BLUE VOICE

This is the second of two posts from June 2019, on the occasion of my 73rd birthday.  Both are about how the future looks at that time in the world, and from my age.  The first was on the far future.  This one is about the future that younger people now alive will live, and some unknown number of generations beyond that.   After the recent 2024 election, these thoughts assume new relevance.
There is no possibility of true culture without altruism."
Susan Sontag

"The absurdity of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of duty...to live through it as bravely and as generously as possible."
Peter Matthiessen
The Snow Leopard

“It is important to work for future generations, for our descendants. We must be proud to do something, even though people do not usually know its value.”
Shunryu Suzuki
founder of San Francisco Zen Center

We live in many kinds of time. We experience time differently, especially according to our age,  and the contexts of our experience are shaped by cycles we know, and that we don't know.  So any speculation on the future is bound to be vague, provisional and a bit of hit and miss.  But this is what I feel about the relatively near future, beyond my time.

As outlined in my previous post, the context of coming decades is likely to be dominated by the effects of the climate crisis, named or not.  Those persistent effects and the new contexts they create will change what people do and how they live.

When that happens in a widespread way (for it is already happening in relatively ignored parts of the world) depends on the climate.  What happens, and how it happens, depends to a great extent on future generations--probably beginning with those who are now young, who are now children.

Right now the impetus for efforts to address the climate crisis--such as the proposed Green New Deal in the US--is coming largely from the young.  Their leading edge is represented in government, and presumably in other influential institutions.  If their awareness becomes the standard for future generations, then responses can become more conscious and deliberate.

 But one way or another, the climate crisis will change just about everything, perhaps in the next few decades, probably by mid century, almost certainly by the end of the century.

There are two major aspects to the climate crisis: there are the causes, and there are the effects.  Societies may choose whether or not to address the causes of future global heating, such as greenhouse gases.  There will be less choice in whether or not to deal with the effects: the sea level rise, heat waves, droughts, floods, shortages, disease outbreaks, and the likely secondary effects of relocations, mass migrations and armed conflicts will demand attention--first local, and then as resources stretch and more people are involved, beyond that. Yet how societies and especially individuals choose to deal with the effects will make all the difference in how people live their lives.

There are those who imagine possible futures, mostly as stories.  While these stories may be visions that include new technologies and/or old forms of human society, or they may be mostly "what if?" explorations, cautionary tales or metaphors of the present, they offer a range of possibilities that cannot be dismissed.  I offer here only a few elements of a future I can imagine and foresee.

There are aspects of that future that can begin right now.  The young can prepare for the meaningful work of that future.  Many of the concerns of today will evaporate.  The consumer economy cannot be the focus of so many lives.  The emphasis will be on meeting needs, rather than in inciting and manipulating wants.

There will be increasing interest in finding technical means for addressing both causes and effects of the climate crisis.  The young can prepare themselves to participate in such research and development.  If I were advising adolescents today, I would suggest examining areas of study and possible occupations by asking the question, what will a climate crisis society need?


At this point, a stubborn refusal to surrender to some sense of the inevitable is healthy for the young. But denial is not.  They can dedicate themselves to possible means of addressing the causes as well as effects of the climate crisis.  But developing means to address future effects is also worthy and important.  In this way--the only meaningful way--they enact hope.  Hope is no longer principally a feeling.  It is a commitment, a set of activities, a life.

In terms of anticipating and dealing with effects, my guess is that the future will need managers of teams and resources responding to individual problems, and to develop strategies to address problems before they occur.


The future will need a greater proportion of dedicated individuals with skills for actions that today are often grouped under the name of first responders.  The future will need engineers and others in specific areas not yet prioritized by society's reward system.  Biological sciences will assume a new importance, especially in areas of innovative applications in energy, in forestalling a major extinction event.  Migrations because of climate will require innovative solutions in a host of areas.  And the list goes on.

The future will also need dreamers and storytellers, visionaries and critical minds, but using means and applying themselves in incalculable ways.  More broadly, when many occupations that today seem important eventually fall away as useless and wasteful, the need for currently undervalued skills will come forward.

Other needs will become the focus of more jobs, and even with increasing difficulties, those jobs can be more meaningful to communities and the individuals who do them. The perils and pains of this future may be great.  But individuals may find new purpose. Life may be harder, but less absurd. What will unite all these occupations is clear purpose, beyond making money to pay for the illusions fed to everyone, or to sustain the unsustainable.

This future, when so much that seems unavoidably important today fades into the sodden inventory of this failing period of history,  offers new opportunities for individuals to make basic commitments.  Some of these will be instinctive, but many personal commitments and choices will need to be made consciously, because they will be hard to make.  It will even be hard to know they can and must be made.

