My natural inclination is toward the silver linings, buoyancy, resilience, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Light followed by dark followed by brighter light.
The view from afar, over the long-term. Not letting our daubers down, lemonading from the lemons.
First the birth, then the fall, then the grace.
I used to think time was on the side of the human project, our capacious brains ultimately squeezing out a net gain for human reason, the virtues of cooperation, and the case for common decency in the face of ignorance, superstition, greed, and fear.
That however ceaseless is the struggle for mere survival, humanity would ultimately forge ahead, closer, inch by inch, to some omega point where freedom, justice, equality and peace would be more than pretty words hung from the rafters of libraries, universities, and government buildings where the people’s business—all people’s business—must reign supreme.
I’m not sure I think that anymore.
Which is to say I think we’re at great risk not to fulfill what has always seemed to be our natural destiny to grow not to perfection but at least toward a steadfast, sustainable goodness and greater intelligence of every kind. Shouldn’t such a destiny follow from our predilection for constant thinking, imagining, speculating, yearning, tinkering, experimenting, drawing, writing, talking and singing our way into ever greater awareness and knowledge of ourselves and our world?
You would think so.
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Mary came home recently with the ceramic doo-dad you see above, and as I examined it in my hands I realized I had not the foggiest idea what it was (though I did consider it a pleasing color). Turned out to be an “egg white separator” for those occasions when one is trying to reduce cholesterol intake by forsaking the yolks, or wanting to bake some confection, or trying to get an omelette to a perfectly idealized balance of density-puffiness.
A cursory Google search shows variations on the basic design above selling from a range of 10 cents (“50% off!”) at Schein.com to $643.12 at Pastry Chef’s. (“Professional!”) Those are among the 25 “Sponsored” varieties on offer, followed by a long scroll that I just couldn’t bring myself to persist in counting.
Not being a baker nor much of an omelette maker (I’m a scrambled kinda guy), I was amazed at this, given the only egg white separating I’d ever seen had been done by hand, via back-and-forth little pours between a couple of small containers until the whites had oozed out on their own, distinct from the yolks they had previously undergirded.
And now I beheld a tool specifically designed for that purpose alone, occupying a place in countless modern kitchens, sold as a separate item, for which there are factories around the world tooled to the precise specifications of that design and the dozens of others available with a half-second search via Madam (Mr.?) Google.
Far be it for lions and tigers and bears to conceive of such an item, am I right?
Oh my!
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To be clear: there’s nothing inherently wrong with a world that produces a dazzling array of items geared to make every currently conceivable human function either easier, cheaper, more effective, or all of those. And that includes egg white separators, which are a classic example of human ingenuity and problem solving—as is the discovery one can do various good things by separating egg whites from their yokes in the first place.
We’re a clever, curious and ambitious species, naturally disposed to dreams of building the better mousetraps that have launched a million businesses and made a good number of their owners into million- and billionaires. (And also bankrupted many as well.)
More, more, more is the byword of all life forms, after all.
Whether plant or animal, every living thing has one primary, instinctual program from its get-go—to increase its chances of survival, to go on living until it can live no more.
And not unimportantly, to leave plenty of descendants behind.
And though you might be tempted to think wisteria, weeds, ants and roaches are much more purposeful at all that than they need to be, no species can even remotely match our ability to access almost limitless, on-demand food sources, develop and constantly improve our tools to do so, radically extend our lifespans, and in the developed world at least, achieve an astounding excess of material goods that could never remotely occur as either a need or want to our lessers in the animal kingdom.
And it is the latter of those that sees us listing toward a likely unsustainable way of life.
Twenty different varieties of canned tomatoes in your local supermarket, anyone?
An estimated $218 billion worth of food gone uneaten annually in the U.S. alone, taking up some 22% of the space in its landfills?
A 90,000-square-foot house (pictured below) that sports nine kitchens, 14 bedrooms, 30 bathrooms, three indoor and two outdoor pools, a ballroom, a baseball diamond, two tennis courts, a two-story movie theater and a two-lane “commercial grade” bowling alley?
In a 2012 documentary on the multi-year development of that home, its owner was asked about the impetus for building such a gargantuan edifice. His response: “Because I can.”
At some level, that is one reason we do most everything in life. But it begets the question: Does some variety of enough or relative stasis ever get a seat at human life’s banquet table?
Increasingly, what we are learning is: It had better.
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German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz recently took to the “New York Times” with a kind of snapshot of what we might call the current human condition, headlining an essay that proclaimed, “The West Is Lost.”
