Tag Archives: electronics

From Ritual to Romance   (2015Nov08)

Posted by XperDunn on

Sunday, November 08, 2015                                            6:21 PM

“From Ritual to Romance” was written by Jessie L. Weston in 1920. It is mentioned by T. S. Eliot in the notes to his poem, ‘The Waste Land’: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book.”  Weston’s book, along with Sir James George Frazer ‘s “The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion”, first published in 1890, were hot topics in Eliot’s day. Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’ did for anthropology what Darwin’s “On The Origin Of Species” did for biology in 1869—it presented academic research indicating that the Christianity of the day was evolved, in many ways, from more-ancient rituals and earlier gods. Further, it showed that religion changes with the times, while it re-tasks older beliefs and traditions. Simple examples include the importance of mistletoe in Christmas tradition—a holdover from Druidic beliefs and rituals—and Christmas itself, a pre-Christian mid-winter festival re-assigned as the day of Christ’s birth, whereas the historical Jesus was most likely born in the spring.

Just as Darwin’s work slowly percolated for decades after its initial publication (the Scopes trial wasn’t until 1925) so too Frazer’s research would not bear the fruit of Weston’s and other writers’ works until well into the beginning of the twentieth century—and this affected T. S. Eliot, scion of a famous Unitarian family and a student of Ancient Greek, Latin, and even Sanskrit (he familiarized himself somewhat with Eastern philosophy—the final ‘shanti’ in The Waste Land is Sanskrit for ‘peace’)—but an intellectual who considered himself an atheist early in his writing career. That he would join the Church of England in his later years, he admitted, was in large part due to his desire for ritual and the focused meditation of prayer.

In his essays on Christianity, culture, and society, Eliot worried that the ending of borders in Europe would lead to an overly homogenous culture, losing the variety of differences between the many nations. His concerns were misplaced, as the United States would handily blanket the globe with Pepsi and Quarter-Pounders soon after the next World War. But the foundation of his concern for cultural diversity, as well as his eventual decision to rejoin a religious community—was at heart a concern for meaning in one’s life and indeed in the lives of everyone.

His masterpiece, “The Waste Land”, was to some extent a gigantic howl at a universe that was losing its old meanings—and having trouble replacing them with modern equivalents. Industrialization, science, and technology were erasing many of the givens—people of different countries were no longer separated by mere physical distance—the secrets of life, of matter, of the universe—all of which had been the province of faith—were now being revealed by scientific inquiry—‘God’ himself had been dethroned.

And Eliot raises a valid point—I spent many years being agnostic, being unsure if my rejection of all religion was based on valid reasoning—but once I decided absolutely on atheism, I’ve spent every moment since in trying to find a way to give life meaning without reverting to any magical improvisations that would simply be religion in another guise. And it’s not easy.

As I watched a PBS documentary on Johnny Carson today, this issue of rituals again raised itself in my mind. In my youth, TVs were made from tubes. This required a TV to be big and boxy—the bigger the screen, the bigger the whole box had to be. So—a very substantial piece of furniture sat in the center of virtually every home—and, at dinner-time, virtually every American turned it on, like a national campfire, and watched either Walter Cronkite or Chet Huntley and David Brinkley tell them the news of the day. Later, at bed-time, Johnny Carson would come on and clue us all in on what was going on, what to care about, what was ‘cool’, and what to laugh off.

The real importance of this was in the following day—our conversations with each other would always have a common context—we all referenced the same ‘source material’. Equally important was our unanimous acceptance of whatever information was received—we talked about how we felt about current events—we never discussed whether we believed what Cronkite or Carson had told us. That’s where the cliché of ‘water-cooler conversation’ comes from—although presently even water-coolers are a thing of the past—now most office workers show up to work with their own individual caffeine drinks from Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts.

Older times saw technology enabling us to be tribal on a larger scale—first radio, then television, gave us a sense that the entire nation, from coast to coast, was all ‘on the same page’. Automobiles allowed us to congregate in public places in larger numbers—and from a larger overall area. The limitations of corded, rotary landlines—mostly always just one to a household—retained the sense that real communication could only be accomplished face-to-face.