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives."
Howard Zinn

“Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as responsible beings among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need to found our hopes upon.”
Ursula LeGuin

"…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

There seem to me to be two essential mysteries about humanity and its history.  One is whether humanity as a whole would develop in time to meet challenges of the changing present, particularly those very large ones that humanity itself has set in motion.  So far, when applied to the climate crisis, the answer seems to be no.

The other in some ways underlies the first.  It is the nature of human nature.  Is human nature based on selfishness, greed, lust, fear, envy, anger, the will to dominate and the passion to destroy and to kill?  Or is it based on understanding, a moral sense and sense of justice, compassion, empathy, courage and generosity?  Or is it an uncertain mix of both?

That last view is expressed in a fable, attributed to several Native American peoples, and may be familiar to some from the under-rated film Tomorrowland.  A version of it goes like this:

A grandfather talks to his grandchild. "A fight is going on inside me," he said. "It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." 

"The other is good," he continued. "He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith."

 "The same fight is going on inside you," grandfather said, "and inside every other person, too."

The grandchild thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

 "The one you feed." 

Under greater pressure and in starker terms than perhaps we can imagine, people of the near future will face this choice.  Their choice may not alter the ultimate future that comes after them--perhaps centuries later-- but it will help characterize their present.  Human civilization is some ways has been a struggle to inculcate a fair degree of personal freedom and justice for individuals while meeting the needs of community.  Freedom is based on choice, and community is based on a sense of common humanity, fairness, decency and shared fate.

 How the needs of the individual and society are both met is an ongoing test of humanity as a social species.  Individuals need the support of community, as community needs the commitment of individuals.  Apart from institutional constraints, the balance is achieved by a sense of responsibility, empathy, compassion, generosity and kindness.  The ethic of "you'd do the same for me" is perhaps the most basic human statement.

Even in his bleakest scenario for the future, HG Wells kept reminding readers than nothing will prevent at least individual human beings from exhibiting qualities of courage and love.  In adverse times, the need becomes even greater for "mutual comfort and redeeming acts of kindness."

Redemption is a curious concept in this context, but there is something to it.  If humanity can't quite redeem its past by fixing its future, it can at least to some extent redeem itself.  Wells expressed his preference that, if the end is truly coming, he "would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack."

Humanity can go down fighting, and it can go down loving, both.  Perhaps it will even endure.  But its time of testing need not be one of unremitting pain and degradation. It can be a time that includes creativity, challenge, commitment and character, in which life is lived to the fullness of the moment.  For we live in many kinds of time.

 

It was a little more than a week ago, very early in the morning on the East Coast and even earlier here in the Western US, and not many people were watching.  The eyes of the news were on mass shootings, police killings of black Americans and the Chauvin trial.  But I happened across a link just as the NASA live feed was starting, so I got to see evidence of the first successful flight of a powered vehicle on another planet (or at least the first initiated by humans, that we know of) at the same time the people at NASA did.

 They were a dozen or so people around hotel convention tables arranged in a horseshow, all of them masked up, most of them wearing NASA orange smocks or golf shirts, peering at their own laptops and glancing up at the big screen at the end of the room.  Many of them had been working on this specific project for 6 years or more. 

 They were waiting to learn whether the flight of Ingenuity, a tiny Kleenix box of instruments attached to very long and ungainly shaped rotors, had actually flown a little earlier, since it takes hours for signals to traverse the distance between Mars and Earth.  Nobody really knew if flying would work in an atmosphere less than a percent of Earth's.

 The NASA channel—which, when I had it on our cable TV system and the Shuttles and Space Station had cameras always pointed towards Earth, I sometimes let just run with this portrait of our planet in real time, in the background—did a fine job of covering this Ingenuity flight story.  A brightly smiling interviewer elicited the pertinent information from various participants in the room, though the answers got less and less coherent as the big moment got closer and closer. 

 Then she did something pretty striking: she shut up, so we could just witness what went on in that room. As I watched the screen full of people watching their screens, I reflected on the deceptive amount of computer power in those laptops and inside that interplanetary tissue box on Mars, and the fact that the Apollo missions that landed humans on the moon had at their disposal much less computer power than a smartphone.      

 We who were watching (and some were: they had sent in questions through various social media) were primed on what to watch for.  So we got the quiet excitement when the initial data package came in, and it looked “nominal” (NASAspeak for A-OK.) The data went from one analyst to another, each adding more information until we all together got the first visual confirmation: a simple diagram, sent by Ingenuity via several links, that mapped its flight: it went straight up, flew sideways, stopped and came straight down, and landed.  That diagram was as exciting as HD video.  It meant it happened.  The first cheer went up in the room.

