Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
— a painting by Paul Gauguin, 1897
The painting, click to enlarge. Visit here for an explanation of Gauguin's intentions
Although I did not know it until much later, when I started reading and thinking about the big issues of human existence in the late 1980s, I had set myself on a journey to answer Gauguin's questions. This blog is largely a result of what I found out along the way. I read extensively in anthropology, sociology, paleoanthropology (human evolution), paleontology, paleoclimate, psychology, history and in many other areas. About three years ago, and despite many false starts and mistakes over the years, my answers to Gauguin's questions became largely settled when my observations of the Human Condition and my theories about it achieved an astonishing harmony which I've had little reason to revise since then. Looking around at the human world now, I never see anything which, at the appropriate level of abstraction, I haven't seen a thousand times before.
As I said, this clarity didn't occur overnight, and looking back, I am often amazed at just how long it took to rid myself of the falsehoods, the bullshit, the socialization, the obligatory hopes and all the other junk our minds are filled with from an early age. That's why I quoted T.S. Eliot the other day in Put The Sunglasses On!
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time
When I read that quote, I knew that Eliot could only have said this if he himself had undertaken some kind of journey like the one I had undergone, for I knew exactly what he meant. (No two journeys could be identical.) I look around at the world now, and I feel like I know the place for the first time.
Something the writer Bernard Malamud said is also relevant in this context.
We have two lives, the one we learn with, and the life we live after that
Malamud got it exactly right. Having dispensed with the life I learned with, I am now living the one after that. DOTE is one outcome of that second life.
This long preamble is actually meant to go somewhere. In 2004 Canadian writer and historian Ronald Wright wrote a book called A Short History Of Progress. I don't read much anymore—most books are a waste of my time now—but I read that one. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Wright began his book with Gauguin's questions, and covered some (but not nearly all) of the ground I had explored over the last 25 years. I recommend you read Wright's book. I will simply quote from the book's conclusion here.
The case for reform that I have tried to make is not based on altruism, nor on saving nature for its own sake. I happen to believe that these are moral imperatives, but such arguments cut against the grain of human desire. The most compelling reason for reforming [industrial civilization] is that the system is in no one's interest. It is a suicide machine... Wealth can buy no refuge from pollution; pesticides sprayed in China condense in Antarctic glaciers and Rocky Mountain tarns. And wealth is no shield from chaos, as the surprise on each haughty face that rolled the guillotine made clear.
There's a saying in Argentina that each night God cleans up the mess the Argentines made by day. This seems to be what our leaders are counting on. But it won't work. Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don't do, now. The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.
The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.
We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees' seeds to plant out of the reach of rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don't do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past.
Now is our last chance to get the future right.
These are sobering thoughts, but marketing never stops in our suicidal Capitalistic Wonderland. Thus we have A Short History of Progress — the movie! From executive producer Martin Scorcese, no less. It's called Surviving Progress, and I've included the trailer below.
In the trailer, if not the movie itself, which I haven't seen, we get hopeful sentiments—
If we can move from non-consumption to consumption, that means we can also move from consumption back to non-consumption.
I hope you'll take that nonsense with a big grain of salt. My own conclusion is that once science & technology and the one-time gift of huge amounts of energy from fossil fuels put humanity on its current consumption path, there will be no turning back until that consumption runs its course and we reach The Final End. Homo sapiens does not have the ability to make fundamental changes in its behavior. Nor is Homo sapiens much interested in the truth about itself.
In the trailer, that's Ronald Wright doing the opening voice-over.
It's coming and it's going to be bad.
Posted by: T E Cho | 05/10/2012 at 10:20 AM