And while we are tempted to blame laptops and i-phones for the insularity of modern communication, we should remember that earlier electronics began the change—the advent of touch-tone dialing, call-waiting, multi-party calls, caller-ID, etc.—all made telephony simpler and more akin to an actual conversation. It was around this time that phone cords of exaggerated length became popular—phoning had become easier, and we began to feel a restlessness from still being pinned to one spot in the home.

The differences today are many: we all have our own phones now; we can take them wherever we go now; we don’t have to worry about missing a call—not only do we know who tried to call us, but they can leave a recorded message for us to hear later. Point-of-contact used to be the family kitchen—now each wandering individual is a point-of-contact. Telephone contact is so universal today that we are confronted by situations, as when driving a car, where talking on the phone can actually kill us.

Similar conveniences have stripped away the trials of scholarship—fifty years ago one would inevitably find oneself in need of a public library—specifically the reference section. ‘Mini-reference-sections’, called encyclopedias, were sold door-to-door—mostly to minimize the number of trips to the library. We got to know our librarians; we got to know each other—if we were the kind of people who spent a lot of time reading or studying or researching. Today, I have no need for the reference section of my local library—I don’t even have to cross the room to use my own encyclopedia (yes, I still have a set)—I can just do a Google-search, or check Wikipedia, or find the e-text of a classic tome on the Gutenberg Project website.

Don’t get me wrong—there’s tremendous power there. Not only do I have access to the equivalent of a library reference section—I have access, from right here where I’m sitting, to every university, laboratory, professional association, research society—hell, with the right access codes, I could rifle through the files of DARPA, NASA, or CERN. But my point today is not concerned with the wonders of the Internet—I’m focusing on the fact that I don’t need to break my solitude—I don’t need to open my front door—and I still have access to virtually every bit of information known to mankind.

Convenience in communication, and in scholarship, was welcome progress—but we still needed to get together to have ‘something to do’. Increasing the number of TV channels from three to 300 made it possible to watch a lot more TV—and cable TV made it possible to watch movies without attending a movie theater—but still, there is a limit to how much TV a person can watch. Likewise, there is only so much time that can be spent talking on the phone or studying. In my day, a person always reached a point where he or she simply had to go outside, to mingle with the throng—or simply hang with one’s friends.

Eventually, one way of ‘hanging with friends’ became playing video games—a group of kids would congregate around a TV hooked up to a video game system and take turns using the controllers. And this is where everything came off the rails, in a sense. The advent of multiplayer online gaming, combined with the use of laptops and cellphones, made it possible to both play with friends and socialize with friends—all without leaving the privacy of one’s room. Additionally, one could leave one’s room—could in fact go anywhere—and still remain essentially within that gaming social gathering. This leads, of course, to the phenomenon whereby your kids could be in the room with you, but not really ‘be’ there at all—they’re texting, or IM-ing, or gaming with unseen other kids while their bodies, devoid of conscious awareness, sit in the same room you’re in.

We call this new generation ‘digital natives’—people who grow up with digital, online technology as a given. To digital natives, being physically present is of less importance than online connection—they pay attention to their screens, not to the people in their environment—hence all the car-crashes caused by cellphones. There was once a time when a rainy day was bad news for kids—it meant we couldn’t go outside to play—and that was a major tragedy in our young lives. Nowadays, when parents force their kids to go outside, it is more likely to cut them off from their friends and their playtime.

In a culture that shops online, plays online, watches online entertainment, communicates online, and learns online, we find that something is lost. In Eliot’s time, they felt the loss of religion as an absolute—but they also lost the comfortable patterns of a life where God was central to everyday activities. In our time, we are experiencing the loss an even more elemental aspect of our daily lives—shared physical presence. And the list of rituals being lost in this new ‘normal’ is even greater.