 A few seconds later we saw the first photo: a black and white snapshot taken by Ingenuity’s camera pointed straight down from the air, looking like a film photography negative, in which the shadow is Ingenuity itself.  There would be other photos and other flights this week, but this will remain the historic one. More cheers in the room, though social distancing meant no hugs.  But the project manager did jump up and down, in place.

 So it meant something to me to be watching this in real time, a memory to set beside seeing in real time the first human step onto the surface of another world When Neil Armstrong touched the Moon, we all did, in a way.  It was the same with Ingenuity’s flight.

 Ingenuity has flown farther and for a longer time, and will probably be pushed beyond its limits.  It’s a proof of concept device, and is unlikely to have a life even as long as the Martian rovers.  None of them are coming back.  It won’t be resting in the Smithsonian—at least, not anytime soon.

 This event, set against the others making news, like those irrational killings, and the raging flames of white supremacy, and within the complicated context of the pandemic, all the madness about masks and vaccines, reminded me again of a conversation I had several Christmases ago with young tech people in Menlo Park, about prospects for the future.  Though we had different intuitions of the outcome, we shared the basic idea of it being like a race—that is, a foot race or vehicle race—between the positive and negative, the creative and the destructive.

 Because it seems clear that as a society we are rushing furiously in two opposite directions at once (with many wiggling lines within the main ones going off slightly in other directions.)  Moreover, the race is timed.  Though we don’t know exactly when the game will be over, there may come such a moment that if destruction is winning, then self-destruction it will be.  And in terms of Earth as environment, that time is fast approaching.

 Who knows if flying a helicopter on Mars is going to contribute to saving the Earth.  (Not if it encourages the Elon Musks of this world to believe they can just leave this planet behind and start this madness all over again elsewhere.)  But those nerdy people in the orange shirts—Asian, black, and immigrant prominently among them—worked hard on this one problem for a long time, and they did something wonderful.  And they know it—they attached a shred of the first manned aircraft from Kitty Hawk to Ingenuity for its first flight.  Maybe future generations won’t care, but seeing something like this we call historic is at least a special experience for the now living.

I don't have a smartphone.  I don't watch new television programs, seldom see new movies, though a few on DVD.  I don't know who the celebrities are that the supermarket tabloids and their internet counterparts get all exercised about.  I don't listen to new pop music.  And so on.

This fits the profile for my age, and a lot of it surely is about age. But it's not mindless.  Some of it is about exploring past music etc. I missed, or in more depth, and some about revisiting books, tv shows etc. for what they now say that's different from the first times around. Or reminding me who I was then, and maybe who I forgot I was since.

Of course, that I don't like a lot of new TV, music and movies does make it easier to ignore.

 Apart from the comfort level, there's the tendency to want to have a deeper experience and find more meaning in what flashed by in the past.  That seems like the natural work, play and purpose of being this age, and in sound enough mind to try feeling the breadth and depth of my whole life while I've got it.

 (And in fact I use some new technology in these activities.  But why should I give up the advantages of the desktop computer just because they aren't fashionable anymore? Or the stereo, the record player?  Or the physical book off the physical shelf ?)

Though I take a certain amount of elder abuse for skepticism of new technologies and so on (which, by the way, I also exhibited when younger), I have my additional reasons. There's expense v. utility, for example. As interesting or enhancing as they might be, smartphones and multimedia packages are too expensive for what I need.  Besides, nobody calls me on the home phone or the flip phone now, so why would that be different? And the screen is too small and the sound too poor for much of anything else.

 So it's partly aesthetics, too: one of the major reasons that so far I haven't been able to bring myself to do Facebook is that it is so ugly.

Bad design, inferior materials also turn me off.  Some new tech is so obviously designed for younger eyes and fingers that it's the height of effrontery to expect I'd shamefacedly accept it.

The other element that is related to age is that the smartphone and related technologies are largely about marketing and selling things, and I'm not interested in that, nor are the marketers and sellers likely to be much interested in me.  In my demographic, and especially my income level.

 But there is a larger sense in which this is a choice, and I know what I'm doing.  What I am doing is concentrating on the past and the future.  The present makes its demands anyway, I don't have to cater to it.  People in youth and middle age, people with children or even actively involved with grandchildren, have reasons to keep up with the fast-changing present.  I don't, not nearly as much.

If I don't need to, I don't want to waste the time.  I am engaged in experiencing the past in more depth, and learning from it.  I apply that to concerns about the future.  Big concerns, about the big picture future.

