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For me, writing as an art form is very much analogous to sculpture. Generally speaking, there are two main (and not mutually exclusive) methods employed when “sculpting” a written piece: build-up and chip-away. During build-up, I begin with a general idea and then, to the degree possible, I let the structure evolve organically as words and sentences are added (although I do a fair amount of mid-sentence editing along the way). During chip-away, I take what I have already written and then bend it, balance it, shape it into a clearer, crisper form—here the added texture and fine detail change what I have written from a blankly stated idea to a meaningful expression: a reflection of a small part of my mental and emotional topography as it relates to the subject at hand. Word choice is a major focus during the chip-away phase, but crafting the right syntax is equally—if not more—important. Syntax can add subtle shades of meaning, giving a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole section a flavor that mere words cannot carry.

I enjoy both parts of the process, but the chip-away phase leads to the most satisfying experience of “flow.”

What I lack is a more general top-down organizational schematic that could somehow serve to regulate and coordinate the direction of these two phases of the process. This is intentional on my part: having such top-down control interferes with the creative impulse. But because of this, I will occasionally write myself into a corner where I am forced to make a painful choice. In terms of the sculpture metaphor, imagine that you have sculpted a highly textured and most beautifully detailed wing, where each feather is perfectly placed and folds seamlessly in with its neighbor, but then you discover that the overall form is not that of a bird after all, and that from the beginning you have really been sculpting a horse. At this point it becomes very tempting to keep the wing and change directions completely, to abandon the terrestrial horse you started with and go with a Pegasus instead. I have found that the best solution in these cases is to put the wing in a box to be taken out sometime in the future when I know that I have a more avian goal.

Although, truth be known, it can sometimes be very hard to let go, and I have amassed a sizeable collection of hideous and unpublishable chimeras over the years.

At one point my wife and I had nine rabbits living in our garage. They were a large silver-grey variety called “Champagne D’Argent.” We were, ostensibly, raising them for their meat, but we kept putting off the killing and eating them part of the process. It eventually became apparent that neither of us had the nerve to don the executioner’s mask, and so they lived in cages in our garage in a state of captive limbo for over two years. But we were good jailors (if you will pardon the oxymoron). We kept them comfortably fed and watered, we gave them interesting things to play with, and on sunny weekends we let them exercise in the yard inside a four-by-eight foot portable rabbit “playpen” that I built that had easily detachable sides made of wooden slats and wire mesh.

A planned winter trip to the west coast for several weeks gave us the incentive we needed to get rid of them. Continue reading “The last rabbit”

In an upcoming BBC documentary called Expedition New Earth, Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist, offers the dire prediction that humanity has less than 1000 years left on the planet, and we need to have functional space colonies within the next 100 years in order to avoid extinction as a species.

The Earth is very likely to be uninhabitable in the next 1000 years, according to Hawking. Climate change, pollution, pandemic disease, nuclear war, asteroid collision, each of these threats contribute their own individual level of risk, but their cumulative threat makes our extinction a “near certainty.” Unless we become a multi-planetary species, that is. By spreading the human seed to other planets, we can help ensure the continued existence of our species even after the Earth has become an uninhabitable cesspool, a toxic viral wasteland, or a lifeless rock. But we need to get cracking soon!

There are so many things wrong with this thought-form that I literally don’t know where to begin.

Let me start with asking “Who the fuck is Stephen Hawking?” Seriously, he’s a mathematician, not an expert in space colonization—nor a psychic, for that matter. OK, granted he is a really smart guy who has thought about this stuff a lot; and I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here and take his prognostications at face value. But perhaps we should take a closer look at some of the orthodoxies and assumptions that his ideas rest upon.

At the most basic level, space colonization is just a modern expression of the nineteenth century US expansionist doctrine of manifest destiny. There is a powerful sense of inevitability being expressed here, as if civilization is an unstoppable natural phenomenon that is built into our species’ design, rather than a historical artifact. Let’s be clear, Western civilization emerged from historical circumstance, not from our DNA. This sense of inevitability, however, is not entirely without merit. Western civilization is a very finely tuned colonizing machine. But it is a machine without an off switch, and there is very little on Earth left to colonize. So it appears that we have only two options: we can let it run idle until its land-devouring gears eventually grind themselves up from the inside, or we can unleash it on extraterrestrial targets.

A more subtle feature of the space-invader thought-form is that it is constructed around a conceptual abstraction. There really is no “humanity” that must be preserved. There is no humanity, there are only humans. And the idea of a “human species” is a fuzzy and somewhat arbitrary categorical distinction—“species” is a useful fiction. The human animal, as a biological entity, is continuous with all other living entities. And we are, all of us, of the Earth. This Earth.

Philosophical and taxonomic considerations aside, and on a more practical level, if we have the technological savvy to colonize other planets, why don’t we fix things here? Seriously, we already have all of the tools and knowledge that we need to ameliorate—perhaps even prevent—many of the risks Hawking cites. If we are smart enough to colonize Mars, then surely we are smart enough to reverse the industrial accumulation of atmospheric carbon on Earth; surely we are smart enough to reduce the human population to something below carrying capacity (over time and without killing a single person now alive). And, frankly, the population problem is the only real problem. It is the source of all of our other major problems. Climate change would never have occurred if the global human population remained in the millions; pandemic disease emerges with population density; and the risk of war is an inverse function of resource availability.

