Life Beyond Measure (23 page)

There is so little time, and so much to know! Science has even given us an idea of what life was like in the universe a billion years ago. Scientists now tell us that the universe came into being 13.7 billion years ago, and they tell us how it probably started and how it developed and became what it is.

Here we are in 2008, and a tremendous amount of science has been accumulated and tested, proven and stamped and sealed as “This is how things happen.” Are there variations? Yes, in some instances very small variations, in some instances profound variations. Science is able to determine what causes the minuscule ones and the gigantic ones. All kinds of wonderful information and answers to difficult and very delicate questions are everywhere as representations of science.

Where we are today is that we have science coming out of our ears. And if we weren’t structured the way we are, we could sit here and be satisfied for the next five thousand years.

But that’s not how we are structured. We say: “Oh, my goodness, look what we did! Ah, but listen, don’t you see, we could do even better than this.” And we did set out to do better, and we kept doing better and better until now in 2008 we can put an airplane that weighs thousands of pounds with five hundred people in it into the
air and send it to Europe and bring it back, or to any other place on earth. It can go around the earth.

Now, if you went back to the people of early times and made a suggestion that such a thing could happen, they would try to find a way to lock you up or burn you at the stake.

With science and society, there often seem to be conflicts between the two. A love-hate relationship, you might say. Society depends largely for its continuance on science, as a major part of our sustenance. There was a time, going back to very early social structures, when we had a horse and a buggy, or a mule and a dray. The power used was that of an animal, and animals were absolutely essential and prized possessions because they helped in the work of society: in the lifting of heavy loads humans ordinarily couldn’t lift, on the farms, even in warfare, and in various other ways. They were appropriate then because we didn’t have gas-powered engines or coal-burning furnaces, or all the subsequent energy sources developed to illuminate and heat our dwellings.

But the pivotal moment of change came when somebody in the world came up with harnessing the power of electricity through lightning. For centuries nobody knew how to harness lightning—some tried and failed, but someone ultimately discovered a way to convert lightning into energy. Then other imaginative men, like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, came up with lights and telephones and other interesting things that enhanced life and added to the growth of the social structure. And through education, other gifted people, whose tenacity was strong and whose imaginations were better than average, came up with all kinds of things—one leading to another and eventually to where we are today.

Now we have, clearly, reams and reams of textbooks that can tell you all about lightning, but there was someone, somewhere in the
evolution of human creatures who took notice of it, and it intrigued them. They kept thinking, and maybe made a note or two about it if they were able to read and write, and then they died. But gifts like that are not just placed in one individual; they are placed in other individuals as well.

The most rare of gifts are not just walking around in one person; nature doesn’t do that. It spreads its gifts, and it was the collective curiosity of gifted individuals that brought about science.

But science, as we know it, is not formed in nature. It is no more represented, for example, by birds than it is by a tree. After all, the tree is fine just standing there, sucking up the water and growing. And birds fly around and land in the tree, but they aren’t carrying little notebooks under their wings and thinking they have to note what the temperature is and stuff like that so that they can know about science. We humans are the ones primarily concerned about science, because nature probably explains it to the birds in ways we would never understand.

And nature probably speaks to all of its other creatures. We don’t know that a butterfly just may be more intricately in tune with not just nature but physics and gravity and communications. How is it that a butterfly can travel from Canada to Mexico? By the time it reaches Mexico it can never go back to Canada because that’s not how it goes: on the trip back, it will probably die. But its offspring will make the trip back. How does the offspring know where to go? The offspring knows where to go because it’s built in. And also built into that butterfly are skills, protections, and understandings that we will never know. If you put intelligence on a scale, the butterfly may be a hell of a lot smarter than we are.

When we are talking about science, we’re talking about what has come about with us. We still don’t know why the shark is such a
quintessential predator, but it’s been there from its first appearance in the oceans of the world.

Society is the incubator: we have built the buildings, we have made the automobiles, we have built the houses, we have made the airplanes, and we tend to extrapolate about God and good and evil; we can do all of that; that’s how it is with us. Science therefore is within us; it is our trying to reach beyond ourselves—our essential human quest. We all do that, even the most uneducated of us. Just out of the love for our children we will reach for a job because we know we have to feed them, and we will endure much more than we ordinarily think we might endure.

Society is made by whatever imagery comes about from human activity. Science is a part of the development, the creation of society, education, understanding, the compulsion of mankind to want to understand things. So science is a natural outflow of man’s reaching to understand, and there is no limit to his reaching.

As a society we have proven an ability to adapt to the new benefits of science. Computers? Yes, we can do that. Cell phones, iPods? Yes. Science now brings us such rapid innovations and capabilities with what it produces that we can say, “My goodness, just a year ago we didn’t have this.”

But now, Ayele, here’s where the friction comes. Scientific developments aside, if you look at society a year ago, ten years ago, we haven’t come too far; not in the area of communications—we can communicate almost instantly with another person practically no matter where they are in the world—but in other ways. We hold on to the ideal of democracy, for example, much as it was conceived by the signers of the Declaration of Independence; yet though we have evolved and continue to do so, after centuries we continue to have unresolved matters
of faith, racism, sexuality, and regional and international conflicts. In such areas, society has not advanced at the same pace as science.

But it is impossible for society to move at the same pace. Society has to move at the rate at which mankind develops. Do you know that it takes humans twenty-one years to educate a child to be able to conceive what there is in the world? You cannot as yet crowd a child’s head, or put something in the brain to accelerate it to where it is ten, twenty times smarter. We still have to spend twenty-one years, and we have to stay on the development of the child almost every day of those years, particularly once the child is three or four years old. We have no shortcuts that will let us give that child what it will ultimately have at the age of twenty-one in terms of the world as it stands, or the information that science has collected and proven. We can’t give the child an injection of all that knowledge or put a chip in its head, pull a switch, and suddenly have it at the child’s disposal. It takes twenty-one years before the kid can even be considered for going on to medical school, and then the child has to spend additional years in internship before going to work. It took eighteen years to get the child even to the doorstep of the college.

Now the child is at the age of twenty-eight or thirty. By that time a whole new generation has come into being. That time frame is somewhat comparable for someone going to work as a teacher or lawyer or in the business world.

This tells us that it takes thirty years for a generation to start replacing the one that came before it. Society is slow because we are limited as creatures. We can’t move faster, in societal terms, than we can move in scientific terms because of the wider gap in our development. As human beings, to get where we are and to have devised
a society as imaginative as ours is took a long, long time. Not three generations, but thousands of generations.

Science can’t take us with it. It develops and grows in dimension faster than we do. So by virtue of our individual structures and capacities, society cannot possibly move as fast as science. And because of that, there is going to be an eruption between the two. The capabilities of science are such that in a matter of ten years it has provided us with the most amazing machines—stuff that was unimaginable just a hundred years ago.

A hundred years from now, I expect we’re still going to be in control of our societal disposition, and science within it is going to be a hundred times more imaginative than it is today, and what it is today is mind-boggling.

In your time, Ayele, science may have found a way not to pollute what is absolutely essential to our survival. It may have found a way to colonize one or two of our nearby planets, a way to increase our life span. It may have found a way to create what we need in profound ways we have not even thought of.

But despite the possibility of an increased life span, we may get to a point where science will have to decide whether we can live only a certain number of years, because if you live too long, overpopulation becomes a problem. The state may well have to say that there will be only one child for every so many couples. If, Ayele, you were extrapolating from how many we are now—over 300 million in America—then the next doubling is 600 million and the next doubling is 1.2 billion. Where are you going to put them? What is science going to give them for food? What is science going to give them for transportation?

However, by that time there may be satellites built here and put out on other planets or on space platforms, and those who can
afford it will live out there and grow food, make medicine, and do all the stuff necessary for their survival.

Still, in our effort to improve the whole world, we in my time may in some peculiar, unintentional way be bringing it closer to its end. New technology itself brings on new environmental problems, since we also send into the air chemical elements that have the potential to change climates. Within this new cauldron, habitats and some species are becoming extinct.

In profound new ways we have grasped the ability to have power over life. And we continue to manufacture weapons of increasingly destructive power. Eventually, nature may choose to recede, leaving all the living creatures on earth doomed. Our only defense against such an outcome might be how we treat nature, not only in terms of the forests and rain and sun and every natural resource, but in terms of how we deal with the entire environment.

So, society has its responsibilities now; science has its responsibilities now. And there is no governing force that says that the two have to work together. Yet if science gets too far ahead, if society does not or cannot control science, its destructive capabilities will lead us all to extinction. And if society becomes too influential in how science functions, in what its purposes are, that will be terrible.

But as we continue to struggle for the balance to survive, as we always have, a question arises about the evolution of human beings. Is modern man as good as it gets? If we look at ourselves today, we don’t see much difference from what we were in the old days. We wear clothes today, but our shapes are pretty much the same. Aside from updating our appearance with hip sneakers and such, our looks are only slightly altered from what they were thousands of years ago; there hasn’t been much change. We are civilized—as much as one can apply the word—but we are the animals who brought about science.

This raises a fascinating question: is there more evolution of the human species to take place? The expanding capabilities of athletes may hint at it. That leads us to ask whether, in the evolutionary development of mankind, we are possibly just the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end.

However that question can be answered, science tells us that if a time comes when we all are no longer here, this earth will continue to move around the sun; the rains will continue to come and bring new possibilities. Even if, ultimately, the rest of the universe has no interest in what happens to us. There’s too much space, too much stuff. Who cares about one little planet with some living things on it who don’t know how to behave themselves?

If humans one day do become extinct, will nature say a billion years from now: “I’m going to start it all up again”? Or will nature say: “I’ve got ideas for making a planet better than that one anyway,” and just opt to create something else?

I hope these questions will be here for you to ponder in your adult years, Ayele, for that will mean you are alive and well, and you just may be helping to provide some answers—with the echo from your elders in these written lines to you, urging you on.

M
y dearest Ayele,

Long after I’m gone, when you and your generation come into your own—eighteen, twenty-five, thirty years from now—your world will quite likely not be free of the devastation of war. That will not be your generation’s fault, but it will be up to you and fellow generations of that era to face the challenge of war.

As I write this letter to you, I see you in my mind’s eye on the occasion of “The Morning of Ayele’s Outdooring,” recalling both the peace and protection created within the community circle, the village, that welcomed you out into a world in which you could grow and thrive.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the century in which you were born, our nation had plunged itself into a disastrous war. At this writing it grinds on, with repercussions that will last well into your lifetime, and at a human toll that in time could defy count.

The contrast was striking, summoning memories of the relative peace and protection of the island of my youth during decades when world wars simmered and raged elsewhere. Why? Could it be that though humanity speaks incessantly of peace between all of the tribes of the earth, actually achieving this goal may be beyond human grasp?

Then again, the failure is not truly our fault. Peace, it seems, grows out of war, and war, in turn, grows out of peace. On the face of it all, it appears that at the very heart of nature itself lies one of the mightiest of all life forces: the instinct to survive. Peace is often seen as being in service to that function. Sometimes war is viewed as a necessary ally to that force.

Let me explain what I mean, first from the context of history and evolution, and then in more personal terms.

For me, war comes down to a philosophical question, one that has to do with who we are. For many years, most of what I could observe came from knowing about World Wars I and II, the wars in Asia that involved us, and, of course, the Civil War. That was pretty much it. But after that, in a deeper look into human history, I found that those wars do not even begin to represent how many wars we have weathered, going back past the 2,008 years since Jesus’s birth and beyond. War was always there somewhere, among the Romans, the English, the French, the Italians, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Spaniards, the Russians, and no less on the continent of Asia, not to mention all the kingdoms and empires, east and west, that were constantly at each other’s throats long
before the discovery of America—which itself led to war against the indigenous people of this continent, erroneously named Indians. And the Indian tribes themselves made war against each other long before America was “discovered” by Europeans. That is man’s pattern; that’s who he is. Times of war and periods of peace alternate, as directed by the hand of nature, and for reasons known only to nature itself.

As much as we may not like the fact, Ayele, we must understand that mankind came to be that way out of a staggering evolutionary experience that started way back when there was not a living cell on the planet. In fact, the planet itself was a boiling cauldron of chemicals out of which arose the first life-form: the one-celled amoeba—which in turn triggered the process responsible for all that followed across that entire evolutionary span. Was the survival instinct an inheritance handed down to all living creatures, including us, from that single-celled amoeba? Possibly!

As the process of billions of years of evolution rolled on, those creatures whose adaptability allowed them to survive on land would gradually develop into other creatures who would move around through the treetops in the jungles and forests that blanketed portions of the land area of planet Earth. Adaptability meant survival, and survival required adaptability.

Throughout that whole process we,
Homo sapiens,
were still nowhere in sight. There were many, many stages before evolution brought about humanlike creatures. Among our closest ancestral relatives were apes and chimpanzees. Ultimately came the evolutionary progression in which we arrived, but we were late in the game. Yes, we have been here many, many thousands of years, but in terms of the history of the planet, we’ve just barely arrived—or so modern science implies.

The survival instinct was a drive of such intensity that cannibalism was a frequent indulgence among some species in their desperate struggle for survival, because our survival needs included food enough to keep the species nurtured. We modern
Homo sapiens
are, therefore, carrying within us the entire drive of our ancestors’ need to survive. It is so integral to our makeup that at points in our history we have spent most of our waking hours in pursuit of that survival.

Though certainly the needs of survival change from time to time and from species to species, we carry the same power, the same drive that the other, earlier creatures carried. However difficult it is to wrap our minds around who we once were, it lays bare the fact that there is a central force in us all, and that central force is survival. The survival force is a monumental energy. We are designed with it, irreplaceably, in ourselves.

So here we are with this highly honed instinct, so finely honed that if we go back from our generation just six hundred years to early man in European countries, everybody was fighting. Colonialism was born out of that warlike behavior. In those days, the important thing was power: power was domination; power was subjugation. France was into it, as were Germany and the Scandinavian countries. In Asia, the Japanese and Chinese were into it. Tribal chiefs in intertribal wars throughout Africa were into it.

In the later progression of wars of mankind, power has been the driving force more than survival—although mankind’s need for power, I think, grew out of the survival instinct. Opponents proclaimed: “We are not going to let them have what we have. It is our birthright; this is who we are.” And so they made conquest the most important thing.

Conquest eliminates the enemy, and the enemy’s spoils become the conqueror’s. This emboldened early nations with large armies like England to eye the Middle East and to say, “Let us build a fleet of ships, and have a navy
and
an army, and just the vision of us will be fearsome. We can sail along the Mediterranean coast and into the cradle of civilization, with its ancient treasures, and forge alliances with the region in trade and commerce that will bring other nations closer to the empire of the queen. Resources will be developed in the interest of the modern world.”

The game of war has not changed. Instead, it has intensified. Because we have technology, television, and newspapers, and because our subjects can read now—which is wonderful—we manage our wars differently.

We are at a point now where our need to survive and our gratification of it take different forms. We have Wall Street, we have farms, we have gleaming workplace towers, and we’ve got all kinds of things that cause us to get up in the morning and go to a job.

In America, we, too, have battle relationships on many levels: political, economic, class, communal, religious, and philosophical—to name but a few. These are wars that we believe we can live with, if you are going to use the yardstick of logic and reason and the need to survive, plus all of the moral and ethical things that we superimpose on ourselves.

Still, nations do go to war—sometimes to defend themselves, sometimes to ensure the security of their borders, and sometimes for all the wrong reasons.

The power question still bothers me. Power was always in the mix, either exercising itself on its own behalf or to weaken the power of its adversaries and prevent unwanted challenges to itself. What changes
is that power takes on different forms as we are a world no longer of, say, 1 or 2 million people, but rather of 6 billion, and we are all still playing that game. In much of my lifetime there were only two countries playing the game of power: the United States and the Soviet Union. And we played it for many years, to the disadvantage of a lot of smaller countries and at the threat of eliminating everybody on earth.

Now we have refined the game. In all too many countries in the world, leaders who wish to maintain or increase their hold on power have found it necessary, in order to go to war, to manufacture an argument to convince their people that it is necessary for their survival.

Not only was that how we were sold the war that was supposedly waged to take down an impotent tyrant named Saddam Hussein, but that was the means used to convince us, in spite of our inherent faculties of logic and reason, that such a thing as “preemptive war” could ever be in our own interests.

Now, I don’t think we are killing people because we’re any worse than anybody else or any better. I think that what we are doing is showing the darker side of what human beings have always been: we have a capacity for love, a capacity for kindness, a capacity for passion, and we have an equal capacity for their opposites. Love is infinitely more effective in the world than hate, but love and hate have their opposites, and we have now a huge dilemma: we have the world’s number-one spot, we are the strongest military in the world, and we have more people hating us than ever before.

