Choosing

Choosing

Was it home or foreign

 that city without color

 where I once lived for a time

 that often seemed long

 thinking there was no choice 

and all night I heard the captive

 lions roaring

 now I look back

 from when the rain is falling

 in the bright day

 a friend and I

 talked back then about a tree

 whose branches were the choice that we

 had not taken

 then she chose not to be

 never was there any such tree

 better

 the sound of the rain

 better the brightness falling

 better the day

 choosing to be morning

--W.S. Merwin

photo: Henri Cartier Bresson

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.

These Are The Clouds

These Are The Clouds

 These are the clouds about the fallen sun,

 The majesty that shuts his burning eye:

 The weak lay hand on what the strong has done,

 Till that be tumbled that was lifted high 

And discord follow upon unison,

 And all things at one common level lie.

 And therefore, friend, if your great race were run

 And these things came, So much the more thereby

 Have you made greatness your companion, 

Although it be for children that you sigh:

 These are the clouds about the fallen sun, 

The majesty that shuts his burning eye.

 W. B. Yeats, 1916

A Severini Saga

I haven't been posting so often on this blog recently, partly because I've been engaged in another project: researching and writing a narrative of my extended family, from what origins I could find to my memories of the 1950s.

I expected this to be of interest only to my family, including (I hope) its younger members when they get older and curious.  Like a lot of my retirement projects, it's been something I've pursued off and on, over decades. It's been fascinating for many reasons, and often frustrating, especially because I never asked a lot of these questions of those who could have answered while they were alive.  My grandmother Severini was the exception--she shared her stories in conversations in the 1970s and 80s.  And I did talk to my Aunt Toni in the 90s about her memories and her life.

  Fortunately, an uncle on each side of the family was able to help with their recollections and confirmations as I worked on this for the past few months.  But it is a sobering lesson in how we change over time, and how self-absorbed we tend to be for much of our lives, while the people who can tell us so much about the past that is the ground of our own being, fade away unasked.

I mention all this here because I did not do the standard sort of family history.  I included the contexts of place and the times.  So there may be some common ground of interest, particularly in what turns out to be a history of the first half of the 20th century that surrounds one family.  

So if you are interested, here it is: the blog I created to tell A Severini Saga, which I hope will be extended by information and memories from other members of my family, particular for the years after 1960.  (If for some reason the link doesn't work, the blog address is: severinisaga.blogspot.com.)

The Peace of Wild Things

The Peace of Wild Things

 When despair for the world grows in me

 and I wake in the night at the least sound

 in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

 I go and lie down where the wood drake

 rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

 I come into the peace of wild things

 who do not tax their lives with forethought

 of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

 And I feel above me the day-blind stars

 waiting with their light. For a time 

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. 

--Wendell Berry

Margaret found this one.  Wendell Berry is an activist, an advocate of rural life and sustainable agriculture, and a theorist as well as a poet and novelist.  

Soul of the Future: Culture of Hope (part 2)

 "To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates."

                                 Shelley

 The often lovely, blooming months from June through August 2021 were in other major respects the summer from hell—that is, the summer from the future.

 An intense heat dome clamped down on a huge chunk of the normally cool Pacific Northwest, from Oregon to British Columbia and edging into Alaska.  Portland broke its all time heat record three times in a week, topping out at 116F—hotter than the hottest day ever measured in Houston or Atlanta. Roads collapsed, trolley rails melted. Other places in Oregon and Canada were hotter than the hottest known day in Las Vegas, in the Mohave Desert.  A British Columbia town had the hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada—as hot as Death Valley.  

 In Alaska, glaciers were breaking apart so fast and violently that they were creating ice quakes as powerful as small earthquakes.  Across the region, hundreds of people died from the heat.  The heat did not end on the shore: an untold quantity of sea life perished.

 Some estimated that it was a once in several centuries phenomenon: heat that hadn’t been seen since perhaps before Europeans knew the place existed.  Another estimate put it at about 5,000 years—half the history of human civilization.  Speaking of this event’s obvious relationship to the larger crisis, climate scientist Peter Kalmus observed, “I feel like the heat dome event in the Pacific Northwest moved up my sense of where we are by about a decade or even more.”

