I like old
dogs—they are so honest and stoic in their aging. They don't
understand, it seems, but they accept. Our first dog was really
neurotic, but we got along. Toward the end of her life, after I got
home from work and finished dinner, I'd lie on the couch beside her,
head to head. Two old ladies spacing out, I'd say to her! Not that
I was old yet, but I was about twenty years over the median age in
this country and teaching students who never got older—and
beginning to realize I was on the down slope of the circle of life.
That dog is dead now, but I adopted another one when she was about
eight (the keepers did not know her age), and she's now about
thirteen and chugging along beside me, though slowing down—as,
indeed, I am as well, just a bit!
One of the things
that worries me as I see more and more time pass is how we as a
species are becoming increasingly more detached from nature, year by
year, day by day. Incredibly, more than 80% of us Americans live in
urban or suburban areas, leaving (as Wikipedia puts it) “vast
expanses of the country nearly uninhabited.”1
This growing estrangement from our original ground, from that within
which we have evolved has, obviously, very great implications for how
we see our world—and how we think metaphorically, even if we can
think metaphorically. Several recent news article have touched on
this issue.
The most scary
article was, to me, an essay by Justin Cronin titled “Confessions
of a Liberal Gun Owner.”2
Mr. Cronin, a well-regarded novelist and professor, relates that he
keeps “half a dozen pistols in my safe” at home, and he's
“currently shopping for a shotgun.” He lives in the Houston
metropolitan area and thus has little likelihood of defending himself
from wild animals. In his essay, he is quite open about the fact
that what he feels he needs to defend himself and his family against
is society, other people. He recounts that in advance of Hurricane
Rita, which hit Texas soon after Hurricane Katrina, he and his family
tried to drive inland, only to confront this situation:
By
2 in the morning, after six hours on the road, we had made it all of
50 miles. The scene was
like a snapshot from the
Apocalypse: crowds milling restlessly, gas stations and mini-marts
picked clean and heaped with trash,
families sleeping by the side of the road. The situation had
the hopped-up feel of barely
bottled chaos. After Katrina, nobody had any illusions that help
was on its way. It also occurred to
me that there were probably a lot of guns out there — this
was Texas, after all. Here I was
with two tiny children, a couple of thousand dollars in cash, a
late-model S.U.V. with half a tank
of gas and not so much as a heavy book to throw.
Cronin concluded from this experience:
“Like most citizens of our modern, technological world, I am
wholly reliant upon a fragile web of services to meet my most basic
needs. What would happen if those services collapsed? Chaos, that’s
what.” One thing I find disturbing here is the conclusion that
it will have to be us or them, not that we will all be in this
bad situation together. But even more clearly, this intelligent man
feels acutely how precarious we all are, how dependent upon our
social web which is maintained by our rather vulnerable
technology—and at a level that most of us by far cannot understand
or affect.
Not only that, but we have drastically
minimized how often we come into contact with the basic facts of
biological life—even of human biological life. In his recent
essay, “You Are Going to Die,”3
Tim Kreider (writer and artist) worries about this estrangement,
after accompanying his mother to her new elder-care home.
Segregating the old and the sick
enables a fantasy, as baseless as the fantasy of capitalism’s
endless expansion, of youth and
health as eternal, in which old age can seem to be an
inexplicably bad lifestyle choice,
like eating junk food or buying a minivan, that you can avoid
if you’re well-educated or hip
enough. So that when through absolutely no fault of your own
your eyesight begins to blur and
you can no longer eat whatever you want without consequence
and the hangovers start lasting for
days, you feel somehow ripped off, lied to. Aging feels
grotesquely unfair. As if there
ought to be someone to sue.
There is humor
here, but it is a grim humor—for people do sue other people for not
controlling nature, as surely we should be able to do by now! A tree
limb falls in Central Park on a pedestrian below, and it's no longer
an accident of nature (to be dealt with with your own insurance); now
it is a breach of social trust and the city can be held responsible
for the bad behavior of its trees and sued for millions of dollars.
What I'm trying to
get at here is that our baseline for understanding reality is
increasingly social these days, no longer natural. People who live
on a beach and lose their house during a storm, which is a
predictable and inevitable event, given enough time, now are often
fully compensated by the government for their loss. In effect, we
deny nature; we deny the insecurity that nature can provoke; we
prefer to believe that we should be able to control nature, even if
we often can't—and that someone should be held responsible when we
don't. To me this is ludicrous—a real slip away from reality, even
pathological.
My husband and I
took a trip to the still-wild Amazon River region when we were young,
decades ago. We bought heavy hiking boots and heavy wools socks for
the trip, but there were women on the excursion who brought only
indoor shoes and stockings—and we were staying alternately on
mountains or in jungles in decidedly primitive conditions! How many
of us have come to the reassuring but deluded conclusion that the
life we live in a comfortable city or suburb, with sidewalks and very
little in the way of wildlife, is the norm—and that when we stray
from that norm unprepared, someone should be blamed for not
maintaining the norm. This kind of insular blindness leads to a
false basis of reality. Metaphor doesn't work very well in this
artificial world, because so much of the artificial world is
abstract, as opposed to the real concrete existence of nature. In
society we often start with abstract ideals, such as that no one
should ever have to die from a falling tree limb, and then we create
laws and lawsuits to try to secure that abstract reality as the world
we actually live in. In nature, however, you always have to start
with the real things around you; if you don't know how to interact
with them properly, you will eventually get hurt or die.
Some people, aware
that technology will probably not always serve us successfully, have
begun to study means by which we can survive the effects of our own
technologies. Huw Price (Cambridge philosopher) has created a think
tank at Cambridge University to study what might happen to us
biological beings if our technologies get too successful and
escape our control.
I do think that
there are strong reasons to think that we humans are nearing one of
the most
significant moments in our entire
history: the point at which intelligence escapes the
constraints of biology. And I see
no compelling grounds for confidence that if that does
happen, we will survive the
transition in reasonable shape. . . . our own intelligence is an
evolved biological solution to a
kind of optimization problem. . . . . The hardware needs to fit
through a mammalian birth canal, to
be reasonably protected for a mobile life in a hazardous
environment, [etc.] . . . the
distinctive thing about our peak in the present biological landscape
is that we tend to be much better
at controlling our environment than any other species. . . . the
question is then whether machines
might at some point do an even better job (perhaps a vastly
better job). . . . Indeed, it's not
really clear who 'we' would be in those circumstances.”4
Throughout his
essay Price uses the metaphor of a large volcano—Mt. Fuji, to be
precise. We socialized humans are that big volcano; we dominate our
environment. But if a larger volcano emerges (the regrowth of
Krakatoa, perhaps, which is actually occurring), where does that
leave us? Instead of spewing our own make up over our surroundings,
something more powerful than us will be spewing its make up on us and
our environment. That is essentially our choice—that we remain the
big shot in our natural world or that we risk becoming subordinates
in a technological world. Nature is the environment we evolved
within; it is what we have learned to succeed in. Technology is
abstract—we make it out of our thoughts; it has evolved from us.
It is an entirely different world, one in which we may not succeed
because of how we have evolved.
Ironically,
technology may do to us someday what we have done to nature—ignore
our reality, try to control us. The more we measure ourselves
against the social world instead of against the natural world in our
thoughts and thus our metaphors, the more we prepare ourselves to
accept that eventuality. In his essay “Politics and the English
Language,” George Orwell laments that many metaphors have become so
common that we no longer respond to them as metaphors; they have
become cliches.5
He uses as an example of a metaphor long past functioning as a fresh
image the phrase “iron resolution.” But why do we need to give
up on such common metaphors, surrender them to the realm of clichés?
What if we were more alert to, even educated to watch for images that
anchor ideas in our speech and writing—and even try to use more of
them? What if we actually paused to imagine something like an iron
railing, perhaps running along a cliff or perhaps separating a
private beach from a public beach, when we use the term “iron
resolution.” Sometimes we are very grateful for the unyielding
nature of that iron, sometimes not. And we know that iron will,
eventually, rust—even when nicely painted. Abstract ideas are
often like iron railings. They have a purpose, but they can also be
prohibitive and punitive—and they will eventually decay, hopefully
unlike our (so far) renewable natural world.
1See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
2http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/opinion/confessions-of-a-liberal-gun-owner.html?emc=eta1
3http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/you-are-going-to-die/?emc=eta1
4http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/cambridge-cabs-and-copenhagen-my-route-to-existential-risk/?emc=eta1
. I have moved the final sentence in the quote above to that point
from earlier in the article in order to clarify the meaning of
Price's argument in this extract, as I see it.
5Please
see my previous blog post, “Stupid Guns,” which discusses this
essay at some length.