His first two paragraphs waste no time in following up that declaration:
“From the Enlightenment onward, progress functioned as the secular creed of the West. For centuries our societies were defined by the conviction that the future must outshine the present, just as the present surpassed the past. Such optimistic faith was not merely cultural or institutional but all-encompassing: Everything was going to get better. In this way of thinking, there was no room for loss.
“Today, that civilizational belief is under profound threat. Loss has become a pervasive condition of life in Europe and America. It shapes the collective horizon more insistently than at any time since 1945, spilling into the mainstream of political, intellectual and everyday life. The question is no longer whether loss can be avoided but whether societies whose imagination is bound to ‘better’ and ‘more’ can learn to endure ‘less’ and ‘worse.'”
Reckwitz sees the same problems we all do: environmental degradation leading to resource depletion and climate change, economies grappling with the effects of deindustrialization, radical income disparities of opulent wealth on one end and starvation on the other, rapid technological change exacerbating those disparities.
To which I would add age-old geopolitical conflicts rooted in the same survival/dominance instinct of territoriality that sees your family (male, notably) dog lift its leg and water every neighborhood tree on his daily walks.
But unlike dogs and all other creatures of the animal kingdom who have remained essentially unchanged over the eons in their arsenal of survival tools, modern humans have paradoxically, both in weaponry and resource acquisition, developed such lethal, profligate means of trying to ensure our survival, buttressed by the “moremoremore” instinct run amok, that our actual survival as a species has now come into serious question.
In a profound sense, the circular firing squad has become a uniquely human invention, potentially sealing our doom.
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Reckwitz’s last line—”…whether societies whose imagination is bound to ‘better’ and ‘more’ can learn to endure ‘less’ and ‘worse'”—lays down a daunting challenge, given how deeply it cuts against the grain of a certain kind of human striving and optimism.
Inhabiting a world that is supposed to get better, more prosperous and fulfilling for each successive generation is the story of our species, after all. Or at least it’s a story we have continued to tell ourselves, one that has gotten rocket boosts with each world-changing invention going back to the wheel, the development of agriculture, the printing press, industry, flight, computerization.
All that “moreness”…
How is it that so many of us are still starving for want of food, and the rest of us are increasingly forced to consider not only a tempering of limitless “progress,” but also an increasingly unlivable world of conflict, mass suffering and potential planetary suicide?
Can the “moreness” that seems to decay over time into rapaciousness and greed be tempered in time for us to avoid the ultimate self-destruction that lurks darkly behind our strivings, given the inherent contradiction of limitless growth and consumption on a limited planet?
Reckwith’s prescription to remedy that challenge falls along three lines: “resilience,” a reimagination of our lives that he labels “revaluation,” and a third “r” that is virtually guaranteed to elicit howls of indignation from the absolutist free marketeers who have ridden capitalism to the rarefied, now problematic heights it has attained: “redistribution.”
That third “r” does not require confiscation of all surplus wealth, I should hasten to add, but only a more equitable distribution that might reduce aggregate human suffering and the class conflict borne of drastic material want.
Though Reckwith does not touch on religion as such, the requirement that we change our values, expectations and very way of life, that we live within our societal and planetary means, suggests a profound spiritual transformation. It means changing ourselves rather than the things outside ourselves, given how closely those external pursuits have brought us to a precipice of profound risk.
But given the reality of the “more and better” instinct, and the complexity of human emotion, where internal change is mostly laborious and incremental at best, can we make the adjustments Reckwith sees as necessary in time to save ourselves?
He would like to think so:
“For liberal democracy, the implications are decisive. If politics continues to promise endless improvement, it will fuel disillusionment and strengthen populisms that thrive on betrayed expectations. But if democracies learn to articulate a more ambivalent narrative—one that acknowledges loss, confronts vulnerability, redefines progress and pursues resilience—they may paradoxically renew themselves.
“To face truth with open eyes, to accept fragility and to incorporate loss into the democratic imagination could, in fact, be the precondition of its vitality.”
On my end, I’m none too sure anymore we can “face truth” to the degree that will be necessary. How about you?
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This song in the early minutes sounds a bit heavy-handed and ironic, given the dramatic over-consumption and crimes against his own true nature by the singer, but there’s no denying the power of the rhetorical question asked via a kind of primal scream in the latter minutes, with imagery to match, and for which, these years later, we still have no real answer…
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See and hit the Follow button at https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas for regular 1-minute or less dispatches from the world’s great thinkers, artists and musers, accompanied always by lovely photography.
Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing
Homepage rotating banner photos (except for library books) by Elizabeth Haslam https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Jet and highrise by Nirmal Rajendharkumar, Milano, Italy https://unsplash.com/@neotronimz
Egg separator by Andrew Hidas https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewhidas/
Protoplasm by Darren E., Bristol, UK https://www.flickr.com/photos/lightbox/
Versaille mansion from Instagram
Woman peeking out window by Alexander Grey https://unsplash.com/@sharonmccutcheon
I’ll probably be gone before these problems manifest themselves. Being 83 offers this silver lining.
I often find myself feeling the same way, John. And then I look at my daughter & grandkids…
I recently read some piece by a Gen X’er excoriating Boomers for handing them a lousy world, but more and more I think the qualities that have gotten us into this much glory and trouble are baked into our very humanity, and we just can’t help ourselves—too much instinctual will to power and mastery, not enough forethought and willful restraint. Think I’d better go review my Nietzsche…
There’s a lot to digest in this blog: our constant endeavor to build a better place for all of us to live in has instead become a Bleak House, and our once Great Expectations may not be so great; I love Mary’s doo-dad ceramic egg white separator is (may get one for Claire); your preference to scrambled eggs over an omelette surprised me; today’s “moremoremore” mania may lead to a “lesslessless” world for our grandchildren; can we “face the truth with open eyes” and somehow retard the march of the goose steppers? do we as a human race prefer killing fields to flowering ones?
Then, there’s this. In the film The 3rd Man, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), an evil black marketer in Vienna following World War 2, reminds his childhood friend writer Holly Martins (Jospeh Cotton), “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace-and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Well there’s much to digest in your comment as well, Mr. Spencer—the bit about Harry Lime (what a name!) and his ruminations on the Italians and Swiss easily the most provocative.
Sometimes I think the theme of genius-madness is overplayed in the artistic world, but there’s no denying that artists most always live to greater or lesser degrees in opposition to the dominant culture. The tension provides grist for the mill of their creativity, but then the rest of it is up to the individual and his/her inner conflicts, neuroses, passions. Not all of them feel compelled to cut off their ear or stick their head in an oven.
I have to admit, though, that I remain completely ignorant of any artistic figure coming from the famously neutral, sensible, emotionally self-contained Swiss! No “… best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…” !!!
How about me? Fourteen years ago, I sold 80% of my belongings, moved to Costa Rica, and began a life built on “less is more.” The weight I didn’t even know I was carrying lifted off me like a backpack full of canned goods. Now, by living with less, I have so much more.
I’m tying flies again, and since there are no fancy fly shops here, I’ve had to get creative. Those genetically modified rooster hackles that sell for $100? I find them on my daughter’s roosters instead. That’s just one of dozens of “make-do-with-what-you’ve-got” ways I enjoy this pastime — and it perfectly reflects the Pura Vida lifestyle.
For years, many Islamic thinkers have warned about the decline of the West and the corrosive effects of its technology and culture. Eastern philosophies have long preached the same lesson — that “more” is not “better.” The Amish, Mennonites, and other Christian sects have practiced this restraint for generations, choosing simplicity over progress.
A recent documentary showed social scientists introducing a generator, a dozen cell phones, and Starlink to a remote Amazonian tribe. Within weeks, their social bonds began to unravel. Within a year, much of their traditional culture was gone. The children stopped fishing and helping with chores — they were glued instead to TikTok and video games. Sound familiar?https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/svg/1f517.svg Watch here
So I’m with you, Drew — I’m not sure if we can stop the momentum of this cultural wrecking ball. Maybe we can only slow it down.
I just bought an electric car, and here in Costa Rica it feels right — our energy is 100% renewable. But in the U.S., it’s another story. There, the push seems less about sustainability and more about bragging rights: 0 to 60 mph in 1.99 seconds!
That’s not the road to a lasting way of life.
You’re definitely trending in the right direction, no doubt about it, my man. I think there are lots of voices now calling for rethinking the whole technology-algorithms-social media sphere, but whether they will be able to overcome its massive, money-fueled intrusion into everyday life is a very daunting matter. And now AI has dumped a massive new challenge on the whole issue, the repercussions of which even our most visionary thinkers find it hard to yet imagine. Will it take some kind of cataclysm to finally get our heads straight on how to live on a human scale? Not sure the answer will come in our lifetime, so meanwhile, we carry on, as best and truly as we can.
Thanks for these thoughts and the link, which represent “good” parts of the technology revolution, as I have to think this very blog and comment section are as well. (Oh, the irony!!)