Progressives, or socialists, or whatever they call themselves this week like to say they’re on the “right side of history”. Nobody is on the right side of history.
To say “history bends my way” is to assume you are a God. “The universe must bend to me, because I am correct.” It doesn’t. The universe does no man’s bidding. Nor does it care how deeply you believe in your inherent perfection.
Nor does history inherently progress upward. For every wide eyed youth who expects Utopia after just a few committee meetings… and eventually a few executions… there’s a equal and opposite generation of hunter gatherers that moved through time without ever thinking about time in a linear way. How many million generations grew old and died without seeing the other side of a hill at the edge of a traditional hunting territory? How many new ideas for bow design, or agricultural innovation, or cultural enrichment simply never happened. The mind boggles.
In the early 21st century, humanity looks like it is locked in a relentless upward climb to glory. It’s appearance without reality. The masses are not climbing. They’re driven rabid by instant communication. Our churning upheaval is another reflection of the twitchy sudden shifts that came about from the Gutenberg press.
Twitter is not real. Until the evolved ape holding with opposed thumbs a device of infinite power learns this, we are maladapted to the world we’ve built.
We’re prone to madness. We panic. We’re easily led. And we’re obsolete.
Already, the newest generations are a different human variant. For better or worse, they have brains rewired since birth by small glass display screens with dopamine dispensing media. They cannot think like the humans of before, just as the humans of before cannot think like them.
Thus, the frenetic spasms of modern life are just that; frenetic spasms.
Yet we sense inflection points in time. All my life this has been a thing I pondered. If you look, you will see. If you see you’re no longer the same as those who do not see.
The most advanced maritime explorers in humanity, the Polynesians, must have pondered the same eternal questions. At least some of them might have.
Some portion of that group, presumably the bravest of the brave, cast off from atolls and specks of land and explored all the way to extremely remote Easter Island. They arrived at the closest thing to the middle of nowhere our planet offers. Depending on who’s archaeology text you believe, this happened sometime in the 4th or 8th century.
Whenever it happened, the explorers found a place no human had ever occupied. They also found Paschalococos disperta (the Rapa Nui palm), an absolutely stellar material for boat building. Imagine the joy these sailing badasses experienced at the discovery of a large island with good resources.
By 1650 the palm was extinct. Modern man cannot understand that level of being stranded. I simply cannot think that way. Nor can you. Yet it happened.
The Rapa Nui imprisoned themselves on a remote speck of the planet they formerly explored. Collapse and poverty was fated from that point on. Captain Cook, an explorer from a culture that took a thousand years to catch up with the first arrivals at Easter Island, showed up in 1744. He found an impoverished people. They were literally the survivors of utter collapse.
We have words for such concepts but they’re inadequate. We speak by analogy, trying to muster the ultimate vision of a world or people that’s completely destroyed; Armageddon, Apocalypse, Mad-Max, SHTF. Call it what you want, on Easter Island it happened.
The thing I ponder is that some of them must have known their fate. Polynesian sailors weren’t fools. They knew how boats were made. They knew how palm trees grew. Some of them must have watched the dwindling stock of building materials with increasing alarm.
I’m sure they tried to avert this avoidable mess, just as we try to avert our current self inflicted messes. They failed. As we fail.
What did they think as the last ocean-worthy hull rotted away? What was their world for “Armageddon”? It must have been a long time coming. Some of them must have seen it happening. A few had to have known what that meant.
Most people don’t think that deeply. Surely most islanders were the same as all people in all times. Focusing on the mundane. Arguing with their neighbor. Pissed off about or enthralled by the chieftain’s expensive public works policy. Hoping to woo a good mate. Trying to keep the garden growing. Wondering if the new generation of kids were idiots. Etc…
But there were some who must have known the full horror of losing the last boat. The few, the wiser, the aware, they always know. They know because they pause, notice, reflect, and think. They use their big monkey brains to ascertain cause and effect. The building material for boats is gone. What have we done?
Did they stand furious on the shore of an island they would never leave and scream their soul’s torment into the universe? If not, then what? Can you imagine being in that person’s head? Can you imagine observing the fools in the village bickering about their little lives when the whole ocean had become impassible? Can you imagine knowing it’s all going to shit, it already started going to shit, it’ll keep going to shit for the rest of your life, it’ll be shit for your children’s life and their children too… for as far as your monkey brain can comprehend; nothing but a long slow dismal decline.
Imagine the weight of the universe in a single human mind. To stand there, feeling the sand, soft and sinking beneath their feet, and know there’s no solution. The resignation is heartbreaking. Humans are still new at thinking. There on that shore an evolved monkey looked at the sky and pondered to the limits of a finite mind amid infinite loss: Is this it?
