Wednesday, Oct 8th, 2008
Categories: thoughts
So last night I tweeted that I needed a break from humanity and was gonna watch some good ol’ David Attanborough nature documentaries. I selected the classic “Trials of Life” series and went for the episode on Living Together. I figured some inspiring examples of inter-species cooperation would be just what the doctor ordered. It worked wonders.
Then this morning I check my email and find my daily question from the Gaia social network that’s crafted to illicit a thoughtful bit of daily blog writing on the service. I usually pass, but today’s was “What makes us human,” so I just couldn’t resist. Below is my response:
SImply, our desire and ability to call ourselves as such. As long as there are those who choose to identify with the myriad of traits, habits, and physicality known as human, then there will be humans.
For me, what makes us alive would be a more interesting and satisfying question than what makes us human. No doubt, humanity as a species has managed what would seem to be a unique feat in its ability to perceive and adopt nearly every evolutionary strategy we observe in the world. But it remains that none of these strategies, abilities, or modes of being were invented by humanity. We have simply collected all of life’s/evolution’s hard-earned knowledge and experience into a single vantage point.
This could be considered exceptional, but it could also be seen as selfish, greedy, arrogant, a fatal flaw even. In the words of Sir David Attenborough when speaking of the many species that have learned to live cooperative existences with other species, “We ourselves have very few such relationships, voluntarily, with other species of animals. Except of course with those animals that we have domesticated and enslaved. But back in our evolutionary past we doubtless had many. Today maybe, we think we’re so powerful, or have become so detached from nature that we think we no longer need them.”
I would say that it is our need to identify as human, to separate ourselves and consider our species as somehow something more than all the forms of life that is our tragic, perhaps fatal flaw. As in the timeless story of King Lear, it is only naked ambition and blind pride that allows one to believe the earth is one’s own to cast dominion over, to divide up, to offer as a gift to our offspring, and for this, a day of reckoning surely awaits.
Last night I fell asleep on the couch after watching the first half of Across the Universe. I think the detail and music and idealism inspired my dreams in some way. I woke up around midnight after having a really fantastic dream and did my best to write it down right then and there:
I dreamed of a tech-geek wonderland along the side of bear mountain.
A loose network of kids from the country who got together in a big comfortably furnished cabin to discuss their ideas and work on their projects. Boys and Girls, Men and Women banded together in a common goal of making cool things that worked.
There was the gregarious, heavy-set guy and his super lightweight, 6 seater, person-powered tank- offroader vehicle. A central bench supported on columns with wheels at the end in a wide stance, it covered ground in a bouncing motion, its center of gravity very high due to its oscillations, moving quickly and erratically due to low friction with the ground.
There was the shy girl doing the study of the bird species that like to peck out indecipherable messages on keyboards. The messages were never the same or held any repeatable pattern, but somehow this was the method of hiding the message they were so obviously encoding.
The radical non-processed food crusader girls who had seen “Processed” years ago and had given up on any kind of factory-made sustenance long ago. One of them did a presentation on the varying shades of yellow that corn could grow in, and be coaxed to grow in for various purposes. The most yellow corn possible actually causing sparks when it was touched, and the most mildly yellow good for some kind of nutrition deficiency or eating disorder when very finely milled.
The cute girl next to me and the excited, self-deprecating way she talked of their long obsession with not eating farm or factory processed food. Liberating goats and cows from barns in dramatic missions of naiveté and adventure.
The excitement with which I waited for her to get to her presentation about a mobile application she had been working on that involved mapping and GPS. How I excitedly suggested we all exchange contact information and band together our geek pursuits into a larger, more important coordinated pursuit.
And always testing our crazy contraptions and inventions on the steep, dynamic hillside of Bear Mountain. So well-known to us, yet so varied and powerful, always able to throw up the unexpected, to push our ideas and inventions to their edges, to their maximum capacity, where they are fantastically destroyed, or fantastically and unexpectedly succeed.