That's my choice, my concentration, and it's meant to be my contribution.  It may well be futile.  Still, chances are a little better on something good coming of this, than from the distractions of the smartphone.

From an essay by  Leon Wieseltier in the New York Times Book Review (emphases added):

"Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind.

"... What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability.

As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

 Meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: Economists are our experts on happiness! Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be.

 It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology. The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past. Beyond its impact upon culture, the new technology penetrates even deeper levels of identity and experience, to cognition and to consciousness..."
Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything.

 "Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life. All revolutions exaggerate, and the digital revolution is no different. We are still in the middle of the great transformation, but it is not too early to begin to expose the exaggerations, and to sort out the continuities from the discontinuities. The burden of proof falls on the revolutionaries, and their success in the marketplace is not sufficient proof..."

" Every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose."

Change is neither good nor bad in itself.  Sometimes change is another word for waste.  These days it is often thoughtless, though it has its own momentum.

Humans are built for change.  Dealing with change--sizing up and seizing opportunities, foreseeing and responding to danger--is what our species does best. When the environment changes, we adapt.  It's why we're still around.

This ability is so much a part of our natures that we seek change.  As a species we spread out all over the world, sometimes compelled by circumstances but apparently very often because we like to wander.  We change our environment voluntarily. We are intensely curious, both mentally and emotionally.  We imagine a better place, a better future.

That and a superficial evaluation of technological change has tended to privilege change itself.  You can't fight "progress."  That may be true to some extent, but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Change that is danger to some is opportunity to others, and it is in their interest to augment the natural excitement that change inspires. Capitalism needs and fears change.  Large-scale change for the past couple of centuries has largely occurred when corporations could engineer it for profit.

As you get older, you have more experience with the vagaries of change.  So older people are perhaps more skeptical of change that sweeps society with the frenzy of fashion, the pressure of conformity and the opportunities to make a move, make money, make a name, move up in the world.  Maybe it takes older people to see the potential pitfalls, the costs of waste, the possible and probable consequences. And to have the security to say, no thanks.

On a larger scale these are attributes that are among those that make elders pretty good futurists.  It may seem ironic but evaluating change, keeping eyes open to consequences, is oriented towards the future.

This is not an argument for stasis.  Change involves risk, but benefits as well as drawbacks are possible, and no one can foresee everything.  Even in daily life, novelty perks us up, change can refresh, and it gives us another place to stand, another perspective, to appreciate and evaluate our world, both old and new.

Change is energizing, and can be intoxicating.  But it is not always better.  We need skeptics as well as risk-takers.  Slow absorbers and synthesizers as well as enthusiasts and early adopters.  People willing to resist the stampede.

Vision does not always mean a vision of changes to come.  Vision is also about evaluating consequences and interactions.  We need look no further than the spreading dead zones and huge floating islands of plastic garbage in our oceans, or to the climate we have irrevocably deformed, to realize this.

Ursula LeGuin made two different but related points, both vital, in accepting an award.

The first has to do with the literary legitimacy of science fiction and fantasy writers, and the importance of future visions to the future itself:

 "And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

 I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality."

The second point is the restraint on the freedom to write and on true authorship that's been growing a long while and has now reached nearly impossible proportions, not because of some fascist or even national security state, but because of the takeover by the institutionalized greed of capitalism:

Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)

 Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. 

 Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words."

This is almost her complete speech--it's under six minutes in the video above, and the complete transcript is here.

So here's the dream: I'm in the driver's seat of a car, coming up to a huge truck.  It is so big that my car could fit under its carriage with plenty of room on both sides.  And that is what starts to happen--my car is moving slowly forward under this dark truck.  You might expect I'd put a stop to this, but I then realize that I have no steering wheel in front of me.  Instead I have a typewriter.  Not a computer keyboard: a typewriter.  And I'm typing as I observe the dark underside of the truck and feel it all around me.    

The Real News

Where do you go for the real news, the significant news, the news you need to heed? Well, you can get the latest on Britney's tour cancellation, the Lacy Peterson trial or Madonna’s name change, plus the furor over whether the voting is really fair for American Idol, in most any newspaper, TV network news, MSNBC, CNN and Fox. But for the real news, you might try the Weather Channel.

There you will see, day after day, a summer full of violent storms from the east coast through the Middle Atlantic States---particularly the Ohio Valley---and into the Midwest. Torrential rains, frequent and damaging thunderstorms. In much of the Midwest, this stormy weather has been accompanied by tornadoes---up to 100 in a day this spring, which NOAA has announced was the 3rd warmest spring on record. Storms in the mountain states, too. And in the West, the worst drought in 500 years. Get that? Since the continent was invaded, since it saw its first metal plow.

