NAME
Christopher Robert Middleton
AGE
36
HOMETOWN
Ware, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom
ALMA MATER
University of Cambridge, England
OPEN TO
Civil Service
Private Clients
Research & Professorships
LIKES
Dry humour, hotel lobbies, garden centres, old trains, fine teas, efficient postal services, constant debate.
DISLIKES
Americanisms, cold toast, slow walkers, poor grammar, salesmen, air fresheners, hot tubs, Elvis impersonators.
Fellow of Burlington House
Fellow at the Royal Anthropological Institute
Associate of the University of Cambridge and University of Oxford
Academically, I am the man behind the proposition called the 'anti-civilisation argument' (contra economia) which sets forth the controversial case that civilisations cannot coexist with the natural world, nor support the needs of life on Earth. My work in anthropology takes a strictly biological view of the artificial economic habitats that humans have created as preferred alternatives to the natural environment, with concise specificity on exactly why economic systems are ultimately doomed to fail and why civilisations eternally rise and fall in deterministic cycles which humans are ultimately powerless to control.
Through new theory in my book, I demonstrate that human civilisation is actually inconsistent with Darwinian evolution and that our post-hunter-gatherer economic systems and domestication function in direct violation of biological imperatives. My field of study proposes that there are 'Three Fundamental Problems of Economy' which from the Neolithic period until today, unintendedly produce a social trap; driving humankind into a tailspin trajectory that inevitably leads to a novel self-extinction event. In light of new revelations linked to the former premise, I suggest that our modern interpretation of reality based on a progressive economic worldview is an unsupported orthodoxy, which prompts a complete rethink of our current philosophies and how we perceive human life and our place on Earth.
As a nascent solution to this problem, I have begun laying the foundations for a new field of biological anthropology called 'Econology' to bridge the disconnected gap between Economics and Ecology, which have remained in academic isolation from each other despite their overlap as inextricably related scientific subjects. My ethos is that we need to start seeing the world for what it is, instead of what we want it to be. Since the beginning of recorded time, our idealistic worldview of human civilisation has diverted our observation away from fundamental problems with economic life in the first place. My job has been to undo the favourable narrative which has long supported our ambitions and instead reveal human life in a painfully objective way that is more scientifically appropriate.
Throughout my own educational journey, I have been largely influenced by the early work of prominent intellectuals like Francis Bacon, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Herbert Spencer, Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley and Ronald Fisher; alongside contemporary thinkers such as Maynard Smith, Hamilton, Gould, Dunbar and Dawkins, to name a few. Where my position on humankind differs from those of my predecessors is that I contend humans gain no exception to the laws of nature which inexorably apply to all entities, and that civilisation is an inorganic ecological maladaptation contrary to selection mechanisms, far from the glorified edifice which scholars have hastily extolled. Further, I asseverate that humankind has not evolved towards a ‘perfected state’, but the notion of a 'perfected state' remains an ideological fiction of social psychology designed to facilitate economic and political demands that are ultimately superfluous and counterproductive in evolutionary terms.
Conventional thinking on this topic is problematic because there is a prevailing social misconception that economic systems and human domesticity are natural vectors toward ‘better’ and ‘higher forms of living’, but this fallacy perpetuates the same historical error biologists previously made with orthogenesis and its theoretical ties to determinism in a probabilistic universe. The problem with our thinking is rooted in the origination of our psychology, where a new dependency on civilisation has installed an inherent economic bias to shape our interpretation of reality around development preferences and idealistic ambitions, hence why human ignorance has misled our continued attempt to fully understand our species.
My ostensible 'anthropological theory of everything' strikes a fatal blow to the mainstream canon on humankind's current status, by showing how a proper scientific approach to understanding civilisation actually contradicts everything we have grown to believe about it; revealing an evolutionarily-inconsistent anomaly and superficial transition in human history. Thus, our prevailing anthropological view should be updated to remain objectively macroscopic instead of subjectively relative to the current phase of complexity present in this stage of time.
This overdue revision of contemporary anthropology has far-reaching consequences that will undermine our existing worldview, but more importantly, it radically alters the future landscape for business, politics, science and technology. Building the formal challenge to civilisation's existence seems a self-defeating direction to explore, but it is necessary when common threads are fast appearing and illuminating a way forward to advance natural knowledge.
Having identified that the fundamental issue with how we live is on a much deeper ecological level, I turn my attention to real-world applications and utilise my expertise in human complexity to aid organisations and governments in navigating the biggest challenges ahead. As a consultant, I cover a broad spectrum of commissions throughout the spheres of business and politics. I would describe my niche as dealing with ‘big problems’ but nonetheless undertake myriad projects to guide management, policy, governance and culture.