Consider laundry—there are still parts of the world where we could witness the weekly washing of clothes by a riverbank—those people gather and mingle and chat as they do their laundry ‘community-style’—and for centuries, all mankind did their laundry in this way. When washing machines came along, people hung up their wash on clotheslines—often socializing with their neighbors over the back fence—a smaller social group, but still partially a community activity. Then came electric dryers—and homemakers found themselves, at least as far as laundry was concerned, acting in solitude, shut up each in their own homes.

Why are rituals important? Look at it this way—we can strive for success, for achievement, for goals of many types—we can chase after lovers, mates, and romance—we can eat, sleep, and work—but all of it is empty without a context, a continuum, that is the cycle of our daily lives. Humans are a social species—we need the comforting presence of others, we need interaction with our peers. But we are raising children in an environment of solitude—where are they supposed to find meaning and fulfillment in their lives? How can they build a comforting pattern of social rhythms to give their lives continuity?

And make no mistake—we have need of these things. Take the Sabbath day as an example—with the decline of religion, one might ask why bother with a day of interruption? But we need rest as much as we need sleep—however we came up with the idea of a ‘day of rest and prayer’, it fits our biological rhythms—even without feeling obligated to pray to God once a week, we still benefit from the rhythm of taking every seventh day off. Or take another example—the taboos on certain foods, like pork or shellfish, were once considered religious observances—but they were useful in that such foods are health risks if not carefully cooked. Further, in modern America, where a person can eat anything—and as much of it as they please—we find that eating without limits presents greater health risks than any one type of food could ever pose.

Boundaries, rituals, democracy, all the inconveniences of being part of a group, rather than a free, solitary agent—these things have a value to our mental and physical health, to our sense of having a rich, fulfilling life. We may be able to get along without our imaginary friend, God, but we are finding out that life can be even more empty and angst-ridden if we try to live without each other, without community and society. There may come a day when we no longer have prisons—we may come to recognize that everyone is already in a prison, that criminals can be punished and isolated from society by the simple expedient of taking away their online connection.

This may seem rambling and generalizing, but I’m trying to make the point that the rhythms and patterns of community provide a substrate for the discrete pursuits of life—earning a living, raising a family, the arts, the sciences, politics, etc. We focus on these ‘goals’ of life and overlook the fact that life has a context within which all this goal-seeking behavior occurs—that there are moments between these activities—that our consciousness goes in and out of these discrete pursuits, but our awareness is confronted by an unbroken continuum of existence—and that overall ‘existence’, without substance, becomes a void that we fall into whenever we are not consciously busy with a particular aspect of our interest. No matter what our individual interests may be, we still need our overall lives to have texture and substance. Without experience outside of our online connections, life becomes disjointed, disconnected, and begins to lose value or meaning.

The human animal can adapt to many changes—but not to emptiness. It has been noted that a person left in a sensory-deprivation chamber will quickly be driven mad by a nervous system bereft of input. We are in danger of finding our global village trapped in an electronic isolation that will drive the whole world mad—we may find that civilization will ultimately be destroyed, not by fire or ice, but by our lust for convenience.

In Geeks We Trust   (2015Jul19)

Posted by XperDunn on

durer-07

Sunday, July 19, 2015                                              6:06 PM

Some people get whiny when their cell-phone service isn’t perfect. It’s a mistake to take instantaneous light-speed communication with anyone else on the face of the Earth for granted. For thousands of years of civilization, no one could speak to anyone who wasn’t within shouting distance. And that’s still true whenever there’s a power outage, a natural disaster, or if you travel too far from where people make money.

The electromagnetic umbrella of cell-phone coverage does not blanket the Earth. It doesn’t even blanket where all the people are. It only covers where there are people making and spending money. Some people purposely vacation where there is no cell-phone coverage, to hide from people who abuse the privilege—but those people are usually involved in over-intruding on others, when they’re not on vacation, so most of us aren’t driven to such an extreme.

