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If there is one word that describes the conceptual landscape of the modern, digital, smart-everything lifestyle, it’s the word sophistication, a word commonly used to describe things that are intricate and complex, or people who are highly cultured and in possession of worldly wisdom and refinement.

Sophistication has another, somewhat older meaning, however, relating to sophistry, which involves the use of ingenuous or fallacious argumentation meant to deceive or mislead. Both meanings seem to apply to the ways that modern, digital, smart-everything people understand themselves.

Life has become increasingly complex and our daily interactions with technology have become increasingly finely calibrated. And our access to information is such that the most obscure details about the farthest reaches of the world are just a screen-tap away. But our knowledge is also littered throughout with misinformation and intentionally-crafted falsehoods that serve the interests of people and entities that do not have our best interests at heart—to the point that almost everything we think we know about ourselves is either flat-out wrong, or so distorted that it barely resembles the realities of our situation.

Quite often civilization is spoken of as if it is an evolved feature of human nature, something that emerged as a natural and perhaps inevitable consequence of our technical and social proclivities as a species. One problem with this way of thinking is that no other species does anything at all like civilization. Not even close. Civilization is evolutionarily without precedent.

Evolution occurs through the alteration of a species’ existing characteristics. As a result, there is an observable continuity in physical features and behavioral tendencies across species. But civilization has no obvious precursor. It is something more than just a series of adaptations and alterations to the lifestyles that preceded it. It involves a whole new way of doing things. Although civilization emerged and developed—evolved—over time, the timeframe from its earliest inklings to its full-blown presence is far too short to fit within a strictly Darwinian natural selection framework. And, despite the irresistible temptation to anthropomorphize, there is zero continuity between many of the principal features of human civilization and anything that our closest primate relatives do. 

Some (for example, Raymond Tallis[i]) claim that this fact, the fact that civilization is unique in the animal world, provides incontrovertible evidence that humans are special as a species, really something quite extraordinary. These folks are right about the singular uniqueness of civilization, but they are wrong in treating civilization as if it is a delimiting attribute of our species, a defining feature of “humanity.” To do so ignores the continued presence of the uncivilized, and implies that existing indigenous and aboriginal people are not entirely human in the way that the civilized are. Or they are not quite human yet; they are unenlightened or uninformed or uneducated in the ways of civilization—or worse: they are less-evolved, subhuman. A quick glance at European colonial history (or what is happening today in the Amazon) shows how this way of thinking plays out.  

The appearance, diffusion, and expansion of civilization is not a natural phenomenon in the way that, say, the emergence of spoken language is. Or the evolution of symbolic thought. Or even the appearance, diffusion, and expansion of tool manufacture or the use of fire. All of these things existed in full flower for hundreds of thousands of years before the first invasive spores of civilization fell upon the river valleys of Northern Africa and Western Asia.

At its base, civilization is a technological phenomenon. It is a result of applying a technological frame to the human social world. Prior to (and outside of) civilization, all human relationships involved the organic interactions of autonomous and irreducibly unique beings. Since civilization appeared, relationships among people have become more and more mechanical and systematic, more systematized. Intimate organic interrelations have been replaced by superficial transactional contacts and engineered connections among standardized servomechanisms. Or, if you prefer a more contemporary vocabulary: humans in civilization are reduced to redundant nodal points of interface in an ever-expanding informational network. Irreducible and multidimensional uniqueness has been replaced with category membership. We are “citizens” and “consumers” and “employees” and “administrators” and “investors” and any of a number of additional hollow abstractions depending on the context. And it is precisely this artificial social structuring, this forced technologizing of human relations, that places civilization outside of the realm of the natural.  

The story of the emergence and proliferation of civilization does not fit neatly as a chapter in the ancient and ongoing saga of the natural history of planet Earth. The consequences of civilization, however, do belong there, and several volumes worth: civilization as a colossal mass extinction event, civilization as the trigger for ruinous climate disruption, civilization as ecological holocaust. The impact of civilization has been like a world-shattering asteroid strike in slow motion. A mere ten thousand years of civilization has rewritten the text of future natural history for tens of millions of years to come.

But this is not the story that most civilized humans tell to their children.   

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[i] See, for example, his 2016 book: Aping Mankind

Reality can only express itself in first-person experience, from a single and unique point of view. All things require a point of view in order to be anything at all, and all points of view have a unique observing being at their center.

