A Short History of Eternity? A Review

The evolution of life in our small portion of eternity has been a miserable failure! That is my dismal conclusion after reading Ronald Wright’s two recent books, A Short History of Progress and What Is America? A Short History of the New World Order.

The first book was originally published in 2004 based on Wright’s CBC Massey Lectures. There Wright repeats the generally accepted theory that all our humanoid upright land animals originated in equatorial Africa. The follow up about America was published more recently.

The first book traces the usual theory of the migrations of our early Stone Age forbears from central Africa, including the passage to America by way of the “land bridge” to Alaska before the end of the ice ages, though updated with current archaeology. He does suggest, however, that some of the migrations, perhaps to Central and South America were accomplished by sea around the Pacific Rim, either north and east or south and east, as was the later Polynesian migration to Easter Island.

In Wright’s discussion of human progress over its countless millennia, the evolutionary theory is simply a given, as it is with me, and his ridicule of religious creationism of one kind or another is stinging. He believes the agricultural revolution caused a more significant leap of change in the human condition than our 18^th Century industrial revolution. With that move to farming and settlement our Stone Age nomadic forbears slowly switched from those wandering ways of hunting and gathering in smaller numbers, allowing exhausted environments to renew themselves, to become farmers and multiply, and eventually to urbanise, civilize and destroy the very surroundings that sustained our kind, as well as our co-inhabitants.

Wright’s devastating analysis of the history of European conquest of South America and European destruction of native civilizations post-Columbus in the first lecture series becomes an even greater guilt trip for us European descendants in the northern part of the hemisphere in the follow-up book. Here, Wright points out that in 1500, just after Columbus first accidentally bumped into the West Indies on his search for the East Indies, world population was some 400 million humans. Nearly one quarter of them lived in the Americas, most in the Aztec and Inca empires, after more than 15,000 years of isolated, independent development.

Contrary to U. S. mythology, the eastern seaboard of our own continent was not vacant or unsettled land for boatloads of Europeans to occupy on arrival. The book goes to great length to give chapter and verse showing that the area consisted of long settled farms and towns from Hochelaga on the St. Lawrence to the Deep South. Wright quotes historian, Patricia Limerich, who wrote: “There is no clearer fact in American history than the fact of conquest. In North America just as in South America, Africa, Asia and Australia, Europeans invaded a land fully occupied by natives.”

One example after another of European cruelty and untrustworthiness in dealings with native groups pervade the first part of What is America? Wright does allow, however, that native people were not pacifists either. At page 67 he says, “Like Europe, America had been bloodied for centuries by war among its nations. Neither race had a monopoly on violence or on virtue.” He then goes on to describe how faith and profit jump in together from the beginning of European settlement to become the American Way and to forge the foundation of the American Dream. It is that dream of the City on the Hill, preached more lately by President Ronald Reagan and even alluded to by Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign. I suggest it is a dream that can be conjured up by every American for his own dream of a personal Utopia of a white supremacy heaven, of a liberally free and licentious Woodstock, or of the free, equal, tolerant, colour blind society of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. Though Wright says there is much to admire in the Protestant challenge to the old world order, in America “fanaticism and intolerance soon spring up like weeds in the Lord’s garden.”

Wright goes on to describe many instances of injustice, lies and deceit in America’s dealings with native nations and the land itself as the country’s expansion proceeds ever westward and beyond. Expansion was seen by the soon dominant and generally white new American as his duty, to carry the “white man’s burden” or his “manifest destiny” as one of “God’s chosen people”.

In essence, Wright’s short history reports that America’s expansionism made it the 20^th century’s dominant global empire. As he describes, “the American Dream has Americanized the world with its myth that everyone will be able to live like Americans if they think like Americans. No matter where they are and how downtrodden they may be, if they convert to the faith of market fundamentalism they will become consumers of goods and enjoyers of democracy. This is the Big Lie of our times.” From my personal observation that dream is meeting opposition around the world in the 21^st century and is beginning to fracture even in the American homeland.

Throughout both “short histories” Wright provides a prodigious amount of energy and astute observations. From them he has gleaned the real impact of the rise of our species and the consequences of the development of our civilizations and the clashes between them on the earth itself and all its organic populations. However, the author is perhaps excessively pessimistic in his outlook for the short term. I see this combined work as a short history of a much longer time. It is a work of history in the tradition of the dystopian novels like 1984 published by George Orwell in 1949; The Children of Men, by mystery writer P. D. James in 1992; Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood in 2003, as well as Wright’s own book of fiction in the same vein. The first “short history” emphasizes human failure to deal with global warming, the second with increasing human populations and their struggles over resources. The religious dimensions and the cruelty, venality and corruption of our kind to each other and the earth as highlighted in these books do not present a pretty picture. Each book closes with a ray of hope indicating that we still have a short window of opportunity to change our ways and preserve our planetary sustenance, restrain our greed and live peaceably together with less. I get the feeling Ronald Wright is sceptical about the prospect that we will grasp the opportunity.

