Scale

A blog friend, Robert, and I have had a spirited political exchange on Deb's and my sailing blog. It has been fun, though there is a basic misunderstanding typical of conservative thought. For him there is only one possible social scale with conservative ideology at the “right” end, liberal ideology at the “wrong” end. Everyone and every policy falls somewhere on that scale. Since I do not share his conservative ideals I must therefore be a liberal.

That scale is an illusion, it has no units that measure how I see the world. But the truth is I cannot offer Robert, or anyone else (including myself), a label that fits how I do look at the world. “Off the Reservation” is all I have managed, and it is not very enlightening. I am a human being who suspects that humanity is a failing evolutionary experiment on what to do with consciousness and intelligence. We are smart enough to do ourselves in and not wise enough to avoid it. I can be described as an atheist. Yet I see self awareness as a fundamental facet of the universe, akin to a dimension or force, in a cosmos that is more like a thought than a machine. We are a mote of an idea in a fully integrated and border-less reality, and maybe not a very good idea. It may be that biology, tool making, tribalism, and intelligence are simply a bad mix that can never mature into much of anything, but it was worth a try.

At best we are a collection of dimly intelligent children who learned how to write just 10,000 years ago. We have barely begun to grasp our place in the universe, if we have even gotten that far. Our politics, religions, economics and wars are largely driven by animal instincts we do not understand and mostly deny. Our religions have their foundations in our caveman beginnings.

Adulthood is hundreds, perhaps thousands, of generations away. One might suspect, on the evidence, that we lack the capacity to ever live that long. Our travels through this life will always be those of children who do not really understand much of anything. If we could just grasp that, maybe we would actually start to grow up a little. Sadly, that understanding is one that still lies beyond our limited reach.

I am not a believer; neither am I completely comfortable with the label “atheist”. Both terms have their foundations in a view of the cosmos so primitive as to be essentially nonsense. “God” is a term that has no meaning. How can one “not believe”? It is like trying to grasp a vacuum, there is nothing there. In addition most of religion is based on the utterly false claim that we were created as adults, but are fallen. It tells us that we are damaged, not children, and need salvation, not maturity. It teaches that someone will come and save us, not that we need to grow up. Our society is steeped in the false assumption that we already know everything we need to know to be adults; that humans are as intelligent as intelligence gets. Religion prevents us from understanding the one thing we need to understand if there is to be much hope for a future that includes humanity.

We have yet to invent a political or economic system that works. I am not a conservative or a liberal. I am not a socialist or capitalist or communist. I don't “believe” in democracy, theocracy, or the divine right of Kings. They are all the babbling of children whose vocabulary is limited to a few hundred words, pictures whose coloring is far, far from being inside the lines. Scribbles mostly, incoherent and chaotic. With politics we have yet to outgrow the “bully” stage. Nation / States are make believe boarders. This swing set is where the cool kids hang out. That carousal is for the nerds. Our economics consists of “THAT is MINE”.

We still love war and force and threats. We like to hurt things. We like to break things; not to understand them better, but just to break them, like a two year old knocking down his brothers block tower.

I have to live in this world, navigating the preschool playground that is humanity, all the while knowing I am just one of the children. A person who lived 20,000 years ago couldn't reach much beyond his or her primitive society. He or she was limited by the social boundaries of knowledge and technology. I can't reach much beyond mine. We are all as integrated into human kind's current disposition as we are in the dimensions of space and time. That current disposition is one based mostly on fantasy, hubris, ego, and delusion. (Remember that that earlier person was physically identical to us and fully human in every possible way, just as smart, just as capable.)

I try to live my life with the curiosity and joy of a child while remembering that we do not even know what it is we do not know. I try to judge things by how they work for all of us on the playground. Who gets hurt, who gets helped, who does the hurting, who does the helping. Who is hording all the marbles. Who are the bullies and just how dangerous are they likely to be. Who cheats. Who plays fair. But I can't help but hope that in a truly adult world such concerns would be laid aside, making room for a better way to live.

I act all grown up when I talk about it, use the biggest words we have, pontificate a bit. All kids like to sound like adults, and we all do it. But the fact is we do not even know, for sure, just what “adulthood” means. I thought I did when I was 20. I thought I did when I was 30. At 59 I am not so sure. Humans have barely 5,000 generations of evolution behind us, just 300 since we started to write, 13 since Galileo first spotted the moons of Jupiter, 5 since Darwin published his book, not yet 3 since Hubble discovered the universe is expanding. Dark energy was discovered and the Internet invented in this generation. (The cosmos by the way, if measured by human standards, is 490,000,000 generations old. But then, we are not exactly sure just how to measure time. All we have is our reference frame. For a photon of the original “Big Bang” - what we call cosmic background radiation – no time has passed at all.)

I'll argue politics, religion, economics, and philosophy. Not very well sometimes, but I will give it a shot. I may even enjoy it. But I can never forget that the debaters are children playing hopscotch in the sand, that most of what is being debated is based on utter, unrelenting, nonsense.  We are talking but, on any real scale of measure, we can't possibly know much of what we are talking about.

 The only saving grace is the hope that we are doing the best we can. But I'm not sure that we are.