A momentary event observed by a woman stepping out of her luxury SUV can look quite different to a man sitting on the curb on the other side of the street and holding a hand-drawn cardboard sign that pleads for a meager contribution, and different still to the raggedy dog lying on the sidewalk next to him—to the point of whether what is observed by any of them counts as an event at all, and if it is an event, where its boundaries lie. 

At any given moment, there are an unimaginable number of living beings experiencing the world, each from a unique one-of-a-kind perspective. And none of these perspectives have any special claim on the reality of that moment. Or, conversely, all of these perspectives have a special claim, which comes to the same thing.

To understand the world for what it actually is in itself, you would need somehow to stitch all of these unique, individual, momentary perspectives together into a single inclusive tapestry, a single viewpoint. And even this composite viewpoint would not yield a comprehensive weave: its very nature as a point of view means that something is being left out.

There is a deep and abiding humility that goes along with this, with awareness that what is true for you is only true for you, and, even then, it is only true for you now, for the moment. There is humility in knowing that your transient perspective is not part of some universal point of view, and that a grasshopper’s experience is as legitimate as your own.   

I have never met an extraterrestrial. Neither have you or anyone you know (alien abduction folklore notwithstanding).

This is a somewhat surprising thing given that as planets go the Earth is really nothing special or unique. In fact, there appears to be a substantial number of very similar planets in our galaxy alone—one estimate puts the number at around 6 billion. Considering that life materialized very soon after the Earth formed, it seems highly likely that many if not most of these Earth-like planets are also populated with living creatures, and that several of those are inhabited by intelligent beings capable of space exploration. So, where are they? if the galaxy is teaming with intelligent life, then how is it that you and I know only Earthlings?

That question forms the substance of what has been called the Fermi paradox.

There are several potential rejoinders to this paradox. Until recently, the easiest solution was to claim that the Earth is unique in the universe, and that life is an extremely unlikely thing to happen anywhere. Both science and simple logic suggest otherwise, however, and the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

A slight variation on the uniqueness explanation is to suggest that perhaps the universe is infused with life, but intelligence like ours is a rarity. This explanation, however, smacks of hubris, reinforcing common but grossly misguided opinions about human superiority and implying that humans serve as some kind of benchmark for what counts as intelligence.

A humbler and frankly more interesting possibility is that intelligent life—whatever the benchmark—is a fairly common occurrence, but there is only a narrow window of time in a planet’s lifespan in which technologically-advanced beings appear on the scene. The Earth was crawling with life for almost 4 billion years before humans came along, and humans themselves have been around for a couple million years, but it’s only in the last hundred years or so that we have been engaged in technological activities detectable by someone outside our solar system. So, even if intelligent life is common throughout the universe, it may be statistically unlikely for two or more technologically-advanced interstellar species to be operating at the same time. Maybe the window is narrow on both ends, and the particular kind of intelligence that leads to space exploration inevitably results in catastrophic extinction shortly after it appears. Consider how we have very likely guaranteed our own species’ extinction by failing to respond to global climate change, for example.  

I personally find the narrow-window idea compelling. But there is a far more parsimonious explanation that involves a slight reworking and extension of the original uniqueness argument. The Earth itself may not be all that unique as planets go. And the emergence and evolution of life might be a rather pedestrian occurrence, perhaps inevitable once certain minimal conditions are met. But the specific way in which life has evolved on Earth is unique, expressing forms and patterns that are idiosyncratic to the point of being entirely unrepeatable anywhere else in the universe. Communities of self-replicating multiple-cell organisms might show up everywhere there is liquid water, but there is only one place that herds of bison could ever happen. Self-aware intelligent creatures might be as common as snowflakes, but planet-consuming metropolitan congregations of linguistically-endowed tool-using primates are a one-off event in the history of the universe.  

There are at least three “uniqueness filters” that render human technological civilization as we know it an entirely distinct and unrepeatable phenomenon, one that is extremely unlikely to have even a remote analog anywhere else. Ever.

The first filter is natural history. The human species is a chance result of 4 billion years of intersections and interactions among an uncountable number of very specific biological, climatic, and geographical events, many of which are unique to the point of being unrepeatable on Earth—let alone something that could happen in the exact same way anywhere else. One stray asteroid more or less, a different sequence of volcanic eruptions, the survival of a now-extinct species of insect, a slight deviation in the pattern of continental drift, an unlucky solar flare, a difference in the timing of glaciation, a random virus mutation, and humans never happen. The natural history of life on another planet would be likewise unrepeatably unique to that planet, and even if the other planet started out as an exact physical duplicate of earth, any resulting intelligence would be housed in creatures very different from humans.      

