How Close Is The Future?

This blogpiece is a little more personal than most of those on this page. It is personal with respect to my musing on how much time I have left on this Earth and my relationship with that time.

Let me start with a personal observation.

As I get closer and closer to my death, I find that my thinking about the future becomes more acute, and more fearful. Let me explain.

I do not mean fearful for my own death, nor do I mean fearful for what any afterlife (or non-afterlife) may hold. None of that do I find fearful.

But, I do discover that as I have less and less existential future, the more concern I have for the future per se. Yet, when I had plenty of future ahead of me (say, in my 20s, 30s and even into my late 50s) I had little to concern me about the future. How is it, I ask myself, that as I get closer to my death, the more I feel a distress and unease about the future that is to occur after my death?

Partly, I suspect, the answer to this paradox can be found in the book Future Shock,¹ written by husband and wife team, Alvin Toffler and Adelaide Farrell (often unattributed), published in 1970.

The basic thesis of Future Shock is that too much change in a short period of time leads to psychological stress and anxiety. Toffler and Farrell noted that previous generations of humans had dealt with major change about once (or less) in their lifetimes. Yet, by the time of their writing, each generation was now experiencing significant change twice, or even thrice, during their lifetime.

We are now 55 years on from the publication of Future Shock. The pace of change has accelerated in that time, so that now the amount of change in a person’s lifetime is much greater. We are now facing an ‘abrupt collision with the future’ as Toffler and Farrell predicted in the book.

Is this what I am facing and noticing in my unease? Have I collided with the future?

Yes, but it is only a partial answer. A further aspect is my own involvement with the environmental movement. This is a movement that has shifted and morphed into various identities since the early 1970s when I first became involved.

When I first became involved with the environmental movement the environment was viewed (by me at least, and I suspect most others in the movement) exactly as the words etymology suggests: the environment is what surrounds me, it is outside of me and is the medium through which I pass.

However, as the years and decades passed by my understanding of environment and the nature of the world has shifted. Indeed, the word environment is no longer useful, as my perception now does not recognise a difference between me and not-me. This shift passed through a stage of “I am part of nature” to “I am nature.” That is a long way from the understanding of my youth.

Alongside this spatial shift I also experienced a temporal shift. My part in nature is not confined to my lifetime. I am part of the entire cosmos. The atoms that make up me today have been part of the universe for millennia, they have been part of humankind since the stone-age and before, they have been ingested by wolves, beavers, and many other animals, they have been spewed out of volcanoes 13 billion years ago. These atoms in my body will exist somewhere in the universe in another 13 billion years.

We have learnt a lot about the world since the 1970s. We have learnt a lot more about how intricately entangled it is. We have learnt a lot about how the feedback loops that have kept the Earth in homeostasis are breaking down and the system as a whole is collapsing.

None of this was I able to see, or foretell, in the 1970s when I was much younger. Then I had no sense of a collision with the future.

But now I do.

The collapsing future will not only impact humanity. It will, and already is, impacting the more-than-human life upon this planet. Extinction rates are presently anywhere from 100 times to 1,000 times the normal background rate.

So it is that, although I can appreciate my spatial and temporal entanglement with the cosmos, the closer come to my death, and the less future I have personally, the more unease I have for the future of those to come (human and other-than-human.)

Do any other readers of my cohort notice anything similar?

Note:

1. Alvin Toffler (and Adelaide Farrell) Future Shock, Bantam Books, New York, 1970

Miracle Of A Smile

Spike Millagan penned a delightful poem titled Smile. In the first line of this poem Spike declares that ‘smiling is infectious.’ (The first stanza of the poem is quoted at the end of this blogpiece.)

Infectious – yes. Miraculous also. How so? You may ask.

It is miraculous through language. The words smile and miracle are etymologically linked.

Both words derive from the Latin mirari meaning “to wonder at, to marvel, to be astonished.” From this verb comes the noun, miraculum, meaning “an object of wonder.”

Prior to the Latin, the Proto-Indo-European word smey (or smei) can be translated as smile, or laugh. It can also be translated as wonder.

Looking at these etymologies the connections between the words smile and miracle can easily be seen. Other common English words that share this etymology include; admire, mirror, mirage, and marvel.

