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Life as we know it, “business as usual,” will kill us all if continued much longer. The changes required for survival are also changes that would bring us all great happiness. I hope people will see this, when the extinction gets a little closer. But for now, the required changes are so incredibly unfamiliar that most people cannot imagine them.
“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.” So begins Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis. The transformation facing us is as beautiful as Kafka’s is hideous, but it is also as strange and unfamiliar.
John Lennon said, “life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” But most people are reluctant to give up those other plans, because they have so much effort and emotion invested in them. Imagine that you’ve been building a house for many years, and then one day you receive an entirely unexpected message that a spaceship has arrived, and we all must leave in it, and you can bring nothing with you but the shirt on your back. You must leave behind your lovely house, the repository of all your hopes and dreams, the center of your thoughts, which you were still building. And the world to which the spaceship will take us is utterly alien, incomprehensibly different. The spaceship is called “love,” and we were all taught that “love” is a good thing, but it turns out to be very different from what we thought it was.
Really, it’s stranger than a spaceship to a different world. It’s like dying and being reborn. It’s like dying and being resurrected. Didn’t Jesus already do that for us, so that we don’t have to? No, you haven’t understood his message. It’s an end of the “war of all against all” that philosopher Thomas Hobbes described. It’s an ending of separateness and selfishness, but it is not a loss of the self as some have said — rather, it’s a change in the relationship between self and other. For instance, it’s realizing that the seven billion other people in the world are your cousins.
It involves a reallocation of material resources, but that’s really a secondary effect; the transformation is much more total than that. And the transformation is not something physical, like caterpillar becoming butterfly, or Neo awakening from The Matrix. It’s something mental, psychological, spiritual. It’s an incredible change in how we behave, how we see ourselves and each other, how we see the world. As Nietzsche said, a few are dancing, but most of us — not hearing the music — see only madness.
But from the viewpoint of the new world, the old one is madness too. The growth of information is irreversible, and modern technology has made separateness unsustainable. The ecosystem cannot survive if it is privatized into little bits. Now we must share everything, and that fact ends everything and begins everything.
Most people don’t want to board the spaceship, don’t even want to acknowledge that it has arrived. Most people don’t want to change that much, not even to something beautiful. They’d rather go on with their familiar lives, with business as usual, with only minor changes — perhaps picking up a new viewpoint, but only one that at least can be understood and described from within the old viewpoint. They want gradual transition, “baby steps.” But that is no longer possible, for our old way of life is destroying the world; it cannot continue. Now we’ll have an entirely different life, or none at all.
The change could be really wonderful, if only we could get more people to want it. How can we do that? We already have enough facts; what we need is inspiration.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
[box type=”bio”] Eric Schechter is an American mathematician, retired from Vanderbilt University with the title of Professor Emeritus. His interests started primarily in analysis but moved into mathematical logic. Schechter is best known for his 1996 book Handbook of Analysis and its Foundations, which provides a novel approach to mathematical analysis and related topics at the graduate level. In retirement he has become a full-time political activist and radical educator. His conversion to anti-capitalism in recent years transformed Eric’s life. By temperament a progressive and iconoclast, his study of social and environmental conditions, domestic and international, rapidly led him through various stages from standard liberalism to a far more radical critique of the corporate status quo, which he regards as unreformable. [/box]
* Eric’s main blog—Eric’s Rants—is at http://leftymathprof.wordpress.com
21 June 2015, version 1.09.
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