When I was a boy they taught me the first European to reach the new world was Columbus, who, as Bugs Bunny sang, “sailed the ocean blue to arrive in 1492”. Like everything else I was taught in school, this was wrong. I don’t know if it was deliberate falsehood by bored teachers or oversimplification by ignorant ones.
L’Anse aux Meadows is a small spot in northern Newfoundland. It is firmly established (as it was when my teachers instructed me otherwise) that the Norse had a settlement there. Tree ring analysis puts it at the year 1021.
Imagine the vast gulf in time and space between Medieval Europe (itself a remnant of the long dead Western Roman Empire) and the Mississippian culture that was thriving not too far south of the point of contact. Medieval Norse explorers bridged the gap, or almost did, or perhaps they simply tried. Regardless of intent, they failed spectacularly in terms of joining the two.
Archaeology suggests that the Norse weren’t defeated so much as they retreated… never to return. They may have failed but they did manage to go home. That’s no small thing.
Imagine standing on that shore, watching your culture and the Norse parting ways. Those two paths in time wouldn’t meet again for 471 years. When Europeans returned again they’d make first contact in what is now Cuba, not what is now Canada. They’d inadvertently carry smallpox. They’d bring with them firearms. The Spanish would bring horses. Whatever incremental change that could have happened with the Norse became a landslide with the Spanish.
If you stood on that shore watching the last Norse boat leave you would have no idea that the rift would be half a millennia. It would be impossible to know that the strengths and weaknesses of both sides would change completely. Whatever happened at this contact, the next was very different.
Maybe they were happy the smelly dipshits were leaving. Maybe they wished they’d pried the secret of smelting iron out of their heads. Maybe they expected them to come back the next year. Maybe they were better off without them. Certainly a harsher, larger, irreversible contact five centuries and thousands of miles away could not have been foretold by anyone present at the time.
Thus it passed. Explorers came. Explorers left. The Norse left not much more than footprints. Their absence wasn’t the start of anything. It was a footnote leading to a gap of half a millennia.
I was born to the only culture that ventured past earth. My people walked on the moon.
Then… they didn’t.
I was too young to experience that moment. Just a kid. I never saw a live moon landing on TV. It was done before I was old enough to remember.
The generation before me tried but failed to pave the way for mine. As a kid I had high hopes. America had high hopes. I remember being ecstatic when the Space Shuttle first flew.
Then… hope faded. NASA crawled up its risk averse ass and died. America recently seeks the same outcome.
Oh sure, there’s been progress. We have lasers and microwaves and cell phones and all sorts of cool new technology. But over the decades the spirit of adventure and the willingness to take risk has been systematically beaten out as many humans as possible.
Gen X that I am, I have always been standing on the shore watching options ebb. Twelve men walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972. In due time, I gave up hope that my generation would go where others had gone. I began to give up hope that any generation would return.
How different am I than my hypothetical Polynesian? He was trapped on an island without the resources to make an ocean going boat. How different am I than my hypothetical native? Are grainy black and white videos of men on the moon any different? It’s the same. The bittersweet and scarcely recognized loss of watching the secret of iron sail away toward Greenland.
I too remain at the shore; trapped in a little spherical human cage.
By 2010 the Chief of NASA said his agencies goal was to “reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.” (Google it.) That’s when I really gave up.
So why am I telling you all this? Because resignation, despair, failure of the soul is never the right choice. The human soul is meant to soar.
Today the whimsical human parody Elon Musk, pulled another rabbit our of a hat. He used government money and his balls to do what armies of bureaucratic risk averse desk jockeys could not. Today was the first experimental orbital launch attempt of Superheavy / Starship.
The thing about Superheavy is that it’s on the verge of completely changing the cost of flight. Elon’s audacious goal is to make the per pound cost of putting objects beyond the earth’s gravity well an order of magnitude cheaper than it is now. He’s making good strides in that direction. He created an organization that’s doing what no other bureaucracy could.
His biggest challenge now is less a matter of gravity than the government (which funds him yet defaults to tying innovation in knots). This morning went well. A rocket with twice the thrust of Saturn V evaded both the bounds of earth and the red tape of man. It made it to the edge of space.
Then it exploded.
Adventure is hard. Everyone knew the risks. Watch the video. People cheered at how far they’d gone instead of lamenting that the flight wasn’t perfect on the first experiment. That is how you get to space! Cheers, not lamentation.
I have more hope today than I did yesterday. I may eventually be more than the guy standing on the edge. At this point I’m too old to go even if I could but that was never the point. I may once again be of the people who can land on the moon. That’s what I really want!
The link below is cued up for the launch.
A shorter video is here.
P.S. I’m sure I’ve told the Easter Island / Norse / Space story before. It’s a thing that’s often on my mind.