This relates to another feature of the space-invader thought-form, one that for some reason bothers me more than the others. Take a close look at what civilization has done to this planet, take a close look at the horrors it has brought to other people and other creatures, and take a close look at the massive despoilment of the biosphere and of the Earth’s natural geologic features. Take a close look, and then ask yourself “Why would we wish the horrors of civilization upon another world?” Why would anyone want to export death and despoilment? If there are other intelligent, technologically “advanced” societies out there, it is surely in their best interests to obliterate us the moment we stick our nose off-planet, just as a matter of their own self-preservation.

And, finally, at the very most fundamental level lurks an unquestionable, yet, ultimately unsupportable, presumption: that the human species needs to continue into the future. Why? Why does it matter whether the distant future is inhabited by our progeny? It makes no difference to anyone alive at this moment if every human on the planet disappears two hundred years from now. Our lives will be as rich and full and complete (or not) regardless of the future of the species (or lack thereof).

It turns out that psychology has a pretty good explanation for the “humans must persevere” orthodoxy, something called terror management theory, for those interested in further pursuing this particular belief’s psychological underpinnings.

I recently listened to an interview about “autonomous technology.” The main message was that increasing automation means that more and more people are losing their jobs to robots.  And apparently it’s not just assembly line factory jobs that are at risk. White collar jobs are being absorbed at a rapid pace as well.  We don’t need to worry so much about all those jobs being shipped overseas; the real threat is the microchip.

The technology part of the discussion went into all of the predictable places: “It’s part of an inevitable and unstoppable process.”“Progress is irreversible.” “We can’t turn back the clock.” Etc.

Then the conversation took a rather unexpected philosophical turn, which began with the idea of providing a universal government wage so that the consumer economy could continue to function. We could easily provide a living salary to all persons in the country right now, and at a microscopic fraction of the defense budget. But the problem with providing a universal wage in lieu of actual employment is that people derive meaning from being gainfully employed, and without a job their lives would become meaningless.  And what’s even worse, life without meaningful employment brings into question the true purpose of industrial civilization—and the whole meaning of humanity! What is at risk here is nothing less than a culture-wide slide into crippling nihilism.

So, let me see if I have this right. We need jobs, even mindless factory jobs, in order for our lives to have meaning. And without the meaning we derive from wage-slave employment, we would all suddenly realize that the whole thing—industrial corporate consumer civilization—has no human purpose?

Interesting.

The Tsimane people live in the Bolivian jungle and eat a diet of monkey, piranhas, peccary, wild harvested nuts and fruit, and plantain, rice, and corn from small gardens. Although they are plagued by a variety of jungle diseases and parasitic worms, their average age of death is around 70, and they currently hold the record for the lowest incidence of cardiovascular disease of any group of people on the planet.

Recently some medical researchers convinced about 700 of these folks to take a two day trip to a clinic downriver and undergo high-tech x-ray scans of their coronary arteries, where they were found to have an average “arterial age” almost 30 years younger than the typical denizens of Western civilization.

Although the researchers can’t determine which part of the Tsimane lifestyle is responsible for their heart health, diet, exercise, the general lack of stress, some other variable, or some combination, cardiologist and author, Randall Thomson, was quoted in the Washington Post as saying “Obviously the Tsimane are achieving something that we are not.”

Stop. Heart health is an achievement? Let’s think about that for just a moment.

Doesn’t this have things backwards? The Tsimane are not trying to be healthy. They are just doing what they do, what they have always done: living their lives in a manner similar to that of their ancestors and their ancestors before them. They aren’t worried about their cholesterol. They don’t count their carbs. They don’t have a gym membership or a Fitbit recording their daily steps. Their health is not something that is achieved. It is a side effect of living a traditional lifestyle.

Wait, that’s not quite right, is it? I’m so metabolized into the civilized frame that I fell for it once again myself. Health is not a side effect of anything. It’s lack of health that is the side effect.

The cardiologist’s simple statement provides a window into the warped, carnival mirror perspective that civilization imposes on everything it comes in contact with. There are two main distortions on display in this particular story. The first is technological: that everything can ultimately be reduced to a mechanical system. Cardiovascular health can be “achieved” by assembling the right combination of behaviors. Second, that civilization is the default state for humans. The authors were a little too quick to emphasize that life is not all peaches and cream for these folks. Living in the jungle is hard work and fraught with danger and gross parasites. We can’t have anyone getting any ideas about going Tarzan here. The only thing we want from the Tsimane is to identify the specific causal factors involved in their superior heart health so that we can incorporate those things—and only those things, and only if they aren’t too onerous—into our (incomparably superior) civilized lifestyles.

The reality is the Tsimane haven’t achieved anything. They are healthy because they are living an authentic human lifestyle. It is corporate consumer industrial civilization that has done the achieving, and heart disease is only one among many of civilization’s noteworthy achievements.