 Also this summer a heat wave in the Middle East included temperatures in five countries that were higher than those in the Pacific Northwest event. There was historic heat in Moscow and Australia.  A heat wave across the Mediterranean included the highest daily temperature ever recorded in Europe. It was reported in July that one day’s worth of melting Greenland ice could cover the state of Florida in two inches of water. On Greenland’s highest peak that only ever saw snow, it rained.

 Globally, on land and sea, July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded in 142 years of measurement, and significantly hotter than the 20^th century average.

 Ecologist Simon Lewis was among those to warn that literally unlivable temperatures that have at times already been measured in Pakistan, the Persian Gulf and even, momentarily, in Chicago, will occur over larger areas and in new locations, and last longer, in coming decades.  

 

The 2021 summer heat led to titanic fires in California and 11 other western states, as well as in Siberia, Greece and Italy. Many of these fires are so huge and hot that they create their own fiery tornadoes, their own thunder and lightning, as they burn through forests and fields, farms and towns, for months. Some are burning still, not so far away, as I write this in October.

 The summer heat also deepened ongoing droughts around the world.  In Colorado, the largest reservoir in the US declared the most severe water shortage in its 90 year existence.  In California, some rivers dried before they reached the sea, and major species of salmon face extinction.

 Historically heavy rains and floods shocked Germany and Belguim, China and India, as well as London and several cities in the U.S. in July.  At the end of August, on the anniversary of the devastating hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans, the even stronger hurricane Ida became only the third category 4 in history to make landfall in Louisiana: one in 1856, and one last year.  Even after weakening it carried heavy rains on an unusual inland path, causing flash flooding in places like Pittsburgh before flooding New York City subways and killing families in their basement apartments.  FEMA’s director noted that recent hurricanes have formed faster, become larger and more destructive.

 This hurricane—not likely to be the last of the season—further demonstrated the deadpan truth that began a report in the New York Times in July by Somini Sengupta: “The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it.”

 The summer brought additional news of forests being slaughtered in the Amazon and Indonesia at record or near-record rates, of a crash in the global population of insects (up to 75%) upon which bigger animals and fish depend, of growing dead zones in the oceans, and of scientists worried that the North Atlantic ocean current and the Gulf Stream have slowed down—the doomsday scenario of The Day After Tomorrow.

 In the midst of this, portions of the sixth assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were leaked and then issued—perhaps the last such report, one scientist observed, that might make any difference, because if the world doesn’t act on this one, there may not be time to prevent the worst in the farther future. 

 For as this summer shows, the future is already happening.  Agence France-Presse summarized the report’s findings: “Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions...Species extinction, more widespread disease, unlivable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas—these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30.”

 “The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21 century unfolds. But dangerous thresholds are closer than once thought, and dire consequences stemming from decades of unbridled carbon pollution are unavoidable in the short term.”

 According to the IPCC report, “we need transformational change operating on processes and behaviors at all levels.” To put it another way, 14,000 scientists from 151 countries signed off on a study that predicted “untold suffering” for humanity if it does not successfully address the climate emergency.

 But at least in the United States, thanks to ego-driven partisan politics, and the heavy influence of gigantic fossil fuel corporations, prospects for any substantial immediate action seemed dim.  Meanwhile, the public response remains largely divided between benumbed desperation and angry, self-righteous denial.  The denial is not surprising, as the damage becomes obvious.  It’s very hard to admit that this society has contributed mightily to ongoing self-destruction that could make the atom bomb look like less than a firecracker.

 The future, almost by definition, is always uncertain. But the dominant context of human life in the next decades is becoming painfully obvious.  And what happens in those decades looks like it will determine whether human civilization has more of a future.

 So where are the grounds for hope?  From a philosophical or conceptual point of view, hope presupposes a situation that has something wrong with it.  Otherwise there would be no need to hope for a better future. 

 Hope becomes an issue, and tends to arise, when things are very bad.  Before he became President of his country, Vaclev Havel was a playwright and activist in  communist Czechoslovakia who was jailed for expressing his dissent.  He championed a particular view of hope.

  “...the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison),” he wrote in Disturbing the Peace, “ I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.  Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.  Hope is not prognostication.  It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.” 

