Joy Among the Ruins

"The last year has been one of the most depressing of my nearly 50 years as a journalist." So begins Thomas Friedman's latest New York Times column.  If you are deep into the grip of such a depression, you might want to skip, for example, catching up with Rachel Maddow's latest MSNOW hour.  But if you are looking for a little hope, even a little uplift, try the rest of Friedman's column. (Photo above also from NYT.)

After offering a brief summary of the contributors to that depression ( "It’s not just that I’ve had to watch the Trump administration destroy cherished alliances, like ours with Western Europe and Canada, that have upheld freedom, democracy and global trade since World War II. It’s also been the stunning cowardice and boundless greed with which leaders of big law firms and Big Tech have bent their knees to King Donald and indulged a cabinet of clowns — not one of whom they’d hire in their own businesses."), Friedman quickly continues:

 "But then I spent time in my native state, Minnesota, after something else that I’d never seen in nearly 50 years: a spontaneous uprising of civic activism propelled by a single idea — I am my neighbor’s keeper, whoever he or she is and however he or she got here...It was one of the most courageous battles ever fought by American men and women not in uniform."

I've read (and written) descriptions of the Minnesota Miracle, but this long column adds more information and clarity.  It is moving and inspiring.  It is even joyful.

If you're in the mood for something clarifying and inspiring that is more metaphorical, you might check out the recently streamed concluding first season episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, in which the climax occurs when a powerful villain is exposed as "an angry child with his finger on the trigger, whose entire worldview is based on a lie."  Given that this series was castigated for its woke diversity  by psycho Steven Miller himself, it demonstrates reassuring bravery as well as a concise analysis. Plus the good guys win. It's Episode 10: "Rubincon."  (Another inspiring episode of this outstanding series was #8, "The Life of the Stars," which centers on the Thornton Wilder play, Our Town.)

I haven't seen it yet, but judging from Michelle Goldberg's column about this year's Oscar winner for Best Picture, One Battle After Another, it might be another such candidate. She writes about how it mirrors today's Chaotic America, even though it was made before the 2024 election.  She calls it "forthrightly anti-fascist."  

On the subject of the Oscars, I'd also recommend as a potential source of solace and uplift checking out clips of the winners' acceptance speeches.  They were almost unfailingly generous to the other nominees (there are so many awards shows in awards season and the same people tend to be nominated in all of them, so they've all been hanging out together for months) and instead of just thanking their agents, they acknowledged those who preceded them and paved the way for their achievement.  

This was true of the big awards but also especially of some others-- the first winner in the new category of casting, who called out the names of legendary casting directors who were never honored, and the first woman to win the cinematography award, who asked all the women in the audience to stand, because they made her award possible.  It all made the term "the film community" a little more real, even across time.

But if you'd like several jolts of pure joy untethered to the depressing political present, I wholeheartedly recommend checking out clips from performances through the past two decades of Paul McCartney.  Many can be easily found on YouTube.

Going back to around 2002, McCartney formed a new band that basically has backed him ever since, and their sets are heavy with meticulous renderings of Beatles tunes. Over the years they include some of the earliest songs recorded and performed by the Beatles, as well as later songs that the Beatles themselves never performed--partly because they gave up touring, and partly because these studio-made records couldn't be reproduced on stage, either economically or at all, due to limitations on the technologies of the time.  But now they can.

In the first decade or so of these concerts, McCartney's voice was strong and pure.  In more recent years his voice has thickened and developed a kind of vibrato that takes getting used to, but that happens pretty quickly, especially as the utter thrill of this music takes over.  These are joyful songs to begin with.  Seeing and hearing them performed now...well, you might be surprised how you feel.

The audience really accentuates that thrill.  Not just the miracle of McCartney playing songs that the Beatles played in the 1960s, or never played on stage, but what the songs meant and continue to mean to these listeners. 

These are multigenerational audiences, entire families hugging and dancing. Grandparents going wild next to their enthralled grandchildren. There are girls as young as the ones in the A Hard Day's Night concert scenes (often shown on a screen above and behind the stage) who know every word and every note in music created decades before they were born.  And there are men of various ages just stunned, and moved to tears.

After all the angst, Paul McCartney has lived long enough to be completely vindicated, now with fans in at least three generations. You see the same expression on the face of other superstar musicians he performs with as you see in these audiences--they can't quite believe what's happening. It's an out-of,  in-the-body experience.

 He made amazing music after the Beatles as well, as most recently demonstrated in an excellent new film (currently streaming) on his years with Linda McCartney and Wings.  McCartney has written and recorded so many great songs that among them are songs that have fallen into obscurity, simply because there are too many others.  Yet it is clear that the past and the Beatles live in him every day, and he brings that music to life again.   

Kurt Vonnegut used to say that the purpose of art is to make people happy.  He was asked if any artists actually achieved that.  "The Beatles did," he replied.  They still do. Paul McCartney brings it alive again.  Try it, it may work for you, too.

TV and Me: Rescues

 TV and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Latest in a series.

TV and I had grown up together, and then grown apart.  But television as I knew it continued to contribute to my life, though in more sporadic and selective ways. 

 When the alternative weekly I edited—Newsworks in Washington D.C.—folded in 1976, I returned to Greensburg to chill out and plot my next move.  I was soon offered a job as an editor at the Village Voice in New York, but just before that deal was completed, the Voice was sold and all hiring cancelled.  So I turned to reviving my magazine writing, as well as other writing.

Which in the present context is all to say that I had a lot more time for television. This would not be the first or last period of my life when I needed some rescue provided by books, movies and TV, but it was acute in those years of “inexpensive isolation” (as I later described them), when after a period of uncompensated writing and searching for an agent, an article led to the protracted effort to get a book contract based on it, followed by the research, writing and then re-writing, and all the elation and trauma surrounding the fraught odyssey of its publication and its aftermath—a period that extended through most of the 1980s. I had family and friends and something of a social life, but otherwise the rhythms of my life and identity were disrupted to the point of shapelessness, and I often felt lost and bereft.

 What kind of rescue did TV provide?  It certainly offered the mind-numbing kind in abundance but I valued other, more positive, active and specific contributions, and in this last sections of this series, I want to acknowledge some of them. 

 Some forms are pretty familiar to others: the TV shows or series that create an alternative world to painful aspects of the real one.  So I share with many the need and gratitude for M*A*S*H during the Vietnam war, and The West Wing during the Bush/Cheney years. In a less specific sense, Star Trek served this function for many over the years, and it did so for me.

 Star Trek modeled the soul of a better future, especially in its most globally popular series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94.)  It was personal nourishment and a beacon to future possibilities: not in terms of technology but attitude, generous ethics and community.  

Another series of the early 90s that encompassed new possibilities was Northern Exposure (which in 1990 ran at the same time as its nightmare side, the unforgettable first season of Twin Peaks.)