When I consider the generally dismal record of our species, I suspect that we are not alone in writing similar records. Perhaps the seeds of extinction are built into the very process of natural selection from which evolutionary success is derived as Darwin describes. As Darwin wrote in the last chapter of his Origin of Species,

"Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, show that the greater number of species in each genus, and all the species in many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct."

Of course he holds forth more hope for the "larger and more dominant groups within each class" but that may just mean that the greater will be their fall.

Bill,

July 23, 2009, 5:45 PM

PS: For those wishing to know more about Ronald Wright, please search Google for a Wikipedia reference or Wright's own website.

Revisiting Joys of Spring in Summer

In my second Blogger attempt on July 6 I published a piece I called The Joys of Spring. It was my first experiment with adding pictures from my files and the pictures ended up messing up the descriptions. Still the three shots showed various spots along my favourite walking trail as it appeared in February, in April, and on May 29 of this year.

This park is one of the most popular recreational areas in my community. It is well used through every season, though less so through the winter when we often have wet and cold weather. The city has done a great job of expanding, improving and maintaining the grounds and facilities and its cost is one item on my local tax bill I gladly pay.

We are now into our hottest summer weather and high afternoon temperatures through the second half of July are expected to range between 25^o C and 35^o C, which in the Fahrenheit scale is from 77^o to 95^o. Yesterday and today our highs have been around 30^o C with a high humidity. We consider that hot and for an old guy who needs a cane for support likely not a good day for any extended walking. Still, my camera needed some exercise after a month or two on the shelf, so I drove to the park and walked around for a half hour or so to take some snaps in the locations depicted in my July 6 issue, just to compare them with their July 16 appearance. My attempt to insert them along the left margin in sequence didn't work. Photo 1 and 2 now appear from right to left in row 2 at the top. They were taken from a picnic table off the trail where I took the February shot. Photos 3, 4, and 5 now appear from right to left in the upper row. No. 3 shows the spot where I shot the mating mallards in April. No. 4 is the family of Canada geese described below and the fifth shot is the same location as the one shot May 29 depicted in the July 6 issue.

All these pictures were taken between 7:30 PM and 8:00 PM our time last night. The camera records it as an hour earlier because I didn’t program the change from Standard to Daylight Saving. The temperature at that hour was still around 27^o C. The trail, the playground areas, the picnic tables, the resting benches scattered all around the 2 Km trail perimeter were well populated with seniors strolling and chatting along the trail and resting on the benches, young couples walking their babies, groups of young mothers wheeling strollers, joggers, the odd bicyclist dodging walkers, couples walking their dogs—everything from wiener dogs to Labs and even a group of three obstreperous and hard to control greyhounds. Leash and pooper scooper rules are in effect and generally observed. The first picture is a view east on the south side of the park from a picnic table on the grass beside the trail near the southwest corner of the park where I took that February shot of the lone walker entering the shady portion of the trail. If you look closely on the right side of the photo you’ll notice a rather lonely looking young lady sitting at a picnic table strumming her guitar with the passing parade on the trail itself to the left. From about the same spot I snapped a view of the playground and outdoor swimming pool area, looking into the area of the setting sun.

Earlier I had visited the playground area along the middle of the south side of the park and took the third and fourth pictures inserted above from the lake’s outlook area. That is where I showed the mating mallards along the shoreline back in April. I saw only two mallard hens there, one of which was hiding behind the shrubbery. I suspect they were both offspring of the April mating pair shown in the July 6 issue. I took the fourth picture of a large family group of Canada geese, most of them hatched this spring. I saw only two or three adult geese in this particular flock, along with a great white goose whose genus is unknown to me, who has attached himself to this family for several years now as a protective guardian. I call him Aflac after the one in the commercial. He is huge and quite aggressive and the only white bird of its kind I have seen at the park.

The fifth picture shown depicts the same area of the trail shown in the May 29 photo included in my July 6 issue, just as it appeared last night. It’s possible I will revisit this park from time to time in this publication as it is reasonably accessible to me without extensive travel, but for this issue, I will limit my comments to last night’s walk.

Bill

17/07/2009 5:58 PM

This Technically Challenged Old Man's Week

My wife may say I am not only technically but mentally challenged to even consider fooling around with computer bits and bytes. After this past week of watching me mess around with my ISP's email account and attempting to reset my Outlook Expres email program repeatedly and unsuccessfully she might add that I am also stubborn, miserly and unwilling to ask for help when I obviously need it. That, though attributed to my wife is really my own assessment, but I believe myself to be frugal rather than miserly.

Since first changing one of my email addresses so that it would be the one to use to create my Google account, I never managed to receive any mail through Outlook Express addressed to the address shown on this Post above. Even after I managed a lengthy chat session with my ISP's help desk people.

Finally yesterday morning after many hours over many days attempting to follow instructions to reset my email configuration to include the changed address, I finally broke down and asked my computer service store just down the block for in-home help. They sent one of their young experts yesterday afternoon. It took him about a half hour after trying to figure out the various explanations I gave him of my problems, and what I wanted to happen, to get the whole thing worked out with some fast navigating through my system to get it to work. All the mail that had been addressed to this address streamed into my inbox, including the original warning from Google that my URL for this Post would be cancelled. And to add the success, I got billed only for their reduced seniors rate. I tell you, we old men never had it so good! Of course they did not cancel because I had asked for a review from the Blog itself after I saw the warning there.

I will not pursue this further today. I still have much to learn about the many facets of Blogger that will hopefully improve my efforts over time.

Hopefully I will manage another effort in a day or so.

The New Entrepreneur - Greed is Good?

Predictably The Economist’s 20 page special report on entrepreneurship in the magazine’s March 14, 2009 issue does its usual sales job in favour of the new “Global heroes”. On the first page they report on the oversubscribed conference of entrepreneurs in Bangalore, India, mentioning that many speakers “praised entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well.” Then, summing up in the last paragraph of the report, they say, “The revolution for the current generation is the entrepreneurial one. This has spread around the world, from America and Britain to other countries and from the private sector to the public one. It is bringing a great deal of disruption in its wake that is being exaggerated by the current downturn. But it is doing something remarkable: applying more brainpower, in more countries and in more creative ways, to raising productivity and solving social problems.”

Of course The Economist has been trumpeting the wisdom of “free” trade and “free” markets since it was first published in 1843. In spite of the many changes that have destabilized the creation of wealth and the growth syndrome, its editorial belief in that wisdom continues unabated.

A little more lip service really ought to be given to limitations on the unending idea of “more”, and on the possibility of building sustainable communities on the principle that “small can be beautiful”. Although The Economist has suffered many who do not agree with them through its history on its favourite rocking horses, most have emphasized only other or different objectives of growth. The voices raised on behalf of slower growth, greater stability and less inequality have been weak and small. The entrepreneur is too restless to dwell much on “enough”.

Just a brief perusal of western literature on the subject of wealth reveals to what extent its acquisition has preoccupied our civilization since the beginning of history. Plato, in his Laws stated it was impossible to be good in a high degree and rich in a high degree at the same time. Aristotle preached that money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest itself. Yet by the time of Adam Smith, it was held that a reasonable interest charge is a necessary rent for the use of money in making a profit. Today, most of the unseemly accumulation of excessive wealth is accomplished strictly by using other people’s money and not one’s own. Even the excessive consumerism of the very rich competing for the purchase of the largest homes in Monaco, the largest yachts and the most expensive hotels, is done mostly on cheaply borrowed money while their own wealth continues to make excessive profits.

There is never enough and there never will be until all the ever scarcer bounties of the earth are exhausted. The rich will get fewer, and the poor, who will be always with us as biblically predicted, will increase until they too disappear along with the other used up bounties of the globe.

The hungry consumers too, created and managed by the entrepreneurs, will disappear and the rich will struggle for survival and eventually join the ranks of the poor. And that seems to me to be the eventual end of the perpetual growth syndrome indulged in by almost all forms of life on our poorly managed planet. May it then rest in peace!