 There are those (such as the British author John Gray) who see this current self-destruction as inevitable, because of the imperatives of the “selfish gene” driving  evolution. But the orientation represented by Havel  may be at least partly based on a rejection of this rigid and mechanistic view.

 "To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic,” writes American historian and activist Howard Zinn, in the concluding paragraphs of his 1994 book, You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train.  “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,” Zinn continues.  “If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.  If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”

 “ And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future.  The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

For Zinn and for others, to hope is to act.  Hope as an emotion is insufficient.  It may even be unnecessary.  What makes hope is action.  Hope is enacted.  Hope for the future is not  primarily how you feel or don’t feel: hope is what you do.

 Those of us winding up our lives may continue to contribute to that future.  There’s a lot of bullshit out there characterizing and mostly maligning the Baby Boom generation, and these projections and over-generalizations verge on slander.  The activist element of the huge boomer generation was always a minority, but those that remain may still direct their resources to the future.  Activists Bill McKibben and Akaya Windwood recently published a piece in the Los Angeles Times calling upon progressive boomers to once again step up, perhaps through the organization they co-founded called Third Act.  “But older people too can be catalysts for deep change...If enough of the 70 million of us who passed the six-decade mark join it, then we’ve got a chance.  We’ve done it before.” 

But it is the young who have the greatest stake in the future because they will live it, as will their children. So it is crucial that they realize that hope is created by the choices they make.

 A recent article in the Guardian is headlined: “No point in anything else’: Gen Z members flock to climate careers.”  “ Survey after survey shows young people are not just incorporating new climate-conscious behaviors into their day-to-day lives—they’re in it for the long haul.  College administrators say surging numbers of students are pursuing environmental-related degrees and careers that were once considered irresponsible, romantic flights of fancy compared to more ‘stable’ paths like business, medicine, or law.”

 But environmental careers are just part of enacting hope.  There are choices within choices: within medicine, public health and treatments for climate-related ills; within law, environmental law is very important, as global impetus grows for giving legal standing to the environment and the future itself.

 Though business is more likely to be a self-deceptive choice, Kim Stanley Robinson has argued for the necessity of changing the global financial structure in order to address the immense scope and variety of the climate emergency.

 There are choices within the sciences, where research remains a source of hope. The arts need to free themselves from consumerism and apply themselves to reality on all levels. And effectively expressing what needs to be done really, really needs to be done.

 This commitment to hope in action begins basically with a rejection, stated or not, of predominant values: making and spending money as the object and activity and priority of life.  There is no financial stability in a world that is cooking itself. 

  Without becoming unrealistically one-sided, it may mean rejecting the very idea of career, replacing it with vocation—the commitment to use personal talents to be of use, to contribute. 

 As President Obama was leaving the presidency, he spoke to his last group of White House interns. He advised them to get beyond career goals, because ultimately the opportunities are often a matter of luck, of happenstance.  He told them instead to emphasize not what they wanted to be, but what they wanted to do.

  “Be kind, be useful, be fearless,” he told them. I think I would change “fearless” to “brave.”  But otherwise, I can’t think of a better formula for hope for the future. We can live with the future in mind, but we live only our own lifetime.  We can only decide how to live.

That's also why it's important to note that President Obama started out his advice with "Be kind."  Hope's reality in the world is what we do, but also what we are.  How we live is partly action--what do we choose, among the choices we have?  But it is also how we are, to ourselves and others.

A few years ago I was talking about the prospects for the future in the context of the climate emergency with some high-powered tech industry people in their 20s and 30s.  One of them saw it as a race--can the climate future be addressed effectively before it is too late to make enough of a difference?  It is a race--and the truth of the near future is that it will remain a race for decades while no one knows whether it is being won or lost.  There is too much of a time lag between cause and effect. So for the foreseeable future, the reality is the race, and the race is the reality.  

 For whatever the future holds, at least for the next several decades, people are going to live in it.  That future will be their present.  In some respects, maybe many respects, life may be harder.  But it could also be more exciting, more enlivening.   

That’s also where courage comes in: facing the apparent hopelessness, and facing down those who insist on giving up, on living without integrity and love for each other, for the future and the life of the planet.  “”Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present,” wrote Ursula Le Guin, “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.”