 Northern Exposure’s witty contributions include taking seriously the Indigenous worldview in today’s society, which was also a concern in fiction by Native and First Peoples authors, as well as a few films, especially surrounding the 500^th anniversary of Columbus in 1992.  There were Jungian notions in Northern Exposure as well, as there were in The Next Generation.  And since by this time I was building a new life in Pittsburgh, and deeply interested in contemporary Native American views and Jungian psychology, these felt like synchronous elements of these dialogues.  But even before this, I responded to common elements in these programs: intelligence and a sense of wonder in the stories, and articulate characters who respected each other.

 Also in the late 80s and early 90s, I found the series Thirtysomething more than just entertaining and generally informative on what my generation was going through.  For much of that time I was employed as a senior writing at an editorial firm with business and government clients, which was my first (and last) experience in that kind of organization.  It turned out I learned more about what I was experiencing from the advertising firm portrayed in Thirtysomething than any other source.

 But other forms of TV rescue were more personal, more linked to my circumstances in a time and a place. This was most acutely true in those late 70s and 80s in Greensburg.  I suspect others have shared these experiences, at different times and places, and with different television. 

 Most of my television viewing continued to be late at night. I still watched talk shows.  The Dick Cavett Show was a valued, even essential oasis while it lasted, but it was ended in 1975.  Tom Snyder’s quixotic Tomorrow Show was still on NBC in the early 80s before it too disappeared.  Watching other talk shows was like attending old rituals, comforting in a way but often empty. However, anything approaching intelligent or even amusing conversation was welcome. 

Paul McCartney brings Johnny a birthday cake

I should however say a few words about Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, which I never watched regularly but saw often enough over the years, especially when Steve Allen and Dick Cavett weren’t on the air, or I would catch some of it tuning in early for David Letterman.  Carson’s Tonight Show opening was highly ritualized, his repeated bits became ritualized and the audience had their parts in them. Eventually his popularity made the show an American ritual.

   For a long while his success puzzled me.  I first watched him on his afternoon show, Who Do You Trust?, and though he was a compelling presence, it was hard to say why: basically he was a skinny guy who seemed to be restraining himself from telling dirty jokes. On the Tonight Show he shamelessly adapted bits and characters that Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs and Jonathan Winters had originated, but he made them his own.  As he relaxed into his silver-haired years, he assumed a mastery over that show and its environment.  Within its ritualized context, he added the human element, especially when he knew his guests. And he could be funny.

 Carson was said to be painfully shy and so socially awkward that he avoided social events.  But he found elements that worked for him, particularly his adaptation of the reaction take that he freely admitted he learned from Jack Benny.  There was however an earnestness about him that appealed to me—the impression that he was a serious person, if not as intellectual as Cavett or Steve Allen.  He also seemed to be without prejudices, and seldom belittled his guests.  He seemed a generous, decent man who knew he was limited, and pushed against his limits, but not too hard.  The audience at home was part of all the ritual, and they saw themselves in Johnny Carson.

But who was going to replace Johnny Carson when he retired, as he said as the 70s ended?  Thanks to my friend Mike Shain, I attended an NBC dinner with all their executive arrayed at the head table, including the head honcho Fred Silverman.  The evening's entertainment was a hot new comedian named David Letterman. I suggested to Michael that this was his audition for the Tonight Show. 

 I turned out to be right, sort of.  Carson didn't retire that time, so Letterman scored a morning talk show and then Late Night with David Letterman on NBC in 1982, following Carson.  It became a sensation.  I watched it every night.  Sure, once again a lot of the bits were familiar from Steve Allen, but Letterman had something extra: insolence.  His Top Ten Lists were some of the funniest writing on TV.  Eventually, Letterman would soften his image for the Late Show on CBS (when he was passed over for the Tonight Show in 1992) and bested Johnny Carson's record for the most late night hosting appearances. 

Magic Johnson on Arsenio Hall Show

 As for other talk shows, they had their moments.  Arsenio Hall had a good run with his (1989-1994), and I watched it now and again for several years.

 I continued to watch movies, of course: on TCM and AMC, and HBO and whatever other premium channels were part of the package, like TMC. What was new were the late night reruns, not locally syndicated but through networks.  So I watched old episodes of Magnum P.I., Kojak and Baretta, shows I hadn’t watched (and didn’t watch) in prime time.  I knew I was scraping the bottom for solace here, and I wasn’t grabbing role models (although the catchphrases “Who loves ya, baby?” “And that’s the name of that tune,” were catchy) but they gave me the quicker rhythms, personality and style that real life wasn’t providing. 

Early in my exile I was devoted to the Lou Grant series starring Ed Asner.  I'd watched the Mary Tyler Moore Show of course--and even happened to be in downtown Minneapolis at the precise moment she was filming new inserts for the introductory montage of the show.  I watched her walk by in her brown trenchcoat.  It was my first time in Minneapolis and it might have been hers as well.  Considered a spinoff, Lou Grant retained some of the humor but was basically a serious series about newspaper reporters and the social issues they confronted in their stories.  This was my neighborhood in a way, and I loved entering their world. Once again, Monday nights at 10 p.m. were sacred.

 At a later point, the cable channel A&E was alternating late night episodes of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett (from Granada TV in the UK) with another UK series, Lovejoy, a comedy/drama about an antique dealer—a “divvy” who can divine the authenticity of an item-- who solves antique-related crimes, often in self-defense.  

A&E was the first to show Lovejoy in the US, while the Sherlock Holmes series premiered on PBS before A&E. I might have seen it on PBS but like the original Star Trek and the aforementioned series, seeing it every night (or several nights a week) gave it a stronger, more consistent presence.  When I was watching these, I was most fascinated with Lovejoy: the rogue and outcast who always finds a way to right a wrong, or at least outfox the more unscrupulous.   

 

Watson (Hardwick) and Holmes (Brett)

I enjoyed the Jeremy Brett series on A&E, but it was seeing these stories uninterrupted on DVD in more recent years that turned me into an addict.  I’ve seen episodes of the first and second seasons literally dozens of times. The writing and production are generally satisfying, the guest actors range from competent to brilliant, regulars like David Burke (series 1) and Edward Hardwick (thereafter) as Watson, and Colin Jeavors as Inspector Lestrade were entertaining, but it is Brett that keeps me coming back. 

His Holmes is magnetic (and occasionally frenetic) as well as nuanced and complex. At times Brett plays him with what Hardwick calls “Edwardian acting,” the high style of early 20^th century theatre, a brilliant notion even historically for the advanced detective of the late 19^th century, for whom deduction was a performance.  Even when I know the story, even the lines and the moves, it’s a joy to revisit Brett’s Sherlock.  I also love the men’s clothes—the long coats, the tweeds with matching caps.  I admired much of the BBC modern times Sherlock series and the CBS modern times Elementary series, but Brett’s original period series wears the best.  