Often the word miracle gets attached to events associated with divine intervention. However, the word miracle simply means an inexplicable event, an even that cannot be explained by natural or scientific laws. However, attributing (or explaining) the event to a supernatural, or divine, cause does not follow. That is a logical fallacy. A miracle is simply something to wonder at, to marvel at. Explanation is not required.

A more common use of the word miracle is that of a statistically unlikely event occurring. Instances of this use are such things as; someone surviving an air disaster, or emerging from a blazing building hardly scathed. A statistician may describe such an occurrence as “falling outside the third standard deviation from the mean.” In common parlance, it is much easier to say, “a miracle.”

Miracles, and so-called miracle-workers, have been with us for millennia. The Roman god Hercules, and the Egyptian goddess Isis, were both believed to have been able to perform miracles. The Greek philosopher, Pythagoras (in the 6^th century BCE) is said to have been able to accomplish miracles.

Of course, in western culture, and specifically within Christianity, Jesus is attributed with having the ability to perform miracles. Within other religions too, miracle-workers are proclaimed. Muhammad and Gautama Buddha are both said to have performed miracles.

But, let us return to smiling.

Science can describe how our facial muscles work to shape a smile upon our face. Science can also describe the neuronal messages in the brain of someone else perceiving the smile of the other person.

But, science cannot explain a smile and it cannot explain how it becomes infectious.

A smile is a miracle.

Smile (Poem by Spike Milligan - first stanza)

A smile is infectious

You catch it like the flu

When someone smiled at me today

I started smiling too.

Are You Sick Of The Rain Yet?

We have had a lot of rain recently where I live. One day, after about a week’s worth of rainy days I was walking with my umbrella up and encountered a neighbour. After greeting one another, my neighbour asked, “Are you sick of the rain yet?”

Under the circumstances this may seem a logical and innocuous question to ask. It is also rhetorical; it seeks to find a common sense of experience, and a shared desire for sunshine and fine weather.

As I continued walking I pondered the question, and found that below the question lay some potentially troubling human psychology. I was reminded of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.

Before continuing, a quick note about the word noble. We may often think of noble as pertaining to someone of the aristocracy, such as a Baron, Duke, Duchess, or Baroness. The Pali word ariya (translated as noble), however, suggests notions of valuable, precious, and not ordinary. With this sense in mind, it is possible to recognise something in the Four Noble Truths that is not normally considered and is a precious insight.

Back to the rain and the question.

The Buddha’s First Noble Truth tells us that suffering exists. It is a simple statement of how something is, a bit like a doctor making a diagnosis. Again, we must be careful with translations. The Pali word dukkha is often translated as suffering. However, the fuller meaning of the word encompasses such feelings as, dissatisfaction, un-ease, discomfort, disquiet. With this in mind it is possible to recognise that dukkha is not the same as pain. Pain is unavoidable, it is an aspect of life. Suffering (or discomfort, dissatisfaction etc) is our response to that pain.

The First Noble Truth was implicit in my neighbour’s question. A feeling of discomfort was embedded within the question, and a desire for that discomfort to be alleviated.

It is this desire for alleviation where the Buddha’s next three Noble Truths attain their preciousness. Many of us get no further than the First Noble Truth – viz. expressing discomfort, dissatisfaction, or un-ease. Then, once expressed, we might try to wish the discomfort away, or maybe want someone else to fix the problem, or pray for a miracle. Very rarely do any of these approaches work.

The next three Noble Truths, however, tell us that there are causes of our dukkha, that there is a remedy, and that there is a path (or medication if you like) we can take to relieve ourselves of the dukkha. I do not intend going into a complete explanation of these Noble Truths. I will simply make the following observation.

When we recognise that our suffering (not our pain) is a state of mind then we can see that suffering is caused by one of two prime states – aversion towards something, or grasping for something. Both cause us to suffer. And this suffering, declares the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield is ‘like a rope burn. We need to let go.’¹

Easy said, much harder to do. It is a practice that takes time to learn. We westerners, attuned to wanting quick results, find this difficult.

The Buddha was aware of this also and prescribed a path (the Fourth Noble Truth) that, if one travelled upon it, would allow us to let go. But, let us not delude ourselves. Letting go does not mean that the pain will go away, nor does it mean there is an end to suffering.

It does mean, however, that suffering no longer has a power over us.

Back to the rain again. The rain might have meant I got wet (a minor irritation of pain) resulting in my feeling discomfort. Yet, once I let go my aversion to getting wet then discomfort has no power over me.

I am reminded of a lovely story that illustrates this concept well.

Two people are going down the road in the rain. One is skipping along with a smile upon their face. The other is slouched over looking grumpy. The lesson here is that no matter which of these two approaches is taken, both get wet!

Notes:

1. Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart, Rider, London, Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg, 2008

Scarcity, Plenty, Enough

Medieval grain store

Have you had a conversation with someone about inequality in the world and the unfairness of economic systems that privilege the rich and punish the poor? I have, and sometimes the other person responds by telling me that I am deluded because of my “scarcity belief.”

According to this person a “scarcity belief” is one in which no matter how much, or how little, there is, it is never enough. The corollary to this is that the scarcity belief is an error. Scarcity, according to this person, does not exist.

A quick aside: Have you also noticed that sometimes those who reject the “scarcity belief” idea are often also those who are praying for, seeking to manifest, or wishing for more abundance, more money, or more riches. It is odd.

Rejecting, denying, or attempting to overcome scarcity does not mean that there is, or must be, plenty. We live in a finite world, and no matter how much praying, manifesting, or wishing we do, that is not going to change.

Scarcity Origins

We might ask though, where the concept of scarcity originated?

I have not been able to track down any authoritative answer to this. However, it is likely that the concept arose some 10,000 – 12,000 years ago with the Agricultural Revolution. Prior to then, it most likely did not exist in our minds, except as a temporary sense of shortage or lack. Most likely, the response in this case would be to move, as hunter/gatherers, and other nomads did.

But, the Agricultural Revolution brought with it a lessening of the variety of food (via specialisation of crop growing and/or animal raising) and hence, a reliance on a much-reduced diversity of food sources. Regrettably, this reliance meant that food sources became prone to drought, floods, pestilence, and other ways in which the food supply could be reduced, or wiped out, very quickly.

In short, natural processes could spell scarcity for early agriculturalists and farmers.

The solution to this possibility was to hoard up supplies in expectation of lean times. But this too had consequences. Hoarding led to a stratification of society into those who hoarded and those who didn’t and may have resulted in a stratification of society into the owners of grain stores and those who worked for owners. (I know I am surmising here, but you may agree, that something like this is likely to have gone on all those millennia ago.)

Now, what might have happened in lean times? The hoarders may have felt protected by their stored grain (or wheat, or barley, or whatever) whereas others now became vulnerable to a scarcity. No longer able to move (as had their ancestors living a nomadic lifestyle) the non-hoarders most likely thought to themselves, ‘we cannot provide for ourselves, we’ll have to steal from the hoarders.’

How likely is this scenario, you and I may ask? My hunch is that it was highly probable.

Sketching out this possible scenario indicates where and when the concept of scarcity may have first arisen.

Scarcity Today

Today, scarcity is not a belief, nor is it a myth. Scarcity is real and has been for a number of decades. Ironically, it is the Agricultural Revolution, and the worldviews and paradigms that arose as a consequence of that revolution, which have left us in a world of scarcity.

By scarcity here, I am referring to what might better be thought of as limitation. Globally we began to overshoot the world’s carrying capacity around 50 years ago. The concept was neatly captured in the seminal report and book – Limits to Growth. We live on a finite world, which means that there are limits to how much we can exploit and extract from the world, and how much the earth can cope with our waste and pollution. Continuous growth brings us slap back up against limits. In short, growth brings us close to scarcity.

The antidote to scarcity is not its opposite – plenty.

It appears that there are only two means by which we can break out of the scarcity cycle. One, is a programme of degrowth, the other is to establish a mentality of enough.

One who knew the concept of enough was the author, Joseph Heller. I have written of this exchange between Heller and his friend Kurt Vonnegut before. It bears repeating.

When Joseph Heller died, his good friend and fellow author, Kurt Vonnegut (author of Slaughterhouse-Five,) wrote in his obituary of a party that the two of them attended. The party host was a millionaire. As the two of them talked, Vonnegut opined to his friend that the millionaire made more money in one day than Heller’s book (Catch 22) had since it had been published.

Joseph Heller looked at his friend and said, ‘Yes, but I have something he will never have.’

Vonnegut naturally asked, ‘What is that?’

To which Heller replied, ‘Enough!’

Heller knew the antidote to scarcity.