Everything New Is Old Again

By Ben Tripp
Created Jan 7 2007 - 10:46am

Humankind has never changed, and it never will.

The essential misapprehension under which individuals labor --generation
after generation-- is that we are on some endless collective journey that
will take our species from weak-chinned, flint-chipping anthropoid misery to
an exalted state wherein our lives will pass with the elegance of a new-age
celebrity wedding in Tahiti. People imagine we're about three-fifths of the
way along this evolutionary trek. They have always imagined this, and they
have always been wrong. Nothing ever changes, and nothing ever will.

Which is not to say that nothing ever changes. Change is the only constant
in this universe. It's just that the changes that occur around us (and
within us) have all happened before, but on a quantum scale. The human
curse --and our greatest blessing-- is that man's intersection with the
world (and most women's, excepting Marie Antoinette, who crops up in
past-life regressions approximately six in ten times) is limited to one
lifetime. Look at history, we surmise, and avoid the obvious mistakes
recorded there, and progress will be made. All we have to do is internalize
the idea that Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it".

Clever-boots know that this statement is attributed to George Santayana,
which shows they're very well informed and aren't likely to repeat the
mistakes of the past. Except for always. George, now armed with such insight
into the brevity of human existence as being dead provides, would probably
agree that history is inescapable. We are all doomed to repeat it,
regardless of what we learn of mankind's errant peregrination along its
course. There are two obstacles to genuine progress: first, we are
hard-wired to repeat behaviors; and second, history is rubbish.

It would be nice to think that our species, which after all has come to rely
on its brain power more than its physical prowess (I am living proof of
this, or proof that inertia trumps both attributes), could innovate its
collective way out of the situation. But it can't. History is primarily the
glorification of murderers as told by liars to idiots. What we can learn
from the past by studying history is much like what we can learn about a
1963 Chateau d'Yquem 1er Cru Superieur Bordeaux by studying chip vinegar.

Even if history could be relied upon, it wouldn't change the human desire to
do the same goddamn things, over and over and over again, because these
things worked for our stoatish proto-ancestor Morganucodon Watsoni 225
million years ago, they worked for Siamopithecus back in the day, and in
terms of DNA-swapping (which is the purpose of organic life) these behaviors
still work for humans today. Ah, but Morganucodon Watsoni couldn't fly, you
say (although Volaticotherium antiquus could glide pretty handily, 150
million years ago); we modern man types have made progress!

Pother.

The fossil record demonstrates that genus Homo was always on the go,
cropping up in Africa first, then toddling off to Asia and points north the
minute he got the hang of ambulating on his back legs. We started off
walking, then figured out riding; when the wheel came along I'll bet
everybody scoffed at their ancestors for dragging things around. Then they
scoffed at their ancestors for relying on animal power, and scoffed again at
steam, and anybody that isn't scoffing at internal combustion today should
be taken out back of the woodshed and beaten soundly. The means of getting
about has changed, but our desire to do so, on a species-wide scale, is
absolutely constant. We simply mistake innovation for transformation.
Despite twenty thousand technological solutions, the best mousetrap remains
the cat.

It makes no difference if hauling ourselves and our goods from place to
place is destroying the ozone layer and ruining the landscape and causing
the North Atlantic Current to reverse itself. We gotta keep moving. Another
example might be our desire to live above-ground. Would it make sense for us
to dig down, instead of building up? Of course it would. Manhattan could be
two hundred stories deep, and Central Park could cover the entire island,
and it would be just like in Popular Science. But humans like to live above
the root line. People that prefer subterranean dwellings are still
considered weirdos. Ah, but didn't we once favor the cave as a desirable
address? Sure, as long as it was on a slope. It's living below the horizon
that bugs us. So we continue to pile up massive edifices that, from a
historical perspective, are 100%% guaranteed to collapse. The caves, it is
worth noting, are still around.

A thousand years ago, there was an industrial revolution no less impressive
than the recent version that brought us the Eiffel Tower and World War One.
Huge numbers of able-bodied men --belligerent, religion-crazed nitwits--
marched off to the crusades, leaving behind the cleverer fellows and a
dearth of ready manpower (I'm paraphrasing a vast, complex stretch of
history for my own purposes here, although the basic arc of the thing is
correct, so keep a grain of salt handy). What was needed was a way to turn
crops into portable food with a minimum of human effort. The main innovation
was harnessing free energy-- wind, water, and so forth. With this power our
forebears could turn grain into flour at a terrific clip, which meant that
enormous amounts of food energy could be accumulated for later use. Which
led to a revolution in agriculture, because now one could grind as much
grain as one could grow-- so science came into play and brilliant new
growing techniques were developed. This, combined in devious ways with
advances in metallurgy, war-making, and the number of babies that survived
past their first year, paved the way for explosive growth in urbanization
and non-agricultural trades and industries. By the 14th Century people were
worried about pollution and mineral rights, there were unions, strikes,
miserable conditions in cloth factories, and the great cathedrals of Europe
were being erected. Gosh, it sounds just like the 18th and 19th Centuries.
But haven't we made progress?

Not really. We're still operating sweatshops and mines as miserable as
anything they had in the Dark Ages, although we've innovated transportation
so much that we can use serfs in distant countries to do the grunt work.
We've revolutionized pollution, but not in the better sense of the idea.
We've only figured out how to make more of it that's more poisonous. Just as
the people of medieval Europe eventually self-destructed, so are we doing.
There are many more parallels throughout history to the sort of state we're
in today: the rise and fall of superstition, the building up and tearing
down of secular and religious states (ask the Greeks, ask the Romans), the
ebb and flow of knowledge, art, and innovation.

