Meant to Be?

Watch 'n Wait: So good to hear from you after all this time! Yes, it's true, lots of men eventually suffer from prostate cancer, but not usually until they should be well past worrying a lot about erectile dysfunction (I said "should be"). I'm not sure I think this accounts for the apparent insatiable demand for aids for performance. A lot of it is probably just a result of the pharmaceuticals manufacturing and encouraging demand. Anyway, thanks for the comment and best wishes to you.

Drunken Punxsutawney man
arrested for giving mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation to dead opossum.

I hesitate to even mention this incredibly complex topic, and I have no idea how to realistically do anything about it, but I believe it is true – human beings were not meant to live the way we currently live. We were meant, I think, to live with nature, not to attack and destroy it. Of course when there were fewer people on earth it was much easier than it is today, and I suspect the myth of the noble savage living at one with nature is in itself just that, a myth. “Savages,” as near as I can tell, did not always live completely at one with nature, but because they were fewer, and because they did not have the destructive technology we now have, they were unable to destroy nature as easily and routinely as we have increasingly learned to do. However, in some instances they tried. For example, in the New Guinea Highlands there are vast stretches of grasslands (kunai). The soil is not very productive in these areas and nothing much grows there except a tall, tough grass with sharp spear-like leaves. Cattle cannot eat this grass except if it is periodically burned they can eat the tender new shoots. Of course there were no cattle there, having only recently been introduced by Europeans. But my point is simply that those unproductive grasslands are the result of human intervention, they were caused by the systematic burning over many years of what was there previously, burning to hunt, to clear ground for cultivation, and also during warfare and raiding. The people who inhabit these grasslands learned to adapt to life there, they learned to raise pigs that do well there, and to make salt from burning the grass and processing the ashes. They learned to trade with other people who lived in the nearby forests for products they needed but could not produce themselves, black palm for bows and arrows, stone axe blades, bird-of-paradise plumes for decorations, and so on. The Plains Indians in the United States were well adapted to their environment as well, as long as there were plenty of buffalo. Indeed, there were so many buffalo they could not possibly have killed them all even if they had desired to do so. The Arctic Eskimo, as we know, learned to adapt to an unbelievably harsh environment. If you look around the world at people who lived in various environments prior to the Industrial Revolution, in the jungles, the deserts, the arctic, wherever, it is more or less true they were adapted to their environment. People lived as hunter/gatherers or small-time horticulturalists, and did not have a particularly bad impact on their environments. As humans we tend to pride ourselves on our adaptability.

All of this began to change dramatically with the Industrial Revolution and the technological “improvements” that resulted. It seems to me we have gone from being highly adaptable to becoming highly maladaptive, as far as living with nature goes. Whereas “savages” might have destroyed things had they had the means, they couldn’t and didn’t. But we have done so and have created modes of existence that simply violate the previous human condition. Our inventions and technological innovations have become antithetical to what should be our more natural condition. The invention of the internal combustion engine, for example, in some sense a remarkable achievement, has in some respects been a disaster for life on the planet, not only wasting natural resources but also killing us by the hundreds of thousands. Bulldozers and huge cranes and backhoes have allowed us to build gigantic dams on our rivers, but only at the cost of destroying priceless natural resources. The invention of plastic, now becoming a true ecological disaster, is perhaps one of the worst of our “achievements.” These inventions were not intended to create the problems we now face, but they were created without considering the consequences that would follow their use. We have not been content to leave nature as it is, but have arrogantly thought to change it and make it exist for us, rather than we for it. This has, I believe, been in many ways disastrous, although I doubt most people today think of it that way. I do, I don’t believe humans were meant to live in huge crowded metropolitan areas, having to spend hours commuting back and forth to where they work, breathing foul air and enduring road rage and exhaust. I don’t believe each human should have a thousand or more pounds of steel and plastic, with hundreds of horsepower, just to drive to the supermarket to buy packaged food produced under questionable circumstances and of questionable nutritional value. I do not believe we were meant to suffer from obesity and diabetes to the point where it has become a national emergency. And related to all this, I don’t believe we were meant to live in a situation where profit is the most important motivating factor in our behavior. There was nothing like the profit motive that exists today in the smaller pre-industrial societies that existed for thousands of years previously. Economics was imbedded in systems of kinship and village, location, history, and even religion, it did not exist as an independent institution.

I do not mean to suggest that somehow we should go back to “the good old days,” or that all progress and technology has been necessarily “bad.” Frankly, I don’t exactly know what to think about it all, I don’t have any way of knowing what was “meant to be” in human affairs. I am pretty sure the human body and psyche were developed for hunting and gathering, digging in the earth, and wondering about the “Great Mystery” of it all. Sometimes I wonder, while sitting in front of the TV or my computer, if even wonder still exists in any extensive form: “God is dead,” but not March Madness, the NFL, “Lost,” and “American Idol,” to say nothing of “Dancing with the Stars,” and “Hip Hop.” “Life” goes on, or does it? Sometimes I think maybe some "Intelligent Designer" designed people with free will just to see if they would use it wisely. He/She/It lost.

LKBIQ:
A lifetime is more than sufficiently long for people to get what there is of it wrong.
Piet Hein

TILT:
Stem cells can be successfully harvested from wisdom teeth.