Nobody really knows how bad the global climate crisis will get, but it’s clearly underway. Not clearly enough for most people yet, it seems. Americans are incredibly literal---the only time they “got” global warming was the very hot summers at the end of the 1980s in the eastern U.S.---including the media capitals of New York and Washington. Hot summer equal global warming, get it? So the first flood of books and films made their way into the marketplace in 1990. But now there's just storms and floods in some places, drought in others, too scattered and slow for the pattern to look as real as a still photo, a special effects sequence.

Probably it will take a combination of extreme events and a new president to point out what the problem is. Or it might be the next international climate change report, due this year, though with a Bush-approved change in its leadership, probably not till after the election.

What really will matter is what the U.S. does or doesn’t do about climate change. Later it will also matter what China and other growing industrial economies do or don’t do. Much of Europe is getting itself into better position to both cope and begin slowing down the runaway train. But the consequences are likely to go on, and probably continue getting worse, for a hundred years or so. In twenty to fifty years, our children and their children will probably have a pretty good idea just how bad it will be---whether it’s going to be manageable, survivable or apocalyptic.

If it’s apocalypse in store, the half-full folks can cheer themselves by remembering that our species achieved its humanity, that we became pretty much what we still are, except with a closer relationship with nature and the realities of the universe now hidden to us, during the last period of major climate disruption---the most recent big Ice Age.

The kind of consequences outlined in the deadpan predictions of the last international report suggest there will be some big losers (in the Third World mostly) and a few offsetting winners (some in the U.S.), so this will be something we’ll just muddle through. I don’t really think so. For one thing, our current government is not only unprepared for any serious set of problems, but is bleeding away the financial resources the U.S. will need, even if incrementally over a very long time, to cope. The goodwill of the world to offer help that might offset what the U.S. can’t afford, is an even more precious resource being bled away. We could wind up with no recourse but to threaten people with our hydrogen bombs and other WMDs.

Or the whole nation-state vs. global corporation situation could come to a head, what with gigantic companies buying up fresh water and doing their best to destabilize governments that might stop them (I’ve even seen this charge applied to attempting to destabilize Canada, the biggest reserve of fresh water in the world.)

It’s all way beyond my meager knowledge, but my intuition does tell me that (and I suppose this is another half-fool move) a lot of the things people are terribly worried about in our technological future---wholesale genetic engineering, human cloning to order, etc.--—aren’t going to turn out to be problems, because society won’t be able to afford them (financially, in terms of energy or social stability), and technology is going to have to take quite a different turn.

There’s just no doubt that climate is going to shape how humans live in the future that is now beginning, for climate always has. And apparently we’ve usually been blind to that fact.

For the last half century or more, and certainly since the 1980s when coincidentally the “greenhouse effect” began to attract notice (although Arthur Miller notes in his autobiography that some scientist he met mentioned the possibility in the 40s) there’s been the drumbeat of the end of western civilization, one that has been growing so insistent that it seems a foregone conclusion. But we might have figured that, absent blowing ourselves up, this might turn out to be overly dramatic. Still, the end of a “civilization” is a bit abstract---a lot of people who wouldn’t agree with each other on what constitutes western civilization, believe it has already ended.

It’s “civilization” or “society” in the broader sense that’s now at issue---humanity that doesn’t shrink way down, that doesn’t go back to the caves and the deserts. Absent being overcome by barbarians---not an idle thought anymore, thanks to…well, let’s not get into that—we’re looking at biological threats. We might be poisoning ourselves fatally---I’ve always expected that my generation would be the litmus test of that, since most of this crap started when we were babies. Overcrowding breeding disease and spreading around the world in a flash, or even the coincidence of a few badly placed disasters that might have gone unnoticed in a less intensely interconnected and interdependent, smugly vulnerable time as ours---earthquake in LA, big volcano eruption somewhere else---or just another brazen meteor—there are lots of scenarios for the possibility of Armaggedon. I’ve even had the nasty thought that a fairly large human die-back is the only way this planet will survive without tossing out the last few million years of evolution: the Gaian enterprise. Still, it wasn’t until this climate thing that it truly seemed that major painful change became all but inevitable.

If it’s the end of the world as we know it, I can’t say I feel fine about it. I’d like to believe we’ve learned enough to make a conscious transition, to do what plenty of us know has to be done (and plenty of people smarter than me know how to do). We could even eventually go back for what we mistakenly jettisoned and see if we can’t recover what we lost in the process of developing certain other aspects of ourselves. At the edge of science and other thought, we seem primed for that.