While Brett’s style remains a chief attraction, at the time I gravitated more to Ian McShane as Lovejoy on A&E (though on DVD many Lovejoy episodes are enjoyable but they aren’t as consistent as Brett’s Holmes.) Lovejoy also affected my style by favoring t-shirts with suit jackets (years before Miami Vice changed everything with their ultra-slick ensembles.) Again, this attraction was as much aural (the way they spoke—even their diction) as visual.  These late night forays added some buoyancy to my days.

 I remember two other shows from the UK were introduced on late night television in the US, this time by our PBS station, WQED in Pittsburgh.  Both I believe were on late at night once a week.

 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came into my world unheralded, sneaking in very late on what I remember as Sunday night.  PBS apparently re-edited the original six episodes from the BBC into seven half- hour programs.  I had no idea of the history of this Douglas Adams project in the UK: a novel, a radio series, a stage show and an LP, before this TV series had first aired in England two years before.  The books were yet to come. 

So I was a complete innocent--I didn’t know what would happen.  When the computer Deep Thought was ready to answer the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, I didn’t know what it would be—I had to wait until the next episode.  There were wonders after wonders.  

The production was a bit clunky but forgivable in such an imaginative romp, as if Star Trek had married Monty Python.  The sets were only slightly above Captain Video level, but that became part of the charm.  The animated interpolations were priceless, and overall, the wit was astonishing and most importantly to me, nourishing. One of the things I needed from these shows was that their effect, their style and worldview would linger for as long as possible, until lost in the morass and vocabulary of everyday life.

 Speaking of Monty Python, their Flying Circus series was introduced on PBS in the 70s, and though I watched episodes when I ran into them, I was for some reason never really a big fan.  They were funny, and they weren’t.

 I was however a fan of a few PBS shows ostensibly for children, mostly for their sly humor.  I caught a few minutes of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood (and later watched a day’s filming and met Mr. Rogers himself) and Sesame Street here and there, but in the early 70s I tuned in as often as I could to The Electric Company (the original one, with Rita Moreno and a young Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader) and later to Mathnet, partly because in both there was usually a layer of subtle but hilarious humor for adults.

  Mathnet was essentially a parody of Dragnet, and once made an elaborate inside joke about Citizen Kane.  The Electric Company included a daily parody of soap operas, “Love of Chair,” in which (as with most soap operas) almost nothing happened.  Each segment ended with the question, “And what about Naomi?” with the quintessential organ sting.   

A few years before A Hitchhiker’s Guide appeared, another BBC series began appearing late at night: the (then) latest incarnation of Doctor Who with the eccentric, enigmatic but magnetic Tom Baker as the Doctor.  It appeared unheralded on the Pittsburgh PBS station WQED.  I was blown away by it---after pretty much memorizing all the episodes of Star Trek made in the 60s, I was hungry for another sci-fi world.  But I don’t remember it as being on for very long.

Peter Davison was the Fifth Doctor.

  It was later that I got the opportunity to saturate myself in the Whovian universe.  Back when WQED was an NET educational channel, it farmed out some instructional programs to its UHF subsidiary WQEX, channel 16.  But as mentioned previously, cable TV gave the UHF channels with a weaker signal a level playing field and new life.  So in the 1980s, WQEX remade itself as the spunky “Sweet Little Sixteen,” with a visibly youthful on air presence, and a slate of offbeat syndicated programs.  Its first and most enduring hit was Doctor Who. QEX promoted it with a Pittsburgh-based Doctor Who convention, and most importantly, ran an episode every day. 

WQEX started with the Tom Baker episodes—seven seasons worth in the late 70s to early 80s.  As everyone must know by now, the Doctor is a Time Lord who travels in a TARDIS disguised as a 1950s London police box. He usually travels with one or more companions, often young women.  Every so often the Doctor “regenerates” and takes on a new appearance and personality so there had actually been three Doctors with different actors before Tom Baker and at that point in the late 1980s, two more after him. 

 

Doctor Who was so popular with the QEX audience that, apart from encouraging the running of a raft of other old BBC shows (some of them dubious) the station acquired the rights to show all the existing episodes from past Doctors, and eventually each new episode as seen in the UK until the series went into hibernation in 1989.

 I don’t know how many other US stations did this but I doubt there were many.  I was probably among the few in the US who had the opportunity to see all surviving episodes of Doctor Who, from its first in November 1963, through the Tom Baker stories and beyond them to the Peter Davison and Colin Baker episodes and eventually the last ones with Sylvester McCoy in 1989.  There was no more Doctor Who after that until  the series was reimagined and restarted in 2005, though religiously keeping continuity. Eventually these "classic" episodes became available to US viewers through the BBC cable and streaming channels.

 At that point my favorite Doctor far and away was Tom Baker (only supplanted—but not entirely—by David Tennant in the new iteration.)  His mixture of whimsy and high intelligence, a kind of Time Lord Lewis Carroll, was a new sort of role model.  I had already identified with the alien Mr. Spock—this was a different way to accommodate my alienation. (All of these protagonists were outsiders of a kind, and I could not help but identify.)  I liked his style, too—a kind of post-60s look, with long coat, floppy hat and very long scarf.  I had them all in the closet, including a very long scarf with better colors than his. As I transitioned my life away to new adventures living and writing in Pittsburgh, his long hair with wild curls was an easy addition (for as long as any of that lasted.)

 

The wit of the Tom Baker Doctor Who was deepened when Douglas Adams wrote for the show and became its script editor for a year--Adams of course was the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide.  Adams was a fascinating writer and talker-- especially on ecological subjects there is no one who could be succinct and dramatic as he could.  He wrote a couple of funny and charming cosmic detective novels, too.  His early death remains a huge loss.

 Much later, another British series important to me was Foyle’s War.  Its format was unique: each episode marked a point and an issue in World War II Britain, wrapped around a complicated crime mystery on the homefront, usually murder. The UK's ITV produced it, and over here PBS featured it in its Mystery! series.

 
 It had a rocky television history in the UK and therefore a sporadic presence in the US but I saw enough of it to more recently obtain the DVD box set and immerse myself in its stories and its world. The conception, execution and historical depth and accuracy as well as the creative weaving of a good mystery by its main writer, Anthony Horowitz, are all breathtaking, as is the addictive performance of Michael Kitchen as police superintendent Christopher Foyle, himself a model of rectitude.  Partly because of the UK’s Official Secrets Act, quite a lot about the behind-the-scenes war effort in England was only revealed in the 21^st century, so a lot of intriguing World War II dramas emerged.        

 My hometown loneliness and alienation were emphasized by the daily ramifications of the fact that almost nobody—and almost nothing on TV—quite shared my sense of humor.  This became acute as the horrifying, depressing, Orwellian 1980s began.  At that point, Saturday Night Live had hit a long dull spot, and Monty Python (which I wasn’t crazy about anyway) was no longer regularly shown.  But suddenly, there was the best of all: SCTV was on the air!

 

SCTV station manager Edith Prickley
(Andrea Martin)

Second City in Chicago was the best-known improv theatre in the US, and they had a Canadian branch in Toronto.  This group began doing a television show in Canada, combining sketches, satires, fake movies, talk shows and other shows plus commercials pretending to be programs of SCTV, a ramshackle station in the town of Melonville.  The cast also played continuing characters, chiefly the people running the stations, and the hosts and stars of the various programs.

 Then in 1981, the NBC music program The Midnight Special suddenly ended production, and the 90 minute post-midnight Friday night slot opened up.  SCTV was an inexpensive alternative, a stopgap that became a cult hit. 

 After midnight was my prime time (and I believe the show was repeated even later, after 2 am) so I became an avid viewer and grateful fan.  On its best nights, all 90 minutes constituted the funniest show on television, and even on uneven nights, there were always hilarious moments.  

There were variations in the cast over the years but the episodes I saw mainly featured John Candy, Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis. (Harold Ramis, Robin Duke and Martin Short also appeared at different times. Short introduced his defining character, Ed Grimley, on SCTV before he moved to Saturday Night Live.) 

 All these cast members went on to some degree of Hollywood and US television success--Candy made the biggest splash initially, Moranis starred in the “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” series, and most recently Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara won Emmys for their performances in Levy and Son’s series Schitt’s Creek.  In addition to her comic roles, Andrea Martin has been nominated for the Tony Awards’ Best Featured Actor in a Musical a record five times.

Catherine O'Hara as "Lola Heatherton"

 SCTV’s basic target was television itself.  The first years of Saturday Night Live also skewered TV and its commercials ( like Dan Ackroyd demonstrating the Trout-O-Matic and other gems from Ronko) as had Steve Allen and Sid Caesar to some degree, but thanks to its premise, SCTV was really television-centric. They took on every form, including the saccharine sentimentality and circular flattery exhibited in  celebrity talk shows.  The premise of a small town station broadcasting cheap versions of program types exposed their absurdity beneath the glitz. 

Woody and Bob Hope

  In their impressions of the famous and in their delineations of recurring characters (including the hypocrisies evident in their off camera versus on camera personalities) the cast showed amazing skill and attention to detail, as well as an instinct for deeper and uncomfortable layers.  For instance, Dave Thomas did an eerily deadpan, surprisingly normal-sounding and yet perverse Bob Hope, while the chameleon Rick Moranis nailed a sad sack Woody Allen.  Catherine O’Hara’s portrayal of Katherine Hepburn was devilish and affectionate, and who could forget John Candy’s Luciano Pavaroti—or his Julia Child?

 Several running bits became legendary.  Joe Flaherty’s Count Floyd introducing Monster Chiller Horror Theatre was a parody of every late night horror film host, but specifically inspired by “Chilly Billy” Cardille, host of Pittsburgh’s Chiller Theatre, which Pittsburger Flaherty knew well. (Like Cardille, Count Floyd was a moonlighting TV news reporter seen on SCTV, Floyd Robertson, paired with Eugene Levy’s hapless Ed Camenbert.)

  Flaherty further exploited his Pittsburgh roots, for instance by narrating a horror film, Blood Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin PA, providing western Pennsylvania geographical details and interpolated Pittsburgh accents. For the initiated it’s a reminder than indeed one of the classic horror films of modern times, Night of the Living Dead, was shot in Pittsburgh—with Bill Cardille in the cast playing a news reporter.  Later in SCTV’s run, the cast performed a series of horror films starring John Candy, including Dr. Tongue’s 3-D House of Pancakes, which also lampooned their cheap 3-D effects.      

What turned out to be their most popular and characteristic bit was a parody of a Canadian public access show, The Great While North, in which two rural brothers in stocking caps, Doug and Bob McKenzie (Thomas and Moranis), drank beer from cans while sniping at each other about “today’s topic.”  It was a rage in Canada and enough of a novelty in the US to lead to a feature film, Strange Brew.

 

Polka stars the Schmenge Bros

SCTV later appeared for a year on Cinemax, and could be found in various packages into the 1990s. For those who remember those late night laughs in the dark, it takes only mentioning character names to elicit them again: Guy Caballero, Edith Prickley, Sammy Maudlin, Mrs. Falbo, Bobby Bittman (“How are ya!”), Lola Heatherton (“I want to bear your children!”), Johnny La Rue, Gerry Todd, Mayor Tommy Shanks, the Schmenge Brothers, Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok (“Blowed up good! Blowed up real good!”), and of course Tex and Edna’s Organ Emporium (“Come on down...”) 

 

Expanding on television’s trivialities can be enervating in bulk, but much of it still works for me, along with the memory of feeling part of a rowdy, imaginative and wildly fun group, even in the distant isolation of a solitary Friday night.

 Apart from SCTV, the last several aforementioned shows from the beyond the US first appeared on PBS (though SCTV eventually was shown there, too.)  These weren’t the only public television programs that nourished and saved me, even directed me, in those years, from the 70s into the 1990s.  Those shows are featured in the last episode of this series, next time.

RIP 2022: Nichelle Nichols

 

It's been my tradition on this blog to write at the end of each year honoring some of the people in public life I admired who died that year.  This time I'm planning to do several such posts, about an individual or several individuals at a time.  This is the first.

I first met Nichelle Nichols at what’s become known as the Farewell Scotty convention in Los Angeles in 2004, when I was writing a story about Star Trek for the New York Times. I believe I was the only reporter at the Saturday night formal dinner, seated with several Star Trek fans at a table near the front, and the area in front of the dais where distinguished guests would dine.  The lighting in that area was dim, so I could not distinguish all the figures whose backs were to us, but I did see Nichelle Nichols arrive and sit at one end of the table nearest to me.

 So in a lull before serving began, I approached that side of the table.  I quietly introduced myself to her, so she might recognize me in the hubbub of the convention when I would seek to briefly interview her.  I was ready to duck back to my table when she said, “Let me introduce you to someone.”  That someone was Neil Armstrong, the main speaker that night. I hadn’t even seen him when he popped up out of the darkness near the other end of the table, and suddenly I was shaking hands with the first human being to touch another world.

 I’ve often wondered why she did this, what prompted her to instantly, spontaneously perform this act of grace that included introducing me by name, even though she had only heard it once.  It was a moment of singular generosity and thoughtfulness.  It was the act of a singular lady.  

