Facing our worst enemy

I'm nearly 62 years old and I am struck more and more by the idea of how absolutely brief life appears from this end of it. That is, when you are younger - especially under 30 - it seems like you will never grow old and everything is moving incredibly slowly. From here it is just the opposite. You were young only yesterday and whatever time is left you, it is much too little. Like flipping a telescope around and looking through the wrong end.

This different perspective of time leads to a more profound assessment of reality and what is happening to us as a country, a world, a species. For me, the great turning point in society is about 1830. Before then all the important things were the same. People communicated face-to-face, or very slowly over time and space with writing on paper. That had not changed in a fundamental way for 5,000 years. People transported themselves then at the speed of a horse - or their own feet. Never faster than about eight miles an hour and even that speed was maintained only for relatively short distances. That too, had not changed in a fundamental way for 5,000 years. And in that same 5,000 years it's hard to see any genuinely important advances in medicine. Medical treatment varied from locale to locale, and age to age, but the results were all roughly the same. Lots of children died before they became adults and adults died very easily from a wide variety of illnesses and what we would see today as simple injuries.

But in 1830 all that began to change and it has been changing rapidly ever since. Now I have close friends half a world away in different directions with whom I communicate regularly, sending words and pictures at virtually no cost. And the advances in medicine and travel are obvious, as well as thousands of other lesser things. When I give medicine a thought, I realize that had I been born in 1820 there's a very good chance I would have died in childhood and given the various things that have happened to me, I certainly would not have made it much past 30!

This is all obvious, yet I think it is overlooked and underestimated. 1830 was only yesterday. Stack up three 62-year-olds, one on top of the other, and you get to 1817! I have no trouble at seeing 62 years as an incredibly brief time, as I'm sure anyone who has lived that long or longer will agree. All we are talking about here is three such spans, one of which is our own life to date. That is very little time indeed. And yet look at how much has changed?

There is one more thing. We are amazingly adaptable. We accept these radical changes in our lifestyle and a few years after a change is introduced, such as the Internet, life without it is difficult to remember or imagine. We take it, and all changes, for granted. There's a little resistance at first, but pretty soon it is absorbed into our lifestyle and it is very difficult to imagine that life was ever any different. Certainly we can accept the differences in the abstract - but we quickly lose all feel for those difference - for how life was without . . . well, without whatever.

Bottom line? We don't appreciate how different things are. We don't appreciate all the subtle ways these changes are impacting our individual psyche and the collective psyche of society. Old institutions and values have new challenges - and yet certain basic challenges involving individual integrity and mortality remain the same. But those aside, we face new an unprecedented problems as we mix the age-old temptations of greed, jealousy and hatred with the modern environment of high technology, and communications capabilities that are as rapid and pervasive as they are subtle.

For me there is a growing sense of being overwhelmed by change - of being absolutely out of control. At the same time I can't shake the impression of a population spreading out of control as well - I see the human race as I see a mold in a petrie dish, spreading suddenly to cover the entire surface. All sorts of images jump to mind of overpopulation in nature - images that include lemmings rushing to the sea. But the strongest one is from an old computer game called "life" where populations would suddenly spread on the screen like a little spider web of cracks. Before you could blink the whole screen would be covered with lines linking to lines and somewhere out of sight you knew the expansion was still happening.

We are inside this adventure and it is very difficult to step outside it and get the big picture. like being trapped in that computer and seeing only the lines right in front of you. Yes we see ourselves as the dominant creature on earth and we think of ourselves as in control of our destiny, but we are far from it. We're just buying into our own press releases. We simply don't understand what is happening to us, let alone control what is happening.

We do totally insane things. When we are not starting wars we are destroying our environment. None of us would be so stupid as to destroy our homes - but we can't see beyond our own front doors - or refuse to do so. Thus we go on consuming non-replaceable oil reserves, spewing crud in the very air we breathe, and overheating the planet. We take great pride in our political boundaries, but all the real forces on the planet - economics, disease, hunger, environmental rot, racism, religious fanaticism, insect pests, ideas - these all laugh at the political boundaries. We have viewed our planet from space. We see there are no lines on it - nothing to denote states. Yet we don't learn.

So here we are - back where Pogo the cartoon Possum told us we were about 30 years ago. "We have met the enemy and he is us!" Can we defeat ourselves? Of course not. Can we rise above our petty behavior? Maybe. Does it matter? In any ultimate sense, how could it? But in the particular sense of you and I alive today, it matters. We can't know any ultimate answers, but we can sense an ultimate direction and we can move towards it.

Posted by Greg Stone at May 24, 2003 06:36 AM