D
**DONOTDELETE**
Guest
\"The Future\" - - good read!
I stuck this at the end of Empath's "New World" thread but it seems not many noticed it there so here, enjoy;
(I wanted to post the whole thing, but - if this excerpt is too long, I'll edit it, or be banned, which ever comes first .. )
http://www.spectacle.org/198/future.html
"...
I didn't know it at the time, but my dream was about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Since it is patently evident to everybody who watches the world around him that "tout casse, tout passe, tout lasse" (everything breaks, passes away, wears out), it does not take much of a leap of the imagination to project the daily degradation into the future. Small failures today extrapolate to great ones tomorrow. When you see a gun in a movie, you know it will be used later; when you see an atom bomb in the world, you know it will be used later.
Adding to the absurdity of life and the likelihood of the wasteland future, was the early 1960's attitude towards training children for nuclear disaster. During the years of worst tension, around the Cuban missile crisis, we held nuclear drills in my school where we hid under our desks. In order to believe, as a child, in the World's Fair future, you must believe as a prerequisite that adults know what they are doing. As a seven year old, I felt no confidence that the glass windows or flimsy wooden desks would protect us against the force of a blast. In Brooklyn, a few miles from ground zero in Manhattan, the grown-ups seemed to be preparing us to defend ourselves against a flash with no force. They themselves seemed hysterical, or confused about what we were trying to accomplish. At some point I read John Hersey's Hiroshima and understood that people melt away entirely, that sometimes only their shadows are left burned into the concrete.
Then there was the Vietnam war, antipersonnel bombs that shot little steel arrows, napalm that seared children. The adults seemed unable to explain the importance of fighting there, doing such terrible things and enduring so much horror. It was not hard to conclude that the adults running the world, and responsible for our future, were a band of sadistic hypocrites.
If one peeled away the vision of nuclear disaster, a very hard thing to do in those days, there was still the Second Law: the world would still wear out. This was the dystopian environmental vision of the 1960's, that it wouldn't take nuclear war to put us out of business. It could come, instead, through the exhaustion of resources, economic burn-out, and the depletion of compassion.
In books with titles like The Twenty-Ninth Day, a Malthusian future was painted in which human population growth (sometimes called the "population explosion" or even the "population bomb") took the place of nuclear weapons as the trigger of our destruction.
When I was a child, I knew there were three billion people on earth. Today, thirty years later, there are nearly six. I am nearly silenced by this thought, as it comes very close to making all human creativity, all individual aspiration, all art and thought, irrelevant.
In the sixties, as I learned about the environment, I came to the conclusion that humans were a sort of intelligent rats, able to solve most problems except the key one of how to avoid fouling their own nests. I still believe this to be fundamentally true; a key insight into human nature, expressed in the tragedy of the commons, illustrates how little motivated humans are to consider or plan for the future.
T.S. Eliot's "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper" has become a truism over the years. One's mind shuts off today when hearing the line, because one has heard it so many times....
****
(last tiny bit added, best part..)
"...
I have set this up as a straw man, not because I think that free will may not exist, but because belief in a detailed future seems to me to sap the will and to be almost as bad as a belief in predestination. We are weak and lonely, and we project images onto bleak walls which make us feel less alone. For some, a belief in the future takes the place of the belief others have in God. The more detailed and inevitable the future, the more powerful it becomes, and the more passive we become. Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski made a related observation about hope, calling it the "killer" that made men passive and accepting of their fate in the camp, when desperate men with no hint of a future would have fought.
It is important to remind oneself frequently that the future does not exist. It has not been invented yet; each action we each take, and the sum of all our actions, help to invent it. This magnifies our choices to a sometimes unbearable level, but leaves us utterly free..."
- - - there's more ... http://www.spectacle.org/198/future.html /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif
I stuck this at the end of Empath's "New World" thread but it seems not many noticed it there so here, enjoy;
(I wanted to post the whole thing, but - if this excerpt is too long, I'll edit it, or be banned, which ever comes first .. )
http://www.spectacle.org/198/future.html
"...
I didn't know it at the time, but my dream was about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Since it is patently evident to everybody who watches the world around him that "tout casse, tout passe, tout lasse" (everything breaks, passes away, wears out), it does not take much of a leap of the imagination to project the daily degradation into the future. Small failures today extrapolate to great ones tomorrow. When you see a gun in a movie, you know it will be used later; when you see an atom bomb in the world, you know it will be used later.
Adding to the absurdity of life and the likelihood of the wasteland future, was the early 1960's attitude towards training children for nuclear disaster. During the years of worst tension, around the Cuban missile crisis, we held nuclear drills in my school where we hid under our desks. In order to believe, as a child, in the World's Fair future, you must believe as a prerequisite that adults know what they are doing. As a seven year old, I felt no confidence that the glass windows or flimsy wooden desks would protect us against the force of a blast. In Brooklyn, a few miles from ground zero in Manhattan, the grown-ups seemed to be preparing us to defend ourselves against a flash with no force. They themselves seemed hysterical, or confused about what we were trying to accomplish. At some point I read John Hersey's Hiroshima and understood that people melt away entirely, that sometimes only their shadows are left burned into the concrete.
Then there was the Vietnam war, antipersonnel bombs that shot little steel arrows, napalm that seared children. The adults seemed unable to explain the importance of fighting there, doing such terrible things and enduring so much horror. It was not hard to conclude that the adults running the world, and responsible for our future, were a band of sadistic hypocrites.
If one peeled away the vision of nuclear disaster, a very hard thing to do in those days, there was still the Second Law: the world would still wear out. This was the dystopian environmental vision of the 1960's, that it wouldn't take nuclear war to put us out of business. It could come, instead, through the exhaustion of resources, economic burn-out, and the depletion of compassion.
In books with titles like The Twenty-Ninth Day, a Malthusian future was painted in which human population growth (sometimes called the "population explosion" or even the "population bomb") took the place of nuclear weapons as the trigger of our destruction.
When I was a child, I knew there were three billion people on earth. Today, thirty years later, there are nearly six. I am nearly silenced by this thought, as it comes very close to making all human creativity, all individual aspiration, all art and thought, irrelevant.
In the sixties, as I learned about the environment, I came to the conclusion that humans were a sort of intelligent rats, able to solve most problems except the key one of how to avoid fouling their own nests. I still believe this to be fundamentally true; a key insight into human nature, expressed in the tragedy of the commons, illustrates how little motivated humans are to consider or plan for the future.
T.S. Eliot's "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper" has become a truism over the years. One's mind shuts off today when hearing the line, because one has heard it so many times....
****
(last tiny bit added, best part..)
"...
I have set this up as a straw man, not because I think that free will may not exist, but because belief in a detailed future seems to me to sap the will and to be almost as bad as a belief in predestination. We are weak and lonely, and we project images onto bleak walls which make us feel less alone. For some, a belief in the future takes the place of the belief others have in God. The more detailed and inevitable the future, the more powerful it becomes, and the more passive we become. Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski made a related observation about hope, calling it the "killer" that made men passive and accepting of their fate in the camp, when desperate men with no hint of a future would have fought.
It is important to remind oneself frequently that the future does not exist. It has not been invented yet; each action we each take, and the sum of all our actions, help to invent it. This magnifies our choices to a sometimes unbearable level, but leaves us utterly free..."
- - - there's more ... http://www.spectacle.org/198/future.html /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif
