph in Egypt capitalizes on it. Our contemporary version is ‘disaster capitalism’. In the Egypt of Genesis it is the ability of powerful and wealthy elites (Pharaohs) to build granaries to establish domination and control over entire populations. By controlling access to food in a time of famine, Pharaoh (with Joseph’s help) weaponizes agricultural abundance to amplify (climate-caused?) scarcity into extreme upward redistribution of resources and massive social-political-economic inequality. Agriculture allows Pharaoh to grow and store grains, which are then sold to starving populations in exchange for their land and freedom. Eventually, Egypt’s Pharaohs end up with so much surplus land, wealth, and slave labor that they develop ever more elaborate monuments to their own hyper-inflated sense of divine superiority just to keep their massively unequal populations under control.

Aliens did not build the pyramids, but the social conditions that enabled their construction are alien to human dignity and flourishing. In their inhuman cruelty and the ungodly wealth and power it enabled, the Pharaohs may have seemed to themselves and others as altogether alien – an evolutionarily superior lifeform set apart and above the lesser masses of humanity.

So Yahweh does the Exodus thing to bring them back down to reality (maybe).

Anyway, my goal is not Sunday School Bible stories, at least not from the Hebrew Testament. My interest is in the Gospels: how are the teachings of Jesus ‘good news’ for humans in light of the potential for collapse inherent in the development of agriculture as an evolutionary adaptation for survival?

Jesus advocates against the very collapse-prone abuses that Pharaoh (and plenty of other civilizations throughout history) represent. Jesus identifies his message with a proclamation of ‘the year of the Lord’ – a reference to the Hebrew concept of Jubilee. I’m not an expert on these things so ask your favorite Hebrew scholar if you want the whole truth, but Jubilee is designed to undo the abuses that naturally arise and ossify in human societies built on competition for survival – every 50 years. Marking the social-political-economic ‘reset’ to every 50 years compared to the thousands of years of Egyptian history reveals a concern for just how quickly human societies can devolve toward collapse, and how extremely unhealthy inequality becomes if left unaddressed for any longer.

Jesus’ message and the year of Jubilee work directly against the kinds of extreme inequality the Pharaoh exploited from the famines in Genesis: Redistribute wealth. Return land to its original owners to prevent generational resource consolidation. Forgive debts. Release captives. Free slaves.

From a survival perspective, things might get a bit riskier for humans under these conditions. Cooperation becomes more necessary because there is no dominant authority to control resources and impose distribution from the top-down. For many U.S. Christians, the lesson is one of radical individualism and extreme self-reliance. But that is the opposite of what Jesus teaches. For Jesus, the increased risk of decentralized power has to be offset by greater relational investment and communal cooperation: Give. Share. Sacrifice. Don’t hoard. Don’t create debt. Don’t discriminate. Don’t establish social-economic-political hierarchies.

Would a community living as Jesus taught be more or less fit to adapt and survive environmental challenges like famine? I honestly don’t know. But what if it didn’t maximize reproductive success, at least in the form of population growth? Is maintaining a smaller human population overall a key part of human adaptation?

Please refer to my disclaimers above. I don’t wish for famine to kill off human populations. I don’t believe God wants people to starve so that earth reaches some ideal sustainable population level. I’m not a Darwinian eugenicist. But it seems reasonable, and perhaps maybe likely, that a smaller more sustainable human population might be an evolutionarily beneficial outcome of the type of social-political-economic cooperation Jesus advocates. And such a population might be more resistant in the face of environmental challenges like famine, climate change, pollution, etc. And in so far as conditions for disastrous outcomes from challenges like famine are in part the result of human-caused overpopulation, or population density, or urban concentration, or over-farming, or extreme inequality, or manufactured scarcity, those conditions may be minimized by adapting to Jesus’ way of human flourishing.

Would God really want a more sustainable world with less humans in it? What about the charge to the first humans in the Bible to “Be fruitful and multiply”? How is it evolutionarily advantageous to reduce reproductive success by potentially exposing humanity to greater risk?

I’ll go there, if not next time, then eventually. Thanks for staying tuned!