I think it is not altogether wise to presuppose that their hatred of us has to do with their envy of us; it isn’t that all the time. Some of the time it has to do with who we perceive ourselves to be, and who they perceive themselves to be.

Now, we know that, in this latest exemplar of the warrior within us, we should have taken another tack. Where we are now, we look at each other in terms of what we are to each other: enemies. And where we are now is a dangerous, dangerous place.

Thus we, Ayele, the generation before you, and many generations before that have been derelict in opposing the warrior within us long enough or hard enough to provide you with a less violent, more agreeable world.

We had our chances. While the early wars were often fought between tribes or nations who knew nothing of each other and feared each other’s strange looks, customs, and unknown powers, much of that changed over time. In the wars of my time, while people spoke different languages, nations were no longer fighting total strangers. We knew, at least, the overwhelming similarities of the various members of the human family. Beyond our mutual need for food, water, and air, we knew that even among our enemies there were similarities of love, kindness, religious worship, and reverence for children as inheritors of our space on earth.

But war remained the ultimate way to settle our differences, even when we described the most recent one to be the last. The First World War, sometimes called the war to end all wars, involved twenty-four nations and claimed an estimated 11 million dead. Still, some twenty years later came the Second World War and its staggering human toll of more than 59 million.

That should have been enough for man to say, “Stop! Enough!” But the fate of the young men and women who pay the ultimate price for our national disagreements was totally in the hands of older men, the politicians charged with the care of the world, the elder statesmen. In this important responsibility, they failed their
generation, Ayele. And during the time of that failure, the Hitlers and the Stalins ravaged the world.

But even though we speak of the warrior nature within mankind in its most cruel manifestation, it is not one-dimensional; that same warrior instinct, that same battling for survival, has produced not just the bad wars, but also the good wars.

The good wars are the ones we fight in the name of children, in the name of the poor, in the name of those oppressed by overwhelming odds or forces beyond their control. We fight good wars in medical laboratories, endlessly seeking to cure the scourges of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and mental illness. We fight good wars when we devote time, energy, and money to relieve the suffering of hungry people around the world. We fight good wars when we come to the aid of those struck by the overwhelming forces of capricious nature: fire, flood, drought, hurricanes, and earthquakes. We fight good wars when we refuse to allow injustice to be done to others. We fight good wars when we oppose hate, bigotry, and ignorance.

These are the battles, Ayele, in which you and the best of your generation will need to engage. While the energies of my generation have grown fragile with age and worn with effort, your generation can bring fresh insight, boundless vigor, and rigorous intelligence as you merge into the ranks of those a mere generation ahead of you. You must fight to make the words
freedom, democracy,
and
equality
more than just the buzzwords of men and women seeking higher office. In the current time of my life, the words
terrorists
and
terrorism
have become almost daily chants to be absorbed into the public psyche.

I do not know how the atmosphere will be for you, Ayele. But understand that terrorism is not just the landscape of the terrorists; it is also inhabited by those who cry out the word to spread fear
for their own political gain. Do not easily accept the premise that another war will change things, or that it is necessary. Demand more accountability.

While collectively you can change things, you can do that only if you firmly believe that you, as an individual, can make a difference. Too many good causes have met bad ends because too many otherwise good people felt there was nothing that they, individually, could do to make a difference.

Let me rush to explain, Ayele, that I am not suggesting that you devote your life to being a missionary. You are entitled to your share of love and joy and leisure and pure happiness. But within the warm periphery of your life, there should be room for passionate involvement. As the Italian poet Antonio Porchia put it: “In a full heart there is room for everything, and in an empty heart there is room for nothing.”

Racial, religious, and sexual bigotry must be your enemies. Go for the jugular when you encounter the principal adversary: ignorance.

Why did we not do it, my generation? We tried, despite our overall failing grade. And we succeeded in modest bits. We fought the scourge of AIDS and its early bigots. We raised our voices and our hands against genocide, and we began our efforts, although belatedly, to better protect the planet. My generation and the one that followed have not been totally negligent in trying to make the world a better place.