The other day, I was sitting here behind my desk in my little room on the trembling lip of the bland continent, when I began to think about failure. Not just mine, but yours, and theirs and ours. I sat here and thought about cities: Venice and Fresno, St. Petersburg (the one in Russia) and Muskogee. And about nations, all of them.
I thought about what it means to be human, and to live as we have presumed we ought to live: in groups – cities, states, nations – in birds’ choirs, in bees’ hives. And hanging like bats from the rafters of our glass and metal caves.
What a beautiful idea, this getting along, finding and making what we need. So I hate to be the one to bring this up, but civilization is a failure. The grand experiment our ancestors began some five thousand years ago – one species living together in groups, with tools and stuff – has turned out to be a complete flop.
I think it’s apt that I post some thoughts on civilization the day following the death of Charlton Heston. I never met the man but I didn’t care for his politics. He was a fine actor, no doubt, and in many great films. Perhaps the most telling of his own character was his performance in Bowling for Columbine. But the most prescient for the rest of us was a film he starred in as an astronaut named George Taylor, when I was seven.
Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.
[The Planet of the Apes, 1968]
Civilization has some primary functions, on which I think we can agree: Shelter, food, water, defense, and a decent provision for the helpless and the sick. You can throw in education if you like.
Shelter: Civilization does not provide it. It provides the means – for those who have means – to buy it. Many others are on the outside looking in on a subsistence quality of life they seem doomed never to attain. And many of those who have homes are – even now in the 21st century after Christ taught us to care for everyone – in sight of losing them. The moneychangers are still running the show.
Food: It seems we can’t produce what we need to eat without destroying the space essential to doing so. You would think that human–planted crops would be an indefinitely renewable resource. Not so. We’ve laced the soil with pesticides, herbicides, infanticides. The meat industry, besides being cruel and resulting in a product that’s nutritionally pretty dead, is simply a universal and unqualified ecological disaster.
Which brings up the topic of biofuels. What a monstrous trick. The amount of grain it takes to produce the ethanol for one fill-up of one large car could feed a human being for a year. Yet great swaths of land are being killed to feed, not us, but our insatiable compulsive need to keep moving. I say the land is being killed, because the poor little morons in South America are denuding the jungle for this fraud.
Water: We are running out of fresh water. What we haven’t polluted or mismanaged is being lost to drought, related to global warming. The rainforests, which produced and retained so much of our fresh water, are being bulldozed. And all the while, the demand for water is rising exponentially to meet the demands of exploding human population. So civilization as we know it is helpless to provide water for our species.
Defense: The best defense is a good offense, right? That’s certainly the new paradigm under Bush. Well, I shouldn’t say it’s new. There have always been tribes whose business plan was brutally aggressive and acquisitive. Rape and pillage, pillage and rape, loot and burn, and drag home the survivors as slaves. The problem is that we’ve learned nothing, grown in heart and mind not a whit.
Since we came down out of the trees, we’ve been murdering one another for our resources. You’d think that if land or food, oil or gold or whatever was worth killing for, we might learn how to take care of it, at least hold on to it. Maybe we’d learn to be stewards of these things, treat them as investments. And if ideology – religion – is grounds for homicide, we might at least evolve to practice what we preach. But no. We still commit murder for what someone else has, and for what he fails to believe, and in spite of what we claim to believe. And we call it defending ourselves.
What do the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have to do with national defense? You tell me. I dare you.
Education: The topic is academic, don’t you think? The purpose of education is to give people the ability to think critically. At least here in America, it’s a joke. The society that keeps Survivor, Wife Swap, and American Idol on the air has abdicated all responsibility for teaching, all interest in learning. The vast majority of Americans initially believed Bush about Iraq and 9/11. And the fact that his approval rating isn’t at flat zero, even now, speaks to a systemic knuckle-dragging stupidity. Present company excepted.
A Decent Provision:
“A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.”
– Samuel Johnson
Tonight, millions of people are homeless, hungry, unfed. What we Americans spend on our wars in a few days could provide health care for every one of our children. We could be curing diseases, building homes, developing truly sustainable sources of food. But we don’t want to. That’s the only explanation that one can draw from the willful waste that defines us.
So we’ve been at this for several thousand years now, and I just don’t see much progress. I don’t think the civilization of human kind is working. The meaning we’ve sought in our art and philosophy, in our governments and laws, eludes us no less than it did a thousand years ago or more.
We have had wise people among us, trying to show us the way into compassion, love, and a meaningful life with our fellows. We’ve killed most of them, listened to none of them. There is no help from the Lawgivers; they just make us weep. Our politics is a sick joke of universal suffering. Our science is like the twittering of birds, high in a naked scaffolding, because we do not really fund and nourish it for our betterment. For our profit, yes; for our betterment, no.
Our advancement as a species is a pale priority, compared to our will to do battle. And all of our building is just a tearing down.
Where do we go from here? I don’t know. Maybe a dozen people will read this post, and click away thinking, “Gee, what a cynical asshat.” And you’d be right, perhaps. You might come to my home and note the water pumped to my faucets, the electric toys, and my insulated, heated comfortable space. All gifts of a civilization which I claim has failed to evolve. But don’t come without calling first, after dark, or you might find me crouched by the door, brandishing a rock.
Cornelius: Well Taylor, we’re all fugitives now.
George Taylor: Do you have any weapons, any guns?
Cornelius: The best, but we won’t need them.
George Taylor: I’m glad to hear it. I want one anyway.
Metaphor 