SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
“All life strategies have their advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of the exploitative-experimental approach is obvious. We see it in the triumph of our own species. We do not simply dominate the world in the way that the dinosaurs are said to have dominated. We are not merely numerous and ubiquitous. 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 potentially damaging, in a way that acceptance is not; and experimentation, by definition, is likely to produce unforeseeable consequences. Contrariwise, accepting-conservative creatures leave the world just as they found it; which is the safe thing to do, and operate on the assumption that whatever behavior allowed their parents to survive has a fair chance of ensuring their own survival as well. This policy is not foolish. Snails, one might point out, have been around a lot longer than human beings and are likely to be around in various forms long after we have gone. In short, acceptance-conservatism is a safe policy, while the exploitative-experimental approach is innately risky. 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, and it would take another 10,000 years to find all the fertile spots and dig them up. But now we have had that 10,000 years. The fertile spots have been dug up, and we know there are no more continents to be had, that indeed, as the world warms, the land will shrink. Agriculturalists can argue about details – can we feed ten billion people sustainably? Or can we manage 20 or 30 million if we really put our minds to it? – but no sensible person can seriously doubt that the finishing post is now in sight. The world is not indefinitely large. We cannot simply hurl ourselves at it with the abandon of the last 10,000 years.
“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 ways completely: our social systems have bound themselves conservatively to the habits and limitations of the past. Experimentation has been systematically forbidden for decades if not for millennia, in anything but marginal improvements to obsolete technologies (especially weapon technologies); mindless exploitation has trumped acceptance at every level. His exploitative-experimental versus conservative-acceptance model becomes mine of conservative exploitation versus experimental acceptance].
So all of a sudden, or so it seems, our political and economic institutions and philosophies are out of synch with the biological and physical realities of the planet. It might be unrealistic to devise new systems that are radically different, with a radically different motivation; but if we do not do this, then we cannot seriously contemplate long-term survival. 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? Our position seems not merely precarious, but ludicrous. It invites parody. It brings to mind an image that appears in all the best cartoons: the one where Tom or Jerry runs over the edge of a cliff, seems for a moment to defy the laws of physics, realizes something is amiss, turns to the camera, gulps, holds his nose, and is seen from above plummeting to the depths of what looks like Death Valley, to carve a perfect outline in the all-too-solid rock below.” 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 need to undertake – no matter how well thought-out, thoroughly planned and optimistic – turn out to be a mere kiss and Band-Aid lovingly placed on a green-stick fracture gushing arterial blood? Will Gaya laugh quietly at our efforts and shrug us off, the way a Grizzly might drown its fleas in vigorous pursuit of its next tasty Salmon? Are we mere biped dinosaurs equipped with brains: less worthy of million-year survival than they?
The shortest answers are: probably so, maybe not, and so what?
First: probably so. Whether or not this civilization pulls through its next set of challenges, all its members will be transformed beyond recognition. This transformation may be purposeful, clear-eyed and promoting the greater good; or it may be chaotic, anarchic and bent on personal survival at everyone else’s expense. We may thrive as individuals and nations, our hypocrisy and lies cast aside to reveal the true beings we would be without them; or we may turn into trapped and wounded animals treacherous and lethal to one and all. In either case, this adjustment will be more intense than our wildest dreams and more dramatic than our worst nightmares.
We will change beyond recognition, so will our societies. Our replacements will look back on us as creatures of myth: either figures of derision and disgust, or envied role models of trouble-free stability and matchless prosperity. “Just imagine: they took hot showers whenever they felt like it! They never walked anywhere, but took one ton jalopies instead, everywhere they went.”
They might view us as spoiled children set loose to wreck a well-stocked toy store, compared to the austere stewardship of the world to which they will have resigned themselves, proud of their sacrifice. Then again, our worst wars, massacres and plagues may seem to them like the playground spite of grade school bullies, compared to continent-clearing hecatombs that a very few of them will have managed to survive. Our technologies may seem alien to them, compared to their nano-tools and bio-systems; or compared to older, mud-bound alternatives they may have to resort to; or both.
Mankind is born and bred conservative (the few of you out there protesting your radical activism are fooling yourselves): “I will only do what my father and his father’s father did – just a little bit better if I can.”
As I began this chapter, I was listening to a televised 2007 debate between ten Republican wannabe replacements for President Bush the Lesser (and as I rewrite it, to a 2011 one to replace the Obama they despise: no change). Their narrow-mindedness was staggering. None of them took heed of the changes about to overcome us, intent instead on restoring America to some simulacrum of 1950 if not robber baron 1870 – as if such fantasies could ever materialize again. As a tidal wave of transformation crested above their heads and darkened their cliché-ridden notes, none of them paid the least attention. They counted on silly votes in their favor, because they refused to pay attention and allowed their supporters the luxury of refusing to pay attention. They and those they took in will be overwhelmed by change, like children swept offshore because they were drawn to the tsunami’s initial tide retreat and the beached fish it exposed.
If only we had undertaken this transformation earlier, when we could have called upon so many more resources!
A handful of Zionist idealists emerged from World War I with dreams of rebuilding ancient Palestine into a modern, high-tech nation and regional breadbasket. If only that handful of rejected Jews had been the mass of intellectuals and dreamers from every race, nation and religious conviction, intent on turning the whole world into a technological powerhouse and a Garden of Eden! Most of them must have been carried out feet first during intervening wars. If only President Roosevelt had held on for another ten years after World War II; his dream of a one-world government might have taken root and we might be living today as one prosperous tribe on PeaceWorld.