Geopolitics - An American SciFi Future

The book is Ultimatum, a first novel by Matthew Glass, with the first Canadian edition published in 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. It first came to my attention in a June issue of The Economist fiction review. They praised it sufficiently as "thoughtful and timely" to warrant a request to my local public library, which had it for me in short order. The jacket blurbs from other authors praise it as "gripping, smart and persuasive", "... it feels probable--if not inevitable." "... The ending will leave you gasping." and "a remarkably intelligent novel."
Although I find the American presidential term intervals and the timing references here and there in the novel a bit confusing, the action narrative, and the interminable meetings all take place within a year. It begins on the evening of U.S election day on November 2, 2032 when Democratic Senator Joe Benton of Arizona is declared winner over one term incumbent, Republican President Mike Gartner. Though Benton is southern and white, his character is easily translated into the appeal of Obama during his 2008 campaign. Gartner on the other hand bears an amazing character likeness in appearance and style to a combination of G. W. Bush and John McCain. The story ends when the crisis with China that has consumed Benton's entire first year in office is tragically over with President Benton addressing a joint session of Congress on November 7, 2033.
As my first general comment, I can say this fiction enforces my pessimism about the viability of any government of a large and diverse country or region or union. Furthermore, I sense from a general reading of history that whoever gains political or military power, and likely that includes financial or industrial power, also gains at the same time a pig-headed stupidity in using that power. In the Americas it was evident in the European destruction of then existing indiginous societies in the post-Columbus world. The native leaderships had their own examples of the trait as well. It showed up in the revolutionary war on both sides. It appeared in the John Adams and Thomas Jefferson rift that led to the originally unintended two party system. It was particularly evident in the first military conduct of the American Civil War by General McLellan and his Army of the Potomac.
Ultimatum's Senator Benton mirrors Obama's campaign in many ways. He sets out and hammers away at a simple campaign package he calls New Foundation, stressing Health, Education, Relocation, Jobs. It works. As he begins work in the transition period to his inauguration and preparing for the legislative program and cabinet appointments, the incumbent Gartner, in a secret meeting, discloses to him privately that the global warming crisis is many times worse and much more imminent than anyone else knows. At the same time he tells Benton of secret bilateral negotiations for carbon reductions with the Chinese regime, then the largest offenders against the third set of Kyoto guidelines then in effect. The result is that Benton's publicly known program is effectively scuttled. He decides to keep the news secret and proceeds with the secret China negotiations. Honest Joe Benton has to waffle, prevaricate, rationalize and use all his political wiles to persuade his former Congressional mates to pass his program and go ever more trillions into debt, while dealing with the carbon reduction crisis as a daily distraction. The U.S. presidency is an impossible job. Though I have followed politics generally all my adult years, I still don't understand why so many people seek to take it on.
What I find most frightening is the sense that the author is really giving us a critique of the current Obama administration. In 2009 the U.S. is now getting ever more deeply embroiled in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the story at page 85 the author relates a fundamentalist coup in Pakistan in 2013 with a nuclear war between India and Pakistan a real possibility. That would be the first year of Obams's second term assuming he is re-elected. Furthermore, according to the book the U.S. has by 2032 been fighting an insurgent war in Honduras to the south for a decade or so, and the threat of getting involved there is in the news as I write this issue. At the same time China is alreading having internal problems and is apparently using harsh measures to put down sectarian violence in a western Chinese province. All the book's scenarios are already in place. The U.S. debt to China, the nuclear proliferation, the melting ice caps and rising water levels, the desertification of California and the American South--they are already in evidence.
Whether or not one believes human carbon emissions are alone responsible for global warming in our post-industrial global economy, today government and industry are more intent on exploiting the riches made available in the Arctic than they are in reducing the effects of that exploitation. If the current recession turns into a global depression, perhaps populations will reduce the demands for the easy life with no thought of tomorrow that western consumerism provides.
In this first novel, the personal and family story is not exceptional. But if you are a political junkie like me, you will find the book fascinating. It's a good read.

Note: My technological clumsiness shut down my email server for a almost a week but I believe it is now repaired. You may comment to the address shown on this blog, and though I don't intend to reply to individuals I may comment with attribution in future issues.

Tomorrow ....

My first two issues of the Post turned into a real schlimazel. That came about mainly because of not being very familiar yet with this blogger program and my seeming inability to click the right buttons at the right time. To complicate things further I tried to make some email changes on my ISP server and apparently shut down my Outlook Express email program for several days from July 5 last weekend. I hope I have resolved those problems and have asked blogger to take me off their disallowed list. Accordingly, in this issue I am taking the precaution of composing the content directly into the posting page and will avoid adding pictures or other material until I master the method.

