Is it too late? Probably. Maybe not. So what? We are honor-bound to do our best, no matter how likely our success or failure.
Is it too late? Probably. Maybe not. So what? We are honor-bound to do our best, no matter how likely our success or failure.
WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
- IS IT TOO LATE? -
“All life strategies have their advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of the exploitative-experimental approach is obvious. … We directly manipulate the environment in ways that ensure our populousness and ubiquity, notably in farming. The disadvantage of the exploitative-experimental approach is also obvious. Exploitation is … likely to produce unforeseeable consequences. On the other hand, nothing ventured, nothing gained.” …
“But the party really is over. This really is a special time in history — a critical time. The first full-time farmers of 10,000 years ago were perfectly capable of overfarming (we can see evidence of ancient soil erosion); but even so, they could effectively regard the world as a whole as a limitless resource. There were entire continents still to be discovered, … [Now] the fertile spots have been dug up, ... Agriculturalists can argue about details – can we feed … ten … twenty or thirty million if we really put our minds to it? – But no sensible person can seriously doubt that the finishing post is now in sight. …
“In short, the attitude that has been so appropriate this last 10,000 years, and has allowed the most exploitative-experimental people to raise inexorably if fitfully to the top, has simply ceased to be appropriate. Yet our economics are geared to the exploitative-experimental approach, and so are our political systems.”
[Note: Here is where the author and I part company. Our social systems have stuck conservatively to the habits and limitations of the past. Experimentation has been forbidden for millennia with respect to anything but marginal improvements to the delusional exploitation of “striking it rich soon by exhausting something precious but considered free because poorly defended by nature.” Unheeding exploitation has trumped acceptance at every level. His exploitative-experimental versus conservative-accepting model turns into mine of conservative exploitation dominating experimental acceptance, at least until now].
“… Surely it cannot be the case that the only “realistic” course is to head pell-mell for disaster? Is that what the levelheaded, sober-suited people are arguing? …” Colin Tudge, The Time Before History: Five Million Years of Human Impact, Scribner, New York, 1996, p. 342.
Has humanity procrastinated too long to save itself? Will the transformations we require – no matter how well thought-out – turn out to be nothing more than a Band-Aid stuck on a green-stick fracture squirting arterial blood? Will Gaya mock our efforts and shrug us off, the way a grizzly drowns its fleas while seizing its next salmon? Are we simple mammalian dinosaurs equipped with but slightly renovated brains: less worthy than them of million-year survival?
The short answers? 1) Probably so, 2) maybe not and 3) so what?
First off: probably so.
Whether or not this civilization pulls through its next set of challenges, its members will transform themselves beyond recall. This transformation may be purposeful and clear-eyed, promoting the greater good for everyone; or it may be chaotic, anarchic and bent on personal survival at the expense of everyone else. We may thrive as individuals and nations, our hypocrisy cast aside to reveal the true beings we are without them; or turn into wounded, cornered animals harmful to one and all. In either case, this adjustment will be more intense than our wildest dreams and terrors.
We will evolve beyond recognition along with our societies. Our successors will look back on us as mythic beings: either figures of wicked extravagance, or envied role models of matchless prosperity and trouble-free stability.
“Just imagine! They took hot showers more than once a day if they felt like it! Their electronics were designed to waste electricity when shut off! They never walked anywhere, but took a one-ton jalopy wherever they went. Their homes were crammed with idle equipment and tools no one else could use.”
They might see us as spoiled brats set loose to wreck the toy store, compared to the austere stewardship of the world to which they resign themselves, proud of their sacrifice. Then again, our worst massacres and plagues may seem to them like the novice spite of a schoolyard bully compared to the super-tech omnicide that few of them survive. Our primitive peace technologies may seem alien to them compared to their nano-tools and biomime systems, or else to older, mud-bound alternatives of last resort, or to both.
After surviving eons of lethal ordeal, human beings are born and bred conservative (the few of you out there who assert your progressive activism, you are fooling yourselves): “I will only do what my father and his father did — just a little better if I can get away with it.”
Unlike young and even middle-aged adults, for old folks like me almost every life-change is for the worse. As someone once said, life offers everything to youth and takes it all back from the old. They become reflexive conservatives almost always.
When I began this chapter, I watched a 2007 televised debate between ten Republican wannabe replacements for President Bush the Lesser. During my rewrites in 2011 and 2015, more racist clowns sought to replace President Obama because they felt superior to him; thus nothing significant had changed. Their lack of spirit was staggering. None of them paid the least attention to the transformations about to overwhelm them and us. They were intent instead on restoring America to some pre-Crash reprise of the 1920s if not the robber barony of the 1870s — as if those destinies could ever take hold again. Even though a tidal wave of history and science crested over their heads, casting a grim shadow over their cliché-ridden notes, none of them took heed. They counted on millions of special interest dollars and childish votes cast in their favor, simply because they refused to pay attention and afforded their supporters that fatal luxury. They and those they take in will be swamped by this transformation, like children swept out to sea because they were lured by the tsunami’s initial, extra low tide.
If only we had undertaken these transformations earlier, when so many more resources were available!
