I often read arguments about the ability or inability of humans to change. They generally fall into two categories, depending on their proponent's worldview:
- Humans
can change quickly because we are no longer constrained by our bodies
and by natural evolution. What makes us 'us' now is our cultural
evolution, not our biological one. Freed from 'natural' restrictions,
we can change in a heartbeat. We can accomplish anything. Mind over
matter. Imagination trumps mere reality. We can reach the stars, we can
live forever. We can create technologies, extensions of our brains,
that transcend all 'real'-world limits. We just need to want to do it,
and it will be done.
- People don't change. We're still living
with (and in) hardware, our bodies, that control most of what we are
and what we do and which evolve infinitesimally slowly. Only 18 of the
16 million bits of information our bodies process each second are
conscious. It doesn't matter that our brains have allowed us to
establish more complex cultures than those of other species. We
continue to be preoccupied with the needs of the moment. We do what we
must, then we do what's easy, then we do what's fun. There is no time
left for anything else. We can't even grasp real complexity, let alone control it.
I'm
not sure there's any reconciling these two views, though there seem to
be lots of people determined to try. For years I was a fence-sitter on
this issue, unwilling or unable to make up my mind. Recently I've come
down squarely in the second, less popular camp. That's not to say I
couldn't be convinced to change my mind. But it jibes better both with
my understanding of history and with my instincts.
I remember
sitting in a dentist's waiting room many years ago and watching three
generations of a Chinese-Canadian family. The grandparents spoke no
English, dressed traditionally, and seemed bewildered and distraught
about the world. The grandchildren spoke only English, dressed in
definitive Canadian branded clothing, and seemed able to take anything
in stride. The parents, caught in the middle, had to translate for
their own families. They struck me as simply coping, dealing with the
needs of the moment. To the grandparents, their grandchildren were
utterly alien, incomprehensible.
I've seen this again and again
over the years, and I now closely observe my own grand-daughters for
evidence of how able new generations are to make leapfrog changes that
any one individual, no matter how long her lifetime, could not. I
recall in my youth arguing with my father (himself a progressive, all
his life) about his generation's inability to change. I told him I
didn't trust anyone over thirty, and that it was time for 'the
establishment' to get out of the way of the momentous change we were
destined to bring about in a new, loving, peaceful Earth.
Come gather 'round people wherever you roam, And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone, For the times they are a-changin'.
Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen, And keep your eyes wide the chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon for the wheel's still in spin, And there's no tellin' who that it's namin'.
For the loser now will be later to win, For the times they are a-changin'.
Come senators, congressmen please heed the call, Don't stand in the doorway don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled. There's a battle outside and it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls, For the times they are a-changin'.
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, And don't criticize what you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. Your old road is rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand, For the times they are a-changin'.
The line it is drawn the curse it is cast, The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past. The order is rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now will later be last, For the times they are a-changin'.
Dylan
wrote that over 40 years ago, and my father's argument that it had all
been said before, generation after generation, yet we kept making the
same mistakes over and over, fell on deaf ears. He just didn't understand, I thought. This is something new. And now, nearly 40 years later, I have become my father. And we are still making the same mistakes, over and over.
My Genius is Imagining What's Possible. It's a useful and interesting talent. But I don't confuse what's possible with what's likely. It's possible that a meteor will hit the Earth tomorrow. It's possible
that some benign alien species will arrive tomorrow and fix all the
world's problems for us. But I'm not counting on it, in deciding what
to do next and what to do in the future. It's possible
that humanity and technology will transcend the looming crisis facing
us, and it's interesting to imagine that happening. But it's science
fiction stuff, escapism, denial, a distraction from reality, from the
real work facing us here, now.
Back in the 1960s, we did what we
had to do. We shook an intolerant, war-mongering, fearful culture to
its foundations. We ended the war. We challenged everything. We tried
some bold and optimistic experiments.
But in the end, we changed
nothing. Our twin religions of humanism and technology, it turned out,
were not enough to make us, and our culture, over into something we,
and it, were not.
So now I'm a skeptic about our ability to
change. I recognize its imperative. I can imagine and appreciate its
possibility. And I think about the leapfrogs that were made, from the
generation of my grandfather, an enlightened and conservative
depression-era survivor (and, like me, a bird-watcher); to the
generation of my father, a progressive and an explorer who is still
today generous to a fault; to my generation; to that of my lovely
children, utterly caught up, like the middle generation of that
Chinese-Canadian family in the dentist's office, with the immediate
needs of the moment, raising their own families in a deeply troubled
economy; to the generation of my extraordinary grand-daughters, who are
learning, exploring, discovering what their world is about, and who are
not yet ready for the terrible lessons I have for them about their
future.
My grand-daughters' culture is as different from mine as
mine was from my grandfather's and from that Chinese-Canadian family's.
Yet somehow, in the ways that are important, these cultures are
indistinguishable. Almost as much as 'we' are mere servants of our
bodies, so too are we co-prisoners of our culture. Noam Chomsky has
said that all human languages are so astonishingly similar that an
alien ethnographer would have absolutely no doubt that we all came from
a single ancestor. Anthropologists are flabbergasted that human groups
so utterly separated by time and space have evolved such staggeringly
similar cultures, quite independently. Our culture, with its local
variations that cause us so much conflict, is becoming more homogeneous
and undifferentiated, and hence poorer and less adaptable, less
capable of complex change, every day. Rather than liberating us from
doing what we must, and enabling us to do what we can and what is
imaginable, our culture is instead our bodies' evolutionary servant.
Our bodies evolved our brains to invent culture because without it we
would have perished. To see human culture and 'consciousness' as
anything more than an evolutionary survival mechanism is a colossal,
collective conceit, an exercise, like belief in The Rapture, in magical
thinking. As Eliot said, "Human kind cannot bear very much reality".
So
we go on doing what we must. Rising and groaning and going to work.
Sublimating our dreams and intuitions and imaginations. Looking after
the needs of the moment. Invading Iraq and tomorrow Iran to feed the
inextinguishable hunger for the 'food' that nourishes our fragile
bodies and keeps us in the evolutionary gene pool. Distracting
ourselves to death with useless information and desperate consumption
and flimsy entertainments. Exploding in numbers and despoiling and
impoverishing the Earth. Generation after generation, being what we
are, and doing what we do.
The answer is, ironically, not striving for impossible, collective change, but rather becoming more truly human. Connecting better, more authentically to each other and to nature. Learning everything we can; learning to be useful, to be a part.
Becoming more aware, more sensual, more instinctive, more generous,
more in touch with 'our' bodies and hence ourselves. Taking delight in
small pleasures. Living on the Edge. Slowing down and paying attention
and living in the moment, undistracted. Refusing to be being everyone else in our culture.
That
will not save us, but it will give our lives meaning and purpose. In
the end, I think, that is all there is, and all that can be asked of us.
Image: From Danish Ministry of the Environment. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
