We find ourselves in a post-modern, post-human world. The apparently contradictory though practically identical positions that either life’s purpose and meaning is found only in what one experiences on a purely private and subjective level or that life is whatever fashionable dogma presently in vogue is Truth are both toxic to being human. Both the weeds of suicidal absurdity and totalitarian nightmare grow from the soil of ignorance watered with pride.
The emergence of a human being from animals more like modern apes than modern humans is not an automatic process. The difference between a band of gorillas living peacefully in a jungle where fruit is close at hand and safety is a tree climb away and a space shuttle launch is obvious. The apes to which we are related are well adapted to a specific environment while we have adapted our environment to ourselves to such an extent that we recreate it in cold airless fatally radioactive space away from the planet where we and the gorillas came into being. The science behind the shuttle involves a large number of steps and processes and materials, many of which do not exist in nature. The science involved is neither subjective nor dogmatic; it involves question, experiment, and replication. What comes together in the vehicles we launch off the planet comes from the patient, persistent work of many human beings many of whom had little idea that their work would contribute to the ability of humans to leave the planet. We learn with mysterious deliberation and use what we learn in work with a purpose utterly unclear until generations later. Here is ample cause for humility and acknowledgement of a higher power. There seems to more here than simple genetic mutation leading to more successful reproductive and survival probability in light of random adaptation to random environmental change. In the minds that made the space shuttle out of materials that did not exist in their present form a century ago, we see the mind of a Creative Intelligence that is more than a result of discernible cause and discernible effect.
The kids I have taught over the years will be hear after I am dead and have the capacity to ask questions and attempt to solve problems. I tell them every year that everything in the classroom around us began as an idea, as a solution for a problem: the room’s walls, floors, and ceilings; the electrons flowing through the tubes of glass over head bringing relatively high light with relatively little heat; the sheets of glass in the windows blocking air but allowing the light from the sun. The list goes on seemingly forever. Paint, clothing, floor tiles, cinder blocks, door knobs, heating system, chalk, wires inside walls, and computers. Each made thing was created, patented, and sold as the result of someone solving a problem and bringing their solution to market.
We went to the Herr’s potato chip factory and counted the products and processes involved in growing potatoes, transporting them, preparing and packaging the chips, selling them, and getting them to the stores. The machinery and equipment that is involved and the way it is assembled to make a good tasting and inexpensive snack all came from the minds of people asking questions and solving problems.
Any scientific work is done on the basis of precedent work. Even the purest creativity has some basis on previous discovery and invention. Isaac Newton, in considering his work in physics and the discovery of the laws governing the movement of objects in space (though not the laws underlying the laws: this remains an area where other dwarves stand on the shoulders of other giants) said he was like a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant. He was repeating the words of Saint Bernard who was in turn referring to a Greek myth. If you don’t believe this, stand on my shoulders and look it up on the Internet.
Outside the controlling interaction between instinct and environment, we change the world outside our minds to make a world that our ancestors would have difficulty recognizing using means we create as well. Flying through the air at 600 miles per hours in tubes made from a metal that can only be extracted from its ore with massive amounts of electricity we sip our coffee and fart into cushions fabricated from the black sludge pumped from beneath the earth which is also used to run the superheated jets of air that pushes us and the bored stewardesses in hours toward cities it once took months of dangerous ocean travel to go to. A little over a century ago, science was revised when the Wright brothers showed that heavier than air flying machines were possible and filled the world with previously unimaginable possibility. Aluminum was a precious metal when Ben Franklin was fooling around with electricity. Now planes made of aluminum fly overhead and nobody bothers to look up until someone with nothing to lose and a box cutter forces some of them to crash into office buildings. We have changed the world greatly but ourselves hardly at all.
I talked to a relatively intelligent man two nights ago who is drinking himself to death. His liver is being destroyed by his swallowing a liter of vodka everyday of his life. The smell of his dying liver comes off his body like a miasma. What is he doing? Karl speaks in sentences, has held a good job for many years, is pleasant and conventionally moral but he had killed himself with apparent deliberation. Why? What is missing that could make all the other elements of his life add up to 0? He is dead by his own hand whether deliberately of by accident. “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”
Around the edges of the cities at night and more often than not within them, darkness comes and mocks our efforts to entertain and invent ourselves out of our fear. Religion, philosophy, and science have tried for all of history (the written record) to deal with or to deny death. The brightest lights in the brightest rooms in the brightest cleanest cities do not ease the blackness that comes when we close our eyes. The planes hurl themselves through the cold sky overhead and our doctors cut out cancer and send us home healed. God, the gods, and the demons live only on our screens as important as the Disney characters they have become. We put make up on the faces, stuff cotton in the mouths, and formaldehyde into the bellies of our dead put them away into the ground or burn them to ashes and then forget them rather than visiting graves and honoring the ancestors as we once did. We are like unto the most high but we know we are not. We shiver with the buried certainty of our death and the end of everything to which we cling. It’s dark out there but darker in here.