She was Uhura, and (as asserted in the title of her autobiography), she was beyond Uhura.   Her story as she told it in her book is a very American story.  The heritage within her included African American, European White (a grandfather) and Native American (her mother was half Cherokee.)   She grew up in Robbins, Illinois, a town founded in the late 19^th century by Henry E. Robbins, who purchased land some 30 miles from Chicago from disappointed speculators, and began selling lots and homes to Black and mixed race families, otherwise shut out of home ownership solely because they weren’t White (Robbins was himself a White southerner.)  That’s why from that day to this, Robbins has always had a Black mayor.

 In the 1930s, that mayor was Nichelle’s father.  It was in the era that Al Capone and other mobsters fought and ruled in Chicago over the liquor trade that Prohibition made illegal, and gave Chicago an international image that lasted well beyond that decade.  This led to a situation that begins Beyond Uhura, in which, just months before Nichelle’s birth, her mother held a gun on Capone’s brother in her parlor. 

But mostly her childhood was idyllic, full of art and books, though her mother was troubled by a psychic gift for precognition.  Nichelle loved to sing and dance, and after rigorous local training in early adolescence, she became the first Black dancer to be accepted into the Chicago Ballet academy.  But after two years of training to become a ballerina, she wandered into a class of Afro-Cuban dancers, and quickly converted.  This soon led to her first professional appearances.

 But there were difficult times.  A failed early marriage left her a single mother with a young son to support. She became a popular night spot singer and entertainer, which at times involved her with organized crime figures who for decades either owned or controlled many clubs.  Once on tour in the 1950s she was brutally refused a hotel room because of her race (not in the deep South but in Utah.) In another incident, a prominent citizen in the town where she performed sexually assaulted her, and left her alone overnight in an isolated cabin in the woods.  But she was not intimidated: she reported him to the police and returned to testify at his trial, where he was convicted and sentenced to prison. 

The brief summaries of her life and career that have appeared since her death often leave out important details.  She not only sang with the Duke Ellington band—Duke himself commissioned her to choreograph and perform in an Ellington dance suite, in addition to later featuring her as a singer.  Years later, she not only acted in a triumphant Los Angeles premiere production of James Baldwin’s first play, she essentially produced it for the theatre company she started with her partner, actor and director Frank Silvera. That production went on to succeed on Broadway.

   When more years later, she created a one-woman show in which she sang new songs in the style of past greats, she didn’t have to research them through old records and film clips.  She’d known many of them and heard them perform, including Josephine Baker, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne. 

 A small part in the movie of Porgy and Bess made her known to Sammy Davis, Jr. (with whom she had a sort of romance), Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge and her dancing partner, Maya Angelou, whose fame was to come later as one of the great writers of the age.  

She costarred in an ill-fated Broadway show with Burgess Meredith, and was a hit in her debut as a singer at New York’s Blue Angel. Through Frank’s theatre and film work, Nichelle came to know many other luminaries, including Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda and Tony Bennett.  But hobnobbing with the stars didn’t stop racism from being a fact of life and occasionally surfaced in a blatant way, as when she and Frank were refused residence in a house they had rented in Manhattan when the caretaker saw Nichelle.  Sexism of the most Hollywood sort also came into play, when she lost a lucrative contract with MGM because sleeping with an executive was required. 

Then in 1963, Frank asked her to do an acting scene with one of his students, Don Marshall.  Another student named Joe D’Agosta was so impressed that he told his employers at a television production company about them. The executives watched Nichelle and Marshall do the scene (from Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge—a title that would soon take on different meaning), and hired them both.  It was for an episode of the TV series The Lieutenant, produced by Gene Roddenberry.  D’Agosta would become the casting director for Star Trek.

 With Star Trek, she would become probably only the third Black woman featured in a continuing non-stereotyped dramatic role in series television. (The first two played the same social worker-- a very young Cicely Tyson, with Diana Sands substituting for one episode-- in the short-lived but significant social drama East Side West Side in 1963, starring George C. Scott.) Nichelle Nichols’ presence was more prominent, but still…

 With prodigious talents expressed on stage and screen, Nichelle Nichols lasting fame results mostly from what must be described as a relatively small role. For three years she had to get up in the middle of the night to appear on set, where typically she would sit in one place, and say and do very little.  Given her skills and experience, it is reasonable to wonder why she bothered.

 The answers begin with expectations: she had reason to hope her part at Lieutenant Uhura would be larger.  She saw scripts in which she had better scenes, more lines and more to do.  Her book makes it clear that in Star Trek’s first year, her part was diminished due primarily to network and studio demands, which involved fears of audience reaction, but in the end reflected race and gender bias.  How deep that went is indicated by her assertion that executives kept most of the fan mail she was getting (almost equal to that of stars Shatner and Nimoy) from being delivered to her. In other words, she’d proven them wrong—she was accepted and she was popular.  But they had to deny it.

  By then she was ambivalent about her role (a feeling played in a different way by Celia Rose Gooding as the younger Uhura on the Strange New World series, which also seems to be dramatizing aspects of Uhura’s backstory that Nichols and Roddenberry invented, but never could portray.)

 So it wasn’t surprising that she was leaving the series after that first season, until her now famous encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr., who talked to her about the power of her presence on television, and in the 23rd century.  Her status as a role model for Black and minority viewers, especially children, and most especially girls; the ground she was breaking in television for other Black and minority performers, and the simple fact that she embodied a Black presence in the future, were all reasons to stay, even knowing that she was missing other opportunities, and possibly typecasting herself indefinitely.  And even when her role was further undermined in the second season and thereafter by William Shatner’s insisting (with the connivance of the Suits) that scripts focus heavily on Captain Kirk, and then Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy.

 But an equally compelling reason that she stayed seems to have been that she believed deeply in Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the Star Trek future.  Her book describes the vagaries of their personal relationship, but her devotion to his vision never wavered.  Her absolute conviction is expressed in this extraordinary sentence in her book: “Every time I sat down at my console on the bridge of the Enterprise, I felt that I was in the twenty-third century, that I was Uhura.” 

 It was this conviction that resonated with fans and made her a convention favorite.  It was this nobility as well as her intelligence, experience and cultural depth that made her an eminence as her hair turned silver.

 By accounts and observation, she was energetic, thoughtful, kind and at times mercurial, with a wicked sense of humor. Her book makes clear that she was a proudly passionate person, as also suggested in person by her occasional naughty references and raucous laugh.  But from the start, and especially as she grew older, she radiated and embodied a confident dignity.

 Before her final years and the conflicts surrounding them, she valued her prodigious memory. She put it to work in Beyond Uhura. Those who wish to honor her life can do so by learning more about it—by reading her autobiography.  Our lives and what we experienced and learned ultimately are our legacy. 

She was always more than what was obvious. It’s become widely known that in the period between the Star Trek TV series and the movies, she helped recruit minority and women to NASA, especially candidates for Space Shuttle astronauts.  But this achievement has also been slighted in some quarters.  In fact, this inclusion was a need she saw, and a proposal she made, carried out as one of a number of contracts by the company she ran.  She was astute at business and organization as well as artistically multi-talented.