A handful of Zionist idealists emerged from World War I (sic) sharing their dream of rebuilding ancient Palestine into a modern, high-tech nation-state and regional breadbasket. If only that handful of Jews had been the mass of Learners of every ethnicity, nation and religion, intent on turning the whole world into one federated technological powerhouse and Garden of Eden! Most of them got carried out feet first during intervening wars. If only President Roosevelt had held on for another decade after World War II (sic), his dream of a one-world government might have taken root and we could have become one prosperous tribe on PeaceWorld.
Picture the untold energy, intellect, dedication, discipline and selflessness it took to murder over half a hundred million war dead, wound three times as many, turn a dozen times more into refugees, destroy the home of a hundred times more! Imagine that frenzied effort devoted to peace and mutual benefit instead. Think of stadiums-full of fuel wasted to thrust aircraft carriers, battleships, submarines and transports across the seven seas; to fill the sky with deadly aircraft tasked with burning countless cities to the ground; to roll cities-full of soldiers, their weapons and supplies back and forth across Europe, Asia and North Africa; to truck innocent victims by the million to ovens, gulags, and killing grounds. Think of that incredible wealth wasted on futile mayhem!
As far as most people are concerned, progressives are best left unheard. Transformation is by definition dangerous; keeping things the way they are seems to be safer on the whole. The only dramatic transformations we tolerate are those at the behest of war. Any peaceful transformation proposed on the same scale must be unacceptable.
Think again!
On occasion, shifting conditions twist the status quo beyond the ability of its fans to cope. Once things get that bad, they may resort to dramatic change. But. Oh. So. Reluctantly! Soon thereafter, they will put up with virtually anything to resume the olden ways of golden days.
The tendency of every revolution in human history has been to fall back on ancient routines the moment new ones reveal their drawbacks by spawning worse disasters. We fall back on the older ways (for example, letting ancient royal monarchy relapse into modern corporate monarchy: the mirror image of its iniquity), no matter how worthless that retreat turns out to be. Our innate conservatism may well spell our doom once change comes knocking at our door.
Second: maybe not.
These problems we face might appear so massively unfamiliar as to exceed our competence. But instead of hysterical paralysis, our efforts to head them off may lend us untapped dexterity. Turning away from the trivial obsessions of modern culture, we could concentrate on real problems instead. They might shrink to sensible proportions once they were honestly addressed, much easier to solve than we expect. As our initial problems drop off one by one, our rate of success may accelerate to liftoff. More of us may take the bull by the horns and vault exultantly over its mighty shoulders; fewer will pirouette away from onrushing progress like matadors setting up their death stroke.
In addition, we might not be alone in our efforts. Alien forces may be out there just beyond perception, invisible allies and unacknowledged friends. They might be human agents eclipsed up ‘til now, or beings beyond our ken. Something in the Universe seems to favor life and, by extension, us. Call it God, call it UFO, call it what you will: a benign rewording of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: “intellects vast, cool and [sympathetic].” A course in miracles may linger just beyond our doorstep, waiting for us to turn our back on faithless, ourselves-alone scientific determinism and its serial failures.
What would attract this miracle to us, what transformations should we undertake? I have sketched a few of them in Learner.
Our first renovations may be spiritual rather than high tech. The threats we face may poison our scientific technologies in the absence of psychic supports we cannot yet fathom. Religious convictions deeply held in the past may be obsolete; orthodox approaches to spirit and transcendence, rigid and heartless. Our religious leaders may turn out to be grim fools crouching whitened sepulchers, or institutional monsters (Serial child molesters? Protectors of Nazis in flight? Enslavers of women?). Selfless saints, ignored up ‘til now, may step forward to replace them. We will have to launch an ethical revolution as groundbreaking as the industrial one, a spiritual revolution that outshines the scientific. Learner empathy and cooperation could replace the official cruelty of competitive individualism; global humanism and PeaceWorld, national-capitalism and its inevitable wars.
Finally, so what?
Humanity may have doomed itself before it starts this transformation in earnest. As during painful rewrites of Learner, we may have delayed too long.
What if every transformation we undertake not only fails to postpone our doom but helps to bring it about?
Those who block transformation to prioritize their short-term gain may cut us down for our trouble – as they’ve done so often in the past – and destroy everything in an orgasm of omnicide their victims set up so tirelessly. Human civilization may grind to a halt like a wind-up toy wound backwards too hard.
So what!
What we need most these days: idealism, heroism and hope; new ideas, untold elegance and unobstructed innovation. Conservative mediocrity dishonors us with the memory of those drowned in its wake. If we do not undertake this transformation for practical reasons, for reasons of mere survival, we should do so for its glory.
Crouching in the mediocrity of special interests and stumbling over the bodies of those wiped out by incompetence and indifference: that is brain-simple, brawn-easy and bereft of glory, the fond dream of Republican politicians everywhere. It involves no self-sacrifice, no appeal to genius, no stretch of the imagination; merely persistent self-pity, unearned entitlement and empty claims of exceptionalism.
Reaching out for something better, even though it is declared impossible, perhaps so magnificent as to perch just beyond our reach: now, that would be worthy of our talent and honor.
Every delay will make this transformation more difficult, riskier and less likely to succeed; every month spent weighing our options will make those options more perilous. The longer we do nothing, the more desperate our task will become. The most hazardous alternative at this point would be to do nothing and wait, sitting on our hands, the consequences of having done nothing.
What about you! Is it too late for you already?
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