For this issue I am publishing a few lines that evolved in the early morning sleepless hours after I had a chat with my sister who is celebrating her 86th birthday next week. In fact I added the lines to a birthday card for her and she may find them either sad or negative. But they were not intended in that way. They are simply a realization of one of the frailties of my own particular journey through various occasions and relationships through life till this time, and I feel sure I am not alone in the sentiment expressed, and I don't think of them as being sad or down putting. I headed the lines with the title of this issue, and they came out as follows:

As we thrust forth
from womb to world,
loved and fed
and cleaned and clothed,
are we happy then?
We know it not--
tomorrow we will know.
The joys of childhood
were there forever.
In centre stage
we took it all for free.
The joys were there;
we knew them not.
Just wait until tomorrow.
And in our youth
long days of peace
and beauty, that joy
escaped unrecognized--
we could not wait to get away,
to really live tomorrow,
and so it went for all the many morrows.
Now we live well and peacefully
in rapid aging years.
We're left alone,
left to atone
those long lost years
of tomorrow and tomorrow
when tomorrow calls us there.

Readers, if any, may comment by email. Pleading the exigencies of age and idiosyncracies, I likely will not reply to emails directly, but reserve the right to respond in future issues of the Post. Please try to send emails to me directly by clicking on my follow address, which I hope will access your own email creator: 83rdplus@telus.net

Of The Joys of Spring in 2009

OF THE JOYS OF SPRING IN 2009

Although my Rapid Aging Syndrome hit me with greater than usual force early this year to slow down my regular walking routine, I did get out to my favourite park area a number of times. It is a large urban park with an old mill pond or lake as its central focus and attraction. A paved and level trail, some 2.2 Km in length surrounds the lake and I take great delight in observing the natural changes that can be seen almost every day. I am adding a panel of three snapshots I took during some of those walks, to illustrate.

To this old observer our winter and spring this year seemed more severe than it has been in the last decade or so and the weather didn’t turn warm until well into June. The stiff legs, joints, poor balance and numerous other complaints of whatever age don’t lend themselves well to wet and cold and slippery sidewalks, so my walking routine became curtailed. Still, slow and steady persists and though shortened and slowed, I still enjoy getting out whenever conditions permit.

By February I found much of the park trail more or less cleared of snow, so instead of walking all the way I drove to the park and slithered my way carefully around a part of the trail with cane and camera and this is one of the shots I took then. I didn’t follow the walker ahead of me any further as the trail there heads into a shaded area where the weak morning sun had not yet dried the trail and I was already running into some treacherous black ice. I simply cannot afford a fall, so I took the snap and headed back. You’ll notice the snow, the dried foliage and bare trees still in evidence.

The second shot was taken on one of the few sunny days in April. The foliage was beginning to bud and sprout, the weeping willow trees were leafing out in their light green colours and the ducks on the lake were courting. This picture is a close-up of a male mallard, in the process of protecting his chosen female from a wannabe competitor.

This last view is a shot taken from the south side of the pond towards the western periphery where the trail heads into the shaded portion, which has private housing on the south side of the trail and the lake edge on the right. This snapshot was taken in the mid-morning hours of May 29, 2009 that everything is bright and green and the walkers are all in summer kit and shorts.

Hope you enjoy my brief walks in my favourite park.

The Old Man's Post

AN INTRODUCTION

Though long schooled in the art of public silence, a few years of observing the power of the Blog and the broad public fascination with it, have tempted me to add my own contribution to the cacophony of voices already out there.

My object with this personal website publication, is the preparation of any essay, commentary, review, memoir, verse, short story, or anything else that comes to mind, written from the personal perspective of my advancing age (post-80) as I observe the world from small town west coast Canada. I will likely include selected observations I self-published and distributed to a few family members and friends in the five year period beginning some ten years ago in what I then called my Passing Thoughts volumes.

The risks are obvious enough, I suppose. Each time one offers an opinion or comment there is a risk of offending someone else. Each publication can be examined for defamatory content and could invite legal retaliation. Every comment made can be misconstrued and invite abuse from the more ignorant or dismissal from the more wise. The principal risk, of course, is that the undertaking will be totally ignored. In that case I am sure it could be discontinued and dismantled, hopefully with little risk to whatever small competence of financial security I still possess.

My personal profile has not been added to this first effort, as I am mainly interested in finding out if I can make this thing work. Should anyone actually be interested in an old man's notions ever be interested in my background, probably that profile can be added at a later date. Having been on the Web simply to obtain specific information or to read the odd news outlet's Blog, but after picking up Mark Frauenfelder's book, Rule the Web, I decided to give it a try. Perhaps it is something I can do at this age to keep my brain's synapses connected and stay a bit ahead of the acute case of RAS (rapid aging syndrome) that has plagued me this past year.

One of my pet peeves is the abundance of old age jokes that populate my email Inbox, often without a personal message of any kind. I realize, of course that most of these friends and relatives who have me in their address book, never learned keyboard skills, but even a word or two would always be appreciated.

For now, I'm going to let this go as my first Blogging attempt, and see what happens.