Loss

Originally written Monday, February 14, 2005

On the weekend, I watched a small part of a speech by Ronald Wright, the author of A Short History of Progress, a book that’s been recommended to me here and that I would really like to read. What I saw of his speech was interesting. He was talking about predictions – some intentionally satirical predictions he had made in a book written years ago that actually came true – and some predictions made by various people (futurists, scientists) and groups (like the Pentagon) for the future.

As we are accustomed to hearing, the predictions were frightening. The Pentagon (“hardly a group of hippie tree-huggers” as he said) predicting worldwide chaos, war, and environmental destruction if the more severe predictions for climate change come true. Other predictions dealt with the consequences of war, pollution, overpopulation and the “onslaught of progress”. He also talked about how this is the century where we have to get it right, that this could be the last century where we have the chance to turn things around. I think he’s right about that.

Unfortunately, the task is monumental and it’s getting harder every day. In fact, instead of things getting better, things are actually getting worse, quicker and quicker by the day. Instead of having a global leader intent on improving our world, we have America intent on driving us to the very bottom as quickly as possible. Instead of the world getting cleaner and more sustainable, we are polluting more and more each day. Instead of more social justice, things are becoming more unequal and more unjust each day.

For centuries, humanity has been hearing warnings of the end of the world (or more accurately, the end of us, which to humans is the same thing). We’re used to proving the doomsayers wrong, even when our escape from doom is “more luck than judgement”, as Wright called our avoidance of nuclear disaster during the Cold War. In spite of previous escapes, there is a certain line in our future that, once crossed, will stop us from ever turning back. Our fate will be sealed. The frightening part is that we will not know when we have crossed that line, and we may have crossed it already.

We have already experienced tremendous loss, and we lose more each day, but we feel immune to it, so powerful is our self-deception. If we were a sane society, we would be in mourning right now. We lose millions of each other each year for no good reason, through war, hunger and disease. We lose priceless links with our past as we carelessly destroy artefacts, languages and cultures – a painful loss, because what we are really losing are other ways of being, living and understanding, ways that might be superior to what we have now. We lose species each day, slamming the door shut on millions of years of slow and painful evolutionary development. We lose the contribution of human intelligence and ingenuity, contributions perhaps essential to our survival, as millions of children are born each year mentally underdeveloped because of malnutrition, with millions more unable to apply themselves because of their poverty.

If we keep losing like this, at some point we will have lost.

Comment from Alevo:

I went to his first of Wright’s several Massey lectures this fall. I believe the subtitle for his series was: every time we ignore the lessons of history the price goes up. His talk definitely gave cause to wonder, suggesting that for centuries technology has been viewed as humanity’s salvation from behavior counterintuitive to survival. If things go wrong – we can invent technology to fix it. If extinction is on the horizon – we’ll drum up some solution. However, we may have very well crossed a threshold. Our Western cultural narrative is too replete with stories resolved in the nick of time. It will be our own undoing. How thoroughly ironic.