I've been promising to end this series, which I will do with the next post, plus an appendix/bibliography.

Soul of the Future: Culture of Hope (Part 1): Science as Salvation

“In the act of searching out the future, Home sapiens crosses the frontiers of the unknown and is transformed from the man of action, who responds in the moment, to the man of thought, who takes account of the consequences of his actions.”

 Fred Polak

The Image of the Future

  In stories about fatal threats to the future—especially movies, at least before the superhero epics—the future is most often saved not by military force or dithering politicians but by science. (Though prominent scientists often laugh at the lone scientist who predicts the danger or offers the solution.)

 So can science save the real future, particularly against the ruinous threats to civilization and planetary life as we know it, namely the climate emergency and mass extinction? 

Some recent books—including fictions—suggest that it might.  In at least three novels, Kim Stanley Robinson suggests various technologies that can be applied to specific elements of the climate crisis, most recently including a formerly feared favorite of “geo-engineering” technological fixes, the artificial cooling of the atmosphere by injecting particles to mimic the effects of the dust layer created by a giant volcano.  (It’s a technique that one of those earlier novels seemed to dismiss as causing devastating unintended consequences.)

 But KSR and others do not claim that technological fixes alone can possibly prevent global heating or its consequences far into the future. Such efforts could possibly help, temporarily, and may be necessary, but there must also be fundamental economic, political and cultural change, because otherwise the job won’t get done.  It’s just too big, and complicated.

 Many people automatically turn toward science and technology for last-minute solutions.  Many of the measures to address the climate emergency proposed so far involve technologies, especially clean energy systems, but also carbon capture and various other schemes.  Other proposals include or assume the participation of science, such as robust public health systems and medical treatment for heat-related conditions.

 But at least in the United States there does not appear to be a consensus, or even the extent of agreement that existed within western societies a generation or two ago, that science is the answer, or even that science has proved there is a question.

  Globally but especially in America, attitudes towards science are dangerously stratified.  One side rejects the scientific consensus that identifies the climate emergency, accusing the scientific establishment of systematic lying for institutional and personal gain, for a political agenda, and for even more sinister motives.  On climate as well as the Covid-19 global pandemic, alternative explanations and conspiracies are vociferously asserted.  But it all is clearly part of a larger, deeply adversarial group position that is most often expressed as political.

 This position is identified as anti-science, and so the other side digs in to defend “science” against all criticism.  “Trust the science” has become an adversarial mantra and motto.

 But not all science—or the products of science-- can be trusted, as history shows. Yet those not wishing to find themselves allied with creationists and anti-vaxxers cannot criticize “the science” even when conclusions, procedures or even institutions warrant such criticism, or at least scrutiny.

 Does “science” even exist as much more than a polite fiction?  There is a scientific method, there are ideals of how science should be conducted, and there are scientists and institutions that sponsor, conduct and regulate the work of scientists.  But as shorthand, “science” can be deceptive and unproductive.

 Indeed there are images of “science” in the public mind, with a complex of emotions attached, from awe and admiration to suspicion and fear.  Often these two contrary reactions are held simultaneously in some proportion or other, as expressed in science fiction movies of the 1950s discussed earlier in this series.  Science unlocked the unearthly power of the atom, and science was often called upon to protect humanity from its monstrous consequences.  In this way, science takes on the ambiguous and mysterious power of gods.

 The nature of science is even obscured by the heroic stories that illustrate its ideals. We have this image of the scientific thinker dreaming up theories or following their curiosity in lab experiments, and coming up with an immense general discovery. Then after it is finally if tentatively accepted, others busy themselves applying this discovery to practical ends—to processes and products that have an important and usually lucrative function in the society of the day.

 Sometimes this is more or less true.  But the story obscures a larger point: much if not most science, even the most theoretical, is supported and undertaken with some practical end in mind.  Science is not about discovering how the universe works; it is about discovering how the universe works in order to achieve human ends.  Science is about learning things primarily in order to do things.

 These ends historically have mostly been military advantage or economic gain, though ultimately, it’s been both together.  The laws of physics were investigated on the payroll of rulers interested in the effectiveness of weapons: in how to make their archers more efficient, or where to place their guns or deploy their forces, or build better defenses. Other discoveries were paid for so that one seafaring nation could gain an advantage in global trade by navigating better, or building faster and bigger ships.  And so on.

 The industrial revolution saw an immense increase in the number of people employed in science and engineering, because industry needed them—to mine ores better, refine them better, to build better machines and manufacturing processes.  English industry encouraged the government to expand educational opportunities (including the new university that H.G. Wells attended) and extend them to the lower classes to find the scientific diamonds in the rough, and to provide a scientifically literate layer of technicians.  It wasn’t until then that the word “scientist” even existed, and it was coined to describe these technicians.  Since then, the connection between science and consumer products has not only been obvious--it's proudly shouted in their advertising.

 The point is that science was always oriented towards what it could enable people to do, and that was usually to expand economic activity through machinery and processes, while fixing people up (always the rich at first) when they broke.  This was the triumph of science, and one of its weaknesses, for knowledge that didn’t fit into the science of making things go just got ignored.

 Despite the imagery, science was practical. Chemistry was clearly practical. There was some patience for science that wasn’t obviously going to pay off right away, but might eventually pay off big.  Geology was a bit that way, though its relationship to mining was there from the beginning of it as a science.  Biology was more that way perhaps. The scientific knowledge that could improve weather forecasting had obvious benefits, especially to seafaring nations, for instance.  But there was leeway, because highly useful knowledge sometimes came from unlikely inquiries.

 So some scientists—not many, not particularly well funded, and not generally listened to-- managed to study the Earth’s atmosphere and how chemicals released into the air could affect it.  Eventually they would be among the first to give science a new practical function: to save civilization from destroying itself and the stability of the living Earth. 

 Unfortunately, this crossed purposes with most science: the expansion of human manipulation of the environment, and the unfettered exploitation of the Earth’s resources.  That's primarily what they were paid to do, and by extension, paid to think about.  It was the way they were institutionally biased to look at the world. 

 Not surprisingly, scientific findings that don’t support the interests of those who pay the scientists did often get suppressed, ignored or changed.  Some scientists skewed findings to support their employers’ interests.

 This does not negate all scientific findings. The main scientific findings on climate are so thoroughly proven in so many ways by so many scientists over so many years that they are as solid as science gets.  But it’s all more complicated than “believe the science.” 

 Knowledge or observations got ignored also because, in order to make things go, even in very complex machines and processes, the science had to be pretty simple.  Of course, starting from scratch, the progress was prodigious.  Still, for most of human history scientists learned how to do very basic stuff, including how to treat the ailments of the body that responded to gross mechanical interventions.  

 This kind of science is pretty straightforward on how to address the climate emergency.  Attack the causes of global warming by stopping greenhouse gases from polluting the atmosphere.  Build non-greenhouse gases polluting systems to meet energy requirements. Address the ongoing effects of global heating and the climate emergency. 

 There are known technologies and systems to do all of this, though new technologies can make these efforts more widespread and efficient.  Some of these technologies may employ biological and chemical as well as grossly mechanical means.  Some may be ingenuous and subtle.  They may be large projects on massive scales, or very many small projects.

 But there are now other components to science just beginning to become useful.  The 20^th century brought us relativity, quantum physics and chaos theory. Part of what makes them different is that they are all more or less incomprehensible, even to experts, but scientists have figured out some uses based on them, because the math works. Nobody really understands quantum physics, but quantum mechanics is usefully worked out, and today’s computers would be impossible without it.  There is the hope of new science as well as new technologies.

 Involved in practically all efforts to address the climate emergency is the relatively new and rapidly evolving science of ecology, and related insights into systems behavior and complexity.  While not itself a science, the concern for the future that is wedded with evolutionary and ecological insights is an essential underpinning, as well as ancient wisdom that was a mixture of insight and observation, such as the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee: “In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation to come.”

 Arguably, ecological insights have already changed science, from concentrating on doing things to include examining the possible consequences of doing those things.

  But it is society that must engage these efforts to address the climate emergency, which involve politics and economics, and ultimately culture.  So far, movement towards action has not been fast enough or large enough to prevent the first devastation of the climate emergency, which will likely grow and cascade for some decades to come. 