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When we lose cell-phone service because of a storm, we don’t think of it as a deadly threat—we wait for someone to fix it. But if it didn’t get fixed, we’d be in a bit of a mess. The further we travel down the road to wireless everything, the more resounding the thud when Mother Nature or some other cause brings down the network. When we began using computers in our office, back in the seventies, we kept paper back-up records of everything. The computers broke down sometimes, and we had to be able to go back to the old paper records to continue doing business.

After a while, we stopped doing that. Not only were the records a huge storage problem, but the volume of transactions we were doing on a daily basis had grown far beyond what could be done by hand in the same amount of time. We were doing business faster using computers than we could have physically done by hand on paper. Suddenly, our digital back-ups became important—even vital. Hard drives can die—and without a digital back-up to restore from, an entire business can disappear—all the records of sales, bills, and payments gone—poof.

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Now we’ve invested in digital to the point where even an individual can find themselves in big trouble through the sudden loss of a cell-phone. To a large degree, they’ve replaced wallets, address books, calendars—they’re even starting to replace credit cards recently. We don’t just talk on them, we exchange memos, agenda, travel info, we have meetings with small groups, we get directions, we store passwords and account info. Pretty much anything that used to involve a piece of paper or the use of a reference book or map or required memorization—it’s all been digitized down into that one little gadget.

Back-ups became as important a part of our personal lives as our businesses—enter the ‘cloud’. A cloud is a place where you rely on someone else to make reliable back-ups of your stuff. If you lose your phone, you can get a new phone and replace everything from your cloud. Clouds are billed as ‘conveniences’, but this belies the enormous trust and reliability implicit in (1) trusting someone with all your personal info and (2) relying on them to do a better job of keeping your data safe than you could do yourself.

For most people this is natural—they don’t know from back-ups and would have, in the past, simply accepted the fact that they lost all their data whenever they lost their phone. But my background goes back far enough that I still talk about ‘computers’—I’m old school. I spent most of those old days worrying over my own back-ups, in the office and at home. My home PC is fully backed up, in duplicate, on CDs (for the older files) and external hard drives (a more recent, easier and cheaper alternative due to the plummeting cost of digital media storage).

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But even for me, the cloud offers something important. One rule of safe back-ups is to always have one copy off-site. A cloud allows me to have another copy of all my personal data files in a place other than my house—in case it burns down or something. For now, I’m not doing this—clouds are expensive and new, which makes them unreliable. And this idea that new technology guarantees trust is ridiculous—I’m never getting behind the wheel of a vehicle that can be hacked—that’s insane. And I’m never going to trust my data to a cloud until clouds have some kind of industry oversight or government regulation. If information is the new currency, then where’s the Federal Reserve Board for my personal data?

I don’t want to get all survivalist about it—but those people are correct when they point out the fragility of our existing infrastructure. The more complex the system, the more vulnerable it becomes. Our digital technology gives us great speed and convenience, but our trust and reliance on its uninterrupted, secure continuance is based on wishful thinking rather than any proof that the digital industry has the gravitas of a life-supporting industry. They are more like kittens, easily distracted with a laser-pointer.

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Hacking can come from friend and foe alike. Parents can hack their kids. Kids can hack their schools. Government can hack us all. And black hats can hack the government. Businesses, without any actual hacking, can take your life story and sell it as demographic research to marketers and retailers. Online services can take tacit ownership of your intellectual property through draconian EULAs that users never even read before clicking ‘I Accept’. Banks and phone companies and credit cards can stick little charges in your bills, hoping that you won’t look close enough, or care enough, to complain. Insurance companies routinely refuse claims, or make you jump through an exhausting number of hoops, knowing that a certain percentage of people will just throw up their hands and walk away. We’ve been ‘hacking’ each other for long before computers got involved—they’ve just added another layer to the conundrum.

Yet we willingly place our trust in anything that’s got silicon chips inside. I can see where it got started. People used to have to trust nerds—we were the only ones who could tell you how to work a computer. But it’s not like that anymore—except in the basement of development labs working on new tech. Everywhere else in business and consumer electronics, the nerds are no longer in charge—or they own the company, which amounts to the same thing—a billionaire becomes a businessperson, nerd or not. Just ask Bill. And there is one thing we know for sure about business—it can’t be trusted with the public welfare.

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As digital becomes more important in our lives, we see many bad side-effects. We see poor driving—make that dangerous driving. We see a lack of social interaction and a rise in online addiction. We see misuse of mega-data collected for one purpose and used for a hundred others. We see online stalking, online bullying, and online terrorism. We see ubiquitous surveillance. We see the markets being manipulated by micro-traders. Drones and hackers range from the harmless to the bloodthirsty. What we don’t see is regulation and oversight.

I want to keep the Internet free and open to equal access—but that’s the only thing I want to see remain in its wild state. Everything else should be managed and regulated with the same stringent requirements as money or medical records. I know that such an initiative would just draw all the lobbyists out of the woodwork, trying to tie us all into a tighter-still knot of commercial peonage, rather than acting as the civil service I’m suggesting. But there’s little enough accountability in business and government today—the digital industry should have at least a taste of it. After all, we aren’t that far from a day when we’ll all die without it—shouldn’t we take it a little seriously?

We can’t take a bottle of water onto a commercial airplane—but we can take a laptop, cell-phone, i-whatever—and we’re not all agreed yet on whether those things can crash the flight electronics of certain planes. Does that make any sense? Electromagnetism is invisible—we’re always tempted to think of it as harmless. We’re lucky there’s thunder—or we wouldn’t have the sense to fear the lightning.

CuriousOnes

Do Over

Posted by XperDunn on
01 Russell's Last Visit (Sept. 2012)

01 Russell’s Last Visit (Sept. 2012)

During our Revolutionary War, we had the fire of change burning in our hearts—so much so that we defied a Monarchial world order. The Dutch had introduced the concept of self-government but both their geographical and cultural settings made it impossible for them to give birth to a truly separate national ideology. They were too old to start over from scratch—they and their neighboring nations had too much inertia in the direction of the status quo to allow a pivot into something truly original.

Our Civil War, again, was based on the ideal of continent-wide unity. Being the last civilized nation of that age to ban slavery was a great part of it, but its roots were in the maintenance of the United States of America as a Union of States. Europe was still too mired in its antique cross-nation wars and competitions to create a similar Union of European States (something it would take them two World Wars (and the near-destruction of all Western Europe) to find.

The end of the Civil War, and the dawning of the Industrial Age, led to America’s explosion of strength and wealth. But the nature of power and of riches is to exclude the weak and the poor. The greatest imbalance came during the Great Depression, which left most Americans wanting, and only a handful of rich and powerful ‘Robber Barons’ left holding the moneybags, and most of the political influence. The Second World War ended the joblessness problem, and increased America’s sense of unity—but both effects were superficial enough to allow the USA of the 20th Century to create permanent pockets of horrible poverty and deep bigotry, while it exploded in technology, communications, transportation, and of course, electronics.

Here in the 21st Century, we have long ago lost the frontiers—not just our own West, but all the Terra Incognita of the globe—both poles, the deep sea, and even the near-earth orbital zone of outer space. Industry has grown into a self-sustaining Rube Goldberg that both threatens and sustains us. Our laws, after two-and-a-half centuries, have become deeply layered, and too dense for new entrants to easily shoehorn themselves into the economy. Our population has zoomed to the point where we have given up our oldest and proudest tradition—‘give us your tired, your poor, your wretched refuse longing to be free’. Now we talk of electrified fences and infra-red-sensing border patrols. ‘Hard work and honest effort’ never were a sure path to success in business, even when such was our favorite delusion. But today’s Capitalism has literally outlawed those ideals, in favor of profits and shareholders’ wishes.

So, America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, is now an exclusive nation, an owned nation, and a nation dependent on its addiction to capitalism, credit, competition, and powerful political lobbies that veto the will of the people. Our laws have become as arcane and impenetrable as the most ancient legislations of the Old World. Our freedoms have been usurped by Industrial Privilege and Monopolized Media. Our hopes have gone beyond ‘college degrees for our children’ into a world where we hope that our college-graduated children can get a job at the neighborhood mall.