The second filter is the appearance of technological civilization. Humans are a foraging species. For hundreds of millennia, all humans everywhere were hunter-gatherers living in small nomadic or semi-nomadic communities. In the wake of the last ice age glacial period, some of these groups became larger, more sedentary, and increasingly dependent on domesticated food sources. But the transition to agriculture was not an inevitable event in human social evolution. It was a chance result of a unique confluence of climatic, geographic, and social conditions.

It turns out that some (at least one) kinds of domestication-based lifestyles have a viral quality to them, and spread quickly (and violently). Once dependence on agriculture exceeds some minimal level or degree of spread, civilization might be an inevitable eventuality. Even so, the fact that the first civilizations appeared when they did instead of a hundred thousand years previously or yesterday or not at all has nothing to do with the nature of humans as a species. Rewind time 12,000 years, change something as seemingly trivial as the pattern of glacial ice melt in the north Atlantic that altered the ocean currents affecting climate in northeast Africa and the Levant, and civilization would never have happened. At least not when and where it did.

The third filter is the shape of historical events once civilization appeared. Civilization, because it happened when and where it did, took on specific forms that set the stage for future versions of civilization. The modern global technologically-advanced world still carries systemic traces of physical, social, economic, and political forms and patterns that emerged in the earliest cities of Sumer and Egypt and Babylon. Technology itself “advances” in unpredictable ways and in response to unlikely events, and might rightfully be considered a fourth uniqueness filter. Add to this the fact that the details of our present circumstances are entirely contingent on the details of uncountable and arbitrary past events, and that our values, interests, beliefs, and ideas are linked intimately with a specific historical past that didn’t have to happen the way it did.

All of this means that popular interest in space exploration is not necessarily an inevitable consequence of human intelligence and curiosity. Nor is its form independent of the specific colonial and technological history of modern civilization. There is a direct through-line connecting Enlightenment ideas of progress, nineteenth century notions of manifest destiny, and present-day ideas about space colonization—ideas that may have never occurred to anyone had our social history been somewhat different.

These three filters stack upon each other, with each layer adding an order of magnitude to the unrepeatable uniqueness of the present human situation. The universe might very well be packed to the brim with intelligent lifeforms that share virtually nothing in common with each other, and the reason I have never met an alien is that the motives of civilized humans are not galactically generalizable and I’m the only one even remotely interested in the possibility.

That’s the new favorite word being bandied about by those savvy folks in the know in pop-psychology circles. Languishing is waiting without something to wait for, feeling forlorn and forsaken in the absence of actual abandonment.

Languishing is a psychological symptom of COVID that is linked with the involuntary dormancy of lockdown, and is commonly seen among those who have never had the virus. It presents in the uninfected when they have been forced to slow down, and the emptiness of their lives begins to show through the patina of perpetual distraction.

Languishing leaves the person with a penetrating and deceptive sense of purposelessness—deceptive in that real purpose is no less lacking than it has ever been, only now, after Netflix and PornHub have lost their palliative value, it is difficult to pretend otherwise.   

Waiting without something to wait for. Feeling forlorn and forsaken in the absence of actual abandonment. I wonder whether languishing might in fact be a symptom of civilization itself. Maybe something more than a symptom: the reason we still allow it to exist.   

The campus of the college where I work was, along with every other built structure on the North American continent, constructed on indigenous land. A few of my more thoughtful and compassionate colleagues have adopted the practice of explicitly acknowledging that fact in various ways, for example by including a blurb below their email signature line, or by giving a brief statement to that effect at the start of important meetings. To the extent this enhances cultural awareness and all of that, this is probably a good thing to do. At the very least, it isn’t a bad thing to do. Nevertheless, I am bothered by it on some level—actually, on several levels.

First, the psychologist in me knows that with continued repetition information you are not required to do something with can quickly lose what little potential impact it may have once had. Think of the complete vacuity of IN GOD WE TRUST that has been scrawled across paper currency since 1957. Or, perhaps a better example, think of when the cashier at the grocery store tells you to “have a nice day.”

Also, written or verbal acknowledgement of a patent historical truth is not a meaningful form of action to begin with. Despite this, there seems to be an implicit assumption that overt recognition of the facts somehow makes a difference. Let’s be clear, acknowledging that the land you are standing on was stolen does absolutely nothing to mitigate the consequences of the theft.

Even worse, it can actually serve as subtle validation of the status quo. And this is particularly disturbing, the fact that this acknowledgement is being offered by people who are at the very same time, as a contractual requirement of their employment in an institution of public higher education, supporting and actively promoting a way of life that has been constructed out of the products of colonization and genocide (two words for variations in intensity of the same thing), slavery (in both its physical and economic forms), and the persistent oppression, exploitation, and immiseration of people everywhere on the planet. There is a troubling ingenuousness lurking here, a latent insincerity that mirrors in nontrivial ways the hidden treachery of the original land treaties themselves.      

Of course, I am no different than any of my colleagues when it comes to supporting an exceedingly corrosive way of life through my coerced participation. And I suppose what bothers me the most is that I am unable to sustain the illusion that mere awareness of that fact makes a difference.

Two stories appeared in succession on my news feed today, and there was something about the two of them appearing in such close proximity that struck a nerve—something like the pairing of two flavors that don’t belong together, only with fingernail-on-the-chalkboard overtones.   

One story was about a traffic accident on a bridge in which a baby was ejected from a car and into the Maryland bay. The other story was about a Colorado woman who was killed and partially eaten by a bear and her cubs while walking her dogs. The baby was apparently rescued, although there was no word at the time on the infant’s condition. And the bear and both of her cubs were tracked down and “euthanized” on the outside chance they might have acquired a taste for human flesh.  

We should be happy for the baby and grateful that the bears are no longer a potential danger. However, if you put these two stories side-by-side, and then think about them in terms of how the risk to human life is being dealt with (or not dealt with, as it were) in each case, there is a glaring disconnect that is difficult to ignore, one that shines a light deep into the expanding glacial fissure separating civilized humans and wild nature.   

Bear attacks are extremely rare. And people actually dying from bear attack are even rarer: there were only four in the whole of US and Canada in 2020. Car accidents, on the other hand, happen with the dizzying frequency of one every five and a half seconds in the US, with more than 100 deaths each day. In Colorado, the bear and her two cubs were immediately killed to prevent future deaths. In Maryland, the wrecked cars were removed from the bridge, and any damage to the guardrail will be repaired so that traffic can proceed as usual.

For wild animals, there is apparently no level of risk that is acceptable, but ejecting an occasional infant off a bridge is just the price we pay for progress.    

Dogs don’t have religion. They don’t need it. Neither are they “spiritual”—at least in the sense that civilized humans use that term. The idea of spirituality is largely a civilized creation to begin with. Notions of spirituality emerge in the human world only when humans are forced to live in ways that diverge from those prescribed by their evolved human nature.

The life of a traditional hunter-gatherer is intimately embedded within the living natural world around them, and from the outside this might appear to be a kind of deep and penetrating spiritual connection. But this is an illusion caused by looking through civilized eyes. Imagine two oranges, where one has a wedge-shaped section cut out of it. If asked what makes the two oranges different, it wouldn’t make sense to say that an extra section has been added to one of them. But this is how the civilized see spirituality, as a separate thing to be added to fill a missing void. Why that void exists in the first place is rarely if ever considered.

This perspective emerges from living a life in which the whole has been violently torn into pieces, a life that was never meant to be separated into parts. From the inside of an authentic human life, spirituality is simply participation in the ongoing cosmic unfolding of the present moment. Which means that everything is spiritual to the same degree. Which makes the entire idea of spirituality empty. From the point of view of an authentic human life—or the life of any dog—the idea of spirituality is meaningless because there is no way to separate the spiritual from the nonspiritual. Spirituality is inseparably infused throughout.

In addition, the idea that there is a transcendent being or power or principle behind or within or (choose your preposition) experienced reality would find no traction in a dog’s mind. The idea of such a thing is not just unnecessary. It is incoherent. If there is such a thing, a universal being or power or principle—and if it is truly universal—then how could it be extracted from everything else in a way that would qualify it as a separate entity? As with spirituality more generally, as soon as you distinguish this being or principle or power from everything else, you have separated it from itself and you are left with nothing at all. You would have better luck separating wetness from water.

In order to see a spiritual realm or a transcendent realm or a godhead lurking within nature—as something separate from nature itself—you first have to make the irrational leap to a perspective that somehow lies outside of nature. Religion and spirituality require first that you occupy a dissociative mental space populated with fictitious abstractions.

This is exactly the kind of mental space that emerges from the viral delusion of human exceptionality, the demonstrably false belief that humans are unique and somehow separate from the rest of the natural world, the delusion that serves as the cornerstone of the civilized worldview.

Simple things continually peck and gnaw at my attention, the trivial, the everyday, those things that appear in their fullness only in the present tense.

But I fight against their intrusion and seek a vantage over them that lies outside of time: I sketch breathtaking prophesies of the future and paint thrilling mythologies of the past—only to watch helplessly as familiar demons repaint my mental canvas, shading tomorrow and yesterday with hues of fear and regret, respectively.

But in this moment, occupied with this routine task and the one that follows and the one that follows that, here, surrounded by all of these regular things, here and now is where I spend my time; even as my mind slides away into yesterday’s clumsy conversation or tomorrow’s stalking treachery, I am at all moments standing inside the humdrum context of right now. Always right now.

In the end, it may be a simple failure to acknowledge proportion, a proportional blindness: a malignant form of base-rate neglect. Moments that earn the title of event are exceedingly rare, and yet these are what my memory is stocked with: things that scarcely ever happen—and never happen in the ways they are remembered.

Life is not in these things. Life is in the ordinary, the commonplace, the unexciting, the all-day-long now. But it is precisely this that I dismiss as nothing of importance. I am living life upside down. My reckoning of experience is inverted; I grant meaning to the ultimately unmeaningful and look right through that which is of greatest consequence: the sheer impertinence of biological necessity, the perpetual imposition of a world that moves through time and drags me along with it.

There is a Pawnee prayer that ends with “Remember the sacredness of things.” I want to add: “Also remember that all things appear in their fullness only within the present tense.”

 “Nothing in the universe has ever been concealed.”

I stumbled across this Dōgen quote over forty years ago in a book that I pulled from a library shelf while killing time between classes my first year of college, and the entire world changed.

Or maybe the entire word was suddenly allowed to be itself. Or maybe simply being itself was suddenly more than enough. Or maybe both of these, and I suddenly noticed something about myself that I should have known all along.

Dōgen’s eight words are as direct and unadorned and sturdy as the potent message they convey, a simple and profound wisdom. I understood the purpose behind his words immediately; it was as clear and fresh and new as if I was sitting beside him as he spoke to his students at the Eihei-ji monastery northeast of Kyoto in the thirteenth century. I could smell the 750 year old incense lingering in the cool mountain air.    

Problems arise when we get stuck on the surface of things. Dōgen, however, seemed to be saying that the real problem is not that we get stuck on the surface, but that we assume there is something besides the surface itself, something else, something more fundamental lurking beneath or behind the surface, that there is some deeper or more meaningful reality than our actual moment-by-moment experience. Where could such a reality be? Where might it be hiding? Why would it do so?

The universe is exactly what it is, and is not intentionally trying to make life difficult for us. We don’t need to search for hidden meaning behind, beneath, or outside of experience. Moment-by-moment experience is all that has ever been. It is all that can ever be.

And it is entirely enough.

The word traces to the medieval Latin verb contrarotulare, a combination of contra (against) and rotulus (wheel or roll). In ancient times, official contracts, laws, regulations, treaties, and decrees, were reified through written documentation stored as cylinders of rolled parchment. Supporting a legal argument or verifying the accuracy of a claim involved comparing statements or assertions “against the rolls.” To control something originally meant that you had access to the documentary means of justifying the exercise of power over that thing: the bill of sale for a slave, for example.

Control is an entirely civilized word. Literacy is a prerequisite—the very idea of control is derived from the magical power civilization assigns to things that have been written down.

The word has grown much since its earliest days. Its application is no longer limited to the realm of bureaucratized power; its broad metaphorical application has made it a word that the civilized simply cannot do without. Control as metaphor is so widespread and commonplace that it is no longer possible to recognize it as metaphor.

We are asked to control our temper, for example. We are told the control of fire was a decisive event in our species’ evolution. But this is metaphor. No one really has power over fire—whether we are talking about an emotional flame or one that burns skin, not the kind of power that commands the labor of another person, not the kind of power that seals a man in prison, not the kind of power that empties the ocean of fish and the forest of trees.

Control—real control, not its metaphorical cousin—still requires documentary means of justification. An Achilles heel here, I think: remove the words, and you remove the power. Burn the rolls, and the magic becomes mere ashes.