Patty, Cape Cod 1964 © UrbisMedia
A month ago I posted the first part of this subject and expected to be writing a quite different second part. But sometimes your mind wanders off in a different direction. I was going to address issues related to climate change but seemed to lean in more cosmic and transcendental direction. Then a simple, common incident brought me, in a manner of saying, back “down to earth.”
We have a tendency—perhaps because we are only around so briefly—to characterize history in “ages”; time Before Christ, or the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment. There were indeed, quantum lurches in history, some seemingly in the direction of a kinder, wiser, more considerate form of humanity, but that may be more because we are unable to get far back enough, or above enough, of our human history, to perceive it more seamlessly. There have also been lurches that are, at least in the view of this writer, retrograde. Monotheistic/eschatological faiths are one, wretchedly botched experiments like theocracies and communism, another, and it may well be that a more insidious and slower acting social poison of capitalism, yet another. It would seem that each time singular visions, whether mystical or systemic, of the purpose of man conjoined with political power they are undone by their inherent corruptability.
Our “view” of things is much dependent upon our focus. And we are inexorably drawn from the establishing shots to the close-up, because it is almost always we who our most narcissistically interested in ourselves; and so it is “our” age that becomes the comparative baseline, our experience that is the only “relevant” viewpoint from which to focus life’s “subjective camera.” No matter what, the most objective-obsessed historian cannot get “outside” of himself, trapped like a bug in the amber of his own time, space and circumstance.
Progress. One suspects that there is some positive advancement of human evolution as we become more and more interdependent through urbanism and globalization; or is it just the sense that we need to become more aware of that interdependency. But Darwin would contest that point. Evolution was survival by natural selection, but it was not “human progress” in any axiomatic sense of that term. It is a chilling declaration, one that regards us as not above, and very much in control of biological processes that we are able to direct them normatively. It is Nature that is ultimately the mistress of our human fate, not the reverse (unless you subscribe to the fanciful destiny of Revelations).
The fact is that, historically, since the black plague of 1348, and the Great Influenza of 1918, we humans have been treated rather benignly by Mother Nature, particularly when we measure the record against that of intra-species cruelty. There has been nothing in the scale of thee infrequent pandemics that is the equivalent of the die-off of the great saurians. With good reason and better memory, we have had far greater cause to worry about the behavior of our neighbor than that of our environment. So there have been great famines (those occasioned by greed and stupidity), genocidal wars, ethnic cleansings and other acts of inhumanity, but even they have also left the perpetrators, and most of the rest of humankind intact and unharmed. At the same time there have been significant advancements in health, productivity, and increases in economic well-being to compensate and countervail these acts of inhumanity such that we have become (over?)confident in our capacity to remedy the consequences of our misbehaviors; our meanness is often mitigated by our cleverness.
This is all preparatory to alleging that we are unaccustomed to the idea of the combination of environmental and human events that would result in a massive global die-off of our species, a level of self–inflicted genocide without historical precedent, and seemingly with beyond our capacity to imagine its eventuality. Only the mass extinction of the great and long-lived reptilians of 65 million years ago, something we have difficulty in imagining and, for the scripturally-obsessed, cannot be temporally accounted, would serve as a precedent for a catastrophic human global die off.
Viewed from the perspective of astrophysics the earth exhibits a stochastic recipe of its fundamental periodic table elements, its temperature, its form, its geology, even its polar magnetism, rearranged many times in its long history. Times of conflagration, as well as great ice ages, have come and gone many times. Most of the species and its bio-history have thrived and gone into extinction. We are the only species who possess a consciousness of all that, but we are obsessed with our individual needs and ambitions, our individual mortality, rendering us largely incapable of orienting our personal and social behavior to respect the current beneficent expression of the natural environment or to imagine it turning upon us with an indifferent lethality.
We will likely be incapable, if history is any teacher in this matter, of acting in concert, as members of the species, rather than as members of a nationality, race, ethnicity, faith, community, social class, or other level of division and distinction that has overwhelmed a capability of raising our identity to the common level by which the natural environment regards us.
I do not hold out great hope for such a species.
But there are those that do. For them the glass is half-full. Look, they will respond, we have come from little bands of hominids cowering in the grasses of African savannas to flying between continents, shipping our masses of products of our ingenuity across the vast seas, even poking or finger into the firmament with a dream of spatial colonization. We have facile minds to devise cures for diseases, fashion more efficient forms of locomotion, create new devices to communicate and amuse. No longer do we cower in the grasses, there is no fang, nor claw any longer that we fear; we are the masters of Earth. We are survivors, not just of that evolutionary tree, but because we have even figured out– in the laboratory, or in the pew— or think we have, how it all works. We are (call ourselves) Homo sapiens sapiens (although we don’t necessarily act like it).
But in fact, we are a puny assembly of carbon atoms indiscernible from the stratosphere (without high-powered spy cameras), much less from the edges of our solar system and, universe-wise we are a Podunk outpost of gravitational insignificance. How we have managed to regard our species as the “center” of it, much less its raison d’etre is the height of human hubris in extreme, or the desperation to assign meaning to that which is epistemically beyond us.
There will be a die off. There will be an adjustment/rearrangement in a system that is bigger than us, and whose workings are beyond our ken and capabilities. No doomsday preppers bolt-hole, or a passel of firearms, or stash of pork and beans, will sustain us.
That’s the way the big system works; we are only a part of it, neither its creators or inheritors or masters. “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Unless Jesus shows up for that Second Coming; then some of us are home free.
An afterthought:
Just so you don’t write me off as some depressing Jeremiah I am compelled to record that, as I write this—on the deck of a beach house on Cape Cod on a salubrious Summer morning—a comely young lady stops her jog by to ask me if I know “where Lobster Lane is.” She is as sweet as is this moment in time and place, and I am reminded by the lilt of her voice and her smiling eyes that I honeymooned with a girl much like her on this cape forty-nine years ago this month. “We are here,” as a native on an island in the South Pacific told me years ago, “for a good time, not a long time.” There is a truth in there somewhere.
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© 2013, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.25.2013)