We were great at exploring, pioneering, developing, researching, learning, and teaching—but we have done all that and now we find that we have little talent for simply living. Our Yahoo sense of discovery and Yankee ingenuity are both played out. We are faced with a world where we are no longer as special as we were.

Don’t get me wrong—when we were special, we were very special—and now that we are less special, we are still head-and-shoulders above most of the world’s governments. But there are now places such as Great Britain, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands (and several more) where the quality of personal freedom is equal to or surpassing our own, where economic opportunities are greater, where immigration is less difficult, where industry and finance have far less say in the legislation and culture of these nations. They are, at the very least, our equals. We probably had a hand in helping them get there, but you can’t live on a reputation—WWII has been won and ended for some time now, and Europe has been free of threat of the Soviets for decades.

We Americans have to start seeing ourselves more like the Canadians see themselves—not as Cop, Judge, and Executioner for the World, but simply as a bastion of modern civilization. Our biggest problems are internal—for now, looking outward is little more than star-gazing and we have become a divided nation, a commercialized nation, and a source of half the world’s production of BS. We are not comfortable with self-reflection, self-awareness, self-searching, or self-discipline—rather ‘Eastern’ notions for citizens of the USA—but highly desirable for a post-modern nation.

Seeing ourselves the way others see us; Seeing things from the other’s point of view; accepting uncomfortable (or inconvenient) truths about ourselves, our culture, or our future—none of these things has value in a Capitalist culture. But in the real world, self-knowledge and the acknowledgment of hard truths are invaluable weapons against humanity’s biggest danger of our time—the rate of change.

The faster an environment changes, the more difficult it becomes to plan and prepare. The changes that come at us today are daily ones, sometimes hourly—humanity has historically enjoyed a far more glacial rate of change in both technology and culture. Communication lag-times could reach into years, or at least weeks—and that was just the rate at which the news of change was spread. The actual changes were measured in decades.

We oldsters still think that way. Hence the popularity of VH1’s “I love the 70s” (or “80s” or “90s”) series. Its charm (for me) is in that feeling I get when I look at Michael Jackson’s single sequined white glove—I feel ‘weren’t things so much simpler and innocent back then?’ To compact our present day lives into similar half-hour segments would require today’s shows to be called “I loved 2008” (or any other 21st Century year).

Please do not mistake me—seeming innocence, perceived by an individual like me (in my youth) doesn’t change the fact that no era of humanity has been ‘innocent’ in any but relative terms, or as a product of some white-washing campaign that had not yet faded and exposed the truth. Revisionist history, an up-and-comer of my schoolyard years, taught us to mistrust an individual interpretation of time’s great sweep—which led to the ‘death of history’.

This is where we are at present—the liberties taken by Hollywood in the telling of an historical period or event are less revolting, now that we judge history books to be of similar veracity—and conflicting accounts of past chroniclers are given equal voice—with the assumption that both may be untrue in some way. I sometimes suspect that the Powers That Be encourage this perspective as a way of moderating the clear examples of past power-abusers which we could otherwise learn from. However, in my more rational moods, I accept that people avoid learning from history without any help at all.

To sum up, America is no longer an energetic child with boundless opportunities—it isn’t even an uncomfortable adolescent, seeking itself and its values, with little concern for the future. No, today’s USA is a middle-aged cynic, disappointed of the promise of its youth, fearful of the loss of strength and ability it once had, and apprehensive of its future—which is turning out to be a lot less ‘special’ than we had always hoped it would be.

Our country has too much overhead and too little engagement with the challenges of the future—and a propensity to fantasize that we are what we once were—the new kid on the block. The Industrial Revolution long over, we tend to see the Electronics Revolution as its natural extension—another boom market for America, that others will be slow to adopt. But Electronics are more democratic than we are—and are easily adopted by any country, or indeed, individual with a desire to push the envelope. And our current economic and cultural inertia virtually guarantees that we, the USA, will be one of the laggards in that race—and in the development of off-world industry as well!

We assume that digital code and space exploration will remain our strong suits in spite of our neglect, and other countries’ growing interest. We have lost our yeast, so to speak, and from now on, America will have to grow and strengthen through immense effort, without a ‘tailwind’ of novelty and easy successes.

Our idea of ‘public education’ once gave us a huge lead over countries that minimized its importance—which was most of them, in the beginning. But it is now an old, accepted axiom of national strength. Our ratings, compared to other countries, show our present public education system to be either very near to last place or, in some subjects, dead last! Our proud heritage and our present neglect of education is a tsunami of obsolescence that will inundate our nation in just one or two more generations.

While Americans are ‘teaching the controversy’ to each other, the rest of the globe is hightailing it after the mysteries of physics and medicine. Even our universities and colleges, which somehow retain primacy in comparison with the rest of the world, will find no faculty prepared to teach in these institutions—except those foreign experts and researchers willing to teach in the ‘backwater’ country we are in danger of becoming.

And the world, itself, is older and more awkward—the population is at seven billion (way more than nature alone could support); the natural resources are becoming more and more difficult to find and exploit; the ocean, atmosphere, and ground we stand on is more polluted every day; and the biological diversity of our planet has been shaken, not stirred, with some out-of-niche intruders (lapses of world travelers’ efforts to keep things in their proper place) taking over entire bio-spheres with no defenses against the interloping specie. These ‘blurrings’ of ecological dividing-lines removes the geological separation that protected plants and animals from each other’s niches since Life began—not a good thing. And pollution, all by itself, can kill off species, even entire biomes.

They say that it’s harder to fix an automobile when it is driving down the highway—and that is a major problem for civilization, too. It never stops—in fact, it’s going too darn fast—and fixing our civilization’s problems pose the same difficulty—we can’t stop the world and fix its engine—we have to do it on the fly. Worse yet, we now have a time limit—if we don’t adjust ourselves before pollution reaches lethal levels, before the biosphere collapses, before climate change freezes the planet in an ice age, before overpopulation causes a total collapse of civilization, or before the next unlucky Tunguska-event from space—we won’t have the chance.

It’s funny how facts, like the above, can sound a lot like hyperbole. But we created a hyperbolic world—nuclear explosions, forest-clearing, carbon-burning, freak storms—you name it, we’ve been busy at it for over a century. Our margin of safety is no longer incalculable—we cannot  tell ourselves there will always be more trees, more fish, more land, more everything. It is now possible to calculate the very day (conditions being constant) that the last tree in the Amazon rain-forest is cut down, the exact day that over-used aquifers in our Southwestern states go dry—forever, the day that China’s largest cities are forced to evacuate because of toxic contamination of the local atmosphere.

It is the final nail in our coffin—our potential doomsdays are too fantastic to take seriously. Also, there have been many Chicken Littles throughout history, predicting humanity’s Doom—next year, next month, or tomorrow—and they are always wrong. So, of course, it would be foolish to take me seriously—I’m just another over-excitable nut-job. Yes, I may be crazy—but no crazier than the world we live in.

There is one sensible thing we can all do, difficult though it may be—we can start seeing the USA as a part of the global civilization, rather than its leader. Think about it—with the world in the fine mess it’s in, why would we even want to take credit for its leadership? Plus, one thing becomes more painfully obvious every day—the globe has no leadership. No one is refereeing, no one is taking responsibility, no one is facing the hard truths about the world. We stick by our competitive, animal roots and tell ourselves that the cream always rises, that civilization is self-adjusting—and so it was, before we gained the fantastic powers granted to 21st Century people. We are powerful enough to tip the world out of balance, but we still insist that the world will right itself. Only by replacing competition with cooperation can we survive our looming, self-imposed disasters.

02 Russell's Last Visit (Sept. 2012)

02 Russell’s Last Visit (Sept. 2012)