Reply to Charley Reese on Civilization
The Charley Reese quotes on this page are from his editorial, A Good Hobby.
Charley Reese:
We are mites on a cinder, spinning around a third-rate star in a galaxy that is one of billions of galaxies. Much of what we see in the night sky might no longer be there, since it takes light so long to reach us, even traveling at 165,000 miles per second. Distances in space are quite unimaginable.We have reached our own moon, and one day we might reach Mars, the closest planet, but beyond that, space travel is a vain, human fantasy. The closest star other than our sun is four light-years away. That's the distance covered by light at 165,000 miles per second. We have no conceivable way to reach anything approaching that speed.
We get puffed up about our own importance because of our very limited perspective. The scientific elites like to suppose that they will one day know everything, but the truth is, what is known compared with what is unknown remains a teacup of water out of an ocean. As has often been noted, modern science, for all its inflated sense of self-importance, cannot even find a cure for the common cold. In fact, it hasn't been able to find a cure for anything except mild bacterial infections, and that was a happy accident...
And, if you calculate how long it has taken us to learn simple things, like how to grow crops and how to stack stones on top of each other for buildings, you would have to conclude that as a human race, we are not all that smart. It is an open question whether we are smart enough to survive much longer.
Jerry Abbott:
Mr. Reese missed an important point. Humans are more intelligent now than their ancestors were a million years ago. But our basic nature has not changed. We remain primates, which means that we are strongly tribal in the manner we tend to associate ourselves. When you find a human who has been "liberated" from his tribalism, you have found a mentally disturbed human. Our metamorphosis from erectus to sapiens changed our cranial capacity far more than it changed our instincts.
The worth of a race is judged by what it has accomplished and by what an informed person might suppose it has a good chance of becoming. Some races, though not all, could colonize the Solar System. And, having thus achieved an expanded economy of scale, they might one day attempt a voyage to the nearer stars.
Time is running out on the possibility of creating a sustained human presence away from Earth. But we should not give up while some chance remains to us.
Charley Reese:
We have constructed a civilization entirely dependent on petroleum, the production of which is estimated to peak in about six years. What will happen after that is an open question.
Jerry Abbott:
That's true. In fact, the per capita production of petroleum, the number of oil barrels divided by the Earth's population, peaked back in 1979 and has been declining ever since. A similar depletion will occur in uranium ore, natural gas, and (probably last) coal. By 2100, there may be no source of energy left on Earth able to sustain a large-scale industrial civilization.
The effect this will have on space travel was foreseen by Sir Fred Hoyle in 1964.
It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.
A deadline for Earth's chance to produce a space-faring civilization is coming. Once it is too late, it will be too late forever, unless there's some way to turn wind, water, and animal power into spaceship parts and rocket fuel.
Charley Reese:
If all of mankind worked together in harmony, the problem might be solved, but we are still engaged in tribal fighting, much like our ancestors who lived in caves. Our so-called civilization is a very thin veneer.
Jerry Abbott:
The hope that mankind would learn to work together in harmony is what has led directly to the present political mess. We will no more rise above our own nature, short of an evolutionary process that alters it biologically, than we will exceed the speed of light, which, by the way, is 186282.4 miles per second.
If, by some miracle of propaganda, all of the human races achieved some sort of harmony, it would be an unstable balance, like a bicycle wheel hub balanced on one spoke. The slightest presumption, the merest offense, or the preception of such, would instantly fragment that "harmony," no matter how long it was in the making or how many laws were passed to legitimize it. Interracial harmony is like a glass hammer, shattering at the first blow. It isn't worth having for free, much less paying for it.
Tribalism is the natural state of human social stability, and that's how things will stay for the next million years or so. Racism is natural, and being a racist is no more reprehensible than having fingerprints. Human societies are best established along lines of racial homogeneity.
While we know of animal species that aren't tribal, we don't know of any species that practices universal altruism and brotherly love. Charity originally evolved to promote kin-selection: to aid in the survival of one's own genes as embodied in close relations. Any other application is contrary to survival. What can be known of nature's rules for living creatures should have taught us that global harmony is not an attainable political objective, and, even if it were, endless charity toward foreigners would not be the way to attain it.
Furthermore, we should suspect that anyone who advances global harmony as a desirable and attainable objective either does not understand what he's asking for, or else he has a hidden agenda. In the latter case, the apostle for harmony wants power, and his means for getting it is a subterfuge that relies for its success on the good intentions and gullibility of most people.