One could argue that improvements in technology and advances in the human
condition have allowed us to go from maybe 200 million people on earth in
the time of that guy Christ, to 6.5 billion people today. Tell that to the
trilobites, for example, that kicked so much ass with their little expodite
legs they ran to 15,000 species before the inevitable end came. Or the
dimetrodons, critters that ran the show for 30 million years. You don't see
them around any more. In fact, ingenious as humans consider themselves (no
trilobite ever figured out how to build even the simplest four-stroke rotary
engine) we are on the same road to extinction that marks all highly
successful species, the terminus of which appears again and again in the
fossil record. It's tough titty for us, that's all. None of this ought to be
particularly upsetting, unless you take the vast cycles of creation and
destruction personally. Species come and go, merely another manifestation of
the transfer of energy (force operating on matter), or in layman's terms:

I don't know about you, but I find that comforting. On the other hand, just
as I once believed in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus (college cured me of
that), and just as millions of people still believe in those magical fellows
Jesus, Yaweh, and Mohammed today, an enormous number of people believe that
mankind is going to sort it all out, head off into a vaguely Romanesque
future with flying cars and charabanc tours to Venus, and beat entropy once
and for all. That new-age celebrity wedding in Tahiti is never going to
happen, however. As long as there is somebody getting something right, there
will be someone else killing him and running off with it. As long as we're
succeeding in one area, we're dooming ourselves in another. We can study
history all we want; the real tale of human non-progress has been artfully
concealed by every single teller of tales since the species first took on
latent memory as a specialization.

Our species has never changed, it is true. And never will, regardless of the
guaranteed pan-fatal consequences. This being, however, the early 21st
Century, a time when people require an uplifting coda at the end of any
depressing narrative, just as the ancient Greeks required a god to descend
from the heavens and thwack somebody at the end of their plays, I will
provide an uplifting coda. A real one, at that.

If mankind has a single talent above all others, it is a knack for
acceleration. Paleontologists go back and forth about what adaptation let
hominids, and especially our ancestors, take off like blazes up the
evolutionary ladder. Anybody that has ever been menaced by a big dog on a
lonely road knows the correct answer. It's not the opposable thumb, an
upright stance, or a large brain. It's the simple ability to throw a rock
with accuracy.

Hitting a sabretooth cat on the head with a rock in hand might be good
enough for some hominids; apparently not, though, because they're extinct.
The throw is the thing. It doesn't matter if you have the biggest fangs or
the sharpest claws if there's a dent in your forehead with brains leaking
out of it and your quarry is still thirty feet away. That opposable thumb
makes it easier to put a wicked topspin on the rock, walking upright frees
the hands for hurling, and that big brain can do some lightning calculations
that will get the missile from fingers to enemy cranium every time. It's all
part of the throw. Problem is, other bands of us could throw, too. And then
nobody has an advantage.

So someone comes up with the throwing stick, which allows even a runty
specimen to hurl a stone with formidable power over long distances. Someone
else comes up with the spear, which allows a point to be thrown with
accuracy; this is the difference between a bruise and a sucking chest wound.
The next gink develops the bow and arrow, or in other words a miniature
long-distance spear. This stuff is going faster and faster, accelerating.
And the violence is accelerating. Twenty thousand years later the spear has
become the ICBM and instead of arrows we're launching air-to-ground missiles
from F-22 Raptor jet fighters. Faster and faster, accelerating. Repeating
the same behavior again and again. So far this doesn't sound like good news.
But it is good news.

Even as the consequences of our actions come hurtling up at us (say the
North Atlantic Current really does reverse itself-- Europe could be in for
an ice age in 200 years) we are getting faster and faster at coming up with
antidotes. Populations have figured out how to move fast. We've gotten
better at insulating our dwellings. Hell, we can move stuff all over the
world, including our lifestyles. Religious end-times fervor has gripped the
United States again, and it looks like the government may finally drop its
pro-democratic posture in favor of corporate fascism. But as fast as these
things occur, new things rise up to take their places. Expect another age of
enlightenment. Expect a chastened mankind (after a few decades of extremely
shitty weather) to start taking environmentalism and conservation seriously.
No matter how bad we make things, we're unlikely to have such an unsalutary
effect as the volcanism that precipitated the Permian extinction (95%% of
species wiped out), or the K-T extinction that ended the age of large
leathery non-mammal creatures.

Imagining that the consequences of our unwillingness to change will somehow
cause everything else to change is probably hubris. Things will change
regardless. It's just that the changes in the world are now subject to man's
accelerating influence. As I said, the human grasp of things extends not
more than a lifetime; historians are trained to extend their grasp of time,
but their heads are filled with nonsense made up by long-dead bullshitters,
so it hardly matters. Our great-great-great-great grandchildren will look on
our works and scoff, like everybody has scoffed through the ages. But they
probably won't get upset that the jungles, elephants, polar bears, arctic
ice, rhinos, low-lying coastal communities, sources of potable water,
predictable winters, rivers, islands, and fish are all gone. We don't miss
the mastodons, the woolly rhinoceroses, the Neanderthals, or being able to
walk across a land bridge from China to Australia. Hell, we don't even miss
ox carts.

The faster things change, the more we have to remember that it is our
short-sighted experience of change that makes us think things are getting
worse-- or worser than usual, to coin a phrase. in fact things have always
been getting worse, unless you're of a mind that they're getting better, in
which case they've always been doing that; but in actuality things are
moving through immense cycles we cannot comprehend, let alone have any
impact upon, except to create a little turbulence at the very end of the
Holocene epoch.

That said, I will miss the elephants.
_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson