Tag: CHesterton

An Old Gorilla Talks to An Old Lady

If you are close to my age, you might remember reading Ishmael when you were in your 30s or 40s.  The novel by Daniel Quinn won the Tomorrow Fellowship in 1992, a prize created by Ted Turner and awarded (only once) for fiction offering “creative and positive solutions to global problems.”  It is a readable book and lovely in its conception.

Ishmael is an elderly gorilla who communicates through telepathy and has a novel way of looking at human history and where “it all went wrong.”  He posits that mankind took a fatal turn when they turned into “Takers” rather than “Leavers,” several thousand years ago in the fertile crescent.  He retells the Genesis story as a prophecy of how humans started on a trajectory that would end up destroying humankind and much of the world around us.  He never mentions Faust, but it is definitely the story of a Faustian bargain – according to which we are granted the knowledge and mastery of our lives and of the earth.  Anything is permitted if it makes life easier for humans.  But, as in any Faustian bargain, there is a cost.

I was impressed with Ishmael in my 40s and am still intrigued and impressed in my 70s.  While you can argue with many of Quinn’s conclusions, Ishmael is a rare phenomenon – a totally fresh look at what humans call “progress.”  In these days of AI and a return to a nuclear arms race, I am thinking about this more and more.

The whole notion of progress is different when you are old.  At the time I first read Ishmael – still in my prime, raising kids, building a career, learning new technologies – my world was progressing and I was progressing too.  We all jogged, took up Pilates and yoga, ate yogurt, and were convinced that ours was the generation that would never age or turn into shrunken old people. In my 70s, I realize that – from a bodily standpoint and notwithstanding all our efforts to the contrary – progress is eventually replaced by regress. One hopes for plateaus rather than higher and higher levels of function – and one fears for the abyss. Whether or not the world around us is “progressing,” we are doing something else.

For the past few decades, we elders told ourselves that while we aren’t keeping up with technology (partly because we might not want to), we still had some basic skills and experience which had some worth – experience, verbal and mathematical literacy, a developed sense for human interaction.  Artificial intelligence seeks to replace those things, and while I still believe it cannot, there is some heavy betting that it can.

Our faith in the progress of the world around us has likewise been undermined by reality; “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”  That is what Quinn’s book is about.  And when I read Ishmael again, I saw his argument from a much different standpoint.  I had gotten old and the world had gotten damaged.

Here is his argument (but please read the book).  At some point (and Quinn places that point ten millennia ago), humanity took a step in the wrong direction, mostly through the growth of what he calls aggressive agriculturalism – which led to one culture replacing other more sustainable cultures through the seizure of lands and spectacular population growth.  (There is much more to the story, of course.) And now the greatest threat we have as a species is…ourselves.  I would hardly call that progress.

Even for us Sputnik kids, science no longer looks like a source of unqualified progress – is AI an achievement or a threat?  Ecological damage which, truthfully, we were pretty blind to in the 1950s and 60s, has become so obvious that it is amazing that so many people are still resisting the facts.  The world population has progressed in numbers – from about 2.5 billion when I was born to over 8.3 billion (think about it!), but this can hardly be called progress by the millions scrambling for sustenance on this planet. But every time the notion of progress (as we have defined it since the Enlightenment) is challenged, our culture just doubles down.  Think of the denial of climate change or the recent disagreement between the Pentagon and Anthropic over whether there should be any guardrails on AI.

Chesterton complained that “Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”  Do we even have a vision? Is it a sustainable vision?  Are emotion and commerce (or more specifically commerce using the impetus of emotion) changing the goal to meet the product?  Spinoza said that progress happened when we went from being dominated by the emotions and were guided by the rational, by the thing that makes us human.  I have seen little sign of this lately.  And a couple of days ago we all woke up to the news of yet another war in the Middle East.  No matter how you define progress, it does not feel like this is it.

Early in Ishmael, there is this exchange between Ishmael (who speaks telepathically because, of course, gorillas can’t talk) and the unnamed narrator.  It is worth thinking about.

“Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?”
“As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world.”
“And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world. Why don’t you stop?”
I shrugged. “Frankly, we don’t know how.”
“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”

Our “civilization system” is looking rocky from the perch of old age.  Our generation is grappling with its deeply rooted faith in progress in ways that previous generations maybe did not.

Once we could console ourselves with the thought that we had left our progeny a better world, even though our personal world and body were falling apart.  Our generation has no such consolation.  And we cannot comfort ourselves that it will be better for our children.  Our children are not doing as well as we were at their age, and it looks even worse for our grandchildren.  In general, they are not as well educated – language and math scores are at their lowest point in two decades – and their prospects for good jobs, home ownership, debt relief, and eventually a comfortable retirement, seem dim indeed.

And it is made worse by our cultish attachment to the concept of “progress.”  The stock market goes up, Silicone Valley comes out with a new gadget, we can stream anything anytime – we follow the breadcrumbs and never think that we might end up at the witch’s house.

Anyway, these were all things I thought about when I reread Ishmael in my old age, and I am pretty sure they were more coherent thoughts than I had when I first read it in my forties.  So maybe I have made some kind of progress.

 

 

Golden Years?

We have come to talk about old age and retirement as the “golden years.”  The current use of this term is relatively recent (1959) and usually dated to advertisements by Del Webb for the new “Sun Cities” sprouting up in Arizona and elsewhere.  In the past, however, the “Golden Age” referred to earlier and better times of men. Things were perfect in the Garden of Eden – and it was all downhill from there.

According to Ovid and the mythology of even earlier civilizations, including the Hindu and Judaic (Book of Daniel), the first age of man was the Golden Age, from which we have degenerated through the Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages.  Over time, according to ancient law, things got worse instead of better (as in the Second Law of Thermodynamics).

This was, in part, because early man hadn’t developed the cult of progress.  Until the Age of “Enlightenment,” there was no assumption that the world was “progressing.”  In fact, there had been an accepted notion that culture was deteriorating from an earlier “golden” time as noted above.  The Enlightenment changed that; progress was real, progress was good, progress became a god.  But, for the aged, this reversal also produced the paradox of a cultural ideology of progress juxtaposed with the reality of the aging body. (Think about that!)  But back to the “golden years.”

Of course, golden also has connotations of wealth.  And we often conflate a good old age with a financially rich one.  Theo of Golden, a recent bestseller, is a good read about an admirable elder, yes, but Theo is an old man with endless riches at his disposal.  And while it is true that Theo often uses his riches to help others, it is also true that he is not on a budget, nor does he worry about what happens if the cost of heating his house goes up dramatically.  Is money necessary for a good old age?  Do you need to have enough to buy friends and a house in Sun City?  “Better to go down dignified/With boughten friendship at your side/Than none at all. Provide, provide!” says the hag of Frost’s poem.

In years past, old people with money were generally depicted as misers.  One might think of Silas Marner, Scrooge, Uriah Heap, or Mr. Potter of It’s a Wonderful Life.  Now, gold is looked on as a necessity and not a flaw in old age.  Of course, capitalism has encouraged such a change – don’t hoard your money, spend it!

The highly underrated G. K. Chesterton had more naturalistic take (long before 1959) on the golden glow of old age:

Lo! I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold;
Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out
The year and I are old.

In youth I sought the prince of men,
Captain in cosmic wars,
Our Titan, even the weeds would show
Defiant, to the stars.

But now a great thing in the street
Seems any human nod,
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God.

In youth I sought the golden flower
Hidden in wood or wold,
But I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold.

Here, gold is a matter of perception, specifically a change in appreciation that comes with age – or so we would hope.  And the notion of progress is meaningless in the face of the cycles of nature.

Of course, we might also nod to Robert Frost again, who brings us back to the golden age being at the beginning of life and reminds us that the true gold is nothing that we can grasp:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Our memories of early days are often golden.  We are nostalgic for our past, but our childhood Edens cannot stay nor be re-created.  They can only be recognized and remembered.  But it might be the wisdom of old age that makes us remember and finally realize that the real gold is in all Chesterton’s leaves and faces.  And that, perhaps, for us and for our planet, progress is overrated.

For other of my posts about the golden autumn of old age, you might try “Accepting the Season” or “Bare Ruin’d Choirs.”

Accepting the Season – Autumn Leaves

For millennia, the season of fall has been identified with, been a metaphor for, old age.  The Greeks did it, the Romans did it, the Bible does it.  Poets do it.  And there is a correlation; as the leaves get old and change color and fall, so do we age and wither and fall.  There is a difference, though, isn’t there?  The trees will bud up again in the spring and new leaves will replace the old.

For me, the new year begins in the fall. I grew up in an academic family, and I spent my working life on one college campus or another.  Labor Day signaled the start of a new year.  When I was young, I got new clothes and new textbooks.  A fresh start.  But of course, fall is when nature (at least in the northern climes) starts winding down.  And in New England where I grew up and (a little less so) in North Carolina where I now reside, the woods pass into mellow golds and flaming reds and oranges.  The air gets crisp and cool, the air conditioning gets a rest, and I feel reinvigorated.

In his “Autumn Day,” Rilke reminds us that the fall of our life means “it’s time”:

Lord: it’s time.  The summer was magnificent.
Lay your shadows upon the sundials
And o’er the isles allow your winds to vent.

Command the final fruits to be full and fine:
Give them two more days in the southern sun,
Push them to completion and then run
The last sweetness through the heavy wine.

Fall reminds Chesterton that the gold of old age is easier to find than the gold of youth:

In youth I sought the golden flower
Hidden in wood or wold [moor],
But I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold.

When “all the leaves are gold.”  If we could only think of old age that way.  If, at least, old people could look at autumn that way.

In “Spring and Fall” Hopkins gives us the “golden groves” through the eyes of the young.  He sees the “unleaving” season through the eyes of a girl, a girl with a name – Margaret – who grieves for the leaves without realizing that she is really grieving for the mortality of all things including ourselves.  He starts:

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

And ends:

It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

The losses of autumn can make us, like Margaret, melancholy at times.  As Robert Frost says in his poem “Reluctance”:

Ah, when to the heart of man
   Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
   To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
   Of a love or a season?

And yet I love the fall with its final gasp of color and last flutters as the wind fills the air with the weightless corpses of the verdant summer.  As the wheels swirl and crackle, I am reminded of the end of Rilke’s Tenth Duino Elegy: “And we who always think of happiness rising would feel the emotion that most startles us when a happy thing falls.” (Trans. By D. Young).  Yes, we must “accept” the end of a season, of our youth.  And yet, if we are willing to be “startled,” we may find happiness in the falling, I think.

There are many ways to handle the “end of a love or a season.”  My story for this week, “Livability,” looks at one (somewhat humorous) way of making a new life when an old one ends.