Charley Reese:
In the meantime, we are upsetting the natural balance that makes human life possible on this planet. If I had to bet, I'd bet the human species will become extinct as a result of its own stupidity.
Jerry Abbott:
It might become extinct, but stupidity isn't quite the reason. Many people in leadership positions understand what sort of future capitalism must necessarily lead to. As it continues to maximize the profits of stockholders and the salaries of top executives, all of whom are alive in the present, with no regard for the people yet to be born, the end of the process and the motives of those who control it are hardly concealed from the careful thinker. Savitri Devi was one such thinker.
All men, inasmuch as they are not liberated from the bondage of time, follow the downward path of history, whether they know it or not, and whether they like it or not.
Few indeed thoroughly like it, even at our epoch—let alone in happier ages, when people read less and thought more. Few follow it unhesitatingly, without throwing, sometime or other, a sad glance toward the distant, lost paradise into which they know, in their deeper consciousness, that they are never to enter; the paradise of perfection in time—a thing so remote that the earliest people of whom we know remembered it only as a dream. Yet, they follow the fatal way. They obey their destiny.
That resigned submission to the terrible law of decay—that acceptance of the bondage of time by creatures who dimly feel that they could be free from it, but who find it hard to try to free themselves; who know beforehand that they would never succeed, even if they did try—is at the bottom of that incurable unhappiness of man, deplored again and again in the Greek tragedies, and long before these were written. Man is unhappy because he knows, because he feels, in general, that the world in which he lives and of which he is a part, is not what it should be, what it could be. He cannot wholeheartedly accept that world as his—specially not accept the fact that it is going from bad to worse—and be glad. However much he may try to be a "realist" and snatch from destiny whatever he can, when he can, still an invincible yearning for the better remains at the bottom of his heart. He cannot, in general, will the world as it is.
But a few people, as rare as the liberated ones, for whom time does not exist, and perhaps rarer, can and do. These are the most thorough, the most mercilessly effective agents of the death forces on earth: supremely intelligent, and sometimes extraordinarily farsighted; always unscrupulous to the utmost; working without hesitation and without remorse in the sense of the downward process of history and, whether they can see or not as far as that, for its logical conclusion: the annihilation of man and of all life.
Naturally, they do not always see as far as that. But when they do, still they do not care. Since the law of time is what it is, and since the end must come, it is just as well that they should draw all the profit they possibly can from the process that is, anyhow, sooner or later, to bring about the end.
Since no one can re-create the primeval, lost paradise—no one but the wheel of time itself, after it has rolled its full course—then it is just as well that they, who can completely forget the distant vision, or who never had a glimpse of its dying glow; they, who can stifle in themselves the age old yearning for perfection, or rather, who never experienced it; it is just as well that they, I say, should squeeze out of the fleeing moment (whether minutes or years, it matters little) all the intense, immediate enjoyment they can, until the hour comes when they must die. It is just as well that they should leave their stamp upon the world, force generations to remember them, until the hour comes for the world to die. So they feel.
It makes little difference what suffering they might cause to men or other living creatures, by acting as they do. Both men and creatures are bound to suffer, anyhow. Just as well through them as through others, if that can forward the aims of these people. The aims of these people—of men within time, par excellence—are always selfish aims, even when, owing to their material magnitude and historical importance, they transcend immeasurably any one man's life, as they actually do, sometimes. For selfishness—the claim of the part to more place and to more meaning than is naturally allotted to it within the whole—is the very root of disintegration, and therefore a characteristic inseparable from time. One can practically say that the more a person is thoroughly, remorselessly selfish, the more he or she lives in time.
From The Lightning and the Sun.
Among these "death forces" that Savitri Devi speaks of, you can include most heads of government, the Jews who control international finance, the media bosses, and most of the people who profit from the military-industrial complex, whether they are Jews or not. You'll also those who hope to become agents of the death forces in the universities, taking business administration classes. You can meet them on the street, making cynical conversation about how the world is dying, but he has a plan for making his fortune anyway.
Charley Reese:
But in the meantime, buy yourself a telescope and look at the stars. That will at least teach you not to sweat the small stuff. And all human affairs, compared with the universe, are small stuff.
Jerry Abbott:
This is Reese's biggest mistake. The universe has a purpose, and that purpose is its own self-actualization, achieved through the awareness of its living constituants. It is like an embryo awaiting its birth. We, and the lifeless celestial bodies, are both part of the same reality. But we are the cells of a slowly evolving brain. They will never be anything other than a fingernail. If we are stupid and weak, then let us become wiser and more powerful. This isn't conceit: it's the reason life exists, and it is the right thing for us to do.