I’m reading Jensen’s Dreams.  Many of his claims border on hyperbole, some of his literary gimmicks seem contrived, and his stream of consciousness writing style is a bit too self-absorbed to be truly enjoyable. But his books are laced with kernels of insight, and some of his ideas are subtle and unexpected. For example, he suggests that it is wrong to equate the mass extinction event occurring now with the half dozen or so that have occurred in the distant past. Although that by itself is neither subtle, nor, given his particular radical environmentalist posture, unexpected, he takes it one step further and suggests that, not only is the equivalency between current and previous mass extinction events a false one, it is also potentially dangerous.

It is true that the present mass extinction event it is on track to exceed in size and scope the event that heralded the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And it may eventually eclipse the great Permian extinction which wiped out over two-thirds of the land animals and almost all marine life.

But, suggests Jensen, unlike the mass extinctions of the past, there is nothing natural about what is happening now. What is happening now is a direct result of global industrial civilization. And global industrial civilization is not a natural event. To call industrial civilization an extinction event, and to position it relative to the mass extinctions of the past, is a form of validation. To think of what industrial civilization is doing, destroying the biosphere in a calculated and intentional way, as just another example of what has happened before, creates a false sense of inevitability.

Jensen’s “dangerous line of thinking” concerns also apply to the recent addition of the Anthropocene to the list of geologic time periods. Let’s be clear about this: industrial civilization is not just another stage in the geological progression of the planet. It is not an inevitable side effect of human evolution. It is a historically contingent cultural artifact that can be eliminated permanently at any point in time without violating a single physical law or biological principle.

I notice this frequently, how each new event feels not entirely new, how the emerging present carries a familiar flavor, an oblique nostalgia, the covert recurrence of a prior moment from both yesterday and decades ago—neither memory nor déjà vu but something in between. But the awareness of this familiarity is fleeting. Western civilization’s insistence that time is linear, consumerist society’s obsession with newness, and the relentless intrusion of corporate-crafted distraction prevent it from sinking in, from reaching the maturity of full conscious expression. And so the present moment passes with both the source and the nature of its not-quite novelty left unanalyzed. Continue reading “Progress is a virus”

Why the “Posted” on no trespassing signs? Why tell me, on a sign saying no trespassing, that a sign was posted (this very one you are reading now, as a matter of fact) that trespassing (which is illegal by definition) is not allowed?

I can’t look at a no trespassing sign without thinking about the last few stanzas of the Woody Guthrie song “This land is your land.” Funny, we never made it to these stanzas in grade school when we sang this in class:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

 

 

The word andrapoda means, literally, “man-footed.” It was used to refer to a class of slaves in ancient Greece who were made to perform the kind of mindless hard labor that might otherwise be done by animals. They were usually war captives, and typically bound to each other with ropes or chains. As a description of our present circumstances, the term is something more than symbolic. We are, in point of fact, slaves to a system that has conquered—and is continually, moment by moment conquering—our humanity, binding us to each other in the service of purposes that are not our own, demanding our unquestioned compliance, and condemning us to a meaningless mechanical existence where we are little more than biological servomechanisms yoked to a mindless global machine. Modern chains are forged of a different substance, but the weight of ceaseless servitude is the same; we are modern-day andrapoda. Continue reading “Andrapoda”

Several months ago I ran into an entry in Futurity titled “For Early Humans, Life was no Picnic 1.8 Million Years Ago.” The article is about research that mapped out what the landscape of the Olduvai Gorge was like during the time two of our ancestral human relatives inhabited the region. The short lived (30-40 year life expectancy) and short statured (4.5 to 5.5 feet tall) creatures had extremely hard lives, we are told.

And how do we know this? How do we know their lives were extremely difficult? How do we know life was not, in fact, an actual perpetual picnic for these folks?

Because, despite the fact that food and water were plentiful and shade and shelter were abundant, they had to compete with so many carnivores for meat.

That’s it.

So—and ignoring the fact that as omnivores their access to food was orders of magnitude greater than any carnivore they were ostensibly in competition with—life was hard for Paranthropus and Homo habilis because they couldn’t simply grab some McDonalds on the way home or pick up a roast for Sunday dinner at the local grocery store.

It’s amazing anyone was able to survive long enough to reproduce. Their populations must have been microscopic and constantly teetering on the verge of extinction. It’s astounding that evolution had anything to work with at all! Seriously?

I mean, seriously.

It is vitally important that we understand that the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors (and contemporaries) were (and are) full of unimaginable hardship and suffering. Hobbes’ assertion that life outside the warm and protective embrace of civilization is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short has become a mantra.  The declaration that an uncivilized life is a life of toil and unimaginable hardship has been enshrined—literally, as an idol might be placed in a shrine and regularly showered with offerings and ritual expressions of worship.

It is vitally important that life outside of civilization is impossibly hard. It is vitally important that we understand how good we have it. It is vitally important that we know this right down to the very fibers of our modern civilized being because it is absolutely not true.