Picture the fortunes of energy, intellect, dedication and sacrificial discipline needed to murder millions of war victims, wound three times as many, turn a dozen times more into refugees, destroy the infrastructure of a hundred times more, and starve and plague many more! Imagine all that frenetic energy devoted to peace and mutual benefit instead. Think of the stadiums-full of fuel wasted to thrust aircraft carriers, heavy battleships, submarines and assault transport fleets across the seven seas; fill the sky with death-dealing aircraft burning every city of whole countries to the ground; roll cities-full of soldiers and their caissons back and forth across continental Europe, Asia and North Africa; truck innocents by the country-full to ovens, gulags, and killing grounds. Think of that incredible fortune we’ve wasted!
As far as most humans are concerned, progressives should be ignored. Change is by definition unsafe; keeping things unchanged seems safer on the whole. The only dramatic transformations we may tolerate are those at the behest of war. Any peaceful transformation proposed on the same scale must be insane and unacceptable.
I bid you, think again!
On occasion, shifting circumstances will distort the status-quo beyond its fans’ ability to cope. When things get that desperate, they may resort to drastic change―but oh so reluctantly! Then they will do everything they can to take up again the golden days of olden ways. The tendency of every revolution in human history has been to fall back on ancient routines the minute new ones have confirmed their drawbacks, usually by spawning worse disasters. We always seem to fall back on the olden ways (for example, by allowing royal monarchy to degenerate into corporate monarchy: the mirror image of its iniquity), no matter how worthless that may turn out to be. This innate conservatism may doom us, once transformation becomes compulsory.
Second: maybe not. These problems may appear beyond the grasp of current insight because they are so unfamiliar. No matter how staggering our challenges in the future; our desperation, as we head them off, may lend us untapped skills instead of hysterical paralysis. Our first efforts at transformation may gain momentum and take off as initial problems are tackled, resolved and dropped off behind us. More of us may rally to the banner of transformation; fewer may step aside from onrushing progress, like reactionary matadors turning aside and baffling each new effort. We may focus on actual problems and turn away from the trivial distractions that obsess us today. Those problems could shrink to sensible proportions once honestly addressed. They might turn out to be easier to solve than expected: superior solutions may arise spontaneously, once our institutional and intellectual barriers fall away.
Plus, we may not be alone in our efforts. There may be alien forces beyond our perception, invisible allies and unacknowledged friends. They might be human agents, hidden so far, or perhaps not. Something in the Universe seems to prefer life and, by extension, us. Call it God, call it UFO, call it what you will: some benign reflection of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: “intellects vast, cool and […] sympathetic.” A series of miracles may be waiting patiently at our doorstep, for us to tire of our faithless, ourselves-alone scientific determinism and its serial failures.
What do we need to do to attract this Miracle; what transformations must we undertake? I have tried to reveal a few of them in Learners.
Our first renovations may be spiritual rather than technological. The threat we face may dwarf our science and technologies, render them impotent and irrelevant without spiritual supports we cannot admit. Our deepest-held religious convictions may turn out to be obsolete; current approaches to spirit and transcendence, weak-willed and half-hearted. Our most respected religious leaders may reveal themselves to be fools crouched in their whitened sepulchers, or hideous institutional monsters (serial child molesters? Protectors of fleeing Nazis?). Selfless saints we have ignored up ‘til now may step forward to replace them. We may have to launch an ethical revolution as groundbreaking as the industrial one, a spiritual evolution as earth shaking as our scientific one.
Finally, so what? Humanity may have doomed itself before we had begun this transformation in earnest, no matter what we do. We may have tarried too long. Let’s assume that every transformation we may undertake might not delay our doom, but accelerate it instead.
Those who would block transformation for their short-term profit may have become so dominant and cunning that they will cut us down for our trouble – as they’ve done so frequently in the past – and go on to destroy everything, in an orgasm of omnicide that their victims have prepared for so strenuously. Human civilization might grind to a halt like a wind-up toy wound too hard backwards. So what!
What we need now are idealism, heroism and hope; new thoughts, creativity and insight. Conservative mediocrity would disgrace us, disgrace the memory of all those who drowned in our wake. If we do not undertake these transformations for practical reasons, for reasons of mere survival, we should do so for our ultimate glory.
Dying like fools crouched in selfish mediocrity, tripping over those we’ve wiped out by our incompetence and indifference: that would be brain-simple, brawn-easy and inglorious: the sole aspiration of Republican politicians everywhere. It would involve no sacrifice on our part, no appeal to our genius, no stretch of the imagination; merely feeling sorry for ourselves and claiming riches and privileges (or mere survival) we never earned.
Reaching out for something infinitely better, something declared impossible, perhaps so great as to withhold itself beyond our reach: that would be worthy of our honor.
Here is what I realize now. Every moment we delay will make this transformation more difficult, more risky and less likely to succeed; every month we spend weighing options will make those options more perilous. The longer we do nothing, the more desperate our task will become, once we decide to act. The most dangerous thing right now would be to do nothing and wait for the ultimate consequences of having done nothing.
What about you? Is it too late for you?
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld