Was It Worth It?

I'm reading Alan Watts' book The Supreme Identity again. It's one of his older works, and one of the best books I've read on metaphysics, because it is a very reasoned argument he makes, building up on some pretty solid premises. It's a pretty hard read, therefore, for both that reason, and the fact that he takes a lot of time explaining things, to try to make clear a subject that is inherently hard to talk about. I will also note that he wrote this while still an Anglican priest, and he admits in the intro that, because he was still "in the system" as it were, trying to match Vedanta and Christian theology, it is, perhaps, "somewhat torturous." Still I find it illuminating. Not a good intro to his writing, though. 

I'm on the part where he's discussing the Problem of Evil. I won't get into the arguments here, I haven't the time and it'd be better if you just read it (the whole book, that is), for I'm sure to ruin the argument in trying to simplify it here. But briefly, he argues for a God that, rather than being absolutely good, is the source of both good and evil (in the finite, relative realm), while Himself transcending both. Towards the end of the chapter he says something like how, from our limited perspective, evil seems absolutely terrible, yet, from the standpoint of the infinite, it is an integral part of the finite duality, and even the most atrocious acts are worth it, for the overall beauty of the whole Creation. He likens it to standing with your face pressed to a painting; stepping back, you suddenly see that those ugly shadows are what give shape, form, balance, and identity to the light and color.

Now, I talk a good deal on here about civilization and it's pitfalls. I've long sympathized with the Daniel Quinn/Ishmael position that civilization has been the cause of many of the negatives we see in the world today: war, poverty, starvation, disease, environmental degradation. These may exist at a basic level in all humanity, true, but civilization grows them to a scale unimaginable at that level.

So, has it been worth it? Much as we hate war and genocide, crushing poverty and tyrannical rulers, plagues and pollution and extinction...do things like high art, advanced medicine, the internet and global communications, justify it? I have a hard time here. Human history has been a bumpy road, full of inhumanity and horrors that we in the West can hardly imagine, given our plush lifestyles. No living American has had a war happen in their own backyard, we really have no idea. Though there are systemic problems, the vast majority of us don't know true poverty, true starvation. These things are everywhere in poorer places, a vast suffering of masses of people. They would still be living at peace if it weren't for civilization, close to the Earth, in communities where no one is left behind. If it weren't for agricultural surplus, expanding populations, and urbanization, there could never be slums and shantytowns.

But I must admit it hurts my very heart to imagine a world without Ode To Joy. Whenever it plays, I feel like I want to burst with happiness, and tears often come to my eyes. Or Starry Night, by Van Gogh; my favorite painting. A perfect case in point, actually; the man, like civilization, was tortured and half-insane, yet look what came of it! Or, appropriate to today's topic, Edvard Munch's The Scream; a creepy painting, yet it stirs the soul. What about all the poetry, the great novels and plays, the elegance of higher mathematics? What about telescopes revealing the heavens, microscopes showing us worlds within? What about the rush of foreign money and help when a disaster strikes a place like Haiti? Before such a thing would be impossible, if ever we learned about the disaster in the first place.

One can narrow it down to religion, as they did in one of the Intelligence Squared debates. We all know of the bigotry, the crusades and jihads, the suicide bombers on buses, the gay-bashing and abortion clinic bombings, the strife in South Asia, the Troubles in Ireland. They are terrible. But religion has also brought us the stained glass at St Denis Cathedral, in fact all of the great cathedrals, mosques, temples, and shrines. Most of the art down the long centuries has been religiously inspired, if not overt iconography. And what about the joy and giving at Christmas, the pillar of Islam that requires charity, the ideals of love and brotherhood, compassion and kindness? It hasn't been all bad, you know?

Tribal equality is a wonderful thing, and clearly mankind evolved to fit that lifestyle. We certainly have problems squaring a tribal mind to a globalized world. Yet, we have grown, stumbling, into something more. Tribes are isolated, closed within themselves, extremely conservative and narrow. Today, we have ideals of universal brotherly love, individual freedom and innovation. Such things would never occur to a hunter-gatherer, because it is born out of the long march of history, which has slowly built upon our awareness.

Is this all we've become?

I'm also reading Lord of the Rings (I usually have several books going at once), and think of the elves in this case. Immortal, they watched as evil first came down into the world, and watched as many great and lovely things died or faded. At one point, Merry, a hobbit, states that he has never until this quest been outside his country, and, had he known the perils that awaited, he should not have had the courage to do so. Haldir, an elf, says in his reply, "The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places. But still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater."

It grows perhaps the greater. The play of duality in the world is inevitable, and is what gives us joy and love, even if it also requires we know sorrow and hate. And of course, civilization is, and all this discussion is rendered moot by that fact. We are here, and there's no going back. Even if we had the deepest, darkest collapse from modern society, we would have the memory of civilization, would still almost surely continue agriculture, metallurgy, the use of animal labor, and other such advanced things. I doubt we could ever slide all the way back to the sort of natural tribal state that the Cro Magnon lived within.

I'm not sure we should want to, either. I've never been too sure about "spiritual evolution" but in some sense, we have in fact matured as a species. Many things have been discovered within ourselves that likely would not have been under the simple tribal conditions. We needed a more complex substrate, that of civilization, to bring it out of us. Emergent properties. We often do a lousy job exhibiting these higher things, of course. But they are there, waiting for each one of us.

To those of you who have read this far, I beg you to reply. This is one post I'd be very interested to have a discussion on, to hear your opinions and thoughts on the topic: Has it been worth the pain, to walk this road of civilization? Would we have been better off remaining stone age adepts, wise in a simple way, in tune with Nature? Or is it a good thing, in spite of all the hurt and horror, to have come this way, and to have found the more refined aspects of heart and mind?

Passenger Pigeon

Driving past one of the local wildlife management areas yesterday I saw a huge flock of birds, must have been a thousand of them, like those awesome flocks you'll see in documentaries about the Sarenghetti, a broad shimmer against the blue sky, and the dry marsh boiling with them. I immediately thought of the passenger pigeon for some reason, and of cloning. How unfortunate that we've been denied the spectacle of those flocks that would "darken the sky" for days on end (to say nothing of the birds' own right to enjoy life). For a moment I considered how nice it would be if they could be cloned and recreated. Then I caught myself indulging in scientific superstition.

What hubris it is to imagine that we can remake a species from some old DNA salvaged from stuffed museum pieces. How ridiculous to presume that life can be boiled down to a strand of nucleotides. Life is never anything less than a living cell; even in our most basic, refined essence, that being sex cells, or more accurately, the fertilized zygote, we are never just pure DNA floating around our mother's womb. We may be single celled, but we are never that.

And imagine if we did clone the passenger pigeon, what would we end up with? A perfect reproduction of this species that was wantonly blasted from the skies 100 years ago? Doubtful. As Alan Watts so often and clearly demonstraded, a living thing is part and parcel with its environment:  

What we really are is, first of all, the whole of our body. And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment. A body requires a mild and nutritive planet with just enough oxygen in the atmosphere spinning regularly around in a harmonious and rhythmical way near a certain kind of warm star.

That arrangement is just as essential to the existence of my body as my heart, my lungs, and my brain. So to describe myself in a scientific way, I must also describe my surroundings, which is a clumsy way getting around to the realization that you are the entire universe.

You can speculate about a universe that didn't include you or any life, but the only universe we know of is the one that does. Or, look at this in another way: what is the most important organ system in the body? The nervous system, many might say. But what would a nervous system be without the pulmonary and cardiovascular systems to bring oxygen and nutrients? And where would the nutrients come from without the digestive system? But we'd be soon overwhelmed by toxins without the urinary system... One could say the only unnecessary system is the reproductive, but one would be wrong-- where did that sexless individual come from at all but through working reproductive systems? So it becomes clear even on this single scale that all systems arise together, organically, as one.

Likewise with species. Take our new pigeon-- it may by some miracle be viable, yet even if you made ten thousand for the flock effect, it will not be the same thing. I suppose it's possible that lower, simpler forms would be more or less the same; fish and reptiles, for instance, live on instinct and need not be taught how to live, unlike a puppy which must be taught socialization, and a child needs to be taught a culture. Yet the environment has changed since 1900 when the last passenger pigeon was seen. The elms and American Chestnut are (nearly) gone, and the forests themselves are smaller and more scattered. Food sources have changed, the climate has shifted, as have land use patterns, industrialization and urban sprawl have occurred, new species have arrived on the continent from afar, native ones have gone extinct or nearly so.

There are also no adult passener pigeons to rear these new test-tube chicks. Who knows how they'll behave. Like gang-bangers in the ghetto, who often have no man in the house to show them how to be men, they depend on their peers for their example and end up with insecure adolescent behaviors. Or mockingbirds, which will imprint on what sounds they hear while in the nest. Originally it was birdsong, but now, it can be telephones, doorbells, even air conditioners and car horns. We would only be making a only a fascimile of the passenger pigeon if we attempted to do so.

But there really is talk of cloning wooly mammoths, saber toothed cats, and even dinosaurs. All because we can't see the forest for the trees, can't see beyond our skin and see that Watts was right: an organism "goeswith" its environment. You cannot draw a line between them, because the line joins them as well as it divides them. Everything is polar, and even though you seem to have isolated one pole, it always implies the other by its very existence.

I know the science of individual things works on some levels-- you can get a new heart if you need one, and you can make Dolly the sheep-- but it's such a clumsy way to look at the world in general, and a rather crude way of getting healthy hearts and sheep. It's astonishing, but it's very limited in scope. Heart's bad? We'll cut it out and install a new one. Depressed? Take this pill. Need livestock? Let us tinker around with microscopes and cells, we'll throw some shit together for ya. Species extinct? Here, we'll grow it anew in this test tube.

But the underlying problems aren't resolved. So the depressed guy takes his pill, hasn't solved his problems but gets his energy back, and is now alive enough to actually go through with those suicidal thoughts! We go on destroying the ecosphere, thinking we can piece it together later. We don't exercise, we don't quit smoking, because we can have a new heart or lung installed when we need it.

Well, I'm exaggerating again, but only a little. I just prefer the natural way, it's so elegant. The body knows how to keep itself healty, and sheep, through the long, amazing process of evolution, know how to make more sheep. And although it's sad there are no more passenger pigeons, or any of the other species we drove to extinction, I think it's just a point instance of the ridiculous lenghts we as a society will go in order not to live in harmony with nature. Just as we think we can laze about, eat crappy food, and smoke, because we can get a new heart, we think we can re-produce the creatures we've driven to extinction, rather than take a look in the mirror and take note of our deeply flawed way of life.