Oh well.

I’ll keep plugging at this for as long as I’ve got the resources and the wits to do so, because I believe that the future is what we do and what we dream right now, so living in the future and living in the present are really the same thing, as far as our mortal lives go. There are a lot of people working that future more diligently, more knowledgeably and more effectively than me. But facing the climate challenge will take the whole society, and sooner or later it will change the whole society, maybe all societies and cultures on the planet. The longer we do nothing, the worse and the longer-lasting the crisis will be. The sooner people start taking in the real news, the better chance we’ll have to make the major changes that might keep this enterprise going with the least possible amount of pain and destruction.

YOU'D DO THE SAME FOR ME: MARKING 9/11

This is an unpublished piece I wrote last year, shortly after 9/11. It's something I'd been thinking about for awhile, but it also represents as aspect of the 9/11 aftermath most apt to be forgotten at its anniversary: the expressions of a social ethic, of brotherhood and altruism and what I consider the social contract of community.

But as the 9/11 anniversary approaches, America is apparently abuzz about a television show called American Idol, which seems to mostly celebrate meanness and zero-sum competition. This show, along with the brief popularity of "The Weakest Link" and various permutations of "Survivor"-a show with a dishonest premise (that this is how survival in the wild is accomplished) carried out dishonestly (i.e. manipulated if not rigged)-seem to say that people are reveling in the opposite of altruism or that spirit of 9/11. They want to watch people being mean and manipulative.

I tend to think the entertainment value of such programs has less to do with a social ethic than with a compensatory rebellion for all the forced niceness and phony images of "have a nice day" friendliness demanded in most jobs today, from corporate managers to badly paid fast food clerks.

Still, if 9/11 changed many things, its effect on civility wasn't all that lasting. But its anniversary shouldn't go by without a reminder of the kind of behaviors we're capable of, and perhaps even desire.

"You'd Do the Same for Me"


A few days after the World Trade Center towers came down, a fireman from Michigan or some other place distant from New York City was explaining to the TV reporter why he was starting a 24-hour shift digging through the rubble: because the firemen working there and buried there were his brothers. And because "they'd do the same for me."

That phrase once before had prompted a moment of illumination for me. I was living in Pittsburgh at the time, nursing a coffee one afternoon while reading and writing at a table in a restaurant in my neighborhood. I knocked a pen to the floor which was immediately picked up by a maintenance worker, a black man who I judged to be past 60 years old. As he handed it back to me I thanked him, and he said simply, "You'd do the same for me." He said it with a casual gravity, as though it was something he said regularly, but it also had the quality and weight of a personal mantra of some importance.

It wasn't the first time I'd heard it of course, but this time it hit me differently, mostly because of who said it to me and the sound of his voice. Gradually I realized what an important statement it is. It sums up entire philosophies and puts many book-length ethical treatises to shame. "You'd do the same for me" is nothing less than the basis of civil behavior, from courtesy to heroism.

By saying it to me, moreover, this man was stating both his own moral standard and his faith that others share it in the delicate informal system of day-to-day civilization. In the simplicity of this statement, in its simple assumptions, he was educating me and challenging me to rise to this standard. It is in some ways an ultimate equality, and a testament of faith in human possibility and the human heart.

I've thought about this for years. I wanted to write about it, about how I saw its truth in the ordinary behavior of so many ordinary people, there on the Murray Avenue and everywhere I traveled, and now where I live in Arcata. I confess I hesitated. I really don't need more rejection in my life, and this idea seemed so counter to the attitudes that news media, entertainment and books like to present as the prevailing one in society: Look out for number one, dog eat dog (and top dog fires disposable little dog); he who dies with the most toys wins.

And then after the shock of epic violence came the surprises of the response: not just the volunteers in the hell of lower Manhattan, but the people bringing food and flowers to them, or giving blood and contributing money when the economy is doubly uncertain, and being conspicuously kind to each other. Such behavior may be temporary, or our attention to it may be what's fleeting. And its opposite has also emerged in racist violence. But I am struck also by the biographies of the random victims in this deadly episode. So many of these people are remembered for their dedication to others, their efforts to benefit future generations as well as those around them in their lifetime.

And among them are heroes, quite probably including someone from our own community. Those who study altruism notice that people who go to extraordinary lengths to help others often don't think there's anything unusual about it. "They'd do the same for me" is the foundation of beliefs they can't otherwise explain.

