As
a slow learner, until I was in my early 20s, I was always behind the
times. Then in the 1970s, being just a bit late to embrace hippie
values, I caught up. Since then I have been cursed with being further
and further ahead of 'progressive' thought. I graduated with a computer
science degree before there were any jobs in the field. I jumped into
the 'knowledge economy' before it became (briefly) fashionable. I
foresaw the dot-com bust coming five years before it happened. When the
dire warnings of 'the population bomb' were sounded back around 1980 I
already knew the warnings were far too early, and would be ridiculed
when the 'bomb' failed to materialize -- and that by 2000, when the real
population crunch loomed, those who warned of it then would be
ridiculed as neo-Malthusians. Back in the late 1960s I thought the
summers of love would last forever, and realized too late how brief and
fragile that wonderful era would be, but by the 1980s I knew a
right-wing backlash was coming -- and worried about it a decade too soon. And everything I have recommended to the companies I have worked with and for has proved to be, in the long run, wise -- but way ahead of its time.
Today
I can see the future playing out like a futile game of chess, with the
answer a foregone conclusion. But now I am so far ahead of the
mainstream of progressive thinking that I alienate progressives as much
as conservatives. The ideas are out there -- the Slow Crash, the Long
Emergency -- but the world seems polarized by two groups equally
lacking in foresight: Those (progressives, moderates and conservatives)
who think some sort of global humanist renaissance and/or technology
and/or Rapture (respectively) will rescue us from civilizational
collapse, and those (neo-survivalists) who, almost eagerly, see such
collapse in the next decade, or at least in our lifetimes.
There
is no comfort, no smug satisfaction, as I get older, in finding my
predictions increasingly right. I end up arguing with almost everyone
-- progressives who still believe in social revolutions, moderates
(including many environmentalists) who are utterly incapable of seeing
that every technology in our history has, inadvertently, created more
problems than it has solved, and conservatives who get apoplectic when
I objectively analyze short-term business trends and give them insights
and analysis they find very valuable, but then shrug and say in the
long term it doesn't matter anyway because we're all fucked.
What
makes it worse is that I no longer really have the energy (I seem to be
constantly tired these days, and I've always been a sprinter, never
having much stamina) nor the patience to argue with people who really, really want to convince me, for my own good, that I have my head up my ass. The words of Daniel Quinn (from Beyond Civilization)
ring in my ears each time I get a challenging blog comment or e-mail,
or indulge in discussions on the future (I should know better) with
people in my various circles/networks:
People will listen when they're ready to listen
and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren't ready
to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people
come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them.
Don't preach. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll keep
you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something
new.
When presenting a new idea, you don't have to have all the answers. It's
better to say 'I don't know' than to fake it. Make people formulate their
own questions. Don't take on the responsibility of figuring out what their
difficulty is. We each internalize information differently. If you don't understand
a question, keep insisting they explain it until it's clear. Nine times out
of ten they'll supply the answer themselves.
Above all, listen. Your close attention is
sometimes more important than your articulateness in winning converts. And
learning is always a good thing.
Since I wrote my glowing review of John Gray's Straw Dogs,
I have met about two dozen people who, either because they have
excellent intuition and the intelligence to trust it, or because they
read as voraciously and indiscriminately as I do, just seem to get
this. When I meet or hear someone who understands Quinn's point above,
or cites some passage from Gray's book, like one of these:
We
humans have not changed and cannot change what we are, what we do, how
we behave or what we value. We are doomed by the coding in our DNA to
continue along our inexorable path of self-destruction, and to inflict
large-scale but ultimately transitory damage on our planet in the
process.
Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not
obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct.
When it is gone Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the
human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on
destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to
spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.
or perhaps this quote from Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress:
If
we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us --
nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the
laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.
or this quote from Reg Morrison's The Spirit in the Gene:
If
the human plague is really as normal as it looks, then the collapse
curve should mirror the growth curve. This means the bulk of the
collapse will not take much longer than 100 years, and by 2150 or so
the biosphere should be safely back to its preplague population of Homo
Sapiens -- somewhere between a half and one billion.
... I just sort of look at them quizzically, as if I'm not sure I should believe my own ears, and just nod. She/he gets it.
There is nothing more to be said. There is nothing to debate.
Acknowledge with a wry smile that our numbers, those of us who see Too
Far Ahead, are growing. We are heading for a wall, and it is far too
late to brake, but the worst part of the hideous messy crash is still a
half-century or more away. So accepting that, here, now, why is it so difficult for us to simultaneously be these four things:
- Accepting: Recognizing
that our new and well-intentioned but ill-conceived 30,000-year-old
'civilization' culture is on its last legs and will soon collapse in a
particularly unpleasant manner, no matter what we do (and it's no one's fault);
- Responsible (without laying guilt or blame): Doing our best nonetheless to reduce suffering, and to make the world a better place, each in our own way, while we're here;
- Joyful (alive, in the moment): Becoming fully aware, and relishing every day of our lives to the utmost for the astonishing and miraculous experience it is; and
- Purposeful (towards a full, natural life): Striving to become each day less what our bland culture tries to make us and more truly ourselves, animal creatures full of wonder, open, connected to and part of all life on our planet.
This is, admittedly, not easy. We are brought up to believe that we, the human master race, are in control,
of the world and of ourselves. It's hard to accept that we are what we
are, and that we cannot be otherwise no matter how our religions and
philosophies will us to be. It's even harder to accept responsibility
for our own actions (and inactions) knowing that the brief experiment
of human life on Earth is nearing an end, and that that is not
our responsibility. And then, with that burden of responsibility and
the news of our species' looming end, it becomes harder still to be
happy, here, now, in the moment. And then to put an onus on us to
strive for a fuller life, to become what our species has, in the last
30,000 years, forgotten to be, seems an almost unbearable demand of us.
Yet every other species on this planet simultaneously is
these four things. For them, it is easy, intuitive, natural. For us,
who have unlearned so much, who have turned away from all that we were,
it is a much greater challenge. But if we really understand our
purpose, our place, our destiny, it is an imperative, a duty. It is
what we must do.
In a word, we must learn grace.
So
I am announcing the start of a new Movement. It is the Movement of
People Too Far Ahead For Their Own Good. Or, for short, the Too Far
Ahead Movement. And since most movements have an icon, or a secret
handshake, or some other quiet acknowledgment of mutual membership,
like the 'V' sign of the 1960s Peace Movement, the Too Far Ahead
Movement should have a gesture, too.
What might be a good
gesture to acknowledge the presence of another Too Far Ahead person? We
could use something exotic like the 'be seeing you' gesture
from The Prisoner. But I'm leaning towards something subtle -- say, a
simple nod with eyes closed and closed right hand to right chest. And
for the Movement's logo, we could use an animal that exemplifies grace.
Like the one pictured above.
Photo by Kevin at the Bastish blog. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
