Straight to Camera
Chapter 6, Musing 24
The zany corner of Australia I’d found to live in was an excellent place to extrapolate the infinite from the everyday. Life was simple but colourful, with lots of inspiration and plenty of time to think. My feet were firmly in the gutter, but my head was in the clouds and my eyes were fixed, unwaveringly, upon the stars.
Here’s how I read it: you, me, everyone alive, everyone who’s ever lived and everyone who ever will live are on an adventure together. Until recently, the wisest understood this in principal, but no one had a handle on the parameters. Myths, legends and religious parables were our main tools for making sense of infinity and humanity’s relationship to it. That’s now changing.
Collectively, the human race has begun to piece together its own story and comprehend what it’s part of. The past is turning out to be remarkable, the future enigmatic and the cosmos mind-blowing. As for this epoch, its most striking features – it transpires – were shaped by two transitions through which the human world has recently passed. Together they have sent that world into flux.
The first of these transitions was the shift to agriculture as our main method of food production, a process which began about 12,000 years ago.
The initial effects on humanity were detrimental: hundreds of generations afflicted by oppression, instability, malnutrition and bad teeth. A great many of humanity’s biggest unresolved problems stem from its effects. But it also created opportunities. Big ones.
The second transition got going about 300 years ago and is now in full swing. Its first obvious manifestation was the Industrial Revolution. But that was just one in a series of related developments (which include the spread of world-changing technologies, a huge expansion in material wealth and dramatic increases in literacy and life expectancy) which are still playing themselves out.
We have a major problem in interpreting this second – current – transition: we’re too wrapped up in it to have perspective.
To illustrate what I mean, think about what it was like to live through the initial development of agriculture. Prehistoric humans didn’t wake up one day and decide to invent farming. Its adoption took the form of a series of individual steps, across thousands of years, involving small changes in subsistence from one generation to the next.
At certain stages during that process some of the people involved (presumably) grasped that their lifestyles were (slightly) different from those of their parents. But it’s only with the depth hindsight now available that we understand what was going on: humanity was swapping a way of life which had been stable for a million years for a completely different one, irrevocably. As for the ultimate implications – cities, civilisation and the rest – you can be sure those first farmers didn’t have the slightest clue.
Similarly, the true nature and implications of this second transition are impossible to identify because we’re slap bang in the middle of it. Global society is exceedingly dynamic. We’re rushing forward into an unknown future, but we have no idea what it’s going to look like. What is human civilisation turning into? What will it be like in another 12,000 years? What, in later ages, will historians make of all this?
We’re not even in a position to know which aspects of this transformative period are genuinely significant. Is it the great increase in life spans? The increase in knowledge? Is it the change from rural to urban living as the norm for humankind? The spiralling sophistication of computers? Could it be some aspect of bourgeois culture which we have failed, thus far, to grasp the deeper significance of? Or maybe all those things are just the prelude to something else. Maybe we stand at the threshold of an even more profound set of changes in the human world.
We just don’t know. But, in the shadow of Chartres Cathedral, it’s something about which I came to an opinion. I believe that the most significant thing about this current transition we’re living through is that this is the moment the human race is coming to understand its own context.
*****
Here’s the thing: intellectually, we all understand that these twenty-first-century post-industrial societies we inhabit are a chapter in a larger narrative. We understand that humans are a species of carbon-based life form which came into being via a process of evolution by natural selection and which is travelling down an unprecedented and uncharted path (civilisation). Yet, when people consider the world around them, that larger context is generally ignored.
For example, in the Newtown of that Australian winter of 2006, the main gripes of the educated, bohemian crowd within which I found myself were the environment and the (then) government of Prime Minister John Howard.
Mr Howard was considered an evil good-for-nothing because he was economically and socially right-wing and had sent troops to Iraq. The fact he was in charge was interpreted as a sure sign that the country was under the control of a corrupt establishment with a nefarious agenda.
I don’t have anything particularly to say about the merits or otherwise of Mr Howard’s government. The observation I do have is that, not only can we now evaluate our political systems beyond the strictures of such black and white tribalism, we now understand why humans are tribal in the first place and can assess those political systems (and their inadequacies) in terms of the twelve-thousand-year dynamic of which they are the current (and temporary) expression. As for our politicians, we can now deconstruct their behaviour right down to the twists of the double helices inside their every cell.
Discussion about the environment was dominated by the climate change issue and peopled with good guys (including Al Gore and Greenpeace) and bad guys (including oil companies and George W Bush). It’s incredibly healthy that we’re having those discussions. But not only can we have them, we can be realistic about the context in which we’re having them, i.e. seven billion monkeys running around on the surface of a planet, organising themselves through socially constructed abstractions (such as businesses, lobbying organisations and political parties) and struggling to make their civilisation environmentally sustainable.
Many areas of human interest, including lots of the really significant ones (such as humanity’s relationship with the environment, the existential elements of religious belief and everything about the process of globalisation), make much more sense if you think about them in terms of that wider context. Not just the problems of a bunch of humans in their twenty-first-century societies, but a phase in the story of a species of hyper-intelligent tool-using social omnivores trying to build a technological civilisation from scratch, without an instruction manual.
Getting people to think about what’s happening to the world in that context is a lot harder than you might think. Our conceptual systems – our very language – evolved in the pre-industrial, pre-scientific age. We understand the dynamic of our world in terms of vast timeframes, but fail to assess it accordingly.
I think it’s only a matter of time before that changes. When it does we’ll see that most of the issues over which we agonise are the inevitable consequence of the historical context in which we find ourselves. Fate has laid down certain challenges for humanity, but there is every reason to believe that those challenges can be overcome. All of them.
*****
Increasingly, these ideas were pouring into the big black book where the essentials of my thesis were, by this point, taking shape. They also began informing the email diary.
My instinct was to point out dots and invite people to connect them. What I found, to my increasing frustration, was that the moment you mention God, people pigeon-hole you into a predetermined set of positions (atheism, agnosticism or theism) which in my view are largely redundant. When I wrote about Angkor’s temples or India’s economic history there was a presumption that I was making standalone throwaway comments. I wasn’t.
That was how I came to realise that, if I wanted people to understand what I was getting at, I was going to have to spell it out. So, from my home at 119 Australia Street, I drew up plans to find a corner of the world where I could do that systematically. That path led me to South America and, ultimately, to the book you hold in your hands.