That fireman's words-spoken diffidently, as if he didn't expect anyone to really understand-also illuminated a very different phrase that was stuck in my mind. I don't remember who said it but it struck me as true, though I couldn't say why: "the reason academic infighting is so vicious is that so little is at stake." In the light of those too-often repeated explosions, I realized this could be applied to any arena-business, family, politics, small towns.

Compared to life and death and to our common interest in the basic behaviors of living together, the envy, betrayal, cynicism and denial that rule so often in so many arenas can't be accepted as the inevitable responses of human nature nor the unfortunate byproducts of a generally beneficial economic system. They are what some in past generations would call them: small and mean. Because most often so little is really at stake for the perpetrators, while the consequences are profound for others, and for the fabric of our common lives. In times of crisis our best instincts seem to tell us this.

All of this emboldens me to assert that "you'd do the same for me" is a mantra in the heart of millions. Perhaps they do not always hear it, or even literally believe it, but it is our common faith, the ideal we live by as citizens of human civilization. It gives new meaning to the concept of the brotherhood of man. Beyond gender, and beyond any other distinction, this is what brotherhood means.

It is not too early to say that not honoring and acting upon this impulse enough is one reason-not the only reason, but one reason-- we're in this tragic mess.

Of course, the terrorists probably consider themselves brothers (and some may actually be brothers), but if they are who the U.S. government thinks they are, their reasons for loyalty are different. They are loyal to a dogma, to leaders, to blood. They are not really loyal to each other, or to any others who do not conform to their specific beliefs. The dispossessed of the world have grievances against the powerful who have ignored and abused them. But our fates excuse none of us-powerful or abused-from decency in our dealings as individuals.

"You'd do the same for me" may not tell us much about those who name themselves our enemies, but it might tell us something about ourselves, and what we need to defend in our own lives together.

Copyright 2001 by William S. Kowinski

When I lived in Cambridge, Mass. in the early and mid 1970s, I had one Saturday ritual for awhile. The Boston Globe published a column on Saturdays called "The Lit'ry Life," by George Legendary (note: sometimes I make up names to protect the innocent, sometimes the guilty, and mostly myself, but in some cases-like this one-because I can't remember the real name...) It was mostly odds and ends about people in various print media: the Boston book authors and publishers, periodical poets and the newspapers, including the ones I wrote for (the weekly alternatives, and a couple of rock music/pop culture regional rags).

I lived in east Cambridge, in the ragged end of what I believe was John F. Kennedy's old congressional district. It was a healthy walk up to Mass. Ave (pronounced "Mass Ave") at Central Square. I got my major groceries at the Purity Supreme supermarket, which had a deli attached next door. Before or after my weekly shopping, I stopped there for a sandwich (always had the same kind--tuna, I think, but I definitely remember the pickle) and coffee, and to read "The Lit'ry Life" column in the Globe.

Even though I was at various points the book review and book supplements editor, and then the Managing Editor (Arts) for the Boston Phoenix, and had some poems published in Arions Dolphin and other locally produced magazines, I never got a mention in that column. (Though I did get a complimentary one in the famous "Ear" in the Washington Star some years later.)

At the moment I have no lit'ry life to report on but my own, so in what I gather is the true spirit of Blogging, I'll do my own Saturday chatter.

Current Reading: Apart from the books I'm examining or reading for assigned reviews (My two-book review of The Atrocity Paradigm and Altruism and Altruistic Love is nicely placed at the top of page two of the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Book Review tomorrow, 8-18-02. The Chronicle is at www.sfgate.com, and the Sunday sections are retrievable for the week, and the reviews are searchable. But I won't have an actual link until tomorrow.)-

As I was saying, apart from those, I am reading:
Almost finished Milan Kundera's short novel, Slowness. On the surface his books are very absorbing, entertaining monologues, you can almost hear him inventing. He explores ideas through character and story, and I often wonder which came first (assuming at least some of the characters and events are based on "reality"), the character or story that suggests the idea, or the idea that he works out by inventing characters and story. I suspect it's a mixture, but that's one of the things you don't usually get to explore in reviews-maybe a very astute reading group with a penchant for research would be interesting-so you can go into detail about which parts are invented from ideas, which involve actual people (several in Slowness are public figures.)

I'm also re-reading the first book I ever took out of the library as a child. It's called The Space Ship Under the Apple Tree by Louis Slobodkin. I remember it was a hardback with a red cover, with white letters and a white flying saucer line drawing. I found a thrift store copy of the paperback edition. The basic plot is a lot like E.T. More as I get into it.