 Her efforts were among the principal reasons that the world of fictional space exploration and real space exploration intermingled in public, leading to among other things, the first human to step foot on the moon speaking at the Scotty Farewell Star Trek convention of his wish to pilot the Enterprise.

 I did interview her on the Sunday at the end of that convention. She was direct and articulate. “Because the fans are loyal to Gene’s dream,” she told me, “we are loyal to the fans.” But she also wasn’t abject before them.  When a fan tried to talk to her during our interview, there was iron in her voice when she prevented the interruption.

 When my story appeared on the New York Times arts section cover Monday morning, she was the one who held it up to the crowd gathered to witness the ceremony marking the installation of James Doohan’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

 I saw her again two years later at the 40^th anniversary convention in Seattle, where I led a panel on the soul of Star Trek. I was one of several people greeting her as she entered “the blue room,” where participants gathered, and wondered if she would recognize me.  In any case she greeted me with an embrace and the brush of a kiss.   

May she rest in peace.  Her work and her legacy live on.

Soul of the Future/ Evolution of Hope: Eight Figures for the Future

“We must take comfort from the fact that human nature gives rise to altruism as well as selfishness, to conscience as well as cruelty.  The hope of the race is that passions of generosity, restraint, and goodness may prove as strong as those of egoism, aggression, and cruelty.”

Eric Bentley

 “Better to make a good future than predict a bad one.”

Issac Asimov

 “The future is not a gift: it is an achievement.  Every generation helps make its own future.  This is the essential challenge of the present.”

Robert F. Kennedy

 “I am curiously not interested in things,” wrote H.G. Wells in his 1917 book, The Future In America, “and curiously interested in the consequences of things.”

 This is the first lesson of evolution, which Wells applied to the future to shape what “the future” means to us.  The consequences of things (technologies, processes, events, inventions, decisions, etc.) in the past and present comprise the conditions of the future.

 Wells is the first of my “eight figures for the future” and sets the agenda for the rest: to fill in his outline of the future.  Most of these figures have appeared earlier in this series, so this is a kind of summation. Significant aspects of their work help form a framework for envisioning and enacting an evolution of hope.  

 From his first public writings to his last over a fifty- year career, Wells was fixed on the future. He learned as he went, and came to another seemingly simple conclusion that seems also to have escaped many other who command the mainstream of assumptions about the future: the causes of future conditions are complex. 

 It was fine for a science fiction story, or a thought experiment, to follow the effects of one change while keeping everything else familiar.  But that’s not how the future works: it’s the consequence of everything.

One technological change—or even technological changes in general—can and usually does have a mighty influence on the future.  But these effects interacted with other factors, including other changes, and with responses that were often unanticipated.  Things happen on different scales, at different rates.  They interact unpredictably.  And the consequences always include the unintended. 

Future reality would be made by the interactions within the whole, and the whole acting on itself.  Analyzing one or two strands of change wouldn’t be enough. “The end of all intelligent analysis,” Wells wrote, “is to clear the way for synthesis.”

 This is a lesson that overwhelmed the sensible futurist of the 1970s, but other more egotistical predictors persist in making the fatal mistake of leaving too much out.  This is a particular habit of those predicting the dominance of technologies, and it still happens. 

 In an online Substack piece of August 2021, the author chides those who make extravagant claims for the rise of certain technologies in the near future, and then offers his more “conservative” or realistic predictions based on current trends for life in 2050.  He issues 18 detailed technological, social and political predictions, employing hundreds of words, and never even mentions climate--not causes nor effects of the ongoing climate catastrophe, or anything involving the context of the natural world.

 Moreover, this was published during the most violently and obviously consequential summer of the climate crisis so far, which included the hottest month ever recorded for the entire planet, and which climate scientists confirm would basically have been impossible without a seriously deformed climate.  

 These are not just omissions; they are serious distortions of the future we know is coming that make his predictions worthless.  His predictions presuppose everything else is stable, and at this point that’s fantasy.  The irony is that based on chemistry and atmospheric science alone, the acceleration of a distorted climate is about the most certain prediction about the future that can be made.

 The habit of holding on to a single through-line for the future based on a narrow interpretation of the past that requires that counter-evidence be ignored, has itself distorted the prospects for the actual future.  Such interpretations tell slightly different but mutually congenial stories about the human historical past and the biological past predating but including humanity—in particular the principles that govern the outcomes of evolution.

 The common story driving western civilization was that man and nature were separate, that at best nature was a useful source (i.e. “natural resources”) but most of the time, an enemy, a barrier to human “progress.” The dominant interpretation of Darwinian evolution complicated this story, without really changing it. The human species was placed in competition with the rest of nature, and that competition was defined as violent struggle, with a few winners—maybe only one-- and lots of losers.

 The idea that the future belonged to the best predators predated and probably influenced Darwin.  But Darwin’s positing of natural selection as determining survival became immediately distorted and supercharged by the ideology now known as Social Darwinism.  That two of its prominent 19^th century adherents were John D. Rockerfeller and Andrew Carnegie pretty much explains its dominance.

 Though the 20^th century strengthened this view through the reductive misinterpretation of genetics that produced the infamous “selfish gene” theory, it was during the 20^th century that other voices countered this view by adding new information and context. 

Much of this information was hiding in plain sight. Another brilliant synthesist (and our second figure for the future) was Paul Shepard.  Credited as one of the pioneers of the science of ecology in the 1960s and 1970s, he braided observations of the natural world and human culture into a unique field, recognized when he became an endowed Professor of Human Ecology.

 Many other ecologists, scientists and thinkers contributed to Shepard’s syntheses, but many more have followed in his unacknowledged footsteps.  He wrote eloquently about the long human development in the Pleistocene, and the deeply human need for connection with the rest of nature, beginning with childhood.  This is “human nature--” physical and otherwise-- that goes back hundreds of thousands of years, and basically it has not changed.  Shepard brought human culture back into the context that nourishes it, and shows how human destruction of the natural world is profoundly self-destructive.

 Most of what Shepard and other ecologists found did not require laboratory experiments or expensive technology.  Archeological discoveries and analysis, a certain amount of quantitative data gathered in the field were part of it, but the new picture emerging also required rediscovering the research and insights that had been ignored because they didn’t fit the dominant program.

 For after all, the behavior among primates that exhibited cooperation, altruism and empathy in a carefully nurtured social structure had been there for researchers to see, centuries before primatologists like Frans de Waal and others showed up. But those earlier researchers didn’t see it because they weren’t looking for it—and since they were not prepared to believe it if they saw it, they didn’t see it.  More broadly, the deep relationship of humans and nature was evident in the words and practices of Indigenous peoples all over the world, but was dismissed as sentimental and exotic, and profoundly threatening.

 However, the 20^th century also saw new information unavailable before, because (for example) new technology allowed researchers like Lynn Margulis to study microorganisms that Darwin knew nothing about. There she found evidence for symbiosis and other behavior contrary to the selfish gene theory and other prevailing prejudices. 

 She then eloquently described the implications of her research, inspiring such thinkers as William Irwin Thompson.  Margulis also went from micro to macro by becoming the co-author of the Gaia Hypothesis, a planetary vision of a single self-regulating organism.  She is our third figure for the future.

 Thanks to her and many others, a new synthesis and a more complex view of evolution has begun to achieve acceptance. (In a series of books, British philosopher Mary Midgley is especially trenchant on the weaknesses of the old standard view of evolution.) Whether the species that invented bombing deserves to survive is still a question.  But that humanity is programmed by its genes to self-destruct is no longer a viable scientific conclusion.

 The reality is that both competition and cooperation, both individuals and various kinds of groups, both genetics and epigenetics (when genes turn on or off), drive evolution. This vision has profound implications for the future, and offers hope that the consequences of the ongoing destruction of the natural world as we know it can be recognized more broadly before those consequences become entirely overwhelming.

 Wells came to a second crucial realization when he turned to envisioning an attainable and desirable future.  Wells believed human civilization could not survive much longer if humanity did not unite.  National, racial and other enmities were leading to global catastrophe in a world in which weapons were inevitably going to be more destructive  (Wells foresaw tank warfare before there were tanks, saturation bombing of cities from the air, and the atomic bomb.) 

 He saw that humanity needed a new vision of itself, a new story of human progress. So he wrote The Outline of History to tell that story, and it became the best-selling book of his career.  Well’s history is now outdated.  Progressives who worry about the future have for years called for “a new story.”  Elements of it are contributed by others among these eight figures for the future.

 At their best, utopian stories explore possibilities inherent in our past to create models of better futures. Today as in recent decades, dystopian stories remain plentiful, but there is still only one popular model for a better future: the Star Trek saga.  Over five decades and counting, Star Trek has evolved a capacious vision that has inspired generations spanning the globe.

  Its universe of easy travel to other planets populated by similar beings is very likely a fantasy, but beyond the visuals that delight many, Star Trek has always been blatantly allegorical.  It has championed a profound respect for life, whatever its form (“Infinite diversity in infinite combination” is the motto every fan knows) a spirit of adventure and wonder, but the wisdom of humility.

 In addition to the allegories of principles tested by the unknown, Star Trek: The Next Generation in particular models behavior: courage and civility, discipline and openness, technological expertise and explorations of art and culture, loyalty and compassion, humor, love and the ability to examine behavior and change it.  This is not a utopia without problems: it is a utopia because of how people define and attempt to solve problems together.

 This Star Trek also demonstrates the power of an institutional morality that aligns with individual commitments.  Institutions like the Federation and Starfleet have learned from history.  In their encounters with the alien, the Other, they anticipate the past.  “We are not invaders,” Captain Picard insists.  “We are explorers.”  This time, humans do not export their unconscious in attempting conquest by another name.  Though they do not always succeed, they have rules to help them (the Prime Directive), and (it’s worth repeating) the humility and the tools to reexamine themselves.

 Behind aspects of this vision were dozens of science fiction writers (Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov, Hamilton etc.), moviemakers and Saturday morning television shows, as well as those who contributed their talents to Star Trek itself.  But television writer and producer Gene Roddenberry began this saga, and he inspired others to add their creativity to it by enlisting their enthusiasm for a vision that functionally became theirs as well as his.  For this achievement he is our fourth figure for the future.

Other visionaries have explored enlightening and sophisticated visions of at least aspects of the future through the complexities of story, particularly science fiction.   These have not directly reached as many people as the Star Trek saga but those who have read them have been profoundly influenced.  For her unique achievements that include The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for the World Is Forest, The Lathe of Heaven and Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin is our fifth figure for the future, but she also represents other significant visionaries from Olaf Stapeldon, Karel Capek,  Yevgny Zamyatin, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley to Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood and George Zebrowsky.

 Particularly in the Next Generation series, Star Trek suggested that the journey outward through space was a journey inward, and that each was at least equally important.  Or as Star Trek writer David Gerrold wrote, “"...space is not the final frontier. The final frontier is the human soul."

 In the first half of the 20^th century, C.G. Jung drew what he knew was only a rough map of our inner landscape—of the soul or psyche.  As crude as this map is, it suggests a crucial set of conceptual tools for understanding and directing our behaviors.  These tools—such as denial, projection, compensation, and the shadow—help us question and discern whether our thoughts and perceptions are actually products of our conscious mind, or are deceptions and misperceptions arising from our unfathomable unconscious.  For this alone, Jung is among our eight figures for the future.

 The future that evolves from the past is not an entirely rational process, Jung warned.  The mystery of the insistent unconscious—individual, group (or mob) and collective unconscious—persists in waves of human behavior, while the unconscious supplies deceptive reasons to keep the conscious feeling justified.  That’s why these tools are so crucial. 

(Using these tools to openly question our behavior was also modeled in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  The necessity of doing so makes the sometimes ridiculed addition of a ship’s counselor so important.) 

Jung also cautioned against one-sidedness, and called for the integration of rational thought, feeling, perception and intuition, or the head, heart and body that comprise soul.  The inner world is also complex, and the unconscious is a source of power and insight, and something that links all humanity, as well as the repository of raw fears and longings, especially those the society represses. 

 Thanks in part to the fervors surrounding two world wars, Jung saw that group delusion and a kind of mass psychosis fueled by unconscious compensation, self-righteous projection and denial are particular dangers in the modern world.  After World War II, he feared the power-mad Soviets and the suggestible Americans. The grip of this equivalent of shared and mutually reinforcing demonic possession can be broken, he felt, only one person to another.

  Towards the end of his life, Jung begged others to continue the exploration and mapping of the psyche.  “The world hangs on a thin thread,” he said in a video interview.  “That thread is the human psyche… We are the great danger.  The psyche is the great danger. But we know nothing about it.”  Despite the growing reductionism, arrogance and drug dependence of psychology since, others like James Hillman have continued the search—but not enough.

 Part of the necessary synthesis to secure the future is re-integrating the profound experience and insights of ancient traditions.  Particularly in the past quarter century, that work with Native American cultures has begun.

Leslie Marmon Silko (right) with Maxine Hong Kingston 
(left) and Toni Morrison (center.)

This synthesis is the ongoing work of many: Native leaders like Chief Oren Lyons, Native scholars such as Robin Wall Kimmerer and Gregory Cajete, non-Native scholars like Richard Nelson and Keith Basso, and non-Native synthesists like David Peat and Calvin Luther Martin, along with many Native poets, elders, activists, novelists and others. Leslie Marmon Silko, our seventh figure for the future, represents them all in the power and relevance of her writing, in Almanac of the Dead and the works that precedes and follows this American classic. (See the earlier post on The Ghost Dance future, as well as later in this post.)

 The Dalai Lama is among the great synthesists for the future of our time.  Over decades he has brought together scientists and Buddhist practitioners to reconcile religion and science, but especially to advance western science into introspective areas of the mind that Buddhists have been exploring for many more centuries than western science has existed.  These discussions through the Mind & Life Institute,  which led to new scientific experiments partially designed by Buddhist practitioners, have been public, resulting in nearly a dozen books and many hours of video, inspiring even more writing and discussion.

 The Dalai Lama also has articulated principles and ethics that are widely shared and do not depend on doctrines of particular religions, or any religious doctrine at all. “... we are all members of one human race and have the same worries and needs”, he writes.  “This ethical principle is not bound to a specific religion.  Even an atheist can follow it.  It is therefore not at all important whether we believe in God or the idea of rebirth.  We can always do good, even today when we are afraid of the dangers that the future may bring.”

 But this is not a matter only of the lowest ethical common denominator.  It is a re-orientation: the direction of a new story. According to visionary William Irwin Thompson: “...the Dalai Lama becomes not a medieval theocrat, but a global teacher precisely because Buddhism captures some of the dynamics of a worldview based on relationship, dependent co-origination, and compassion.” 

British author John Gray has tried to co-opt Buddhism and Eastern religions in general to support acceptance of inevitable apocalypse inherent in human nature by rejecting active hope for the future.  While it is true that Buddhist meditation focuses on exploring the individual’s present moment without judgment, this is only part of Buddhist tradition, and certainly the Dalai Lama has been outspoken in favor of both the possibility and the urgent necessity of compassionate action to build a better future. 

 Moreover, a core tenet of Buddhism is the value of the non-human world: of beings, of all life. The first precept of Buddhism, as Gary Snyder describes it, is ahimsa: “Cause the least possible harm.”  It applies not just to humans but to everything in the natural world, and requires judgment and forethought as well as this radical empathy.  As many contemporary Buddhists would attest, it applies to the larger questions of what harm humanity is causing to the life of the planet.

 “In order to change the external world,” the Dalai Lama writes, “first we must change within.” That inner world includes imagination and a vision for the future. “If you want a beautiful garden, in the human mind you make some kind of a blueprint in the imagination, and then according to that idea, you implement, so the garden will materialize.”  

 That change may well be underway. The current dominance of rigid denial, Buddhist philosopher David Midgley maintains, “is typical of the terminal phase in the life-cycle of a paradigm, and might be compared to the chrysalis stage in the life-cycle of a moth or butterfly...While the outer shell of the organism seems rigid and immoveable, invisible changes are taking place within, which may erupt dramatically when they reach a critical stage of development.”

 In any case, the activities of hope and personal commitment are essential to create the desirable future by enacting it now. "Whether we achieve what we are hoping for or not, it is important for us to keep hope,” said the Dalai Lama. “Hope is the basis of our future."

 The Dalai Lama is our eighth figure for the future.  But these eight are joined by newer voices, opening up new knowledge and possibilities. 

 The synthesis continues for example with books on parallels of Jung’s writing with Native American tradition and Buddhist practice (such as the connections between Buddhist mindfulness and Jungian consciousness), as well as Jung and nature, and Buddhism and ecology.  Others explore the implications of quantum physics for insights related to various mystical traditions, Indigenous practices and Jungian glimpses (such as synchronicity) into what Star Trek’s cosmic being Q called “the unknown possibilities of existence.” 

But the synthesis is also advanced with new analysis, information and insights. One of the most exciting is literally a new story, called The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.  The authors demonstrate that the dominant received history of early human civilization is “entirely wrong,” according to a detailed article in the Atlantic by William Deresiewicz. “Drawing on a wealth of recent archaeological discoveries that span the globe, as well as deep reading in often neglected historical sources,” he writes, “the two [authors] dismantle not only every element of the received account but also the assumptions it rests on.”

 Deresiewicz suggests that this new story demolishes “the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces.”  Societies at different times and in different places made deliberate choices: they saw the perils of their authoritarian government and changed it, they saw a neighbor’s stratified society based on wealth and avoided it, they refused to become trapped in a single mode of existence, and moved easily as appropriate among farming, gathering, herding and hunting in an “ecology of freedom.”

 “In a remarkable chapter, they describe the encounter between early French arrivals in North America, primarily Jesuit missionaries, and a series of Native intellectuals—individuals who had inherited a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as “generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.”  They call this the “Indigenous critique,” and maintain that it helped inspire the European Enlightenment.

Humanity did not march from hunter-gatherer nomads to total agriculture and then cities.  They mixed and matched and did them backward and forward.  They did not develop from tribal chieftains to kings and bureaucracies.  They governed themselves in a variety of ways, with and without “authorities.”They did not always see civilization as acquiring wealth and power in a top down structure. Civilization might mean “mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality...simply caring for others...”

 Moreover, these weren’t just doomed experiments.  Some of these societies lasted longer than today’s. 

These were stories untold, and there are more, including the stories of women, other Indigenous peoples and subjugated cultures.  The stories include the occluded, ignored and dismissed.  They include overlooked, devalued or derided examples of cooperation, civic duty, kindness, empathy, love of nature, selflessness—the civic and human spirit of “You’d do the same for me.”

These behaviors and these stories emerge in the worst times.  Scholars Pearl Oliner and Samuel Oliner (a Holocaust survivor) studied Europeans who risked their lives sheltering Jews during the Holocaust, and expanded this research into broader inquiries on altruism and compassion.  In The Altruistic Personality and other books, they explored many more examples of altruism under pressure than are mentioned in conventional histories. 

In A Paradise Built In Hell (2009), Rebecca Solnit tells the stories of communities that responded to disaster with creativity and solidarity.  “The history of disaster demonstrates that most of us are social animals, hungry for connection, as well as purpose and meaning,” she concludes.  “Hierarchies and institutions are inadequate in these circumstances...Civil society is what succeeds, not only in an emotional demonstration of altruism and mutual aid but also in practical mustering of creativity and resources to meet the challenges.”

 This is one basis for hope, as we confront the seemingly overwhelming effects of the climate emergency.  But another basis, equally ancient yet reinterpreted for our time, is at least as vital, as we address the causes of what will otherwise be even worse fates. It can be expressed as the Buddhist principle of “bringing the future into the present path.”  It still cannot be said better than in the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee: “In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation to come.”  

Remember the future.  Anticipate the past.

  This ends the Soul of the Future series.  I’ve decided to integrate its bibliography with a still ongoing series, History of My Reading.  But eventually it will also bear the Soul of the Future label, for direct access.