Speed of Nature
Speed of Nature
The professor packaged the question as an academic contest, the winner receiving a lollipop. The question was, “Why does anyone want to be civilized?” Or, phrased another way, “What does civilization promise us?” I put on my thinking cap (which occasionally metamorphizes into a dunce cap), and I won the contest. I really did. My answer was this: “Civilization promises us no surprises.” We drive over a bridge and we expect to get to the other side. We flick a switch and we expect to receive light. Most children are not big eating adventurers, hence their penchant for eating at fast food franchises that offer the same fare everywhere, the same dietary security. A Big Mac is a Big Mac whether in Pennsylvania or Wyoming. No surprises.
Many adults are like that, too. I ordered a bison burger from a diner in Montana while my buddy picked up a double cheeseburger from McDonald’s. As I munched away, he asked me, “How do you know there is bison meat in your bison burger?” I replied, “How do you know there is cow meat in your hamburger?” He looked at me as if mad cow disease had infected my brain. “I got it from McDonald’s.” So what?
The British Empire made a big deal out of offering civilization to the tribes and countries they brutally conquered. The promise was that at 4 pm every day in all corners of their empire their minions would be having tea. No surprises.
The problem, essentially, is that the promise is a myth. Bridges collapse, storms make blackouts happen, ecoli finds its way into the lettuce on a Big Mac burger. When this happens, Americans do what they traditionally do when promises are broken…they sue. Somebody has to be responsible!!! So it is hard for us to come to grips with the reality of, well, the truth that we are not always (maybe not ever) in command of our own fate. Nature raps her fist on our door demanding us to recognize the reality that we are not in control. That things, bad things, do happen and all we can do is suffer through it.
There are other cultures, usually ones that are victims of poverty, that respond to disaster differently, with resignation. Monsoons wipe out homes, war lords trample crops and kill families, diseases wipe out villages. And the people in these cultures suffer and cry and grieve, but they accept because their expectations are so low. They were not promised anything.
During the bubonic plague, victims blamed other people, witches, and God’s wrath for the multitude of sins committed by multitudes of people. How scared they must have been not to have any idea of what was happening and why.
The second problem that afflicts our culture is what I call the “Patience Quotient.” I learned patience from my parents. My mother would tell me a hundred times to wait until the tomato sauce simmering on the stovetop was bubbling before I could dip my Italian bread into it. My father took me hunting and fishing. I spent hours upon hours sitting under a tree waiting for game to come by or hours watching my bobber and anticipating its being dragged under. During all that waiting I was never bored. There is always something in the woods or around the lake to watch and to observe.
But we live in a time where the Patience Quotient is dramatically narrowed. My favorite anthropologist (yes, I am a nerd who has a favorite anthropologist!!) is E.T. Hall. His books The Silent Language and The Dance of Life are worthwhile readings. So anthropologist Hall is appointed to a post in southern New Mexico. He lived in northern New Mexico. He also owned horses. Since he had the time, instead of putting his animals on trucks and driving to his new abode, he decided to drive his horses, eighteenth century cowboy style, to his new post. What he learned is that time slowed. He had to travel at the speed of nature. Horses needed to forage away from his planned trail, rivers were impassible because of sudden flooding and he had to wait until they subsided. His Patience Quotient was extended.
How dramatically different from our own demand society! I would ask my students to imagine a time, say the eighteenth century, when the only time people heard music was if a group of musicians came to town…and only if wannabe concert goers could afford to attend. My students could not imagine a world where they could not listen to their favorite music any time they wanted to.
And I have forgotten the time when I could not have picked up my mobile device to look up a question on Jeopardy…”Ah, so that is where the Shetland Islands are.” Much of the totality of human knowledge is on demand….wherever we are and whenever we want.
We want things and we want them right now! It is expected. The corona virus is unsettling for many reasons, one of them being the inability of many of us to extend that Patience Quotient. Why do I have to wait a couple of weeks, a month maybe, to go to the grocery store to pick up some maraschino cherries, to go bowling with my friends, to have dinner with my fellow workers at our favorite restaurant? We can only travel through time at the speed of nature. And that reality unnerves us.
We are not very good at coping with uncertainty. Maybe none of us are. What events such as the current pandemic remind us is that the certainties that civilization promises us are necessary for us to navigate through life, but that in the universal scheme of things they are not much more than wishful thinking.
There is a Simpson’s episode in which astronomers predict that an asteroid is going to wipe out Springfield. Fortunately the asteroid shrivels as it enters the earth’s atmosphere and becomes a pebble that bounces harmlessly off a structure. Moe grabs a baseball bat and yells, “Let’s destroy the Observatory so this never happens again!”
We should hold our leaders responsible for how they react to crises, but we should never forget the fragility of our planet and the vulnerabiltiy of the promises civilization makes to us.