On my visit back in Pittsburgh this May, I had dinner with an old friend, Jim Hayes, who later emailed me a list of the books he'd talked about. I've started with Mark Epstein's "thoughts without a thinker", which is excellent. This is one of the areas of what you might loosely call spirituality that I'm exploring, and at the moment the chief one: which is Zen. (The other would be Native American spiritualities.) I've read a few really good books in the field, Joko Beck's books, Shunryu Suzuki (he makes me laugh). For a bit I was into a book called Zen and the Brain but my interest in neuroscience is limited. This one is more like it---it relates Zen and western psychotherapy, and it's very, very good. Thanks, James!

One of the reasons I re-reading "Space Ship..." is that I'm getting into the science fiction section of the book I'm writing, SOUL OF THE FUTURE. I've spent part of the spring and all of the summer so far on the first sections: introductory chapters about apocalyptic futures, which involves 9-11 but mostly the nuclear age apocalypse scares that I grew up with in the 50s and 60s; and many chapters about London in the 1890s, H.G. Wells and The Time Machine.

Now I'm bridging the science fiction gap between Wells and Gene Roddenberry, since Star Trek is going to be a major focus for the next set of chapters (right now they're tending to be about 2,000 words long.) I'm about to read through (rather than just reference) Brian Aldiss' Billion Year Spree, a history of science fiction that so far is the most nuanced of the several I've already read. I don't share all of Aldiss' tastes but I do share his enthusiasm for Olaf Stapledon, the obscure (in the U.S. anyway) novelist of the 1930s on. Something of a disciple of Wells (they came to know each other, and eventually it was Stapledon who influenced Wells' last science fiction and other books) I'm almost finished with what I regard as Stapledon's masterpiece (and Aldiss does as well), called "Starmaker."

My book-in-progress addresses scenarios for a hopeful future of the two basic kinds (which, with a different outcome, are also the two basic kinds of apocalyptic fictions for a really bad future), and they are: with technology, and without technology (meaning without so much, or so dominant.) So science fiction-particularly through Wells and Star Trek, and the familiar stories they tell---addresses a hopeful future in which technology is emphasized. Then comes the second kind of story, which emphasizes ecology and spiritual emphases. Then finally a synthesis of the two, to suggest what qualities and activities today can help create a hopeful future.

Which is a long way to saying I'm only getting started. (Though a lot of research and preliminary writing is accomplished. After all, I've been working on this stuff for several years.)

But I've got a lot of other work to do before I can get back to SOUL OF THE FUTURE-and a lot of work to FIND. The paying kind. So progress on reading these books is apt to be slow. I'm also tempted by Robert Johnson's "Ecstasy," another thrift store find, partly because he's an easy read, and it's short.

FILMS OF THE WEEK: We saw "Signs" at the theater, which I suppose is obvious from the preceding column. (Although I guess it's the following column in this format...) What I liked most about it is the director's style of storytelling, and how well Mel Gibson and the other actors responded to it. The mixture of (realistic) family comedy, the dead-on characterizations, along with how the suspense aspects are structured, are all admirable, and advance current filmmaking. The scene in which dad is outvoted by the kids on whether to stay or head for the hills (or the lake) to escape the aliens is really good. Shamalyan (I'm probably not spelling that right) has absorbed Speilberg (of E.T. and Poltergeist, say) as well as suspense directors, and he is very good at the pacing etc. necessary to keep his elegantly wrapped mysteries moving, and keeps you surprised, even when you sort of know what has to happen. The man of the cloth loses faith and collar, regains same, is still a cliché and is a serious flaw. I don't quarrel with spiritual content, but that was too heavy handed.

Another film we saw was on video, Preston Sturges' "Christmas in July." I had a big Sturges phase a few years ago, and this was the first time since then I'd screened this one, his first. It's a very interesting film to watch during the current corporate revelations. The idea of businesses being "a family", and of people thinking of others first, all seem sadly obsolete. Sturges movies are utterly unique-nobody else does comedy like his, and his scripts are gems. The characters are at once recognizable as movie characters and with complexity and individuality. You pan in on some of the minor ones, convinced you're going to meet a cliché, and by the time they start talking they turn out to be more nuanced and surprising, like the office manager in this film who at first seems to be the stereotype of the bean counter, but turns out to be a dignified, intelligent and kind man, bearing his disappointment and compromise with honor.

Poetry: In the past few weeks I've read A. R. Ammons for pretty much the first time, read a little Shelley, but find myself fascinated with Yeats. Really for the first time-I read the required work in college, even saw one of his plays performed, but didn't care for him much in comparison to the other Moderns of that moment, Pound and Eliot. Now I'm content to let Pound and Eliot fight in the captain's tower, and explore Yeats, from the early work to The Tower.