Some of those who don’t believe humanity will meet this challenge—and there are many—suggest only a fundamental change in humanity itself will make the difference.  Such a possibility has been the theme of science fiction.  For example, a sudden evolutionary change, a genetic mutation either created by aliens or naturally, appears in the work of Arthur C. Clarke, Greg Bear and Doris Lessing, among others.

 Still other stories involve deliberate genetic manipulation, from major enhancements or changes to more subtle effects on thinking and behavior, as in everfree, the concluding novel of Nick Sagan’s apocalyptic/utopian trilogy. Most recently, such changes are the result of neurofeedback therapy in Richard Powers’ near-future novel Bewilderment.

 Among others who believe humanity is not yet capable of dealing with environmental crises and their cascading global effects, there are those who turn to science and technology for salvation according to their particular hopes and fears.  Some see humans transplanting to other planets as the only hope for the future.  Some see a humanity weakened by crisis becoming subsumed by the artificial intelligence beings it has created. And some hold both views.

 Science fiction stories and other forms of imagining alternative futures have presented intriguing possibilities and fostered many insights into the present and the past as well as the future, but care must be taken that they are not seized upon as literal predictions or even possibilities.  

There’s a rich tradition of stories about robots and artificial intelligence, as well as humans living on other planets.  But although they represent fruitful story premises, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson argues that neither is a real possibility for our future. In his view, science doesn’t support the likelihood of artificial intelligence beings surpassing humans in the foreseeable future, though science does suggest that humans cannot survive for long on other planets without at least periodic contact with the biology of the Earth.  “There is no Planet B.”

 The climate crisis has been shaping up for some time to be the ultimate challenge of humanity’s ability to take the next evolutionary step in consciousness by marshaling forces to ascertain and confront a crisis of an unprecedented kind not yet obviously occurring in front of our eyes.  The evidence now in front of our eyes is that it hasn’t met this challenge, and if our civilization hasn’t run out of time already, it probably will soon.

 We may yet turn more urgently to science for our salvation, and it may help, but it alone won’t save the future.  It is a tool, and still a fairly blunt one.  It allows us to do some things well.  But even when it works as well and as ethically as it ideally can, it is still too simple-minded to match reality.  We need other resources, even to know how to use science well.  We need to be better people, perhaps starting with greater humility. 

I had some correspondence with Nick Sagan after he’d published everfree.  I questioned whether genetic intervention was necessary for people to change.  He said he’d had the same discussion with his father, Carl Sagan.  Nick’s view of human nature was that humans  couldn’t (or wouldn't) change on their own, but his father argued they could. 

 Many social visionaries have called for or predicted a relatively sudden change of consciousness, or what Star Trek’s Captain Picard called an “evolved sensibility,” without sudden biological change or the intervention of genetic or other technologies.  It’s been called the Great Turn or the Great Turning and so on. 

 Is it possible?  Those of us who remember the omnipresent ashtrays of the 1950s know that deeply entrenched cultural phenomena can change relatively quickly.  The scale of necessary change is indeed daunting, but as Ursula K. Le Guin suggested, “ We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.”  

There is change in the world now—in awareness, political will, as well as in science and technologies—though it all does not seem to be enough. Chaos theory however suggests that small changes can eventually induce large ones, beyond our ability to predict.  The principle is simple enough, when we consider that seed money in the present can turn out to have vast consequences for the world of the future.  But we must return to one of our basic definitions of the future: it is what hasn’t happened yet.

 Yet there are aspects of the future we can be pretty sure of.  And while many possibilities exist, hope in the future doesn’t depend on any of them.  It does not even depend on believing in any of them. More on that  in the next—and last—post in this series.

Into October

Into October 

 These must be the colors of returning

 the leaves darkened now but staying on

 into the bronzed morning among the seed heads

 and the dry stems and the umbers of October 

the secret season that appears on its own

 a recognition without a sound

 long after the day when I stood in its light

 on the parched barrens beside a spring

 all but hidden in a tangle of eglantine

 and picked the bright berries made of that summer

 --W.S. Merwin

Anything To Avoid Reading The News