Three weeks ago (Thurs–TAC VIII) I tried to write about the correct relationship of life and death. It was inadequate. I try again.
It’s a little urgent: Stirling Newberry writes that Americans are not ready to give up on Bush. [OOPS–if you went there, you know I should have said GOP! Not the same (though no less depressing)–that’s how information gets dirty. Sorry. FRIDAY 18: 05 EST] Why? Because they think housing prices are still rising. How can he write this without sinking into despair? He is describing a people going cheerfully to extinction.
Let us consider first what we know with some certainty. Humans have existed for about a million years. This is a very short span of geological time (though that is not my point). For most of the million years humans have been hunter-gatherers. Unlike our media fantasies, hunting is much the smaller part. We know from the hunter-gatherers that still exist that gathering is the greater source of food, even though hunting may be more celebrated. Perhaps more significantly, hunter-gatherers work about ten hours a week. In some ways an arduous life, the anxious tension and endless labor of civilized life is not theirs. Indeed, this is the life that humans are actually adapted to.
About ten thousand years ago humans developed what we call civilization, based on the first forms of agriculture. We usually think of this as an advance, but it is equally possible that it represented a deterioration in human life. Its one clear virtue was the ability to engage in endless expansion through military ventures. But this has its own price, and all civilizations, without exception, have collapsed. Good or bad, it is a way of life for which humans are still not fully adapted–there just hasn’t been enough time.
It is usual, and certainly easier, to look farther afield and consider other species of (plants and) animals. Their histories are generally much longer, but again that is not my point. My point is that we see them evolve over the course of millions of years in the geological record. They can evolve only because they die. A species that was truly immortal could not evolve, and therefore could not adapt, and therefore could not maintain its life.
Death is necessary for life. Without it, life could not persist.
Now, I know of primitive religions that recognize this, but our civilized monotheisms, and the secularisms and atheisms that have followed them–that is, the modern world–preach the opposite. They are wrong.
The explicit goal of modern medicine is to extend life. Well, of course! we think, but we are wrong. That is a pointless goal–truly wrongheaded. How did we get to think of life this way?
I chose that as one example. It is everywhere. We ignore that death surronds our lives, before and after, and it is the before and after that defines the meaning of our lives, lying between these two boundaries.
We are only vaguely aware of what lies beyond our lives, yet that is their real definition. Their real meaning.
Right now we know we lie on a geological boundary. A great portion of the species that were, are now gone, and also, the situation of humans is about to change fundamentally. What we are doing right now is creating this, and also shaping what the coming epoch will be. Our meaning, right now, comes from that.
Do we care?
The question of what is worth saving, and carrying across the boundary, obsesses me very much. I know that my own answers will not be those of most. I know that much of what we think we value will disappear with no regrets.
And some things will cross the boundary that we would not wish.
I do not fear that capitalism will cross the boundary, because it cannot. Rather, I fear the effect of capitalism on the boundary itself.
The story of Easter Island, with which many of us are becoming familiar, is much on my mind. But it wasn’t until I saw pictures that it began to haunt me. A rugged island, with the austere, windswept, treeless beauty of a land lying high in the arctic–that is what the photos show. Only, it doesn’t: It is almost within the tropics.
Last week NorthDakotaDemocrat suggested on the thread of Thurs–TAC IX that bird flu may well save us from that. Yes, but personally, I hate the idea of dying of bird flu: I would prefer a better way. Will we be allowed a better way?
Will we allow it for ourselves?
But yes or no, the real question is: Do our choices acquit us?